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“Sanji, you really could’ve just let me talk him down,” Nami says, holding out a hand to help him off the dusty ground of the market plaza. “I dealt with plenty of creeps before I had you around to kick their lights out.”
He takes her hand and gets to his feet with a slight grimace.
“You shouldn't have to,” he grumbles, ignoring the blood dripping down the back of his light blue shirt. “What kind of man would I be if I just sat by and let you deal with that jerk alone?”
“A smarter one,” she says with an unimpressed look, though in truth it's nice to know someone has her back. No matter how good she is at thinking on her feet and taking control of situations, fear still rolls deep in her stomach when a man leers too close and his smile is too wide. She'd just rather not admit that to Sanji. He doesn't need the encouragement, especially if he's going to get in fights with the type of crazy person who would carry an oversized fish hook on a chain for a weapon. She's not going to unsee the way that horrible thing tore across his back.
“Alright, come on, let's patch you up,” she says more softly, taking his arm and pulling him over to a shaded alley to sit down and inspect his wounds.
“Nami dear, I'm perfectly fine,” he assures her, though the tilt in his posture says otherwise. “My jacket will cover it until we get back to the ship. We need to finish shopping for supplies.”
“You can't shop for supplies if you're gonna pass out while carrying them,” she argues, sitting him down on a crate and situating herself behind him. “Do you really want to waste a bunch of food by falling on your face and dropping egg cartons everywhere?”
He opens his mouth, then closes it again with a frustrated grunt.
She sighs and forces herself to take a close look at the two large gashes on his skin. They're deep, deeper even than a sword would've done probably, and ragged in shape. Not to mention the dust and grime stuck to them from when he collapsed on the ground after chasing the guy off.
Sanji is acting like it doesn't hurt, but that's clearly not possible, and the tension in his shoulders speaks louder than his words.
“Sheesh, Sanji,” Nami says with a wince. “These are really bad. I'll have to clean the dirt out, and it's gonna hurt, sorry.”
“Nonsense, you could never hurt me, my love,” he says, but his smile is strained and he sounds a little breathless.
“Sure, you tell yourself that,” she says with an eye roll. “Alright, take your shirt off.”
He quickly turns his head to look at her, eyes wide and face flushed. Okay, admittedly she should've seen that coming.
“N-nami, are you sure? I--”
She cuts him off with a flick to the forehead. “It's not like that and you know it, you idiot!”
“Right, sorry. It's just, um…couldn't you bandage them with my shirt…on?”
Well this is unusual.
“Not really,” she says. “I kind of need the whole area clear. Is there a problem?”
“I'm just a little uncomfortable, that's all.”
“More uncomfortable than bleeding all over the place?”
He lets out a nervous chuckle. “Fair point.”
“What, did you get a bad tattoo or something?” she asks, half-joking. “Don't tell me it's a girl's name.”
He sputters for a moment and turns even redder. “No, nothing like that, it's just--well, my back isn't…a pretty sight, that's all.”
She doesn't point out how silly that is when she's already looking at ten-inch tears in his skin. There's something he's not saying, but at the moment she really can't afford to accommodate it.
Instead she pats his leg with her right hand, the one with a thick scar straight through the middle from her own knife. “We've all got ugly parts.”
“Nami,” he protests, “no part of you could ever be--”
“Hush. You're missing the point. I'm not scared of your back, so man up and let me take care of you.”
Sanji lets out a sigh, and there's a slight tremble in it.
“Okay,” he says.
He quickly lights a cigarette, then starts to unbutton his shirt.
The first thing Nami notices once it's off is just how inflamed the skin is around his wounds. She knows that feeling, and grits her teeth to ignore the tingle in her shoulder at the thought.
She grabs Sanji's shirt and wads it up so that the less bloody parts are on the outside, then pours a little water from her canteen on it and wrings it out.
“Hang on,” she says. “This'll sting.”
He tenses slightly, and she places the cloth on the higher of the two gashes.
“Ngh!” he cries, then quickly composes himself. “Sorry, keep going.”
She carefully dabs the dirt out of his wounds, trying not to press too hard while he tries and fails not to flinch, and begins to wash off the already caked blood covering the rest of his back. It's then that she sees what he was hiding.
She thought maybe it would be a single ugly scar or a deformity or something, but his skin is like a patchwork quilt of old injuries.
Mostly small cuts and nicks, healed white and stretched with time, but some are longer, wider strips. From a belt is her first instinct, or maybe a stick of some kind. Either way she presses her lips together with concern. But the most frightening part, just by virtue of how few explanations she can imagine, is the lichtenberg scarring in several places across his entire torso.
She knows he's probably been in fights since a young age, but when on earth would he have been electrocuted?
She's sure the last thing Sanji wants is for her to ask about it, but the implications are eating at her.
“You…you said Zeff mostly raised you, right?” she starts hesitantly.
“They're not from him,” he says, maybe a little louder than necessary.
“Of course not, sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “That wasn't what I meant. It's just…you're barely older than I am. It's hard to imagine when you would've already gotten all these.”
He takes an unnaturally steady breath from his cigarette.
“You've got scars at this age, too, remember? You just brought it up.”
“Sure, but I grew up a slave to fishmen pirates,” she says. “You worked at a restaurant.”
Sanji is quiet for a moment at that, and Nami gets the roll of bandages out of her satchel.
“You don't have to tell me about it,” she clarifies. “I just…couldn't help wondering.”
His shoulders relax a little as he breathes out smoke.
“I'm flattered, but you don't have to worry about me, Nami dear,” he says, if softly and without the usual energy behind it.
She bandages his wounds in silence for a while after that, heavy with the feeling she knows something she shouldn't. She watches him slowly burn his cigarette down to the end. It's a familiar scent, and a little comforting to her as well, admittedly. Belle-mere always tried not to trap it in the house, but nicotine smoke seeps into everything it touches. Last time Nami was there the couch still faintly smelled like it even after all these years.
Her mother had scars, too, from battles over the years as a marine. She didn't talk about them, either. Nojiko asked about some on her arm once, how'd she get them and things like that. Belle-mere quickly covered her hesitation with a smirk and spun some horrible tale about a dragon with steel teeth until the girls yelled and covered their ears.
Nami wonders what dragon Sanji faced.
She finishes bandaging him up and hands him his shirt back, still a little damp but mostly dry.
He puts it on, covers the torn back with his jacket, and stands up with a barely audible grunt of pain, but he doesn't turn and meet her eyes. He just stands there for a moment and looks at the ground.
“Zeff didn't find me ‘til I was nine,” he says. “I…ran away from where I was born. Guess I don't have to tell you why.”
Nami's chest aches, though he said more or less what she expected. No wonder, then, that he helped her escape Arlong without a second thought. They'd both been abused.
She doesn't ask him any more questions, just takes his hand and squeezes it. He returns the gesture and smiles slightly.
“Thank you, Nami,” he says. “I'll make you something special when we get back to the ship.”
She laughs at his optimism. “You will be getting stitches when we get back to the ship, but I appreciate the thought.”
“Fine, after the stitches.”
“It's a deal.”