One Piece Daemon AU - Sanji

One Piece Daemon AU - Sanji

So yeah, this is why I was thinking so much about daemons. I wasn't actually planning to write anything in this 'verse, I just wanted to think about what everyone's daemons would be, but then I started thinking abbout how and when they settled, and I thought about Sanji and all his trauma and I thought 'huh, okay, how would having a daemon make it worse?' And then I wrote this.

Ever since Sanji can remember, he’s always been weaker than his brothers. At this point, it’s not a surprise, but it never stops hurting. He can’t run as far or as fast as they do, he can’t take a hit like they do, he can’t fight as well or for as long as they do. He can’t send his daemon as far away as they can.

Every day, Father makes them practice. Every day, Ichiju, Niju, and Yonju diseappear over the horizon as birds or fish or flying insects. Every day, Sanji throws himself into the ocean after Sanju before she’s even reached the next snail-ship.

And every day, he lasts a few seconds less before the pain becomes unbearable.

He cries to Mama about it often. She clucks her tongue at him and wipes his tears from his cheeks with her thumbs, and then pinches his cheeks with a smile. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she tells him firmly.

“But,” Sanji sniffles, “everyone else can do it. Even you.” He knows this because Voltaire often comes to sit with him when he’s hiding in his room, and maybe it’s not over-the-horizon far from Mama’s room in the infirmary, but it’s still all the way on the other side of the flagship, and Sanji and Sanju can’t manage even a fraction of that.

For a moment, Mama’s smile takes on a strangely sharp edge. “I didn’t used to,” she tells him softly.

“Besides,” Voltaire adds, voice gone wicked as he eels up Sora’s arm so he can stage-whisper into Sanji’s ear, “have you ever seen Legata go all that far from Judge’s side?” Sanji twists his head around to stare at him, utterly agog at the notion that Judge might be anything less than terrifyingly capable at anything and everything. Voltaire just cocks his head in challenge, mottled dark brown skin glistening under the harsh lights of the infirmary.

“Of course Father can do it!” Sanju protests, daring to uncurl from the little ball of pale pink shell she’s made of herself in Sanji’s lap.

“Whether he can or not,” Mama says, reaching up to smooth Sanji’s hair down and trying to tuck his fringe behind his ear, “doesn’t mean you have to. You’re perfect just as you are, baby.” His hair falls back in front of his eye, and he puffs a little laugh that makes Mama grin at him.

Sanji’s smile falls, though, the moment of humour not enough to distract him from his worries. “We keep getting worse, though,” he complains.

Mama closes her eyes, takes a breath, and then leans in and kisses Sanji on the top of his head, before bundling him up and onto her lap. Sanju squeaks and turns into a squirrel to scramble up Sanji’s shirt and onto his shoulder, to avoid any risk of getting squashed between them. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep your heart close,” she tells him, cuddling him aggressively, “all snug and safe, like this!”

Sanji laughs outright, and hugs her back as best he can.

---

He remembers her words, later, when he’s on that godforsaken rock. He and Sanju try again, to get more than a handful of feet away from each other, to reach the ocean, to find food. They don’t manage. He lies there on the barren rock with Sanju a quivering bundle of fur in his arms, sobbing with a desperation that still hasn’t managed to overcome the vice that clamps down around his chest any time she gets too far away from him.

His mother was wrong. She was wrong, he’s weak, and he’s going to die because he’s too needy and pathetic, just like Father said. “I don’t want to,” Sanju cries into his chest, butting her head up against his chin and whimpering. “Don’t make me, I don’t want to-!”

“We won’t,” Sanji says, determinedly. “There’s somewhere else we can get food around here.”

Except there isn’t. All he finds on the other side of the island is a bag of things he can’t eat and an old man who ate his own leg because he’d already given Sanji all the food. Sanji, who’d been willing to take even more food from him, just to feed himself.

The horror is almost entirely self-directed.

He goes back to his side of the island and thinks. His father was wrong. It isn’t just that Sanji isn’t capable of being what his father wanted, but he doesn’t want to be the sort of person who would hurt other people and take what they have just because he wants it. He doesn’t like the person hunger turns him into.

But that doesn’t mean Mama was right. Being weak and needy and depending on other’s kindness without giving anything back is just as selfish as taking things they didn’t offer. Sometimes, there is something wrong with keeping your heart close, when tearing off a piece of yourself can save someone else.

He looks at Sanju, and Sanju looks back, long ears twitching. “Okay,” she says quietly, and turns to the edge of the island again. She bounds off the edge, shifting into a mottled black and grey bird with a hooked beak as she goes.

It twinges in his chest almost immediately after she drops out of sight. Lurches, clenches, aches. He grits his teeth, screws his eyes shut, clenches his fists against the rock, and holds himself tense and still as it strains and hurts and tears. They can do this. They can.

It’s not as hard as cutting his own leg off.

A whimper slips out of his throat despite his best efforts.

Then a sob.

A cry.

A scream.

He thinks, if he’d had anything at all in his stomach, he’d have thrown up. His throat is convulsing like it’s thinking about trying anyway. There are hands on him, grabbing him roughly, shaking him, and Sanji’s in too much pain to think rationally. He cries and begs and apologises again and again. He’ll do better next time, he will, he promises! It hurts but he can put up with it, he can be strong, he can.

The hands turn gentle.

The pain fades.

The person holding him gasps.

