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The boys are yelling about bounties again, and Nami feels sick to her stomach.
“Look at it!” Luffy says, cheering as he holds a Wanted poster emblazoned with his own face aloft.
“Nice, Captain!” Sanji says, as Zoro grins and gives him a thumbs-up.
Usopp is regarding his own poster with obvious nervousness. He’s the only one Nami doesn’t hate right now.
Beside her, Nico Robin leans against the ship’s railing, perfectly casual. “Does it bother you, seeing them make such a fuss?” she asks.
Nami doesn’t answer, because she’s petty, and she’s angry at Robin. She knows it’s wrong and that nothing she’s blaming on the woman is actually her fault, but she can’t help the niggling spark of resentment.
She sees the numbers, written in bold black, and thinks, We’d be worth less to them without you.
It took a while for the euphoria of Arlong’s defeat and Nami’s newfound freedom to wear off. She spent her first week or so as a real member of the Strawhats halfway drunk on sheer relief.
When she finally came back to reality, it was to the realization that not only was she the only member of the crew who cared about their money, she was also the only one truly capable of managing it.
Luffy barely even had a concept of money, Zoro seemed to be under the impression that funds just turned up when one needed them, and Sanji would blow everything they had on saffron if Nami allowed him. Only Usopp actually understood how to budget, but he lied too much to be trusted with it.
But it’s fine. Nami is good with money. She’s got this.
Except that it turned out that spending reasonable amounts of money to keep her friends healthy and her ship afloat was different from just hoarding as much money as possible in hopes of someday earning freedom.
She’d never liked spending money. Nami liked having it, just in case she needed something, but actually spending it made something in her gut twist.
She’d tried to keep it to herself. She grimaced at the grocery bills and tossed Zoro’s stupid bandages at him with a little more force than necessary, but mostly she did a good job of it.
The debts help. They started as a joke, as a way of reminding her crew members that they can’t just take advantage of her without consequences, because she wanted to trust them, but it was hard, when all her instincts tell her that pirates are dangerous.
So the first time Zoro had barked at her that someone needed to untie the sails, she replied, “You’ll owe me 100 berries.”
She expected him to take it back or apologize, but instead he smirked and said, “Add it to my tab.”
She’d been too taken aback to do anything other than untie that sail, but soon it wiggled its way into their customary banter. She keeps running tallies for each of them in her head, adding and subtracting as needed.
The total adds up to thousands of berries. If she could cash all of the debts in at once, she’d have more money than anyone could possibly demand of her. She’s well aware that what she imagines isn’t actually how the debts work; they’re more a joke than anything. From a practical perspective, few of the crew members actually keep a stash of their own money separate from her collective account for the Straw Hats. But it feels safer, somehow, to know that the tally is there, like she has a sort of emergency fund.
Robin joining them is a tipping point. Even before that, the boys had astronomical bounties, but accepting the woman that the World Government painted as a monster into their crew is something that they can’t take back. As long as she sails with them, they’ll be a Marine priority, and the numbers on every single poster will only grow.
All of it terrifies Nami.
The others are only going to get stronger, and the World Government will respond in kind. Maybe not yet, but soon people will begin coming after them for no reason other than the reward. And Nami won’t have enough to pay them off.
She knows it’s dumb. She knows that there isn’t a bounty hunter this side of the Grand Line able to outfight Zoro, nevermind the rest of the crew. None of them will ever allow their lives to hang on a financial transaction. They’re too strong and too committed to being free.
Even so, the sound of Arlong’s voice echoes in her ears.
It’s sickening, to know exactly what someone else would pay to see the people you love dead. Someone could look at her wonder of a captain and his broad grin and calculate exactly what they'd have to give to have him gone. The very thought makes Nami’s stomach churn.
So, while the boys are crowing over bounties, seeing them as the measure of strong pirates, Nami gets out her ledgers and makes plans.
Her findings are…disheartening. She doesn’t have even half enough to afford Luffy or Robin’s bounties. If she wants to be able to pay off bounty seekers, they need to start looting a little more thoroughly.
The next day, she and Usopp spend nearly an hour arguing over whether they should wait to refinish the deck. Afterward, she tags along to the market, and when Sanji reaches for the filet mignon, she scowls at him until he picks something cheaper.
It’s Zoro who finally calls her on it, after he asks her for a few berries and she practically hurls them at his face.
How typical. The man wouldn’t recognize his own hang ups if you shoved a flowchart in his face, but he has an eagle eye for everyone else’s quirks.
“What’s with you, witch?” he snarls.
“Just tired of being surrounded by careless men,” Nami deflects.
“That’s not it,” Zoro says. “Are we running low on berries?”
“No, not exactly—”
“Then stop being such a miser.”
“Why, you—”
It feels like their normal banter. It should be like their normal banter.
But Nami can’t escape the fact that he’s right. She’s greedy, and proud of it, but this isn’t about greed anymore. It’s about fear.
It’s about still smelling blood in the scent of the tangerine grove. It’s about the years she spent trading berries for the lives of everyone she loved.
She’s not Arlong’s anymore, but the lessons he taught her persist.
She spends a few days avoiding Zoro outside of mealtimes, ignoring Usopp’s mounting nervousness and Sanji’s attempts to smooth things over. Then, before the sun is fully up, she sneaks into the crow’s nest while he’s on watch.
“How much would you pay to keep Luffy alive?” she asks, unprompted.
“Anything,” Zoro answers because that’s who he is.
“I would, too,” she says. “But we don’t have enough.”
Zoro acts like a meathead, but when he’s interested, he’s almost frighteningly sharp. “This is about Robin's bounty.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“That’s not gonna be an issue,” Zoro says.
“You can’t promise that,” Nami protests.
“Sure I can? If someone tries to take any one of us for their bounty, they’ll have to kill me first. And I won’t die.”
Seas, she hates him for the way he says that, as if all it takes to stay alive is willpower. He knows better, she’s sure of it.
“And what about your bounty?” she asks, instead of just calling him an idiot.
“Luffy won’t let anyone take me,” he says, still with that unshakable confidence.
Nami wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. She wants to scream. She wants to explain that sometimes you don’t have a choice, that sometimes someone stronger shows up and nothing you do is enough to stop them. She wants to tell him that right now, money is the closest thing to power she has, and she wants more of it, not less.
“I’ll give you the money for your dumb sword polish tomorrow,” she says instead.
Zoro huffs out something like a laugh, and Nami leaves him to watch the sunrise alone.
The others will be up soon, and she needs to make sure they’re still on course.