Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Where Memory Sleeps

Part I

The island rose out of the Grand Line like a painted altar, all slopes of green and terraces of white stone wreathed in marigolds. Garlands of orange and gold ran from rooftop to rooftop, fluttering like tiny suns in the sea wind, and every alley was draped in paper banners punched with skulls, flowers, and little ships.

“Look!” Chopper bounced to the rail, tiny hooves clacking in excitement. “So many flowers!”

Usopp was already elbow-deep in a bag of stall samples delivered by beaming dockworkers. “So many snacks! I’m getting a story inspiration: Usopp and the Festival of a Thousand Sk—” He choked as a skull-faced toddler tugged his coat and handed him a sugar cookie in the shape of a skeleton. “Uh. Thanks, tiny Spooky.”

Robin watched the islanders with a soft smile, fingers tracing the lacework on a bright paper skull hung from the Sunny’s gangplank. Sanji leaned dramatically over the rail toward a cluster of women with painted faces and marigolds tucked in their hair. “Angels! Divine deities descending upon the port—”

“They’re just people,” Nami said, but she couldn’t keep her own grin from spreading. The square gleamed like a treasure chest thrown open: gold petals, shining candles, woven blankets, a painter splattering pink on a sugar skull while a boy with a crown of orange petals watched, serious. It wasn’t just decoration. It felt like a whole island remembering together—with joy, with care.

“Captain,” Franky said, flexing his forearms, “permission to party.”

Luffy threw both arms in the air. “Permission granted! Party permission for everybody!” He hopped onto the dock in three leaps and landed in front of a shriveled old woman whose face paint turned her cheeks into roses. “Hello! We’re pirates! We like meat!”

“Welcome, pirates,” she said, laughing, and placed a marigold behind his ear like a medal. Then her eyes slid past him, widened, and shone. “Oh! Oh, look!”

Brook had descended from the Sunny with his usual swanlike grace, top hat and cane set just so. He hadn’t changed for the festival—he didn’t need to. He was a skeleton, after all. The first child to see him squealed, then clasped both hands to their chest as if faced with a saint.

“Ah,” Brook said, touching the brim of his hat. “Yohoho. Good evening—”

A crowd formed fast. Someone thrust a garland around his neck. Another knelt to touch the tips of his skeletal toes. A small, fierce grandmother in embroidered skirts thumped her cane on the stones. “El músico,” she declared. “A blessing.”

Brook’s empty sockets gleamed like stars. “You honor me,” he said. “May I repay with a song from beyond? Yohoho~”

“Yes!”

“Yes, song!”

“Sing something for my abuela!”

Franky wiped at his eyes. “Beautiful. The love of culture.”

Sanji’s cigarette drooped. “Even on an island full of beautiful women, only Brook gets worshipped.”

“You could try being dead,” Zoro said. He’d slung his swords across his shoulder, expression neutral as always, but his gaze moved carefully over the square with its candles and photographs and little plates of salt and loaves of bread shaped like bones. He took it in like he took a battlefield: no hurry, nothing missed.

Nami leaned on the rail to watch the crowd swirl around Brook. She hadn’t said it out loud, but she felt a kind of quiet relief at the island’s warmth. Death wasn’t whispered here. It was invited to dance.

The old woman with roses on her cheeks took Luffy’s hand and pressed a candle into it. “To place on your altar,” she said. “For the ones who feed your steps.”

Luffy blinked. “My steps are fed?”

“She means the people who made you who you are, you idiot,” Nami said, and the word “idiot” came out with no sting. She found herself smiling at the candle’s little glass cup. A tangerine and a small photograph would suit beside it. Maybe a pinch of salt. Bell-mère had loved the sea, too salty to the end.

They spilled into the town like a river of bright cloth. Sanji spun off to chase a train of painted dancers and almost cried when they thanked him for his compliments like he was a gust of wind, not the wind itself. Usopp discovered a stall where the artisan carved a dragon from a sugar block in less than a minute and promptly tried to negotiate for a sugar cannon. Robin acquired three stories from a kindly archivist in exchange for a promise to visit their cemetery and remember someone named Tomás who “used to carry five chairs at once.”

Luffy acquired a mountain of skewers, all meat. He handed one to Zoro without looking. Zoro took it without looking.

By the time Brook had sung his third song and accepted his fifth flower crown, the crew had settled into the festival’s pulse. Lanterns bobbed. Candles were lit on small altars set in doorways and corners, each arranged with care: a cup of water, a favorite hat, a carved boat, a splinter of bone. Nami stood in front of one and read the name on the frame with its black-and-white photo: Mariana. A woman with fierce eyes, mid-laugh.

The sight tugged something warm and hurt at the same time.

“You should make your own,” Luffy said beside her, solemn as if delivering an order. “For Bell-mère.”

“I will,” she said. “We all should.”

He nodded and took off in a whirl of joy toward the square’s tallest staircase, yelling something about firecrackers. Nami watched his back for a second, fond and exasperated, and then looked around for the swordsman. She didn’t see Zoro where he had been, leaning on a pillar beneath a banner of lilac paper cut with looping vines. In fact, she didn’t see him at all.

“He’s lost,” Usopp announced in a tone of doom, appearing at her elbow. “He saw a staircase and walked wrong on purpose.”

