Chapter Text
In this hour, dawn splits the sky right in half, so that the clouds bleed, and red drops of sun drip down into the frothing ocean. The wheel of colors spin, and what is green is now red, what is blue is now gold. In this hour, Nami’s breath puffs out in her own, personal little clouds, that mix into the damp air. There’s dew on the grass of the lawn and droplets of sea spray clinging to whatever stretch of wood they can drain into. Here, despite a pollen allergy, Nami sits side-saddle in the yard with a pale, crocheted blanket draped across her legs. Atop one of her legs rests a leatherback journal with a fraying tape-and-paper label entitling it as Nami’s Cartography. Between her teeth, she gnaws a wooden pencil.
There’s nothing yet written on this page, just one hastily erased slip of the pencil still feeding its echoes into the grain of the paper. Nami grabs the pencil from her mouth and erases it again. This journal — really much closer to some kind of sketching book — has very little to do with the other maps she has stashed away in the drawers of her wide-surfaced mahogany desk. It’s used more as a book of warm-ups and haphazardly scribbled ideas, so she can begin a project knowing that her hands won’t shake.
The kitchen light turns on, shimmering from the small windows hovering on both sides of the door. Through one of them, Nami spies the tall silhouette of Sanji flicking a lighter up by his jaw with a cold cigarette clenched between his teeth. He’s awake, but it’s unlikely he’ll start breakfast for another hour. He wakes, he smokes, he showers, he cleans, he cooks. That’s his pattern. Nami is awake early enough most mornings that she knows this — she knows the routines of all her crewmates, they all know each other’s just as well as they know breathing. They move as a marching band, all trodding their own paths with the trust that they won’t stumble into anybody’s way. It’s kind of graceful, in some boyish way.
Nami glances once more at her journal, and the blank page collecting the humidity, then she closes it. She’s been stuck in something of a limbo, the last three days. Even the blank pages of her harmless practice journal seem too daunting to press a pencil to. It’s been too calm, too lenient. The sun’s been too kind and the wind too pretty. Her body has made up anxieties to sit curled around her spine until tensions kick back up.
Nami stands and folds the blanket gingerly, her journal tucked under one arm. Goosebumps speckle the skin on her legs, she shivers as she crosses the line. She knocks on the door briefly before shuffling into the kitchen.
Sanji waves a thin stream of smoke away from his face to better see, and when he does his eyes soften and sparkle. Nami shuts the door behind her.
“Hello, my dear, good morning,” he hums. He almost bows subtly, steeping down halfway, but his muscle-memory isn’t quite up to par with the sleepy control addling his mind, so it just looks like an awkward stumble. That tiredness sits under his eyes, dulling his shimmer and spark. He crushes the end of his cigarette on the wall and tosses it in the trash. Nami mumbles a reply and yawns, hiking her folded blanket higher in her arms.
“I can clean while you shower,” Nami offers.
Sanji grins, trying for dashing but ending up startled, “If you’re sure it’s no hassle,” he tilts his head, and his bangs flop as a greasy conglomerate. Nami grimaces.
“No hassle,” she promises, “though I do have a condition,”
“Oh, yeah?” and there’s a flicker of apprehension in his eyes, because he’s a charmer but he’s not ignorant to his debt. Nami smiles as sweetly as she can.
“Can we have maple sausage this morning?”
Sanji frowns, a small crease of the brow and downturn of the lips, “Luffy doesn’t like the maple sausage.”
Pretty much the point, actually. One of the only things Luffy won’t eat, and it means she doesn’t have to defend her plate. She concedes anyway, though — something Chopper once said about rubber organs and fast metabolisms burning calories scarily fast
“Maple sausage and bacon?” she proposes.
Sanji grins again, spinning out of the kitchen “As you wish,”
And so, their routine is set afoot an hour earlier.
***
The buzz and hustle begins thirty minutes into breakfast, as it always does, when Luffy finally crawls out of his sleepy stupor and gains enough of a mind to reach across the table onto Usopp’s plate. He doesn’t have enough of a mind, though, to not knock over the pitcher of orange juice. Robin catches it with a fabricated hand, not even pausing her smiley conversation with Franky. Luffy and his fistful of bacon are halfway back across the table when Usopp notices and yells. Because he yells, Sanji yells, thwacking Luffy on the head with a rolled up newspaper then shovelling three pieces of bacon from his own plate onto Usopp’s.
