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"Robin!" Nami yells across the distance between them, half a warning, half a reflex of fear.
When did Marines start carrying knives?
The man's neck is snapped and he collapses before Nami could even start running over to her, his knife falling from his hands, but it isn't fast enough, and by the time he hits the ground Robin’s shirt is staining with blood. Panic surges through Nami, but underneath that is some kind of shock, too– she'd almost forgotten that Robin could get hurt. She's always the protector, shielding Nami and Chopper and Usopp, Marines and pirates alike dropping to the ground all around her. Nami can't even remember the last time she'd suffered anything worse in a fight than a minor scrape.
"Robin!" she yells again, closer to a scream this time. She swings her Clima-Tact one last time and feels it make contact with her enemy's skull– he drops to the ground, limp, and doesn't even twitch.
She runs towards Robin, dodging a Marine's unconscious body as she did, racing as fast as her legs would carry her to get to Robin before someone else did first. She sees Robin stagger, a hand clutched to her side, purple fabric staining dark red under her fingers. A desperate mantra of no no no no runs through Nami's mind, drowning out any rational plan she might come up with. Not Robin. Please, not Robin.
Nami makes it to her just as Robin sways dangerously far to the side, wrapping her arms around Robin’s shoulders to keep her upright. She can feel Robin shaking, her breath coming in shallow gasps.
"Robin? Oh, God, where’s Chopper–"
"I’m fine, Nami," Robin says, her voice tight through her gritted teeth. Her head is bowed, her hair falling in dark curtains around her face.
"You’re not– how bad is it? Did he–"
"I was just distracted for a moment. There was–" Robin’s breath catches, and a soft whimper escapes her mouth. "There was another, he distracted me, I couldn’t get to both of them at once. He got me from behind, but– but really, it’s not that bad–"
"Let me see."
Robin hesitates for a moment, and with her face turned away from Nami, she can't see her expression. She's trying to protect me again, isn't she? Even from this, she's trying to protect me from worrying about her.
"You can't handle everything alone," Nami says, her voice growing quiet and unsteady.
A moment passes, and Robin hand slowly comes away from her side, her palm stained a deep, sticky red. As she does, a fresh gush of blood comes from her wound, and Nami stifles a gasp.
It's hard to tell quite how deep or wide it is; all Nami can see is a glimpse beneath the torn fabric, obscured by the blood still streaming out of it. A lot of blood, Nami realizes, and as she glances up at Robin's face, her eyes wide with horror, she can see Robin's cheeks draining of their color.
"Oh, God. Okay– okay, it's gonna be fine," Nami stammers, whipping her head from side to side as she desperately searches for Chopper– for anyone, really, anyone who could be more useful than her, but she sees nothing but rocks, circling around them and obscuring her vision.
"I'm afraid," Robin begins to say, and trails off, her knees buckling underneath her. Nami half-catches her, with one hand gripping her upper arm and the other around her waist, carefully avoiding the wounded side.
"Sit down, okay, maybe lay down, just so you don't faint–" Nami catches sight of the Marine she’d knocked out, still unmoving on the ground, and a new wave of panic crashes into her as she realizes they're helpless; with Robin incapacitated, Nami doubts she could fight off a horde of Marines on her own, nor could she even see them coming.
Robin, with Nami's guidance, lowers herself to the sandy ground, at first trying to kneel until Nami forces her to lay down, with her shoulders and head supported by Nami's arms. "I'm afraid," she continues, her voice strained, "that Chopper may not be reachable right now."
Nami surveys their surroundings; a valley hemmed in by cliffs on every side, the ground broken up by clusters of rocks large enough and tall enough that seeing the cliffs on the opposite side was impossible. Nami and Robin are between two boulders taller than Brook, with a handful of Marines unconscious or dead around them. It meant they couldn't be seen by enemies, but it also meant they couldn't see enemies coming. An ambush would catch them entirely off-guard.