“Maybe he took a left around the ocean,” Sanji sniffed, materializing with a lit cigarette and a box of pastries balanced on his right palm. “That marimo can get lost on a straight rope.”

Robin’s chuckle floated like smoke. “It is true he sometimes vanishes.”

Nami felt Zoro’s absence like a small new emptiness under her ribs, odd and uninvited. She told herself it was annoyance. Then she remembered the way he’d stared at the altars with their little swords and cups of tea. Not lost, then. Somewhere deliberate.

The cemetery wasn’t far from the square. The townspeople had built it on a hill so that the dead could watch the sea, a kindly woman told them as she handed Nami a basket of marigold petals. The stone path up was lined with skulls made of clay and paper, the eye sockets painted blue or gold, each with a delicate grin. Children ran past, laughter fluttering like ribbons. A few had Brook’s flower crowns copied from straw and orange silk. “Yohoho,” one kid said at a friend in the exact cadence of their musician, and they both burst into giggles.

The hillside was dotted with shrines. Families arranged photographs and flowers, food and cups of water. Nami slipped between them with a nod here and there, a sorry when her skirt caught a ribbon, a quiet “that’s beautiful” when a man placed a tiny carved ship at the edge of a relative’s stone. At the top of the path—the highest terrace, hung with a hundred candles that mirrored the sea—stood an older shrine, not to any one person but to the nameless, the lost at sea, the never-found. A low stone basin held a pool of water where marigold petals drifted as if they were small boats.

And on the edge of the stone bench, just to the left of the basin, sat Zoro.

He’d chosen a quiet spot in the shadows of a thick marigold arch. He wasn’t dozing. His back was too straight, his hands still. The three swords rested by his knee. The white hilt of Wado Ichimonji was closest to his right hand, as always. The candle near him cast a warm tremor across the steel, and his face was carved in the sort of calm that felt like the ocean when there’s no wind—flat, emptied of obvious emotion, but something deep moving underneath.

Nami slowed. She knew the look. She’d seen it before in windless hours at sea, when Zoro would sit at the bow alone, letting the world roll by his half-lidded eye. Meditation, she’d thought then. Waiting, she realized now, shifting the basket of petals in her hands. Or maybe it was both.

“Hey,” she said softly.

He didn’t startle, or pretend he hadn’t heard her. He glanced up with that minimal tilt of the chin that served him in place of a dozen gestures for hello, go away, how’s the wind. “Hey.”

“I told the others you were lost,” she said, easing down onto the stone beside him. The candlelight moved across his earrings. They gleamed when he breathed.

“Let them believe what they like.”

She set the basket between them. He flicked a look at it. “What’s that?”

“Marigolds. I thought Bell-mère would like them.” Her voice hitchhiked over the name before easing into it. The air felt different up here: thinner, with more stars in it. You could hear the square below like a faint heartbeat.

Zoro’s eye dropped to his swords, then past them to the basin. “You putting up an altar?”

“I thought I’d use this one. The one for the lost.” She swallowed. “She wasn’t lost. Not to me. But she’s far, and—” She stopped, then set the petals at the edge of the water and pulled her knees up, hugging them loosely. “It felt right.”

He nodded, and the nod held more weight than usual. He rested his elbow on his thigh, the way he did when he was thinking. “I came to say something to Kuina,” he said, voice even. “This place… it’s loud. But it’s quiet, too.”

“How very Zen of you.”

He snorted. “Hmph.”

She waited. Zoro didn’t always need words, but when he chose them, he meant them. He was quiet a long moment, watching the lanterns like ships in the air. When he finally spoke, it was simple. “I told her I’m still going.”

“Still going?” Nami asked.

“Toward the goal,” he said. Then, after a pause that felt like a bridge extended in her direction, “She wanted the same thing I did. We promised it to each other.”

“World’s greatest swordsman,” Nami said, softly. Wado Ichimonji’s white ribbon gleamed in the candlelight like a promise made tangible. “She would have been the world’s greatest swordsman too.”

He didn’t flinch at that. He didn’t play it off. He breathed once, slow. “She would have cut me down if I got in her way.”

“Sounds like a friend,” Nami murmured.

He made that almost-smile—barely a twitch at the left corner of his mouth. “Yeah.”

Below them, someone cheered. The music surged, Brook’s high laugh floating up like a ribbon. Nami realized she could hear the soft scrape of Zoro’s thumb across the wrap of Wado’s hilt. A small, steady sound. She thought of Bell-mère’s callused hands breaking bread, the way she’d ruffle Nami’s hair like the wind, and how, in Arlong Park’s ruins, Nami had felt emptiness and rage and release all tangled into one knot she could finally cut.

“You look different,” Zoro said, not looking at her.

“Different how?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Some of the marigold’s powder had dusted her fingers orange.

“Sad,” he said, plain as always. “More than usual on days like this.”

Nami didn’t bristle. With Zoro, blunt didn’t mean unkind. She stared at the marigold petals drifting in the basin and thought of a certain photo in a hand-carved frame back on the Sunny: Bell-mère, cigarette hanging loose from her mouth, wind in her hair like a flag. “I’m thinking about… who I was when she was alive,” Nami said. “And who I am now.” She grimaced. “That sounds dramatic.”

“You’re dramatic.”

