Work Text:
They take stock in a moment of hard-fought calm: Sanji counts the food, while Nami counts her bruises.
Her ribs ache from the impact of the water. If she’d leapt from the merchant ship alone, she might have dove into the waves and spared her bones, but Sanji’s hand had been clenched to hers with what she now concedes as necessity. Alone, they might have lost each other in the black ocean and never been found again.
Her elbows are scraped, evidence of the hours spent clinging to the side of the wooden lifeboat as it bobbed, passenger-less, still bound to its doomed mother ship. The storm had come on so fast that the crew had barely managed to lower the craft before a wave swept them off the opposite side of the boat. Nami and Sanji—the only guests on the voyage—had been saved by her quarterstaff, jammed beneath the gunwale at the last possible moment. The manoeuvre nearly wrenched Nami’s shoulders from their sockets, but it kept them aboard long enough to make a more calculated escape.
There are burns on her palms from holding the heavy rope of the lifeboat taut against the wrenching of the sea, and a knick across two knuckles where Sanji’s knife slipped as he hacked them loose from the sinking ship. She can’t fault his dexterity or his knife’s sharpness—the hemp was slick with stormy spray and fought them both—but he still apologised the moment the wind began to die, offering to kiss her fingers and her pain away even as the ocean roiled beneath them still. Ridiculous.
She can’t tell how many bruises Sanji hides beneath his button-down and black slacks, or the jacket in his lap, somehow annoyingly unwrinkled despite the terror they’ve just lived through. But he bends without complaint, counting parcels of waterlogged provisions with his tongue between his teeth, so she figures he must be alright.
Sanji’s final tally, excluding anything that’s been ruined by seawater or lost to the waves: three stacks of hardtack wrapped in brown paper, twenty-four strips of dried white fish, a small burlap bag of assorted nuts, and six bottles of water. It’s not much, but it should be enough to last till the Going Merry finds them. The merchant ship had been only a couple days out from their rendezvous with Luffy when the storm hit. Their lifeboat has two paddles, meant more for short distance travel than traversing the open ocean, but once night falls and she can see the stars they can start rowing in the right direction. She can’t spy any land at the moment, but it must be just over the horizon.
They’ll be there. She knows they will be. Nami doesn’t trust Zoro to hold a sea chart rightway up, but she left Usopp with detailed instructions on which East Blue islands to cut a course for. Nami doesn’t trust Luffy to keep any kind of schedule, but she knows his stomach will bring him chasing after Sanji before too long. Put together, they’re not exactly a crew of geniuses, but she trusts them to remember what’s important when it counts.
With the next plan of action solid in her mind, Nami asks Sanji to divide up the rations, fifty-fifty, so that they know how much they each have. He harrumphs, then slips a pack of waterproof matches from his pocket and lights a cigarette. The briny scent of the ocean mingles with tobacco and turpentine. Nami wrinkles her nose.
“I’m the cook,” Sanji says, flicking a bit of ash into the clear water. “This is my job. You don’t need to worry one beautiful hair about it, Nami. I’ll make sure the food lasts.” His teeth clench around the cigarette, grin wolfish as he eyes her across the boat. She rolls her eyes, but leaves him to his work as she settles down for a much-needed nap. So long as he doesn’t interfere with her navigation, she won’t trouble him about his domain.
Nami wakes with the coolness of the night breeze ruffling her hair, rocking in the cradle of the lifeboat’s narrow hull. She slept well—better than she should have after the day’s events. Maybe a different person would be mourning all those sailors who were swept away by the waves or carried to the ocean floor by the whirlpool of the merchant ship’s demise, but she’s seen enough death to numb herself when necessary. She can’t spend all her life grieving. The ocean is dangerous and people die every day, but she is still alive, and the names of those who aren’t will be remembered by someone with fewer tragedies to carry.
Sanji has barely moved since she fell asleep. His arm still hangs over the side of the boat, trailing the butt of his latest cigarette above the gentle waves. There’s little left to raise to his lips, but he does so anyway, the orange glow so close to his paper skin that it seems he might catch fire. From what she’s pried from Zoro in the last few weeks—mostly in the form of dismissive barbs—their newly-acquired cook had never left Baratie once in his adult life. He’s so pale. His face hasn’t felt the sun, the weather. She wonders, not for the first time, how someone so unseasoned will learn to bear this life.
“Here,” Sanji says when he notices her sitting up, holding out a piece of fish and a water bottle. She takes the jerky and sticks the leathery tail in her mouth. It’s stale, but palatable. As she gnaws at the strip her stomach reawakens, along with her thirst. She opens the bottle and chases the jerky down with slightly metallic water. Her tongue still tastes of salt, but she doesn’t dare waste a single swallow of the precious water by spitting into the ocean. When she’s done the bottle is half-finished, and Sanji has returned to staring at the blank horizon.
“What about you?” she asks, eying his empty hands.
“I had mine while you were asleep.” Again, he grins, but with his head turned towards the water his eyes are shaded, inscrutable. “Our first dinner date should be in a finer place than this. I intend to make a good impression.”
His flirting is beginning to wear on her in a way it usually doesn’t, small pinpricks of annoyance chafing like the dried salt beneath her shirt. All his romantic bluster felt somehow muted on the Going Merry beside Luffy’s energy, Usopp’s boastfulness, Zoro’s intensity, but alone in the middle of the ocean it’s too insistent, too much. Can’t he put aside the suave performance for a moment, be serious when seriousness is needed? She doesn’t need a lovesick admirer: she needs another pair of strong hands.