Nami’s food remains relatively untouched. She rests one arm around the curve of her plate, filled with maple sausage and fruit salad. Zoro has his own plate shoved up against hers and his arm in a mirroring position, so that their arms forge some makeshift wall. A united front. He has yawned seven times in the brief conversation she tried to have, and he can’t seem to keep those fussy tired-tears from falling. Still, he’s an excellent guard against food-prying hands.
The morning moves again. Breakfast ends, Brook and Robin hang behind to clear and clean the kitchen. Nami wanders back out onto the lawn, settling this time below one of the tangerine trees, her journal still in hand. The crew scatters upon the sun-exposed levels of the ship, and for one reason or another Luffy has settled quietly beside her. He isn’t still, his boundless energy tugs grass from the yard and rolls it between his palms, so that his skin finds itself stained a mild green. His legs are criss-crossed, but occasionally he wiggles his ankles like a rabbit thumping its foot. He’s not still — he never is — but he’s quiet, and that makes Nami tight in the throat. Luffy almost always is a chatterbox, but his lips now draw a tersely closed line. He’s smiling, but something fills his eyes halfway up, and he won’t look anywhere but to his left, at the rocking waves.
She jabs a finger into his shoulder. “What has you so quiet?”
She leans close to him so she can see his face at a better angle. He blinks once, twice, squints like he doesn’t want to blink, then blinks a third time. It’s a minute before Luffy answers, but he hums just to let Nami know he heard her.
“I didn’t have a good dream,” he finally answers, leaning back against the base of the tree. He turns to her, “I don’t remember it, though. I just have this feeling in my chest, it’s kinda gross.”
Nami raises an eyebrow, “You’re feeling anxious…?”
Luffy shrugs, breaks into a sunshine and clear-skies grin.“Sure, I can call it that. I’ve been ‘anxious’, and so I thought: you’re scarier than any nightmare I could ever have, and if I sat next to you it’d chase off that feeling.”
The sun decides that very instant to crawl out from a small cirrus cloud and dazzle Nami’s eyes, so brightly she blinks soft tears from the strain. Luffy wiggles himself across the grass and sits properly in front of her, casting his shadow across her eyes.
“Is it working?” Nami asks.
If possible — very much so, for a rubber boy — Luffy’s grin splits wider, “Well, I’m not sure I feel all that bad anymore…?” he tilts his head and scuffs his hair, “I think I feel hungry, actually,”
Nami laughs, the tilt-your-head-back and open-your-mouth-wide kind of laugh. The top of her skull knocks the bark of the tree once, then she peers back down at Luffy, who’s bright smile and soft face is more a comfort than any gold or diamond. He’s like a fruit, a pear or a tangerine. Or maybe he is the branches that fruits grow from, reaching out far and offering up all the sweetness he has.
And that’s just Luffy, always. Luffy, who gives so much to people, like he’s giving away baskets of fruit. Luffy, who knows just how unforgiving life can be, and makes the baskets free anyway. It’s not a consciously selfless decision, Nami’s quite certain given an actual basket of apples, Luffy would eat them all before he could remember to share. It’s just — in passing, there’s all that love to give. Sweetness blooming on every stem.
“I think Sanji is cutting up some watermelon,” Nami contemplates, smiling. Luffy makes some whooping noise and swings his way towards the kitchen. She sits like that for a moment, listening for the inevitable shout and shatter, her hands warmed by her jacket’s cloth.
Then she frowns, and tosses a glance back to the sky. Cirrus clouds. A promise of a warm front, and so a promise of rain. That’s odd, Nami wraps her jacket around her fingers once more, there’s been no other signs of rain recently.
She tosses open her journal, and scribbles a note about keeping an eye on the weather.
***
The cirrus clouds deliver on their rainy promise some four or five hours later, an unusually rapid progression. Even for the Grand Line. It starts with one or two heavy drops that splash into the watermelon mocktail Sanji made her, and in twelve minutes the upper deck is drenched.
There is power in the rain. It brings floods and lightning and clouds that grow darkness like parasitic vines. What Nami’s learned, though — what she’s let herself be taught in these last few months — is that it also fills lands with life, and rivers with water to drink. Of course, she’s always known this, it’s intuitive. But there seems to be a difference between knowing something and understanding it, because as soon as she pushed to understand this, the bad days seemed so much lighter.
