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As Penguin picked his way across the mess that was what remained of Onigashima’s performance floor, all he could think of was how tired he was. That was the thing stories never went into detail about, when they described grand battles and victories; just how short a time the high of winning lasted before reality inevitably made its crushing reappearance.
It’d been a couple of hours since the raid had officially ended, and Penguin had finished his adrenaline-fueled journey through hysterics that they’d actually pulled off the impossible a while ago. They were solidly in the mess of clean-up, triage, and corpse-counting now, and as one of the more mobile and put together of the Heart Pirates currently still on his feet, he’d sucked it up and done the responsible thing and gotten to work.
But by now, all that extra energy had bled out of his body to be replaced by bone deep exhaustion and a deep desire to finally leave this insane country. He’d say that the entire crew probably agreed with that sentiment, and seas knew they deserved a vacation, but unfortunately, he wasn’t sure they’d be allowed one. Not after what they’d just did.
Or rather, what Law and his equally crazy allies had just done.
“Fucking…captains and their dumbass decisions,” he mutters to himself as he moves through the rubble, idly noting that his right ankle seems a bit more wobbly than usual. He’d have to look at that later. “Paint a target on your back by fucking over Doflamingo. Paint a bigger target on your back by helping unseat half the power structure of the New World. Can’t wait to see where your insanity brings us next, Law.”
“I’d drink to that,” comes a familiar voice from his right. “But I’m sadly out of alcohol at the moment.”
The Straw Hat’s navigator is leaning up against a section of ruined wall, looking just as exhausted as Penguin feels, covered in cuts and bruises and caked with dried blood and grime in a way that looks pretty uncomfortable on her bare arms and legs.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” Penguin asks, walking a little closer. “All the action has moved outside now we’re not floating anymore.” He shuffles past one last pile of rubble. “At the very least, you should be getting cleaned up instead of sitting here in the middle of a war zone.”
“Needed a few moments to decompress,” Nami admits. “Tonight was…a lot. And I can wait until Chopper’s free, I’m not hurt that bad.”
And well, that’s fair, Penguin supposes. Tonight had been the definition of ‘a lot.’ And part of the reason he’d gone walkabout himself after he finished working was to calm down. Shachi could take charge for a little bit, or even Jean Bart, who was still good at getting people in order even if it had been years since he’d been a captain himself. Penguin thinks if anyone asked him to make important decisions right now he’d punch them in the face.
“Chopper’s going to be overseeing the serious injuries for bare minimum a few more hours with Tristan and Miyagi,” Penguin points out. He’d literally just come from where the medics were working, and he didn’t envy the task they had ahead of them. “The Phoenix is one of the few people in decent shape, but he’s still pulling people from the rubble and stabilizing them. And it took ten of us to frog march Law out to a place where he can get some rest so he doesn’t go killing himself trying to help, so if anyone wakes him up I will kill them myself.”
That last comment shakes a chuckle out of Nami, who, he supposes, would definitely know the pain of a stubborn-ass captain. He shakes his head. “I know triage, and you wouldn’t be priority, but if you’re going to be sitting out here in the dirt and ash and whatever else is oozing across this floor, you can at least let me make sure you’re not going to get an infection.”
He reaches into the satchel resting on his hip, pulling out a roll of sterilized bandages and some of Law’s homemade disinfectant. He raises an eyebrow in question, and wonders if he was going to have to try and out-stubborn a Straw Hat.
He’s not sure he’s got enough energy left to out-stubborn a Straw Hat.
Thankfully, the answer to that question appears to be ‘no.’ “Fine,” Nami mutters, and scootches over so Penguin has room to kneel next to her.
It’s quick work, thankfully. Penguin can do dressings in his sleep by this point, and Nami doesn’t fight him every step of the way like some patients do. Quickly enough, he’s finished assessing the damage on one side of her body, and moved onto the next, when something catches his eye.
“Huh,” he murmurs. “Your tattoo…was this done over a fresh wound? The color’s a little irregular in the healed spots.”
But the question causes Nami to flinch unexpectedly, and Penguin studiously goes back to dressing the scrapes near her elbow. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry. I’m always looking at interesting tattoos. There’s usually a story behind them and I don’t get to see many in color. Crew mostly favors blackwork.”