“Very funny. I just mean—” She exhaled. The night’s air smelled like sugar and smoke and salt, and it grounded her. “When I was little, she felt like… everything. Like the center. And later she was the thing I couldn’t have anymore, and that made me into someone who—” She waved her hand, as if she could swat the words into place. “Who thought she had to hold everything alone. Steal, bargain, lie.”

“Survive,” Zoro said.

Nami looked at him. The candlelight cast his face in warm relief. “Yeah. And now I have all of you. A different kind of everything.” Her throat tightened. She forced a small laugh past it. “It’s confusing, sometimes.”

Zoro made a quiet sound that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite disagreement. “You can be more than one thing.”

“Swordsman wisdom.”

He ignored that. “Do you ever talk to her?”

“At altars?” Nami asked. “Sometimes. And sometimes I don’t, because I feel stupid.” She shook her head. “That’s even more stupid. The festival isn’t about the dead judging us for talking to them.”

“She wouldn’t judge you,” he said.

“How do you know?”

He offered a shrug, the sort you might mistake for indifference if you didn’t pay attention. “You’re you.” He paused, then tilted his head toward the pool. “Tell me about her.”

Nami blinked. “You know about her.”

“I know the facts. Bell-mère. Former Marine. Adopted you and Nojiko. Tangerine trees. Tough.” His mouth twitched again. “Hit like a canon if you mouthed off.”

“She did,” Nami said, and it came out as half a breath, half a laugh. “She could smack us and hug us in the same minute.” She stared at the marigolds and felt her lips curl. “Her cooking was terrible.”

“She’d have liked Sanji.”

“She’d have bullied Sanji into seasoning like a soldier,” Nami said. The smile was widening now. “She had the ugliest slippers. Bright pink. With rabbit ears.”

Zoro’s eyebrows lifted an imperceptible degree. “Huh.”

“She wore them like the queen of the house,” Nami went on. “And she’d put her boots on with the same authority and go into town with a cigarette and everyone would nod like ‘yes, Bell-mère.’ She taught me how to mend nets. I hated it, until she told me I could sell my mended nets for a better price if I did it right. Then I didn’t mind so much.” Her chest loosened with each image. “She carved her initials into the side of the house three times because she thought the letters looked too small the first two. She loved storms. She’d stand in the rain and swear at the sky in three languages.”

Zoro’s attention didn’t drift. It anchored to her words. “She sounds like a real pain.”

“She was enormous.” Nami let the breath come. “That’s what I keep remembering today. Not… not the end.” Her voice faltered a fraction and she let it. Let it and let it pass. “How big she was.”

Zoro set his forearms on his knees and bowed his head in a way that made Nami think of prayer even though she had never seen him pray. “Strong woman,” he said. “Didn’t let herself get defined by any man.”

Nami glanced at him sideways. “Like me?”

“Like you,” he said. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to for it to land. Then, in a lighter tone that veered too close to teasing to be an accident, “Except you define yourself by money sometimes.”

She snorted, grateful for the pressure-release. “You define yourself by naps.”

He grunted. “If I nap harder than other men, that’s just discipline.”

“Discipline,” she echoed, rolling the word around like a coin. “Bell-mère would have liked you.”

He glanced up, meeting her eyes. “You think so?”

“She would have liked your dry humor,” Nami said. “And the way you meet force head-on without wasting words. She would have yelled at you for endangering yourself, and then made you a terrible stew and told you to eat every bite.”

He actually looked faintly horrified. “I don’t know if I like her stew part.”

“You would have eaten it.”

“Yeah,” he allowed, and his mouth moved into something that was not exactly a smile but something with a little softness. “I would have liked her, too.”

His gaze flicked down, and Nami realized his fingers were very lightly touching the white hilt of Wado again. “She was strong,” he said. “Like you.”

It wasn’t flattery. Zoro never gave those. Her throat tightened again, but gentler this time, like a knot loosening rather than constricting. “Thank you.”

He tipped his chin. “Tell me more.”

She did. She told him about the way Bell-mère could fix a roof with the same expression she wore when scolding a thief. About the time she’d made Nami sit at the table and calculate the cost of every single nail in the house before she’d let her go outside to play because “if you know the price of your shelter, you won’t sell your worth cheap.” About how she laughed loud and ugly and didn’t care.

The more she spoke, the more the heaviness that had sat on Nami’s shoulders all afternoon shifted into warmth. The memories came without the old, familiar ache of wanting to change the end. They stood on the terrace of the nameless, and she could feel the love like a presence that required no altar, even as she scattered petals into the water.

Zoro listened the way he fought: focused, unshowy, steady. When she faltered, he didn’t fill the space with noise. He didn’t need to.

After a while, they fell into silence that had shape, not emptiness. The square’s music drifted up like incense. Firecrackers popped. The sea slicked the rocks with its tongue.

“Want to walk?” Nami asked, surprising herself. She meant: I don’t want to leave this quiet, but I want to move through it with you. She meant: stay.

“Yeah.” He stood and for a heartbeat she thought he might reach for her hand, then reminded herself that Zoro didn’t reach for people. He just stood near them, as if that were a form of gravity.

They took the path along the ridge that curved away from the bustle of the square. Lanterns hung from trees like moons. The cemetery sloped down to stone steps and a narrow bridge over a ravine where night flowers opened shyly. Even here there were small, tucked-away altars—little shelves with candles and a cup of water, a cigarette burning down in a clay pipe.

