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The Baratie is floating restaurant in the middle of the ocean and it is visited by Marines, pirates, and any sailors and cruisers alike, and it is a work of art when the sunset hits through the arc of the fishmouth just right.
This is what the World Economic Journal opens with in its latest review, and this is what people think when they step foot on the wooden docks and transfer onto the plush blue carpet of the dining room. To Sanji, however, the Baratie is a minefield.
It's not a minefield in the sense of an ongoing battle in a warzone, though some days it could feel that way. Orders get barked down a chain of command with a saluted, unified response of yes, chef! shouted back, the solid structure of the kitchen towers over them, the precision of knives and scales and spoons and tweezers flash beneath harsh lights like distant gunfire. The stoves spark with open flame, the fryers sizzle with intent to burn, a flattop grill makes silent threats through emitted waves of heat. It's a battlefield, for sure, in all rights. But the minefield? No. The kitchens aren't the minefield. The bar where pirates and Marines will catch a glare across the room and inch closer to each other with threats that bartenders have to separate with mugs of ale or glasses of wine? That's not the minefield either.
The dining room is where the minefield really lies, underfoot and waiting. Sanji has learned to navigate it with precision. Skirt around a table here, duck into a corner and out of the way there. Seat the Marine admiral by the window and the first mate of the Seachicks up on the dais so the two of them are far enough apart to catch sight but promptly forget about each other. The threat of the minefield lies in the silence of the room; the gentle clinking of glassware, the soft pop and sizzle of a fresh bottle of champagne, the way a knife cuts gently across porcelain - not the grating screech heard in a dive bar on Truff Isle, but the practiced intent of someone who knows the expectations of their surroundings.
Sanji steps his way through the pathways he's memorized, avoiding the tripwires and pressure plates of the patrons. He pours wine with the bend of a wrist and swipes plates out of sight with ease. Candles get lit without the blink of an eye, the only recognition coming twenty minutes after with a soft murmur of I didn't realize the sun had already set! Did you?
The Baratie dining room is a minefield in the way that there is always a firing pin waiting to be pushed down into a detonator cap, but Sanji is a sapper and always has been. He's been trained to detect where a threat is and have it neutralized before someone even thinks about being concerned. Be subtle, but always be aware. Render a room safe before anyone knows you're doing it.
It's not until he's finally in the safety of his own bed in the Baratie bunkrooms, set above the new waiter-of-the-week they've hired who will be gone by Friday, that he lets himself think about the day and how it could have gone if he hadn't played it safe. If he'd stepped just a bit to the right and felt the tell-tale sign of built up pressure rumbling throughout the room. How would the day have ended if he let it detonate and sat back to watch the fallout, lit a cigarette while an Admiral fired his gun and covered the painting of the East Blue in a splatter of red? What kind of satisfaction might he feel when the plush blue carpet gets a knife stuck into it as someone rolls out of the way, or when the alarm bell sounds because someone finally breached the kitchens?
The Baratie dining room is a minefield. And it's getting really fucking boring walking the same, safe pathways every day.
It's Friday. He knows that because Zeff shouts it into the kitchen and seasons the word with spit and a gruff voice. He reminds Patty to fix his collar, stomps his peg leg into the ground when Carne doesn't marinate the meat correctly for the evening special, and then grabs Sanji roughly by the back of his chef's coat.
"You're on tables today," he says, already half-way turned away to signal the conversation is over.
"What?" Sanji bites back, because he's never really cared about the end of someone else's sentence if it didn't satisfy him. A meal half-cooked isn't a meal at all, is it?
"Don't make me repeat myself. Lose the coat."
"I'm not going out there," he says, wrist cocked on the counter, fingers still curved around the knife.
"You are if you want a place to live and work."
"Who's gonna make the waterzooi?"
"What was that, boy?" It's finally enough to get Zeff to turn around. He never does if he can help it, but Sanji always tends to find the right threads to pull when he wants to. "Who said we're putting waterzooi on today's menu?"
Sanji glances over at the scribble on the whiteboard. There's a list of items and, there, at the bottom is his own neat gentle scrawl.
"Didn't I tell you last time if you write on that board again you'll be shitting out markers for a week?"