In fact, the ambush had caught them off-guard in the first place– the island had seemed entirely safe, until they ran into a Marine patrol. Their numbers wouldn't have been hard to handle, not with Luffy and Zoro fighting at their full strength and Robin snapping the necks of anyone within her sight, but the structure of the valley made it impossible to have a fair fight. The Marines had stealth and cover on their side, and it wasn't long before the crew was forced to split up, each of them isolated in pockets fighting different groups of Marines, none of them able to find each other among the maze of boulders.
"You're right," Nami realizes, as the truth in Robin's words dawns on her. "I don't know how we'd even find him."
"Yelling for him would do no good," Robin says, drawing Nami's attention back down to her. "Our voices wouldn't carry, not with these rocks between us."
Nami bites down on her lower lip hard enough to bring tears to her eyes as she sees the state Robin's in. Her face is chalk-white, her lips pale enough to match, her dark hair tangled and sticking to the sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her chest heaves, and Nami can feel her body trembling, even as she tries to stay still and appear collected.
"And you couldn't use your Devil Fruit, could you? To summon eyes from up high somewhere?"
Robin manages a weak smile. "No, I don't think I can."
Nami squeezes her eyes shut. "Oh, shit."
"It's fine, Nami, I can handle this well enough until Chopper gets here. I can–"
"No," Nami snaps. "You're not 'handling' anything, not alone."
Robin's eyelids fall closed, her brow creasing. "I don't know if you–"
"I can. I will, I'll do whatever I– Just let me see it. I can bandage it, maybe."
Robin lets out a shaky laugh, ending in a soft whimper as the movement jostles her wound. "Bandage with what? We're far from the Sunny."
Nami starts to lower Robin's upper body to the ground, an idea coming to her mind. With her arms now free, she grips the hem of her T-shirt and pulls it over her head. She's never been more thankful to be wearing a tank top underneath her shirt– the idea of wearing only a bra in the middle of a battlefield sounds like hell.
"Now really is not the time to be stripping."
Heat rushes to Nami's face. "That's– that's not what I'm doing." She tucks her shirt into her lap and slowly reaches out to Robin's wound, her hands stilling as she realizes she has no idea how to handle something like this.
Chopper taught them all basic first aid, of course, in preparation for situations exactly like this, when he couldn't get to someone fast enough, and she’d learned enough on her own under Arlong. She knew how to handle minor lacerations, burns, scrapes; she knew CPR, she knew how to expel water from a drowning man's lungs (an essential tool, with Luffy around); she knew how to tie a tourniquet and replace bandages and clean an infection.
But this, she realizes, as she gingerly lifts Robin's shirt, peeling the sticky fabric away from her skin, is not something Chopper ever prepared her for. Her breath catches in her throat, and she struggles to keep from recoiling, to keep her expression as calm as possible so Robin doesn’t realize how severe it is.
On her waist, just below the right side of her ribs is something halfway between a stab wound and a slash, wide enough that Nami could fit three or more fingers into it and deep enough that she can see the yellow bubbles of fat and the blood pulsing out in time to Robin's heartbeat. Far too fast, and far too much.
The blood is already soaking into the ground below them, the sand becoming sticky and clumping. A choked whimper leaves her mouth, her eyes glued to Robin's wound even as she begs herself to look away.
"I wonder how fast blood dries into sand," Robin says, dragging her fingers along the ground beside her. "If you made a little sandcastle, would it hold its shape after the blood dried?"
The morbid comedy in the idea shocks Nami enough for her to pull her gaze back to Robin's face. "Oh, I hate when you say that sort of stuff," she says, her voice empty of the outrage it usually held.
A smile touches Robin's lips, and Nami has to look away from that. Something in that forced half-smile felt too sad, too final. She stares at the boulder a few feet in front of her, swallowing down the lump forming in her throat. I need to focus. I need to do something, and I need to do it fast. Her gaze returns to Robin's wound– oh, that was a mistake– and she forces her hand to close around her T-shirt.
