Chapter Text
Beer #1
The Strawhats are party people.
No member of the crew, nor innocent bystander who happens to be caught up in their post-battle celebrations, nor Marines and enemy pirates alike disagree on that statement.
When it comes to drinking during said parties, however, there’s a hierarchy of alcohol tolerance that puts the likes of Zoro and Nami at the top and Chopper as dead last. Sanji happens to be only a couple of steps above their doctor, but he doesn’t have an excuse for the low placement half as good as being a mid-teens reindeer.
To Nami, the sight of a drunk Sanji fumbling his way through a pick-up line aimed at the pretty bartender is a pathetic one. And familiar, which only adds to the pathetic factor, really. Must be why she can’t look away from the sad little tilt of his lips when the bartender slinks away to serve some other client. Hard not to stare at a shipwreck.
“—and when the cannonball barely missed us? I’m telling you, you’re aaall lucky to have such a great captain—me, of course—to save your ass…Nami? You listening?”
She can feel Usopp leaning over their little table, his long nose almost poking Nami’s arm as he does so. He, too, doesn’t have what it takes to survive a wild night of alcohol abuse (alcohol indulgence !), but when one talks this much one has little time to down cocktails.
“Mh-mh,” Nami says to reassure him. That will have to do; she’s too busy watching Sanji work up the courage to chat with a newcomer at the bar counter to pay full attention to Usopp.
Usopp groans, chair creaking in emotional support as he stands up, unsteady on his feet. “Whatever! You’re no fun when you go all moon-eyed. I’ll go find a captive audience somewhere else.”
Sanji approaches the tall woman he’s been eyeing. Considering how enticing her legs look with that black dress hugging every curve, surely she is used to men hitting on her. As he goes to stand next to her the height difference in her favour becomes apparent—Sanji, despite the slight heel on the burgundy boots he’s donning tonight, has to look up to hold eye contact, and he seems entranced by the fact.
Jesus. He’s like a puppy looking for his forever home.
Nami wants to tell Usopp that since his recounting of today’s skirmish with the Navy is bullshit , it’s hard to hang from his lips or whatever, sorry not sorry, but by the time she manages to tear her eyes away from the scene at the bar, he’s long gone. She spots him in the distance, trying to turn Franky into his next victim.
Beer #5
In between the start of the night and Nami’s personal point of no return, there are: copious amounts of dancing; a game of strip poker where she quite literally leaves a bunch of strangers in their underwear and acquires a new lovely watch for her trouble; and a deep conversation with Robin in the pub’s bathroom. Nami couldn’t tell you what about—the details are already getting hazy. But by the time all is said and done, one single memory will be occupying all the available space in her brain.
For now, though, she’s taking a seat at the same table she’d been occupying earlier when Usopp took his leave. This time, Sanji only happens to already be sitting there—all broody, for once. It’s a rare sight. Perhaps that’s why her aching feet guide her to the empty chair in front of him.
“Hey, Sanji-kun! What’s got you looking like that, uh?” She coos at his sad frown, untying the laces of her strappy heels to get some reprieve from the those stupid torture devices. “Let me guess…”
He doesn’t let her guess. “I’ve been looking for love! But it’s nowhere to be found!” he declares, loudly , and then he lets his head fall heavily on the table. The sound his forehead produces when it hits the wood makes her wince—before she starts laughing, that is, because what the fuck was that?
“You’re so corny,” she mumbles under her breath, licking the beer foam off her top lip after a huge sip. “So the—the girl from before, it didn’t go well?”
Sanji raises his head with a sad little sniff. Nami gets a glimpse of a red mark on his forehead before his fringe falls over to hide it. “Which one?”
That makes her snort. “It might be your problem, you know? You flirt with everyone, it’s bound to make girls think you just have zero standards.”
“Not my fault every lady here is beautiful,” he whines, thumbing at the garnish stuffed in his drink. “Present company included, of course, Nami-san.”
There are more leaves and skewered pieces of fruit and tiny umbrellas than ounces of liquid in that thing. Nami got a similar one earlier and found it lacking compared to the concoctions Sanji prepares for Robin and her on any random afternoon. She vaguely remembers shoving it into Zoro’s hand at some point. It’s unclear if he appreciated her generous gesture.
“But all of them hate me. They hate my face , my clothes, and my guts .” he’s saying, all mournful. Nami thinks she’s missed a few sentences of self-commiserating. “But you know that my heart only truly longs for you, Mellorine. Sweet princess. Beautiful angel descended from—”
Nami plucks one of the three straws out of his Mai Tai and throws it at his forehead. “If you ever shut up, someone would have let you get into their pants by now.”
