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Calluses	By : bevin Category: +M to R > One Piece Views: 2108 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece or any of its characters and I make no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Callouses
- 1
Author's Note: This was written in response to a challenge for Sanji and Nami to be in a friends with benefits relationship where there was no unrequited love and no one was getting used. It was fascinating to think about how that could work and I had to see if I could pull it off. Hope it works.

Behind her in the dark, Sanji made a small noise as he shifted in his sleep. Normally she slept warm and didn't like to cuddle, waking up in the middle of the night feeling suffocated and sweltering, but tonight they were passing through a frigidly cold weather system. The fog they'd created on the inside of the windows earlier was frozen now but still let in enough dull light for her to see her own breath fogging. Outside, chunks of ice scraped past the hull of the Sunny, the sound dull, aching and eerie in the quiet. Tonight she didn't mind him sleeping so close and let his arm stay where it had been slung across her side. Listening to him breathe softly. Smelling the brine, fish and nicotine that he had always smelled of, along with the salty tang of sweat, musk and sex that was becoming more familiar, she snuggled back against the heat from his body.

He shifted again and now his cold feet, so much larger than hers, were pressed between her own. She was plenty warm so she didn't mind. Without much fat to insulate him he got cold easily, though those feet of his didn't feel much. His legs either, she'd discovered. The nerves weren't shot, simply dulled from years of taking and dishing out inhuman amounts of blunt force. The soles of his feet, his heels and his toes were so callused he'd once described the sensation in them like being felt through layers and layers of blankets-- there but faint and dull.

Under the covers she slid one of her hands softly over his, the one belonging to the arm slung over her. It was, like the rest of him, sinewy, slender, deceptively strong, and covered in calluses and old scars. It had surprised her the first time she'd noticed. She hadn't expected them to feel so rough against her skin, considering how closely he protected them. It wasn't until he had run his thumb over her own calluses-- from years of holding quills and hauling large, rough sacks full of money-- that she felt silly for being surprised. Just because he never used his hands to fight didn't mean he didn't use them. A chef's hands were precious and irreplaceable, but they still showed the wear and tear of their experience with blades, fire, scalding liquids, and dedicated repetition with the tools of the trade. The end result wasn't so different from his feet, although he took considerably more pride in them. Despite the digits lacking the sensitivity she'd once imagined, they still proved to be talented and he still enjoyed watching her inspect them in their quiet post-coital moments.

Not that she had spent that much time imagining his erogenous zones before they'd started sleeping together, they'd just turned out to be less obvious than the conventional ones. His neck, the small of his back, his ears, the insides of his elbows, between his pecs, his navel... and the more obvious places, too. Of course it wasn't so much a matter of where she'd touch him so much as how she'd touch him. She didn't know if he remembered what gentleness felt like, or if he'd ever felt it at all; affection for him lay in the spaces behind gruffness, indifference, hostility and contempt. The only ways he knew how to relate to anyone emotionally. He expressed what he really felt by never saying it. Once, before she'd really begun to understand him, she'd mistaken his boisterous declarations of love for exactly what they appeared to be: a huge, gaping hole in his emotional armor through which he was somehow never wounded by rejection. Now she understood it to be just a different sort of armor, another callus protecting him from real sensation. It wasn't the same method that he used to deal with his feelings about men, where he could only express them as being the opposite of what they really were; he really did love women, or rather the idea of them. Somewhere underneath all the layers of protection he'd built up he knew they weren't really perfect, flawless goddesses, but to admit that would be to pierce the safety of the fantasy. It would leave him vulnerable and having grown up surrounded by men who only related to each other by saying the opposite of what they meant, having been consumed by his need to be one of them, to be accepted by them, and to surpass them, to be vulnerable in any way was unthinkable. So he kept himself safe by pretending he was wide open.

