Nami thought she had conquered nightmares long ago. She had believed that she mastered the art of induced, dreamless sleep. In all honesty, she had hoped as much, having lost so much of her life to viciously reliving things that no sane person would want to experience.
If someone she had trusted had asked but a week prior, she would have told them with pride that she had been sleeping like a guiltless child for nearly a year now. Unfortunately, her past performance was not indicative of current success.
She knew the lack of sleep was making her more irritable than ever. Her head hurt and she had very little patience for the adrenaline rush that kept assailing her when she finally awoke from her horrific ephemeral jaunts to see her two crewmates outside. Though it would be rational to feel that way when one considered just how off-course those two idiots could have steered their boat, the emotional impact came from something less distinct.
For a moment, she would profoundly regret her decision to follow the girl with the straw hat and aversion to modesty, because it meant she had to look at him. Roronoa Zoro, the man with the predator's eyes, who reeked of blood when no combat ensued, whose very presence made her hair stand on end...
...Roronoa Zoro, who gave his friend his own shirt as a blanket in the evening, watched the horizon for hours, and never complained about anything Nami hadn't instigated. She had seen how far he'd go for a comrade firsthand, so why couldn't she trust him? Why did she have to keep testing him?
The navigator's intuition was hardly ever wrong, which presented its own barriers to Nami's desire to cut her losses and leave the ship as soon as the opportunity presented itself. As much as she believed Zoro's presence conjured her demons into her nightly mental expanse, Luffy's soothed. That smile she kept sending in Nami's direction might not have always been entirely genuine, but it was for her. There was an implicit faith in those eyes.
It was difficult to rationalize that she instinctively reciprocated Luffy's trust. Especially in the wake of the realization that Luffy was like a dumb, needy kid; overly-attached, socially-inept, and more than a little self-destructive. She needed guidance from someone who wasn't just going to enable the worst of her impulses.
It was a responsibility that attracted and repulsed her in one fell swoop. Nami didn't have the time or energy to care for someone else… So how was bickering with the other woman more a release than a burden? Why was it so rewarding to put Luffy's repaired hat into her hands? Why did she want to devolve into happy tears when she succeeded in tricking Luffy into resting instead of playing rough? Why did it make her heart break to be pulled into that warm embrace? It was sufficiently saccharine to be sickening.
On the other hand, no one could say that life with her new companions was boring or without objective merit. No matter what she thought of the two personally, they were a source of free entertainment. Whenever the two weren't sleeping or eating, she had a chance of glimpsing something spontaneous and fun. A decent example included the time she looked up from her maps to see them having what they called a 'chicken fight'. Apparently, this was a game wherein opponents hopped on one leg and tried to knock the other person to the ground without falling over themselves.
She was tempted to yell at them for risking reopening their wounds, but the game never quite reached that level of intensity. When Nami finally civilly mentioned the risk of roughhousing while trying desperately not to poke fun at them, Luffy puffed up her chest and called it 'balance training'. In fact, this trend of screwing around and acting like it was some incredible exercise of strength became a pattern. For heaven's sake, the tiny woman spied the next island while being benched on a spare oar like some kind of idiotic barbell!
Nami found herself grinning despite her misgivings. No matter how terrifying Zoro might have been, he was, at the very least, a leashed tiger. She had to keep telling herself that.
Nami felt the relief of the seasoned sailor when they placed their feet on land after days at sea. The little voyage she'd just finished was short, but one can only stay on a boat in a tense social situation for so long. The sound of Zoro's heavy footsteps behind her did little to sour her mood.
"Welcome to Ingwa Gecko; home of Syrup Village!" she said happily, her job as navigator truly complete as Luffy joined her two cremates on the shore.
After a satisfying stretch, Zoro quirked an eyebrow at the copse of trees and narrow. hand-hewn path cutting up a gray cliffside. There wasn't a soul aside from them anywhere, unless someone counted the plethora of birds, insects, and fish that made their appropriate sounds in the morning sun.
"Some village," the swordsman scoffed. "Their harbor is just teeming with life."
Luffy hummed, but not in any sort of committed response to either of the two. Her brows furrowed in confusion, and Nami swore she saw the young woman's nostrils flare as she sniffed the air.
"I think I might have been here before," the pirate said with uncharacteristic quietness, "but have I been here before? Hnn."
She cocked her head so far to the left that Nami would assume her neck had broken if it weren't for the devil fruit Luffy had ingested. She had also put her emphasis in a weird place during that second sentence, but the older of the two women was in no mood to contemplate the idiosyncrasies of Luffy at that moment.
Zoro looked at his captain with a completely straight face while Nami, as usual, tried to actually find a way to speak using the appropriate apparatus; words.
"Unless you come from a family that liked to buy-," she narrowed her eyes at the margins of her charts,"-musilage adhesives in bulk, I can't imagine why you would have come out this way, Luffy."
The navigator chuckled. "Glue, huh? I wouldn't have even thought, just looking at this place."