“Time to work,” she says shortly as she tosses him an oar. He takes the paddle with no small degree of reluctance, but she ignores his dubious expression and holds the flat of her palm to the line of faint stars above. Once she has her bearings she turns them towards the line of blue against blue, and Sanji’s heavy breathing soon drowns any comment he might have made about her hair in the moonlight. She basks in the silence from her perch on the front seat, looking forward to the sight of land that awaits at the end of the night’s labours.
The morning light breaks over the horizon, and all that remains before them is blue.
It isn’t an immediate cause for alarm. Maybe they didn’t paddle as fast as she expected. Maybe the storm blew their ship farther off course than she realised. She hasn’t had a chance yet to make her own sea chart for this region, relying instead on maps from stolen Marine logbooks, and any one of those hastily copied pages could have been inaccurate. They’ll just have to try again the next night.
Sanji, to his credit, doesn’t question her competence despite the setback. Instead he offers her reassurances, and a piece of biscuit hard enough to break her teeth. He’s asleep before she manages to gnaw off a single corner, too exhausted to eat his own ration. Her body aches for rest as well, but she stays awake with the rising sun, watching for ram horns and worrying the hardtack down to nothing.
The next day’s progress is similarly disappointing, and the next as well. If she wasn’t so certain of her own knowledge of the stars, she’d think they’d gone in a circle. There are no landmarks to judge their progress, not even a swamp of floating seaweed or the swirl of a strong current. There is nothing but water: dangerous, seductive, undrinkable water. They’ve been careful with their bottles, but their freshwater is dwindling fast. There’s food to spare, but thirst will take them far quicker than starvation. Sanji tries to keep her spirits up, cheerful to the point of absurdity, but even his sunny smiles and endless anecdotes about the kitchen politics at Baratie can’t keep her mind off the shrinking supply between their feet.
Their meagre provisions are stacked in careful rows beneath the two benches that serve both as rowing perches and as unofficial division between their respective sides of the boat. They stay in their own spaces—or at least, they do now. On the first day of their journey, Nami had slipped while trying to stand and stretch and Sanji had thrown himself forward to steady her—force of habit—and nearly capsized the lifeboat in the process. Her yelps and angry reprimands—force of habit—reminded Sanji that she could find her own footing, and neither has crossed the invisible line since.
When they reach the fifth day and the water is all but gone, even Sanji’s chatter abates. He grows quiet, save the spare sweetened remark that he throws her direction as proof the most grating aspects of his personality will survive any predicament. Moisture is too precious to waste on idle words. Her mouth aches. She barely speaks, which leaves nothing to do but think.
Luffy must have reached the rendezvous islands by now. He probably would have gone asking at the port to see if Sanji and Nami had arrived. The port authority would have told him that their boat never came in. Usopp would panic about hungry sea kings, and Zoro would add another few furrows to his brow, and Luffy would laugh and say that he was sure nothing too bad could have happened to them because in his world, nothing bad ever happens until the problem is pointing a pistol in his face.
But even with Luffy’s optimism, they wouldn’t just give up the search, she’s sure of it. The Going Merry must already be back at sea, hunting for traces of the merchant ship. Maybe they’re rounding the group of islands now. Maybe they’ve finished their circumnavigation and have ventured into deeper water. Maybe they’re right over the horizon, ready to sweep in for a dramatic rescue just as Nami and Sanji are about to expire, and Nami will lift her weak head and meet Luffy’s grin with a relieved, tearful smile.
I’m glad you found us. I’m so glad—
Maybe it will be too late.
Nami knows that the bad doesn’t need to stare you in the face to kill you. The worst things live in the corner of your eye, hunting you at your weakest, mocking your will to survive. Not everything has a poetic ending. Sometimes your luck just runs out.
She drains her last bottle and lays down. Sanji says something to her, too soft for her ears to catch. His voice, cracked from smoke and disuse, is almost hesitant, and that’s enough to peak her interest but raising her head again feels like too much effort. If it was Luffy’s voice, she’d summon the strength.
Luffy...
In her dreams, she sees him on the cliff of Coco Village. Head bare, Luffy turns to her and smiles, then takes a step back. Her throat is too dry to scream as he drops off the rock and out of sight. The waves batter the shore, the ocean dragging the village out into the surf along with her, pulling her towards the empty blue where her ship disappeared and left her to hold herself together, alone.
She startles awake to the patter of rain against her cheek, soft and warm as tears.
***
They drink hungrily, mouths open to the dark sky, each swallow bringing life back into slowed veins and dull eyes. After those first few desperate minutes, Sanji laughs and points at the shallow freshwater lake around their knees, and they gather handfuls of water from the bottom of the boat and drink again and again and again. Sanji’s eyes meet hers as they both pause to gulp a little air between mouthfuls. His head is only inches away, the closest they’ve been since they carved out their own halves of the boat, and the startled expression on his sodden face is so undignified that she breaks her own commandment: she grins and throws her arms around him. He freezes in her grasp, like a dog confused to find the cat’s purr instead of claws, but soon enough he’s clinging to her twice as tightly, laughing with relief as the rain soaks them both.
