A/N: For Day 3 Prompt: Friendship for 20 years at sea over on tumblr. (Cross-posted from there.)
Once again this was not were I was going when I first started, but I guess this is what I get for just sitting down with a vague idea of what I want to do.

First Friends

It hit Nami on an oddly quiet day on the Grand Line. The sun was out and the currents were calm, and they would stay that way for some time. Everyone on the crew was taking advantage of this turn of advents, lazing about on the deck, napping or taking part in some other quiet activity.

Sanji had set up a deckchair for her below her tangerines to allow her to sunbathe while taking int he scents of her first home. She had let her mind wander to the soft sounds of snores rising from where Zoro had managed to wrangle Luffy into napping over to one side of the deck. A sight that had given her a flashback to the two idiots in the barely seaworthy little skiff that they had been when she had first met them.

It was that memory that prompted the realisation that the two of them had been her first friends.

Cocoyashi village was her home, but as a child the only real playmate she had had her age had been her sister, who didn't really count. All the other children had made fun of them for being poor. Before.

After. No one had wanted to be associated with a marked member of the crew that held them all hostage.

She hadn't had any chance to make any friends in her years of collecting for the ransom for her village. Time had always been of the essence and betrayal a skill she had needed to survive.

But those two had been different and Nami still wasn't sure when she started thinking of them as friends rather than marks. What she did know was that it was before she had taken the Merry and left them behind on the Baratie, thinking that even if she ever ran into them again she wouldn't be treated like a friend as they had been doing.

But they had come for her, trusted she had her reasons and come to get her back (and saved her at the same time). They had continued to treat her as a friend, even after she had seemingly betrayed them. That they saw in her as much a friend as she saw in them, as quickly as she had come to see them as such.

It would take her weeks (months, seas, islands, adventures, crewmates and an unwanted separation) to come to the realisation that them both taking her as a friend so quickly had been unusual.

Sure, Luffy made friends easily, arms open in welcome to anyone who was nice to them, hadn't hurt any of his other friends (and some who had) or was interesting. Seemingly able to pinpoint those that needed friends them most. Trust a thing he showed everyone unless they proved otherwise.

But Zoro didn't trust anyone, and those he did had to earn it the hard way. A loner in nature who held himself back from people until they proved themselves, but once they did was unflinchingly loyal to them. Willing to be crewmates with Luffy's choice of new additions and protect them as needed for Luffy, but would not really consider them friends until some unspecified event (Nami still wouldn't be able work out what it was with some of them).

But somehow, sometime, possibly on that first island they had both decided that she was their friend and they hers.

A/N 2: Now I'm off to finish setting myself up to write the next chapter of First Mate.