Chapter Text
Nami wakes up.
She doesn’t remember falling asleep, so this is a surprise. She doesn’t remember being knocked out either.
She’s not in pain at all. It feels like she’s just laid down for a nap, except she still has all her clothes on and the floor under her is too wet for her to ever choose to sleep on it. Her long-sleeved white blouse is probably permanently stained. At least the cute skirt can be washed.
Cracking her eyes open, she sees trees stretching far above her, shading the sun so effectively there isn’t much underbrush.
Surprising. For some reason she thought she was indoors, even though there’s dirt on the ground and it smells like jungle.
It’s the weather, she realizes. The weather is odd. The trees reach for the open sky far above her, but aside from the spotty sunlight and a slight wind, the weather feels like it’s barely present. Like she’s under a roof.
How did she get here?
She stands up and looks around, but she’s never seen this place before in her life, and she can’t see any kind of trail.
Brushing most of the dirt off her clothes, she tries to think.
There was a man with a very long scarf, she remembers. He was causing trouble, and she and Luffy went to find him, and then… She can’t remember.
And now she’s here. Wherever here is.
Cautiously, she pulls out her Clima-Tact and gets ready, just in case. This is a jungle, and if she knows anything about jungles, it’s that where there’s trees, there’s animals. She has no idea what kinds of animals live here, but she’s willing to bet they’d like to eat her.
The ground she’s standing on has a slight slope to it. If she follows it downwards, she’ll most likely get to water. From there, it’ll be easier to navigate.
Squaring her shoulders and getting a good grip on her weapon, Nami starts walking.
The forest is remarkably vibrant. Mostly green, she sees glimpses of flowers in every colour far above, and every time she passes a clearing where the sun reaches the ground, she has to wade through a lake of bushes and herbs. The slope of the ground is nearly imperceptible at times, and steep enough she has to climb at others. Here and there, butterflies flutter by, and dragonflies and colourful beetles rest on tree trunks. She can hear the buzzing of insects, the wind through the leaves above and the creaking of wood.
After about twenty minutes, she reaches a river.
The river itself is not very treacherous, flowing slowly enough that she could probably swim along the shore without getting swept away. The large number of gigantic crocodiles is a little harder to deal with.
It would probably be better to follow the river at a distance, but before she can turn around, a shout draws her attention.
Three small shapes fall from above.
Three children, brandishing weapons and shouting, diving directly for the crocodiles.
She readies her Clima-Tact and crouches, ready to jump in at any time, but it doesn’t seem necessary.
They strike skilfully and devastatingly, three blows to the head of the largest crocodile, knocking it out instantly. They’re moving so fast she can barely keep her eyes on them, bouncing back and forth from crocodile back to crocodile back, whooping and laughing.
Then they land on the riverbank and start running downstream.
“Come on! Before it floats away!” one of them shouts.
The crocodile they knocked out has been taken by the current, she notices.
The kids run right past her. There’s three of them. The smallest one has a straw hat.
She takes off after them, recognition ringing in her ears. That kid looks way too familiar.
The tallest black-haired kid jumps into the water and grabs the crocodile’s tail, bracing against the river bottom. The blond one with the fancy coat jumps in a little further down and grabs the head.
“Got it!” he shouts.
“You push and I’ll pull,” the first one yells back.
The littlest kid with the straw hat stays on land. He’s bouncing almost literally, to the point where I feels like he should be making a boing sound, waving his arms in the air. “Croc for dinner! Croc for dinner!” he’s shouting.
It’s crazy. It’s so familiar she has to catch her breath, stopping a step behind and to the right of the kid. She knows that voice. She knows that hat.
Except that’s ridiculous.
The kid notices her and stops bouncing for a second, turns around and leans far back to look up at her past the brim of his hat.
Nami feels her heart stop.
That’s Luffy’s face. His black hair and wide-open eyes, his blankly curious expression. He’s much smaller and the scar under his eye looks almost new, but it’s him, no doubt about it.
“Hi, who’re you?” he asks.
She’s clutching the Clima-Tact so hard her fingers feel like they’ll break, but she tries to answer calmly.
“I’m Nami,” she says. “Who are you guys?”
The kid grins with his whole face. “Shishishi, I’m Luffy, and they’re Ace and Sabo,” tiny Luffy says. “We live here!”
Out here? In the jungle?
That would explain a few things about Luffy, except of course it explains nothing because it’s not possible, because Luffy is not a child, and neither are his brothers.
This must be a dream. She’s dreaming that she’s in a giant forest together with tiny versions of her captain and his brothers who are hunting giant crocodiles with metal pipes. She’s had crazier dreams.
