Work Text:
Nami wasn’t quite sure how she got into this situation. One minute she was trying to figure out how the hell this nice, respectful young man could be her captain's brother. Then next thing she knew she was trying to teach this idiot basic math. For free even!
“Can’t you just do this in your head?” Nami had given him a few basic math problems to work on and on the third question she noticed Ace was doing the work with his fingers, not on the paper.
“I think that’s what got me into this situation in the first place,” Ace started over his count for subtracting 9 from 17, by counting backwards using his fingers.
Nami is patient and she’d hit anyone who said otherwise so she let him keep going after that. It wasn’t like he was fucking up the question, just doing it slowly. If he got it right she wouldn’t give a damn how he got there.
“What’s this thing mean?” Ace pointed to a * on the sheet.
“That means multiply,” Ace didn’t look like he understood, “Like repeated addition?”
Ace still didn’t get it.
“I’ll walk you through it. Give it here,” Nami took the sheet and the pencil.
“The problem is five times four. So we will be adding together five four times. Five plus five plus five plus five,” She wrote it out on the paper, “What do you get?”
It’s not how Nami would have done the problem, but according to her mom it was how most people would do it. If it was Nami doing the problem she would have halved four and then moved the decimal place back. It made much more sense that way.
“Twenty?” Ace was still counting on his fingers, but he was quick this time.
Nami nods and sets him back to working on the questions. Ace doesn't ask her for another example. She’s glad she thought ahead and only put one word problem on this sheet. If her captain couldn’t read that well then his brother probably couldn’t either.
She honestly made it really easy. Four simple addition questions, four simple subtraction problems, two multiplication and two division questions. She also threw in the word problem, a problem with fractions and two logic puzzles. Some people would say a logic puzzle was not a math equation but that just makes it obvious that they weren’t that good at math.
Ace asked what the division sign was and she explained that too. Honestly this was one of the best ways she’s come up with to skip doing chores on the ship. She also could have gotten out of them by getting Sanji to do her share, but it gets boring manipulating him when he falls for the same tricks every time. The least he could do was make it a bit interesting for her.
Ace flew through the word and logic problems. It was a bit surprising how fast he read through them. While Luffy wasn’t completely illiterate he was still someone who spoke out loud when he read and needed help if he read anything written for a reading level above a ten year old.
“I’m surprised you can read that well,” Nami forgot to catch her words.
“I read well and Luffy’s better at math than me,” Ace just simply shrugs while telling one of the most obvious lies she’s ever heard. While thinking about it Ace would have no reason to lie about this but she also just doesn’t believe it on a fundamental level.
“Who taught you? My mom did most of mine,” Nami knew that the brothers probably didn’t go to school. Those were expensive and rare. Schools were for rich kids to build ‘buisness’ ( not like those fuckers ever really worked) relationships and learn how to be a model noble. Those kids were easy to steal from if you knew how to do it (don’t go as a maid but as a substitute teacher, while they won’t notice the maid they will think one of the poors stole from them first, not an academic).
“Sabo did, or at least he tried to,” Ace gives a sort of sad smile at that, good times tainted by bad futures.
“Luffy’s never mentioned a Sabo before, who is he?” Nami’s hoping to get some blackmail on her captain. You can never have too much blackmail.
“Our other brother,” Ace’s sad smile is fully gone, “He died when we were kids.”
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Nami couldn’t have imagined losing Nojiko now, and she’s fully sure that if she had lost her when she was a kid. She’s gotten a few bits from Luffy that give her the picture that he grew up basically feral, so the brothers must have been insanely close. That’s probably why he hadn’t talked about Ace before he showed up.
“That’s what I got this for,” Ace points out to the misspelled tattoo of his own name on his arm, the crossed out S all the more prominent.
“That was going to be his flag when he set out as a pirate, all of us wanted to be one when we were kids, have our own crews and all that,” Ace has a happier smile now before his head slams into the table as he passes out.
Nami had already been warned about his narcolepsy so she wasn’t too surprised. She took the time to dig around for a kids workbook that she stole more out of habit than anything. It wasn’t her target when she went into the supply store, but the owner was guarding the good notebooks too closely so she nicked something else that could work. She bought a fresh pen pack for a hundred berri, so it would look like she was someone who actually came in there for a reason.
It was a very pink book, but she didn’t think Ace would mind it. Luffy was a habitual clothes stealer and not even her skirts were safe. She had even gotten her captain a jean skirt of his own to have but he just kept on stealing from people at random. It wasn’t even good thievery.
Nami stretches and grabs a snack while waiting for Ace to wake back up. According to Chopper she shouldn’t try to shake him awake when he passes out. So it’s a waiting game. She is patient so waiting is no big deal. She decides to pace quietly around the room until Ace gets back up.
Luffy barges into the room the exact moment that Ace begins to rouse, like he’s got a sixth sense for it. It’s probably just that he knows when his older brother will be up or just ran down there when he finished whatever he was doing on the deck. Either option is likely with Luffy.
Ace notices the small pink workbook that Nami had left on the table, mostly because she had shoved it under his head while he slept. It was a better pillow than the table. There was a small section of fake fur on the cover where there was some fluffy animal, small cut outs like that were also on two other animals on the cover, one scaly thing and one feathery thing. Ace seemed transfixed with it.
He keeps rubbing his finger over the small sections, switching up where exactly his thumb was rubbing on the cover. Nami knew this behavior, it was exactly how Luffy had gotten when she handed out a bunch of small stim toys she’d shoplifted. Usopp had liked them too, but he already had the things he liked to stim with.
“I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff like that,” Nami kept a whole box of stim toys around because she had so many of them. They were at the end of most counters and they were very easy to steal. She had once even gotten away with it while fiddling with it and talking to the clerk. Apparently they just thought that she had brought her own with her when shopping. She did sometimes do that, but it didn’t stop her from stealing
Both Ace and Luffy stuck their hands in the box like they had just been presented with the most full treasure chest they’d ever seen. She could have understood this from Ace, who seemed not to have this stuff on his ship, but not from Luffy who both knew that she had this box and also had a few dozen stim toys that he kept losing about every couple of hours. Luffy seemed to have a problem where sometimes things would just disappear.
The weirder part of that was the few rare occasions where Luffy found an item that he had lost. It was as if she was following a complete alien’s train of thought. If Luffy noticed that he lost something in the crows nest after coming up from under deck and was thinking of how much he hated sunbutter then the item would be shoved into a mouse hole under the stairs. She didn’t really get it. She was a messy person, but she didn’t really lose anything, especially if it was literally in her hand a few moments ago.
Okay, that was a lie. She would totally lose stuff all the time, mostly pens. When she shoplifts she always buys a few pens because she knows she’ll need them. There are probably her pens and Luffy’s toys in every corner of the ship.
Ace’s hands finally come back up from under the surface of the box of stim toys, having picked several as a reward. It was mostly those little cubes with a different thing on every side. Ace seemed to have as much a fixation on those as Luffy had with the spinny things. She knew they had proper names but she didn’t fucking care.
She never gets the chance to prove if Luffy is better at math than his brother because, as usual, Luffy comes in a room and sweeps everyone out of it with the promise of adventure and shenanigans.