“It’s fine,” she says quickly, and it’s probably not, if Penguin had to guess, but he says nothing. He already overstepped once, he’s not going to be an asshole and push the matter.
They sit in silence as Penguin finishes tying off the last of her bandages before she awkwardly breaks the ice. “Do you…see many tattoos?”
“Most of the crew have tattoos,” Penguin replies absently, closing the bottle of disinfectant and placing it back in his bag. “I’ve got matching sets on my shoulders and upper arms myself. I’d prove it, but” he looks down at himself, covered in blood and grime and still half-soaked from the flood that had swept through earlier “I’m kind of gross.”
“I would kill for a bath,” Nami groans, and the awkwardness bleeds away just a little. “So I won’t ask for proof. In solidarity, or something like that.” She waves a hand vaguely in his direction. “So humor me: why are tattoos so popular on your crew, especially if you’re just going to—” She gestures at Penguin in a manner that he presumes is supposed to indicate his coveralls, and doesn’t bother finishing her sentence.
“I mean, a lot of us have tattoos for the crew, y’know?” Penguin shrugs, and ministrations finally completed, and kit stowed away, flops down on the floor next to Nami. Seas, but it feels good to be sitting down. “That’s pretty common, I think. But lots of islands in North Blue have tattooing traditions. Especially the small ones. So the crew’s full of people with work from their home islands, little memories and local patterns. Like the ones Jean Bart’s got on his forehead, yeah?” He makes a gesture with his fingers that he hopes is reminiscent enough of the flamelike designs he’s describing. “And Shachi has a common textile pattern from our home island on his wrists. Stuff like that.”
Nami hums thoughtfully. “Is that why Torao has so many? I’ve never seen a person with so many before.” She lays a hand on her shoulder, idly tracing the whorls of blue. “I suppose that’s kind of what mine is for, too. To remember the best things from home. So I understand the appeal, I guess.”
“Seas, that fucking nickname,” Penguin snickers. “I’m so glad that stuck. I’m going to get so much mileage out of that.” He shakes his head. “But to answer your question: some of them, yeah. Some of them are for…other things. All of them are for something, though.”
He’ll let her keep guessing as to which are what kind. Law’s secrets aren’t his to share.
That said, he doesn’t need to spill anything important to brag just a little bit.
“I did the big one on his back myself,” he says with a grin. “The jolly roger? Don’t know if you’d have seen that one, though; he’s usually all wrapped up in a sweater or something because his skinny ass can’t figure out how to stay warm on its own. A few of us are decent enough to give tattoos ourselves, which helps when you’re trying to keep a low profile. Tattoo parlors kind of turn the client into sitting ducks, if you think about it, especially if you’re getting something big.”
Nami shakes her head. “I’ve never been in one, but I’ll take your word for it. But then, the village doctor did mine, so I wasn’t exactly worried at the time.” She gives him a considering look, one Penguin has seen a few times by now and has learned to be deeply skeptical of.
He’s spent enough time around sneaky geniuses. He knows what that look can mean.
“The way you talk about your crew,” she starts. “Torao especially. You’ve known them for a long time, haven’t you?”
It’s not a question he would have expected, but it’s not an unwelcome one either. Maybe the talk about tattoos and home made Nami feel a bit nostalgic, he doesn’t know. And he guesses that after big events like the fight they’d both just been through, it was only natural to get a little sentimental. Emotions running high and all that shit.
Penguin lets the breath in his lungs whoosh out in a deep sigh, crossing his arms behind his head and reclining more against the wall. “Yeah,” he starts. “A real long time. Feels like forever, honestly. Especially if we’re talking about the originals.”
“Do tell,” Nami urges, and maybe it’s a little pushy, but Penguin doesn’t particularly want to go back and find out what new crises need dealing with yet, and this wall is feeling more and more comfortable the longer he leans on it.
So yeah, what the hell. He’ll indulge.
“Fine, but if we’re going to do this, we need to do it right,” he says, and ducks into his bag, rummaging around until he pulls out two bottles of rice wine he’d scavenged from the wreckage of the Beast Pirates’ feast during his earlier aimless wanderings, holding them up with a wicked little grin on his face.
“Oh-ho,” Nami says, clearly delighted. “Story time and refreshments? You’re speaking my language.”