Very few this realistic, though.
“Say,” she says, and then pauses. She wants to ask tiny Luffy how old he is, trying to figure out how far back in time the dream has sent her, but then she remembers that she’s… not actually sure how old he is in reality. Instead, she says, “Say, Luffy, do you know what year it is?”
“Eh?” he says, looking completely clueless. Of course. Then he turns back to the river and cups his hands over his mouth. “Hey Sabo! What year is it?”
By now, the tiny brothers have gotten the crocodile’s tail onto land. Tiny Ace is pulling on a leg, and tiny Sabo is up to his chest in water, pushing from the other side. He looks up when tiny Luffy shouts.
“What? Oh, fuck!” and then he goes under, slipping on a rock.
Nami drops her Clima-Tact and leaps over the crocodile after him, reaching out for the hem of his clothes as the river tries to take him.
“Gotcha,” she says, yanking him out of the water by a coattail and holding him to her chest to keep him steady, letting him cough water.
The crocodile has been caught by the current again, and is slowly being dragged towards her, into the river.
She grits her teeth, tightens her grip on the kid in her arms and puts her shoulder against it to start pushing. Nami might not be the kind of monster Zoro or Sanji are, but she’s a New World pirate all the same. She’s stronger than a couple kids.
The crocodile rolls onto land and stays there. Tiny Ace is gaping at her. Tiny Luffy is cheering.
“Uh. You can let me down now,” tiny Sabo says, still dangling from her arms.
She drops him on his ass in the shallows and he laughs.
“Thanks, lady! Who the hell are you?”
On dry ground, tiny Luffy picks up her Clima-Tact, curious fingers pocking at the orange stripes.
“Luffy! Put that down! That’s dangerous!” Nami yells.
“Huh?” Luffy looks up from fiddling with it.
Tiny Ace looks between her and tiny Luffy and the Clima-Tact in his hands. “Just put it down, idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot!” tiny Luffy says, holding it closer.
Nami vaults the crocodile and crouches down in front of him, hand out, her best anti-Luffy glare on her face. “Give. Now.”
He gulps and gives it to her.
“That just looks like a stick, though,” tiny Ace says, looking up at her.
“I’ll have you know it’s a very dangerous weapon.”
“U-huh,” little Ace says, injecting as much scepticism into the sound as humanly possible.
“Can I see?” little Luffy asks.
They’re all adorable children. Nami feels wrong-footed by the whole situation. Doesn’t know how to react.
She looks behind her at where little Sabo is wringing the water out of his coat. Just in time to see a shadow fall over him as the crocodile wakes up.
“Oh fuck, Sabo!” little Ace yells, rushing forwards.
Nami grabs him with one hand. With the other, she points the Clima-Tact.
A lance of supersonic wind crackling with electricity shoots straight through the crocodile’s head with a deafening crack and a burst of hot air.
The riverbank stills in awed silence, all three kids gaping.
“Whoaaa,” little Sabo breathes, his hair ruffled and his hat askew from the blast of air.
Little Ace takes a step back. “Okay, that was pretty cool. Where did you get that?”
“Again! Again! Again!” little Luffy shouts, jumping up and down.
Nami points the Clima-Tact at him, and he shuts right up again. “And that,” she says, “is why we don’t touch Nami’s Clima-Tact. Understand?”
All three boys nod rapidly, and she puts it back in its pocket.
“Do you, uh, wanna join us for dinner?” tiny Sabo asks, jabbing a thumb at the crocodile.
Does she?
She looks up at the sky, clearly visible over the river.
Whatever strange weather phenomenon she woke up to must have passed, because it feels mostly normal now. The wind and the temperature make sense together, and she can feel the edges of larger pressure systems moving around at the edge of her senses. It’s still very mild, but it’s there. She feels a little better with that.
So, she’s dreaming, stuck somewhere in an unknown forest in the past. She is a little hungry. Might as well stick with the captain, even if he’s small and incompetent like this.
“I’d love to,” she says.
Little Ace huffs, clearly not happy. “If you want to eat, you’ll help carry the crocodile.”
Rude brat. How can he expect that of her? She’s… an adult. The tallest person here. And a visitor. It’s actually perfectly reasonable to ask her to help carry something, even if it’s a giant crocodile.
And she doubts any of these kids will be easily bribed.
If only Sanji was here.
Nami sighs. “I guess that’s only fair.”
Together, they carry the giant beast into the forest.
---
The kids don’t have a proper kitchen, of course.
