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whirlybirdwhat · 5 years ago

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Daughter of the Sea, Daughter of the Storm (Pt 1)

The Viking Nami Au inspired by @onepiecehcs now fully written for your enjoyment. Two more pieces should be coming in the next two days as well! Enjoy!

Ao3 for better quality!

Nami doesn’t know this, but she was born on the coldest night of the year, in the eye of a storm. She doesn’t know this, because her mother (unnamed and unknown save for the roaring thunder above) dies three days later due to the struggles of childbirth.

Nami survives, because her father places her wicker basket in the midst of a battle (a slaughter) where another young girl, hair like blueberries, picks her up. Nami is born from blood and storm, and brought into battle and sisterhood.

(Nojiko won’t let her go.)

In this battle, a lightning strike watching over head, a woman finds her. The woman, Bell-mere, does not care for the lightning marks running down Nami’s back, or her (currently) nameless state. She cares instead for the blood staining her blankets and the dirt settled on Nojiko’s face – she cares for these two children, one kingdom born and one sky born – and Bell-mere takes them home.

This, Nami knows, for her mother (Bell-mere) raises her and her sister on the snow-littered island of Cocoyashi, where the winters are tough and the people stronger, where stories are told every night and the sweetness of oranges grown in ice and cold dance on every tongue.

This is Nami’s truth.

Cocoyashi is about three degrees past “too cold” and one away from “uninhabitable” but its people make it work. Nami (Daughter of the Storm, Daughter of Bell-mere) grows up with furs and boots and twenty ways to keep out the cold when you are too poor to get proper heating. She knows the way animals flee in the colder months by the time she is four, and can hunt half of them by the time she is six. When she is seven, she knows how to tough out a winter by the spit of her mouth and the grit of her hands – Bell-mere teaches her how to make baskets that keep the food from rotting, and the cloth patterns that keep the devilish cold out.

In between survival, Nami learns from Nojiko (who learns it from the older kids down the street) how to two weave thirteen different types of braids, and pin up thirteen more. Her hair isn’t long enough yet, but it will be. In the meantime, she threads beads and glass into it, to make it shine like the gold she knows her family doesn’t have.

On her own, Nami maps the island and learns from the sky. Thunder rumbles her to sleep, and wind guides her map-pencil to the right points. Piles of books are formed and read next to her bed, speaking of meteorology and altitude and wind pressure – things any (good) navigator should know. Two axes (small but sturdy, fit for a warrior child’s hands) find their way into her hands and into furrows in mountain sides, helping her climb and climb and climb, till she, all of eight years old, stands atop Cocoyashi highest peak in the midst of a raging tempest. She maps her island home from this peak, and then ventures into the woods to practice her aim.

(Bell-mere says that she became a Marine to put her skills to the test. Instead, she was forced to use a musket and strike down those unworthy to be apart of the World Government. Now, Bell-mere has her musket by the door, next to her axe, and a dagger by her waist. She’s welcome in town, but she listens to no chief.

Nami loves her mother, and she listens well. She won’t make the same mistake.

She’s going to be free, and if Bell-mere has taught her anything, it is to fight for the things you hold dear.

Every target hit is another day lived, another treasure kept, another lesson from Bell-mere in Nami’s mind.)

Cocoyashi’s cold, but its people are strong, and care for the trees and hunt the beasts. Nami, despite the storm she was born in, is no different.

Arlong comes in the summer months, and so does the axe.

Its longer than her, made of wood stronger than sea stone and sturdier than the mountains, with a metal that Nami has never quite seen before for its blade, hooked it seems, for easy grappling

Oska, Nami whispers the name that’s carved in its handle, (Thunder), when she finds it leaning outside her door, scorch marks (lightning marks) all around it.

Nojiko likes to poke at it, and Bell-mere just nods in blind acceptance before gathering them in to eat.

Later that day, Bell-mere starts training Nami in its use.

Later that month, Bell-mere smiles at Nami before Arlong shoots her through the skull.

Arlong’s brutal in all the way her people aren’t. He can stand the cold just as well as any of them, without needing any fur (fishmen, apparently, live in the depths of the sea where the sun never sheds it warmth. The ice bothers them, but does not stop them from terrorizing her people) and the way he orders her people about makes her shrivel inside.