"Bandage it. Okay. I'm gonna try to stop the bleeding," she says, more to herself than to Robin.
"With that?"
"It's all I have."
Robin's quiet for a moment too long, just a heartbeat long enough to make Nami's stomach drop. "It won't be enough."
Nami grits her teeth. "It'll have to be." If it was an injury on a limb, I could tie a tourniquet with this, but a stomach injury… I don't know where to even begin with this. She almost turns to Robin to ask what to do– she’d know more than I would, she always does– but she can tell Robin is fighting to stay conscious, and in more pain than Nami could imagine.
Apply pressure, I know that much. "This is going to hurt," Nami says, guilt already strangling her at the thought of what she’ll have to do. Robin’s hand finds the hem of Nami’s tank top and she holds it tightly. She nods, understanding, and before Nami can second-guess it, she firmly presses the shirt to Robin’s open wound.
Robin cries out, her body instinctively jerking away. Nami can see tears slipping down her temple and feel her hand shaking. Tears sting at Nami's own eyes, a mix of fear for her safety and guilt for making her pain even worse, but she presses down harder, leveraging her body weight into her arms to apply as much pressure as possible.
"How could this happen?" she whispers to herself, her tears flowing freely now, tracing hot tracks down her cheeks.
"Just… the right angle," Robin gasps between groans of pain. "It was only a knife. He was… weak, anyway, but… enough weight behind a stab, at the right… the right angle, and…"
"Don't talk," Nami urges. She can feel her fingers becoming wet as blood soaks through the thin cloth of her T-shirt.
"I've… seen it happen. And this was… I've… done it before." Robin presses her cheek to the sand, her entire body shivering now. "I've done this. To someone else."
Nami shakes her head in denial of the thought, but deep down, she isn't surprised. She's seen Robin break limbs of pirates and Marines alike in seconds– her time in Baroque Works, and long before, probably forced her to do much worse things than Nami had seen.
"The problem is the conviction. If you have that… it's not– not hard."
"Shhh. It's okay, it's gonna be okay. Just– deep breaths." Nami inhales shakily, trying to lead by example, and to sooth her own panic. She feels Robin's stomach lift underneath her as she breathes in, but she winces and groans as the movement stretches her wound. "I know it's hard," Nami says, the words ringing hollow to her ears, "but try, at least, and stay calm–" I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I can't fix this injury by myself, I don't know how to comfort her, I don't… It's always Robin helping the rest of us, it's always her doing the comforting, her doing the fixing. A sob rips through Nami's chest, her bloodied fingers going blurry as her eyes fill with tears.
"Take your own advice," Robin says wryly.
Nami almost laughs, but as Robin inhales again, a wave of blood gushes against her hands. The T-shirt is entirely soaked, so saturated with blood it can't absorb any more. She looks around in vain for something else to layer on top of it, but there's no other fabric easily within reach, and anything she could get would require taking pressure off the wound, and that– she doesn't want to think it, but in a corner of her mind, she knows this amount of bleeding would be fatal if it continued.
"It's not… getting better, is it?"
Nami looks up from the wound to meet Robin's eyes, her arms beginning to tremble with the effort of applying consistent pressure. Her stomach drops as she sees Robin's face; impossibly pale, shining with sweat, her eyes unfocused and distant.
"It's–" Under her hands, the T-shirt slips, sliding against Robin's skin as blood leaks out from below it. "The shirt isn't enough. I need– I don't know, I think if I had more layers to put on top it would stop, but there's so much blood… the shirt's too soaked."
Robin pants heavily, her eyes falling shut, her lips moving silently as though she wants to speak. "Robin?" Nami says, fear settling like a rock in her chest. "Stay with me, Robin, please."
Nami's eyes dart between the T-shirt, so bloodied that no trace of its original color remains and so wet that it slides against Robin's skin when she presses down. It's useless. It's not stopping the blood, it's not even slowing it down.
