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The baby was smiling when Nojiko found her. Somehow, amongst the destruction of the city, this tiny scrap of humanity was able to laugh. Nojiko—tired, afraid, scarcely more than a baby herself—didn’t understand it. All day and night the air had boomed like thunder, and now wind whipped around air brimming with gunsmoke and ash. But still in the corner of a ruined house the baby babbled happily, pink round cheeks smudged with dirt, the stink of blood all around.
The sky was dark with rain. There were no grownups around to call to. Not wanting the baby to die, Nojiko picked it up and cradled it clumsily against her chest. The baby cooed and pulled her hair, and despite herself, Nojiko laughed too.
In the distance real thunder rolled. Or maybe it was more guns. Nojiko didn’t know, and she didn’t want to find out, so she hurried onward, grateful that she was no longer alone to face the coming storm.
Bellmere didn’t have any real plan other than to make it home. It was easy enough to slip away before representatives of the World Government came around to clean up the mess she left behind. Duty demanded she stay, but after experiencing the horrors of war firsthand Bellemere was of the opinion duty could go fuck itself. Her comrades were dead. The people she was meant to protect were dead. The enemy was dead.
All that was left were two little girls who demanded that she not add to all the dying, and Bellemere chose them over the marines. She would have chosen them over the world, over life itself.
The frantic flight to Cocoyashi took them into the teeth of the oncoming storm. Rain fell in sheets, cold and sharp as knives against her skin. The children she kept huddled best she could under her oiled officer’s coat, itself sliced to ribbons over the course of the battle.
With every flash of lightning Nojiko cried and screamed and clutched at Bellmere’s legs. Between her and the babe in her arms, Bellemere was barely able to keep her sloop on course for home. Any words of comfort were swallowed by the howling wind before they could bridge the gap between woman and girl. Bellemere, exhausted, injured, and desperate, couldn’t even find the energy to curse the cruelty of the sea.
A streak of white-hot light flashed directly overhead. The sky shook with thunder so strong even Bellmere was forced to hunker down. Nojiko clung to Bellmere, and Bellmere clung to the baby, and in that moment she was once again sure that she was going to die failing to protect the innocents under her care.
In her ear, over the shrieking wind and crash of the sea, the baby bubbled with laughter. Bellemere looked down at the child and saw her staring straight up at the sky, and swore she saw sparks still dancing in her wide, dark eyes.
Unnerved and amazed, Bellmere turned her attention back to the wheel. In the future, when she was rested and recovered, she would dismiss the moment as a flight of imagination made by a half-delirious mind. After all, she and the children both reached Cocoyashi sick and dying. There was no way anyone, let alone a babe, could laugh through one of the worst storms Bellemere had ever seen.
But the memory stuck with her, and when the moment came to decide upon a name Bellemere chose Nami. It seemed fitting for a girl who seemed destined from birth for the sea.
Sometimes, when Bellmere was busy and at her wit’s end with the responsibility of taking care of two rambunctious little girls, Genzo would take the children on little day vacations. This mostly consisted of having them run around town causing mayhem and terror like their mother before them, but Genzo would occasionally give them pocket money for treats and toys he knew Bellmere couldn’t afford. He avoided Bellmere’s accusations of charity by having the girls do odd jobs for both himself and others in town, but compared to the labors of the tangerine grove these trifles were nothing. More than once Genzo heard the girls giggling conspiratorially on how they’d gotten the better deal in the exchange. Little did they know.
Together Nojiko and Nami bought cheap dolls, spinning tops, and bright satin ribbons—the sort of ordinary treasures girls that age were drawn to like a fly to the flame. Sometimes, when they were getting along well enough, they would pool their money for books. Nami in particular was a ravenous reader, outstriping both Genzo and Bellemere’s ability to satiate her thirst for knowledge. While there was a school on the island, Bellemere couldn’t afford the fees for both girls, and rather than send one and deprive the other, she ended up teaching the two of them at home, using the same set of books for the both.
If Bellemere or Nojiko realized how unusual it was for Nami to keep up with a sister two years her senior they never mentioned it. Nami herself would brag about finishing her reading assignments ahead of Nojiko for exactly as long as it took Nojiko to slap her upside the head, Nami’s crows of victory lost in the ensuing scuffle.
But the day Nami came back from town with a small tin boat was the day that Genzo realized there was something more to her thirst for knowledge. The toy was a small clockwork, meant for putzing around the bathtub after a few cranks of a key. Nami sat on Genzo’s knee and proceeded to rattle off all the different parts of the ship from keel to mast, explaining in excruciating detail what each did.
Genzo knew for a fact that Nami had not been on a ship since she arrived on Cocoyashi. Like any good island girl she got in her fair share of swimming and earned each of her innumerable freckles honestly by spending the majority of her days out in the sun. But Bellmere had explicitly forbidden the girls from going out to sea until they were older, and on this bit of parenting she and Genzo were in agreement. Bellemere hadn’t even told them about her time with the marines.
When he asked how she learned about ships, Nami smiled radiantly and said she’d listened to the fishermen as they brought in their catches. She then asked if she were allowed to play with her boat outdoors later that afternoon, and when a baffled Genzo said that she may, that smile grew bright as the sun shining above their heads.
