Notes: A short Sanji character piece, in the same spirit as 'Season in the Sun'. Yaoi implications are certainly there, but the situation is a bit more complex than merely that. And the thing about the pickles is completely true, although in real life the children in question were Victorian street kids. This fic is for Harlem, because she wanted it so bad.

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BREAD ALONE

They say a man can't live on bread alone; but bread was all I had to give him when he dragged himself in looking like a smashed cockroach that one morning. 'Feed the body, feed the heart' is what Zef had pounded into me time and time again, but how do you feed a heart so stunted and shriveled that it throws back out anything good you try to put into it? No, you have to go slowly and coax it like the tender stomach of someone who had been sick a long time, praying all the while that the illness isn't terminal. In some book of the old man's I had read about how children starving in West Blue during the food riots had developed this curious addiction to pickles, and had repeatedly chosen them in favor of more nourishing fare. Supposedly charity workers over there had actually had to teach them to eat real food again. And now I think that's how it must have been for him- living without kindness for so long that he wound up craving people who were as acrid and sour to the heart as those pickles were to the palate.

I never had the luxury of time, though. Quick as that he was in and out of my life, no doubt ready to get on with his own once that great purple buzzard had been toppled from his perch. And I was left sitting there with the distillation of all morons sanding my ears with his snores and taking up an already uncomfortably large amount of room in that tiny shoebox of a worldview that the Sanji-who-used-to-be nested in all those years. I guess Gin and Zef were both trying to tell me the same thing- that gratitude's as hollow as an empty seed pack if you don't use it to grow something new.

I never failed to feed the physical hungers of mankind, but Gin's departure still had the feel of a stalemate to it, as if some crucial thing had been left unsaid or some decisive battle lost. Maybe that's why I signed on with Luffy in the end... I could feed bodies all day on the Baratie, stuff rice down the gullets of pirates and fill the glasses of beautiful women- but there were other hungers in those bright dining rooms of flashing cutlery, ones that didn't show in the clarity of ribs or the looseness of clothing, but instead stared from hollow smiles and emptier eyes like pot-bellied street waifs standing mud-spattered and silent in alleyways. The whole world was hungry, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it there.

I've never really loved anyone besides that shitty old man before. I've never really had friends my own age. But I know this; that feeding those small loves is greater than laying out banquets for entire armies, and that a few moments of comfort offered a friend whose captain treats him like a privy- there for the shitting on- is worth more than a thousand fruit flambés offered on delicate china to equally delicate girls. Maybe when I see him again I can offer him more than just a plate of rice- a shoulder to cry on, a buddy to get smashed with, a friend to talk to. Or maybe even a lover who doesn't think he owns your ass just because he runs your ship. And maybe, if I can find the courage, I could give back some of what I took for granted for so much of my life- the knowledge that a man can't live on bread alone.