The shower lasts only a short time. The clouds roll back as quickly as they came and leave stars and a deep indigo sky in their wake. Sanji and Nami fill their bottles from what remains in the bottom of the boat, but one of hers still has a little space at the top when the boards run dry. Unwilling to waste even a drop of precious water, she holds the bottle between her knees and peels off her shirt. Nami wrings the wet cotton into the mouth of the bottle and ignores the shiver of revulsion at the thought of drinking her own sweat. Even a swallow of water could be the difference between life and death, and she’s certainly imbibed worse in the name of survival.
As she hangs the shirt over the edge of the boat to dry, she waits for Sanji’s comments to start rolling in. He’s been in a good mood since their watery deliverance and he’s certainly never wasted an opportunity to admire before, even when all there was to oggle was a low-cut top or a pretty skirt. His appreciation is unending and unashamed, embarrassing but ultimately harmless. She prefers his loud pronouncements and adoring gaze to the subtle leers of Arlong’s men: the hungry eyes that followed her when she was finally permitted to her leave her room and join the other pirates in the courtyard, the whistles that greeted her at the door and saluted her as she left, the unsaid words that crawled along her spine and sent nervous shivers through her scalp. Arlong was too possessive to let his men touch her, but she still watched her back constantly, wary of a silent approach and a knife at her throat. She doesn’t worry about that anymore. Sanji is always in front of her, so she always knows where he stands.
Nami crosses her arms over her chest, wondering at Sanji’s odd silence. She expected him to be more brazen. Her bra is definitely cute enough to admire: something black and lacy she picked up from the market during their trip. It’s true that they’d mostly gone for the sea charts of the areas surrounding the Grand Line (with Sanji her insistent chaperone on what, she reminded him many times on the voyage, could have been a one-person errand) but there was no reason not to get a few nice outfits before venturing out into the unknown. It still feels strange to spend money on herself, to not feel guilty over it. She’s getting used to the freedom. Maybe she even feels like showing off a little. Nami puffs out her chest and looks to see if Sanji notices.
He’s not looking at her. If he’s realised her state of undress, he doesn’t show it. His eyes are fixed on something in his lap: a roll of brown paper. Forgetting her posture, she leans forward to see what he’s holding.
It’s one of the packages of hardtack. The paper is dark in his hands, completely soaked through with rainwater, and her breath catches in her throat. All our food, it was on the floor of the boat...
Sanji smiles at last, holding up the bundle and shaking it cheerfully. The biscuits slump around in the packaging, heavy with moisture. “Shall we have a little feast, to celebrate living another day?”
The biscuits won’t keep—not soaked, not out in the sun. What could have lasted them weeks will have to be eaten now, before it spoils. The lightness in her chest dies as the reality of their situation sinks back in at once.
Today’s rain will only keep them alive long enough to starve to death.
***
The moisture makes the hardtack more easily edible, but the food still sits like iron bearings in Nami’s stomach. After nearly a week of subsisting on only a round of the stuff and a few slices of fish a day, eating three pieces in a row feels like gorging herself. Her stomach cramps, but she swallows back the nausea and forces herself to finish the last piece in her hands. If she throws up now, everything will be wasted.
Sanji looks equally green when he brings his own biscuit to his lips. This is the first time she’s seen him eat any of it. Honestly, this is the first time she’s seen him eat anything that isn’t gourmet. After a life of fine dining, with rich and decadent food at his fingertips every moment of the day, the meanness of the dish must be off-putting. He takes a small bite and winces, as though the flavour offends him. His next bite is just as ginger and something sour turns in Nami’s stomach that has nothing to do with the heavy hardtack. Oh, to live a life where you can be choosy with your food, where you can refuse if the meal doesn’t suit your palate. She knows the thought is unkind—she’s sure the years at Baratie couldn’t have all been wine and leisure—but bitter jealousy still curdles in her gut as she watches him choke down his first piece.
If he had turned up his nose at a second, she might have lashed out, but as he swallows and picks up the next piece of hardtack, something seems to shift behind his eyes. He crams the whole thing in his mouth in one bite, breathing out through his nose like a frightened bull while he chews. He’s not even finished with the piece before the next is in his mouth, and then another. He’s reaching for a fifth when she grabs his wrist.
“Slow down,” she snaps, glaring to mask her alarm. “You’re going to make yourself sick, and I’m not cleaning up after you.”
His breathing doesn’t slow—it stops. His eyes snap to her hand, then to the nearly-empty package in his lap. She tries to catch his eye, to see what the hell is going on in his head, but he turns away, avoiding her glance as he carefully pulls his hand back from hers and starts to wrap the remaining hardtack with shaking hands. His hair falls across his face as he hunches over the food, but what she glimpses of his expression is wracked with guilt.
Part of her heart, the part that wants to be as capable of kindness as someone like Luffy, aches to reassure Sanji that he’s done nothing wrong. He’s just hungry. Maybe he’s never known what that feeling is, not the real kind. Not the desperate, ravenous hunger born of long days at sea with no coins in your pocket for even a crust of bread. Not the hunger that keeps a small body awake at night, trying not to wake a sleeping sister with the rumbling noise. Not the hunger that makes you lose your mind in small pieces until nothing remains but the emptiness in your stomach and the willingness to steal anything, betray anyone to fill it. The other, more practical side of her heart reminds her that survival outweighs sentiment. He shouldn’t have eaten that much without thinking. He should have had more self-control. He’s in charge of their food, and for the first time, she’s wondering if it was wise to trust him with that responsibility.