Penguin pops the corks from each bottle carefully, and hands one to Nami, who immediately takes a hearty drink, gesturing with her free hand for him to get on with it.
It’s so obviously demanding it makes him laugh.
“Let me paint a picture for you,” Penguin said, placing his own bottle at his feet and holding his hands up before him like he was framing a painting, just like the grandmas in Swallow’s market square used to do when they told their stories. “Imagine, if you would, that you’re fifteen and you hate the world. You’re stuck on an island where it snows more than half the year and you’ve got no one to rely on except your best mate because sure as shit no one else seems to care about you unless you’re ruining their day. Which, in hindsight, is perfectly fair because you are also a raging asshole.”
“I was with you through ‘fifteen and hating the world,’” Nami cuts in, leaning forward with her head in one propped up hand. “But I can’t say that the rest is something I am at all familiar with.”
Penguin is pretty sure she’s lying, but what is he going to do? Call the known con artist on lying? No thank you.
“Hush, it’s story time with Penguin now,” he chides imperiously, and Nami leans back again with a snicker, taking another sip of her drink. “Anyway,” he continues, “one day, you and said previously mentioned bestie are—“ He pauses. “You know, I don’t actually remember what we were doing.” He blinks, reaching to pick up his bottle of wine again, giving it a suspicious look before shrugging and taking a long pull of the alcohol. That wasn’t the important part of the story anyway. Him and Shachi wouldn’t have been up to anything good or interesting anyway. Nothing good, because he hadn’t been kidding when he’d called himself an asshole, and nothing interesting, because to this day he’d yet to find a place more boring than Swallow Island.
“Sorry. Lost my train of thought there for a second,” he hums. “But anyway, we were walking through the forest near town, statistically up to no good, and what do we happen upon but a walking, talking polar bear. In overalls.” He sees Nami’s eyes widen in recognition, because both of them know there’s only one person who fits that description.
And now he’s come to the part of the story he hates talking about, because even if it’s been thirteen years, even if Bepo has forgiven him for it more times than he can count, it’s always been too close of a reminder of the kind of person he could have become—and maybe still could, if left to his own devices.
He never wants to find out for sure.
“I don’t know if it’s because we were scared, because where we come from, polar bears regularly did show up to rob the fishermen, or if it was some misplaced stupid primal instinct to get rid of what we didn’t understand, but we started kicking the shit out of him, no hesitation. And he was screaming and crying and confused, because of course he was, but we didn’t care.” He sighs. “It was fucked up, is what it was, but so were we, so I guess there’s some twisted logic to it.”
Nami is making a face at her bottle that looks just a little too understanding, so he pushes on. He’s not interested in turning this into a circular guilt-fest. Especially with not how strong this wine seems to be.
“But then,” he stresses with a wave of his arm, because this is the whole point of his story, after all. “Then out of the woods this little kid, this waif—you know how sometimes you can look at a person and a word immediately pops into your head? That’s what I mean, he was so pathetically skinny and sick—just marches up to us on tottery little legs and starts reaming us out for what we’re doing. And we do stop, because here’s this maybe-nine year old cussing us out with a combination of the most graphic insults I’ve ever heard and vocabulary to put a professor to shame, and that just doesn’t happen, right? So we did what any self-respecting bullies would do, and made to change our target to this kid.”
Penguin lets out a gusty, self-deprecating sigh. “Only for said kid to hand our asses to us and then promptly pass out in the snow.” That’s worth another long shot out of the bottle. He’s never living that embarrassment down, because everyone who was there besides Bepo was a little shit. And even he had his moments. “And then we kind of just…bundled him up in a panic, because we were fifteen and fourteen, and way out of our depth.”
Nami barks out a laugh at that. "Oh man, he must have got you good in the head if you did a one eighty like that. That must have been a sight.”
“I mean, what were we gonna do?” Penguin says with a shrug. “It was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to us, and we had Bepo, still bleeding from half a dozen places from where we’d kicked the shit out of him, leaning over us and asking us if we were okay, and I think.” He pauses, reaching for the right words to describe the experience. “I think we just reached the tipping point of what we were ready to deal with at the moment. Before I knew what was going on we were all holed up in a nearby cave, and Shachi had started a fire because his brain turned back on before mine did, I guess. And then him and me and Bepo all sit there awkwardly in silence until the kid wakes up, takes one look at us peering down at him, and promptly panic-teleports us into the wall before passing out again.”
