Work Text:
“Your sister?” Bellemere asks the little girl with a baby in her arms.
And Nojiko says, “No, I don’t know her,” and it’s fine. None of them know each other, but they’ve found each other, and they’ll stick together from now on.
But the thing is, if Bellemere had been there before the war, if there never was a war, and she’d walked through the town here in peacetime, she still wouldn’t have found anyone who knew this child.
It is perhaps some sort of irony that this child who had no one found someone because everyone was lost.
Ironic that she always would’ve been a stranger and an orphan, but as the dice fell, she is expected to be. She is a war orphan, now. Something understandable, not something inexplicable.
No one knows where Nami comes from, and they don’t wonder, because they don’t expect there to be an answer.
Nami is given a home, and her existence is never questioned.
But if there never was a war, she would’ve been.
If not for the war, she would’ve simply appeared one day, from nowhere.
Abandoned, maybe.
Or maybe not.
Now, no one will ever think to wonder.
Nami is a restless child. She’s light on her feet, runs from place to place when she could walk, and when she’s not drawing, she’s outside, running.
It’s like the wind calls her.
The sound of the wind rustling the mikan trees comes through the windows, and Nami is already running, arms extended, eyes on the sky. She knows when the wind is coming, long before it does, always, so reliably that she can warn the sailors in town of the weather before they even set out for the day.
When she’s not running, she draws, and it takes a long time before anyone realizes what she’s drawing, because it’s all from bird’s-eye view.
She moves on into drawing maps quite naturally, as if the way she’s meant to see the world is from above.
When she’s eight, something starts growing on her back. Two little bumps right above her shoulder blades.
No one’s quite sure what they are, but the doctor assures them it seems harmless, and so they leave it be, even as the little bumps keep growing.
A little after she turns ten, she learns that she can control them, that she can wiggle them a little, and also press them so flat against her back it seems like they disappear, even though that shouldn’t be physically possible. They’re the size of fists now, and seemingly full of little bones. They’re weird, and she doesn’t think she likes them.
If nothing else, hiding them against her back makes it easier to get into her clothes.
“We’re not even real family!” she yells the day everything goes wrong, and she runs, eyes full of tears but still fixed on the sky, thinking of how she’s the only one growing weird bony lumps on her back and no one else has to deal with this.
She barely has time to apologize before her mother is gone, shot right before her eyes, and she decides never to feel bad about her back ever again.
She does her best to stick to that decision.
But when she goes with the fishmen, she keeps the lumps hidden carefully away, tucked into her back, so not to give them any more reason to hurt her.
They lock her in a little room to draw, and she can’t run anymore, can only read the data they provide and translate it to paper, imagining herself away, dreaming of flying high above the sea, soaring with the winds, and her back itches.
She wonders, as she gets used to the fishmen, if maybe they hold a clue to what she is.
Some of them have more limbs than the regular, and she wonders if it’ll happen to her too. If the lumps on her back will grow into a second set of arms, if maybe she isn’t human at all. And then she cries a little and misses her mother. Nami doesn’t want to be a fishperson. She can’t imagine anything worse than being cut off from the wind like that.
“Aren’t they wings?” Nojiko asks one day when Nami is twelve.
They’re at home, and Nami’s shirt is on the floor, her back lumps stretched out like she only does between the walls of their house anymore.
She’d keep them hidden all the time, if not for the infernal itching that’s only gotten worse over the past two years. The only thing that helps is stretching them out, and it helps more when Nojiko scratches them for her.
“Wings?” she asks, and looks over her shoulder.
It’s true that they don’t really look like lumps anymore. They’ve grown to the length of her forearm, the bones inside ordered and grown together into articulated joints, a little like an extra set of arms, the way she feared, but without anything approaching proper fingers.
“Yeah. They look a little like, you know, like a plucked chicken.”
“Hey!”
But aside from the unfavourable description, Nojiko is right.
Nami flexes the little naked limbs on her back, sees the skin stretch thin over narrow bones, and can’t help but feel a little more at peace with them.
Wings would be good. Yes, wings would be just fine.
A year later, they prove Nojiko right by starting to grow feathers. Soft, white and grey and useless down feathers, but unmistakably feathers.
Nami definitely isn’t human now, and isn’t that just fitting, when the village doesn’t want her anymore? When she’s a pirate under Arlong? Isn’t it just right that she should be something inhuman as well?
She wears long-sleeved shirts whenever she leaves the island. In part to hide the tattoo branded on her shoulder, and in part to hide the fluff of down feathers on her back, marking the spots her wings inexplicably disappear into.
It’s getting more and more impossible to understand how she hides her wings as her wingspan grows to be longer than she’s tall, showing no sign of stopping, but she’s glad she can do it.
And then puberty hits, and one day before she turns sixteen, she bursts in on Nojiko, pulls her shirt over her head and says, “Look!” as she spreads wings that now have proper flight feathers poking out from under the down.