Once, so early in their journey that they hadn’t even left the waters of the East Blue, Nami sat through the night with Zoro and Luffy. She’d asked, with the halfway point between a frown and a snarl on her lips: what’s your goal in piracy, anyway? It takes a lot of focus to be the rule it all, and a lot of power to be the best of them all.
Luffy frowned, like the answer was simple and she was the slow one.
That’s a dumb question, he said, the world isn’t here to be ruled. I’m not here to rule it. I just wanna live.
Nami furrowed her brow, breathed a sigh into the air. There’s always consequences to living. You’re not afraid?
Zoro answered her, then, mimicking her sigh as a puff of laughter. He tilted his head back, opening eye, Fear is stupid.
Nami glared, It’s a survival instinct!
Sure, Zoro shrugged, but people say that so much, it’s beginning to sound like an excuse for being a coward. Kinda stupid.
Nami rolled her eyes then, she doesn’t think she would now. The world isn’t here to be feared, either, and fear isn’t here to be disregarded. It’s also not here to loom, and letting it loom is feeding a wild animal and startling when it begins to approach people.
Maybe, then, Nami shouldn’t let this anxiety sit in her spine. Maybe she’s feeding a button buck and not seeing the antlers that are soon to grow.
“Nami!”
Usopp is knocking on her desk, crouched down with his chin pressed to the wood. Nami dozed with the intention of pulling out an unfinished map. The knocking bounces through the woods and leaves a humming in her ear resting on the table. She sneers.
“What do you want, Usopp?” she turns to him, twisting out a crook in her neck, “have you ever thought of waking people up gently?”
Usopp rises with her, rocking back on his heels, “Well, I was going to, but I thought you might, eh, bite me.”
Nami glares, raising an angry fist. “I’m not a snapping turtle!”
Usopp laughs, and then he cuts himself short. Cautious and tense in the muscles of his face. Nami lowers her hand, matching his frown.
“What is it?” she swipes her static hair down flat, and then she sees it.
Her log pose isn’t pointing down anymore. Rather, forward, like it’s humoring the magnetic pull of a new island. She brings it closer to her face, right in front of her eyes.
“What…?”
Usopp scratches his neck, “That’s what I came in to tell you about. Zoro spotted an island in the distance, but we’re nowhere near the Red Line, let alone Fishman Island.”
Nami springs from the desk, out the door and up the stairs to the bow, rain soaking her clothes heavy. She’s her own rainstorm of wet cloth as she whirls around the deck. So they’ve caught another island but — how? There’s no changing their path, and no two islands are this close together. Surely? Thriller Bark hadn’t caught the log pose, but that made sense. It was West Blue, it was drifting as a ship. It wasn’t natural.
She hops up and leans over the taffrail, looking right where the log pose points her — roughly east, almost directly in front of the bow but leaning slightly starboard — and there it is. Off in the distance, only the vaguest of silhouettes hiding within the curling and swirling of the directionless wind, is an island. It’s jagged, perhaps cliff-heavy, and Nami thinks she can make out the shadows of trees coating most of the land. They’d need to get closer to be sure.
“Damnit,” she hisses, jumping back from the taffrail. She rushes over to the top of one of the staircases. On the lawn, the rest of her crew are standing in a line, all wide-eyed and waiting. They’re staring up at her, a tossed together chain of the sharpest ups and downs humanity can offer. Nami clenches her jaw with a fire in the back of the throat.
“You know what to do!” her scream echoes out louder than the rain, and just as angry as whatever storm gods have crashed over these seas. She leans a little over the rail, “get us to that island!”
Various sounds of confirmation, that all conglomerate into a sharp “hai” sound, and then they’re all scurrying off to their posts. Nami slides down the stairs to the center of the lawn, so she can direct with the changes in the wind.
She glances once more back at the island, a knit of unease tightens in her gut. She looks back around at her crew, and the knit unfurls the tiniest amount. There’s a looming peril in the storm, but some whispered comfort in its haze. Like lamp light through fog. Like the beginning breath of the morning, and the final promise of the evening. They’ll be fine, if a little roughed up.