Somewhere below, Brook’s violin lifted into a new song—soft, slow, strange. It sounded like light on a river.

“Feels… nice,” Zoro said, which was almost effusive for him.

Nami let her shoulder brush his as they walked. It could have been an accident. The warmth that ran from her shoulder down her arm felt like anything but. “It does.”

They came to a stone archway crowned with more marigolds. Beyond it, the path dove into a small grove where the lanterns were sparser. The trees here dripped long laces of moss that swayed when the wind moved. Nami touched one and it felt like cool hair.

“Romantic,” she said lightly, because she could feel suddenly shy, like someone had peeled away a layer of skin she’d forgotten she wore.

Zoro glanced at the hanging moss, uncharacteristically at a loss. “Huh.”

“You’re supposed to say ‘yeah,’” she said. “And then offer me a hand in case of slippery stones.”

“It’s not slippery.”

“It might be.”

He grunted, but then, after three more steps, reached out and offered her his hand like he was passing over a sword. She put her palm in it before she could think better. His hand was big and callused, warm even in the breeze. The warmth surprised her. She didn’t know why it should. Rivers ran warm in the evening after a hot day. Steel held heat a long time. Zoro’s palm fit hers like two pieces of something stubborn that didn’t want to admit they matched.

“Happy?” he muttered.

“Yes,” she said, and only then did she realize it to be true.

They crossed the grove. The path emerged on another terrace, this one empty except for a low wall and a small altar to no one in particular. It held a shell, a wooden toy sword, and a tin cup. There was a bench. Nami sat on it without letting go of his hand. He stood for a breath as if confused by the mechanics of sitting while attached to a navigator, then sat too.

They listened to Brook’s violin. They watched the far lights where the tide hit the rocks. The shy feeling turned from prickly to sweet, like citrus.

“You’re quieter than usual,” Nami said.

“I’m always quiet.”

“Quieter than that.”

He looked at their joined hands as if he were trying to decide if he was holding a lantern or a live fish. “I was thinking about what you said,” he offered. “About who you were and who you are. I don’t think those are different people. You’ve always been you.”

“That’s… uncomplicated,” she said. “Swordsman logic.”

“Sometimes things are simple.” He shifted, not pulling away, but not studying her face either, which made it somehow more intimate. “I don’t like… the idea of you sad, I guess.”

She couldn’t help it; she smiled. “You guess.”

“I don’t like it,” he said, firmer. “So if talking about Bell-mère makes you… breathe better. Talk.”

Her smile softened. “You’re bossy.”

“You like it.”

“I tolerate it.” She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back carefully, like testing a grip on a new blade. “Tell me about Kuina.”

His jaw worked. “I don’t… talk about her a lot.”

“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”

The silence stretched, but it wasn’t tense. It was a field waiting for wind. Finally he said, “She was better than me.”

Nami considered. “At swords? Or at everything?”

He huffed a laugh. “Both. But especially swords. She beat me two thousand times.” He paused. “We had one draw. I was proud of that. She wasn’t. She wanted the win.”

Nami smiled. “Sounds like someone I would have admired as a girl.”

“You’d have argued with her. She would have enjoyed it.” He rubbed his thumb along her knuckles absentmindedly, as if he’d forgotten his hand was there and had started fidgeting with it like a tool. “She couldn’t accept that people thought she couldn’t be the best because she was a girl. She knew she was strong. She didn’t want to be told where the ceiling was.”

Nami breathed in. “I would have liked her.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then, softly, “I didn’t get to keep my promise with her when she was alive. But I still intend to keep it. Becoming the best isn’t only for me.”

Nami turned to look at him, but the words had done that thing where they lodged in the air like cords, taut between them, humming. She didn’t have to touch them to hear the sound.

“I’m glad,” she said, her voice low. “I’m glad we can carry them with us like this. Not… like an anchor.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a terrible metaphor for a navigator.”

“Like another sword,” Zoro offered.

“Of course you’d say that.”

He made a small noise that might have been a laugh and might have been a sigh. The music shifted below—still Brook, but someone else had joined him, plucking a low, rolling accompaniment that sounded like the thunk of boat hull against gentle dock. Luffy whooped somewhere distant. Someone set off a new string of firecrackers; sparks flowered above the square like brief marigolds that burned out into night.

Nami found herself staring at their hands again. She felt young in a way that matched who she’d been, but newly, as if some piece could be young and old at once. She realized Zoro had leaned closer, a careful tilt.

“Are you—” she said.

“Is this—” he said at the same time.

They both stopped. Nami laughed; Zoro’s ears turned the slightest shade darker. He wasn’t embarrassed often. She felt a tiny, treacherous thrill at seeing it. “We’re unbelievable,” she said, but her voice was fond. “You’d think we’d be smoother.”

“I don’t do smooth,” he said. “I do straight.”

“That’s… a line.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Then truth, swordsman,” she said, and she leaned in just enough that her hair brushed his shoulder. She didn’t press. She didn’t need to. Zoro didn’t take what he wasn’t sure he wanted. He earned. He moved toward.

He moved. Very slightly. It would have been easy to miss if you weren’t watching. Of course she was watching.

Something thumped a second later. They jolted apart like guilty teenagers. Chopper’s head popped over the archway, upside down, antlers snagged briefly in the marigolds. “There you are!” he chirped. “Whoa! This place is pretty!”

