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The first night Nami and Robin roomed together was awkward. Not because Nami was afraid of the woman who twelve hours previous had been a mortal enemy (although there was a little of that) or because they knew nothing about one another (which was also true) but because Robin was so damn quiet.
And not in the understated, aloof loner way either. Nami was convinced that if Nico Robin made a sound it was because she wanted to be heard. She moved silently from one place to another, more like a ghost than a person made out of flesh and blood. It made sense, in a morbid kind of way. What kind of assassin would she be if she were noisy all the time?
But still. Nami had grown accustomed to the cacophony that was the Straw Hat Pirates. Even Vivi — with all her regal grace — wasn’t this...reserved. It reminded Nami a little of Nojiko, back when Arlong still ruled over their lives. On the days Nami would return home kicking and screaming, her sister would just sit and wait for the tantrum to fizzle itself out, before calmly cleaning up the mess Nami made and going on with her daily business.
The difference being, of course, that Nami and Nojiko trusted each other explicitly, whereas Nami wasn’t sure where exactly she stood with the Straw Hat’s newest and most enigmatic member.
Robin was still reading when Nami laid down to sleep. Perhaps it was the dim lighting, but Nami thought she caught a flicker of surprise when on her face when she said goodnight. Like Robin wasn’t expecting even that basic courtesy. Nami considered for a moment saying something more, but couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be awkward or intrusive. The moment passed, and Nami allowed herself to fall asleep. Tomorrow would be a new day, with new chances to learn more about their new archeologist.
She was awoken hours later by the sound of Nico Robin tossing and turning from the other side of the room, and spent the rest of the night wondering what was hiding beneath that impenetrable silence.
Robin spent the immediate aftermath of the battle against Enel sleeping. She, like so many others struck by a bolt of divine wrath, was not out of the woods simply because they survived being struck by lightning. Chopper warned that she was at risk of dangerous heart rhythms, and that shock and adrenaline were the only things that kept her going as long as she had.
There were too many injured for Chopper to focus on any one person, especially since Robin seemed to be in no immediate danger. As the only other crew member with even a sliver of medical knowledge, Nami volunteered to watch over her in his absence, with strict instructions to send for him if anything changed.
It was impossible not to feel guilty at the sight of her bruised and burned skin. Robin was one of the strongest people she knew, and it was terrifying to see her so...so vulnerable. Robin wore an aura of mystery like a second skin, and kept her true thoughts hidden behind an enigmatic smile. Her graceful air was stripped away while she slept, and Nami felt an almost violent urge to protect her from any further harm.
It was then than Nami realized that Robin was one of theirs. Any doubt of her allegiance was gone. There had been plenty of times when Robin could have turned on them, but she hadn’t. In Jaya she helped gather the information they needed to reach the sky islands. She went along with their insane plan to ride the Knock-Up Stream. She followed Luffy into a war that wasn’t theirs and fought till the end, risking her life in the process.
It was interesting. When Nami was small, her entire family consisted of Bellmere, Genzo, and Nojiko. In time she opened herself to Luffy, Zoro, Usopp, and Sanji. With every new Straw Hat her heart felt full and her family complete, yet every time a new member joined she was able to love a little bit more, and her family grew a little bit larger.
It was nice to have a sister this time around. God only knew, they had enough boys already.
Shaking her head ruefully, Nami chuckled quietly to herself. “Welcome to the Straw Hat Pirates.”
The Straw Hat Pirates spent four days on the Long Ring Islands while Robin and Luffy recovered from the encounter with Aokiji. Nami hesitated to even call something so one-sided a fight. The first night the entirety of the crew slept together, with the galley transformed into a makeshift barracks. Nami, once again relegated to being Chopper’s assistant during the crisis, remembered falling asleep sitting up with the exhausted doctor curled in her lap.
The next day Robin and Luffy were deemed well enough to be moved to their respective quarters. Luffy, with his nearly preternatural ability to recover from injury, was back to his normal bouncy self by the middle of the afternoon. If he was more subdued than usual no one mentioned it, and as soon as he was able he went to sit on the Merry’s figurehead, where he stayed in perfect silence for hours, deep in thought.