That memory is also worth another drink.
Nami’s eyes widen as the context clues fall into place. “That was Law?”
“Sure was,” Penguin chuckles. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been around baby devil fruit users before but let me tell you, their control is shit. Law hadn’t had his for very long before we met him, had very little idea of what he could even do with it and it was an absolute nightmare. Every time he got one thing under control enough to keep from accidentally causing chaos, his little gremlin brain thought of a new potential use for his fruit and it had to be tested immediately. Shachi and Bepo and I were never bored after that.”
He doesn’t mention the white spots, or the nightmare it was to watch Law unravel himself in those early days, let alone how fraught those first few months had been, as four kids with varying degrees of trust issues learned how to get along. Sometimes he finds himself marveling that they ended up working so well at all, and wonders if he’s going to wake up someday to find out that the last thirteen years had just been a particularly nice fever dream.
“I thought it must be him, until you described him,” Nami hums. “Like, I’ll admit he’s a bit of a string bean, but I don’t think I’d ever call him a waif.” She snickers. “That feels like the sort of thing that would get under his skin, though.”
“Well, he’s not now, sure,” Penguin agrees, and chooses not to confirm the accuracy of the second half of her statement. “But he was a full thirteen years old when we met, and I thought he hadn’t even reached double digits. He didn’t hit a real growth spurt until he was nineteen and I don’t think it surprised anyone more than it did Law himself. We had to ban him from certain rooms on the Tang because he kept finding new pipes to concuss himself with.”
“Aww,” Nami coos. “Tell me more. That sounds adorable. Little baby Torao just stumbling into things.”
“Uh uh,” Penguin says, holding up one finger. The wine is hitting his exhausted body just fast enough that if he’s not careful this will turn into him just telling thirteen years’ worth of embarrassing stories about his captain, and that won’t end well for anyone. Especially him. “Tit for tat. I’m sure you’ve got some good stories of your own, right? You lot seem to generate them wherever you go, after all. I read the papers.”
Nami makes a face at his refusal, but stays silent, finger tapping a steady rhythm on the bottle in her hand as she sits lost in thought, and Penguin takes advantage of the moment of quiet to assess how drunk he’s likely to get if he downs this whole bottle. He’s pretty sure he can manage it. He’d at least be able to make his way back to the rest of the crew without too much difficulty.
Probably.
“I get where you’re coming from a little bit, you know?” she starts after a few moments. “When I met Luffy and Zoro, I was several years into attempting to buy my village’s freedom back from the pirates who had taken it over and killed my foster mom. Made a deal with the leader and everything: if I worked for him as part of his crew, he’d honor that promise once I raised enough money.” She takes a long drink from her bottle before letting out a bitter-sounding noise. “Of course, that was a lie. I just didn’t know it at the time. Or maybe I just needed to believe in something to keep me going.” She scoffs. “Of course, given first impressions, I definitely wasn’t putting any faith in Luffy at the start.”
She shakes her head, as if she still can’t believe the events she’s describing. “And boy, was my first impression bad. Here was this pair of idiots with no direction sense between them, and this kid takes me at my word that I’m the best navigator out there—which I am—and decides I’m his even before he admits to being a pirate. And then before I know it, we’ve caused a whole pile of trouble, stolen a map from Buggy the fucking Clown, and legged it. And at no point was this weird or disturbing for Luffy, because as far as he’s concerned, dangerous situations are the most fun. That hasn’t changed since the moment I met him, and I very much doubt it’s going to change at any time in the near or distant future.” She glances up at the giant hole in the roof her captain had made not a few hours before and sighs a deep, bone-weary sigh.
Penguin sympathizes.
“So after that we end up a few islands over, where we run into Usopp and help save his village from this asshole pirate butler who’s been playing a long con on everyone in order to get inheritance money from a sick rich girl—don’t ask—and they give us our first ship in thanks, a little caravel called the Going Merry. And I’m thinking: jackpot, I can sell this thing and make a whole bunch of cash in one go. So as soon as I see my chance—which was shortly after, while Luffy was busy bullying Sanji into making a major life decision—I grabbed the ship and booked it out of there.”
