Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nami steps from starlight into the inert chill of her and Robin’s quarters. She holds up her lantern, not bothering with the room lights. The flush from the evening’s wine is already dissipating from her extremities, the cold quickly seeping into her skin and bones. Hissing, she runs tip-toe through the room to keep the rest of her feet from touching the ice-cold floor. She swipes her foot under the bed, kicking out her fluffy white boots. Setting the lantern on the vanity, she hops in place while she pulls the shoes over her frozen toes, wincing at how they ache. Kicking them back off, she does a weird tip-toe skip to the closet for a pair of thick socks to put on, followed again by the shoes.

Next, she digs among the disheveled duvet for Sanji’s blue hoodie, eventually unearthing it with a triumphant huff. The fabric is thick and soft but chilly from the night air, making her shiver when she pulls it on. She buries her nose into the neckline, breathing deeply. It doesn’t smell like Sanji anymore.

Why would it? She stole it weeks ago when they first set off from Zou to retrieve him. She had always liked it on him, liked the blue with his eyes and how happy and comfortable he looked in it. That first night, she swore that she only needed a few hours to wallow in her guilt at being too weak to stop him from leaving. And, surrounded by his scent—his expensive cologne, cigarette smoke, and just a hint of grease from the kitchen—she had cried.

She wore it most nights on their way to Whole Cake, usually only in the cold library at night. A time or two, eyes burning from staring at her maps and too tired to change, she had worn it to bed.

Of course the scent is gone now, just the faintest hint of cigarettes if she turns a certain way, gone again before she can be sure it was there.

But Sanji is back with his cigarette smoke and cologne, with garlic and spices on his fingers. She doesn’t need the hoodie anymore—not that she needed it in the first place. She could give it back.

Except, it’s already warm against her skin, and her shivers are finally subsiding. And, well. She is a thief.

The hoodie had tugged chunks of hair out of her already-messy bun. She pats at it and tries to smooth it before giving up. She shakes out her hair and combs through it with her fingers before pulling the frizzy mess into a quick and loose braid. Using her finger to curl some of the flyaways around her face, she turns to glance in the mirror to check the hasty work.

Oh, right, she thinks as she stares at the blank wall above the little vanity.

The mirrors.

The mirrors and the Big Mom Pirates and that awful—if convenient—Mirro-World. Luffy trapped inside with a billion-beli bounty monster. Fire exploding from the mirrors, immolating the Sunny from the inside out, burning their home and their only means of escape from Big Mom’s territory.

Luffy’s voice shouting from a shard across dimensions, commanding them to break all the mirrors. To protect themselves. To leave him to figure his own way out. Attacked on all sides and no fucking time to argue, to think of another way. Believing in Luffy but breaking the mirrors with an agonized scream all the same.

It’s over. Nami reminds herself against the swoop of dread she had carried constantly during the overwhelming adventure at Whole Cake. It’s over, and we escaped.

“Ah, I think...” The vanity's top drawer doesn’t usually stick, but tonight it opens with a screech of wood that pierces the quiet of the room like a scream. Chills burst down her spine but she shakes it off, laughing at herself and marking it up as yet another thing Franky will have to look at when they see him again.

She shoves aside makeup brushes, snagging the handheld mirror from under two eyeshadow pallets. The face is a little larger than the width of her spread hand. No handle, but the plastic lavender frame is wide enough for her to hold.

“Yes!” She whispers and doesn’t know why she’s whispering because there’s no Robin or Carrot in the room, and everyone else is on the lawn deck. She holds the mirror up and brings the lantern closer. The jumping light and shadows on her face are jarring. Nami tries to focus on her hair, refusing to acknowledge how the chilly darkness, the screeching drawer, and the lingering paranoia of being hunted through Whole Cake have thoroughly spooked her.

Lowering the mirror, she holds the lantern out from her body so her eyes can re-adjust. She blinks, waiting for the deep shadow pits to recede back to the familiarity of her bedroom.

Except.

It's dark under the vanity. Darker than the rest of the room. She catches it from the corner of her eye and then looks at it full-on, blinking like a black spot is in her vision. She swallows, apprehension plummeting through her again. She lowers the lantern just a little, thinking that maybe the light just isn’t reaching far enough.

But the space underneath is the pitch black of a yawning mouth swallowing the lantern light in soundless gulps. She should be able to see the vanity's strawberry-lemonade paint and the polished wooden floorboards beneath it. The lantern in her grip wavers with her shaking hand, it’s metal and glass casing clinking together tinnily.

Nami jerks back, stumbling a step until her calves brush against the edge of the bed. She looks away from the vanity and takes a shuddering, centering breath. There’s nothing there—just ordinary shadows.

She can almost hear Usopp with his superstitions: “if there’s a weird sound at night or a shadow that shouldn’t be there, you don’t call back to it and you don’t shine a light into it. You keep your eyes averted, and you move the fuck out of there. Don’t you know anything?”

Usually, Nami agrees wholeheartedly. She’s a self-proclaimed scaredy-cat. Being scared also usually means being smart. But she’s not in some wilderness on a strange island; she’s in her bedroom. If she doesn’t look, she knows she’ll just keep thinking about it later when she's trying to sleep. She’ll have nightmares about mouths opening wide and gulping her down in silence. She knows she’ll dream of falling in darkness forever if she doesn’t suck it up and check for monsters under her vanity.

Besides, they’d already gone up against a mysterious shadow monster and won, hadn’t they?

“Please don’t be anything weird or horrible,” she prays before lifting the lantern again.

The light illuminates the chair, the pink paint of the vanity, and the space—and floorboards—beneath.

Nami laughs to herself, except it’s a single sharp and breathy note that doesn’t sound much like a laugh at all. She rubs her hand over her face. She’s being so stupid and childish.

“There’s nothing there,” she whispers defiantly into the cold night.

She flies out of the bedroom anyway, like she’s a child again, convinced that the monster from under her bed is chasing her. If she looks back, she’ll be—well, she doesn’t know. But she’s not about to find out.

Breaking into the moonlight is a relief, and Nami immediately breathes easier. She hurries down the stairs and imagines the darkness and paranoia dissolving behind her like feathers in the wind. She even giggles to herself about her childishness. Slowing down once she hits the deck, she creeps along the lawn, which is charred and pitted in some areas from the battles they narrowly escaped from. She steps heavier once she remembers that nothing short of cannonball fire would wake her idiots and hurries more purposefully toward the warm glow of the fire pit.

“You OK, Nami-swan?”

The fire dances about Sanji’s golden hair and elongates the tired marks under his eyes and the healing purple bruises along his temple and cheekbone.

She’s so glad he’s home.

“Yeah,” she sighs as she plops down. She catches it when Sanji realizes she’s wearing his hoodie. He smiles dopily, a pink dusting on his ears and cheeks. But he keeps any commentary to himself, which is good because she's not in the mood for pervy or mushy things.

“Yeah,” she repeats and then finds herself being more honest than she expected. “The dark is just spooky, sometimes.”

Sanji hums in agreement, though Nami’s pretty sure that, to him, the only spooky things in the dark are creepy-crawly bugs. “Luffy dropped a plate behind me today, and I about jumped out of my skin,” he admits. His rueful chuckle says, how silly, how stupid am I?

“I’m glad it’s not just me.” She turns her face away from the fire to hide how sad he made her, to hide the anger at his family she has to scrape from her face and tuck inside of her so she doesn’t scare away this surprising and fragile little openness offered to her. When her emotions are suitably schooled, she turns back and smiles with a nod toward Luffy. He's sitting between them, slumped against Sanji, fast asleep. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

“He conked out before you even got up the stairs. It’s embarrassing how poorly he handles his ale,” Sanji scoffs, but he’s grinning fondly.

“Well, there’s no island-wide rager to keep him occupied.”

The crinkles at the corner of Sanji’s eyes are adorable. Had they always been there? And so boyish? “Then we should definitely have one in Wano.”

“There’s too much to do before we can even think about a party there.” But her heart races in almost-giddy anticipation at another victory, another step closer to achieving all of their dreams. “Should we take them to bed?” Nami asks, gesturing at Brook, Chopper, and Carrot, who are all asleep under the thick quilts they had brought on the deck for their impromptu picnic.

“No,” Sanji murmurs as he gently reaches to ease the tankard out of Luffy’s hand and set it beside his empty wine glass. “It’s cold; let them be by the fire a little longer.”

“San-ji,” Luffy mumbles petulantly in response to the jostling.

The night wind surges around them, stinging Nami’s ears until she pulls the blue hood over her head. Luffy’s shirt is still open, baring his skin and white bandages. He’s wearing Zoro’s button-up, the dark green linen one with the light green hash marks. Luffy had stolen earlier in the evening, running back toward the fire and laughing with the shirt's tail flapping behind him, a dinner napkin tied around his head. He had stopped before them, snatched up one of the steak knives from the pile of dirty dishes, schooled his face into a hilarious grimace, and said with an affected voice, “being caught off guard could cost us our lives from now on!”

Chopper had squirted milk out of his nose with laughter, so Luffy continued his ridiculous impressions until they were all laughing so hard they hurt.

“Stupid Captain,” Sanji mutters now, maneuvering one arm around Luffy’s back and tugging the ends of the shirt closed and buttoning the buttons. Luffy had grown taller and broader in two years, but so had Zoro. Luffy swam in the shirt, the sleeves hanging over his hands, the hem skimming just above his knees.

(She’s glad the sleeves are covering the bandages around his arms. She tries not to imagine how they hold together the split skin from where Luffy had—

From where he had tried to—)

Luffy grumbles and presses into Sanji, almost knocking them both down. Sanji responds with something soft and nonsensical before sighing indulgently and guiding Luffy to rest on his lap. Something red spills out of Luffy’s pocket with the movement and rolls across the grass to clink against the foot of the iron fire pit.

Nami picks it up, rolling the red ball between her thumb and forefinger. It’s heavier than it looks, and she can make out a million tiny scratches on its dulled surface in the firelight. It’s a bead meant for stringing on a bracelet or necklace.

Her gaze snaps up to Sanji once she realizes what she’s holding, what this bead is. He’s staring back at her, his startled, awed expression surely mirroring her own.

Without saying a word, Sanji reaches out, hand trembling. Nami reverently places the bead in his palm. He slips it back into Luffy’s pocket.

Luffy snorts comically, breaking the tense atmosphere. He shifts, dark eyebrows furrowing before he turns to his side and presses his face into Sanji’s stomach, wrapping his arms around Sanji’s hips before finally becoming still again. Eventually, while Sanji stares stupidly down at Luffy, his hands hovering unsurely in the air, Luffy starts to snore into Sanji’s shirt.

“Oh,” Sanji says, eyes wide as he looks down at Luffy. He knew that Luffy had welcomed him back to the crew, had forgiven him—hadn’t ever seen anything to forgive. But Sanji still seems surprised all over again at the precious thing he gets to hold in his hands. “Oh.”

Nami respectfully looks away from the wet little quake in Sanji’s voice.

The open door at the top of the stairs, the one leading to the women’s quarters, catches her notice. She had closed it behind her, hadn’t she? She had pulled it shut during her childish flight out of the bedroom. Right? She glances at her hand, trying to recall the vibration of the knob under her palm, but she only remembers how fast her heart was racing.

Goosebumps slither down her arms, despite the hoodie, despite the fire. Every nerve in her screams like the drawer in her vanity and—

“Nami-san?”

She startles hard and looks at Sanji as if in a daze. She reminds herself that she's not cold at all. She’s nice and warm by their fire. The stars above them shine bright enough to chase away most of the shadows on the lawn deck. She’s with her crew. There’s nothing to be frightened of.

She turns back toward the door. It’s closed.

“Nami?”

“I… think we should sleep out here, together,” she says, her words as slow as syrup. “I don’t want to wake them up trying to move them.” She forces her body to turn away from the door, eyes lingering until the last second.

Sanji had covered Luffy in a blanket while she was distracted. An unlit cigarette hangs from his lips as he combs thick black hair away from Luffy’s forehead and tucks it behind his ear in a tender, unconscious gesture.

Sanji looks her over, clearly concerned.

“The fire is nice,” he agrees eventually, tone careful. But he doesn’t push her, so she doesn’t get too annoyed at his handling. “I’ll take the first watch.” He looks like he needs about two months of uninterrupted sleep. But she doesn’t fight him about that, either.

Freedom from monsters doesn’t mean freedom from nightmares.

She murmurs good night to him and stands, taking her quilt. Chopper snuffles cutely when she stoops to tuck him back into his blanket burrito, and she’s still smiling when she sits next to Carrot. She leans over her friend, tempted to try and rub away the dried tear tracks in her fur but not wanting to risk waking her up.

Nami swallows back Pedro’s crushing absence, tired of grief. Wiggling under Carrot’s blanket with a satisfied sigh at the warmth, she pulls her quilt over them both. She wraps her arm around Carrot’s waist, doing her best to lay over her like a shield.

The scent of cigarette smoke curling in the salty breeze and Carrot's coarse hair are the last sensations Nami has before she slips into sleep.

**

Nami wakes to wan light, the kind between the night and the dawn that almost makes it harder to see than complete darkness. The shadows are long in this in-between, the poor gray light blurring the edges of things. She sits up, blinking and confused at her bearings. The stars are cold, distant pinpricks in a sky indistinguishable from the sea.

It’s cold, though there is no breeze. She tucks the blankets around Carrot and stands, squinting at the deck. Someone smothered the fire pit during the night, though she still feels a little heat emanating from it. Sanji is asleep now, tangled up in his and Luffy’s blankets. Brook is gone, perhaps to the crow’s nest. Chopper is now burrowed with Sanji, having migrated to the nearest body once Brook left for his watch.

Luffy is gone, too.

She looks up again but can’t quite understand the stars above her. Had they drifted off course?

The sea is a silver gray like the sky. As still as a looking glass.

She is coming.

Nami whips around, heart in her throat until she sees the silhouette on the figurehead above. She stands on her tiptoes as if it would help her to see better.

“...Luffy?” But that’s not right. He would have to shout for her to hear him. He’s up the stairs, past the helm, up the giant figurehead. Even with the wind and waves eerily calm, she shouldn’t have heard him from that far away.

She looks around her again—Chopper, asleep. Sanji, asleep. Carrot, asleep. Their heads are buried under their blankets. Brook is in the crow’s nest. Or in the kitchen, making tea. The silhouette on the figurehead is too small to be Brook.

“Luffy?” She asks again. Taking a step forward, she frowns when the heavy morning dew seeps into her boots and socks. “Is that…” No, that’s stupid, don’t ask that, she firmly tells herself. Of course it’s Luffy. Who else could it be? They were alone on the ocean.

She licks her lips. “Who’s… coming?” Gooseflesh spider-crawls up her shoulders and skitters across the back of her neck. She squints at the figurehead, but the in-between light makes it impossible for her to see anything. Luffy’s outline slips into the gray sky and sea and he’s just one more shadow in the pre-dawn morning.

“Luffy?” She tries again, her voice shaking.

Seconds stretch where she doesn’t breathe, doesn’t blink. And then,

What’s in your hand?

Nami launches up and over to her hands and knees, swallowing a terrified scream like she learned to do all those years ago. Pieces of hair, freed from her braid, cling to her sweaty forehead and neck. She bats at them, at her face, half-convinced in her sleepy panic that thick bands of spider webs have ensnared her. She tries to sprint away from the suffocating weight around her, promptly face-planting when she trips on the quilts and blankets. The brief spark of impact finally wakes her, at least, but she continues to struggle like she’s fighting for her life.

She just wants out.

Finally rolling away, she wobbles to her feet, fingers clawing at her thighs for her Clima-Tact.

“Nami-san?” She reels around, boots catching on the goddamned blankets, arms pinwheeling.

“Oh, dear—” Dry, brittle fingers wrap around her wrist and steady her. “The fire is out, but I think the metal is still quite warm,” Brook says as he kneels at her feet to untangle the blankets from around her ankles.

She looks over her shoulder at the smoldered fire pit. Now that she’s paying attention, she feels a little of the warmth radiating enough to whisper against her leg. She could have burned herself.

“There we go. My lady,” he says, remaining on one knee and gallantly offering his hand for Nami. Affecting as much regality as her white fluffy boots and pale pink sweatpants afford her, she places her fingers in Brook’s palm and primly steps over the bedding. Brook chuckles a little at her, which is what she wanted. On his feet, their hands still loosely clasped, he elegantly spins her out, and they bow at each other like they’re at the end of a dance.

“Am I the last one up?” It’s a gray morning. She can clearly see around her, images sharper and more colorful than in her dream. The thin clouds stretch over them as far as her eye can see, enough to block the sun and sap the warmth out of the air but not enough to rob them of pleasant daylight.