Conflicted, she says nothing, and the silence between them grows until Sanji mutters a rough apology and slinks back to his side of the boat, out of arm’s reach. He leaves the rest of the package on Nami’s seat, an offering that does nothing to soothe her unsettled mind.
She lays down and tries to rest, but thoughts keep coming in reckless waves. The tranquil sleep of her first night on the lifeboat is long gone: every creak in the wood sounds like a leak about to spring, every tap of Sanji’s foot the fin of a shark knocking their hull. She plans a dozen routes that the Going Merry might take to find them, pretending Usopp can hear her instructions from wherever he is if she thinks hard enough. She counts the number of miles that two people in a rowboat can travel in six days and compares that to the distance to the nearest island on her charts. She wonders if they have six days before they run out of energy to paddle. She isn’t sure, because Sanji was the one counting the food. The thought repeats in intervals, interrupting her other worries, nagging her with the insistence of a splinter in her foot. She can account for every other variable, but the only one that matters—the number of days between life and death—she’s trusted to Sanji’s hands.
And she trusts him... she does trust him. He’s been in charge of their food supplies since he joined their little crew a few weeks back and he’s very good at the job. At least, he’s very good about letting them know when they’re eating too much, or when they need to restock, or when there’s simply nothing left to go around. Yet somehow, even when the cupboards are empty for Zoro and Usopp and especially for Luffy, he always seems to have a treat saved for her: a little dish of sugared strawberries, an egg salad sandwich cut into triangles, a bowl of steaming hot stew on a cold night. The gestures struck her as sweet, if naive—surely he must see by now that though she won’t turn down a gift, that doesn’t mean she’ll give him anything in return—but now she can’t help wondering where that food came from. When he said the cupboards were bare, she believed him (partly because she always checked for herself), but he must have been keeping a stash somewhere else on the ship. Enough to make little treats for Nami.
Enough to have an extra bite himself?
Nami gives up on sleep near dawn. She sits up, eyes bleary from exhaustion. Sanji is curled against the bulkhead, arms wrapped around the jacket he’s bundled up into a makeshift pillow to hug. His shirt is beginning to show the wear and tear of the journey, wrinkled and salt-stained at last. The stubble on his chin now extends from ear to ear. In the cool blue twilight he looks unkempt, unfamiliar. And after all, he is—unfamiliar, that is. The newest of their little crew, the last to step into their circle of friends. She left the Going Merry to find Arlong, and when she returned he already had a bed and a job and a special place in the crew she’d left behind.
Why did Luffy choose you? The sour waiter with the winning smile, what made you shine in his eyes?
She doesn’t know. She wasn’t there.
Carefully, Nami steals to the centre of the boat. She just wants one look. One quick look, to set her mind at ease. She’ll count what they have left, make sure that nothing unexpected is missing. She knows what she’s eaten, and if Sanji is honest he would have eaten the same amount. The math should be simple. Just a few quick calculations to soothe her worries. She’d promised herself that that part of her life was behind her and she meant it. She doesn’t have to watch her back with Luffy’s crew—they watch hers. It feels treasonous to doubt any one of them and that’s why she has to do this: to stop having treasonous thoughts. To reassure herself of what she already knows. Sanji is one of them, and he cares about her. She doesn’t need to know all of Luffy’s reasoning to be sure of that.
They’ve already eaten one roll of hardtack between them in the last week. The remains of the second package still sits untouched on Nami’s bench. That just leaves the third to check.
She pulls apart the wrappings around the last untouched roll of hardtack, stomach swooping in anticipation of promised relief. It feels heavy in her hands: comfortingly heavy. That’s a good sign. If it’s all there, then she’ll just have to check the fish and the nuts, and then—
The packet spills open on the floor of the boat. Waterlogged biscuits tumble over each other into a small, haphazard pile.
She doesn’t need to count to see that half the packet is missing.
***
The next morning, Sanji is back to his typical cheerful self, whistling and humming as though the rain and the ruined food never happened. Watching him now, it’s so easy to see the chinks in his performance: the quake in his hands, the twitch in his eye. He comes across so polished, so refined, but everyone puts up an act. Everyone has something to hide.
It’s not surprising that the men wouldn’t have noticed. Luffy loves everyone. Usopp follows Luffy’s lead. Zoro is suspicious by nature, but his animosity towards Sanji is born of machismo, not any sense of real threat. For them, enemies are something to be fought head on, to be defeated by strength or daring. Nobody taught them how to live alongside what wants to destroy you, the subtler strength it takes to love a lie wholeheartedly, how to be quiet and compliant and work for your escape.
She finds a space beneath the gunwale and carves a notch with her pocket knife while Sanji snores the day away. The notch becomes a score, then a shallow pocket. She leaves just enough wood to keep the vessel seaworthy. Not as sturdy as it was, but it’s not like it really matters; they’ll starve long before the ocean wears the thin barrier through.
The nuts are the easiest, so she starts there. The burlap bag is definitely lighter than it should be, which helps tamp down the guilt as she takes her gleanings: a few walnuts and peanuts, nothing with noisy shells. She eyes Sanji warily as her fingers dip into the little bag, watching the rise and fall of his shoulders, the stillness of his head. He’s vulnerable under her gaze and that makes her gut ache with misplaced shame, but she reminds herself that stealth is always her best advantage. She won’t start a confrontation with someone strong enough to simply take the rest of the food from her. If he commandeered it all to his side of the boat, what could she do? And it’s not like she can live without sleep herself; it will be her turn to be vulnerable soon enough. It’s better to lift a little here and there, insurance against the worst case scenario. You take what you can, when you can, and she still wants to believe Sanji is good at heart but she knows that instinct, to take, too well. Even if his care for her is genuine, hunger will win out in the end. He’ll forget his courtesy, the simpering acquiescence, tripping over his feet to serve her the best portion. She has to take first.