His mark is now on her shoulder, where Bell-mere told her she could have her first tattoo when she was old enough. (It was going to be a mix of all the things she loved – tangerines and storms and pinwheels and family. But she can never have that anymore, can she?)

Everything’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?

(Nami makes it for the pyre, the Viking funeral they give for the funeral that is her mother, her Bell-mere. Nojiko holds her tight and Nami takes the pain that her hug presses down on her shoulder (she deserves it) because that’s their mother in that pyre, and that’s her favorite axe and her musket.

Is she smiling while she’s getting devoured by flames? Nami can’t tell.

(All she feels is cold and electric all at once.))

Nami cries every night, but every morning she ties her hair into a knot and slips on her boots and meager armor. She’s ten and all but mastered her smaller axes, but the new one Oska eludes her still – and Bell-mere isn’t there to help her, so she has to do it all alone, training and pushing her body til Arlong drags her in to draw another map.

(Are the lines she draws born from ink or blood? She can’t tell anymore.)

She manages to get out one month in to her imprisonment. A small sailboat is all she has, and provisions enough for a week – two if she only eats once a day. Tenancity is all she has left to hold her up, so she uses it all to sail away for the first time.

Cocoyashi fades into the fog and the axe on her back weighs heavier than ever.

(Nami faces a storm at sea, on her first voyage. It is a tempest, a hurricane, a thunderous rain of ruin, but no lightning touches her. Instead, the sea parts before her as she knots her hair and ties up her dress, fingers gripping the rope of the sail. Her face is wet but it feels more like platonic caress than a rainy whip and the way the lightning flashes (heat lightning, her books called it, a blessing, Bell-mere said instead) illuminates her way out.

She places her feet on land come morning and faces a trio of pirates – men bigger and stronger and more ruthless than her – on the shore. There’s a pull from her side and her hand reaches for Oska, leaning against the boat. The men laugh at her ten-year-old form, but she slams the handle down and suddenly they aren’t laughing any more. Suddenly they are very burnt and Nami is glowing blue electric.

Suddenly, there’s lightning.

Suddenly there is hope.)

(Thunder smiles and heads away – his daughter is well.)

Life goes on, and Nami steals gold after gold after gold. Necklaces start to lie around her neck and cloths from around the East are threaded to make her dresses. She learns more braids and learns that even warrior women can lure men in to traps. She’s fifteen and strong enough to lift up her boat (The Tempest) and then sixteen and strong enough to lift a (small) sea king head. She carves her own weapons and makes more maps stained with blood.

She’s a thief and she’s a warrior, a map maker and a navigator. Her family’s far away and she has a quarter of a million to free them, but she won’t falter, she won’t.

(The thunder won’t let her.)

Then, she stumbles upon Orange Town and a map to the Grand Line.

Then, she meets Monkey D. Luffy, who looks at her axe and her face and her claim to be a navigator, and asks her to join his pirate crew.

She hates pirates.

(But once upon a time she wanted to be free.)

Here are some things that Nami knows: her (temporary) captain is an idiot, she can outdrink the swordsman, both are stronger than even her strength but she’s more sensible than both of them.

This is evident by the way she has to haul the two idiots out of a bar fight while carefully avoiding the orders for them to pay for the drinks.

The money has better use anyhow.

“What were you two thinking! You idiots! We don’t have that kind of money!”

30 plates and 30 drinks. Luffy was a bouncing ball of rubber two seconds ago and Zoro is leaning heavily on her shoulder, muttering about swords and axes and who believed that people got weaker as they grew older, damn witch, and she’s about to dump both of them in the mud.

“But Nami! We have you!” Luffy cheers despite the painful hold she has on his ear.

“No – you don’t!”

“But you’re super strong! You shoulda seen all their faces when they realized that you weren’t drunk after all those drinks!” She might have lied when she implied Zoro was the only one drinking. �� And then you brought out your axe and did the slammy thing with all the thunder rumbling all around – and you’re the best! I have the best navigator! Zoro, did you know I have the best navigator! She’s so cool!”