Penguin snorts. “Are all your recruitment stories like that? One degree shy of forced conscription? Is it bad that I’d believe it if you said yes?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Nami mutters, voice dripping with exaggerated exhaustion. “Ask Franky about how he got recruited some time if you’re feeling brave. I think Brook was the only person who didn’t have to be convinced in some way, and if I were him, I’d have made the same choice, considering where we found him.”
“Anyway,” she continues. “They managed to find something seaworthy enough to chase after me—and yeah, by this point Luffy had finished browbeating Sanji into accepting his fate in life, so he came too—and proceeded to demolish all my problems within a few hours of making land in Cocoyashi, with prejudice. Because he’d decided I was his friend. And let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like being told by a force of nature like that that he’s in your corner.”
She sighs, but it’s accompanied by a small, wistful little smile. “Almost a decade of conning my way across the East Blue, thinking I’m immune to anything a person can throw emotionally at me, and it’s this skinny rubber kid with a giant smile telling me that he’s decided I’m his friend and that that meant he’d fight the world for me to break me down.”
“Yeah, well,” Penguin sighs, thoughts turning briefly to a more recent, serious subject. “I’ll shake his fucking hand as many times as necessary for that trait. Law was pretty clear that it’s the only reason he’s still alive, even if I’m not entirely sure he thinks he was worth the effort.”
“Well, slap it out of him or something, because fair’s fair,” Nami says with a raised eyebrow. “Because he’s the only reason half of us made it out of Dressrosa alive. And from what I’ve been hearing from the part of the crew that stuck around, he faced a personal bogeyman to do so.” She takes a long drink from her bottle and fixes Penguin with a look. “I’d say that makes us even, and I don’t like debts, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.”
Penguin knows that they could go back and forth on this if they felt so inclined, with Marineford and Zou, but that sounds fucking exhausting, so he raises his hands in acquiescence instead.
“It’s not like we need more to worry about, anyway,” he chuckles. “I assume Straw Hat is going to be off to cause havoc as soon as he wakes up—” Nami’s groan tells him he’s hit the nail on the head—“and if I know Law his stupid gremlin brain will wake him up without a tenth of the rest it should be letting him get and then who knows what carefully planned shenanigans we’ll be engaging in this time next week.”
“Does Torao know you talk about him like that?” Nami asks wryly and follows it up with a hearty burst of laughter at Penguin’s fervent ‘yes.’ “He’s got more of a sense of humor than I thought, then. Or maybe self-awareness? I don’t know, he’s got a good poker face.”
“Self-aware?” Penguin snorts. “He wishes. That’s why we were so against him going off on his own,” Penguin points out. “I mean, aside from all the other reasons why it was a horrible idea to everyone except him. He just does not do well alone, and like I said, it was a hell of a time to get him to even consider resting coming off his fight with Big Mom. I’ll tie him to his bed on the Tang if I have to, the stubborn ass.” He slides a sideways glance at Nami. “Though I can’t imagine Straw Hat is any better.”
“I just got done chasing Luffy through a terrifying nightmare land of animated singing sugar,” Nami deadpans. “And then we came straight here. If Luffy doesn’t feel like taking it easy for a few days, I will make him.”
“Then I wish us both luck,” Penguin says. “Doing the impossible over and over again is starting to get exhausting.”
That gets another chuckle out of his drinking partner, and the conversation ebbs for a bit, as they both sit in silence and presumably reflect on the insane men they’ve tied their lives to.
“I was there when they made the alliance, you know,” Nami says softly, rolling her bottle pensively back and forth between her fingers. “Just me, and them. Or, my mind, anyway. Torao had swapped a bunch of us around and I was stuck in Franky’s body and so maybe wasn’t the most neutral party on whether an alliance with him was a good idea.”
Penguin couldn’t help the low whistle he let out. “If it makes you feel better, that’s more consideration he’d give most people.” At Nami’s incredulous look, he elaborates. “Law hates using that ability, because he can’t figure out how it works or how it’s supposed to relate to medicine. It offends his sense of logic and his obsessive need to pick things apart until he figures out what makes them tick. But if you need to control people and still want them to be somewhat functional…it works way better than disassembling them. Which is his usual go to.”
