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“Oh ho ho, well now this is interesting…”
Pudding jumped back, staring at the man trembling before her. He grit his teeth and glared at her through wavering vision, blood dripping down his arm from the bullet wound in his shoulder. He shook in pain, but stood firm, his stance wide and steady, covering the red head on the ground who stopped rolling and started coughing. Pudding lowered the smoking gun in her hand, cocking her head with annoyed curiosity.
“You could have easily hit me instead of protecting her, but you didn’t…” Pudding mused. “I know she is your nakama, but why is that, I suppose?”
“Don’t—don’t fight her,” Sanji hissed. “Fight me instead.”
Nami gasped through a cough, and reached out a shaky hand toward Sanji. Her legs still weren’t working properly from the spitting acid of Nitro. Pain laced up through her spine and made her vision blur. Pudding frowned and itched her head with the barrel of her gun.
“But I thought you don’t fight women, Sanji? Given up on your little code already?” She said.
“No,” Sanji said. “I don’t fight women, and I never will.” He took a stumbling step toward Pudding, glaring at her. The auburn-haired woman narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips.
“But I wanted to play with my friend a bit more.”
Around them, the resounding screams of Luffy reverberated alongside the deep cackles of Big Mom. Gunshots pocked the air while the clanging of swords rang behind them. Sanji could discern between those of Brook and Zoro; Brook’s were light, near-silent, joyous and precise while Zoro’s were heavy with power, rushing and controlled and terrifying. Sanji picked out the raucous shouting and dazzling display that was Franky, rockets and lasers landing with ear-splitting explosions and the cyborg’s infectious laughter. He could almost feel Franky’s “super” display afterward. Up above them somewhere loomed Chopper in his monster point, growling low and angry, swiping at hordes of Big Mom’s candy soldiers. Robin and Carrot were working together, the flowery sounds of Robin’s powers mixing with Carrot’s fierce shouts. Jinbe, Pedro Usopp and the others—they could all be heard shouting and screaming and punching and attacking, leaving the air thick and heavy with the battle.
But the air around Sanji, Nami, and Pudding felt eerily silent. The tension between them was strung taught, quivering with immense pressure. Pudding finally released Sanji’s glare and threw her head back in a cackle.
“You really are pathetic, aren’t you?” She said. She casually side stepped a couple of times, moving to aim the gun at Nami again. Sanji slid along with her, keeping himself planted firmly in the line of fire. Pudding tried again, but Sanji wouldn’t let her line up her shot. She rolled all three of her eyes and drew the gun back in exaggeration.
“Sanji-kun, you can’t…” Nami said through clenched teeth. She continued trying to push herself back onto her feet, and had managed to get to her knees, but the hissing and popping of the acid on her skin was making her nauseous, and the pain made it hard for her to see.
“That’s right, Sanji-kun, you can’t do much of anything right now with that bullet wound,” Pudding sneered. She jumped to the side, trying to catch him off guard, but Sanji stumbled along, mirroring her movements. Sanji’s entire shoulder and left side were stained a bright red but he kept his grip on the wound firm and shook his head. Pudding tried again, jumping to the other side, but Sanji diligently followed along, always keeping Nami at his back.
“I can protect Nami-san,” he said.
“Even at the cost of protecting yourself?” Pudding shouted. She jumped forward, aiming at kick at his face. Sanji blocked her, stumbling back a bit. He made no move forward, even though Pudding knew she had left herself wide open.
Pudding stared at him for a moment before suddenly smirking. Instead of jumping to the side or trying to fake him out, she calmly walked forward, slowly, almost leisurely, stopping right in front of the panting man. She spread her arms wide, making a show of taking her finger off the trigger of her gun and even lifted her head, exposing her throat.
“Here, since I’m feeling a bit bad for you, I’ll even give you a free shot,” she said. Sanji said nothing, glaring down at her and wincing in pain.
“C’mon now, don’t be shy, I’ll even close my eyes for you,” Pudding purred. Seconds passed. Then a minute.
“No,” Sanji said. “I will never—can never—hit a woman.”
Pudding’s theatrics deflated, and she let her arms drop to her sides, staring at Sanji with an incredulous look. “You’ll throw away your life for that?”