"Didn't I tell you if you keep making me serve tuna corn chowder you'll be digging your own teeth out of the front deck?"
Zeff gives him a single warning glare. "Get that coat off and get your ass out in that dining room right now. I'm not telling you again." He turns for good this time, any remaining threads snapped and useless to pull at.
Sanji slams the knife down and tugs the buttons of his chef coat open.
"Don't know why you try it," Teju mumbles to him, slicing cucumbers in thin neat rounds. "You should just shut up and cook what he tells you."
Sanji stares at the side of Teju's face as he yanks the coat off of his shoulders, the rough polyester scratching tightly at his arms. He tosses it into the laundry cart, leaving Teju and his cucumbers to their monotony, and shoulders his way up to the crew's quarters.
Ten minutes later finds him stepping down onto the plush blue carpet with a polished black leather shoe, hands in the pockets of his trousers, and suit jacket snug at his shoulders, buttoned neatly at his waist. He keeps his face impassive as he scans the tables. A wine glass two-thirds empty will need refilling, there's the gentle trilling sound of a fork's edge sliding against porcelain and he follows the sound to the dais without bothering to look. He'll need to pick up the empty plate from there shortly. The soft thud of a menu closing sounds from his right and he sways his body into a turn to step up to the table. "Welcome to the Baratie. Are we ready to order?"
The day remains unmarred until every stroke of repetition starts to grate on him. It's getting harder these days, and Zeff's in a mood since a cannonball decided to slam into the roof of his private bedroom, so when he's told to bring the Iturutz Burger Stein to table seven by the window, Sanji's hand hesitates over the bottle. His fingers curl back and his eyes shift to a three-year shiraz. What's the harm in a light tap against a pin?
As is the case with most minefields, one explosion tends to set off another if the shards and debris fall just right, and The Baratie dining room is no exception. When the dust settles, Sanji finds himself treading ground with a lighter step, his mouth curved up a bit more in the corners, amused enough by the fallout of the day's events. And to think, it's barely one o'clock.
His ears perk with the undercut of voices, louder than they should be in the careful space, delicately designed to carry even the faintest whisper across like a breeze. The new chore boy's voice hits like a clap of thunder and, more than once, Sanji catches scattered patrons casting glances over their shoulders toward him. Sanji doesn't look, doesn't want to bring attention to it. He sets a salad down on one table and then pauses at another, wrist bending backward enough to allow the flow of the shiraz to round the wine glass in a small wave. The woman doesn't notice. Her eyes are narrowed as she looks at the center table by the stairs where a choking cough is blaring out toward the ceiling. The room shudders with the thump of Chore Boy's body on the floor and that's when Sanji knows the pin has been hit.
He looks up as the explosion begins. It's slow to start - every detail ringing out to make itself noticed. If it's putting on a show, it's gonna do it right, and it starts with the growing laughter from the table, a fist banging on white linen-covered mahogany, a chair creaking with the weight of its patron slumping back against it, and there above the reeling, choking chore boy, is the loudest piece of all.
If there's one thing Sanji has learned over the years, it's that movement and volume doesn't always equate weight of influence on a scene. He's seen the way people can bark orders, slam fists hard enough to earn grunts and cries, laugh a cacophony into the air. It's never meant much to him, which is why The Baratie dining room has always felt like comfort to him. It's silent, it's meticulous, and in the best of times, it's a daunting, looming threat that reminds him it can explode at any moment.
There stands, above Chore Boy, another minefield in human form.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Sanji doesn't notice until the pressure plate is already crunched underfoot. But, like most things, Sanji has learned to adapt to threats before they fully form, and he shifts his gaze enough to find something else to blame the sudden internal detonation on.
You could tell a lot about a person based on their hands. Sanji's learned people by their hands before he even knew their names. He's familiar with the calloused weight of Zeff's hand on a shoulder, Patty's tight grip always embedded with oil trapped in the lifelines, Carne's knobbled knuckles as he curves his fingers and rests a blade against them. He's come to know his own hands as well as any others: thin fingers with nicotine and fish scales tucked beneath trimmed nails, a nick from a parring knife just outside the stark blue vein on his left hand. He knows the way his rings clink against each other when he's finally slipped them on after ten minutes of scrubbing grease from its temporary home between shifting metacarpals. His hands are thin skin and nimble bones held together with strong tendons. He knows the way his hand curves around a knife and the way it pushes into dough. He's learned hands the way most people learn fractions and language: repetition, use, and visuals.
