your love's a fucking drag, but I need it so bad
PaTD - Nicotine
She climbed nimbly out of the balloon ship and landed with a cheeky wave and a cheerful smile to the old men working on maintenance on the other balloon ships moored—is that the right term, I wonder—in the hangar, but little else. There was something she wanted to do, and the trip to the surface to get supplies and research data had provided her with the means to do it.
A few minutes later found Nami sitting on the ground of the tiny garden behind the house Haredas-san had loaned her, as per her instructions. She sat with her back against the wall, knees bent into a wide angle with her arms hanging heavily on top of them, a lit cigarette dangling between lax fingers. Three burnt out cigarette butts were lined up neatly next to the open box on the ground by her side, a plain black lighter pilfered from the chemist's storerooms on the other.
"Oi, oi, oi. Oi, oi, oi, oi."
Nami looked up with a small smile to this rather obnoxious greeting, Haredas-san's head was tilted at an odd angle towards her and entirely too close for comfort.
"Young lady. I didn't know you smoked...?"
The way his sentence trailed off implied a question-and Nami knew she was under no obligation to answer, but she found herself chuckling softly as she went ahead and did anyway.
"I don't, not really." She paused to take a deep drag of the cigarette, motioning the old man to sit upwind, away from the direction the smoke blew in as she exhaled. "It's just..."
She didn't know how to continue that. As a navigator (as Luffy's navigator), she couldn't really afford to smoke for real. It tended to ruin an otherwise perfectly normal palette and, more importantly, a person's sense of smell; something she couldn't do without if she wanted to be able to sense and maneuver the Grand Line's freak weather patterns before they even hit. But then again...
Nami glanced down at the pack of cigarettes, not the kind she'd known growing up, and yet so very intimately familiar it made her heart ache and her stomach swoop with unhappiness. She watched the embers of the lit end of her cigarette and flicked it with a familiar motion as the ashes began to extend.
"Just a bit of nostalgia, I suppose," she finally said, glancing up once more to flash a less-than-perfect smile as unreal as the thought of a sea without Luffy in it. It wasn't her best work, and she'd work on that, but for now Haredas-san had remained silent this whole while, letting her wallow in her own thoughts.
So she told him.
She spoke of the mother who had left her behind, the mother who'd given more than she could yet never asked for more. A lovely smile even when Nami screeched in alarm and Nojiko giggled in sadistic glee as Nami messed up using the razor to help shave the sides of soft red hair. She told him of soft words spoken into the dark after waking up from a thrashing nightmare about monsters under the bed, and the smell of mikan juice in the air when she awoke.
At one point while she spoke, her new guardian—or perhaps her new keeper, as the wary old men probably saw him-had taken a seat next to her, his arms wrapped around his knees as they were tucked in close to his chest, like a little child needing comfort. And at some point as she spoke, Nami had started speaking instead of a flamboyant chef with a penchant for expensive suits, of a home on the sea with grass on its deck and a space especially designed for the mikan trees she'd brought to carry home around with her. She laughed softly as she recounted his elaborate fawning, the perfectly timed cold drinks when the weather was at its boiling point; of the times when he was quiet, for once, sharing in her company in silence and with quiet drags instead of his usually obnoxious servitude.
"The first time it happened," she said, forcing a joking laugh into her voice instead of the violent shaking it wanted to put there, "I didn't even realize how overwhelmed I'd been sailing out to sea like that with no plans at all until he just came over to stand next to me by the railing. Didn't even say anything, just stood there and looked out to the sea, smoking like he's trying to die early."
Nami couldn't continue past that. She never got to say how the scent of tobacco had calmed her, had reminded her of her long gone mother, and how precious Sanji's awkward, fumbling smile had been to her in that instant. She was shaking so hard she couldn't even joke about the miracle it was that Sanji wasn't sick and coughing out his lungs the way he burned through cigarettes when he didn't know what to do in situations like that.
She didn't really notice that Haredas-san had gotten up or that the sun was already sinking until he went around her to pick up the half-empty box of cigarettes and scooped the butts she had still lined up neatly next to each other into his other hand.
"Now, now, now. No more smoking for you, young lady."
And Nami couldn't argue that, she shouldn't be smoking at all, really, except—
"You'll see them soon enough, won't you?"
A choking laugh bubbled out of Nami in reply to that. She kept her eyes on the ground between her feet as she listened to Haredas-san shuffle away, humming cheerily all the while.
The next day, Nami found the cigarette pack and a brand new, white-gold lighter tucked carefully between her research notes. With an energy she didn't have to fake for once, she bounded out the door to pester the old men to teach her about the Grand Line.
She left the cigarettes where they were.