“I came to retrieve you for breakfast.” He bustles around her, picking up the blankets, shaking out blades of grass, and piling them over his arm to drop into the laundry. He tells her the breakfast dish line-up as he works. “Luffy-san is sore about the lack of bacon, bless him, but Sanji-san said he’d be feeling good enough to make his Sea King sausage tonight if the repairs don’t wear him out too much. I can hardly wait! My mouth is already watering, but ah!”

“You don’t have a mouth,” Nami finishes as she picks up the last couple of blankets. Brows furrowing, she runs her hand over them. They’re dry, with no lingering dew. Tilting her head down, she scowls at her boots. They’re soaked like in the dream; she can see the water beading on the fur.

“Are you sure you’re well, Nami-san?”

Blinking rapidly, like that could help her somehow make sense of the swell of confusion and dread inside her, she looks back to Brook. His face is stark white, his exposed teeth and lack of expression as familiar to her as any warm, gentle smile. Who needs lips to smile? To sing? Certainly not their musician.

“Just hungry.”

“Oh?” he hums, and because it’s hard to track his eyeline (because he has no eyes! Yoho!), he helps her by tilting his skull down. “What are you holding?”

What’s in your hand?

Nami swallows and looks down.

It’s the lavender-framed mirror from her vanity drawer. She’d carried it out with her, held it while she talked with Sanji around the fire, and held it while she slept and dreamt. A small line of fog outlines her thumb on the glass, but its silver-smooth face unerringly reflects the white-gray sky above her.

“So one was left after all?” Brook asks as they walk up the stairs toward the kitchen, where Nami can now smell the delicious breakfast waiting for her. She can even hear Luffy’s voice and Chopper's laughter followed by an ominous crash and Sanji’s swearing. “My, my,” Brook hums. “So lively in the morning! These old bones can’t keep up.”

Nami tucks the mirror into her pocket and reaches to hold Brook’s elbow like he’s a gentleman escorting her to a grand ball. The position is a little awkward with his height, but he slouches a little to accommodate her. Her stomach rumbles, and she beckons him forward more insistently, grinning at him.

“I think you’re the liveliest of us all.”

**

The sun never breaks through the clouds. The sea and wind stay calm. Nami spends most of the morning adjusting and re-adjusting their course because it’s fucking difficult traveling by vivre card. She’s had practice getting to Zou—which had been ridiculously annoying because the island had kept moving. She kicks ass at her job, but this is the most tedious navigating she’s ever done. The vivre card’s ragged edge isn’t as precise as a needle, and the paper is prone to only little twitches and flutters so she’s unsure if it’s pointing North, East, or Northeast. Plus, either Kin’emon moved drastically during the night, or the Sunny got off course while Nami slept.

The rest of the day is hard work. Hard because they’re down to half of their crew. Hard because this is the fourth full day out of Whole Cake, and they are all still covered in stitches and bruises. Drunk with exhaustion, they're hilariously (and somewhat dangerously) delayed in physical and mental processes.

But they work because the Sunny is in bad shape. The kitchen is amongst the worst of it.

“No thanks to you, Luffy!” She had sworn at him as they hauled patchwork materials from below deck and across the entire damn ship to the galley in the late morning.

“Sorry, sorry!” He called ahead of her, balancing wood stacks on his shoulders with Chopper yapping at his heels.

“Dammit, Luffy! Watch your fucking injuries! No, Nami, don’t—”

She had thrown her mallet at the back of Luffy’s head anyway and then tried throwing the entire piece of wood she was carrying when the little shit had the audacity to dodge. “You don’t sound sorry at all!”

After the kitchen, the deck needed the most work. An Emperor had stood on Sunny, the sheer weight of her will and presence almost imploding their ship. The cargo bay was a hazard that needed re-organization and repairs. A thorough search of the hull for leaks was required. Weakness in the foremast necessitated reinforcement while Nami and Sanji worked together to stitch a patch on their sail.

A painstaking inventory made their decimated stores a disheartening reality. They were on a tight schedule, but they would have to stop eventually to restock food and other necessities, including some of Chopper’s infirmary supplies.

After dinner, resting her forehead against the shower wall, the hot water does little to soothe Nami’s sore muscles. It stings her skin, making it apparent that she had forgotten to reapply sunscreen early enough in the day. She’ll have a burn on her neck and shoulders before it fades into a cluster of freckle galaxies. She aches to her bones.

Stepping out, Nami applies Chopper’s aloe mix to her burns before massaging his muscle relief cream into her legs and lower back. Even her fingers and knuckles feel sore and swollen.

She changes into warm, comfortable clothes for the evening. Well, mostly warm. The long-sleeved crop top she chooses to go with her sweatpants isn’t exactly suitable for their current environment. But it’s cute. She grimaces when the neckline rubs at her sunburn.

Still, she muses as she slips on fuzzy socks and house shoes; it had been nice to keep up with the boys today. In a crew of monsters who could singlehandedly take down a giant, she often felt like the weak one. How could she know how strong she was when she compared herself to them?

But the other day, she’d hauled a barrel of Cola into the Soldier Dock System. And, yeah, sure, some of the monsters on her crew can lift that thing with one hand. And she was entirely fueled by terror and adrenaline, but there was no way anyone from Cocoyasi could have done that by themselves. They would have needed two, maybe three people.

Sometimes, Nami wonders if Cocoyasi’s residents might see how strong she is while doing everyday things like lifting a full barrel of Cola and think of her as a monster, too. She can’t help but be fiercely proud of that.

The dining room table is cleared of dishes and mostly tidied back up when she re-enters and dramatically slumps over the table.

“I think even my hair is sore,” she groans miserably. “If the others were here, I wouldn’t have to work nearly as hard.” She angles her head, cheek squished against the table surface, as she glares up at Luffy. He doesn’t even register her rising ire, focused instead on the brightly-colored origami paper someone had handed him, likely to redirect his fidgeting. He’s pretty good at origami shapes—as long as you don’t expect him to make anything... traditional. His tongue poking out as he works is freaking adorable, but he’s wearing one of his vests, exposing his bandaged arms, and she still can’t bear to look at those.

Pouting, she thrusts her hand into Luffy’s face. “Look at this! My nails, which survived Whole Cake—they survived Big Mom, Luffy!—have been torn to shreds today. These conditions are inhumane!”

Luffy just blinks at her. “Uh,” he says intelligently. “Sorry?” And then his expressive features melt into an annoyed scowl. “You were the one who yelled at us to do all of those things!”

Nami rears up to glare at him. “Because they needed to be done! Don’t use my words against me!” She slumps back over. “Zoro owes me so much money. I could have made him do my work and his while I watched from a lawn chair. I deserve a break, you know.” She pauses, thinks, then decides, “I’m raising his interest for shirking chores today.”

Luffy bubbles over with laughter like champagne fizzing over a crystal clear glass.

“That moss head doesn’t know his ass from a hammer,” Sanji scoffs as he appears at the table, setting down a tea cup and saucer in front of Nami. She wearily lifts her head in acknowledgement of the steaming cup. There are cute little frosted biscuits lined on the curve of the saucer. “I’m easily worth ten of that stupid swordsman.”

“Well, if you say so,” she hums.

“I do say so! I’ll prove it!”

“Oh?” She smiles sweetly up at him. “How will you do that, hm?”

“Ah, is Nami-san manipulating Sanji again?” Brooks asks as he ducks into the dining room with Chopper in tow, both cleaned and in fresh clothes.

“Manipulation isn’t nice, Nami,” Chopper pipes with the utmost disappointment. “Especially not to idiots like Sanji.”

“Oi, you shitty little raccoon dog. How about you watch your mouth?”

“Nami!” Chopper cries, skipping past Sanji, over Luffy, and into Nami’s arms with big crocodile tears. “Nami, Sanji is mad! I’m too cute to die!”

“What were you saying about manipulation, Doctor Chopper?” Nami sighs but hugs him briefly before setting him beside her. He giggles and pulls out a pen and the medical journal he’s been writing in lately. Further down the table, Brook tunes his violin, thanking Sanji warmly when he delivers Brook’s tea in his favorite teacup.

“Carrot?” Nami asks, hopeful, but Brook shakes his head.

“On top of the crow’s nest. She wants to be alone again, I’m afraid.”

“I brought her up some blankets! And she promised she would come for a snack later since she didn’t eat dinner,” Chopper adds.

“That was good of you, Chopper,” Nami says, smacking Luffy’s hand away without looking when he ventures to steal a biscuit.

“San-ji,” Luffy whines, cheeks puffed out more like a distressed toddler than a man with a billion-beli bounty.

“You just ate, shitty captain,” Sanji grumbles but plops a prepared plate of triangle-cut sandwiches in front of Luffy anyway. Nami can smell the steaming tea Sanji sets next to the plate and recognizes the blend as the one he makes to promote sleep. Luffy is usually the last person who needs help with that. Still, Robin told them he had been restless enough on the voyage from Dressrosa to delay his own healing—“much to Torao-kun’s poorly-hidden consternation," Robin had assured with a sly smile. She suspected it had to do with the crew's separation. Nami and Chopper had started giving him the tea on the way to Whole Cake, and Sanji had wordlessly started making it for Luffy as soon as he returned to the Sunny. Nami didn’t even have to tell him; that’s how wonderful and attentive Sanji could be.

“The best cook,” Luffy whispers reverently to himself before he starts to eat. Nami grins teasingly at Sanji’s failed attempt to hide his blazing cheeks.

She winces when something in her pocket jabs into her thigh. She pulls out the lavender-framed mirror and sets it on the table. Had she carried it with her all day? Why had she put it in her pocket again after her shower?

Luffy’s gaze immediately zeros in on it, eyebrows climbing in surprise.

“Oh! We had one left?”

“You don’t think they can get us with that, can they?” Chopper asks tentatively, setting aside his journal to duck under the table and come up on Luffy’s lap. This, incidentally, blocks Luffy from his sandwiches. Luffy huffs briefly but stretches his arm around Chopper, causing the little reindeer to whirl around and viciously pinch Luffy’s ear with his hoof.

“I told you not to stretch your damn arms for no reason, you bastard!”

“Ow! Sorry!” Luffy says, not sounding sorry at all. “But sandwiches!”

“Perhaps there’s a certain range to that Big Mom pirate’s power?” Brook muses, tilting his head to signify that he’s looking at and talking about the mirror. “Otherwise, Big Mom would be able to reach her opponents anywhere in the world.” He sips his tea, demurely returns it to its saucer, and slumps over the table. “What a terrifying thought.”

“Don’t depress yourself!” Sanji reprimands from the kitchen.

“I liked Branch. She was funny,” Luffy says, Chopper now hanging over his shoulder. “And Katakuri is a cool guy. If they could reach us, I don’t think they would right now.”

“Right now?” Chopper whimpers. “You mean they could come later?”

“Dunno,” Luffy blithely shrugs before genteelly sipping at his tea—proof he’s fucking with them, Nami knows, because Luffy doesn’t genteelly do anything unless he’s being a shit. Still, she can’t help the plunge of dread. They are almost five days away from Whole Cake now, and she still feels the threat of that entire hostile territory nipping at her heels like a legion of hounds.

Chopper snivels quietly about Big Mom chasing them while Brook nervously stutters comforting platitudes. Nami kicks Luffy’s shin under the table for scaring them. He howls offense in response, even though she knows he experienced no real pain—and Zoro calls her the dramatic one.

“Anyway,” she says a bit loudly, popping her last sweet biscuit in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully down at the mirror. She didn't have anything to say; she just wanted to stop talking about the Big Mom Pirates potentially leaping out of the damned mirror like a demented Jack-in-the-box.

“Are you going to hang it in your room again?” Chopper asks, sitting on the table next to Luffy’s sandwiches (the better to try and steal one) and peering over the mirror. The silver face reflects the top of his and Nami’s heads.

“You’ve been in Nami-san’s and Robin-chan’s room?” Sanji yells from the refrigerator.

“Chopper-san!” Brook laments just as dramatically. “You’ve been holding out on us!”

Nami rolls her eyes at them but smiles at Chopper. “You remember that?”

“Mm!” He says. “You and Luffy and Usopp put them in all the rooms on the Merry and did it again for Sunny! You said it was good luck?”

“Well, uh,” Nami trails off. After last night in her room and the weird dream on the deck, she doesn’t want to speak of dark, creepy things, even in the warm comfort of the dining room.

“There’s a superstition in East Blue that hanging a mirror near the doors is a protection,” Sanji says, finally settling from his busy work in the kitchen and sitting across from Brook with a cup of tea and a few of the frosted biscuits.

“From what?” Chopper cries, the little sandwich he had successfully stolen from Luffy suspended halfway to his mouth in his dismay. Luffy reclaims it by stretching his neck and snapping it away with his teeth.

“Well,” Sanji says, thoughtful. “I’m not too sure.”

“Bad luck?” Nami guesses. Belle-mère never really gave in to superstitions—at least, not that Nami saw. Still, there had been a little mirror at the front door of their house. And, now that she’s thinking about it, she remembers mirrors hung up at many shops and restaurants in Cocoyasi. She chews on this memory from her childhood, so extraordinary because of its ordinariness, and savors it. “Maybe mirrors in entryways are good luck because they're supposed to distract or capture bad luck.”

“Or evil spirits,” Luffy adds with an overdone spooky voice. “Dadan had mirrors up at all the doors to ward them off. I think she even put one up in our treehouse, even though we didn’t think she knew where it was. Ace and Sabo wouldn’t have done that back then.” He pauses long enough to pop another sandwich in his mouth and shrug. “I don’t care about evil spirits and stuff, but hanging up mirrors kinda reminds me of them, you know?”

Nami wants to laugh because only a man like Luffy would look at superstitions and talk of evil spirits and say, “yeah, that reminds me of home. Nostalgic, isn’t it?”

But it is nostalgic. Right now, Nami isn’t looking at the mirror and thinking of evil spirits, bad luck, or even the Big Mom Pirates. Instead, she thinks of Belle-mère’s house. She recalls the creak of the front door, the wooden floorboard thudding hollowly under their feet, and the rug—had it been blue? green?—that always got kicked askew. The old doorknob you had to turn just right for it to catch. The coat rack beside the mirror and Nami and Nojiko's sandals shadowed by Belle-mère’s muddy boots.

“Then let’s hang them up again! Who cares about shitty Big Mom Pirates? Not me!” Chopper cheers, little hooves in the air before they drop back to his lap. “But we only have one mirror right now.”

“Then we’ll put it up here, in the dining room,” Nami decides. She hadn’t been thinking about hanging this one up—it’s just a handheld mirror best used for makeup. But now, floating in her memory of Belle-mère and thinking about what home means, she firmly believes that this is the best place for their last mirror to go until they get more.

(She thinks about their separated crew members, Carrot’s deep grief, and their upcoming battle in Wano and figures they could all use a little luck right now.)

“It’s where we spend the most time, right? I think it’ll protect us the best here.”

“Whew!” Chopper sighs, relieved, sitting back on the table. He swipes the next to the last sandwich and stuffs it in his mouth in one devilishly smooth motion. “What a relief! We’re safe.”

“Oi!” Luffy says, cheeks puffed again before he tickles Chopper’s sides in retribution.

“I saw the crate with the broken mirror pieces in the cargo hold today,” Sanji says. “Are we hoping to repair the broken ones?”

Brook shudders. “So much bad luck in one box, it gives me goosebumps! But, ah—I don’t have any skin.”

“Oh, I know this one!” Chopper says, waving one hoof because the other is trying to push Luffy away. “Seven years of bad luck for every broken mirror, right? Why are there so many mirror superstitions? Humans are so strange.” A pause. “I can’t help but worry about that box of bad luck, though. Oi, Luffy! Let’s get rid of it!”

“Can’t,” Luffy says, his face smushed comically between Chopper’s hooves. He’s holding the last sandwich protectively to his chest.

“Usopp would never set foot on the Sunny again if he found out that we broke the mirrors and just tossed the pieces overboard,” Sanji interprets for Luffy. “If we're not going to repair them, then we have to bury them on land. I don’t really think much of the broken mirror superstition, but Usopp does.”

“I don’t think we could pull off lying to him about it,” Nami agrees, already imagining Usopp’s horrified face.

“That’s how we reverse it?” Chopper asks, hopeful. “Then let’s do that! I don’t want to throw the pieces overboard anymore.”

Chopper returns to Luffy’s lap once the sandwiches are gone, and Luffy rests his chin on Chopper’s head in between sips of his tea. His energy levels had mostly returned today, but he had worked hard beside them the entire day, though Chopper had manhandled him for medicine, bandage changes, and a nap around midday. Now the skin beneath his eyes is dark, and he’s more visibly weary than usual. His shoulders and arms look more fragile under the bandages.

He’s still a little on the thin side.

Nami eyes Sanji out of the corner of her eye just in time to see the flicker of concern.

“But really,” Chopper muses. “I know of superstitions and stuff—I heard of breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, and knocking on wood before I even left Drum. I even heard of sailing superstitions like whistling into the wind or having a woman on board.”