“Never though of it that way,” Nami mutters. “Still pissed at him about it, but I’d definitely have been more pissed if he’d diced me up.”
“I’m sure someone on your crew is good at puzzles,” Penguin can’t help but quip.
The look Nami gives him is not impressed.
“It was,” Nami starts, and then she pauses. “It was frightening, in the moment. Hearing the proposal and knowing Luffy was absolutely crazy enough to take the bait. Thinking that we were going to be sacrificed for someone else’s ambition. How we were nowhere near being enough to challenge an Emperor. I was so sure that Torao was leveraging Luffy’s good image of him to take advantage of us.”
The things she’s saying about his captain aren’t kind things, by any stretch of the imagination, but Penguin understands better than most. Law was a dangerous person, but never more so than when he had a goal in his sights. It was entirely possible that there was an aspect of what Nami is describing in the original proposal, but Law had always been studiously blind to one of his most prevalent flaws or best qualities, depending on who you asked: how fucking quickly he got attached to people who acted in good faith.
“But,” Nami continues. “In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious why they worked together. Because just for that one moment, they had the same smile. I didn’t think there was anyone aside from Luffy who could look so excited about something so dangerous. Zoro, maybe, but he’s always been about the challenge. This was more…I don’t know…anticipation. Of imminently being responsible for turning the world on its head. Like that was almost the entire point.”
“Yeah, I buy that,” Penguin chuckles. “He plays a good game at being cold and unfeeling, but it’s half an act and half a defense mechanism. He was an angry little kid and all he’s done with that as an adult is direct it into some truly astounding ways to fuck over the systems in power. Which your captain seems to just do naturally, so.” He gestures to the room at large. “Wouldn’t be sitting here in this mess if our two idiots didn’t decide tackling an Emperor sounded like fun.”
That was an incredibly simplified description of the events that had played out, admittedly, but as far as Penguin was concerned, this was the craziest thing Law had ever done, and he’d been there for the whole business with the hearts. So, he wasn’t going to get to live this down, not if Penguin—and Shachi, and realistically at least half the crew, if push came to shove—had anything to say about it.
“And they did it,” Nami says, voice couched in tones of wonder. “In barely more than two months. Not by themselves, not just with us, but…still.” She shakes her head. “If you’d told me all the way back on Punk Hazard that tonight I would be watching my captain, my friend, my…” she pauses, a soft smile stealing over her face. “Fine, I’ll admit it: my little brother be declared dead and come back to yank an Emperor bodily through the roof and win that fight, I. Well, I’ve long since stopped betting against Luffy, but that was still pretty unbelievable.”
“Well,” Penguin says with a nod of his head. “My little brother can apparently create miles-deep craters in the earth and has discovered how to say ‘fuck you’ to even more laws of science than he previously already had. And I watched him and Kid just sort of casually shrug off an attempt to steal their fucking souls, so. I’m right there with you.”
“He’s younger than you?” Nami blinks, and then makes a considering face. “I guess you did sort of say that earlier, when you were saying how you first met. He just doesn’t fit the mental image I have of a younger sibling, though y’know? Too serious.”
“Straw Hat’s younger than most of you all, right?” Penguin says, and Nami just nods. “Same for us. Most everyone except Bepo is older than Law. And before he was Trafalgar Law, Surgeon of Death and professional thorn in the Marines’ side, he was just Law, an angry brat who was too smart to be left alone without supervision. And at some point Shachi and I just started feeling responsible for him. That was before we were pirates and had to deal with things like crew hierarchies and all that, but…” he chuckles. “That part never really changed.”
“They’d be useless without us, wouldn’t they?” Nami chuckles a bit smugly, and Penguin can’t help but answer in kind. They absolutely would.
“To the craziest little brothers on the Grand Line,” Penguin announces, raising his bottle in the air. “Seas knows they’re fucking menaces, but at least life is never boring with them around.”
Nami raises her own bottle and clinks it against his own. “And may they never change, no matter how much we might bitch and moan about it.”
The toast ends up emptying both of their bottles, but an hour later, when people come looking for them, the stories are still flying thick and fast, and Penguin makes a note that they at least need to stay on friendly enough terms with the Straw Hats long enough to hear the rest of the insane things they’ve got up to.
If only for the ideas they’re giving him.