“If it saves Nami-san and my friends then it is worth it for me to sacrifice myself,” Sanji said. A dark resignation fell across his features that slumped his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth. Pudding paused, cocking her head to the side, eyes wide.
“You love her, don’t you?” She whispered. Sanji darted his eyes back up to Pudding’s.
“More than anything,” he said with such a heavy certainty he could hear Nami gasp in surprise behind him.
“You’re giving up your life to save the woman you love.”
Sanji nodded.
“Even though I gave you opportunities, again and again, to save yourself, to leave here...” Pudding’s face bloomed into one of grand awe.
“Even though you had a chance to be safe, to be a prince…” Revelation brightened her features, and the gun dangled in her slack fingers.
“You’re choosing her—you’re choosing love over all of that,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Sanji said. A small smile pulled at the corner of his pained lips. At least Pudding could understand that. At least she could understand love.
“How…” Pudding’s huge teary eyes shone with wonder.
“…fucking asinine!” she screeched.
She slammed the butt of her gun down against the side of Sanji’s head. Stars winked in his eyes while he spun and crumpled to the ground with a yell of pain. He could vaguely hear Nami shout his name from somewhere in front of him but he couldn’t stop the world from spinning. Eventually he realized he was on his knees.
“You’re disgustingly weak, you know that?” Pudding sneered. “And, just because it’s so easy, it’s so so tempting to kill you. But you know, I think I have a better idea…” She planted her foot squarely in between his shoulder blades and grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back.
“I think maybe you should learn some self-preservation. With no ugly bitch to distract you, maybe you’d be a bit more fun,” Pudding said.
Suddenly she delved her left hand into his head, the bone and flesh becoming putty and malleable in her grip. He screamed in pain, feeling her clawing around, sifting through his brain and scraping against the inside of his skull. She dug around roughly, purposely causing as much discomfort as possible, and Nami felt her insides heave in disgust.
“Although now that I think about it, you can’t really erase stupid,” she said, pausing for a moment in her violent onslaught. After a short moment she shrugged her shoulders and groped around in Sanji’s head once again, shoving her hand all the way in to her elbow. It didn’t take long for her to suddenly stop and yank her hand back out, Sanji groaning in pain, and draw out a lengthy reel of memory. Even from this distance Nami could see her own image dotted along the strip. Pudding looked up from her work to stare Nami in the eyes.
“You know what the best part of my power is?” Pudding said. Her face twisted up into a deranged sneer, eyes blazing, a menacing aura curling up around her like a black fog. “Not only can I alter memories, my dear Sanji-kun, I can erase them completely.”
Nami gasped.
With nothing more than a soft snip the memory reel Pudding had stretched in her hand, the one containing the precious and sweet image of Nami from two years ago, the one showing Nami spinning around from her work on her tangerine trees to smile and laugh at the viewer—at Sanji—was severed.
Sanji screamed in pain, a high wail of unspeakable torment, while a cold burn splintered through his head. He had tried to keep his grip on… something… intact, but it was all slipping away from him now. He knew it had been important, whatever it was, and his mind scrambled to bring it back, but it was liking groping at air in a blindfold, unsure of what he was even supposed to be searching for. All he knew was that something precious in his head had been ripped away.
Pudding let the orphaned memory flutter to the ground at Sanji’s knee. Nami’s eyes widened in horrified disbelief while Pudding pushed her hand back into Sanji’s head as though it were a mound of soft clay. She brought forth another reel of memory, promptly snipping it and sticking her hand in again. Sanji, meanwhile, screamed and shook, but seemed unable to move, tethered to the spot by Pudding’s malicious glee.
“Stop it!” Nami cried, finally finding her voice. She scrambled to get to her feet, but the pain in her legs had the world winking in and out of existence in her eyes. Pudding glanced at Nami, nonplussed.
“Memory is such an interesting thing,” she said. “It’s important to make a clean break, especially when altering things, like editing a movie. By cleaving the reel in between shots, I can make the transition seamless and painless, and one wouldn’t even know there was a difference. But,” Pudding looked at Nami with a nasty glint in her eyes, “if I were to… accidentally… cut it wrong, leave just a little sliver of a scene left, well, it would cause quite the havoc on the mind.”