Luffy still looked like she was more occupied with her previous thoughts than anything her navigator had just said, dammit, but still wasn't done asking questions. "Nami, do you think there's anyone here who could help us get a proper pirate ship?"
"No," the addressed ginger-haired woman immediately replied, not even really giving it a second thought, "but I guess there's no harm in checking. We need to resupply, anyway."
Nami knew better than to think Luffy needed her permission to better prepare her crew for the dangers ahead. In fact, if Luffy hadn't brought up the need for a bigger boat, the navigator would have breached the subject.
Zoro yawned, though whether this was from boredom or actual drowsiness remained to be seen.
Luffy paused, then let her massive, face-eating smile take back over her face. "Yeah! Let's buy so much food that the village will have no choice but to give us a bigger ship to hold it all!"
Nami knew she was playing into her captain's hands, but she couldn't help herself. "That's NOT HOW THAT WORKS!" she yelled, preparing to whip around Zoro to punch her captain's head, but Zoro had already taken a stance to make that difficult. Even if that hadn't been the case, her new friend wasn't even when the two had left her.
The sound of an elastic band snapping meant she'd already catapulted over them both, ready to be the first one to enter town regardless of how the other two felt about it. Well, as long as she could be trusted to follow a straight path to get to a destination; Nami really doubted that was an ability either of her companions possessed.
"Hey! HEY! Don't get too far ahead!" Zoro yelled in his friend's direction moments before Nami had the chance, fueled by what the navigator could only assume was valid concern, given the track record of the spitfire barreling towards Syrup Village.
Nami groaned as he sprinted past her, his stitches and inferior sense of direction be damned. Now she had two meandering sheep to look after. How was it that her job got harder on land?!
"Wait for me, musclehead!" she called.
Luffy was sprinting as soon as she hit the ground again. She knew she could get lost, but there also wasn't any evidence of danger on this island. On the contrary; she felt incredibly secure. The environment here really did feel like an old friend.
The day was beautiful and bright, the air was clean, and she could turn her head any which way and see a handful of tiny white butterflies engaged in their annual dances.
There was also the benefit of only one main road, which was a help. It took her straight to the village proper. Once she could take in the sight of the entire settlement, she sat on a fence and waited, watching the townspeople coming and going.
There weren't many. At a glance, the strawhat captain guessed that the population of the village that she could see couldn't be more than a hundred and fifty. That didn't mean that there couldn't be more houses or shops hidden inside the many copses of trees, but Luffy didn't think that her nakama would appreciate her running off to make an official census of the population of Syrup Village.
"Hnnn." She stroked her chin and looked from each visible dwelling to another. None of the structures jumped out at her until she found the restaurant. No one could miss the building's purpose owing to the enormous sign that said as much.
As if on cue, Luffy's stomach grumbled. She frowned and looked down the path from which she came. She hadn't meant to get quite so far ahead of her crew, but she also didn't want them to lose track of her.
Thirty seconds passed, and the young woman's eyes wandered back to the eatery, conflicted. The food was there; she could smell it. It smelled like maple, sausage, eggs, and toast.
She was drooling like a waterfall now. Why were her friends so gosh darned slow?! They were like ducks with their waddling feet soaked in molasses in a swamp, and… Oh dear, it was thinking about molasses that proved to be her undoing.
At least, she reasoned, her friends could guess where she had gone. If they didn't know about her boundless appetite by now, they were never going to learn.
There was a little dinging sound that announced Luffy's arrival into the restaurant. It was a small, cozy place, containing only an old man behind a counter sipping something hot (Luffy assumed he was the owner and chef), and one olive-skinned young man partially covered by a divider enjoying a pile of hot cakes. At least, that's what Luffy could determine.
To be fair, Luffy wasn't very concerned about the food the teenager was eating. No, she was too busy letting her eyes travel up his right arm and to the curly, unruly hair that attached itself to the side of his head like woolen curtains.
She knew him from just these visuals, and something like anticipation rose in her throat as her eyes continued to make their way to his thick eyebrows and elongated nose. It was only when they stopped on his eyes themselves that the captain of nearly no one realized she had been caught in the act of staring like a madwoman. The expression meeting her own certainly cemented that impression.
"Can I help you?" the object of her intense gaze asked, an undercurrent of insecurity already present his inflection.
Luffy felt her instinctive smile conquer her face like Gol D. Roger did the Grand Line. It did nothing to calm the young man down, but she couldn't quell it if she'd wanted to. Instead, she hummed to make it seem more natural before taking a seat across from the startled boy across from her.
"Aah, yes." She said, placing her elbows on the table and letting her eyes close in though. "I don't suppose you know who I am, do you?" she asked, the question as perfectly natural to her as it was odd for her companion. She was positioned far enough in her seat that someone fond of personal space would find her perch intrusive.
The young man leaned back in his seat as far as the back of his bench would allow. "N-no," He stammered. "Should I?"
Luffy laughed, but it rang a little hollow. Something about this reaction seemed wrong. Where were the stories? The fabrications? Was she so strange an object that her vicarious friend didn't both with his regular defenses? Well, he didn't really have anyone to impress, to be sure, but…
"Not yet, I guess," she admitted. She fought the urge to steal an unattended sausage. "but I know you."
