The sea is darker in the evening, a cool, inky blue that is slowly extinguishing the sun, getting ready to spit out the moon at her back. Hazy clouds peeter out overhead, smeared with red like thumbed chalk across paper. The belly of the ship cuts into high waves, sending mists of salt into the air, peppering her skin as she leans against the rail.
She loses track of the time just staring at the line where the sea and the sky meet. Usopp put it in her head one day that the line was a destination, not an illusion of distance. That it was something they were constantly chasing, like a finish line to the world's greatest race, and only they would know what lies beyond it.
That was Usopp's way. Hers is more tangible, with images of islands ahead of them, mapping out the unknown by instinct and habit. Her fingers tap against the rail with anticipation, because she has always been like this: it is one thing to imagine and guess and want, another entirely to know.
Maybe it comes from her mother, who grew tangerine trees because her own feet couldn't sprout roots. Belle-mere would secretly take Nami and Nojiko to the coast with rotten tangerines that didn't sell, get her daughters to toss them into the air, and shoot them with her pistol for moldy pulp to rain into the sea. It happened when their mother would smoke more cigarettes and start ironing her shirts to give her twitching fingers something to do.
Belle-mere missed being a marine. Nami didn't want to miss being a pirate, so, she left.
But there are few women at sea.