Nami risks a little of the fish the next night, shaving off thin slices from the few remaining strips of jerky and adding them to her cache of nuts. The hardtack she leaves alone: too easily countable. If she noticed Sanji’s filching, he might notice hers.
She has to force herself to act unconcerned during the times they’re both awake. Her eyes are drawn incessantly to the tiny stack of provisions on the floor between them. Has something been disturbed? Has he taken more since the last time she checked? How much can she ferret away before he senses her theft? She holds her breath when he opens the package of jerky, counting the strips with a thin whistle of disappointment through his teeth. His smile is pinched when he offers her the day’s portion. “We’ll have to be a little lean from now on, I’m afraid,” he says, as apologetic as if they’d only now begun rationing, and the effort not to snap at his hypocrisy is staggering. She takes the half strip he offers and chews slowly, tapping the hollow space where her stash lies every so often to remind herself that it’s there, that as long as it’s there she will not starve no matter what Sanji decides to do with the rest.
He doesn’t join her in the meal, preferring as always to eat his own portion while Nami is asleep. She curses herself for not recognizing the ruse earlier—of course he won’t eat in front of her, not if he’s taking more than his fair share. And Nami, silly trusting girl that she’s become, accepted it without question. He grew up in a goddamn restaurant, how could he not be ravenous? How could he never once complain about his hunger, or eye her food longingly? He barely even looks at her anymore. He just smokes his cigarettes, pulled from an endless supply of white boxes, and watches the waves. Thinner than he was, much thinner, but perfectly at ease. Calm. Not exactly the image of a starving man. Nothing like how she feels: like her brain is skittering away from her on ant legs, like the sky is too bright and the ocean is too dark, like she needs to sleep for a hundred years and like her heart will stop if she closes her eyes.
In the half-dream haze that now substitutes for rest, she curls up facing her hollow stash, tracing the wood with a finger and reminding herself of all the reasons she needs to stay alive—why she can’t just surrender to the fatigue plaguing every unfed muscle in her body. Luffy will be sad, and Zoro and Usopp too, and people die at sea but she doesn’t want to add a tragedy to someone else’s shoulders. She knows how hard it is to carry her own. And Nojiko.... she can’t leave Nojiko either, or anyone else in Coco Village. How much berry does she still need? Was it four million? Five? How much did she get from the Gecko Islands?
Coins drift in front of her eyes, shimmering like goldfish scales, slipping between her fingers before she can count them. She reaches out to try and pull them back and bangs her knuckles against the side of the boat. The sudden pain clears the disorientation for long enough to remember that the coins aren’t here. They’re buried in a grave, and she needs to get back to it, because Arlong is waiting... There's something wrong with the thought, something she’s forgetting, but it drifts out of her grasp too as her eyes fall closed again.
She opens them to find a shadow draped over her. She’s shaking—no, something is shaking her . There are hands on her shoulders, holding her down, and her quarterstaff strikes out with the reserve power of adrenaline and eight years of trained instinct. Sanji falls away, yelping as his back hits the second bench. She’s on her knees, panting, holding the quarterstaff as a barrier between them. He raises his hands. His lip is split. Red glistens on his chin.
“I- you were cr- talking, in your sleep. I just wanted to make sure you were alright,” Sanji stammers out. To her horror, Nami sees flecks of tears gathering in the corner of his crusted lashes, but she holds her quarterstaff steady. She can’t afford sympathy, not anymore.
Zoro asked her once, both wine-tipsy in the Going Merry’s hold, how she knew which people were the right targets for her schemes. I had my bounties. Made things simple. Your face is on a poster, you’re fair game. How’d you choose? The simple answer is that she didn’t. The world was made up of two categories: family and everyone else. Yes, she had some standards—she wouldn’t steal from a child, or someone obviously in need themselves, but the rest? Coin purses with faces. It was just a matter of picking the ones who looked the heaviest. If you stood between her and her village’s rescue, you were an enemy. Enemies don’t need apologies.
There are only two choices: either Sanji is family, or he’s an enemy.
Nami slowly lowers her quarterstaff. “I’m fine,” she mutters. “Just a bad dream.”
Sanji breaths out, putting his hands down as well. He sits for a long moment in the no man’s land between the seats. His eyes are still shining, asking her for something. Comfort, maybe? It doesn’t matter. She has nothing to give.
This time, Nami is the one who looks away.
***
Five more days pass, or six, or seven. There is no more rowing. Nami barely has the energy to sit up, let alone move her arms for hours each night. She still checks their heading periodically, using the oar as a rudder to keep their nose in the right direction, but it’s a pointless effort. They’re at the mercy of the ocean currents now. Wherever the sea takes them is their destination. Who knows, maybe their bones will wash up in a port someday and Luffy will have one more buried treasure to find. Nami giggles at the thought, inexplicably giddy, and Sanji perks up at the sound. He drops his chin again at Nami’s withering glare. Being cruel, she’s relearning, requires far less energy than kindness. She slips back into the old habit like a warm blanket, pulling it around herself as she huddles to her own side of the boat. She’s dying. She doesn’t have to waste her last bit of strength sparing Sanji’s feelings. If there was ever a time to be selfish, she’s earned it now.
