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What the fuck?
Zoro turns left surely and Nami’s right eye twitches in that specific, annoying way that she knows makes the vein on her forehead bulk up.
Careless, mannerless Zoro strides into the deepest part of the corridor, steps secure. “See? Told ya the door’s here.”
Usually, such a claim from Zoro, would make her giggle meanly, little ha-ha as someone—read: Usopp—shared her amusement. How can the green oaf not only put his head to leading the group, but claim to have found the right path? It’s funny in the way that if he simply did the opposite of what his instinct was telling him, he’d be a foolproof compass; out of a fifty-fifty choice, he will always choose the wrong one.
That is, usually. Now, Nami simply stares at the unassuming and plain heavy wood door, left partially ajar. Her eyes track the set of stairs that lead into the darkness beneath, undoubtedly the path to the floor underneath them—the basement, technically. Which is the place they need to go; which is the right path; which Zoro found.
Again, what the fuck?
See, today’s ordeal (not the ordeal, because there’s always an ordeal in the Strawhats crew) started with Luffy being an idiot—which, in all fairness, is how pretty much everything starts.
The day was peaceful and storms—metaphorical and not—didn’t seem to loom over the horizon. They docked at the port of a small island, needing not more than a few hours for the log to reset, a simple strip of spring land which would’ve made a perfect walk to get away from those idiots. Then, of course, Luffy smelt meat and, his metaphorical-tail wiggling, followed the scent like an hound before they could even think to stop him; doesn’t matter that he just had breakfast, doesn’t matter that Sanji would whip up something for him—because it’s Luffy.
And, of course, he mindlessly ate the luscious, untouched spread even if common sense would dictate not to eat food left on the ground that has seemingly been abandoned.
And just because it’s their luck, of course it simply had to be a very important, annual ceremony for the island’s god of the Sea — one they take very dearly.
And, of course, they just had to have a chemical weapon at hand that knocked them out.
Of course. Of fucking course.
It’s a slightly less average Tuesday for them, honestly, but it doesn’t mean Nami isn’t pissed. Four hours—they had to behave for four hours at most.
She had woken up in a dark, damp cell with a pulsing headache and tingling joints from having slept in an awkward position, and found herself observed by a sleepy but grouchy gray eye.
“Was time you woke up.”
The fucking nerve.
At least she’s not alone, she had mused. Small victories but these days it’s never a given.
Zoro had observed the bars keeping them trapped, eye narrowing as he seemed to take note of any weakness, until a mouth and an ear popped up from the ground.
She hadn’t got spooked, not anymore, but she still had to fight back a whole-body shiver.
“Our captain is already causing havoc—” A resonating laugh could be heard from the cell alongside an explosion. “The rest of us are engaged in battle and preparing the ship for a swift flight—shall I trust you to escape on your own?”
Zoro grunted in affirmation.
“Perfect.”
With a soft swish sound, a chain of hand appeared in front of the cell and beyond, dragging Zoro’s swords like a goddamn industrial conveyor belt. He jumped up from his spot, eagerly reaching for them.
In the blink of an eye, where once were less-than-pristine bars, there was a large opening and she barely caught as he sheated them.
“I fear you’ll also have to help our dear cook,” Robin’s saccharine voice added. “I’ve gathered he’s on the lower underground floor but it’s too far away for my powers to reach him.”
Zoro grunted in… complaint? She’s not sure.
“After that, please regroup at the Sunny,” she concluded, a few petals where once stood her powers.
After they had made it out of the cell, they stood still for a few seconds. They needed to head to the basements but where was that? Apparently lower than their current level but the path they were supposed to trace was lost on them; two long, shady corridors stretched left and right—their alike appearance almost creepy. Just how big is this place?
Then, Zoro, the biggest case of topographical disorientation she’s ever had the misfortune of assisting to, takes upon himself the role of guide with the self-assuredness of a fish in the water. Which is always appalling, of course, but not surprising.
(And that is when the current predicament starts. Because Luffy starting havoc? Nothing to write home about. Getting imprisoned in a smelly cell? Not even worth worrying. Having to fight an entire island of people? That’s almost a given. But—)
“Left,” he grunts, steps resonating over the uneven stones. She sighs, running a hand over her face. She’d probably fare better if she picked the opposite course than whatever the Idiot Number Two is undertaking, but alas, her impeccable navigation performance wanes under the dark ceilings and windless spots, and she doesn’t feel like dragging a grumbling lump into the depths of an unknown place. Let him steer them around in a circle until she gets a hang of it.
A bit startled, she blinks when they reach a door—believe her or not, it’s progress—and Zoro wastes no time getting it open with a forceful shrug, little particles of dust fluttering in the air as a result.
…Uh.