Nami isn’t sure what she expected, but they really do live in the woods. They have knives to help skin and gut the crocodile, but they don’t have countertops or a stove or even a roof to work under, and neither do they have spices or salt or a single vegetable.
What they have is a giant fire and a roasting spit made out of a small tree.
She mentions it, and little Sabo says, “Sometimes we’ll pick fruits and plants and stuff from the forest if we don’t have enough meat, but with a big catch like this, it’s best just to roast it.”
Which explains a lot about how Luffy got like he is.
Unless it’s a dream, which it is, in which case it can’t explain anything because she’s just imagining it all. It feels a little too realistic to be a dream, but that’s still more likely than it being real.
On the other hand, those samurai travelled forwards in time, so maybe travelling back isn’t impossible after all.
She’s not sure she wants to think about that.
The boys pronounce the crocodile done, and she gets a part. It’s bland and slightly burnt, but it’s not that bad.
Little Luffy sits right next to her and his brothers are sitting next to him, and she means ‘sitting’ in a very loose sense, because none of them know how to sit still.
They’re ridiculous. Devouring the crocodile, scrapping with each other over the best parts even though there’s more than enough for everyone, shouting and punching and kicking and rolling around on the ground pulling hair.
Every now and again they bump into her, and she can’t find it in herself to be angry. She can barely keep from laughing. They’re so cute it hurts.
In the end, the crocodile is reduced to bones and the kids are worn out and happy, resting on the ground.
“Hey, Nami,” tiny Luffy says. “Are you a pirate?”
“Not everyone’s a pirate, idiot,” little Ace says.
Luffy sits up, affronted. “But she’s really strong and she isn’t from here and not a marine, so she’s gotta be a pirate!”
Nami laughs. “How do you know I’m not a marine?”
The look he gives her is singularly disgusted.
She laughs harder. “Don’t worry, I am a pirate.”
“For real?”
Now all three of them are interested, sitting up and looking at her expectantly.
“Have you been to the Grand Line?” little Sabo asks.
Little Ace scoots a little closer. “Tell me.”
“Yeah!” little Luffy shouts. “Tell a story! A pirate story!”
“A pirate story, hmmm?” she hums.
By now, all three of them are sitting in front of her, almost vibrating with excitement. She couldn’t tell them no if she wanted to.
“Well, alright. What kind of pirate story do you want?”
“Something real,” Ace says.
“An adventure!” Luffy shouts.
“Something dramatic!” Sabo says. “And piratey! Like… Like fighting a thousand marines!”
“Hmm,” she says, thinking it over.
She doesn’t have to think hard to know which story fits those requirements, but something else is giving her pause.
A memory, of a much older Luffy than this, shouting that if he’s told where he’s going, he wouldn’t want to be a pirate, because that’d be a boring adventure.
If this is real, telling tiny Luffy now of the things he’ll experience in the future would be doing him a disservice. It might be the worst thing she could do to him.
On the other hand, this particular story probably isn’t one he’ll mind. He’d do it a thousand times over, after all, no matter what. Also, this is just a dream, so it doesn’t matter.
“Well, okay,” she says, and the boys settle even closer. “How about I tell you about that time our crewmate was arrested, and we had to fight a whole team of government special agents to get her back?”
The boys nod, excited.
Nami takes a deep breath. “Okay. We didn’t know it at the time, but our archaeologist had been chased by the government for a long time, because they were scared of the things she knew. She’d been very good at hiding from them, and had never been caught, until the day we landed at the beautiful city island Water Seven….”
As she tells the story, she finds herself admiring Usopp. She’s not a storyteller like he is. She frequently has to go back because she forgot to mention something, and she forgets to set the scene and doesn’t manage to make some parts seem as dramatic as they were. She also finds that there are large parts of that day she simply doesn’t remember, and she has to make something up on the spot so the story doesn’t fall apart.
She’s not very good, but the boys seem enraptured even so.
She tells them about what happened in Water Seven, leaving out most of what happened with Usopp and their turbulent first meeting with Franky. The eyes of her audience glitter as she gets onto the sea train, and keep shining as she gets into Enies Lobby.
Parts of the story, she skips over or avoids describing in detail, because they are kids, but also because she doesn’t want to dwell on it. They either don’t notice or don’t care.
By the time the story is over, the sun is on its way down, and between the trees, darkness falls rapidly.
In a whisper, little Ace says, “There’s no way in hell that thing with the boat actually happened.” His arms press tight around his knees and he’s watching her with wide eyes.
Little Luffy is on his stomach with his chin perched on his hands, and little Sabo has his legs crossed. They’re both watching with similar intensity.