“Good, because it’s going to rain, and I want to try it in some real water.”
Which was how a bemused Genzo had to explain to a furious Bellmere why her daughter returned home wet and filthy after playing sailor in the mud puddles behind the house. It hadn’t seemed right to say no when he’d already given permission, and they both had to agree that the girl had an uncanny knack for predicting the weather.
It was one of the great ironies of both their lives that Arlong was the one who taught Nami how to sail. The captain of the Arlong Pirates captured her for a reason, and he didn’t have the patience to let her rot at Arlong Park when he could get more value out of her otherwise.
She was so small at first, weak and trembling when she thought they couldn’t see and spitting fire when she thought they were. The girl child reminded him of a trapped kitten, all hisses and claws and bristling fur, but ultimately too weak to defend itself from harm. She was so different from the other human girl he’d once known, and there was some distant part in Arlong’s mind that was glad. Her coppery hair, likewise kissed by the sun, was almost too much to bear, and her fiery disposition amused him where the pathetic mewling more common to the inferior races would have sent him into a murderous rage.
And she was useful. Or at least her small, clever hands were. One of the first things the girl did was demand books, which Arlong gladly provided. She used the information inside to draw her first sea charts. Arlong’s practiced eye could see the hesitancy in her lines, but the information was good. She knew what would happen if it wasn’t.
But books could only get her so far, and before long Arlong decided to take her on an expedition. He gave broad lessons but left the minutiae of teaching her sailcraft to Hatchi and the rest, watching out of the corner of his eye in case she threatened to jump ship.
She picked up the basics easily, but in those first years was too runty to do much good. Arlong put her to work as the crew’s chore girl instead, taking obscene delight in ordering her from task to task, careful to break her of bad habits and the idea of sabotaging his burgeoning empire. More than once she tried to kill him with the efficiency of a ghat fighting a maelstrom. Arlong humored these attempts, for what kitten didn’t occasionally try to scratch its master. Only once did she dare falsify one of Arlong’s precious charts, and he made sure she never did again.
But the thing about kittens was that they grew up to be cats, and cats were independent creatures who liked to pretend that they owned the world. Or in this case, Arlong’s ship. Nami became so comfortable at sea that Arlong occasionally wondered if she had saltwater in her veins instead of blood, or if perhaps an ancestor or two had come from Fishman Island, because he could think of no other explanation for the prodigious talent he'd stumbled upon in the backwaters of the East.
The East Blue was a puddle compared to the Grand Line, but by god it was a puddle that Nami mastered. Arlong could see it in the way she tasted the wind and read the stars, how she soon outstripped even veteran navigators of the Grand Line. Arlong took credit for her skill even as he hated her for it. Hated that a mere human would encroach on the domain of fishmen. Hated that he needed her clever human hands and her clever human mind. Hated the days at sea the light hit the copper of her hair just right and made it glow like the sun.
Nami was thirteen years old when Arlong gifted her with a boat, a nimble little sloop that could easily be manned by a single person. He told himself and his crew that it was an investment, that she would be far more efficient in her labor alone, but the reality was if the girl had a ship of her own she would stay the hell off of his, and the less time he would be forced to spend sailing with a daughter of wind and lightning.
Oh how he hated her, hated that he needed her. But none of that mattered, so long as she stayed kneeled at the foot of his throne, the one useful human in all the world in fulfilling his ambition. Fishman mastered the seas and Arlong would master Nami, and with her power under his command his empire would reign forever.
Luffy noticed it immediately. Nami had a way of moving with ships. She matched the rock of the sea and never lost her balance once, not even when the waves started to chop or she had to run from one end to the other to stop him and Zoro from doing something stupid. Luffy noticed because it’d been tricky at first, for him. But nothing about the sea seemed to trick Nami. Even at its most playful, the ocean never managed to one-up her. The idea of it made Luffy laugh, and when Nami asked what was so funny he wasn’t able to explain. It just was, just like Nami’s trickfulness just was.
And just like the sea, that playfulness could turn to fury in an instant, but that made Luffy laugh, too. She was just the same in so many ways, and it’s what made her a good navigator. She understood the beats and the rhythms of the water and managed to dance with the sea. Shanks had told him so many stories of men who died trying to conquer the ocean, but Nami wasn’t a fighter. She moved with the wind, guided by the clouds and the currents. She respected the fickleness of the sea and romanced it into doing her bidding.
Luffy had already decided she would be the navigator of the King, but watching her move only solidified that decision, because only someone who loved the sea could be so beloved in return. She would screech and howl like a hurricane when afraid, but once she set her mind to go to a place there wasn’t a force in the world strong enough to stop her.
It was his job to free her enough to not fear. He’d decided that, too, about the same time he knew he would have no one else to guide him through the Grand Line. And when a smile finally stretched across her face and she truly laughed for the first time…
It was like some part of her unlocked deep inside, something wild and untamed and free. The wind swept through her hair and the seeds of lightning sparkled in her eyes, and Luffy couldn’t help but laugh, too.