A small set of stairs descends further into the ground, rudimentary and unassuming; she peeks into it with a wide gaze but it doesn’t seem like it’ll eat her alive, so…
“Well, would you look at that? You made the right choice,” she offhandedly comments although she can’t shrug off a tiny amount of incredulity.
They go down the stairs until it opens into a little antechamber, three doors on the sides of the room. She looks up, then down, considering.
“I think we—”
“—Have to go down lower? I know,” he finishes, eye moving around as if searching for something.
Nami blinks—once, twice—before turning to observe Zoro fully, undivided attention and all. Since when has Zoro—“I climbed a palace because you said to go North and everyone knows North is up”— Roronoa had an opinion about the whereabouts of something—let alone a correct one?
Is this a fluke? Is she wrong?
No, no. She shakes her head. No time to doubt herself. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. No reason to dwell on it.
He pushes open the door to his right, strolling in with too much carelessness.
“Oi, shouldn’t we check the other doors before choosing?”
“No time—cook needs me.”
Although they vaguely register as weird in the back of her mind, she doesn’t think much of those words. “We’re no use if we can’t find him.”
He throws a glance at her from the top of his shoulder. “I know this is the right one.”
Her eyebrows rise higher and higher at the absolute audacity of this man, but she clamps them down. Want to lead so badly? Fine. If they get lost it’s his fault anyway.
So she follows him—and follows him.
“Left.”
“Right.”
“Down here.”
“Left.”
“Keep going, should be down there.”
Until Zoro stops her in the middle of her awkward stumbling, looking around like he’s seeing something in the dark. Is he sniffing the air? Is he a werewolf? That would explain it, wouldn’t it? It would make so much more sense than accepting that… that… that—
Zoro, who still gets lost from the bunkrooms to the galley; Zoro, who manages to turn around in a single, one way street; Zoro, who genuinely believes buildings move; Zoro, who got on a pirate ship even though it was very clearly the wrong one; Zoro, the very definition of being lost—
Zoro knows the way—of a place he’s never been before.
Is the world ending? Is he about to die? Is this a trick? Is she just dreaming? Is—
“I think the cook’s under this floor,” he announces and Nami—what has she come to?— is inclined to believe him. “Door’s gotta be at the end of this corridor.”
Disbelief makes her screech though, “There’s no way you’re right!”
He quirks an eyebrow, looking vaguely confused like he can’t understand why she looks like she’s about to burst but unwilling to slow down.
The floor seems wobbly under her feets; her whole world has fallen from her shoulders.
Reaching the end—the end!—with the conceitedness of a smug prick, he takes a few steps back and pushes open the door left ajar.
Her eye twitches.
“See? Told ya the door’s here.”
Call an ambulance, she thinks. I’m about to commit a homicide.
“You mannerless oaf! Give me those!” Sanji berates him and Nami finds a familiar comfort in their trademark insults. A little bit of right in this world of lies.
There’s a slight edge in his voice, though, something between nervousness and ire but not quite. It vaguely reminds her of when he’s unable to smoke, the little twitch of his fingers like he’s imagining the burning stick between them.
Zoro plays with the chunky pair of keys they found hung outside the cell as they spin on his index finger. “Couldn’t break out of it yourself, fourth-place?”
He seethes, glaring with an intensity akin to diable jambe. “It’s sea prism stone, jackass.”
“I could’ve broken out of that.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Didn’t have those.”
With a predatory smirk, Sanji states, “Guess they used the good pair on me. Nice to see someone recognizing I’m the superior fighter.”
With an ampler showcase of emotions than she’s seen him display all day, he fires back, “Oh, shut it, Curly.”
Before he can retort with another insult she’s sure she’s already heard, she butts in. “C’mon, get those off of him and let’s get the fuck out of this shithole.”
Although with colorful complaints under his breaths, he complies easily enough, shrugging off the cuffs around his ankles.
Soon enough, the blonde is standing next to me, a burning cigarette between his lips. “Sorry, mellorine. Having to search for me with that directionless oaf must have been truly horrible—can’t imagine how many times he got lost.”
“I didn’t get lost,” he grumbles, crossing his arms defiantly and with a definitely-not-pout painted over his face.
And, dear, isn’t that true?
Condescendingly, Sanji pats his shoulder and avoids the slash of Wado by a hair. “Sure you didn’t, marimo.”
“Shut up, forth-placer,” he grumbles and then—with all his usual, oaf-like, stubborn, brutish single-mindedness, he trudges further.
In the wrong direction.
With the risk of sounding redundant, what the fuck?
“Oh, my goodness, are you actually blind?” Sanji groans, stalking off to grab Zoro by a piece of his haramaki. “The other side, marimo, the other side!“
“I knew that!” he denies as they walk past her, leaving Nami in a sort of bamboozled state. What in the world just happened?
