Disclaimer: One Piece most assuredly not mine, don't sue lah.
The Eternal Pose
Nami had lived most of her life adhering to a single principle: Survive. She'd lie, steal, flatter, get down on her knees or flat on her back if she had to. She had her pride, oh yes, but pride won't keep her alive and pride certainly won't bring back what's precious. Truth be told, Nami's treasures – the real, irreplaceable ones – are all but gone and what she hoarded and lusted after, only cheap imitations.
Before Luffy, Nami had been willing to lead a coward's slithering, simpering life. She'd resigned herself to an unsavoury death probably in some back alley pounded into the filth by faceless thugs. Then that idiot comes along, with his idiot grin and his idiot hat and his idiot tenacity, calling her Nakama to her lying, worthless face.
Now as Nami watches Luffy toss his life away again and again, as carelessly as a boy might fling his kite into the summer sky, she sometimes wonders if he'd made a mistake. Any day now, she chanted silently, he'd turn around, look at me with a stranger's eyes and demand 'why are you on my ship?'
To be Luffy's Nakama is almost more than Nami could bear. When he literally tears her nightmare apart; when he drags his frostbitten body up a cliff for her; it's then that Nami wants to scream ENOUGH! This much pride and fear and love surely cannot be contained by a heart as small as hers.
Like the rest of the crew, Nami feels reborn. From the moment Luffy caught her wrist – the dust, the blood, the hate – everything had changed. She is becoming someone her old self would have detested and despised. Every day she spends on this ship, she is becoming more foolish, maybe someday even (she hopes) as foolish as he.
If Luffy has taught her anything, it is this: Hope can be clawed from the skies, carved out from the mountains, heaved back inch by bloodied inch from death's door. No enemy is too strong and no odds are too great as long as Luffy is banging for meat, Usopp declaring himself captain, and Sanji and Zoro locked in a fierce battle over nothing. And if Nami has learnt anything, it is this: Even if the whole world descends into chaos, the Straw Hat Pirates will sail facing their horizon, course straight and true.
In the end, life turns out to be so simple it makes her smile.