Nami pressed her fingers to her mouth, squashing a laugh and a groan. Zoro leaned back, eye closing for a brief, comic beat as if he were counting to ten.

“Chopper,” Nami said, amused exasperation tucked neatly into her tone. “Did you get lost?”

“No!” Chopper said. “I smelled pan de muerto and followed it and then I remembered you two weren’t with us and we thought maybe Zoro got lost again and—oh!” His eyes went huge. “Did I interrupt—something romantic?”

“We were talking,” Zoro said, deadpan.

Nami patted the bench and Chopper hopped up between them in his little heavy point, clutching a piece of bread. He took a bite and his eyes mooned. “It tastes like… sugar and feelings.”

“That’s the point,” Nami said, and bumped his shoulder. Her heart had calmed. It still beat faster than usual, but not in the shaky way. In the after-a-close-fight, everything’s-sharp way. “Are the others still in the square?”

“Yeah! Brook is a god.” Chopper held up both hands reverently. “An actual god. Usopp says he taught Brook everything he knows about music but everyone laughed for some reason. They want us back for the big lantern launch! You tie your lantern to your memory.”

Zoro’s gaze shifted to Nami. She nodded. “We’ll be right there.”

Chopper sized them up in a way that would have been intrusive from anyone else and was simply earnest from him. “Okay! Don’t get lost!” He scampered away, nearly tripping over a marigold garland, then vanished down the path in a patter of hooves.

Silence returned, but the chord they’d strung between words tugged drier, a little less taut. Nami exhaled and rubbed the heel of her hand over her eye. “He’s sweet.”

“Yeah,” Zoro said gruffly. He looked at her hand, then at the path, then at her again. “We should… go down.”

“We should,” she agreed, and made no move to stand. Then she did stand, partly because the music below shifted into a lively rhythm and partly because she knew herself and knew him and knew that sometimes the most tender thing you could do for a moment you liked was protect it from too much pressure. She held out her hand again without making eye contact.

He took it in the same serious way. They walked back through the mossed grove and the marigold arch and down the stone steps at a pace that had no rush in it.

The square had swollen to fullness by the time they returned. Lanterns were stacked by the fountain in neat bundles, each with a loop of string. The crew clustered near the fountain. Sanji lit a cigarette off a candle and handed Nami a paper lantern folded like a delicate cage. Robin tucked a blue ribbon into hers. Franky had somehow constructed a tiny propeller for his lantern that twirled slowly. Usopp had covered his with drawings of himself conquering death with a slingshot.

Luffy thrust a lantern at Zoro. “Put Kuina in there,” he said, with the opportunistic straightforwardness that only he could make gentle.

Zoro nodded once. He took a strip of paper and wrote a single word on it with the ink Robin offered. He didn’t hide it. He also didn’t offer it for reading. Nami imagined it anyway. Promise. Or simply her name.

She wrote Bell-mère on hers, then, on a whim, added the smallest sketch of a rabbit-eared slipper.

“Yohoho!” Brook swept in, feather boa flaring, flower crowns stacked like a procession of suns. “My dear friends, shall we help these memories take flight?”

“Let’s launch them together,” Nami said before she could stop herself. “I mean—us. The crew.”

Luffy beamed. “Yeah! Together!”

They moved to the fountain’s edge. Each dipped their lantern into the water for blessing. Sanji lit the wicks one by one. Tiny flames bloomed like captured fireflies. Nami’s heart thudded loud enough that she could feel it in her palms.

“On three,” Usopp said.

Luffy said “One-two-three!” too fast and they all laughed, and then—as if they’d planned it—they lifted the lanterns in a single breath and released.

The lanterns rose—slowly, like uncertain ideas finding conviction. They wavered—caught a draft—then steadied. The square hummed low. All around them, other lanterns lifted at different moments. The sky filled with small, warm moons carrying names, sketches, tokens of love.

Nami’s lantern drifted up above Zoro’s. She could see the smudge of ink where she’d drawn the slipper. She laughed unexpectedly, the sound catching and then freeing itself into the night. Zoro’s lantern caught a slightly stronger wind and nudged closer to hers as they rose. They looked like they were walking together. Nami’s throat tightened with that clean, citrus ache again.

She looked at Zoro. “We look ridiculous,” she whispered.

“We look fine.” He’d followed her gaze. The corner of his mouth turned up. “They look… right.”

“They do,” she said. The lanterns crested the square and drifted toward the sea, mirrors of the marigolds on the water below. The island sang. Brook’s violin rose into a bright reel. Children danced. Sanji twirled a grandmother and the grandmother dipped him neatly enough to make him squawk. Luffy threw his arms wide like he could catch the sky.

Nami stepped closer to Zoro. It didn’t feel like a decision. It felt like stepping onto a deck at the right moment to keep your balance with the ship.

“You know,” she said, more to the lanterns than to him, “for all your naps and your terrible sense of direction, you’re… good at this.”

“At what?” His voice wasn’t wary. It was resigned in the way of someone bracing for a compliment he didn’t know what to do with.

“Standing with someone while they remember,” she said. “Being quiet without being away.”

He didn’t reply for a moment. The silence was warm, marigold-thick. “You, too,” he said finally. “You’re… good at this.”

She bumped his shoulder with hers, just enough. “We can be good at it together, then.”

“Hmph,” he said, which meant yes.