The Charlotte daughter considered her shears, twirling them in her fingers. The glints of the blades slashed at Nami’s eyesight. Her heart hammered in her chest. She tried getting up again, felt herself go light-headed.
“See, the mind likes to keep things complete, you know?” Pudding continued. “If by some terrible series of events a partial memory were left, the mind would scramble and latch onto it, knowing it was important by not knowing how. Without any context, without knowing where the sliver of an idea came from or where it goes, with just a bare whisper of a concept and nothing more, it’s near impossible to tell if it’s really a thought or merely a dream. The mind suddenly can’t tell which reality it’s supposed to believe in. Why,” Pudding stared at Nami and the navigator felt her blood run cold, “it’s enough to drive someone mad.”
Pudding waited while her words reverberated and finally sank in, Nami’s eyes widening even further before Pudding suddenly clipped Sanji’s memory reel at an obvious diagonal, slicing through a scene unevenly. Then she shoved in her hand again, drawing out another reel and cutting that one diagonally too. And then again. And again. And again.
“No…” Nami croaked.
A few times she would pause and giggle while she snipped, a soft “oops, you weren’t in that one, Nami-dear,” and “oh you weren’t in that one either, gosh darn my slippery fingers” dropped from her lips like sweet-smelling poison.
At this point Sanji’s screams had faded, his body appearing to have gone into shock with his mouth open and slack but silent, his eyes wide and blank, hands dropped to his sides, tears flowing freely down his cheeks, blood dripping from both his nose and his ears. The wound in his shoulder oozed darkly. Shredded triangles of memory fluttered around him, piling up around his body like dead leaves.
“Look at where your stupid kishido has gotten you now, you pathetic fuck,” Pudding laughed.
“STOP IT!” Nami screamed. Tears gushed from her eyes. Pudding looked up at her, quirking two of her three eyebrows.
“And what are you gonna do about it, bitch?” She sneered.
Nami felt a raging fire loom up from somewhere deep in her chest, an anger so pure, so precise, it seared away any thought of pain, of acid and blood and broken bones, and zeroed in on a single, all-consuming focus: to save Sanji.
“Whatever I fucking can, you walking sideshow!” Nami spat. She jumped to her feet, her limbs shaking but paid no mind to them. It was as though she had split in two, with her broken body’s pain muffled but still listening to her command on one half, and her mind’s fierce intensity on the other. Her Clima-tact twisted in her grip.
“I’m getting real sick of you, you know,” Pudding said, wrinkling her nose. She let go of a memory reel she had been holding and it snapped back into Sanji’s head with a wet-sounding schlorp! She stepped back from Sanji’s slumped body and cocked her gun.
“Mirage Tempo!” Nami shouted and pushed herself forward in a brisk run. Mist rose from the ground in a billowing white fog. Pudding rolled her eyes and scoffed.
“Seriously? You’re trying this again?”
Nami merely glared and kept running.
“You really are a one-trick pony.”
Pudding spun on her heel, suddenly aiming the gun away from Nami and fired. She smirked, seeing the small hole bloom in between the eyes of the red-head who had been trying to sneak up behind her. The look of shock on the navigator’s face was almost too good to be true, and Pudding felt the smug triumph swell up in her chest, her smile crinkling her eyes, almost making it hard to see that stupid woman’s face through the mist, almost making it look like the image was fading away into the white and—wait the image was fading away; the bitch wasn’t falling to the ground, dead, like she was supposed to, she was merely stuck with that dumb surprised look on her face and becoming harder and harder to see, almost as though—
“—oh,” Pudding said.
She didn’t even get a chance to turn around before Nami—the real Nami—had run towards her and leapt into the air to swung the Clima-tact with the power and fury of a hurricane. The weapon connected with the back of Pudding’s head with an ear-splitting CRACK! and the villain went tumbling off to the left.
“THUNDER TEMPO!” Nami roared.
Electricity sizzled and sparked before it shot out in a rush and cracked down from the sky. Pudding was caught in the crossfire, her body convulsing in midair before crumpling to the ground. She didn’t move when her body finally settled. Smoke drifted off her form, but Nami paid her no mind, already dropping the Clima-tact and throwing herself to her knees in front of Sanji.