Nami misses Zoro’s reply because she still busy standing dumbstruck by Luffy’s too honest words.

She doesn’t even fight against being his navigator this time.

(She might even feel like flying if it weren’t for the ink on her shoulder.)

At Syrup they meet a boy who wants to be brave and a girl who wants to heal. Luffy helps them do both as Nami helps dismember pirates with cat ears with Zoro.

There’s a kind of hope in this town that Nami wish she had for herself, the kind of hope that comes from the miracles Luffy brings, the kind of hope Cocoyashi brings.

But Nami doesn’t think about that when she’s using her twin axes to climb rock faces and trees for treasure, or when she has to fight a pirate crew who even the Demon of the East Blue and a boy made out of rubber have trouble with.

When the battles over, Demon and Rubber Captain wounds tended too, Zoro nods at her, respect in his eyes.

It’s something Nami hasn’t seen in a while, not from anyone but Luffy (and Bell-mere and Nojiko). From one warrior to another. She hefts her axe over shoulders and nods back, before claiming a room for herself aboard the Going Merry.

Its at the Baratie she leaves, and on the Merry she cries. She sails alone, as she has for years, (The Tempest crashed four days before she met them) but now it feels so much more lonely than it ever has been.

The wind keeps pushing back against her but she forges on. She’s so close to being free, so close to killing the fishman that kept her chained to that damned map room for eight years that she can’t bear anything else.

It turns out Arlong is not a man of his word. It turns out her former crew cares to much about her – that her village cares too much about her – and that Nami can’t stand this any more.

The treasure carefully hidden and kept safe so that even the dangerous winter months couldn’t stop her from getting it is gone and her people are going to get themselves killed.

(Axes aren’t always strong enough to break fishman skin, not when they had to have been carefully hidden. Nami knows this, she’s tried many times. )

Her hands are bloody from where she stabbed the end of her axe into them, but the dagger she holds in her hand is steady as she tears at her sleeves, hair slipping out of its knot.

Then – there’s Luffy standing before her, catching her hand. “Luffy… Help me,” She cries, never feeling weaker, but there’s electricity in the air and a hat on her head.

“OKAY!” He shouts, and there’s freedom in the air.

Nami knows, because this is a feeling she’s never known before.

She leaves Cocoyashi one necklace heavier (a gift, from Nojiko, one of Bell-mere’s) one crew stronger, and a shoulder hurting with the familiar sting of a tattoo. Arlong’s gone and so is that room and she’s free.

(Her room has been half transformed into a map making room of her own design, Zoro sits with her when she sharpens her blades, Sanji brings her drinks strong enough to kill a man, Usopp has been helping her make a weapon that will let her make more than thunder and lightning, and Luffy has smiled at her every day while leading them onward to a new adventure. After every new island, he asks to see the map she made of it, and its in such a different way from Arlong she wants to cry.

She loves this crew, this crew of the future Pirate King.)

The way out of Loguetown is the first time she shines, reveling in the storm that bows to her will. She guides them through the waves, keeps them safe enough so that they can make their vow together.

“I’M GOING TO DRAW A MAP OF THE WORLD!”

Light flashes so that she can see her crewmates faces, her captains face, grinning wild and relentless against the storm. Oska is a steady weight in her palm, anchoring her to the deck, and she knows that there is no place she would rather be than in this storm.

Thunder rumbles approvingly, and they surge into the Grand Line.

In Paradise, they meet a man with flowers for hair, a whale that has lost its family, and two bounty hunters, one of whom is the most beautiful woman Nami has ever seen.

So, if she casually uses her axe a bit more leniently than she would before, or moves more crates than ordering them moved, its nothing but her stretching her muscles, that’s all.

(And if she rolls up her sleeves, so far up that the tattoo of an axe, wreathed in lighting and tangerines in the shape of a pinwheel is visible on her left shoulder, then its no ones business that she smiles a bit brighter.)

Still – her axe has never been for show, and she will put it to use if these bounty hunters try anything.

At Whiskey Peak, Nami outdrinks Zoro and fakes falling asleep. This is, of course, not before depleting the people of this horrible town of near all their alcohol. It’s pitiful that they don’t see that Nami’s still awake, or that her axes are still resting next to her.