They watched until the lanterns became a new, temporary constellation. When the wicks guttered to darkness and the lanterns drifted back, the tide would gather them. The island’s children would run the shore at dawn, collecting paper moons, drying them for next year, telling the names again so they didn’t fade. Nami loved that thought. The return, the cycle.

“Want to get some pan de muerto?” she asked after a while, her stomach remembering that grief was work and love was hunger.

“Yeah,” Zoro said, as if relieved she’d voiced the practical. “And sake.”

“Of course,” she said, laughing. “And then—” She hesitated, not wanting to be too neat with the moment.

“And then?” he asked, not pushing.

“And then maybe you can walk me back up to the shrine,” she said. “Just to… I don’t know. Put a new marigold.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Okay.”

They walked toward the food stalls, their steps syncing without effort. Zoro’s hand brushed hers once, twice, and then, with the same deliberate honesty he took into a fight, he took it. Nami squeezed back.

Chapter Text

Where Memory Sleeps

Part II

By the time the last of the lanterns drifted toward the horizon, the square had softened into a comfortable mess of empty cups, scattered marigold petals, and people slumped against each other with full bellies and lighter hearts. Brook’s bow finally fell still; he doffed his hat to a circle of admiring grandmothers and accepted one more flower crown with courtly grace.

“Yohoho—thank you for lending me your living ears,” he said, and the grandmothers cackled like kind witches.

Sanji returned from a final sweep of the stalls with a tray balanced on one hand. “Midnight rations for my celestial crewmates,” he declared, as if the crew had given him a medal for effort. He set the tray on a bench and wagged a finger at Luffy. “Captain, you get one—count it, one—sweet roll.”

Luffy grabbed two and shoved both into his mouth. “Ish on’y one if you eat ‘em together,” he said through crumbs.

“Blasphemy,” Sanji whispered, and lit a cigarette to cope.

Usopp stretched, hands locked behind his head, looking smug and sleepy. “I have been personally thanked by seven children for my role in training Brook,” he said. “I didn’t correct them. To crush a child’s belief would be cruel.”

Franky slung an arm over Brook’s bony shoulders. “You were super tonight, bone bro.”

“Thank you,” Brook said, and tilted his skull toward the sea. “The music felt… easy. Like we were all remembering the same song.”

Robin smiled at that, the satisfied smile of someone who had gathered three more stories and arranged them alphabetically in her mind. Chopper was slowly, reverently licking sugar from his hooves as if the bread were a holy text. He glanced between Nami and Zoro and nearly vibrated with a secret he had no idea how to keep.

Nami pretended not to notice. Zoro was very good at pretending nothing needed to be noticed at all, which meant he looked exactly like he always did—relaxed, watchful, faintly bored. Only the way his knuckles brushed Nami’s when they stood side by side betrayed anything; even then, it could have been the wind.

The elder with rose-painted cheeks hobbled past them on her cane, paused, and eyed Brook. “You’ll still be here tomorrow?”

“If the ocean is kind,” Brook said.

“The ocean loves fools,” she replied cheerfully, then tapped Nami’s wrist with the end of her cane. “Remember to take a flower when you go home, child. For sweetness in your future.”

Nami blinked. “Thank you,” she said, because somewhere Bell-mère had a cigarette in her teeth and was saying, You say thank you to the people who hand you blessings, kid.

They lingered a while longer, caught in the warm undertow of a festival’s end. Luffy yawned wide enough to swallow a candle, then sprang to his feet with renewed energy that made Sanji sigh like a widow. “Time for the Sunny! I’m going to sleep on the deck and watch the lanterns come back down!”

“That’s not how gravity—” Usopp began, then reconsidered. “You know what? Sure. That’s how it works tonight.”

Franky gathered the empty cups with a noble expression. Robin tucked a folded paper skull into her pocket. Chopper hopped into Sanji’s arms without warning; Sanji didn’t even pretend to mind. Brook tipped his hat to the last of his worshipers like a retiring god.

“Navigator,” Luffy said, grabbing Nami’s sleeve with greasy fingers. “Don’t be too long!”

Nami narrowed her eyes. “Too long for what?”

“For being not here,” Luffy said, losing the thread halfway through the sentence and hardly caring. He turned to Zoro. “Swordsman.”

Zoro grunted.

“Don’t get lost,” Luffy said, very solemn, like he was bestowing a sacred mission. He started to add more, then forgot there had been a second clause and took off down the steps. The crew followed in a cheerful, shuffling tide.

Robin was last to pass them. She paused just long enough to say, “It’s a good night for second visits,” in a tone that was both conversational and full of knowing. Then she joined the others without looking back.

Nami felt laughter rise, then settle into a steady warmth. The lanterns had thinned to a handful, tiny moons drifting over the water. The square hummed quietly as vendors doused candles and tucked away offerings that would spoil. Somewhere, an old radio clicked on, fuzzed through static, and found a soft croon.

“Want to walk?” Nami asked.

Zoro’s mouth tilted. “You just like making me take steps.”

“I like when you take the right ones,” she said.

They slipped into the side street that climbed toward the hill. The marigold garlands stirred in the night breeze, scattering specks like a trail. Their footsteps found the path’s rhythm without discussion. Nami kept her hand loose and easy at her side; Zoro’s swung close enough that the backs of their fingers touched now and then, as if in conversation. When the touch became a quiet constant, neither of them pointed it out.