That in and of itself was worrisome, but Nami didn’t have time to dwell on it. Robin’s heart was beating, but she was still frighteningly cold. She woke in fits and starts, staying alert long enough to drink something warm, use the toilet, and bury herself back under a pile of heated blankets.
She was conscious, but not really aware of the world around her. Both her heart rate and respirations were slow, and her complexion had taken on an unhealthy pallor. Chopper said to give it time, but to Nami’s untrained eye Robin looked like a corpse warmed over.
It was an incredibly morbid thought, and Nami felt ashamed of herself for even thinking it. It was the sort of joke Robin was known to crack, and thinking on the life of violence she’d only alluded to, the past with which Aokiji threatened them with, Nami wondered if situations like these were how Robin had gotten her dark sense of humor in the first place.
For the first time since her tumultuous introduction to the crew Nami found herself bothered by how little she knew of the muddied waters of Robin’s past. It shouldn’t have mattered. Robin had shown firsthand her strength, kindness, and loyalty. Her actions meant more than the words of a marine admiral, and Nami trusted her.
But she didn’t know her.
Nami tried to rationalize away what Aokiji told them. He was, after all, their enemy. There was no reason to take what he said at face value. But the more she thought, the more Nami realized it was all true. Robin herself admitted that she’d had her bounty since she was eight years old, and made no secret that she killed people in exchange for protection. Robin conspired with Warlords to engineer the downfall of nations and was a on a first-name basis with marine admirals. That was...a lot, and none of it good.
The one thing burned into Nami’s mind, the memory that replayed over and over whenever she shut her eyes, were the moments before Aokiji attacked Robin. He’d said in an almost mocking tone that the times had changed, but she was the same old Robin. The fear and helplessness on her face as she sputtered her broken protests was different than the terror brought on by Aokiji’s mere existence. She’d been trying to tell him something that only they understood, but he never gave her the chance.
Nami got the feeling Robin hadn’t gotten many chances in her life, and she wasn’t about to let some jerk from the military poison this one now. Tenderly, Nami pulled another blanket over her shoulders and brushed a tendril of hair from her face, frowning at how clammy she still felt.
Robin groaned, and turned her head away. “I’m sorry, Auntie. Please, don’t...”
Whatever else she was going to say faded into an incoherent murmur, and Nami had to fight the urge to cry.
The days after Enies Lobby were strangely liberating. Nami felt herself walking on air, the surreal victory of picking a fight with the World Government and winning giving her a high that lasted for days.
Robin was back. Water 7 regarded them as heroes. Soon they’d have a ship, and Nami was sure Usopp would come to his senses to rejoin the crew for good. She even had her trees. It was impossible not to feel happy and optimistic despite the challenges that lay ahead.
Sometimes Nami worried that Luffy’s incorrigible enthusiasm was starting to rub off on her, but right now she didn’t care. Life was good, and that was enough.
Robin spent the first two days on strict bed rest while Chopper ruled out internal bleeding, or any other injury that resulted from being repeated thrown into a wall by an elephant. Even with her Devil Fruit ability she was too sore to manage her own dressing changes, and her right hand was swollen and tender from fighting back hordes of marines on the Bridge of Hesitation. Chopper claimed it was only a strain, but for a few days it made it difficult for Robin to use her dominant hand.
All of the Straw Hats fretted over Robin in their own way, but Nami was the one she trusted to help bind her cracked and broken ribs when Chopper was tending to the others wounded during the assault. Once again Chopper prescribed rest, and so Robin slept with Nami watching over her.
Or so she thought.
“You don’t have to stay.”
Nami looked up from her book in surprise. Robin turned to face her properly, wincing slightly as the motion pulled at her injuries. The bandage on her cheek was starting to peel off, and Nami busied herself with replacing it.
“How are you feeling? Is the room still spinning?” When she didn’t answer right away, Nami gave her a look that she usually reserved for the boys when they were being stupid. It didn’t do any good, with Robin immune to such simple tactics, and she waited for Nami to finish before speaking agin.
“You don’t have to stay with me. I’ll be fine.”
Nami looked at her bruised, battered body, heard the resigned tone with which she spoke, and felt herself getting angry at the World Government all over again.
“Maybe I want to stay,” she retorted primly. “What do you think of that?”
