Author's Note: At last! I confess, this AU stumps me sometimes... But I rather like this story. Yes...I brought in Ace. I had to, because the canon is making me cry.
Years of Dysfunctional Chaos
The Routine
The first aspect of the routine began when Nami was 5, on her first day in Kindergarten. A little boy whose name she couldn't remember stepped up to her and gave her a dandelion.
Now, Nami did not particularly like this boy. Nor did she particularly like dandelions. But the boy was stuttering and falling all over himself because of her, and Nami realized that this was rather like having a doting servant. So she smiled and accepted the weed. The boy's face went bright red, and Nami smiled wider.
Later, Nami covertly tossed the dandelion into a trash can. The little boy was at her beck and call all through the rest of Kindergarten.
The second aspect of the routine began when Nami was 6, and in the first grade classroom right beside Sanji's second grade classroom. It was a different little boy (though again, Nami did not know his name) who offered Nami a lily stolen from Amazon's back yard. Nami smiled and accepted the gift as before, and the boy stumbled all over himself trying to make up jokes to impress her. Nami found them all dull, but noticed that his devotion to her increased with every giggle; so she tittered mindlessly at the boy's horrible jokes.
The affair was, however, ended prematurely exactly five minutes after it began when Sanji came storming into the room from the classroom next door. With a quick look at the scene, Sanji determined that the boy was dull, unintelligent, and unattractive, and therefore unworthy of the attention of Sanji's little sister. Nami calmly sat in her seat as Sanji's shouts drove the little boy into a corner. She absently reflected that perhaps she should have defended him, but it seemed so pointless when she could not even remember his name.
The next day, Nami went to school intending to talk to the little boy and reinstate him as her slave. But he was not there when she arrived, and he still was not there when the teacher took attendance. Nami figured that he was absent, and put off her plans until the next day.
The little boy did not show up again for a week.
When he finally did appear, the mere sight of Nami sent him running in the other direction.
This was inconvenient, Nami reflected, but there were plenty of boys in the classroom.
The process repeated itself for the first months of first grade, until not one male in the classroom could look at Nami without flinching.
The six-year-old Nami sighed and figured that the whole gentle coercion thing simply was not for her. So she took to threatening the boys into doing as she wished. Apparently, this suited Sanji, for he stopped appearing to interfere with Nami's dealings.
However, the system became problematic when Nami turned 14 and started high school. There was a certain Ace Portgas in the twelfth grade that was the most perfect man she had ever seen—and every attempt she made to seduce him was thwarted by Sanji.
She tried waiting at Ace's locker. Sanji appeared and aimed a kick at Ace as he approached; Ace avoided the kick, shrugged, and apparently decided to forgo his locker. So Nami tried approaching Ace in the cafeteria during lunch; Sanji appeared and threatened Ace with some serious bodily harm if he dared touch Sanji's precious little sister.
Finally, at the end of the school day, Nami ambushed Sanji, stuffed him into his own locker, and then ran after Ace as he made to walk home.
"Look, Nami," said Ace with a sigh, and Nami's heart leaped to know that he knew her name. "I get that you like me. To be honest, I don't think you're that bad either. But if you're thinking about the whole dating thing...I'm not so big on that. It's not that you're not attractive—but I really don't want to spend my days and nights in paranoia of being ambushed by your brothers."
"But- but they're not all like that!" Nami protested. She pointed at Zoro as he ambled homeward (or what he probably thought was homeward—he was going the wrong way). "See? He's my eldest brother, and he doesn't care at all!"
"As true as that may be," said Ace with a shrug, "this is a small town. I know more boys who have suffered serious injuries at the hand of that one brother of yours than I'd like to count."
Nami deflated.
"It's great meeting you, Nami," said Ace, ruffling her hair much to Nami's horror. Then he turned and walked away.
That evening, Nami put on her high heels, stomped into the boys' bedroom, and proceeded to kick the life out of Sanji without a word.
Sanji, who had spent four hours in the locker until the janitor heard the banging and muffled yelling in the deserted school and let him out, did not seem to mind suffering physical abuse at the hands (or feet, as the case was) of his little sister; no one knew if the incident had any effect on Sanji's routine attempts to keep all male specimens away from his little sister.
Nami, on the other hand, frustrated that she had never even been kissed while some of her friends were losing their virginity, formulated a solution to the problem.
The next day, she ambushed Ace Portgas and kissed the living daylights out of him—with tongue. While Ace stood there, slightly bewildered, Nami hissed, "You may think my brother frightening, but just wait till you see what you get for messing with me." Then she cried, at the top of her lungs, "He kissed me! My first kiss, gone!" And she broke down in tragic sobs.
In under ten seconds, Sanji had arrived, more furious than anyone had ever seen him. Zoro took rather longer to appear, and looked rather less infuriated, but landed a few punches around Sanji's kicks before calmly walking away again.
Ace was hospitalized for a month. (And Sanji for twice that, but that detail tended to get overlooked by the townspeople.)
The boys' attitudes toward Nami quickly returned to docile, though perhaps they now stuttered in terror rather than adoration. As long as she had her colony of slaves, Nami did not particularly mind—she had now officially been kissed, and she had no interest in losing her virginity anytime soon anyway. She would travel the world one day, and snag a rich husband; for now, all she needed was slaves.
But whenever she felt a urge to be romantic and was discontent with the knowledge that there was no one in town to be romantic with, she would go out and buy a new pair of dangerous-looking but attractive shoes, put them on, storm into the boys' room and attack Sanji. It was just routine.
She was a member of the Mugiwara family, after all. Nothing she did could be too weird.