The cemetery looked different in the late hour. The crowds had thinned; voices were low, if present at all. Candles had burned down to little saucers of wax. Marigold perfume, heavier now, seemed to cling to the stones like a blessing that had chosen to linger.

Nami led the way beneath the arch where they’d sat before. The bench was still there, patient and familiar. The pool caught the stars and shook them into gold coins at the slightest breeze.

They didn’t sit right away. Nami moved to the edge of the basin and dipped her fingers into the water, scooping up a few petals. She laid them along the stone in a line—Bell-mère’s initials, crooked and perfect. Zoro stood beside her, hands hooked into his sash, looking down as if he were reading the same word.

“Hi again,” Nami said, and she wasn’t embarrassed by the words. “We brought more marigolds. Also, I may have eaten an unholy amount of bread.”

Zoro’s mouth twitched. “I had sake for you,” he said to the pool, deadpan.

Nami snorted, then sobered on the inhale. The night pressed close, not heavy. Expectant. She turned and leaned her hip against the stone, looking up at him. The shadows made his earrings gleam like small, steady stars.

“You were right,” she said.

He lifted a brow. “I usually am.”

“Don’t ruin it,” she warned, but the smile in her voice softened the words. “Talking about her made me breathe better.”

He nodded once. “Good.”

“And you?” she asked, gentler. “Talking to Kuina?”

He looked at Wado Ichimonji, the white hilt quiet in the candlelight. His hand settled on it as if drawn by habit and something more. “I told her I’m still going,” he said. “And that I found… a good crew. People who don’t let me forget what I said I’d do.” He paused, then added, “I told her about you.”

The words landed like a thrown hook—true and a little startling in how far they reached. Nami swallowed. “You did?”

“Told her you argue like she did,” he said. “That you don’t accept walls. You draw maps through them.”

Nami had to look away for a second. The marigolds blurred. “That’s a terrible map,” she managed, and laughed once, small. “Thank you.”

The quiet that followed didn’t need filling. It deepened, curled close. When she looked back at him, he was already watching her with that steady attention he gave to sword edges and storms on the horizon.

“Zoro,” she said.

“Nami.”

Her name in his mouth was a simple thing; it made heat curl low and clean in her chest. She reached up and touched one marigold petal dusted on his shoulder, as if to anchor the moment to something she could feel. “I’m not… good at this part,” she said. “The part where feelings aren’t a transaction. Where you don’t owe me and I don’t owe you and it’s just…” She gestured in a little useless circle between them.

“Us,” he supplied, not missing a beat.

She huffed out a laugh. “Yeah. Us.”

He shifted his weight like a ship adjusting to a wave. “I don’t talk much,” he said, which was almost a joke. “But I can say what I mean.” His voice didn’t grow louder. If anything, it dropped, growing steadier as he went. “I like standing next to you. I like when you tell me where to go even if I ignore it. I like that you take care of everyone and still demand the world pay what it owes you. It’s… good to be pulled in your direction.”

Something in Nami’s bones went loose with recognition. She thought of Bell-mère’s palm on the back of her head, pressing her gently forward. She thought of Kuina’s name written on paper, drifting up in a lantern, and how Zoro’s eye had followed it.

“I like you,” Zoro said, as if the words were a sword he’d sharpened carefully, chosen for the fight, and was handing over the hilt first. “And not like a crewmate. Like you.”

Nami didn’t realize she was smiling until her cheeks ached. The ache felt like running back into a house that smelled like tangerines. “You’re terrible at poetry,” she said, and her voice wobbled like a lantern catching a draft. “But that was perfect.”

“Hmph.”

She could have teased him for the grunt, softened it into humor, but the moment gilded itself into something that didn’t need rescue. She stepped closer, close enough to see the delicate nicks along the curve of his ear from a dozen old fights. He didn’t move away. He didn’t move forward. He held steady; he always had.

“I like you too,” she said. The words landed between them, simple as a coin placed on a palm. “Like you. Not as a bargaining chip. Not because I think it will get me anything. Just because… you’re you.”

His mouth tilted. Not a smirk. A small, surprised smile, like a door opening to a room he hadn’t known he’d wanted to see.

She rose up on her toes and kissed him.

The first touch was as gentle as a fingertip on a map—testing the line, finding the coast. He met her halfway, careful and certain, as if he’d been practicing steadiness his whole life for exactly this. His hand came up to her jaw and paused, asking without asking. She leaned into it. His fingers were rough and warm and shaking the tiniest bit. It made her brave.

The kiss deepened by degrees, not hungry but sure. It tasted like sake and sugar and smoke and something that had no taste at all, only recognition. The marigolds smelled like sunlight in the dark. Somewhere below, a single firecracker popped late and lone, startling a laugh against his mouth that he swallowed like a promise.

When they parted, they didn’t step away. Their foreheads rested together simply because it felt right. Nami breathed, and the breath came easy. Zoro’s thumb swept once along her cheekbone as if he were wiping away something that wasn’t there.

“Hi,” she said, because teasing could be tenderness too.

“Hi,” he said, and the small smile didn’t leave his mouth. “I liked that.”

“Good,” she replied, and the relief that swept through her was warm enough to be called joy. “Me too.”