“Oh my god—Sanji-kun,” she whispered.
Nami touched her palm to Sanji’s shivering face, taking a moment to just look at him before wiping the blood away. She had never seen him like this before, eyes open but staring blankly, blindly. He was shaking and panting, but otherwise unmoving, hair dirty and in his face, shoulders rounded and slumped, hands listless at his sides. Nami felt a sob welling up in her throat. She cupped Sanji’s cheeks, gently bunting her head to his, tears spilling down her face.
“I’m so sorry—I’m too late,” she said.
He seemed to twitch at her words, but otherwise didn’t react. Nami only allowed herself a short moment to silently weep before she leaned back and set her face into a determined frown. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw one of the slips of memory flutter away. She gasped and darted after it, making sure to keep the rest of the pile gathered around Sanji’s knees. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with the memories—there probably wasn’t much she could do—but keeping them all here, together, felt immensely important.
Around them the battle raged on, screaming and shouting and explosions filling the air. But Nami ignored it all, kneeling in front of Sanji again. She touched his knee, needing to feel him, to assure herself that he really was there with her, even if it was in body only. With her other hand, she lifted up the memory that had almost blown away. It was glossy like a photograph, but also warm, and vibrated with a tingly sort of sensation in her fingertips. The memory looked like a photo of her back when she had first joined the Strawhats. She was trying to tuck her short hair behind her ear, but obviously failing, in a strong breeze. The sea and a portion of the Merry’s railing were behind her. A smile lit up her face as she looked at the viewer—at Sanji. The image would have been sweet and full of fond nostalgia if Nami didn’t know where it came from, and at what cost.
Nami feverishly tried shoving the images to Sanji’s chest, as if to will them back into place. But as much as she tried to push them back, to give them back to him, nothing happened; they merely fluttered around them. Tears sprang to her eyes as she tried harder, and harder, pushing hard enough to cause Sanji to wobble and sway, but to no avail. She eventually stopped grabbing for the memories at all, and just pushed at Sanji himself, fisting handfuls of his shirt in the process. She was crying freely now, and collapsed into his chest.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I shouldn’t have doubted you. I should’ve known. I should’ve known,” she sobbed.
Sanji sat still as a statue. He made no move that he even heard her speak. She cried harder, dissolving into aching sobs that wracked her slim frame. And she cried. She cried, and cried, and cried until there was nothing left—nothing left of her, nothing left to hope for. Sanji stayed silent.
After the tears would no longer fall, Nami leaned back and looked up into Sanji’s blank eyes. He stared at her but saw nothing. She felt her lip quiver, and shakily brought a hand up to his cheek, brushing across his scruff and smoothed her thumb across his angular cheekbone.
“Come back to us. Come back to me, Sanji,” she whispered. Before she even knew what she was doing, before she could even realize the meaning of her own words, she leaned forward, further and further, until her eyes closed and—as though magnetized—felt her lips finding Sanji’s in a wanting, pleading kiss. His lips were soft, warm even, but unmoving. She pressed herself into him, as though she could return his memories to him through her own body, return him to his former, shining self.
But nothing.
Until suddenly, like a spark, he ignited. Gasping into her mouth, his arms clamped around her, one around her back to haul her into his lap, the other fisting into the hair at the back of her head, clasping her to him. He inhaled deeply through his nose. Life hummed through him in a sudden heat even Nami could feel from his body.
Nami gasped in return, and Sanji opened his mouth, using the opportunity to deepen the kiss. Nami felt sparks shooting through her body, originating from their electrified lips. She mouthed at him again and again, desperate and needy. The kiss was sloppy, haphazard, but Nami didn’t care. The world zeroed in on this wonderful heady feeling that she realized was the most important thing to her right now. It wasn’t until her head buzzed with a lack of oxygen that she pulled back slightly, panting.
She drew her head back, brown eyes searching Sanji’s face. He looked weary and confused, and stared at her in absolutely bewilderment. He narrowed his eyes and studied her, wary. Nami felt her heart drop.
He didn’t recognize her.
But then he spoke, and his next words froze the moment in hope.
“You’re—are you…Nami?”