If she had to compare the adolescent in front of her to anything, Luffy supposed he would be a nervous rodent of some sort. He had a tendency to shake when excited. He was breathing faster, caught between suspicion and curiosity. His eyes flashed in a way totally unlike Zoro or Nami. It wasn't unpleasant, but she knew plotting when she saw it; and the young man was about to get very creative with the sausage she'd so selflessly denied herself.
"You look just like your dad said you did, Usopp," she finally beamed at him after a bit of dramatic tension linger in the air. Pirate kings were supposed to be masters of such things.
She spoke her words freely; they weren't lies. In fact, they were more true for Ussop than most human beings. How many people could say they looked almost exactly like their nymphal forms? Not many, Luffy would wager; she was very, very grateful for it.
She was still bad at lying outright. One day it would be her undoing.
The young man's fear melted away in an instant, replaced by childish delight.
"You know my old man?!" he asked, nearly dropping the fork he'd been preparing to use as a make-shift weapon should things have gotten much more uncomfortable.
"Yeah! How could I not? He's almost as good of a sniper as an over-sharer!" She laughed, though for a moment, she really hoped that the version of his father she brought to mind was her own. Usopp's complete resignation to sharing her mirth eased her mind more than she'd care to admit, "I swear, he never shut up about his cute little boy, and if I tried to change the subject, I'd literally be held captive!"
That sentence would be frightening without context, as Luffy had meant the word 'literally' as it was intended. Fortunately, the world she lived gave such situations acceptable niches. Ussop had clearly made peace with the fact his father trapped children in his lap so he could drunkedly yammer at them without the possibility of their escape a long time ago.
"Yeah, that's my dad, alright," Usopp said, his own grin plastered to his face. "How's he doing these days, Ms," he stumbled,"-er,"
"Monkey D. Luffy." Luffy said, projecting as much confidence as her frame would allow. "I'm the woman who's going to be the pirate king!"
Usopp may have gone for the sausage and fork again. Luffy could forgive him for that, but he could stand to be more subtle when dealing with a lady. For heaven's sakes, what a waste of perfectly good meat. If she'd really been a stalker suffering a psychotic episode, she'd have stolen his food by now. On principle.
After a moment of maintaining the direct eye contact, Ussop apparently changed his mind, letting out a long exhale. "You're serious, aren't you?"
Luffy nodded, trying very hard not to look at the morsel dangling oh-so-precariously on Ussop's fork. It was glistening, for heaven's sake…
Usopp let a smile creep back onto his face. Faced with an audience he had obviously decided wasn't a threat, he began to shift his posture to radiate confidence that didn't reach his eyes.
"Then I guess I've got to respect that. You know, from one mighty pirate to another. You should really be careful out there on the sea, though. I remember one time-"
Ah. That was what Luffy was waiting for. For a moment, she'd been a little worried. A nervous Ussop wasn't a problem, but an Usopp who didn't try to increase the liveliness of the atmosphere with lies was another thing entirely.
As he droned on about an adventure Luffy was certain had never happened, Luffy finally ate that piece of sausage. Usopp was far too into his creative process to have noticed.
Nami didn't have the slightest difficulty finding her captain, though she couldn't help but feel like she'd had to herd an ornery cat the entire way there. How anyone could manage to require as much help as Zoro did to find a clearly-trodden main road and walk in what was basically a straight line, she wasn't entirely sure, but that didn't mean she couldn't resent him. He'd wasted a lot of both of their time.
Luffy had been long gone by the time she reached the fence-post her new friend had waited at, and the light indicated it was getting ever-closer to midday. By that estimation, it had taken 2 hours to walk what should have taken a half an hour.
She could only consider herself lucky that Luffy's only obvious destination was so close by. The glutton couldn't have gone anywhere other than the restaurant named "Food".
Zoro was the first to the door; for the first time, Nami hadn't needed words to communicate a damn thing. If nothing else, they had shared Luffy knowledge in common; he already knew where his captain had gone.
He didn't wait for the navigator to catch up. By the time she reached the same portal, it had fallen shut. With a long-suffering sigh, she opened it again to see Zoro standing next to a booth, looking rapidly from his captain to a lanky teenager with a nose that could give the first mate's blades a run for their money where jabbing people's eyes out was concerned.
Luffy was busy jamming her face with food as the young man expounded on something to Zoro, who was beginning to look rather nonplussed. Nami could make out some of the words, as they had to do with enraged ghosts and penguins, of all things.
Luffy gave a couple of loud claps at an apparent climax and Zoro cracked a smile, however much annoyance came with it, and simply asked, "Where did the zombies come from, then?"
With only that little bit of input, Luffy's new friend began expounding on the new element to his tall tale, complete with wide, sweeping gestures. Zoro shoved Luffy beyond Nami's field of vision and took a seat, too.
Oh, God. The idiots were multiplying. She had no choice but to join them now.
Nami felt her patience wearing thinner by the moment. Today would be a very long day.