The straw makes a valiant attempt to stick to his skin, but the blonde fringe artfully combed right into his eye strikes again, and makes it plops on the table instead. “Whose pants?” he asks, now breathy and boyish and horny.
“Don’t look at me. I mostly wear skirts,” is what she manages to comment. “And that’s what I’m talking about, by the way. When you say something desperate like that, you just…I don’t know, you curb your own wings. Cut your own legs? Whatever, you get it.”
Sanji straightens in his chair, his expression clearing into a smile so blinding she has to look away from all those perfect white teeth as she contemplates her own mistake. No doubt he sensed the unspoken potential of her statement. Fucking hell. She’s too drunk, or not drunk enough, for this conversation.
She massages her temples, eyelids blissfully closed, before daring another look at Sanji’s hopeful face. He’s probably been nursing the same drink for a while, yet it was enough to bring color to his cheeks without turning his complexion to that tomato-adjacent flush that he gets when he meets a new pretty girl. His lashes are visibly blonde even in the dancing lights of the pub. He’s got…nice collarbones. And neck tendons. And whatever else he’s trying to show off by keeping his shirt 30% unbuttoned. Just a whole lot of nice , wherever Nami looks, and when she’s five beers in there’s no censoring the part of her brain that notices these things about Sanji.
Sanji sighs, and tongues at one of the remaining straws to get it back into his mouth. After a huge gulp of the pure sugar inside his glass, he says, “Nami-san, would you like me more if I shut up forever and ever? I can do that.” He all but melts on the table, swinging back to a weird melancholy state as he’s wont to do when he starts drinking. “I’ll cut my tongue off if you want.” He traces nonsensical shapes on the table as he speaks, tone lower and lower. “I can cook it, I know a few good recipes that use tongue—”
Dear Lord. At least he seems to have forgotten Nami’s earlier slip about probably, possibly—maybe!—finding parts of him attractive. “See, this is what I’m talking about,” she explains, reaching out to pat him on the head as a comforting gesture and also because the demon on her shoulder won’t stop whispering that it looks really damn soft. It is. Silky. Does he use conditioner? He seems like the type of man who’d care about conditioners.
“You just lack confidence, Sanji-kun! Stand up for yourself.” She frowns, thinking back on his last offer. “And no girl will want you if you’ve got no tongue. That’s like, half your arsenal.”
She hears Sanji gasp like he just got shot, and when her eyes drop to his slumped form just to make sure he didn’t, in fact, just got a fatal wound from a straggling Marine seeking vengeance, she finds him blushing a furious red. “Is it, now? T-tell me more,” he says—begs—shifting on his chair.
“Well!” Nami exclaims, thinking fast to deviate the conversation from oral sex before Sanji spontaneously combusts (a likely thing for him to do) and they’re all chased out of this pub for arson. “Kissing, duh. Can’t call yourself a good lover if you’re not first a good kisser.”
“I want to be the best lover,” he mutters, biting his bottom lip in a way that Nami is sure indicates his deep worry on the matter, and is not, in fact, supposed to entice her into a make-out session. “How do I know if I’m a good kisser?”
Poor guy, she didn’t mean to get into his head. She can only imagine how much worse his line of questioning would be if she’d instead mentioned the great merits of eating pussy the right way. He’d follow instructions well, if nothing else, eager to please as Sanji is. She’d need nothing more than simple praise to get him to use all that impressive perceptiveness on pleasing her, and if she was in the mood to play mean he’d let her. He’d thank her for it.
Nami snaps herself out of her line of thought at eh first sign of heat pooling low in her belly, memories of past one-night-stands that left her a sweating, needy mess stoking the fire the more she pictures Sanji, on his knees or laid down on a bed, doing a few of the things those other men have done for her.
Since when are five beers enough to make her this… receptive ?
“Sorry, Sanji-kun, there’s no recipe you can follow for that.” She dismisses his worries with a smile and a wink, already standing up to escape this terrible conversation. Awful, terrible conversation. “Practice makes perfect, though. Hey, watch my shoes, will you? Thanks!”
Nami skips her away back to the dance floor barefoot, feeling the weight of Sanji’s lovesick gaze as she starts swinging her hips to the music.
Beer #8 + four shots of Mysterious Local Liquor
“Nami-san, you’ll catch a cold,” Sanji says behind her, voice almost too soft to be heard over the ringing in her ears. She’s escaped the loud music inside to get a breath of fresh air, although with all the smokers lingering at the door she’s had to move all the way to a darker corner to find it.