“Nami...” Sanji says hoarsely. She turns her head. She knows what he’s going to say. She knows because she saw the empty wrappings last night when she went to take a final gleaning. The food is gone. All of it. Her own stash too: what took her days and days to gather eaten in an instant of breathless weakness, each walnut and sliver of fish swallowed without chewing, without tasting, as though her body knew this was the last it would get and was desperate to prolong the brief feeling of fullness. She hates herself for her weakness. She hates herself for taking and not even having the decency to spend what she got wisely.
“Nami, we should talk. There’s–”
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Nami hisses. Sanji flinches back from the venom in her voice and she feels grimly satisfied. We? He still talks like this is a problem they’re solving together. No. They haven’t been we in over a week.
She finally turns her head to stare at him. He’s leaning forward, hands clenched in the lump of a jacket balled in his lap, sunken eyes full of desperation, and the helpless rage inside her rears up and snaps like a whip. Why should she hate herself for anything, when he’s the one who took first? She didn’t want to be this person again. She didn’t want to weigh her own survival against another person’s. She didn’t want to steal and hurt and claw her way over a heap of bodies just as desperate as hers. If they had to die, she wanted to die together as friends, not enemies.
She doesn’t hate him for stealing what he needed to survive. She hates him for making her do the same.
She’s leaping over the benches before she knows she’s moved, knees hitting the boards with jarring impact as she topples Sanji onto his back, the hilt of her quarterstaff to his throat. Sanji gasps beneath her, too weak to struggle, or maybe he’s still holding back out of courtesy. He’d never hit a lady, right? Only steal from her mouth. There’s more than one kind of violence. She’ll take the bruising type every time.
“Fight back,” she snarls. Sanji’s mouth tries to move, wheezing the shape of choked words, but his legs stay perfectly still between hers. “If you want to live, then don’t be a coward about it! Don’t pretend you’re not fighting to survive!” He doesn’t move, doesn’t grab at her quarterstaff or try to throw her off even though her arms are starting to shake with the effort of pressing down. “All your nobility’s an act, right? You’re not better than everyone else. If it’s between dying and hurting a woman, you’d do it. So do it.”
Sanji is shaking his head but he’s still not fighting back and hot, angry tears flood her eyes. She lifts her arm to wipe them away and Sanji coughs out a word as the pressure on his throat eases.
“N-never—”
“ Liar,” Nami spits, forgetting her tears as she slams the rod back down. “You thought I wouldn’t notice? Thought you could beat a thief at her own game? I know what you—”
Something brushes the inside of her leg and she flinches, jerking back at the unexpected pressure of fabric against her thigh. Her chest flashes electric with fear and exhilaration: this is it. Sanji is finally fighting back. His legs have the power to level walls; her own strength is no match. She braces herself to be thrown, instinctually glancing down between their bodies to find the first source of threat and—
Sanji hasn’t moved. Only his jacket has, unravelling from its ball and slumping against her leg with unexpected weight. There’s something caught in the sleeve, a bit of brown peeking out from the black fabric. As she stares, she starts to notice the fallen white boxes scattered on the boards around Sanji’s hips. Her brain takes a long moment to piece together what they are: cigarette cartons. One of them is open, but she doesn’t see any cigarettes inside. Instead, the box is filled with little brown dots in oblong shapes: some cracked, some shattered, some still in their shells.
Nuts.
Nami drops her quarterstaff and grabs the jacket. Her fingers find the sleeve and she jerks it inside out and more cartons fall into Sanji’s lap, along with a crumpled brown package tied roughly with familiar twine. She tugs and the paper falls open in her hands. Nami watches mutely as hard biscuits tumble through her fingers, eight or nine of them. Almost half a package.
Almost everything that was missing.
“What is this?” she whispers. Sanji starts to sit up, rubbing at his throat, and Nami scrambles backwards until her back hits the bench. “What is this?” She picks up a piece of hardtack, fingers gripping its weight so tightly she’s afraid she might shatter it, this precious food that should not exist. Because Sanji took the food. Sanji took it, and he ate it, and—
“It’s for you.” Sanji says, and his eyes are too bright for the life that she’d almost squeezed out of them, shining with a relief that borders on wild. “For you, Nami.”
She can’t stop shaking. She puts down the hardtack and picks up a cigarette box, fumbles three times before she manages to slide the tray out. More nuts. The next one she picks up has two pieces of jerky folded over and crammed inside. There are still more boxes. Boxes and boxes and boxes.
“Why?” she chokes out. It’s not a question of intentions. Her confusion is more complete than that.
Why does this food exist? Why is it here?
“It’s everything I managed to save. For now—for this moment. For when there’s nothing left.”
Calculations roil in Nami’s mind, all her counts overlapping into a cacophony of numbers. She can’t remember what she figured out a week ago: how much food Sanji had taken, how much they would have had left if he didn’t. But there’s too much here. Too much for Sanji to have eaten his portion and saved some on the side.
She doesn’t understand. And Sanji is still talking at her like she does, like everything is clear and easy now, like he’d saved up every held-back word over the last week for this moment of long-awaited release.
“It’s alright, Nami, you can take it. I won’t stop you.”
Stop... me?
“What?” she breathes.
What?