“That, of course,” Sanji interjects, “has more to do with misogyny and suppression of women in a historically male-dominated industry and social structure.” He lights a cigarette before taking off his jacket and laying it beside him, exhaling a small stream of smoke. “Dumb bastards.”

“Or redheads,” Luffy grins at Nami, but it’s not even teasing, just a little adoring. “Redheads are bad luck, too.”

“Oh?” Chopper asks, and Brook chuckles nervously, already wisely edging away from them. “Why?”

“No soul.”

“Ah! Nami has no soul!”

“Shut up, you two!” She snaps, half-climbing the table to pinch Chopper’s ear and pull at Luffy’s cheek. She lets it go when he tries to get away from her, so the skin flies back with a snap and sends him careening backward off his seat, taking Chopper with him so they land in a pile of groans and giggles.

“I’m just saying,” Chopper continues as he valiantly climbs back up to his spot on the table, leaving Luffy behind on the floor. “Reindeer don’t have anything like that, you know? I mean, I guess they…” he trails off, touches his blue nose. “Well, that wasn’t really a superstition. I think it’s just a human thing. I don’t really get why. It’s just a mirror! And there are so many superstitions about them. But talking about it, I can’t help but somewhat believe it.”

“There are a lot of superstitions to do with mirrors,” Brook agrees. “In West Blue, you’re not supposed to let a baby look into a mirror—he could remember his past life. And you should cover the mirrors in the house of someone who passed away, so their spirit doesn’t get trapped.”

“There’s that one superstition in North Blue,” Sanji adds. “That you can’t hold up a candle to the mirror to look at yourself because it might call forward an evil spirit.”

Nami can’t help it; she shivers at the thought. Last night, when she had been creeped out in her bedroom, she had held the lantern to the small mirror in her hand just like Sanji described.

“But that’s silly, right? How else would people see themselves in a mirror?”

Sanji shrugs. “How should I know? It was probably more of a deterrent for anyone using the mirror at night. You can’t get ready for late-night illicit shenanigans if the boogeyman is waiting in the mirror to grab you.”

“So which is it?” Brook asks, nodding toward the mirror in front of Nami. “Is it protection? Or a window for an evil spirit to come through?”

“I think it’s a mirror,” Luffy says, finally slithering back into his chair.

“I think it’s what we want it to be,” Sanji agrees.

“Then I want it to be protection!” Chopper cries, and Nami smiles at him.

“Alright!” She says, slapping the table. “Get me some, I don’t know—a drill, a hook, glue, twine, or fishing line. We’ll hang it up tonight!”

Chopper and Luffy run off and return shortly with Usopp’s massive toolbox between them. It takes Nami some time to parse out the organization—it’s not a standard toolbox with seeds, tabasco sauce, and fake roaches neatly aligned next to things like wire nails, screwdrivers, tweezers, pliers, and all kinds of string and twine. It doesn’t take long, but by the time she figures out what implements to use and hangs the mirror, Chopper is too sleepy to give more than a mumbled “yay!” from where Brook is holding him against his bony chest.

“Seriously, guys,” she tsks. “Where’s the enthusiasm?” Nami adjusts the mirror again and then takes her time methodically packing and re-packing Usopp’s toolbox. She made up her mind about something while working on the mirror, and now she’s waiting for everyone to leave so she can talk to Luffy. Luffy probably wouldn’t mind talking about this in front of everyone, but she would, so she waits.

“I think it’s lovely,” Brook promises her. “But I should get this one to bed. And these old bones are very tired, trying to keep with you young ones today. Good evening, mademoiselle,” Brook farewells, shuffling Chopper and his violin so he can kiss the top of Nami’s hand on the way out. To Luffy, slumped over the table and half-dozing, he runs his porcelain fingers through his hair. “I’ll wake you after my watch, Captain.”

Sanji’s already wandered off for his watch. He left behind a tray of two sandwiches, fruit, and tea ready to pour over for Nami to take to Carrot. She had refused the same tray when Sanji switched places with her and had claimed to be too tired to eat, which had all but broken Sanji’s heart. He had already smoked through two cigarettes by the time he returned the tray to the dining room and wrapped up his last tasks in the kitchen before leaving again.

When Brook is gone, Nami licks her lips and wraps the embroidery thread she’d found in Usopp’s box around her fingers before plopping next to Luffy. He stirs and slowly lifts his head to blink muzzily at her.

“Oh? Is it time for sleep?”

She means to keep looking him in the eye but can’t stop looking at his arms. “Aren’t you cold?” But what she means is, doesn’t it hurt? And why are you such a self-destructive dumbass? And why did you make me watch you be a self-destructive dumbass?

Luffy heals fast. She wishes he would heal faster. She’s not sure how long she can bear to look at his self-damaged arms without slapping him across the face again.

(She wonders if the tears he ripped in his arms will scar. If they’ll look like Lichtenberg figures in his skin.)

“Nami?”

She takes a breath and stops hesitating. “Luffy, I saw the bead last night. It fell out of your pocket. Me and Sanji put it back.”

He tilts his head, thinking, and then brightens. “Oh, yeah!” He reaches in, digs out the bead, and holds it gently in his palm. “It fell out? Thank you for getting it for me!”

“Yeah, of course,” she says, finally looking up at him to smile. “Listen, I was thinking when we were hanging up the mirror.” She holds up the thread. “What do you think about me making a bracelet for it? So you can string it on and wear it around your wrist. Maybe it won’t be as easy to lose.”

“Oh,” he says, looking down at his palm, eyebrows furrowed. He tilts his hand back and forth, watching the bead lazily spin.

Nami tries not to push him, even though she wants to hurry through the anxious stone in her stomach.

“I don’t even know how I got this,” Luffy says quietly. “I just woke up with it in my pocket. I don’t know if someone—Jinbe, maybe—picked it up and carried it. Or maybe it just…” he trails off. “Maybe it got caught up in my clothes and Torao found it.”

“Did you ask them?”

Luffy reaches behind him to pull his hat onto his head. “No. Does it matter?”

“I guess not,” she says. The how and why, she thinks, have never mattered to Luffy. “What do you want?”

“Hmm,” he murmurs and then grins at her. “I don’t want to lose it yet.”

Yet, she thinks with a little twist. Yet.

Like Luffy is always waiting to lose every last piece of Ace.

“Then we won't,” she says. She takes the black glossed embroidery thread. Usopp had different colors, but she thought this would go best with the red. She tapes the ends to the table and gets to work knotting and braiding the strands. She doesn’t make the band too thick or flat—it still needs to thread through the bead. But she makes it as tough and durable as she knows how to, her fingers quickly remembering the knots and patterns Belle-mère taught her and Nojiko.

Luffy watches her the whole time, wide-eyed and fascinated. When she’s done, she patiently guides Luffy’s hands to assemble the bead himself. He’s got wide palms and thick fingers, hands that always seem clumsy right up until they’re not, right up until he’s holding his breath with Nami as they carefully thread a big, red, scratched-up bead onto a piece of braided string.

He laughs a little breathlessly when she secures the bracelet to his wrist. “Yes,” he says. “Yes. I like this.”

His soft, pleased smile melts her heart.

“That’ll be ten thousand beli,” she says primly. He gasps dramatically but doesn’t do her the service of being distracted. He leans over and kisses her cheek, giggling with delight.

“Nami’s so smart,” he says. “You’re the best.”

Nami gently moves the bead up and down the braided bracelet she made. She didn’t want him to lose it, it’s true. But what she hadn’t told him—what he maybe wouldn’t have understood—is that she’s hoping, like the mirror hanging in the doorway for protection and good luck, that Ace’s bead on Luffy will do something similar. Bring him luck; she thinks as her fingers lightly skim the bulky bandages under his new bracelet. Protect him.

Even from himself.

“It looks good on you,” she declares. He grins, all boyishness that makes her want to ruffle his hair. So she does, knocking over his hat in the process, making him squawk.

Luffy waits semi-patiently until she closes Usopp’s toolbox, then picks the heavy thing up for her. “Thanks again, Nami!” He calls over his shoulder, way too loud. “Good night!”

She shakes her head ruefully at his back and turns to pick up Carrot’s tray. She rolls her eyes when she spots Luffy’s origami creations on the table, the extra pieces of paper fanned out. She hastily stacks the paper again and leaves his creations lined up on the table as if they were standing sentry. She does take one—she has no idea what it is, but it sort of looks like a flower—made out of pale green paper with delicate orange designs and places it on Carrot’s tray, sure it’ll at least make her smile.

Her bedroom is oppressively cold and dark when she enters. Blindly, she sets the tray down on the floor at the door. She doesn’t want to flick the light switch and wake Carrot if she’s sleeping, but she can’t even see enough to find her way around.

She fumbles to the sitting area, where they keep a lantern and candle on the table. She struggles to locate the matchbox and pick out a match. She finds the striking surface with her finger but misses the box completely the first two times. Eventually, fire spit-hisses-crackles to life, and it might as well be a sudden solar flare in the darkness for the way it makes her eyes water and blink. She quickly lights the candle and cups the flame from the chilly draft.

Carrot is curled under the covers. Nami sighs, her stomach turning over with guilt and worry. But she knows about grief, anger, and vengeance. She knows she just can’t will those things away for Carrot, no matter how much she wishes she could.

Nami places the candle on the vanity and decides to bring the tray inside and set it down next to it. Carrot has been restless—never sleeping through the night. If she wakes up in an hour or so, she might see the food and take it with her during her early morning wanderings.

She turns to her closet for a different shirt to sleep in. A cold chill crawls up her neck, and her heart stutters. She whips around, a fist already raised—

But there’s nothing. The room is dark, the candlelight weakly casting eerie fluttering shadows. There’s no one there, just Carrot in the bed.

She sighs and thinks she might need Sanji’s relaxing tea if she hopes to get any rest tonight. She squints in the closet, fumbling for the built-in drawers, when a weird, awful smell slams into her like a physical wall. “What—” she starts to say but gags as soon as she opens her mouth. It’s rancid, whatever it is—sharply rotting with the worst taste of sweetness to it. Hands over her nose, she stumbles back, hip bumping into one of the chairs.

“Na-mi,” Carrot whispers.

Her heart trips up her throat as she turns toward the bed. “Carrot?” She asks, voice muffled by her hands. “Are you awake? Do you smell—?”

“Nami.”

The voice isn’t coming from the bed.

Slow as a dream, her eyes travel to the vanity, to the space she's avoided since the previous night.

She screams.

It rips out of her throat before she understands why she’s screaming.

Carrot is—she is—

Nami runs toward the vanity, toward her friend, thigh glancing off the table and sending her twisting to the floor, candles and candlesticks and matches skitter-spinning in her wake.

“Carrot! Carrot!” She screams, hasn’t stopped screaming. “Why are you—please, please come out. Where—where do I even touch you?!”

Because Carrot is under the vanity. It’s a small vanity, low and narrow and there is no way Carrot should be able to fit herself under there like she is.

Except Carrot’s arms and shoulders are not right. In the dim, flickering light above her, Nami can see that Carrot’s arms are twisted and popped out of place. Her breath is labored and slow because her knees are jammed so far into her ribs that she can't get enough air.

“How?!” Nami shouts inanely and doesn’t actually care about an answer right now. She reaches in and pulls at Carrot’s ankles, her calves.

Carrot doesn’t help, probably can’t move enough to help. She just wheezes and stares at Nami, past Nami into the darkness behind her.

“No,” Nami whispers in denial, fingers gripping Carrot’s ankle tighter as her brain finally catches up. “No. No.”

Because if Carrot is here, twisted up like some sort of doll stuffed inside a box, slowly suffocating, then… what was in the bed?

Slowly, not letting go of Carrot, not letting her think for one second that Nami will leave her like that, she looks over her shoulder, blood rushing in her ears like a cyclone.

Something moves from under the covers. Nami can’t see what it is, her angle making the shadows too deep. She just sees the blankets sinking, like the body under it is sinking into—through—the bed. Like the figure she had thought was Carrot is deflating into shadow. There’s a whisper of… movement? A smell, that god-awful smell of rotting things.

The closet door creaks closed.

tbc

Chapter Text

“Anything?” Nami asks from where she’s hovering in the doorframe.

Her bedroom is a tableau of destruction. Two large shredded pieces remain of her vanity, with smaller chunks spread like confetti on the floor. Piles of clothes from the closet lay in heaps on the floor—not the bed. Nami doesn’t want anything or anyone to touch the bed.

Luffy squats among the wreckage. His anger and confusion from earlier, so palpable when he had wrenched the vanity apart to free Carrot, has receded like the tide. Unabashedly wearing only his underwear and Zoro’s shirt, he hums as he sways on his haunches, the muscles in his thighs bunching and twitching.

Brook is combing the rest of the deck, knocking on the outer walls of Nami's room and shining lights in the corners, under beds and tables, and in the lockers and closets. She can hear him hum when he’s close by, singing to himself because he’s as freaked out as Nami.

Sanji methodically examines the walls and seams in her closet. He’d listened to Nami’s hysterical ramblings about something crawling from her bed to the closet long enough to throw the doors open and start hauling out clothes by the armful. He hadn’t even swooned over the skimpy dresses or the lacy things.

His hands tremble as he works.

Seeing Carrot's knees jammed into her own body with her arms twisted and her neck at a heart-stopping angle had shaken Sanji to his core. Nami can't blink without seeing the vacant look in Carrot's eyes and the tear tracks on her face.

“Guys?” She prompts again. She can see for herself that they’re not finding anything. With the room lights on, everything looks normal. Not whatever it had been earlier, with the shadows, the rotting smell, and the moving things that weren't supposed to be there. With the lights off, the room was an upside-down and reversed version of itself.

“No,” Sanji sighs, sounding regretful. His cigarette hangs unlit from his lips the smoke wouldn't get on her and Robin’s clothes. “No holes, no seams or hollow places. Nothing broken. It’s just—just a closet.” He moves to examine the walls again, visibly irritated at the puzzle before him.

“The smell?”

“Yes,” Sanji agrees more immediately. “Or at least—something doesn’t smell right. Not as strong as you described. It’s like something’s gone off in the fridge, and it’s so faint I can’t figure out what item it is.”

“It smelled awful,” Nami repeats for the umpteenth time. “It was wrong. Like the—like the zombie bodies at Thriller Bark. Like decay and maggots.”

“I think I felt something…” Sanji trails off, and she figures he’s not talking about now but before, during the attack. He’s maybe referring to his observation haki. She doesn’t fully get it, but she knows it works differently for each of the crew members who use it.

Sanji continues, “I mean, at the time, I didn’t notice anything but, looking back, maybe… except the presence didn't really stand out. It felt like it was already part of the ship.” He stands up again and goes to feel around the walls for the third time when Nami steps toward him and touches his shoulder, swallowing back her nervousness at entering the bedroom again.

“It’s fine; there’s nothing here right now. You believe me, and that’s what matters.”

He wraps an arm around her shoulders, surrounding her with cologne and cigarettes. She shivers as his warmth seeps into her, just now realizing how frigid the night had become. Sanji wordlessly takes off his suit jacket and drapes it over her shoulders. He tucks her head under his chin, and Nami sighs with relief. She’ll only allow this for a few minutes, she tells herself. In a few minutes, she’ll push him away. In a few minutes, she’ll be brave.

“What do you think, Luffy?” Sanji asks. Luffy has gone as still as a predator stalking its prey. His head tilts minutely, and Nami realizes that Luffy is not staring blankly where the vanity used to stand. His eyes track along the wall, like a cat or a dog might when they hear something humans can't hope to hear.

It’s eerie, but it’s Luffy. Nami hopes it's even creepier to the thing that hurt Carrot.

“Something woke me up,” Luffy says, voice the same dreamy quality it gets when he’s been by himself too long on Sunny’s figurehead. “Before you screamed for us the first time, Nami.”

“Know what it was?” Sanji prompts.

Luffy tilts his head the other way. “It was familiar."

“Helpful,” Nami sighs shakily. She shores up her courage and pushes away from Sanji’s protective arm. “Do you mind putting the clothes back up? I’ll organize them later.” She doesn’t have it in herself to go in the closet, no matter how many times Sanji checks it. But the thought of leaving the clothes on the floor where something could hide under them is intolerable.

“Yes, Nami-san,” he agrees quickly. His thoughtful seriousness bothers her more than some pervy comment would when he lifts one of Robin’s lacy corsets.

She steps closer to Luffy and asks, “Was it Carrot? That you Heard?” She says it with a capital letter because she knows no one heard Carrot with their ears. But, sometimes, Luffy hears things with more than the usual senses.

Luffy stands, starts to shake his head, and then seems to think about it before finally shrugging. “I don’t know what it was.” His dark eyes skim past her. “Chopper?”

Chopper stands in the doorway, back to his small Brain Point form. He’s wringing his hooves before him, still appearing shaken. Behind him, Brook steps from the shadows like a wraith, his nervous humming the only thing that stops Nami from screaming again.