Sanji picks up his head from a very bony shoulder, and sees Sanju perched awkwardly on one of the strange lumpy rocks that litter this island, a thin little silver fish clasped in her beak. She hops closer, and drops it on the stone beside the old man’s severed leg, where it wiggles uselessly in its death throes.

“Fucking hell, kid,” the old man grumbles, but he takes the fish.

And then tears it in half and offers one half to Sanji!

Sanji is too hungry to refuse, but it steels his resolve – their resolve – and Sanju takes flight again, diving back down to the ocean. It hurts just as bad as the first time, and Sanji only avoids throwing the fish right back up again by sheer desperation. And maybe, a little bit, because the old man holds him tucked against his bony ribcage and lets him sob into his shoulder without a word of complaint

In fact, his daemon leans over his shoulder and huffs at Sanji’s head with enough force that it ruffles his hair and almost feels like a caress. She’s so big, and even as worn thin as she is, with her person so close to death, she still radiates warmth. Sanji doesn’t know if it’s real warmth or soul-warmth, but either way, it doesn’t matter. Especially not when she’s crooning comforting nonsense and unfamiliar lullabies at him in her low, rich voice. It sounds nothing like Mama, but it reminds him of her a little bit anyway.

---

They find their feet at the Baratie. They find a purpose that fits them, that they can achieve, and while he’s a demanding teacher, Zeff never asks more of them than they can give. It’s freeing in a way Sanji has never known before, and Sanju takes to trying bigger and bigger shapes with bright-eyed mischief. Or sometimes, with teeth-bared snarling, when the customers decide to be assholes. Sanji is well past the days that he’d take that kind of shit lying down. No, these days he snarls back, and kicks heads in when the snarling doesn’t warn the bastards off, just like Zeff taught him.

These days, though, most daemons will cower in front of Sanju’s bared teeth, whether she’s a wolf or a lioness or a bear, and their people will back away from a teenager with a daemon that big. Sanji almost mourns those opportunities to start a fight, but he supposes Zeff must appreciate the lack of repair bills.

When they head back into the kitchen, Sanju usually turns back into something small, just to keep out of the way of the bustling and busy cooks. Or, at least, smaller. Neither of them are all that comfortable making themselves too small anymore; it leaves an unpleasant taste on the back of their tongue. Lately she’s been draping herself over his shoulders as some kind of rosetted cat.

So when she doesn’t leap up onto his back as they shove through the doors into the kitchen, a napkin pressed to the gash a customer managed to open up across his cheek, Sanji notices. When she dodges out of the way of a hollering Carne instead of changing to something smaller, she notices, too. They pause to stare at each other.

She’s still a cat, large and lithe and elegant, covered in spots, with a dark mantle over her neck and shoulders that turns into three dark stripes down along her spine. There are two dark tear-trails either side of her muzzle, too, and she blinks large amber eyes up at him. Sanji can’t help but smile, because she’s beautiful. A purr rumbles up in her throat, and she head-butts him in the stomach, letting him card his fingers into the lengthening fur at the back of her neck.

It feels… oddly vindicating, that she’s settled into such a fierce daemon, even if a part of him wishes he didn’t care about that anymore. All his childhood, everyone except his mother had mocked and scorned the way Sanju prefered smaller forms, and now look at her.

Not everyone else is as happy as they are at her settled form, however. It only takes a few days for it to become an issue.

“Get your fucking daemon out of the way!” Patty shrieks, sprawled out across a counter in his efforts to save the tray he was carrying when he stumbled trying not to trip directly over Sanju. She’s pressed flat against the back of Sanji’s legs, hissing back at Patty.

“She was out of the way!” Sanji snaps back, hands not pausing in their work chopping up a whole pile of vegetables. “Don’t blame her because you weren’t looking where you were fucking going!”

“I shouldn’t have to be keeping an eye out for rogue daemons! She should be in the cubby with all the other large daemons!” Patty scolds, shaking a fist at Sanji, who recoils, knife stilling.

He’s not wrong, is the thing. The kitchen would be utterly unfunctional if everyone with a large daemon let them dog their heels the way Sanju does Sanji’s. So Zeff – admittedly one of the worst cases, Sulia is huge– had a side room built just off the kitchen to allow the daemons to stay near enough to their people without getting underfoot in the kitchen.

Sanji looks over at the open archway, where he can see Sulia’s tail fwaping irritably at the floor. It’s a good twenty feet away from the far side of the kitchen, and that’s… too far. Sanji can feel all his muscles winding tight just at the thought. Sanju presses even more firmly into his legs, and he looks down at her, swallowing. They should-

“Patty! If that soup goes cold because you were lollygagging, I’ll kick you overbaord!” Zeff roars, and Patty yelps and hurries off. Sanji goes back to his own chopping, not sure how he’s feeling, because he’s pretty sure the fact that Patty got scolded but he didn’t was Zeff’s way of coming down on Sanji’s side of that little argument, but he still feels like he shouldn’t be getting away with breaking the rules of the kitchen like that, when he could-

A peg-leg connects solidly with his hip, and he yelps out a startled curse. “Don’t even think about it, Li’l Eggplant,” Zeff growls as he stomps past, directing a glower down at Sanju, too. “I’ll have Sulia chase you out if you set one paw in that cubby, and she’s still bigger than you are.”

“Fine,” Sanji grouses, feigning irritation as if they both can’t hear Sanju purring up a storm.

For those who're interested, the daemons are: Sanji - King Cheetah Sora - Great Crested Newt Zeff - Pacific Walrus