In some ways, she understood him better than anyone else on board, although it had taken her some time to figure out. For the first while after they'd met she felt more distant from him than any of the others. They never really had conversations or talked about anything important, or even trivial, for that matter. The closest they had ever come to having an honest conversation had been at Drum Island after she had told him she was defying Kureha's orders and returning to the Merry before she'd completely recovered. She had been sick, focused on Vivi and had forgotten who she had been talking to. Worried for her and recovering from his own injury, he had been disapproving, eerily silent in the wake of her declaration. Kureha's well-timed intervention had spared them both from the looming moment of emotional honesty which had been a relief. That wasn't how their relationship worked and they both knew it.

Well, if she was being honest with herself, there were other times the cracks in his armor showed. Brief glimpses past the barriers when he would get an unexpected compliment, admitting to a moment of weakness, or when one of the others would cross a line, like Luffy and Usopp's fight over poor Merry. Moments that she hadn't registered at the time but now in retrospect had become quietly treasured memories of when they had managed to glimpse the real Sanji without his pretense or affectations. For his sake she hoped he continued to have them. He was beautiful in there. She knew everyone else agreed on that but none of them would ever mention it out loud. Whether he would voluntarily start letting his guard down around them was something he had to work out for himself.

Until then, between the two of them it was always the game, which she indulgently played along with; calling him Sanji-kun to match his honorific for her, countering his hyperactive flirting with politely distant acknowledgment or casual brush-offs that only encouraged him. It was how they related to each other and it was comfortable in its way, even if she regretted their inability to stop playing it. She had bonds with the others in a way she didn't have with him and it bothered her. Especially since she understood how it felt to grow up desperately seeking love and acceptance from the people around her and feeling denied; she understood the long hours of dedication and practice it took to truly master a skill, no matter how much natural talent lie beneath it; she understood the sacrifice of one's own dream to protect someone else. Most of all she understood the deep, instinctive communion with the sea. The others loved it too, of course, but more as a vehicle or a tool they needed to get to what they were really after. For her there was a connection that thrummed through her like a deep bass line; a connection she couldn't rationally define or explain, only understand on an instinctive level. She felt the sea, and she knew Sanji felt that same humming, visceral pull that she did. When they came in contact she could feel it running between them like a current. For them it was more than just a vast, temperamental road to adventure and glory: that was their bond. It was why they'd begun sleeping together.

There were times when she'd come close to mistaking it for love, which had unnerved her until it passed. Not that she didn't care about him, or that the sex was without emotion for either of them. Like everyone else on board she cared for him deeply and knew he did for her as well. The sex was simply the best way they'd ever found to express their mutual affection without having to drop their comfortable armor. As much as they loved each other and as often as he would shout it to the heavens or pant it into her ear, she knew-- the same way she could sense a coming squall-- that they were not in love. She knew he knew it too. In fact the more he waxed poetic about her the safer she felt about their arrangement. The minute he stopped declaring his feelings would be the minute she knew he really had them, and that would be the end of it. It was a day she hoped would never come. Not because of the awkward talk or the possible hurt feelings, but more because she would miss the roundabout method of communication they'd discovered. The sex itself was pleasant and fun, of course, but as backwards as it was, it was how they had finally established their friendship. For two people who weren't comfortable expressing their true feelings for anyone, connecting physically in some way or another was ideal. With sex they didn't need the game and they didn't need to find words they didn't want to say to anyone, let alone each other. It was affectionate and intimate without crossing the line into uncomfortable territory. Unconventional and strange, certainly, but it worked for them.

As sad as the thought of someday losing their ideal communication method was, for right now she wasn't worried. There were lots of fish in the sea and Sanji was too eager to try them all to settle for just one. By the time she woke up tomorrow her bed would be cold, something in the kitchen would smell delicious and the game would be on again. Beyond that she wouldn't think too hard about the future. For right now her friend was breathing softly against her shoulders, his chest warm, his feet still cold, and his callused fingers curled gently around hers.
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Calluses