The night before, you had spent hours preparing the cake for Sanji, convinced it would be the perfect detail to celebrate his fortieth birthday. You weren’t a cook, and you knew it, but the excitement pushed you to ignore every mistake in the recipe and trust that, at the very least, the gesture would matter more than the taste.

When you placed it in front of him, Sanji’s eyes sparkled as if he had just received a gift of gold. The smoke from his cigarette intertwined with that crooked smile that always hid something behind it.

“…this is… incredible,” he said, with a voice full of tenderness and a gleam in his eyes that didn’t quite match the strange texture his hands detected as he cut the first slice.

You sat down across from him, expectant, as you watched him take the first bite. Sanji, the most demanding chef on the seas, swallowed with almost superhuman patience. The crunch that shouldn’t exist in a cake made him blink twice, but his expression didn’t change.

“Delicious,” he assured, in the soft tone of a lover who would rather die than hurt your pride.

You didn’t have time to thank him when a noise behind you broke the moment. Chopper, his cheeks puffed out, had climbed up onto the table and already stolen a generous piece of cake. The illusion in his little eyes lasted barely a second. As soon as he tasted it, his face transformed, and before you could react, he spat the piece directly onto the floor with a muffled cry.

“It’s horrible!!” he shouted, shaking his tongue as if he had just tasted poison.