“Is Carrot alright?” Sanji asks.

“No—or well, yes, maybe,” Chopper sighs, shifting his weight back and forth. Chopper is rarely so indecisive regarding his patients and medical care. “I mean, yes, she will recover physically.”

“Physically?” Nami repeats.

“What did this to her?” Luffy asks with a rasp bleeding into the edges of his voice.

Chopper's shoulders slump. “That’s the thing. There are no bruises on her to indicate someone grabbing or pushing her. She’s got bruises and scratches and, of course, the damage to her shoulders and elbows. But they’re… they appear self-inflicted.” He takes a long, centering breath when his words don't seem to sink in for any of them.

“There are no defensive wounds. Luffy, I think she dislocated her own arms and crawled into that place by herself.”

**

Nami startles awake in the infirmary with a dry mouth and gritty eyes. She has no idea what time it is, disoriented and not quite believing she fell asleep in the first place.

She stands up from the chair she’d placed at the foot of Carrot’s bed, wincing and stretching. Her body is still sore from the day's labor, and the freezing air isn't helping.

Her fingers skim over her stomach—she still hasn’t changed from her crop top, and her skin is like ice, even under her already cold fingers. She considers again how the temperature changes in this area of the sea are so strange. The wind and the clouds don't seem to shift, and no cold fronts are blowing in, yet the further they sail, the colder it gets.

She shivers and gets another blanket for Carrot. She is asleep, breathing evenly.

Carrot hadn’t been much help when they tried to ask her what had happened. She was too muddled with the painkillers Chopper gave her. She only kept crying quietly for Pedro, like she had no voice left in her.

That, and she’d whispered, “hide.” She had said it in such a soft, offhand way. As if it wasn’t Carrot’s own thought or even her own lips forming the words. “Hide, my love.”

And then she’d stopped saying anything and fell into a restless, twitching, moaning sleep.

Nami shudders and busies herself with pulling Chopper’s blanket back around him. He’s asleep at Carrot’s feet, slumped against the wall from where he had tried to keep vigil.

She passes Sanji on her way out of the infirmary. He’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, guarding the door. His jaw is open in his sleep, and he’s snoring softly. She gently nudges him away from the frame, so she doesn't hit him with the door. Then she works the lighter out of his lax grip and tucks it into his shirt pocket.

Nami checks the lights and lanterns, ensuring nothing is in danger of going out. She doesn't want to leave anyone in the dark again.

Then she steps out into morning’s twilight, that awful in-between color in her dream the night before. There are no stars; the cloud cover is absolute. She walks over to the railing, still shivering and annoyed at herself for forgetting a blanket.

She's tired, but her back aches at the thought of sleeping again in the infirmary chair. Hell will freeze over before she sleeps in her room again. Yawning wearily, she thinks about going to the men's quarters. She imagines Zoro's warm bed and how it will smell of plain soap and sake and not anything rotten or rancid. And Luffy would be there.

Only Luffy is likelier to be on the figurehead or sitting on top of the deckhouse, keeping guard and annoyed that he has no idea who he's supposed to fight. Brook is also somewhere close by, a quiet sentinel.

So she’ll stay awake, too. Sanji will probably be up soon. Maybe she’ll help him with breakfast to keep herself occupied. And, during the day, when even the weakest rays of the sun illuminate every dark corner, maybe she'll take a nap with Luffy.

She looks to the figurehead for him but can’t make out anything from this distance in the pre-dawn light. She's at the wrong angle to check and see if Luffy is on top of the deckhouse.

The sudden sound of a door closing startles her badly. She lets out a shaky breath and forces herself calmly look over her shoulder. Chopper’s tiny shadow steps out from the darker shadow of the deckhouse. He shuffles over with his blanket draped over his antlers and wrapped tightly around his body, the end trailing after him with a whisper over the wooden deck.

“Can’t sleep?” She asks him as she sits down at the railing, sticking her legs through the spindles so her feet dance over open air. Chopper mumbles a baby-ish, petulant reply as he sits beside her.

She stays quiet for several minutes. Predictably, she feels Chopper's weight lean against her side as he dozes off. Nami curves her arm around his shoulders.

“You could have at least shared your blanket first.”

Nami tries to stay like that as long as she can, but she only lasts a few minutes. The dawn is taking forever to break, and the cold air is settling into her bones now, her breath white ghosts that dissolve into the wind. Chopper’s blanket is damp when she picks him up. It must have rained during the night. Strangely, she hadn't noticed the signs before now.

She is coming.

Nami whirls around, swallowing back a scream. She looks around but only finds shadows. Was there someone standing on the figurehead?

“Luffy?” She whispers and doesn’t know how she expects to hear any response with her heartbeat in her ears.

Biting her lip, she grips Chopper closer. “Chopper?” Her eyes burn because she doesn’t want whatever is happening. She’s tired, and everyone's a little hurt still, and she just wants everyone to be OK because she knows they won’t be in Wano.

They don’t have time for these spooky hauntings or whatever the shit is happening. She wants to run. She wants the monster to show its fucking face already so she can punch it overboard.

This is her home.

The silence stretches out, and Nami takes a cautious step backward, her nerves starving for the safety of the infirmary with Sanji and Carrot. The night is silent, and she starts to convince herself that she imagined it, that her paranoia and fatigue conjured the voice.

What’s in your hands?

Unlike last time, these words do not cause a lance of fear so intense it wakes her from her dream.

She can’t wake up. She’s not dreaming.

She looks down at her arms, but Chopper isn’t there. She’s just holding his blanket—no, it’s something else. Something smaller, silky instead of Chopper's fleece blanket. A long silk scarf, blackened and squirming with maggots, reeking rot and ruin.

Nami’s gagging cuts off the scream crawling up her chest. She throws the scarf on the ground, white wriggling bodies scattering like powdery snow. The stench of decay roils her stomach, the sliminess of the scarf lingers on her hands, and the idea of maggots wriggling up her sleeve makes her cry out and beat at her arms. Bile burns up her throat and dribbles past her lips and down her chin.

She lurches away from the horrible thing and bumps into the infirmary door. The doorknob digs into her lower back, igniting a spark of pain that wakes her from her stupor.

“Chopper!” She tries to scream but her voice comes out hoarse and weak. Fumbling behind her, not wanting to turn her back on the night, she falls backward into the infirmary. “Sanji! Carrot, we have to—”

Carrot is still on the bed, eyes open but bleary with the drugs. Sanji’s asleep, slumped on the floor and curled in on himself. That’s weird; that’s not right. It’s Sanji. He should have been awake and lit up in, like, righteous fire at her first distressed cry.

“Sanji! Sanji, something’s wrong!” She kneels next to him, and in her hysteria, she shakes him so hard his head flops against the floor, thump, thump, thump.

He groans loudly and grunts like he's lifting some enormous weight. He writhes, face scrunching like the enormous weight is his own eyelids, and he's not quite strong enough to open them.

“What? What’s that sound?” He drunkenly turns on his stomach and struggles to get his hands and knees under him.

Nami finally clocks it, then. The sound she's been hearing since before she even collapsed ass-first into the infirmary.

A steady knocking.

thunk… thunk… thunk…

Nami turns around, body between whatever it is and a still-disoriented Sanji.

It’s Chopper. She hadn’t looked for him because she thought he’d been outside with her. But that’s not right, is it? It had never been Chopper sitting next to her, leaning against her.

It had never been Chopper in her arms.

thunk… thunk… thunk

Chopper is… Nami can’t seem to wrap her brain around it. Chopper is… trying to fit himself into the bottom cubby of the file cabinet next to his desk. The medical journals and folders—their medical files—that he usually keeps there spilled carelessly across the floor. He's trying to crawl into the emptied cubby. His antlers aren’t like Carrot’s arms; they can’t be twisted or dislocated, can't go with him into the dark, tight space.

thunk… thunk… thunk

So he keeps knocking them against the cabinet's frame.

Chopper’s eyes are wide and unseeing. He’s not even blinking. Tears slip silently in little rivulets down his fur.

“No! Chopper!” The pitch she reaches is primal, along with the litany of incoherent curses that blister past her lips. She hits the floor in front of him and scrambles at his head and ears. The side of the cabinet is too narrow and she can’t work her hands in enough to get a good grip.

“Chopper, wake up! Help me!” She wraps one hand at the base of an antler and says, “sorry, so sorry,” as she pulls. She heedlessly shoves her other hand inside, Nojiko’s bracelet banging against the wood and digging into her inner wrist and forearm. She uses her hand to protect Chopper’s shoulder and arm as she pulls him out. This time she shouts in pain as the cabinet's edge smashes the bones in her hand and shears the skin off the back of her knuckles.

Chopper comes free suddenly, and they both go flying. Nami slams the back of her head on the bed frame, but she keeps her tight hold on Chopper. She groans, but this isn’t the worst she’s had, not by far. Her hand is on fire, but she doesn't think about it.

She’s too fucking pissed off.

“Sanji!” She calls, half in relief and half in command. He’s on his knees now, swaying, but his eyes are open and becoming sharper and sharper with alarm. Nami doesn’t give him any more time. She shoves Chopper in his arms so he doesn’t wander off and try to stuff himself in a tiny compartment again, so he doesn’t try to break his own damn antlers off to fit.

“Don’t leave them alone!” She yells at Sanji as she grabs her Clima-Tact from under her chair. “Don’t fall asleep again!”

She explodes back into the night.

“Luffy! Brook!”

She screams for them as she runs, feet pounding like thunder rolling in the sky. She rounds the deckhouse at a reckless sprint, kicking off her house shoes as she goes and taking the slide in her socks. Cold wind whistles past her ears, and her hair whips behind her like a flag. She flies off the slide, hitting the lawn deck so hard she stubs all ten of her stupid toes. Her forward momentum is too much, and she trips but rolls with it and comes up running.

“Luffy!” She shouts again, wondering how far away he is and if he and Brook were under the same sleeping spell as Sanji.

She no longer wonders what the hell is happening and who is behind it. She doesn’t give a damn. She won’t let it touch her crew again.

It feels like she takes the lawn deck in only a couple of strides. Then she’s passing the foremast and crashing into the door to her quarters—literally. Her injured hand doesn’t quite grasp the doorknob in her swollen and painful fingers, so she doesn’t turn it in time and smashes her shoulder and hip into the door.

“Nami!” Luffy calls from too far behind her, but she knows he’ll be with her in just a few seconds. He can stretch and swing faster than most people can run. “Nami!”

She staggers into their quarters, ricochets on the washroom sink, and stumbles into the bedroom. She ignores the vanity completely—it’s not a place it can go anymore. It likes small spaces—cabinets and closets. That’s where it comes from. That’s where it goes when it darts away from the corner of her eyes.

Nami throws open her closet door and the smell—rot and ruin, mildew and putrefaction—hits her like a slap. She crouches as if trying to duck the suffocating, fetid miasma. It’s in her mouth, it clings to her skin.

It is here, behind the clothes. Slithering up from the dark and into their minds. Hurting Carrot and Chopper and scaring the shit out of Nami.

“Nami!” She hears again, closer. Luffy’s voice gives her all the courage she needs, as it always does.

“I’m in here!” She calls toward Luffy. “It’s in here!”

She grits her teeth and tries not to breathe through her nose. Her Clima-Tact extends with a snap and hiss of electricity.

Nami dives into the darkness of her closet.

And falls.

**

Nami wakes up vomiting. She whimpers around it, chest heaving, head throbbing, disoriented and panicked.

(She aches for Belle-mère, for Robin. For strong hands and supportive arms and a kind voice.)

When she stops, nose and throat burning, Nami looks around. The light through the porthole window is still dim.

She’s in her bedroom.

“What?” She whispers, fumbling around, but her Clima-Tact is gone. “What?” None of this makes sense. Had she passed out?

Her head aches. Was it from hitting her head on the bed frame in the infirmary? Had she cracked her own fool skull on the closet wall when she dove in? Knocked herself out?

“Luffy?” He would have been right behind her. Where was he?

Nami looks at the closet. Gray light from the window illuminates it well enough. There is no dark, endless shadow for things to crawl in and out. The smell is still in the air, but not as strongly. She thinks that awful stench will linger in her nose and mouth for days, no matter how many showers she takes or how much water or wine she drinks.

Her closet is just a closet again. Except.

There’s a movement among the hanging clothes. Quick and small, there and gone again. The more she looks, the more she realizes that something is crawling and writhing over the sleeves, collars, and hems.

A million gray, ragged-winged moths leap out at her once. She screams. They fly in her mouth and try to push into her nose and ears. They crawl under her shirt, over her stomach and edges of her bra, and up her legs. She rolls on the floor, flailing, trying to kill them, to get them off. Blindly, she finds her feet, runs out of the room, falls, and rolls again. They’re gone now, but she still shudders and rakes at her hair and clothes. She feels them crawling all over her.

Nami screams again, this time just to scream. She is pissed off and terrified and she hates it.

(There's no difference between anger and fear for her. She's always felt them both simultaneously, one continually entangled with another.)

“Luffy?” She calls again, wondering what the hell happened. She knows she dove into the closet, fueled by rage and stupidity.

And she’d been right. When she charged into the closet, she hadn't rammed into the wall as she had half-expected. She had fallen through endless space. The rotten smell had surrounded her and choked her. When her hands flew out, she touched spongy, organic walls that oozed seawater.

Yet, somehow, she had ended up in her bedroom, outside her closet.

But why wasn’t Luffy here, too? He’d been behind her. She had heard him.

Did he think she was somewhere else?

What happened to her Clima-Tact? Did she drop it when she fell? Was it lost in the hungry dark, Zeus with it?

“Chopper,” she murmurs. “Carrot.” Maybe Luffy wasn’t around because something had happened to them?

Nami takes the lawn at a jog but stops. The grass is sopping wet, her socks squelching in standing water. It’s like the Sunny is taking on seawater, but the ship is sailing as slow and smooth as it has the last couple of days.

She shakes her head, keeps jogging, and takes the stairs two at a time, chest tightening. She intends to go to the infirmary to check on Chopper, but she’s stunned to see the dining room light on when she crests the stairs. She slows down, confused.

The door is open, and inside, she can hear people talking. Laughing. The clank of plates and utensils. She can smell dinner—rich and savory. She’s actually kind of hungry, despite puking her guts out just minutes ago.

“What?” She whispers, stunned. Why are they here? Eating? Who’s eating when Chopper just about broke himself getting into that damned cabinet? Who’s eating with Carrot high on drugs and Sanji half-delirious on the sickbay floor?

As she steps over the dining room threshold, the answer is already creeping up on her. It’s the only obvious one, though it doesn’t make any sense.

At the table, empty dishes pile higher than the full ones. Sanji has already finished his meal and is leaning back with a cigarette, smiling softly as everyone enjoys his work.

Carrot sits stiffly at the table, ice packs strapped to her shoulders and elbows. She has a big glass of one of Sanji’s delicious smoothies and seems content enough to sip on it instead of eating the food. She is a little sallow and shaken, but she giggles when Luffy steals Brook's food and chats with Chopper whenever he tries to include her in the conversation.

And Chopper looks… fine. A little subdued, but he’s in different clothes—they all are—and looks clean and happy, if tired.

Brook looms between Sanji and Luffy and is in the middle of an eating contest with Luffy. They’re laughing with their mouths full, elbows flying to sabotage each other. Sanji rolls his eyes, annoyed but too weary (and soft-hearted) to stop it.

And… beside Chopper. Across from Luffy.

“You men are so mannerless!”

That’s her. It’s Nami. She’s in the lavender sundress she picked up from Sabaody and dainty flats. Her hair is glossy, obviously freshly showered and styled, curling about her shoulders and face. There’s a compression bandage around her right hand from where she scraped and crushed the hell out of it trying to get Chopper out of the cabinet.

“What?” She whispers again. And then, louder, screeching.“What?!”

But nothing changes. No one flinches.

No one hears her.

“Sanji! Chopper! Brook!” She calls, and then she takes a deep breath and screams. “LUFFY!”

Nothing. No one looks up. No one sees her. Not even herself or whatever is sitting with her crew and wearing her face.

“I don’t understand,” she says, the last couple of days (the last several weeks) catching up to her all at once, and she’s drowning. “I don’t understand. Luffy, help me.”

She gasps when Luffy finally looks right at her. “Luffy?” His eyebrow crinkles, and his head twitches minutely like he’s trying to angle his ear toward a sound he can’t quite make out.

“Luffy! Luffy, please!”

Luffy blinks and shakes his head like he’s dislodging water from his eyes and ears. He returns to his dinner, elbowing Brook and grinning competitively up at him.

“Luffy,” she says softly, voice cracking. “Luffy, I don’t know what’s happening. That thing over there is not me!”

She steps away, glancing over her shoulder to the night behind her. What she thought was the wan light of the same morning she had thrown herself into her bedroom closet chasing the thing that was screwing with her crew is actually, she’s beginning to realize, the evening of that same day.