They’re a warm brown colour, with stripes in the same striking orange as her hair, and they’re small, but they catch the wind when she flaps her wings.
And Nojiko gasps and says, “Can you fly?”
And Nami says, “I don’t know.”
They find one of Nojiko’s bikini tops, and then they find the most secluded part of the island they can.
It’s a dark night, and they spend it with Nami throwing herself into the strongest gusts of wind she can find, Nojiko catching her when she falls.
And it doesn’t quite work, her feathers still too small and her wings still too weak, quickly growing tired and aching from the strain, but it’s a proof of concept. She can tell that with time, and with training, she can do it.
And she laughs, for once not thinking at all of money and pirates and fishmen.
She can fly. She can fly. She can fly.
And fly she does.
Not at home. She doesn’t know what Arlong will do if he finds out, and she doesn’t want to know, but when she’s far away from Cocoyashi and relatively sure no one’s around to see, she spreads her wings and flies.
Who needs to walk, when you can sense the winds as well as fishmen sense the currents? When the sky itself is your home?
Nami can’t quite fly from one island to another, not without perfect winds and short distances, but the more she flies, the less her wings itch when she has to hide them away again, the more she feels at home high up, in the breeze. Where she once went running to meet it at the first sign of wind, she now takes off, letting the storms themselves guide her path.
It still itches something terrible, to hide, to be locked away, sitting restless and wingless as the wind blows outside, but wings or not, she won’t be free until her village is, and so she hides and bears it.
And then she meets the idiot boys.
At some point while running from Buggy, she panics and flies, tearing holes in the back of her shirt but getting away with her life.
Luffy acts like it’s the coolest thing he’s seen in his life. Zoro tries to look unaffected, but she can tell he’s impressed.
And she decides, fuck it, and goes with them, sewing up her shirt to have openings in the back so she can let her wings out whenever the wind blows, because it itches less like that and the boys already know, and she’ll need to get a new shirt before going home anyway.
She still hides them once they land at the Gecko Islands. The boys are one thing, but she’s not going to show the whole world.
She’s used to hiding them. She can go like this for weeks. It’s no problem.
They put oil on the wrong slope.
And, okay, maybe this one’s on her, a little, but she slips, and she grabs at Zoro trying not to fall, and somehow, they both tumble down to the bottom.
And he snarls at her and says, “What the hell? You can fly, dammit!”
And she says, “Oh, right, haha,” and takes off without thinking.
Her fault. She’ll admit it. That was silly of her.
But he got up in the end and came to rescue them, so really, it’s fine, isn’t it?
And now her wings are on full display, and it’s too late to tuck them away again, so she doesn’t, just uses them to their full extent in the ensuing fight.
Usopp doesn’t know what to make of them, but by the end of the fight, he seems firmly on the side of Luffy in regard to awesomeness.
Nami has shown her wings to far more people over the past few weeks than she ever intended, and somehow, she’s happier than ever, sailing on the Merry. She stands on the edge of the crow’s nest every morning, feeling the wind through every single one of her feathers, feeling the ship’s sail fill with air below her, and she wishes she could stay like this forever, that she would never have to hide again.
But reality always catches up, doesn’t it?
(“Maybe the lovely Nami is a mermaid!” Sanji muses when he hears where they’re heading.
Luffy picks his nose and says, “Nah, she’s got wings,” and the image nearly kills Sanji on the spot.)
Everything goes wrong.
Arlong betrays her, takes away everything she’s built, takes away the one thing she’s been working towards, and then he doesn’t even let her strangle him, just laughs and tells her she’ll be working for him for the rest of her life.
That she’ll be trapped here for the rest of her life.
Nami’s wings itch like fire, and she can’t. She’s had her taste of freedom, and she can’t live without it anymore. She can’t, she can’t, she’d rather die.
But she still needs to protect her village.
She snaps her wings out and screams, and as the fishmen recoil in shock, she takes off, flies back, hoping to do something.
And she meets the group of villagers, gearing up to fight, ready to walk to their own deaths, and she can’t allow it. She stands in their way, spreads her wings out wide to stop them. She can still fix this. She can still do this, so please, please….
“Oh,” they say. “Our little literal angel.”
“You’ve done enough.”
“More than enough. We’re so proud of you.”
“Don’t worry anymore.”
“Let us take care of this now.”
And they pass her by, leave her there, on her knees, wings limp and useless, her top held on by strings alone.
The tattoo burning on her shoulder. A knife burning in her hand.
She cuts her anger out of herself. She yells and rages and cries.
And then she begs, “Help me.”
And Luffy says, “Of course I will!”
Nami goes home.
She binds her wounds. She puts on one of Nojiko’s bikini tops. She cries until the tears stop falling.
Then she walks to Arlong Park with her wings spread wide behind her.
They call her Storm Petrel, on her wanted poster. The beating wings that either guide your ship to safety or lead it to its doom.
She carries the name with pride.