Realizing it was a lost cause, she releases the pressure, the fabric falling to the ground. She scrambles up to Robin's head, reaching for her face but stilling her hands at the last moment. She stares down at her palms, all but the back of them deep red and sticky, reeking of copper so strongly it burns her mouth. She tries to wipe them off on her tank top, but all she did was stain that, too.
Robin's hand, still fisted tightly in the hem of Nami's undershirt, goes limp and falls into her lap, and Nami abandons the idea of cleaning her hands, instead frantically cupping Robin's cheeks in her palms.
"Robin?" she whispers, her throat constricted by raw panic. She repeats her name again, louder, and Robin stays silent, only a flutter of her eyelids signaling any kind of reaction.
A voice echoes from somewhere to her left. "Nami-swan! Robin-chwan! You came this direction, didn't you?"
It's a miracle Nami hears it over the ringing in her ears. "Sanji!" she screams, her voice cracking, praying that he was close enough to hear her. "Sanji!"
Nami barely blinks, and he's turning the corner around the boulder in front of her, skidding to a stop. His eyes flick between her to the figure on the ground to the puddle of blood around them, and a heartbeat later, he's next to her, his hand hovering above Robin's face.
For once, Nami can't see a single trace of lust or adoration in his eyes as he stares down at Robin's body.
"Chopper," Nami says, unable to form any coherent sentence beyond that. Sanji meets her eyes for a fraction of a second and he's gone, disappearing around a rock. She's never been more thankful for Sanji's speed.
Nami presses her hand to Robin's chest and feels nothing, no rise or fall. She lays her fingers below Robin's jaw, searching for a pulse, and for a terrifyingly long second, seeming to stretch into infinity, she feels nothing, until–
There it is. Faint, slow, seeming to grow weaker with every moment, but there nonetheless, is a heartbeat. Nami lets out a sob of relief and bends her face to Robin, pressing her forehead against the bloody handprint her palm left on Robin's chest.
Moments later, Sanji arrives, with Chopper held in his arms. Nami turns and sees the horror evident on his face, until he steels himself and forces it away, and he jumps out of Sanji's arms before Sanji can set him down.
"Sanji, go get bandages from the Sunny," he says, ushering Nami out of the way. "Bring me the entire first aid kit, the big one. And give me your jacket."
Sanji tosses his suit jacket to Chopper and runs off, a trail of flame licking against the sand behind him. Nami reluctantly moves away from Robin's wound but stays near her head, stroking her hair away from her face with the back of her knuckles, so she doesn't leave blood on her skin.
Chopper gathers Sanji's jacket and uses its hem to wipe away some of the blood coming from her wound, to get a better view of it. His eyes are nothing but analytical, his hooves moving with practiced precision, but Nami can see the way his nose quivers and how shallowly he breathes– he's just as scared as she is.
It seems like a useless question; asking it won't change the answer, but it slips out anyway. "Is she gonna be okay?"
Chopper takes a beat too long to answer. He presses Sanji's jacket against Robin's wound like Nami had been– the fabric is thicker, so it'll slow the blood enough to buy time until Sanji returns with gauze and bandages. "She's in bad condition," is all he says.
That's not an answer. Nami leans down so she's face to face with Robin, staring at her closed eyelids. "Please," she whispers. "Please, Robin, stay with me." Impulsively, she presses her lips to Robin's forehead, her skin feverish and clammy. "I need you. We didn't fight the government just for you to die on us. On me."
"The bleeding has slowed down a little," Chopper says, half to himself. "I can fix this. I just need Sanji to get back. I'll have to stitch it."
"Does he even know which direction the Sunny is in?"
"I hope so. I don't know which direction we came from. These boulders make it impossible."
"He's fast, he'll make it." Nami's hand finds Robin's laying limp against the ground, and she intertwines their fingers.