At least, she hopes it’s only been a day.

Just how long had she been falling through the dark?

She’s here.

She looks to Luffy, but he’s turned away from her now, sitting sideways and clapping as Brook brings out his guitar. Nami—the other Nami—reaches out with a napkin to wipe a smear of sauce on Luffy’s face. A gesture she’s never done.

Luffy jerks away from the touch, eyes blown wide and startled—almost confused as he looks at the not-Nami before him like he doesn’t know her.

“Luffy?” She asks, hopeful.

Luffy shakes it off again, quickly taking the napkin from the not-Nami to wipe his face.

What is in your hand?

She looks down. Something is wrong with her hand—but she’s not holding anything this time. No slimy blanket-turned-scarf. No mirror.

That thought makes her look at the lavender-framed mirror she hung up last night with everyone around her. She meets her own eyes in the mirror and—

—her head hurts, she can’t breathe, every nerve within her is on fire—

She coughs up a mouthful of seawater into her lap.

When she looks up, she’s looking at herself in the mirror. Except it’s not the small handheld one, but a large one set on top of a vanity.

And the face in the mirror is not her own.

The woman in the mirror is beautiful. Her skin is like fine china, not pinkened or splotched with freckles like Nami’s. Where Nami is broad-shouldered, busty, and muscular, this woman’s shoulders and chest are as narrow and fragile as a bird’s. Her eyes are bright like sunlight through a green glass bottle. And her hair is gorgeous—a thick, lustrous brown with honey-rich depths of color. She wears an old-fashioned style with curls pinned up, ringlets framing her face, and a graceful neck. Her gown is antique—crushed red velvet over hot and heavy layers with exquisitely delicate lace trim at her throat. The dress is a little worn and faded from obvious repeated use, but Nami can tell it was once glorious.

Nami wants to look around but she can’t move this woman's head. She can only sit in her skin and watch the beautiful face in the mirror.

But she sees enough. The vanity is a battered thing with chipped varnish, not the cheerful strawberry-lemonade color of her own. The room behind her shoulders is crammed with a simple shabby cot and a rough-cut wardrobe. This is not her room. This is not the Sunny.

But why is Nami surprised? She’s not even herself.

When the door swings open, her eyes—their eyes—cut to the man who crowds out the frame.

The tidal wave of anger surging through her takes Nami entirely off guard. Disjointed thoughts that aren’t quite Nami’s flicker amongst her own—there’s never any goddamned privacy here, and of course not; only men deserve things like privacy, and I’m little more than a pretty piece of meat to him, to all of them.

Or maybe these thoughts are her own. She thought them, too, ages ago.

Rage presses against her ribs, crowding out her lungs and heart.

But the beautiful face in the mirror doesn’t move. In fact, it smiles, red lips parting like a bloom.

(And Nami knows this too, doesn’t she? Knows how to smile placidly, her face a stone while the sea beneath her skin twists in a hurricane. She knows what it’s like to keep her body still even with razors in her belly and ash in her mouth.)

The woman’s fingers ache, even as they sit prettily in her lap. Nami knows that ache, too. And, for a moment, they’re both one being—fingers aching to dig them into his flesh like they’re claws and pull and pull until she rips out his insides and makes him choke on them like she chokes down her grief and fury every day.

She slowly turns from the mirror to face him. The corners of her mouth feel like a string is pulling them. She’s a marionette doll with bone china skin, dressed pretty and smiling pretty and waiting to be played with.

When he smiles back at her, when he can't hide the lascivious burn in his gaze, she’s not frightened. She’s disgusted.

(She imagines knocking over the lantern, the flames licking up the seedy sheets of the cot, growing and growing until the entire damn ship is ablaze.)

Ducking her head, she flutters her eyelashes the way he likes. She doesn't want him to look at her; everything in her curls away at the thought of his eyes, breath, and skin.

But she wants him to look in the tiny wardrobe even less.

Perhaps because she’s thinking about them, the smallest of sounds emanates from the wardrobe. Soft, like a dove’s cry.

He blinks, stupid but suspicious, and turns his head to the sound. She panics, fear pushing bile up her throat. Forcing herself to move casually, she picks up her silk scarf from the vanity surface and stands. With the scarf, she wipes a smear at the corner of his mouth—grease from the dinner that he hadn’t condescended to bring her again.

She’d have to bed him now, let him make a shipwreck of the magnificent dress he’d gifted her, let him make a shipwreck of her body until she unraveled, bit by rancorous bit. She'd have to make herself pliable to his vile touch while her fury burns incandescent but useless like a ship in a bottle. And then, when he was fat and dumb with drink and pleasure and cruelty, he would sleep like the dead, and she would steal into the shadows of the night. She’d find the dark, rotting passages in the ship that no one else seemed to know about. She'd move through those awful, secret places just to thieve a few goddamned apples and tough hunks of bread and jerky.

She dabs away the gristle in his beard and smiles up at him like a flower. She smiles like her petals weren’t bruised and her thorns hadn’t betrayed her and turned inward, shredding up her insides instead of her enemies.

“Has my captain returned to me?” She asks, her voice soft. Once upon a time, her voice had been too loud for her frame. It had pierced through the winds of her home island’s mountains whenever she called her brothers in for dinner.

She’s glad to have left that place, but she despises Captain Vasa and this goddamned prison of a pirate ship in a way she could never hate her home. That one had been a soft prison with manacles in the form of family and expectations and speak softly, girl and good girls keep their eyes to the ground.

This prison is harsher on her body. She feels the bruises on her skin every time she breathes. She tastes the blood on her tongue where Vasa’s open-handed slap to her face this morning had cut her mouth on her teeth.

“Elise,” he croons her name, immediately besotted by her demureness. His eyes drift to the flesh of her throat and neckline, made all the more enticing by the gossamer lace. “My softness, my sweetness.”

Another sound from the wardrobe. Louder and, this time, unmistakable. They’d been so good for weeks now.

But they’re hungry.

Captain Vasa whirls out of her arms, throwing open the door to the wardrobe hard enough that a hinge rips from the wood. The shrieks inside are muffled because Elise already taught them that it’s dangerous to let someone hear them scream.

Vasa’s visage becomes a storm cloud of indignant anger as he takes in the two skinny-limbed children piled at the bottom like discarded nightgowns. Ingela immediately covers her little brother with her body, even though she’s as tiny and hollow-boned as her mother. She snarls up at the towering man above her, an animal gnashing her teeth even as tears fall down her little-girl face.

Calico whimpers beneath his sister. He’s so, so young. He doesn’t really understand where he is and why he must keep quiet. It’s been so much work to keep him hushed, content, and out of sight. His once-chubby baby cheeks are sunken in, and his big brown eyes, brown like his dead father's, find hers.

“Mommy,” Calico cries. “Mommy! Mommy!”

By the time Captain Vasa faces Elise again, mouth almost frothing, she is no longer incandescent with rage and fury.

She burns ice cold. Freezing iron threads through her bones.

“You wench!” He howls at her, lips shiny with spittle. “I had every right to hang you, to throw your body to the sea kings when you stowed away. But I took you in! I fed you! Kept you from the rest of the men! And this is how you repay me?”

A slurry of arguments and indignant barbs crowd her tongue. But they’re useless to a man who viewed stealing the pretty stowaway to his room and keeping her starved and beaten as benevolence.

In the end, she doesn’t have to say a thing.

Captain Vasa reaches for Calico. Ingela reacts first. Fierce, prideful, and bright like a knife, she bites savagely into his arm. Vasa snarls, backhanding Ingela so her head smashes into the wardrobe, and that’s enough.

Enough.

Elise twists the silk scarf in her hand, pulls it tight, and hooks it around Vasa’s throat.

They land on the bed, Vasa on top of her, choking out curses. She stays silent and still as stone, remote as a mountainside, even when he blindly stabs at her with his dagger. She doesn’t make a sound when it slices into her side and hip.

She holds on for five minutes, ten minutes after he stops struggling. After he stops breathing.

She doesn’t scream out the warrior’s cry of victory that claws up her throat. Screaming has never helped her; it only attracts more danger, like blood in the water.

He's heavy, but that's nothing new to her. She slides out from under him with surprisingly little struggle. Staggering to her feet, she cups her hand against the wounds to her right side. They’re not too deep. She should live.

She looks at her children. Her beautiful, starving children. Ingela has Calico facing the corner of the wardrobe, their backs turned away from the body in the bed. Turned away from their mother. Elise deserves that.

She stares at Vasa’s body, his face contorted and ugly in the last agonizing seconds of his death, and she thinks he deserves this, too.

“Mama?” Ingela asks.

Strangely, Elise feels freer now than she has in months. Years. She swallows her laugh. She doesn’t want Ingela to turn around and look at her and see the body or the wretched relief and glee slashing across her face.

What would the mirror show now?

She wrestles off Vasa’s dark captain’s coat and retrieves his hat from where it had fallen to the floor.

In the mirror, she’s in a lady’s gown of crushed red velvet, the big cloak with the golden embroidered edges heavy on her shoulders. Her hair has fallen wildly from her pins. She removes the rest and shakes out her loose curls but doesn't bother trying to tame them.

She’s tired of being tame.

The hat is a little large on her head and tilts to the side.

“I hate pirates,” she tells the mirror, herself, and her children. “I hate them.”

She struggles with Vasa’s belt, cursing under her breath until she frees it and wraps it around her waist. His big pistols hang heavy against her hips. She has never been allowed to protect herself before.

Finally, she can wear her thorns on the outside.

“Don’t look,” she tells Ingela and Calico, her voice the same soft, mothering voice it’s always been. This, more than the dead body and the swell of freedom within her, surprises her the most. It seems impossible that she's the same woman and mother she was just twenty minutes ago. But she is the same. And so much more.

“Rules of the sea are if you usurp the captain, you can take his place,” she tells her children. “That old tradition should win out over their consternation at me as a stowaway and ease their superstitions about having a woman on board.”

As the Captain’s wench, his little doll that he kept locked in his quarters, she was vulnerable to the old sailors and old sailor superstitions. But as Captain? She didn’t know, but she thought power and authority might help.

She cleans the smudged rouge around her mouth with the same scarf she used to kill Vasa. Then she rolls it up and tucks it into her dress pocket.

“I will be captain, and we’ll sail to the nearest island and get off this damned wreck. But if I don't come back by the morning, you take Calico and hide. You find the in-between places I showed you, do you remember? And you get off at the next island, and you live. Do you promise me?”

“Mommy,” Calico cries.

She doesn’t close her eyes; she can’t be weak enough for that. She stares herself down and doesn’t let herself think about the risk of not returning to her children. Instead, she imagines hauling Vasa over her shoulder—he’s a big man, but she’ll do it. She imagines herself casting him down on the deck before a hundred or more grimy, weather-hardened, life-hardened pirates of the New World. She imagines swallowing down all of the anger and fear, her face as still as it had been in the mirror, and how she’ll say, “I am Captain Elise, and you will follow my orders.”

The wardrobe door is broken off one hinge, and she doesn’t have the heart to move them right now. She tucks the few pieces of clothing over them and closes the door as best she can.

“Ingela?” She asks, voice harder than she means it, always harder than she means it when it comes to her daughter.

“...I promise, Mama.”

“Good. I will be back tonight.” She smiles into the crack of the wardrobe. “And I will bring a feast.”

—Nami coughs up seawater again. Her nose and sinuses burn with it as she staggers away. She looks around, but everyone is gone from the dining room. The lights are off, and the door is closed. Outside the window is the full dark of a deep, velvet night.

How much time had passed? Hours? Another day?

Nami takes time to look around, trying not to think too much about the mirror, Elise, and Elise's awfully familiar hate and rage and how it had nearly taken over Nami's own will and consciousness. Beneath her, the wood is damp and rotted, the planks loose and crumbling in areas. The walls are deteriorating with mildew and decay.

It’s the Sunny, but it’s not. It’s the Sunny backward and reversed—upside down and inverted. As if the entirety of their ship is being reflected in a dark, cracked mirror.

And Nami, too. Her arms—her skin—they’re not right. Her skin is the glaring white color of flesh drained of all its blood. Her right hand that she damaged saving Chopper—when had that been? Had it even been real?—is not bloody and raw. Instead, black fissures have cracked open on her skin, like the snowflake-shaped cracks in a sheet of ice before it gives way. Seawater seeps up from fissures like she’s taking on water from the inside out.

If she breaks open anymore, she’s afraid the hollowness inside her ghost body will swallow her.

Nami looks in the mirror but avoids eye contact. She only glances away and back, taking snapshots of herself. She doesn’t want to get sucked into another vision or whatever the hell it was. She doesn't know how it happened in the first place. One second she was looking into her own ghost eyes, and the next, she was Elise sitting at her vanity in another time and place.

But she has to see herself and the ghost skin she’s wearing.

Her hair is matted and darkened like she just pulled herself from the sea. The corners of her mouth are cracked like her right arm, hash-marked fissures that grotesquely expand her mouth, making her a caricature of herself.

Nami looks away and cries. She doesn't have it in her to scream.

But she’s OK with crying, tears her oldest companion. She’s used to working on her maps through them, used to fighting enemies while she’s choking back fearful sobs, used to running and laughing with them falling to her lips.

Nami tries the dining room door, but it doesn’t open. She can turn the knob, but something about this in-between and upside-down place means she has little effect on the real side. She can’t open the door or the teacup drying in the dish drain. Or she can, but what she picks up is a copy, a ghost teacup. The real-world one remains undisturbed.

The dining room door to the sick bay doesn't open, either. And even though she’s wearing ghost skin now, it doesn’t make her incorporeal. She throws herself against the door repeatedly, but all that does is burst more black fissures in her skin. She worries that she'll shatter like glass, the shards of her forever trapped in this in-between place.

She's trapped in her favorite room. The one where they gathered together daily to eat, laugh, bicker, and sing. Where there were late-night conversations about hometown superstitions over tea, funny origami shapes, and Brook's quiet strumming.

Look again.

She looks around, heart racing. (Does she even have a heart anymore? Is it filled with hellish black fissures, too?)

It's the voice again. The voice she heard in her dream the night before. It can't be Elise. Through Nami's body, the ghost is on the other side and can't see Nami or interact with her, just like the rest of her crew.

Look again.

“What are you?” She asks the empty room. “Look where?”

Mirror.

“Hell no. I need to get out of here, not lose more time.”

She also doesn’t want to lose herself in Elise’s memories. They are too similar, their anger and fear too entangled. What if she loses herself completely to the memories and lives in them forever while Elise becomes more Nami in the real world?

Except Elise wouldn’t take Nami’s place. She would throw away Nami’s dreams and maybe even try to kill her crew like she killed Captain Vasa.

Captain Vasa deserved it, but her crew didn't. They were hers, and Elise couldn’t have them.

Please. Help you.

“No,” she repeats, taking another step back. “Fuck no. I’m done, I’m done. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

Yes. Mirror.

The voice, Nami gradually realizes, is not something she hearing with just her ears. And it's something she's experienced before.

“No.” But what else could she do? She can't get out or get to her friends, much less help them.

However, she could try to learn more about Elise and this in-between place. There's always a way to sail out of danger; she only has to find it.

Help you.

The voice sounds so much like Luffy.

Hold your hand.

Little fingers, smooth like polished wood, ease into her hand. She's surprised at the sense of familiarity. She's even more surprised when it doesn't scare her.

Nami takes a breath and meets her eyes in the mirror—

—seawater spills past her lips and down her dress as Elise rushes across the vanity mirror's view. She picks up Calico and takes Ingela by her frail little bird-boned hand.

She’s not paying attention to the mirror, but Nami can make out the details Elise ignores. Her captain’s hat is gone, wild ropes of wet curls flying limply about her like drowned wings. Her crushed red velvet dress is more worn than ever before—browned by the sun, rain, and grime of sailing.

Two weeks of being captain, two weeks of over a hundred disgusting, cruel, filthy pirates grudgingly obeying her. Two weeks of good sailing and fortune. Two weeks of full meals brought up to her children, still kept secret and safe in her Captain’s quarters.

All it took was a New World storm for them to turn on her, for old superstitions to resurface and knit them together in a mob mentality of fear and hate.

She’s not surprised. They’re men, after all.

But the roiling wrath inside herself rivals the storm outside.

She can’t hide Ingela and Calico in the wardrobe—the door is still broken off the hinge. But she can’t risk them being found by the treacherous pirates she captained. She can't suffer the thought of them doing to her children what they’ll probably do to her.

Elise kisses Calico's cheek, plump again with regular meals, and buries her nose into his hair. “Hide, my love. Hide and then run and run. We’re only a few days from land. Stay in the secret places if you need to.”

“No, Mommy,” Calico mumbles, confused but knowing something is wrong in the way children do. “I don’t like those places. They're bad and I don't like them. No, Mommy.”

“Yes, my love,” she whispers, bends down, and sits him under the vanity. He’s short enough that he doesn’t need to bend his head, but the furniture is small and narrow, and his knees press close to his body.