So, here is the fact.
For some reason, Zoro knew exactly where to go to reach the basement. He didn’t even think twice about his steps, always secure and precise, leading them right to their destination even though they didn’t have a single landmark.
Here’s another fact.
After they got to the basement, he apparently had no idea where to go or how to get back to the surface—which is baffling, given how easy he navigated the premises in the first place.
And that’s where her connubrius lies.
(Is she being dramatic? She’s not being dramatic, is she? This is serious. She has all the reasons to think obsessively about it. She’s not being dramatic. She’s not.)
It’s like this: suddenly, the world has been tilted a little bit to the left in a way that leaves everything familiar but wrong, and she’s the only one who knows and the one left untying the complicated strings of a real mystery.
She dwells on it, dwells on it again and then some more. Keeps thinking about it when she eats, when she sails, when she spends the afternoon with ink-stained fingers working on another map, when she’s supposed to be sleeping.
Which is now—a little over two days away from the whole Thing but not any closer to a semblance of truth.
Before she can thoroughly reflect on the actions she’s undertaking, her bare feet are already hitting the wood ground. She slips on a pair of slippers—she’s not a savage— and makes her way out of the girl’s room, closing the door behind her with a careful softness, trying not to wake up Robin.
If she remembers correctly—and she does, seeing she’s the one that wrote the roster back in the Going Merry and has continued to do so ever since—Zoro should be on night watch, drinking away the rest of the shift.
She climbs up the ladder, trying to understand what she’s even going to open the conversation with, and as soon as she pops up from the ground, a single, laser-focused eye clocks her.
“Can I help you?”
Suddenly, the last days’ conundrum rushes in her head with the same voracity as two-hours-starved Luffy; she’s confused and upset all over again which is so unfair because Zoro fucking Roronoa, out of all people, shouldn’t make her feel like this.
“How did you know where to go!?”
His head tilts slightly in confusion, as his hands still. Nami notices that she’s stopped him in the middle of cleaning his swords, the white one now resting on his lap as the other two lay by his side. There’s also a small glass of sake and what looks to be an almost empty bottle, because of course.
“What?”
She breathes. “Last week. When they captured us. How did you know where Sanji was and how did you not get lost?”
“I don’t get lost,” he grumbles.
“Don’t start now. I’m serious: how did you know?”
His eyebrows scrunch together as he stares at her some more with a weirdly sharp expression in his eye—almost like she’s the one not making any sense.
Then, his stare falls to the sword as he resumes cleaning it, careful as he passes a white cloth imbued with something that makes the air feel heavy.
For a moment, she thinks he’s not going to answer her. She shuffles on her feet awkwardly, feeling foolish and unsatisfied in a way only men can make her feel like. She’s about to say something—what, she’s not sure of—when he starts talking.
“That’s easy,” he murmurs, so soft and so much unlike him. “Sanji needed us.”
And Nami doesn’t get it: thinks it’s dumb and not an answer at all, an off-handed comment just to throw her off and piss off the sleeping cook, but then—
Then, it hits her.
Sanji needed me.
She thinks of Sanji, of the way he hates small spaces; of what she’s discovered at Whole Cake; of Zoro saying that Sanji needed him—not cook, not fourth-placer, not pervert idiot, just Sanji.
Of everytime Sanji found Zoro after he got lost. Everytime Zoro covered his back in battle. Everytime Zoro picked a fight with Sanji when he got too much in his head. Everytime Sanji scolded Luffy and Chopper for playing near the stairs. Everytime Zoro threw Sanji a pack of cigarettes from his stack when he was low on it. Everytime Sanji made a particular meal for Zoro’s absurd protein intake. Everytime Zoro goated him into a screaming match whenever Sanji looked a bit too close at the name on his wanted poster. Zoro. Sanji. Zoro and Sanji.
And, dear, isn’t she the idiot here?
There’s something there that she hadn’t seen, yet. Something tender and anciently familiar, like the warmth of Sanji’s stew near winter island maybe. It clings in the air, fills blanks she hadn’t realized existed.
She finds it to be wholly unsurprising, though.
“Okay,” she says, a bit dazed but sated. Her mouth feels dry all of a sudden, full of cotton as she licks her lips and repeats, surely, “Okay.”
It’s the way she always looks East on sunny days, when the smell of tangerine fills the deck with their sickeningly cloying scent.
She doesn’t understand, not really, but she gets it.
And what can she do, but climb down and finally get a good night of sleep?
(She’s still taxing Zoro in the morning for emotional ailments. And if anyone notices that Sanji and Zoro are suddenly always next to each other in the roster, well… It’s not any of their business, is it?)