“Jeez, you scared me,” she murmurs, turning to face him.
“Sorry. I saw you leave, and, well—” Sanji raises her sandals in lieu of an explanation. Before she can say anything, he bends down to his knees next to her. “Let me help you? God knows what’s on the floor out here, can’t have my sweet Nami-san cutting her feet.”
The usual mother hen. The smile that opens on her face feels on the wrong side of fond, and the feeling sinks her claws into her all the more when Sanji struggles to close the multiple small buckles that hold the sandal closed around her ankle. Nami keeps one on the cold wall and one on his shoulder to hold herself up while he works.
“Got any luck with the pretty ladies inside?” she asks. The low chatting from the groups of smokers and the music filtering from the open back-door is nothing but forgettable background noise in Nami’s muddled thoughts. Her vision is yet to go double, but it sways strangely in time with her heartbeat.
“Com’on—” Sanji bites out, fingers clumsy and still fiddling her shoes. He looks up at her face from his crouching position. Halfway there he gets a little distracted by her naked thighs at eye-level, but his gaze manages to reach her eyes eventually. “W-why do you ask?”
Nami shrugs. “I was rooting for you, but I lost sight of you at some point.” She plants both hands on Sanji’s shoulders this time, using his strong build as a crutch to lower herself into a squat without losing her already-struggling balance. “Sanji-kun getting his happily ever after would warm my old harpy heart.”
Sanji shakes his head with such conviction that it almost sends the both of them tumbling down onto the dirty pavement. “Don’t say that, Nami-san! Your heart is as young and candid as the rest of you.” He lets Nami coax his hands off her sandals to finish the job herself, or they’ll truly be here all night, and he raises them to wrap his long fingers above her elbows. The touch keeps her steady as she makes quick work of the straps. “Sorry,” he mumbles, “‘M a little too drunk, I think. I can’t feel my fingers that well.”
“You’ve got to take it easy, you know you’re not like Zoro,” she chastises him, much to his vocal displeasure at being deemed inferior to his arch-frenemy. His offense is soothed in an instant by Nami’s palm rubbing over the top of his hands.
Sanji’s grip tightens on instinct as she tries to infuse some warmth back into his fingers. “You haven’t said anything about your love quest, yet,” she reminds him, staring up at him from beneath her lashes. She doesn’t know why she’s doing any of this—touching Sanji, steering the conversation back to the shores she fled from earlier. Crouched down in the dark, with no one around who could stop them from destroying familiar dynamics.
“I sort of gave up,” he admits. Such words coming out of his lips are so rare, Nami can’t even react before he keeps going. “I—I was thinking about what you said, that there’s no recipe I can follow, and I’m feeling…I don’t know, a little lost. Don’t know where to start.” Sanji takes a deep breath and tries valiantly to give her a genuine smile, but his eyes are too shiny and his cheeks too red to wipe away the vulnerability in any believable way. Nami finds herself pouting in sympathy at the underlying sadness of his statement, but Sanji must take it as mocking, because he affects a laugh and drops his gaze to the floor.
“Ah, never mind, I can’t think straight right now. I think I’ll go back to the Sunny, try to sober up—”
Nami shifts her hand to hold him down at her level before he can stand. Talk about not thinking straight—she has no idea what’s guiding her actions, her thoughts, her fingers to caress up his arms when it’s clear that he’s not trying to escape her hold. “Sanji-kun, have you ever been with a woman?”
The light out there is dim, only flashes of it cutting through the night when the shadows of the pub’s patronage move in and out of the backdoor. Each brief glimpse Nami gets of Sanji is enough to show the expression painted on his face morph from shock, to confusion, to sheer mortification as Sanji processes what she just asked. Cheeks so red she thinks he might pass out, Sanji squeezes his eyes shut, lips trembling. “Nami-san,” he whispers, “why…? I—a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell—”
“Mh,” Nami hums, bringing one hand up to hold Sanji’s boiling hot cheeks between her thumb and forefinger. She’s vaguely aware, somewhere in the back of her sleeping conscience, that this is not the sort of touch she shares with Sanji because it’s not the sort of touch he can bear without getting ideas. Those ideas just don’t seem too bad right now, do they?
“So that’s a no,” she adds. She fixes her eyes onto Sanji’s own, wide and terrified and sweet as they are, just to watch him squirm a little more in her hold. “Surely you’ve kissed before, though, right?”
Sanji accidentally dislodges her fingers from his face by giving her the most enthusiastic, panicked nodding she’s ever witnessed. “Yes!” he exclaims, enlivened but no less embarrassed by the line of questioning. Behind him, Nami sees a couple of the smokers stop their conversation to check who’s the loud drunk yelling affirmations from a dark corner.