They stood like that for a while, letting the quiet be soft instead of heavy. Nami let her fingers trail over the white hilt of Wado—not quite touching—then looked up. “I’m glad we did this here,” she said. “With them.” She tipped her chin toward the water. “Feels like… good witnesses.”

Zoro’s gaze followed. He nodded. “Yeah. Feels like that.”

They sat at last, shoulder to shoulder on the bench, not because they needed to, but because it felt good to rest where they had first found the right words. Nami tucked her hand into his, and he accepted it with that same careful gravity as before. It no longer felt like holding a sword by the hilt; it felt like the easy grip of a tool you used every day, familiar and exactly right in the palm.

“Think the crew noticed?” Nami asked, half-dreading, half-delighted by the idea.

“Chopper did,” Zoro said with grim certainty.

“Robin knew before we did.”

“Hn.”

“Sanji will pretend to die of heartbreak and then make us both breakfast like it’s a duel,” Nami went on. “Usopp will write a ballad. Franky will design a joint chair. Brook will ask if he can see—”

“No,” Zoro said immediately.

“No,” Nami agreed, laughing.

They let the imaginings spin out, not because they feared them but because naming the storm made it smaller. The crew’s reactions would be loud and ridiculous and loving. That was the point. That was the safety net under the tightrope.

“Will you… walk me back to the Sunny?” Nami asked after a quiet stretch, her cheek resting briefly against his shoulder like a test she already knew the answer to.

“Yeah,” he said, as if she’d asked if he’d breathe. He stood and didn’t let go of her hand. The grip was firmer now, and easy.

They took the long way down, past the small altars where candles burned low and cups of water caught starlight. At one little niche, Nami paused and tucked the elder’s marigold behind her ear. Zoro looked once and nodded, the kind of nod that said yes to the picture she made without making a fuss of it.

The dock creaked gently under the light weight of the night breeze. In the harbor, the Sunny’s lion prow flickered with a lantern someone had left burning.

They found the crew scattered in familiar heaps. Usopp was snoring on a coil of rope, hat pulled over his face, one hand clutching a sugar skull like a trophy. Franky was half under a bench, sunglasses still on. Brook had arranged himself like an elegant heap of bones and flowers. Robin was awake, reading by candlelight; she looked up, took in their joined hands, and smiled one of those quiet, encompassing smiles that felt like a secret kept and blessed.

Sanji had dozed on the steps, cigarette long since ashed out. At the soft scuff of their approach, his eyes opened. He blinked once. Twice. His mouth shaped a wordless Oh that collapsed into a small, rueful grin. He tipped two fingers off his temple in a salute so understated it might have been a dream. Then he let his eyes fall closed and pretended to snore.

Chopper popped up from a nest of blankets like a prairie dog. “Did you—did you—” He flapped both hooves, whispering urgently. “Did you do the romantic thing?”

“Go to sleep, doctor,” Zoro said, not unkind.

Chopper made a tiny squeal and dove back under, whispering, “I knew it! I knew it! This is good for cardiovascular—” which faded into little puffs of delight as he conked out mid-sentence.

Luffy was sprawled on the deck exactly where he’d announced he would be, eyes half-lidded, grin soft and loose. He cracked one eye when their footsteps creaked the plank. “You came back,” he said, as if this were a profound victory, which for him it was.

“We said we would,” Nami told him.

“Good,” Luffy murmured. “Stay.” He yawned, then went still, asleep between one breath and the next.

Zoro guided Nami to the rail, where the water lapped quietly. The lanterns at sea had dwindled to embers against the horizon, but the marigold garlands along the dock still glowed with trapped festival light. Nami leaned on the rail and looked out, breathing the familiar salt and tar scent that meant home. Zoro leaned beside her, a steady line of heat at her shoulder.

“I’m not going to ask for poetry,” she said, eyes on the dark silver of the sea. “But I am going to ask for one promise.”

“You get two,” he said.

She looked at him sidelong. “Greedy.”

“Disciplined.”

She rolled her eyes and bumped him, then sobered. “Don’t let me turn this into a ledger,” she said. “If I start… if I try to bargain with it. You know how I get. Just—tell me to stop, okay?”

“I will,” he said, and his voice had the weight he used only when swearing oaths to himself. “And you tell me if I start trying to fight it like an enemy. I’m better at cutting things than keeping them.”

“We’ll practice,” she said. “We’re good at training.”

He huffed a laugh. “We are.”

She reached for his hand again and interlaced their fingers, then lifted the back of his hand to her lips for a brief, unshowy kiss. He stared at her like she’d handed him a sword he hadn’t realized he needed. Then he leaned down and returned the gesture to the crown of her head—one kiss, simple as a mark on a map.

“Good night, Nami,” he said.

“Good night, Zoro.”

They didn’t move for a while, letting the sea make its soft, constant argument for sleep. Eventually, Nami tugged him toward the pile of blankets Sanji had set out.

As her eyes slid shut, Nami thought of Bell-mère’s rabbit-eared slippers, ridiculous and proud. She thought of Kuina’s name rising like a lantern. She thought of marigolds floating in a stone basin, petals drifting and coming together again into new shapes every time the wind touched them.

She dreamt of maps that threaded through walls and came out on open water. In the dream, a white-hilted sword lay beside a stack of tangerines, and nothing about that felt unlikely.

Before sleep took her, she felt Zoro’s hand find hers under the blanket, a simple, anchoring weight. She squeezed once. He squeezed back.