“It did,” she says. “The sea is a mysterious place, and she was one of our crewmates too, you know. Don’t make fun of her.”
“…Sorry then,” he says. He doesn’t sound the least bit sorry, but he does sound like he understands.
Little Ace is so much ruder than the Ace she met once, she has a hard time believing they’re meant to be the same person.
“Tell another one!” Luffy begs.
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” she asks, glancing up at what’s visible of the sky.
“But Namiiii,” little Luffy whines, and he sounds so much like her Luffy it throws her.
Little Sabo frowns and looks up at the sky as well. “No, she has a point. We’d better get back before it’s too dark to see.”
“Is Nami coming?” little Luffy asks, still lying on the ground.
“Eh? I don’t know.” Little Sabo gets up and brushes off his clothes. “Do you have anywhere to go back to?”
“Ahh, not really.” She scratches the back of her head sheepishly. “If you kids could put me up for the night, I’d be really grateful.”
Little Ace shoots to his feet. “We’re not kids! And anyway you’re still a stranger. Why should we take you back to the treehouse where we sleep?”
“Eh? I promise I won’t hurt you or anything,” she says, putting a hand on her heart, but she doubts it’ll work. He’s not being paranoid, just perfectly reasonable for a boy in his situation.
As she expected, he just narrows his eyes.
“Come on, Ace,” Sabo says. “We can’t just leave her in the woods for the tigers.”
Tigers?
No no no, dream or not, please don’t leave her with the tigers.
“I don’t know,” Ace says. “She’s pretty strong, she can probably handle herself.”
“Hey Nami,” Luffy says, still on the ground. “If you come to the treehouse with us, will you tell another story?”
Oh, maybe they can be bribed.
She pretends to think about it for a second. “Well, I could probably tell you about how we almost lost a crewmember to another pirate crew in a Davy Back Fight.”
Little Sabo looks interested. “Those are real? Ace, come on.”
Little Ace looks interested too, his expression at war with itself. After several seconds of wavering between excited and suspicious, he points an angry finger at her and says, “Alright, but if you lay a hand on any of us or any of our stuff, we’ll destroy you, got it? You can’t beat all of us!”
Well, maybe not if they ambush her.
“Understood.” She salutes him.
Then they head back into the woods.
It’s pitch black between the trees, the sun too low in the sky to penetrate the thick foliage, and she stumbles several times as she follows the boys, who are clearly following a path they know by heart. The forest is waking up around her, making more noise than ever. Things are moving around just out of sight, and she thinks she can hear something much larger move in the distance.
The boys don’t take notice at all, just skip through the woods like they’re taking a walk in the garden.
She supposes they are, in a way. This is their garden.
Quite literally. For some reason, she doesn’t expect the treehouse to be what it is, a fortress of a crow’s nest, haphazardly constructed from random boards and bolts.
“Did you build this?” she asks as they scale the tree. The bark is rough enough that there’s no need for a ladder.
“Yup!” Luffy says. “We went independent! So now we live here.”
That probably means there’s someone out there still looking out for them, which is good.
“It’s very nice,” she says.
It’s not, but it’s skilfully made for something built by children, and she won’t have to worry about the floor falling out from under her. It’s too small for her to stand in, but more than good enough to lie down and sleep. The floor is covered in a random collection of blankets and pelts.
Luffy plops down on his butt right in front of her. “Now tell about the Backey Fight!”
“Davy Back Fight,” Sabo corrects him, hitting him ineffectually on the head. “Get it right.”
Ace doesn’t say anything, just sits down and looks at her intently.
She can take a hint.
Grabbing a blanket to throw around her shoulders, she dives into a slightly embellished tale about their fight against the Foxy Pirates.
It goes on a little longer than she intended, and little Luffy barely stays awake to hear about his own (name omitted) very abridged boxing match victory. He’s out like a light a second later, and his brothers follow soon after.
Nami stays awake for a while, blinking against her own exhaustion and the dark ceiling above.
She feels too tired for this to be a dream.
If it’s not a dream, then she’s really here, with a tiny Luffy and his tiny brothers, in a treehouse on an island somewhere in the East Blue, probably.
If she falls asleep here, she’ll probably wake up in the real world. If she doesn’t….
This is the strangest dream she’s ever had. She listens to the sounds of snoring children, and she thinks that even so, it’s one of her better ones.
She doesn’t want to wake up yet.
But she can’t stay here forever, and the real Luffy is probably going to need her soon.
She closes her eyes and lets sleep take her. When she wakes up, she’ll be back home.