Whatever. Who gives a fuck about them, anyway. “That’s a start,” she tells Sanji, smiling a little, indulging in a slow blink to appease her eyelids, heavier and heavier the more those last shots she drank hit. “You’ll get there, Sanji-kun,” she croons. Has she ever crooned in her life? Can she blame any of this on Sanji’s intoxicating aftershave, clouding her senses the closer he leans into her space? “You just need some confidence that you can do a good job.”
He audibly gulps. There’s only one more heartbeat of pause before his forehead gently presses over hers—the touch evokes from him a hitched breath that reveals it was accidental on his part, as if he’s simply swaying in the wind, incapable of controlling how he bends and moves. Nami, for her part, doesn’t mind the warmth of him as it soothes her impending headache. “Practice makes perfect,” he echoes her words from earlier. His eyes flutter close. Nami feels his trembling exhale wash over her lips, and on instinct she licks them as if she could get a taste of what he drank last. “Problem is…” he adds, and the rest of the sentence trails off as he tilts his head, tip of his nose brushing her cheek, unsure fingers suspended in the meagre space between their bodies.
Nami shifts her weight forward so that they'll brush over her naked knees instead. “The things I do for my boys,” she says, exasperated, breathless from anticipation—and then she’s kissing him.
The first touch of her lips on his is comforting and pleasant like sinking your head into a pillow when you’re bone-tired. All of her is sore from the crouching, the high heels, the cooling night air drying the sweat over her neck; but Sanji is warm, his lips yielding to her movements because in his shock he hasn’t bothered pursing his lips as he sometimes does when he has just served Nami or Robin a snack and he’s jokingly asking for a kiss as a recompense. He never does it long enough to make them doubt he’s being serious, flitting away to accomplish some other culinary feat before the girls can so much as simply thank him. Now that Nami is closer than he’s ever felt her, letting the chaste contact linger to give him the opportunity of reciprocation, he stands as still as a statue.
She should have seen this coming. Frowning, she pulls back; immediately misses the soft press of Sanji’s mouth on hers; frowns even harder. “You’re worse than I thought,” she comments. Part of her was aiming for cold and annoyed, but it comes out too bratty, too needy.
Sanji stares , stares open-mouthed with tears gathering in his eyes either from emotion or the incapability to blink in his paralysed state. Nami squeezes the side of his neck to force a reaction, and he does snap out of it with a gasp. His gaze drops to her lips, lashes fluttering until the wetness gathered there rolls down his cheeks in two hot streaks. “Sorry, wait, sorry—” he mumbles, half-incoherent, and before Nami can chalk up the whole exchange to a drunken slip of sanity, Sanji tugs her in for a second attempt. His large palms cover her cheeks, holding her face with all the care needed for a frail but precious ceramic cup, and Sanji kisses her once, twice, three times over her parted lips like he’s trying to catch up on lost time. It’s unbearably sweet—the intention behind more than the actual taste of him, a little bitter from some strong liquor he got at the bar.
On the last kiss he presses closer still, a muted moan at the back of his throat getting lost in the haze rapidly spreading in Nami’s brain. Oh, he’s not bad at this at all. Sloppy, maybe, and so eager to try all the angles in which their lips can slot together that he’s avoiding giving Nami what she’s craving—that is, the languid feel of their tongues meeting—but the craving, in and of itself, deserves praise. A bad kiss, of which she’s had many in her life of fleeting connections with semi-strangers, leaves her regretful that this barbaric practice is even something that people invented in the first place. In contrast, If Sanji were to pull back now, he’d leave her wanting more … and there are worse ways to end an evening.
She’s just starting to contemplate the scenario, images of him breaking the kiss before she gets a real taste of him playing behind her closed eyelids, when Sanji all but melts into her. They’re both balancing their weight on their feet, the ground swaying underneath them from their inebriated state, so that Sanji moving forward means Nami falling backwards. There are his hands firm and protective on her back, not so much as holding her up as dragging himself down to follow her; there’s a seam ripping somewhere in her skirt from her legs bending too far, pressing over Sanji’s flanks, knees and elbows knocking in a way that will ache tomorrow; but most of all, and the only thing that will stick in Nami’s mind to be played on loop the next morning, there’s Sanji’s tongue sliding in her mouth. With a distinct thought of finally! , Nami lets him enjoy that newfound freedom however he wants. After all, this is an assessment. A test of skill. It’s her role in this game to quietly allow him to play, and only after to judge, set new rules, make him try again.