“I’m just glad you went with your staff and not a knife,” Sanji says, grinning sheepishly like they’re sharing an inside joke, only it’s one Nami’s never heard. “You’d have done a lot more damage than a scrawny kid like me would have. Though I guess I never managed to get that far, did I?”
She fights through the haze of confusion, trying to make sense of words that don’t fit into a coherent picture. Maybe it’s the fog of starvation, but Sanji’s speech is starting to run together as much as the numbers. She focuses on what’s in front of her: the food. So much food. So much food, and he didn’t eat it, it's here, and he wants her to—to take it.
“Sanji,” she whispers. “Why is there still food left?”
His smile falters for a moment, confusion cracking through his sure expression for just a moment. His dark, deep-set eyes blink at her, and now that she’s on Sanji’s side of the boat for the first time she can truly see how gaunt he’s become. “I- I saved it. So when you came looking for what was left, there’d be something to find. I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”
When she came looking.
When she decided to steal. To steal the food that Sanji hadn’t stolen. That he’d been saving.
For her.
Hot shame floods the back of her throat. All her paranoia, all her fear feels cheap in the wake of Sanji’s revelation. Did he know all along that this was who she was? That this is who she becomes when times get desperate? A thief, always a thief, always a lying fucking thief who steals from the people she loves when she’s afraid—
“You aren’t,” Sanji says, and he’s kneeling in front of her now, his hands are on her hands, pressing a box of nuts into her hands, holding her fingers closed so firmly that she physically can’t let go of his offering. “I know you, Nami. You’re a good person.” The fingers around hers tighten and she flinches in his grip. Sanji quickly releases her hands and draws back. His cheeks are flushed—impassioned or embarrassed, she can’t tell anymore. “It’s just the hunger. It makes you do things you don’t mean to, don’t want to—makes you hurt people.” Sanji’s fingers curl into his pant legs now, knuckles white against the dark fabric. “But now I know... it wasn’t me. It wasn’t you. It’s just the hunger. It’s just... hunger.” He shudders around the word, like he’s speaking the name of a fearsome god. “I’m glad you came after me, really—I am. Because if someone as good as you feels it too, then...” His eyes are asking for something from her again: not comfort this time. They’re pleading for an answer, for affirmation. For forgiveness.
“It wasn’t you,” she says, and his face breaks out in a starburst of relief, as though the weight of an unseen chain has fallen free from his neck. She doesn’t know what she’s granting forgiveness for, but he’s not the one who should be asking for it. “But it was me.” Sanji starts to shake his head, reaching forward again and she draws away from his hand before it can catch hers. “It was me, Sanji. I’m not the good person you think I am. Whatever sweet, innocent girl you always insist on protecting, she doesn’t exist. She’s not me.”
“I know you—”
“You don’t know me!” she says incredulously. “I don’t know you! We don’t know anything about each other! You just decided the day we met that I could do no wrong, without knowing who I am, even though I betrayed all of you a day later. Just like I—” Her voice chokes off. She doesn’t want to admit it. Doesn’t want to say what she’s done, but a defiant part of her refuses to let Sanji take the blame from her, to make her faultless in everything like he always does. She isn’t a child—she won’t hide a book behind her back and pretend innocence. She owns her mistakes. That’s who she is, now. “I stole. From our provisions. I took nuts and fish and I ate them while you were asleep.”
“I know.”
Nami freezes, reeling from the calm understanding in Sanji’s eyes, no hint of surprise in his expression. “You... know?”
“I’m the cook. It’s my job to keep track of the food,” he says simply. Everything is simple for him. All that’s happened is logical in his eyes and she still doesn’t understand anything. Every word he says pushes her deeper out to sea, leaving her scrambling for any mote of common ground.
“Then why didn’t you stop me?”
“Because it’s for you. It’s all for you. Whatever you want—whatever you need from me. It’s all yours.”
And that’s it. That’s enough. She finally puts the pieces together.
All those times Sanji said he would eat later, without her. Too much food scattered on the floor around them, more than what was missing.
It’s all yours.
It’s not just the missing food he was saving for her. It’s everything.
“You saved your rations,” she repeats, her voice gone quiet and dark, “for me.”
“Of course I did. Zeff sacrificed so much to keep me alive.” Zeff. The one-legged chef from the restaurant. Another story he never told her. Another history she doesn’t share. “I don’t know if I can, but I’d like to be as good a man as him.”
“By sacrificing yourself.”
“If only one of us could survive—”
“You decided it should be me?” The tears are all gone now, their heat replaced by a breathless cold in Nami’s chest.
“Yes?” He cocks his head at her question, as though his answer is the most obvious thing in the world—as though Nami is the silly one for not assuming the same.
“And if that’s not what I wanted?”
“Everyone wants to survive.” His dismissive tone lances through her, reigniting the fire of anger that guilt had snuffed. “There’s nothing worse than starving.”
“There is.” She fights to keep her voice steady as a flood of memories rushes through her mind. Something pops in her inner ear: the flash of a gun barrel going off— “There’s watching someone you care about die.” The thump of a body hitting the ground— “You were going to make me watch you die, Sanji?” Her own voice, small and terrified and screaming—
“Nam—”
“You thought I’d be ok with that? I would rather die. I would rather throw us both off this boat and let the sharks tear our guts out than go through that.” Again.
“If it’s between you or me, you’re the one who should live!”
“You don’t get to fucking decide that!”
For the first time since she leapt over the seats, Sanji’s eyes lose their fervent certainty, and Nami presses the wound.