“Hide with us, Mama,” Ingela demands, her green eyes sparking with fury at Elise. “Don’t you dare leave Calico. Don’t you dare.”

A bright knife, her daughter. She cuts through Elise with the sharpest of ease.

She relishes her daughter’s anger, her blame. It comforts Elise to see her strength reflected in her daughter, maybe even stronger than Elise ever was. Ingela will survive. She’ll protect Calico with all of her bright, sharp edges. She’ll survive with vicious teeth behind red lips, with a hard heart hidden by a sweet voice, like Elise always has.

Or maybe that’s wrong, and Elise has never been strong.

“Be strong, Ingela,” she says instead of I love you. “Be strong and stay hidden.”

Ingela fights her for a few seconds, and bruises burst on both of them where they slap hands and arms against each other and the vanity. When Calico begins to cry, Ingela gives up her fight. Driven, as always, to soothe Calico’s tears.

Ingela is too big for the vanity, especially with Calico already wedged in behind her. Her knees jam into her ribs, hindering her breath. Her shoulder won’t fit past the edge and out of sight, turned as she is to avoid crushing Calico. Before Elisa can coax her out to try another position, Ingela clenches her jaw, teeth bared at Elisa and the whole damn world, and she wrenches. The shoulder pops out of place, and tears spring to Ingela’s eyes, but she doesn’t cry.

Elise combs Ingela’s ginger hair out of her eyes one last time, swallowing back fear and love alike. She stands back, unfolds the silk scarf, and lays it across the vanity, so it hangs over the opening. She pushes the chair in to keep it there. The storm outside casts the room in confusing twilight shadows. The shadows are good. If Ingela and Calico don’t move, they won't be seen between the chair legs.

Elise hadn’t heard the footsteps over the slamming thunder, so she’s caught off guard when the door to her quarters crashes inward. For a brief, suspended moment, the men bottleneck almost comically in the frame before spilling like filth into the room.

No actual words or discussion leave their lips as they advance on her, just a cacophony of shouts and curses. Vitriol about her gender and bad luck, how it's her fault they are about to capsize in this New World storm, are muffled by the rain, wind, and thunder outside.

Elise wouldn’t listen even if she could understand them. She unholsters her pistols, takes aim, and she fires.

The first wave falls in a spray of blood. The ones behind climb over the bodies, too fever-bright with fear of the storm to fear the bite of her bullets.

(She thinks about how Ingela and Calico will have to crawl over those bodies when they escape. Will Ingela carry Calico on her back so it’s only her feet that will be stained with blood? Will she sing softly under her breath and say hush, shut your eyes, baby, close your eyes, my love in her high-pitched imitation of Elise?)

She unsheaths her daggers when she runs out of bullets and pushes in close. Maniacal laughter, wild, furious, and free, fills the room and rivals the harrowing lightning outside. When she realizes that the laughter is her voice piercing the world, she screams the battle cry that has been building for a lifetime inside her.

She goes for their eyes and throats. Their blood reddens her faded dress back to its former glory. A knife rushes toward her stomach, and she catches it. She doesn't question the flush of power through her or the shiny black coating over her hands and fingers. She laughs in their faces as she shatters the steel in her grip.

In the confusing brawl, a man gets behind her and grabs the scarf from the vanity. She doesn’t know it until he has it wrapped around her throat. It crushes her wild laughter. Her face goes hot, and her chest quickly burns with the lack of air. She stabs backward into the man’s gut and feels him fall against her legs. Another man replaces him and jerks her back by the scarf so hard she loses her balance and drops one of her daggers.

They roar with victory. They drag her over the dead, away from this cursed room, from the vanity that hides her greatest treasures.

Nami-as-Elise, or maybe Elise-as-Nami, only gets flashes after that. Reflections in the mirrors they pass, in the glint of swords and daggers and glass panes. She’s dragged through the ship by her throat. She kicks and flails. She maims them with her blade as she's manhandled away from the only things she ever gave a damn about.

Someone twists her wrist and rips the dagger away. She sinks her teeth into his throat and spits blood when he falls away from her.

There is no air in her body when they reach the deck. The pain in her neck, head, and shoulders is nothing she’s ever felt before, and this must be what a broken neck feels like.

The storm rages like a sentient beast above them, around them, through them. The rain pelts her hot skin. The ship rocks so violently in the waves that they trip and fall over each other as they drag her to the railing.

Unceremoniously, their curses and pleas with the gods lost in the wind, they haul her up and over. Her body rocks and rolls in the gale as if she were nothing more than a flag.

When she hits the water, her body shatters and so does the storm.

She’s too tired and weak to swim, bones too broken to fight the seawater that rushes in her mouth.

Her scarf unfurls from her body and floats above her, peaceful and beautiful. The sea is as still as a looking glass, and in it, she watches herself sink into the gulping, rotting darkness below—

—more seawater bubbles out of Nami’s mouth, and she chokes on it for what seems like hours, shivering in a fetal position on the spongy and dilapidated floor below her.

The light outside is golden, though none suffuses the gray in-between place. More time passed while she was stuck in Elise’s memories.

The little hand is still in hers.

She looks up, half-expecting the delicate Calico with his starved cheeks or the angry Ingela with her dislocated shoulder and burning hate.

But it’s not either of them.

“Luffy?” She asks though she knows it's not him. The figure is smaller than Luffy but wears the same scar on its face.

Now the figure’s hair seems blue instead of black. Electric blue hair with a jutting chin. Now his eyebrows are curled, and now his eyes are silver.

Another blink and the hair turns tangerine.

She—he—they’re wearing a green haramaki with a white cowboy hat that slips seamlessly into coveralls with a pink top hat and a feathery boa.

They’re nothing but a shadow and a wide, white smile. A shadow wearing a raincoat with a wooden mallet in their hand.

“...Sunny?”

The grin that angles up at her is Franky’s raucous laughter. It’s Luffy’s grin, Zoro’s self-satisfied smirk, and Sanji’s soft, boyish beaming. It’s Robin’s closed-lip smile and Brook’s hardly-sane chuckle. Chopper’s giggle and Usopp’s pleased blush. It’s all of that but also their own smile, as much as a ship can smile.

Navigator. Our Navigator.

The voice travels from where her body touches the wooden floor and bubbles through her veins like Cola.

Nami laughs. She still has her crew with her. She’s not alone, after all.

tbc

Chapter Text

Sunny’s laugh sounds like waves rushing against the hull.

Whooshh-sh-shh.

Nami’s eyes burn. She thought she’d be out of tears by now but hadn’t realized how lonely she was until Sunny showed up.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” she whispers, wiping the seawater from the cracks in her cheeks. “I don’t even care how you’re here.”

You’re the one who’s here.

“Oh,” Nami gasps in realization. “Oh, is this… is this where you normally are? Beside us but not with us?”

Yes.

She studies Sunny, who prefers reflecting Franky and Luffy in their ever-shifting features. As time ticks by, Sunny’s appearance seems to settle into something wholly them. A small frame with the raincoat and the mallet, wide eyes, and wild sunset-gold hair like a lion’s mane.

“Don’t you get lonely?”

A pause as Sunny tilts their head, red-faced with pouting cheeks like Luffy gets when he’s thinking too hard (or thinking at all).

Sunny is a ship.

Right, OK, that makes sense. Sunny is unique, but they’re still a ship. Nami probably can’t expect human emotions and reactions.

“Does it… always look like this here?” She asks, indicating the crumbling, rotting wood around her.

No.

Nami sighs when Sunny doesn’t elaborate. She points to her ghost body. “Would I normally look like this here?”

Can’t cross here.

“But I did cross here, wherever here is.”

Sunny stays silent, maybe because they’re just as clueless as Nami.

“Something is different,” Nami tests out slowly. “Something changed. Something has hurt you or hurt the place where this part of you exists. And it’s made it so I can cross over, even though I shouldn’t.”

Yes. Maybe.

“Do you know how this happened?”

Sunny’s eyes go glacier blue, like Robin’s, as they seem to meticulously ponder her question. Finally, they approximate a shrug and reach up with wood-smooth hands and place them gently on Nami’s cheeks.

Complicated. No words. Show you.

This is all the warning she gets before she’s gasping—

—she’s in the ocean, and it’s rushing by her, singing, laughing, dancing against her. She laughs with the waves that crash on her hull like whoosh-sh-shh; she laughs with the currents and the winds. She’s so happy, so free.

On top of her is half of her crew.

Captain-Navigator-Cook-Doctor-Musician.

She loves them.

Luffy-Nami-Sanji-Chopper-Brook.

She’s not sure what love is, but that doesn’t bother her. She knows she’d burn for her crew and sink to the lonely depths for them. More importantly, she’d sail for them. Push on and on and on; carry them forever into whatever horizon lies ahead.

She is battered from the last adventure—torn and broken and charred in a way she hasn’t been in her short life. But it was fun. It was hilarious and scary. Besides, she is pretty strong. She could sail until she reached Shipwright-Franky-Creator. She missed his funny voice and his gentle metal hands. He would fix her.

The New World—that’s what her crew calls it—is exciting and frightening, with waters that are often stranger than those in the Florian Triangle. She wonders if her crew knows about the singing, dancing, growling, and weeping below them. She’s not sure their kind can hear those things. Maybe Captain-Luffy-Laughter can. When he sits on her crown for entire sunrises in silence, she thinks that perhaps they’re both listening to the same things.

The waters she goes through now are even darker. She can’t tell the crew or avoid the sick, oily currents below her. It doesn’t matter. She’s a ship. She’s meant to sail forward.

The ghost, an echo of a once-human, is nothing new. Many ghosts churn silently at the bottom of the sea, though none have ever been able to touch her.

But this ghost, the Ghost-Captain-Wrong, is not alone. There is something else, a darkness that seeps through a crack in the hull of the world. It is old, and it does not belong. It never changes but it never leaves. Tendrils made of dead and rotten things seep from the ocean bed in which it festers. An infection, as her Doctor-Chopper-Reindeer! might say. An Infection waiting to be spread into existence on this side of the world’s hull.

She has no lungs, but she holds her breath as they pass over the crack in the world. Nothing happens, and she thinks they are free.

They are not.

Ghost-Captain latches onto Sunny first, boards her like the Ghost-Captain has done a half-dozen ships before her. Sunny knows this because she can hear Ghost-Captain’s Voice, even though the ghost’s vocal cords have long rotted away and become sea debris.

(She can feel the shipwrecks below her being slowly consumed and digested by the Infection. Their cries are tired, bitter, and lonely. It makes her shudder.)

The ghost is a puppet at the end of a dark tendril and, through it, comes the Infection. It riddles Sunny with spaces that should not be there. Shadowed passages and hallways with entries and exits not in Shipwright-Franky-Creator’s beautiful blueprints grow and spread between floors and walls. She is bloated twice her size, but her crew cannot see it because it’s not happening where they laugh, eat, live, and rebuild themselves from their last battle. It’s happening beside them, a step or two to the right of their reality.

The Infection is composed of rotten and dead things. Decaying seaweed and fish, maggots and beetles, mildew and rust. Sunny is a ship and doesn’t know how to hate anything, but she hates the Infection.

She hates it when it lets Ghost-Captain move a few steps to the side, where she can interact with Sunny’s crew in ways Sunny never will be able to. Sunny can only watch and try to warn them as Ghost-Captain targets Carrot-Crew? and Doctor-Chopper-Reindeer!

Ghost-Captain lures Navigator-Nami-Storm into the In-Between, into a vein of Infection. This is how she steals Navigator-Nami-Storm’s hull and leaves her behind, trapped and alone.

Not alone. Sunny is here—

Little hands let go of her cheeks. There’s no boiling nausea like when she traveled into Ghost-Captain’s—Elise’s memories. Just a bubbly, Cola feeling at the back of her throat.

Nami struggles to process Sunny’s alien impressions. They are deeply connected to the world, yet concepts are limited by the physicality of their ship-body. Even now, Nami knows half of that vision was her own interpretation of what Sunny experienced.

“I love you, too, Sunny.”

Shh-shh-sh.

“So this is not a Devil Fruit user?”

Sunny tilts their head and blows out a breath they don’t need to breathe in a familiar gesture. It’s Sanji blowing out cigarette smoke when he’s particularly contemplative.

A little hand touches her cheek. Nami doesn't get as much as last time, just not really Devil Fruit, old like Devil Fruits? Older? Big, world-eating big and hungry, just a tiny part of it in the crack in the hull of the world.

Nami rubs at her temples, warding away the budding headache from trying to follow Sunny’s dancing foreign thoughts.

“You’re amazing, Sunny. You’ve been trying to fight this… this Infection away, right? Trying to protect us? Can you… can you push it away? Shut it back out?”

No. Yes? Maybe? Ghost-Captain in Nami’s hull.

Nami hugs her knees, rocking a little as she tries to assemble Elise’s memories and Sunny’s impressions into something she can work with. Unconsciously, she reaches up to run her fingers over her tattoo and grimaces at what she feels through her shirt. She tugs the collar away, already expecting what she sees. Her entire shoulder is shattered with black fissures.

She closes her eyes and swallows thickly, too tired to feel scared. With Sunny close enough to touch, it’s easier to tuck the horror into a neat compartment in her mind.

“Elise in my… body is the issue. She’s like. A place the Infection can get through.”

Sunny waits, swaying in place like a ship bobbing on the ocean.

“And she’s also a… doorstop. Because she’s real, in the real world and not the In-Between. You can’t shut the door if she’s on our side. Luffy’s side, I mean.”

Yes. Maybe.

“Comforting,” Nami sighs. “I guess it can’t be helped. You’re a Strawhat, after all. We’ve done bigger, way more dangerous things with even less to go on.”

Sunny answers her with a pleased-as-punch woosh-shh-sh.

Nami looks up at the lavender-framed mirror.

“It’s the mirror,” she says out loud. “I don’t know how, but it’s important. Can it see Luffy’s side and our side? It’s definitely a link between the past and the present. That's how I got caught up in Elise’s memories.”

Yes. Maybe.

A pause followed by a fizz-pop Cola giggle.

Mystery mirror.

Nami rolls her eyes hard enough that it makes her headache spark. Still, she can’t help but smile. “You’re a little shit, too, aren’t you?”

Sunny is a Strawhat.

Sunny reaches for her cheek and this time she leans into the touch, bracing herself. Again, it’s not coherent thoughts or words. Funny Mirror Devil Fruit from the last adventure opened up Sunny and made them vulnerable on a transdimensional level. Infection crawled in. Maybe mirrors can be a door, a window, or a crack in the hull.

Maybe just a Mystery Mirror.

Nami blinks away from Sunny’s voice in her mind, leaning back to rest her head against the rotting wood behind her as she chews on this new insight. Maybe Brulee’s power opened Sunny up for this attack. Maybe Elise and the Infection latched on to the excess energy and seeped into the still-closing transdimensional cracks left behind from the Mirro-World.

A mirror may help close it again.

Perhaps there is a reason mirrors inspire so many superstitions.

The beginnings of a plan form. Well, to call it a plan would be generous. But it's all she has.

“I may need your help, Sunny.”

Sunny is a Strawhat.

“Yes, you are,” Nami agrees firmly. A thought sparks amidst the chaotic anxiety somersaulting through her. “You know, superstition says that a Klabautermann is good luck, but if you see one, your ship is doomed.”

Sunny’s smile is so wild and free and happy that she almost thinks it’s Luffy’s but no, not quite. It’s her own smile reflected back at her. The one that she’s bared to the world ever since Arlong Park.

I am what I want to be.

**

Her plan is easier said than done, but what else is new? The waiting is the worst part, and that’s all she can do, confined in the galley in her awful ghost body. Waiting and worrying.

The problem is that there is no logic or empirical evidence for what is happening. She's hoping and praying that the mirror can act as a window to Luffy's side, but there's no concrete proof. Maybe she’s stuck here until the Infection consumes her and fashions her ghost into a puppet like it did to Elise.

But Nami has been operating on low logic and high chaos ever since a stupid boy in a ratty old hat overturned her entire world. Nami has to try something to get out of here. To protect her friends.

(Even so, she wishes she had any weapon besides her desperation and plucky attitude. She wishes Sanji or Luffy or Brook were here to protect her. She’s always been a little selfish like that.)

Sanji enters the kitchen with Luffy on his heels. Nami’s heart soars to see them. She doesn’t try to talk to them this time, knowing she’d be unable to handle another wave of crushing disappointment. Behind them, through the open door, she can see that it’s another overcast afternoon. Nami is getting sick of that awful gray light.

“We haven’t been moving at all, have we?” She asks out loud. Before she got dragged to the In-Between, she knew their progress had been slow with the lack of wind and strong currents. But they had been moving, hadn’t they? She would have noticed if they were really just standing still, right?

Some, not far.

Nami looks, but no child-like form is standing at her hip. “Where did you go? How can I hear you?”