The hands clenching her sheets relaxed, and Robin eased back into her pillow. For a moment there was perfect silence, the kind that was all-to-common those first days she spent with the Straw Hat Pirates. The awkwardness was back, like they were meeting one another for the first time.
Which, in a way, they were.
“It’s a good day for reading,” Nami said. “Besides, you shouldn’t be by yourself.”
Robin’s eyes fluttered closed, a pained expression passing across her face. “Thank you.”
When she dared to look at Nami once more, she regarded her as if she were a particularly difficult text that she didn’t quite know how to translate. Robin simultaneously had the anxious appearance of someone very, very young, and the weighted gaze of someone very, very old.
“My mom used to read to me and my sister when we were sick,” Nami said. “After she died we had to manage for each other. I got pretty good at it. Granted, you might not like hearing about the currents between here and the Red Line, but I can grab one of your books out of storage if you’d like.”
Robin let out a small puff of air that might have been a laugh. Her expression grew distant. “I always wanted a sister growing up,” she admitted.
“Yeah?”
Again Robin fell silent, and she began to pick at an imaginary stray in her sheets. “It’s...difficult for me to talk about, after all this time.”
”That’s okay,” Nami said. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
”That’s just it. I do want to. I’ve been so afraid that I would die, and that Ohara, the real Ohara, would be forgotten. I had no one to share my history with, no way to preserve the truth.”
She laughed humorlessly. ”I used to envy you, you know, for knowing your mother. My only memories of mine are of the day she died. Sometimes I wondered if she left Ohara to be with her secret family. She didn’t,” Robin added hastily, noticing Nami’s horrified expression, “but I would dream of being old enough for her to take me away to where I actually belonged.” She shook her head. “It was nothing but a childish fantasy.”
“There’s nothing childish about wanting a family,” Nami said.
“I had family; the problem was they didn’t want me.” She glanced at Nami sidelong. “I was told that there were people in the world who could love and care for one another just as much — or more than — blood relations. I never saw it for myself, and until I came on this ship I didn’t believe something like that actually existed.”
“Well it’s true,” Nami said forcefully.
“I know that now.”
There was nothing Nami could say to that, so they once again fell into contemplative silence. The clock ticked the seconds past, and slowly a smile spread across Robin’s face and her whole body relaxed. It was the most at peace Nami and seen her since, well...ever.
“Brag Men,” Robin said suddenly.
“What?”
“If you’re...if you’re still willing...I would like to read Brag Men.”
Nami tilted her head. “Sure, of course. If you don’t mind me asking, why a bunch of old fairy tales?” She blinked once, then twice, before remembering how accurate the chapter on Little Garden had been. “Okay, maybe not fairy tales. But it doesn’t seem to be in your wheelhouse.”
Robin’s cheeks went pink with embarrassment. “I read that book when I was six years old. My teacher...” Her voice became thick with emotion, and it looked like it took physical effort to say, “Ohara was home to the greatest library in the world. It held countless rare and unique historical texts from cultures that no longer exist. Brag Men was dismissed in its era as dreamer’s nonsense and quickly fell out of print after a limited run. My teachers said I was reading perhaps the last existing copy in the world. Imagine my surprise when I found you had a brand new copy here.”
Robin took a deep, shuddering breath. “I thought Ohara was gone, but perhaps a part of it still exists. In books, in me.”
“Of course it does,” Nami said, almost reverently. “And of course I’m still willing. Just wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Robin nodded tiredly and leaned back in her bed while Nami hurried to fetch the book. She was nearly asleep by the time she returned, but Nami asked anyway, “Do you have a favorite chapter?”
“You choose,” Robin murmured, her eyes still closed.
Perhaps it was wicked of her, but Nami flipped through the pages until she found the chapter written by Louis Arnote. Clearing her throat, she began to read in a low, steady voice. It was a short chapter, but the writing was engaging, the imagery bringing back to life memories of her own visit to this supposed fairy tale land. Nami found herself falling into the pleasant rhythm of reading aloud, and was almost disappointed when she reached the last sentence.
“...To its inhabitants it truly is a little garden. Therefore let us call it Little Garden, land of giants.”
Nami closed the book and glanced at Robin. She was fast asleep, with each breath making a noise that was almost, but not quite, a snore. Nami smiled as she put the book away, making a mental note to tease her for it at the earliest opportunity.
After all, that’s what family was for.