Pitiful, but not unwelcome if she wants to steal any of their gold.

Miss Wednesday’s real name is Nefertiti Vivi, and she is the princess of Alabasta who became a bounty hunter to save her country.

Nami already feels a kindred spirit with her.

She talks and laughs with her, whispers to her in their shared cabin, spars with her and lifts her up on her shoulder’s. Vivi’s smile is like the pearls that washed up on Cocoyashi’s beaches, beautiful and more common if you know what causes them. She teaches Vivi how to braid her hair and hold an axe, and Vivi teaches her the stars above the Grand line and how to use the loge pose and her peacock whip.

Nami could get used to this.

(She thinks Vivi could too.)

Nami wakes up on Drum, tosses Vivi her heavy fur cloak, and starts making with the mayhem as Luffy starts to liberate another island simply because they hurt someone and got in his way. Drum is her element, the snow and wind casting flurries around her, and her braid (Vivi must have braided it for her while she was out of it-) whipping about her head as she uses her twin axes to help Luffy with the henchmen.

Later, as she sits on the sleigh and watches the sky erupt in cherry blossoms, she feels fingers interlink with hers. A glance to her left is Vivi, still wrapped in Nami’s own cloak, cheeks red and face cheery as she looks to the sky. Nami thinks her own face must be a mirror of Vivi’s, and shifts her own hand to hold the princess’s tighter.

At Alabasta, Usopp gives her a new axe. Tempest, he has named it, and Nami can’t help but think of her old sailboat that carried her everywhere till she met this crew. The blade is sharp and almost as long as Oska’sbut it’s not forged like Oska was, its’ been crafted to collapse, to be hidden, to make her seem like a summoner and warrior all at once. Teary eyed, she hugs Usopp and goes off to practice with her new weapon.

She could summon Lightning and thunder all on her own with Oska, what can she do now?

Tempest is a weapon that Nami has never held before, never heard of before, never trained in before, but that’s okay, because Oska hadn’t been familiar to her either but she learned.

And if such learning must come in battle, so be it.

Tempest splits in three parts with a chain linking the three – a blade is at one end, and its designed so that it can fold in in a feat of engineering that Nami could not possibly comprehend. That’s not the important bit though –

No, the important thing is that Tempest has the technology to create heat and cold and energy that Nami can direct any weather she can at an enemy. She’s sure it can be upgraded in the future, but this – this is the start of something great.

Miss Doublefinger doesn’t stand a chance.

Before she even sets foot on Merry, she knows that Vivi is going to stay. The way she stares at the desert and her people, with such fond love and duty that has only ever been mirrored in the Strawhats is something that cannot be faked.

So she gives Vivi a necklace, one of her own, her favorite one that she made with Cocoyashi pearls and sea glass and iron, and wraps it around Vivi’s neck. Then she kisses her, putting all the love she possibly could into it. Vivi smiles as she kisses back, but her cheeks are damp.

(Nami’s are too)

Nami’s a warrior and Vivi’s a queen. This won’t ever change, not to Nami, but nor will her feelings change.

She looks Vivi in the eye. “Four years, love, then I’m kidnapping you.” She’s a pirate after all, and Pirates love treasure. She’s sure the crew won’t mind, and they are all going to mope anyway if Vivi stays.

Vivi barks out a laugh then kisses her on the cheek before sliding her own braclet (gold and carved with Vivi’s name) on Nami’s wrist. “I’ll be waiting.”

The last view Nami has of her love is her in the desert sun, dressed in white and looking like the sun and sea came together to create something that the world could never quite keep. She has her hand in the air, X proudly shown, and Nami wasn’t supposed to look but she did anyway. Her own wrist stings because she made the local tattoo artist tattoo it on, but her eyes sting more and its don’t because of the salt air.

It is going to be a long four years – but at least she has Vivi’s den den mushi number locked away.

Once Alabasta is in the haze, everyone is moping. Zoro tries to put on a façade that he isn’t, but everyone knows he is.

“We should have kidnapped her.” He says, and everyone agrees. Nami smiles, laughs, and unveils a promise.

She can’t wait.

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