Sunny is Sunny.

“Right,” she mutters.

We sail, but not far. Infection is strong. Mystery time. Mystery space.

Nami snorts, reminding herself that Sunny perceives infinitely more than she can but is also infinitely more limited. But she thinks she understands enough. The Infection plays with the rules of this world because it’s from somewhere else and doesn’t have to follow them. Maybe it can dilate time like it can distend Sunny’s physical frame with rotting passageways to the In-Between.

Maybe the Infection is trying to switch places with Sunny like Elise switched with Nami. Perhaps it’s trying to untether itself from the bottom of the ocean to spread its Infection and open the crack further until the world is swallowed in the hungry dark.

Between one blink and the next, the kitchen blooms with the smells of dinner. The aroma is twisted by the ever-present stench of rot and decay in the In-Between, but Nami’s stomach grumbles anyway. How long has she been stuck here? A day? Two?

Sanji stirs each of the three giant pots he has simmering on the stove, tasting and adding ingredients and humming along to the tone dial. Luffy sits at the counter, intently watching Sanji work. He hums off-key as he swings his feet and bobs his head to the music like a curious bird.

Nami smiles and aches for them, for her boys. Some days, instead of playing with Usopp and Chopper or napping with Zoro, Luffy comes into the kitchen like this, so it’s just him and Sanji. He alternatively badgers Sanji for food and lavishly admires his cook’s exceptional skills. In return, Sanji tsks and rolls his eyes and skillfully dodges Luffy’s grabby hands but not-so-skillfully dodges his compliments. Sanji inevitably relents, as indulgent as he always is with Luffy, with all of them, and shoves food at Luffy even while he shouts “now get lost!”

Luffy always stays. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes Sanji plays music and hums along while Luffy hypnotizes himself watching Sanji work.

And, sometimes, they dance.

(Sanji claims he’s trying to “hammer social etiquette and culture into Luffy’s shitty rubber brain.” Luffy just likes dancing and spending time with one of his favorite people.)

Now, Sanji moves to sit next to Luffy. He quietly and meticulously adds notes to the binder where he keeps his recipes, inspirations, and observations of the crew’s preferences and dietary needs.

The last song ends, and Luffy lifts the dial and gets to his feet.

“Careful,” Sanji murmurs absentmindedly.

“I am, I am,” Luffy says as he returns the dial to the shelf and retrieves a second one. Upbeat music fills the room as Luffy stays standing, swaying at first and then dancing in place.

Luffy is a being of extreme agility… when he’s punching someone in the face. He just doesn’t structure that uncanny balance and grace into any form that can be called a dance. He’s usually too far ahead of the music or laughing too much to keep up. The results are jiggly, wiggly, disjointed movements that look more like he unexpectedly walked through a sticky spiderweb.

Nami giggles at him, like she always does.

Luffy worries the hell out of her. Scares her sometimes, too. But not in the way Arlong had. It’s just… with Luffy, she feels so big. And the world feels even bigger. It feels like she could keep running, keep sailing forever.

Like she could be free forever.

That feeling is terrifying to someone like her. It is everything to someone like her.

And he makes her laugh.

“Tsk,” Sanji says, distracted from his notebook. “Did you already forget how it’s supposed to go? You’re doing it wrong.”

“Maybe Sanji does it wrong,” Luffy snarks as he spins drunkenly.

“You know I don’t. You just don’t pay attention.” Sanji stands, faces Luffy, and holds out his arms.

“Dancing is dancing, you know,” Luffy declares with an imperious eye roll.

“Just who are you rolling your eyes at?”

Luffy cheeses as he steps up to Sanji, placing one hand in Sanji’s and curling the other around Sanji’s waist.

“Think of it as training,” Sanji says as he pushes Luffy into a dance that in no way resembles what Luffy was trying to do on his own. “Dancing helps with poise and balance. It’s not too shabby for building core and leg strength, either.”

“I’m already plenty strong, though?” Luffy asks distractedly, busy watching their feet with intense concentration. From the looks of it, Luffy has learned the hard way not to step on Sanji’s toes.

“Yeah, yeah. No, the steps are like this, here.” Sanji leads the dance, then repeats the steps a second time. Luffy mimics the steps perfectly if a little woodenly. They both pause awkwardly, and Sanji gives Luffy a deadpan stare.

“You’re supposed to spin me out here. I’m teaching you the lead part, remember? You whined at me for hours until I agreed to let you have it.”

“But it’s dumb to have different ones. I want to spin!”

Sanji sighs the sigh of a man worn down by life and spins Luffy out before bringing him back in for a dip. Luffy cackles with glee.

“Glad you’re back,” Luffy says when they’re both upright and dancing again. “Missed this.”

“My cooking?”

“Mm,” Luffy agrees. “Dancing, too.”

“Yeah,” Sanji sighs. “Yeah, I missed home.” He looks around the room with quick, darting glances that seem to stem from something more profound than the paranoia of other crew members finding out about their “dancing lessons”. He taps Luffy’s chin to make him look up, so their eyes meet.

“We’re still missing a few pieces.” Sanji says slowly, intently. Nami knows that calculating look on his face. She hurries to them.

“Sanji? Sanji, have you noticed something?” She asks, voice high and hopeful. Sanji is incredibly observant and not as easily fooled as Luffy is by appearances. Surely he would be the first to pick up on something?

“Sanji! Luffy!” She yells again, waving at them. Her arm bumps into them, but they don’t react.

“Mm, yeah. I miss them, too,” Luffy says. “But we’ll meet up with everyone soon.”

Disheartened, Nami backs away and collapses against the wall. They were obviously talking about Zoro and the others. They can’t be talking about Nami when, for all they know, she isn’t gone.

“Nami will figure it out,” Luffy says, beaming up at Sanji. “She’s strong too, you know?”

In tandem, Luffy and Sanji look at the dining hall door a moment before it opens.

Elise enters, still wearing Nami’s body. Her expression flickers with surprise at the tableau in the dining room. And then all emotion recedes from the corners of her mouth, from around her eyes, and Nami witnesses her own face become as placid as a looking glass.

Nami bares her teeth. She hates that look. The look of becoming less, of trying to blend into the background. The expression of someone without an opinion or a personality. That is not her. Not anymore. Maybe it had been before, during the worst times with Arlong. Now, even when she’s trying to con someone, she’s loud. Flashy and wild and flirty and brave like she was too terrified to be for so many years.

“Oh?” Elise smiles, arms behind her back, and everything about her, from her smile to her posture, is wrong. “Are these dancing lessons, Captain?”

“Yes! Dancing lessons!” Sanji exclaims, dramatically pushing away from Luffy.

“Nah. Just fun,” Luffy answers at the same time.

Though Elise’s expression doesn’t change, Nami has been in her head. She can tell that something about the picture before Elise makes her pause. Was she stunned to see two men—pirates—dancing with each other? To see their boyishness and easy affection?

Or maybe Elise is planning their gruesome deaths. Or maybe she’s more Infection than Elise, and there are no thoughts left, just impersonal hunger.

Elise makes a show of shivering. She’s in another dress—scarlet with a sweetheart neckline and a flared skirt that whispers against her knees. A brown belt is tied around her waist with a pistol holstered on each side.

Nami whips back to Sanji, who has moved to stir dinner. Luffy stays standing, swaying in place to the music and openly staring at Nami—Elise.

“That’s not me!” Nami can’t help but shout. “I don’t—I don’t wear that! Where’s my Clima-Tact? Come on, guys! Please!”

No reaction, of course.

Elise rubs her hands over her arms. “The temperature is dropping again. I can’t wait to get out of this sea, can you?”

“It’s taking a long time,” Luffy agrees, falling out of rhythm without Sanji to wrangle him. His head bops become birdlike again.

“I’m sure you’ll lead us out of here in no time, Nami-swan!” Sanji says over his shoulder. “Would you like a cocktail before dinner? Tea?”

“Tea, if you would, my dear,” Elise says sweetly.

“My dear?” Nami repeats with a face. “Come on! I never call you that, Sanji!”

But Sanji’s an absolute dope. He swoons and carols his acquiescence at Elise as he moves to the cabinets.

“Before you do that, do you mind getting my coat from the cargo bay? I left it there when we were doing inventory earlier, and I’m so cold.”

Sanji closes the cabinet and literally fucking pirouettes to Elise, kneeling before her and kissing her hand gallantly.

When Nami gets her own body back, she’s going to punch that idiot overboard.

“Anything for my lady,” he says before dashing out of the door with a, “out of my way, shitheads! I’m on a mission of love!”

With a sigh, Nami wonders why the hell she thought Sanji, with his women-colored blinders, would be her best bet.

Luffy laughs after Sanji. He’s wearing one of Zoro’s shirts again. He looks like the farthest thing from intimidating with the shirt hanging past his thighs and the sleeves rolled up around his wrists. He didn’t bother with buttons this time, fully exposing his scar and the bandaged wounds from Katakuri.

Luffy doesn’t see how Elise assesses his scar, but Nami does. This could be the first time she’s seen it, an echo of a wound that would have decimated anyone else.

Nami wonders if it will make her pause somehow, but no. Elise steps closer to Luffy, arms behind her back in a way that is supposed to make her chest and body swell gently into the awareness of her mark. She smiles a smile that Nami has never once smiled at Luffy. It’s all… seductive and coy, a lure meant to reel her mark into her clutches.

The act, of course, doesn’t even register with Luffy.

“Would you like to continue your dancing lessons, Captain?”

“I like dancing with Nami.”

“You are too charming, Captain,” Elise says as she takes Luffy’s hand, guiding his other low around her waist.

“Gross,” Nami sticks out her tongue at the scene, even as she feels a flare of… what? Possessiveness? Really?

(Luffy is hers. They all are. Her treasure.)

“She’s definitely up to something,” Nami grumbles as she turns to face the hand mirror hanging on the wall. “We have to figure this out, Sunny.”

Nami is pretty sure she can use the mirror somehow. If Brulee’s Devil Fruit allows her to tap into the transdimensional aspect of mirrors that already exists, then Nami can do the same thing from here.

Right?

The mirror has got to be something that connects both sides. Or maybe it reflects all sides—past and present, the In-Between and Nami’s real world. It piles up refractions on top of each other until there’s enough overlap for Nami to get through. The mirror has to be a key because it’s the only fucking key she has.

Behind her, Elise has to nudge Luffy to lead her in the dance. He wastes no time looking down to study their feet. Which is good because Nami doesn’t want him stepping on her toes, either.

“You’re really good at this,” Elise purrs in Luffy’s ear.

“I’m going to kill her,” Nami vows between clenched teeth.

“Really?” Luffy asks, blinking up at Elise. “Sanji says I’m an oaf with hands for feet and feet for hands.”

“That sounds like jealousy, Captain.”

Luffy shrugs with a laugh. “I thought it was a compliment. It’d be really cool to have hands for feet, don’t you think?”

The conversation seems innocuous, but Nami’s heart is racing. Elise is too calm, too placid. It feels like the night she killed Captain Vasa. The night she played the part of a sweet rose right up until her thorns choked the life out of her captor.

Keeping an eye on them over her shoulder, Nami reaches up to touch the mirror. She presses her fingers against the glass. They don’t go through like they could with Brulee’s power. Nothing happens.

“There’s got to be something.” She picks up the mirror and cries triumphantly when it lifts off the wall.

Except it doesn’t. She has the mirror in her hand, but the mirror—the real mirror—also stays hanging on the wall.

“No!” She cries, putting it back up and slapping her hand against the wall beside it. “This is all I had!”

Nami had hoped she could use the mirror to get her crew to see her. If they did, if they understood that the Nami with them on the ship was an imposter, they would help her. She didn’t know how, but that’s never stopped them before. Nami thought Brook could do something. His Devil Fruit was both fascinating and creeptastic. It straddled the line of life and death. Maybe, in the right circumstances, it could straddle dimensions like the Mirror-Mirror Fruit could.

But she couldn’t get them to help her if she couldn’t fucking warn them.

“No!” Her voice turns jagged and angry. She slaps the wall again, the panic she’s been pushing down, down, down boiling up like a volcano.

“No! This isn’t fair!”

She makes a fist with her right hand, the one she hurt trying to help Chopper, and hits the wall harder. More black fissures erupt between her fingers, and more seawater rushes out of her. She screams at both the agony and the horror of her body.

The mirror—the real-life one—rattles on the wall.

Nami stares at it, wide-eyed, a wing of hope rising so high within her it feels like she’s choking on the feathers.

Behind her, Elise says, “why did you stop?”

In the mirror, over Nami’s shoulder, Luffy and Elise have stopped dancing.

“This is the part where you spin me,” Luffy answers with the same petulance he had with Sanji.

“I—but Captain,” Elise sounds utterly wrong-footed. “That’s not how it’s usually—”

“Don’t care! Spinning is fun!”

Alive things.

Sunny is at her knee suddenly, with their wild red hair and creaking raincoat. They tap their wooden mallet against their shoulder.

Dead things come in. Alive things go out. Maybe, maybe.

“Oh,” Nami whispers in realization. She swallows down the horrifying implication that she is some sort of “dead thing”.

“OK,” she whispers. “Dead things in, alive things out. OK.” But how? How had Elise done it? She looks down at her hand even though everything in her wants to look away and run from her own body. It is white and blue-veined, lumpy with shattered bones, riddled with the black fissures, and seeping brackish seawater. The hand of a ghost, the hand of a monster.

“OK,” she says again, trying to think. Elise was a dead thing, so she shouldn’t have been able to cross, but she did. She had years and years of the Infection working in her, changing her.

Nami didn’t want that. She wanted to escape as herself.

What else did Elise have? Her pain. The pain from her brutal, stifled life. The pain of her starving children. The pain of her death.

Pain was the most alive thing Nami knew.

Elise spins Luffy out in the dance. He laughs and spins her in turn and then demands to be spun again, completely ignoring the rhythm of the music. They dance so close to Nami she could touch them.

She presses her broken ghost hand to the mirror’s face until static creeps into her vision, and she’s teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. The mirror moves in both the ghost world and the real world. Beside her, little fingers press into her thigh, holding her up, maybe even amplifying what she’s trying to do.

(Their Klabautermann exists a little bit on both sides, too, don’t they? Like the mirror.)

“Luffy!” She screams as loud as she can, ripping her throat raw until she imagines the black crevices erupting inside her. She presses harder on the mirror, rattles it, and moves it in both dimensions. “Luffy! That’s not me!”

Luffy and Elise stop their dance with Luffy comically in mid-spin out. They both look at the mirror.

They see you!

Elise’s placid expression curdles into a snarl. Luffy blinks at Nami in his blank, silly way.

“It’s me! It’s Nami! I promise, Luffy. I know I look like I’m—I know I don’t look right, but Luffy! Please! Please believe me!”

Luffy lights up. “Ah, Nami! There you are. How the hell did you get in the mirror again?”

Nami laughs, delirious, imagining the wings in her chest bursting out of her to take flight and carry her away. Carry her home. She barely notices it when her swollen and crushed fingertips begin to slip through the mirror.

(Hope is an alive thing, too, isn’t it?)

“It’s not—it’s not really the mirror. It’s not a Devil Fruit! Luffy, get Brook! I think Brook can—”

Elise strikes like a snake. Using Nami's strength, she jerks Luffy closer to her. He stumbles back, surprised and confused.

In a blink, Elise pulls a scarf out of the dress pocket and wraps it around Luffy’s throat. Luffy’s cry cuts off with a wheezy gag before his straw hat has enough time to flutter to the floor.

“No! Luffy!” Nami cries, looking both over her shoulder and in the mirror’s reflection, stifling the urge to run to them. It wouldn’t do any good. If she lets go of the mirror, she might break what little influence she has in the real world.

Luffy’s lips shine with spit as he bares his teeth, clawing instinctively at the scarf. The silk material is too slick, too tight against his skin. He surges forward, pulling Elise off her feet for a brief moment.

“Are you crazy?” Nami shouts. “Don’t let her do this! It’s not me! Fight!” And then, “but not too hard! That’s my body!” And then, “Never mind! Just don’t let her kill you, you dumbass!”

“What the hell are you?” Elise grunts, twisting the material and wrenching. Her skin is flush with effort, her face contorted with hate.

She’s pulling hard enough to pop Luffy’s goddamned head off. Except Luffy is rubber. His bones can’t be crushed. He wheezes, scratching at the noose so hard he leaves marks on his throat.

He can still suffocate.

Nami looks at her broken, throbbing fingers. They’re going through the mirror now, and it’s the weirdest fucking thing. She’s reaching into the mirror, but her fingers are also coming out into Luffy’s side right next to where she’s reaching in. Like… like the refraction that happens to a straw in a glass of water.

She tries not to look at it. Mainly because it’s a little horrifying, and it’s happening to her already horrifying body. She also doesn’t want Elise to catch on.