He's always admired the hands of a woman.
The way they curve easily at the edges, how delicate fingers seem to trickle along things when they move, and their wrists that cock daintily to hold up soft faces and brush through softer hair. He loves the touch of a woman's hand. Skin smooth from scented oils and creams, nails manicured to a rounded curve that slices not like a knife, but the edge of a spoon. Soft to dip into his skin and slide down his spine with ease. Small fingertips that press into a shifting muscle and curve around the back of an ear. He's watched a woman's fingers fall into place one after another over the shaft of his cock and traced the line from her wrist to the tip of her thumb, tucked the memory away in his mind's gallery to pull up later in the privacy of his bed, staring down at his own hand and repeating the motion. One finger gently after another, he counts the ways he admires a woman's hand.
It doesn't stop there, of course. It's in the rest of a woman's body as well. The silk arch of a neck, and the smooth path toward a narrow shoulder. As he gets ready for the work day, he does up the buttons of his jacket and recalls the small inlet of a woman's waist beneath him. The curve of a thigh, the dip at the back of a knee, the narrow line down a calf when she hikes it up over his hip. He's remembered these in the early dawn hours when he stretches his own body out on the warm back deck. He recalls the look of them when he tucks himself away in the Baratie's weak excuse for a private gym, ignores the grunts of the men next to him, and presses his heels to weight plates, wondering at the way his muscles shift beneath his skin, so unlike a woman's.
Sanji's admired women's bodies since it was drilled into his head to view them as other than men's bodies, and therefore other than his own. Back when he was taught to pay attention to a certain architectural structure of the female figure and learn to be attracted to it. He falls into his studies now in the Baratie minefield when he sees the round curve of this woman's smile as she laughs, the way her orange hair brushes against the slope of her neck, and how her hand smacks into the table with a graceful solidity.
It's nothing like... his.
It's nothing like the human minefield in front of her: broad-shouldered, cut lines of muscles bursting past the tight cuff of a sleeve. The stark line of a jugular vein next to the sharp cut of an Adam's apple. Hinges of a jaw that twitch with a sharp grin as he looks down upon the chore boy. Sanji has learned that the male body is all angles and razors and slashes; their features cut into you like butcher's knives. And at either side of a solid, sturdy middle, this one's arms trail down to wide wrists and wider hands, veins jutting out over tan skin and scarred knuckles, hard bone and harder muscle packed in. He's probably got a grip that could suffocate you and he'd barely flex a muscle to do it.
Men's bodies are different. Sanji doesn't let himself think about them if he can help it, and he's helped it for the past decade when he decided there was no use in second glances toward rough, calloused muscle. It was one of his earlier lessons.
He reminds himself about this decision as he places the wine bottle on the couple's table, steps around them, and determinedly walks past the man, kneeling instead to look up at soft orange hair and brown eyes of the woman at the table. He reminds himself again when he rattles off a compliment to her beauty, tucking away the silent details of how she holds herself, the way her hips tilt when she crosses one leg over the other.
It's a decision that he doesn't think about often; one that's kept written down somewhere in the back of his mind just to have, but never to need. But he looks up at the woman, takes in the way she holds the shape of her body, and bulletpoints each note.
It's later in the privacy of the shower, that he knows he'll recall this moment, thinking about her hands and her waist as he stares at his own beneath the water. As he runs a hand along his own arm to feel the muscle there and wonder what she feels when she does the same to her own body. How it might feel for a woman to place her hand on someone, instead of what he feels with his own. How he tries to keep his hand small instead of spreading it wide across his bicep, to keep it narrow, dainty, curve his wrist just so, enough to understand what a woman would feel.
The Baratie dining room is a landmine. Any minute, there are pressure plates underneath waiting for the tiniest bit of weight to lean into them and break them open, let them destroy everything that's been carefully and meticulously placed around them for the perfect, appealing visual.
Sanji understands the Baratie dining room more than most. And when Chore Boy and his crew barge inside and start digging holes that have long since been filled in, he thinks it's only a matter of time before it all goes to shit.