They part briefly due to that pesky need for oxygen, of which Nami doesn’t find much even as their lips separate. She sucks in a breath that does nothing to clear her head, only stokes the embers roiling in what she used to think was genuine indifference to Sanji’s advances—and look at her now, sprawled on a dirty floor underneath him. Perhaps it’s been hesitance all along, her trust issues ruling undisputed over the barren land that is her romantic life. Sanji, while she’s busy panting, sighs her name like she’s the goddess who hung the moon in the sky.
“Nami, Nami,” he says again, moving closer once more, licking over her parted lips before kissing her again. Nami sinks a hand in his hair to tilt his head, to tug him closer and right where she wants him, and he responds with trembling enthusiasm by moaning into her mouth. He curls his tongue around hers, lack of experience betrayed more by his timidity than his choices. It takes Nami drawing back just so she can mimic the move (like this, you got it, follow my lead—) for him to give into it fully. The slide of their lips gets easier the wetter the kiss becomes, Sanji groaning at the back of his throat when Nami bites him a little more harshly than she meant—but of course he seems to like it, because he’s Sanji and she’s Nami and he would take a beating with a smile if it was from her. In between all the muffled wet sound of their mouths breaking contact, Sanji pulls back an inch to suck in a breath, and a line of spit stretches to connect their lips, inviting him back down onto her again—which he does, with abandon. Bad technique , Nami should say when this is over, you can’t turn a first kiss into this. This is how you do it in the middle of sex. We’re outside a bar, on the floor, with strangers a few steps away from—
“Ah, so that’s where you two idiots were.”
The sound of Zoro’s deeply unimpressed voice is a shock to Nami’s system, but it’s Sanji who reacts like he just got a bucket of ice-cold water dumped on his head.
One second his goatee and moustache is tickling Nami’s lips, the next he’s on his feet with a wild look in his visible eye. He promptly stumbles and falls back to his knees, because a drunk Sanji regresses to a newborn fawn in terms of balance.
Nami limits herself to sitting up instead, glancing at the small crowd near the backdoor to assess how much of a show they were putting on. An older woman steadily working at a cigar gives her a thumbs up when she accidentally makes eye contact, a gesture of difficult interpretation for Nami given her mental and physical state.
“I was looking for the bathroom, but I guess it’s good that I found you,” Zoro comments—and really, how does he seem so bored after stumbling on Nami and Sanji making out, objectively one of the most out-of-left-field events he must have witnessed in his life? “The others and I are gonna go back to the Sunny in like ten minutes. You two can go back to rutting on the floor if you want. See ya later.”
He gives a soft kick to Nami’s shoe with the toe of his own leather boot, a surreal reminder that this is reality, the kind that happens for real, in real time, and Zoro just saw Nami sucking face with Sanji. As she’s actively spiralling, he takes his leave in search of the bathroom.
She clears her throat, and brings her eyeline down to Sanji, who’s still on his knees in front of her. He’s got both hands pressed over his cheeks in a manner that’s tugging all of his features out of shape, like he’s slowly liquefying into the pavement in his shock. Horrifying to watch, but Nami for sure didn’t expect him to recover quickly from kissing her. She doesn’t expect him to recover at all, really. Ugh, what has she done? He’s… delicate , when it comes to her, and now she went and destroyed his psyche or whatever the fuck is going on with him.
“Sanji-kun?” Mindful of her own spinning head, Nami gets back to her feet with slow, clumsy movements. “You okay down there? Did I break you?”
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” he mumbles without looking at her. Nami grimaces. Oh, he’s reverted to his customer service tone, the situation is dire. She’s too drunk to even attempt and diffuse this particular bomb, one whose fuse she didn’t mean to ignite in the first place. It just happened. Isn’t that how life has gone for her since she’s met Luffy? Things just happen and she has to fake-it-till-you-make-it her way through them?
Well, she can’t blame this one on Luffy—although, by God, she will try when she’s less drunk.
So Nami tugs the hem of her tight skirt down to its rightful place, and makes an attempt to clean her smudged lip gloss off of her chin. Act like making out with a crewmate is par for the course on a night out. Pretend that the crewmate being Sanji means nothing in particular. “I’ll send Usopp out here so he can, uh—pick you up from the floor with a spoon or something.” And stop nibbling on your bottom lip!
“Bye,” is the last thing she tells Sanji before she struts back inside the pub. Her head is already throbbing with a migraine that will hit her tenfold when she’ll wake up tomorrow—but that, like the memory of Sanji softly moaning into her mouth, is a problem for Future Nami. Alongside a raging hangover, of course.