“If this is the way it’s supposed to be, if you’re supposed to die and I’m supposed to live and that’s natural and that’s right, then why did you lie to me?” His mouth opens, but no answer comes out. “You could have just given me all the food on day one and curled up and died right then. So why did you hide it?”
“I—I didn’t want you to worry.” But even he seems unsure of his answer.
“Didn’t want me to worry? Or didn’t want me to argue?”
“Someone had to make the call—”
“Because you knew I would argue, right? I’m not some heartless asshole who’d let you die on my behalf. So you just took that choice away. Must feel good to be the hero,” she says, bitterness burning through the childish hurt she’d thought she’d left buried in her hometown. “You get to die on your own terms and everyone else remembers what an amazing, selfless person you were.” The money, use it for my daughters— “You made the call. You made the hard choice. But you’re not the only one who gets hurt.”
Sanji slaps the side of the gunwale, a burst of frustration so often directed towards Zoro, never directed towards her. Has she finally become human enough in his eyes to resent? “I’m not trying to be a hero. I’m repaying a debt. Do you know why Zeff doesn’t have a leg, Nami?” His voice roughens in the middle but Sanji presses forward. “Because he ate it. We were starving and he ate his own leg so that I would survive. If I could sacrifice half as much as he did for me, that’s all I could ask from my life.”
Nami swallows back the nausea at the image, too focused on the anguish in Sanji’s eyes. “And did you ask him to do that?”
“No,” Sanji says, immediate and vehement. “Of course not. He didn’t even tell me that he gave me all the food. I–I hated him.” Sanji winces—Nami can practically see him chastising himself for the admission. “I thought I hated him, until I realised what he’d done.”
“He lied to you.”
Sanji shakes his head desperately, looking at Nami with disbelief. “He saved me.”
“It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
Sanji swallows, hand still gripping the side of the boat. “So what if he lied? It was the right thing to do.” But even now she hears the flicker of uncertainty in his voice.
“You don’t have to defend Zeff to me. He’s not the one I’m angry at.” And Nami is still angry, undeniably so, but it’s easier to speak calmly when she finally has an inch of common ground to latch onto: a glimmer of something real and achingly familiar beneath Sanji’s romantic veneer.
Some fucked up families we had, huh.
Nami leans forward, making sure she has Sanji’s full attention. This is something she needs to say. “I never needed you to be my saviour. I’m not a child that you have to protect. But even if I was, what you did still wouldn’t be right. It doesn’t matter how old you are, everyone deserves to have a say in what happens to their life. And I’ve spent too much of mine with other people making decisions for me.”
In this moment, Sanji’s eyes are wide open: not lidded or winking or averted, but staring at her. Seeing her.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes, and she believes him.
Nami looks down at the box of nuts in her hands, then looks back up and throws it at Sanji’s chest, hard.
Startled, Sanji catches the first box but misses the second. The cardboard clips him in the chin and falls back into his lap. A peanut or two escape and bounce away beneath the gunwale, and Nami smiles. In a moment of pure, blissful clarity, she sees them for what they are: a man and woman trading blows in the bottom of a boat, starving to death while surrounded by food. It’s the punchline of a joke. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous.
Because they’re alive. Right now, they’re still alive.
Nami puts down the next box. Instead, she picks up a piece of hardtack from the floor and hands it to Sanji. He takes it without protest.
“Here,” she says. “Eat.” He hesitates only a moment, then bites down quickly under her sharp glare. “You’re going to need your strength.”
“Why?” he asks around a dry mouthful of crumbs.
“We’ve got a lot of rowing to do tomorrow.”
***
They’re sitting side by side on one of the benches, passing a bottle back and forth. It’s their last water, at least until the next rain comes, but there are still a few swallows left to share. The stars are bright and navigation is clear and easy, but for now, it’s time to rest. There’s no hurry—the food will last, or maybe it won’t. Whatever happens next, the moon is full and beautiful tonight, and Nami wants to watch it for a few minutes with someone by her side.
They first heard the gulls yesterday morning. Her hope is only a faint glimmer, but it’s hope nonetheless. If there are birds, land could be close by. It’s worth trying, at least.
Sanji picks up his paddle as she stows away the empty bottle. Their little ship is lighter day by day, and with the two of them rowing together on one bench, they cut through the water easily, nose piercing a line through each gentle swell towards the horizon. With a little food in him, Sanji’s breathing isn’t quite so heavy as it was at the start of their journey. She has her pair of strong hands at last.
The cries of the gulls are louder now—one very insistent gull far shriller than all the rest. She calls back to it, half-laughing at its frantic squawks.
“Ok! We hear you! We’re coming!”
“A little faster then?” Sanji asks, and Nami grins as she hefts her own paddle.
“Only if you can keep up.”
Their race is short-lived, over in seconds instead of minutes, but they’re both giggling and breathless as they finish splashing in circles. “Huh,” says Nami. Their ship has swung around and she can’t see the moon anymore. Actually, she can’t see much of the stars either. They’re blotted out by a dark shape on the horizon: broad sails, thin railings, and the feathery outline of what might be trees.
The seagull squawks, and squawks, and the shape of its voice is almost familiar. Nami thinks she catches words in the keening, desperate sound.
-mi!
-anji!
Nami!
Nami looks at Sanji. She doesn’t need to say a word. He dips his paddle in the water and pulls until they’re facing towards home.
They take off, rowing perfectly in unison, until they’re close enough to answer Usopp’s call.