Years of Dysfunctional Chaos

The Odd Pair

No one in the community could ever quite figure out how the pair had wound up married at all, let alone to each other. It was to become quite a legend within the old ladies' knitting and quilting circles until the gossiping ladies died and no one was left who remembered the story from the beginning. As years passed, the focus of the gossip would switch from the couple to their children, and the oddness of the couple would be forgotten, so ordinary would their union seem.

But the way it had started had been far from ordinary. Robin Nico and Brook Nico had not even originally been from the community: Robin, in fact, had been thirteen years of age when Brook Nico had arrived at the little village, a traveling musician with nothing but an old fashioned walking stick—more for decoration than practicality, it seemed—a sack containing a meager amount of food and a quiet daughter. The village, of course, had had no use for musicians, but Brook and Robin were both good workers. It had been the house of the Nefertari family—the mayor at the time—that had opened their doors warmly to the homeless father and daughter in exchange for work.

Initially, it had been suggested that Robin would help out around the house while Brook would help out with the farm work in exchange for food and lodging as long as they stayed in the village. The pair had quietly accepted that one of them would work indoors and the other outdoors, and thoroughly surprised the village the next morning when it was the daughter who went out to work in the farm, and the father who cooked and cleaned. Initially, there were objections, but as each did good work in the place they had chosen, there seemed no cause and the objections grew silent.

Days passed, then weeks, then months, and eventually years, but Brook never showed any sign of leaving. To tentative questioning, he would respond that as he got to perform his music every night after dinner and they had all they needed, they had no reason to leave. Robin, it seemed, had always merely followed her father and did not care a whit where she was as long as there were books for her to read.

The Nefertari family had a son named Cobra, who was right around Robin's age. As all other young men in the village, Cobra worked in the farms and therefore side-by-side with Robin. It also turned out that the pair shared a deep passion for history, and they could spend hours debating the finer points of past events as they worked in the fields. This was the only time anyone ever saw Robin animated—or as animated as she ever was. Cobra and Robin developed a very close, if quiet, friendship, and it was the unspoken agreement of everyone that the two would be wed when they came of age. Even after Brook earned enough to build a house for himself and Robin and moved out of the Nefertari residence and Robin began working for Clover—the resident scholar—instead, Robin and Cobra could still be found sitting together in the village square at lunch time, debating heartily as they ate their sandwiches.

But when they reached the age of eighteen and the village was holding their breath in anticipation of a proposal, Cobra discovered young Titi, a quiet, reserved sixteen-year-old who had never really been one to gather much attention. But Cobra, upon seeing her one day in the market, discovered that she was beautiful, kind and intelligent, and instantly began channeling a great part of his energy into courting her. Six months later, he had wooed and wed his lady love, and the village was now holding their breath in anticipation of Robin's fury as a woman scorned.

They waited in vain. Either Robin was incredibly adept at hiding her emotions, or she was not at all affected by Cobra's marriage. She and Cobra still appeared to maintain their friendship, though Cobra's devotion to his wife was such that he had much less time to spare for friends.

Years continued to pass. Brook started a tradition of dancing parties in the village square every full moon. The village began to speculate that Robin would die an old maid.

It was old Amazon who was first to see. One day she came hobbling to the quilting circle half an hour late, and when the other ladies looked up at her crossly, she dismissed them easily by excitedly imparting the news. The quilting circle went wild that day. The ladies' hands moved more swiftly than ever as their tongues wagged even faster. When poor little Conis arrived to deliver a small parcel her grandmother had forgotten at home, she received an excited earful from the ladies. She ran home to her father excitedly and shared the news, though not quite certain what there was to be so excited about. Conis's father smiled and told her not to gossip, so Conis went to play with her friends and forgot all about it. Conis's father, on the other hand, shared the information casually with the shopkeeper at the market as he was buying carrots ten minutes later. Thus, by the time Robin returned having gathered Clover's data on wave frequency, the entire village knew and was watching her covertly.

If Robin noticed this, she said nothing.