"Keep your hand on her pulse. Tell me if it changes, if it slows down or– or stops." Chopper's voice falters for the first time, his capable facade slipping to reveal the scared child underneath. Nami remembers, then, that he is a child, a child forced to take on all the danger and responsibility of holding the crews' lives in his hooves.
Nami presses the fingers of her other hand, the one not holding Robin's, to her pulse point below her jaw, Robin's heart beating against her skin like an agonizingly slow metronome.
Seconds stretch onwards– is it minutes? Nami can't tell, with Robin's pulse as her only indication of time– and finally, Sanji returns, with Chopper's huge first aid kit held in his arms, and extra bandages and gauze piled on top. Wordlessly, he sets it down next to Chopper, who instantly gets to work pulling out gauze pads and unrolling bandages.
"I told the others, the ones that I saw on my way," Sanji says. "Usopp and Brook. I told them to tell everyone else. They should be here soon." Nami nods, she and Sanji exchanging a look, and he kneels down next to her, laying a hand on Robin's arm. His hair falls over his face, and she sees his shoulders shaking.
Nami tries to watch Chopper working to close Robin's wound, but the sight of the layers of flesh moving under his hooves as he prods around it makes her stomach turn, and she looks instead at Robin's face, serene even as Chopper threads his needle.
"I hope she doesn't wake up," he mutters, holding the edges of her wound closed and pushing the tip of the needle in. Robin's fingers twitch and her eyelids flutter. Nami squeezes her hand, praying she stays unconscious.
Her prayer isn't answered. Nami feels her heartbeat quicken, and before she can alert Chopper, Robin jerks and cries out, digging her fingernails into the back of Nami's hand. Her eyes fly open and she looks around frantically for a moment, until her gaze lands on Nami and she goes still again. She takes a deep, shaky breath, her teeth gritted against the pain as Chopper tugs the thread and the edges of her wound pull together.
"He's stitching it, isn't he?" she whimpers, biting down on her lip.
"Yeah. But it'll be quick. You're gonna be okay." Nami rubs comforting circles into Robin's jaw with her thumb.
"I'll work as fast as I'm able to. Please try to stay calm and still," Chopper says. "It's going to hurt, I'm sorry. I don't have time to numb it."
"It's okay, Chopper," Robin says, her voice strained. She hisses through her teeth as he ties the suture, tears beading on her eyelashes. "I'll be alright."
"I'm here, Robin," Sanji says, patting her arm. "Everyone else will be, too."
Robin gives him a small smile. "I'm quite glad to have woken up. For a moment there, I didn't expect to."
Nami shakes her head. "No, don't talk like that. You'll live. Chopper wouldn't let you die. None of us would."
"Ah, that's true." Robin thinks back, years ago, to Luffy hoisting her over his shoulder, carrying her out of a collapsing building, even as she demanded he leave her to die. "I should've known."
Tears spill from Nami's eyes at the thought of losing Robin. She almost did; if she hadn't been with Robin when she was stabbed, if she hadn't slowed the bleeding enough, if Sanji hadn't arrived when he did or found Chopper so quickly, if if if– she tries to shove aside the image of the crew without Robin, but the thought burns a hole into her.
"I couldn't let it happen," she says, lifting Robin's hand to her face and touching her lips to Robin's knuckles. They taste like copper, but the scent of flowers lingers below that. "I'd rather take a knife in the stomach myself than lose you."
"As would I." Robin smiles, pressing her cheek into Nami's palm. "That Marine who distracted me was aiming his gun at you, you know. That's why the other was able to get in close, I was focused on killing him."
Nami lets out a noise halfway between a dry laugh and a sob. "Let me take the bullet next time, then, if this is what happens when you try to protect me. Let me protect you every once in a while."
Robin weakly cranes her head forward and kisses Nami's bloodied knuckles, as Nami had to her. "Only if you let me be there to bandage you up afterwards."