Luffy’s skin turns a mottled red and purple. His lips seem to whiten before her eyes. He jerks again like his body can’t help the survival instinct. Elise’s feet leave the floor.

Again, Elise regains her hold.

“Don’t do this,” Nami whispers, eyes burning.

“What a clever little navigator,” Elise says between gritted teeth, meeting Nami’s eyes in the mirror. Her regard is casual and remote, like she’s not currently murdering Luffy. “Mirrors. In two hundred years, I’ve never figured out how those worked.”

Elise scoffs and pulls even harder. Luffy’s eyes bulge, head trying to twist back and forth, searching for a few more hints of air. He’s getting weaker.

“Don’t do this, please.”

“You cannot save him or anyone on this ship,” Elise gasps, the effort to contain Luffy, to kill him, straining her. They’re close enough now that Luffy’s flailing hand brushes against Nami, though Luffy still doesn’t seem to feel her.

“I will sail away from this godforsaken sea wearing your skin, Navigator. Although,” she laughs, her lips next to Luffy’s ear, taunting them both. “Although, I think I like the title of Captain better.”

Luffy snarls back, rage edging into his features.

“Luffy, don’t do this,” Nami begs softly because it had only ever been him she was pleading with. “Luffy, I don’t know how to reach you. I don’t know how to stop it!”

“Na-mi,” he croaks with the last of his breath. Less of a plea and more of a command.

“You better fucking save me,” she whispers.

She smashes her already damaged hand against the wall. She screams at the pain, at the fury that bubbles through her like magma.

Anger is an alive thing, too.

She doesn’t waste a moment. She plunges her hand—less a hand and more a gnarled, exposed nerve made out of pain and agony—into the mirror. Her arm refracts and reaches past her and into the real world.

Sunny unleashes a battle cry with her. It sounds like wrenching wood and nails as little arms wrap around her leg, their energy widening the opening she made.

Nami doesn’t grab Luffy. She doesn't try to free him.

Elise thought she’d been killing Luffy right in front of Nami. And she had. But Luffy had let her. Because it meant keeping Elise in front of the mirror.

In front of Nami. For Nami.

“Nami will figure it out.” Luffy had told Sanji. “She’s strong too, you know?”

Nami wraps her mangled hand around Elise’s throat.

“Let go of my captain.”

And then she and Sunny drag the ghost by the throat through the mirror and into the In-Between.

Nami gasps in shock and panic as they fall into frigid seawater instead of the decaying reflection of the Sunny Nami had been wandering through. The iciness immediately saps the warmth and strength from her. The sea is flat and placid above them as they sink, the same mirror-like stillness Elise drowned in two hundred years ago. Elise is wearing her own ghost body again, her long, matted hair flowing and mixing with Nami’s.

Elise’s back is against Nami’s chest, so Elise’s screams rattle in her ribs. She fights hard, fists pounding into Nami, bubbles exploding from their mouths and rippling the mirror above them as they struggle against each other. Nami keeps an arm around her throat, tries to get an arm around her torso to stop her flailing, and wraps her right leg around Elise’s legs.

She doesn’t know how long it takes her to realize that the water is bleeding black, that they didn’t somehow fall overboard but into the Infection. The dark, alien, eldritch thing that slithered in between worlds and waited like a trap of teeth and dead things at the bottom of the ocean. The thing that used Elise's angry, broken, raw spirit to overtake Sunny.

How much further away is Nami falling from her crew? Is she sinking to a place where she’ll never see them again?

Her chest burns. Can her ghost body drown? Will she become the Infection’s puppet, like Elise?

Elise weakens in Nami’s arms. She’s dead already; choking and drowning shouldn’t kill her or make her stop.

But Nami had dragged her under by her throat like her commandeered pirate crew did all of those years ago. Maybe ghosts can be killed again if the circumstances are right.

Elise’s struggle becomes a sickening, boneless stillness. She’s already dead, and she tried to kill you, Nami reminds herself fiercely as nausea and horror swoop in her.

Nami whimpers, the sound swallowed by the black sea, but she doesn’t dare let go. She aches to swim up for air, for Luffy. But she can’t let Elise or the Infection have her crew.

Nami will be the door that shuts out the dead things.

You can’t have Luffy, she thinks fiercely. You can’t have any of them!

Above her, the darkness shatters their reflection before swallowing it completely. And Nami is left to drown in decay and hunger. Her chest finally seizes, and when her mouth opens reflexively, it tastes like brine and mildew rush past her lips and down her tongue.

“NAMI!”

Something breaks through the darkness. Luffy’s hand stretches out between realities and dimensions or wherever the fuck Nami is, reaching out blindly for her.

Nami’s chest seizes again, and she can't help how her arms flail out as every instinct urges her to swim and fight. Dislodged, Elise’s body floats gently away. She doesn’t startle back into some sort of awful poltergeist vengeance. The ghost, the captain, the mother, the girl from the mountains just drifts and sinks.

She surprises herself by pumping her arms and legs down toward Elise’s fading form. She hates Elise, but she understands her. She had only ever wanted freedom and hadn’t deserved her death. Nami can’t bring herself to leave the ghost behind to keep being unmade and remade by the Infection.

But the fissures in Elise’s skin, the same ones on Nami’s ghost body, widen like hungry mouths, like cracks in a mirror. Darkness seeps from them, and the ghost disintegrates like a nightmare, consumed by the Infection.

“NAMI!”

Nami doesn’t have enough air left to scream, but she wants to as the last of Elise disappears. She wants to scream in relief as she hurls herself toward Luffy’s hand. His fingers clench tight enough to break more black fissures into her arm. She no longer cares about them because she knows he’ll never let her go.

She sees it, then. In the split second of suspension in the cloying darkness, she sees the gentle almost-glow emanating from the single bead around Luffy’s wrist.

Dead things can come in. Alive things can go out.

(Or maybe it’s just Ace’s love and dreams, still protecting Luffy.)

Then Luffy pulls, and Nami only has to hang on and survive long enough for him to reel her out. The Infection around her is thicker going out than going in like it’s turned from seawater to swamp. It clings to her and fights against Luffy. She has to shut her eyes as indeterminable sludge sticks to her face.

And then, all at once, she’s out. She gasps and retches up rotten things she can’t bring herself to look at. Moaning and coughing, panting so hard her head swims, she looks around and almost cries when she finds herself in the In-Between dining room again.

She just wants to go home.

Above her, Luffy’s hanging impossibly out of the small hand mirror by his head and shoulders, one arm still gripped painfully tight around Nami’s wrist. His other arm is stuck behind him on the other side.

His eyes are wild and angry as he roars ferally at Nami—at something behind her.

She doesn’t have it in her to look.

“Luffy!”

“Run, Nami!” Luffy commands, tugging her harder until she’s finally tripping to her feet. She screams when something viscous and awful wraps around her ankles and yanks her backward. Luffy’s arm extends with her, and she completely loses whatever calm she clung to when she sees his form drawing away from her again.

“Luffy! I can’t do it again! I can’t! Luffy, don’t let go!”

“Don’t you dare let go, either!”

Hair falls in his eyes as he takes a moment to shift, maybe bracing himself, and then he pulls. Muscle, sinew, and veins pop down his arm, and the wounds beneath his loosening bandages pinken and bloom red.

Little shadow fingers grab into her clothes and heave her toward Luffy.

“Sunny!” She shouts, relieved to see their wild orange mane and oversized raincoat at her side.

Have to shut it out. Together.

“Wha—Sunny?” Luffy exclaims.

“They’re helping!”

“Of course they are!” Luffy crows around a grin. “We have to shut whatever this is, right?”

“Not with me in it!”

“Brook!” Luffy shouts as he and Sunny get Nami closer to the mirror. “Brook, I need you!”

“Yes, Captain!” Brook’s voice bounces into the In-Between before an arm appears next to Luffy.

“Brook, your arm! Your arm!” Nami cries inanely. “Your arm!” She says again because she’s too tired and scared to find the words.

Because the arm that reaches for her is not dry and brittle bone but muscle and flesh. At the same time the Infection pulls her feet from under her, her free hand slaps into a big, warm palm with dark skin and calloused fingers. She looks up the sleeve of his jacket to Brook’s face as he squeezes against Luffy's collarbone to better reach her. She has an impression of a broad, expressive face. A mouth and lips all pressed in a line of stern determination.

(Alive things out, dead things in. Brook is a little bit of both, and mirrors can reflect the strangest things.)

“I’ve got her, Luffy-san!”

“Sunny!” Luffy shouts.

The little fingers disappear from Nami’s clothes. She looks down as Sunny, with their sunset mane and slash of a grin, swings their mallet at the tendrils around Nami’s ankles. The Infection doesn’t cry or snarl, it has no voice, but the In-Between seems to pulse and writhe around her. Did Sunny manage to hurt it?

Sunny swings again. The In-Between, the Infection, churns and boils. Its grip loosens on Nami before it tightens unbearably and yanks her. Brook and Luffy grunt and curse but don’t give ground. Nami screams as her body stretches between the two forces.

Mine.

Nami risks a glance, trying to make herself focus solely on Sunny and failing.

Sunny is standing before a black, alien tidal wave of bloated rot. The Infection is everything wrong, every dark thing twisted backward and upside down. She can’t even comprehend it. Her eyes and mind slip and slide past it every time she tries.

But Sunny faces it head-on.

My crew!

Sunny shifts and grows, becomes more themselves—becomes a whole ship’s worth of strength and determination.

Go away!

“Go away!”

Sunny and Luffy roar at the same time Luffy’s haki crashes down, and red red red bursts behind Nami’s eyes. It’s a playful wave to her, a gentle pressure down her neck and between her shoulders, but it rams into the Infection with the enormous wrath and fury of a New World cyclone.

Nami unravels in a world of soundless sound and pressureless pressure. Red and darkness war around and within her. Her breath rattles in the tight cage of her chest. Her skin sings she’s sailing through a lightning storm. She has the impression of something behind her silently screaming, stunned and injured like it hasn’t been in eons.

The grip around her ankles disappears and she hurls forward into the red, red starbursts. She has the sensation that she’s free-falling through something constricted, something that is closing in around her faster and faster—

She hits the ground hard, her knees, shins, and toes taking most of the damage because her upper body lands heavily on Luffy and Brook.

“Please tell me I’m home,” Nami croaks between ragged breaths. “Tell me I’m alive.”

Brilliant golden light from outside warms the dining room. Luffy sprawls gracelessly below her, with Brook crushed pitifully beneath him. She blinks up the curve of Luffy’s shoulder to see the rest of her crew in an undignified heap like they had been playing tug-of-war with a rope that had suddenly given way.

“Nami! Nami, are you hurt?” Chopper cries as he sits up at the same time as Sanji, only for them to bump heads and send each other flopping back to the floor. Carrot rolls to avoid them and struggles to her knees, tears of relief spilling down her cheeks when she meets Nami’s gaze.

“It took you long enough!” Nami shouts at Luffy, slamming a fist into his scarred chest. He jerks and coughs in surprise. And then she promptly buries her face into his skin and cries.

Luffy laughs. Behind her, all around her, she thinks she can hear Sunny laughing, too, before it fades into the whoosh of the waves and the wind outside.

Chopper finally makes it to her, wedging between her body and Luffy’s to grip her tight with his little hooves. Sanji’s forehead rests gratefully on her shoulder as Carrot does her level best to climb on top of Luffy and curl around Nami. Skeletal arms flail comically before reaching up and wrapping around them all.

This was what being alive and home and free felt like.

Nami closes her eyes, content to sail the waves of Luffy’s laughter into every horizon and beyond.

**

Two days later, they bury the hand mirror along with the rest of the mirror shards.

“We could have just thrown them overboard,” Carrot says beside Nami as they watch the boys finish up. “I think everything we went through shows that there aren’t really rules when it comes to superstitions, right? We probably didn’t have to bury them. No one would have told Usopp.”

Nami can’t help but laugh. “Have you seen Luffy try to keep a secret? Or Chopper? Anyway, I don’t think… it’s really about superstition.”

“Then what is it?”

When Nami doesn’t answer immediately, Carrot works her arm around Nami and pulls her in a half-hug. Nami accepts the comfort and gives it in return. Carrot’s been better since the haunting, more social and open. Her arms are healing, too, though it will be another week before she’s allowed to lift much.

“It’s Elise.”

“The mean ghost lady, right?”

Nami nods. “I—for a little while, I lived a few moments of her life. She brimmed over with this endless love for her kids and desire for freedom. Her body—the time she sailed in, the world she was in—could never contain her ambition. She was strong, you know? She was alone, hungry, and injured but fought and captained a pirate ship until the crew mutinied.”

Among the mirror burial site, Luffy runs cackling from Chopper. He trips into a small mound of soil, sending it spraying all over Sanji, who is trying to fill in one of the holes. He curses and dives after Luffy, just missing grabbing his ankles, and lands face-first into another dirt pile. Twin peals of laughter turn into twin screams of panic when Sanji springs back up and gives chase. Brook laughs and heckles them merrily from his perch on the old crate that had held the mirror shards.

“You admired her?” Carrot asks.

Nami wonders what happened to Ingela and Calico, Elise’s children. She wonders how she’ll ever be able to find two small children in two hundred years’ worth of maritime history.

“I don’t feel anything for her but pissed off for what she did to my friends, to me,” she answers honestly. “But I have to admit her story is familiar. She bowed her head and played her part until she wasn’t given any other choice but to die or to fight.”

Nami used to be like Elise. Placid like a looking glass on the outside while whole worlds were born and destroyed in the storm that raged within her. In a way, she thinks Elise was stronger than her—she killed Captain Vasa, whereas Nami was never strong enough to escape from or kill Arlong. But in another way, in so many ways, Nami feels sorry for her.

“If part of her spirit was still in those mirrors somehow, I wanted to get her away from that awful sea. I wanted to, I don’t know. Save her, I guess. From whatever the hell it is that twisted her and used her so badly,” Nami admits. She shrugs at Carrot. “Maybe it’s a silly superstition to think that way.”

Carrot leans her head on Nami’s shoulder. “I hope she finds peace.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They sail away as soon as the mirrors are buried and the supplies are loaded. Luffy mentions a beach bonfire, but no one takes it seriously, not even Luffy. They all want to get to Wano, reunite with everyone, and continue their adventure together.

They sleep on the lawn deck again that night with bright, clear stars arching over them. The firepit is still crackling as Sanji puts out his cigarette and stands with a long stream of smoke.

“I’ll get these two to bed first,” he says, indicating Chopper and Carrot, who are in a lumpy cuddle pile. “Then I’ll come back for Luffy. Do you want tea after that? A snack?”

Brook inclines his head from where he’s sitting next to Nami on the bench around the foremast. “If you’ll please, Sanji-san.”

“Nami-san?”

“No, thank you. I’m good.” She lifts her feet off the grass and tucks her cold toes under her legs. Luffy snuffles at the movement, head lolling on her shoulder before settling again.

She looks to her left at where Brook’s bone hands are genteelly folded in his lap.

“May I?”

He offers his hand without hesitation. She measures her palm against his. Cool, dry bones bend and hook over her fingertips. She smiles and slots their fingers together.

“Have I thanked you? For pulling me out of there?”

“Of course you have,” Brook responds, his voice low and gentle like he’s speaking a lullaby. “But you don’t have to thank me for something like that.”

Nami swallows the lump in her throat that’s been forming over the last two days. “Did you see? When you were in the mirror. Did you see your hand?” Your face?

“I saw something, I think, but I’m afraid I was a little busy.”

It’s not really a lie, but it’s not the truth. He’s humming now, and Nami knows that is how he keeps scary things at a distance from himself.

“You saved me,” she says, holding on tighter.

Brook raises their joined hands and bumps her knuckles gently against his teeth. “And you save me everyday, mademoiselle.”

She giggles, surprised to be flustered. Luffy’s head bounces on her shoulder. He grumbles and turns further into her, bringing up his knees in an impossible position to dig his bare toes under her thigh. She rolls her eyes at him but tilts her head to rest on the soft bed of his hair, anyway.

“Is that a shopping bag from earlier today?” Brooks asks, gesturing to a large bag on the other side of Luffy with wrapped parcels inside.

“Oh! Yes, I meant to bring it down to Usopp’s workshop so he could help me hang them when we get to Wano.”

“Hang them? What are they?”

“Mirrors.”

Brook laughs shortly, a nervous but delighted yo-ho!

(Laughter in the face of darkness is the most alive thing of all, isn’t it?)

“We’ll be hanging mirrors again after all of that? I thought for sure everyone would be too superstitious.”

Nami smiles at the stars, holding Brook’s hand and gripping Luffy’s arm. She hears Sanji coming back down the stairs, the scent of cigarettes and cologne on the wind. She thinks of tiny sandals next to Bell-mère’s big, muddy boots at an old door with a stubborn doorknob and a welcome mat that kept sliding out of place. She thinks of late-night stories and laughter with music and tea and biscuits.

“It’s only a mirror.”

end.