The next day, there were more people on the docks, keen to see if the alleged scene from the day before would repeat itself. Indeed, it did. Robin arrived and sat herself by the shipyard with a notebook and pencil and began to take notes diligently. Shortly after, Franky Mugiwara arrived on the scene and resumed work on Amazon's late husband's boat.

The villagers waited in vain for ten minutes, and began to wonder if Amazon had just imagined it. Then Robin put down her pencil and sighed, and Franky looked up with a grin.

"Another hour of waiting?" he asked.

"Just forty-five minutes," Robin corrected in her usual unconcerned monotonous tone. "It takes me fifteen minutes to take notes."

"Of course," grinned Franky, setting down his tools and walking over to kneel behind Robin. The villagers held their breath, wondering what they were about to see.

In some ways, it was terribly disappointing that Franky's hands settled on Robin's shoulders—hardly a scandal—but in other ways it was quite shocking, for no one ever dared touch a hair on Robin's head. Not even Cobra had dared, citing that she seemed to have paranoia of being touched by anyone but her father.

Here, however, Robin sat calmly as Franky kneaded the muscles in her shoulders. He was back on his feet and resuming work on the boat five minutes later. "You looked tense," was all he offered in the way of explanation. Was that a blush? the villagers wondered in surprise, for Franky was always very prideful and while he would cry dramatically at times, he was not wont to display more subtle emotions such as embarrassment.

Then they saw what had begun the whole rumor: Robin looked up at Franky and gave a genuine smile and a laugh. The old lady pretending to knit dropped her knitting. The man pretending to read a book ripped the page. The woman pretending to pace impatiently stumbled.

The next day, Franky appeared at the Nico residence at sunrise wearing his best clothing—including pants, and several neighbors couldn't resist staring out their windows at this—and proposed. It was the most awkward, stuttered proposal anyone had ever heard, yet Robin agreed. They were married before the priest with Brook as their witness the day after that, and for some reason that no one could understand, Brook decided to change his last name when Robin's changed to Mugiwara.

No one could ever figure out what had transpired between the pair to result in such a relationship. Questioning Robin had confirmed that they had only known one another for three days at the point that Franky had proposed—though, it being a small village, they had of course known of each other before that—and this confused the villagers even more. Eventually, the general consensus came to be that Robin was the only woman around who could hope to keep up with Franky's energy in bed. This argument was made, cited, and supported by the fact that the couple had five children in quick succession, each born nine months after the last.

The first boy was named Zoro, a quiet baby who did not begin to display any personality whatsoever until the appearance of siblings, and the second was Sanji, always Momma's Little Boy and never consenting to being carried by his father—or, in fact, by any male. The third was a girl—to be the couple's only daughter—and was named Nami, the "angel" of the family (she would continue to be referred to as an "angel" by her family even after the village dubbed her a "devil"). The fourth was named Usopp and was an oddly ordinary-seeming little boy, appearing to have none of the temperamental oddities common to everyone else in the family (but when for the first four years of his life little of what he said would ever be factual, the illusion of his lack of eccentricity was quickly dispelled). The fifth was the happiest, cutest little baby ever seen by the village. While most of the siblings seemed immune to the persuasive aspects of his cuteness, it also could not be denied that each had a soft spot for him: Zoro was his protector, guarding his little brother against all the evils the world might or might not hold; Sanji seemed to hold him in esteem second only to Nami, for whom Sanji reserved most of his brotherly affection; if anyone could talk Nami out of something it would be Luffy (a fact which Robin quickly discovered and began to subtly exploit); Usopp would save his best stories for Luffy.

Two years later, the couple had a final child whom they named Chopper, and while Chopper was then technically the baby of the family and all adored him for it, the other siblings still maintained that soft spot for Luffy while simultaneously widening the ring of their friendship to include Chopper without a fuss.

And eventually, between Robin and Franky's serenenity in the roles of husband and wife and the strange, outlandish things that their offspring did, people eventually forgot how they had initially found it so strange that Franky and Robin should wed. In fact, by the time Nami was curious enough to ask people how her parents had met and fallen in love, people would be declaring that they had known all along that the village's trousers-hating shipwright and quiet bookworm were always meant to be.