This is utterly pathetic fluff, only just PG-13 and not R (beware, beware), pre-Chopper, pre-Vivi and pre-Robin. And Lina, it's all for you, because I promised I would write it. Also because you're a very precious ho.
i.
Nami wakes up and dreads the first kiss. Wakes up in her pyjamas and pushes sweaty tangerine locks out her face - wakes up and is terrified deep down to her stomach, which is not a normal feeling for her, the day when she gives in and can't stop herself and accidentally kisses Sanji. It's not Sanji she's afraid of: Sanji, who has the gentlest hands and the most (adorably) idiotic eyebrows - it's herself; because once she kisses Sanji -
She always strangles that thought and stuffs it at the bottom of the drawers of her head, hits it until it shuts up and can't whisper sly whispers. Nami is sensible: Nami is practical. Nami will do what is in Nami's Best Interests, - and Nami has never been kissed - Nami will do the Clever Thing.
Nami absently doodles stick figures of Zoro and Luffy making kissy faces at each other. Nami, panic-stricken at heart, burns her ink blotter.
(Nami goes to bed sometimes and wonders what she's afraid of.)
Nami will never let her cover break - or maybe it's already broken -
Which is why next Tuesday Nami wakes up, and five hours later ends up kissing Usopp.
ii.
Three things precipitate this: she is locked in a closet due to his inability to fix it, he is also locked in on the other side, and she is fumbling in the dark to hit him very hard on the head. Zoro, who could sleep through the end of the world, is their only chance of saviour as Luffy and Sanji buy supplies. There is also the fact that when you are both convinced you may be running out of air, it suddenly feels very real despite the actual air supply of closets. It is a sad thing to die in a closet with Usopp.
"It's stuck!"
"I'm going to die! I'm going to die in a closet!"
"Hey! Hey! Somebody let us out!"
"Is this the end of Captain Usopp? Choked to death in a closet - "
She claps her hand over his mouth. "Don't breathe. You'll take up all our air." (There are strangling noises, so eventually, she stops, in the panic that he is going to die and then she would be locked in the closet with a dead body instead.)
"Wait. Look. Somebody will come to save us."
"Okay. We won't panic. If we panic, we'll use up all our air. They'll all be back on board eventually."
Usopp and Nami are not born patient; they wait for a whole five seconds in silence before they shriek again, arms around each other, kicking violently at the closet doors in unison as they wailed in despair. "We're going to die in a closet!"
"Look," she says, practicality trying to rise over fear of tiny cramped spaces, - "look, at the worst, we're going to miss lunch." (Considering this worse than lingering death, Usopp wails in existential despair.)
"Stop it - is that your elbow!"
"Look. I have a plan. I, brave Captain Usopp, have been trapped in a closet many times before. An ignominious fate for a man, surely, but who knows the levels men will stoop to - "
"Usopp."
" - relieved that you have me to save you, cool-headed and relentless Captain Usopp - "
"Usopp."
" - once defeated a clan of terrible monstrous woodworms with a glass of water and my bare fists - "
"Usopp. What's your plan."
Silence. "Um. Cry very loudly?"
She shrieks, in terrible fury this time, and takes his shoulders so that she can hopefully kill him through shaking. Usopp, due to the fact that he is Usopp, screams like a girl - there is momentary movement as he attempts to flee in their tiny crawlspace from her, and she tries to pull his hair out, until they are jumbled up at the bottom of the closet and her legs are tangled up with her rope supplies and he claims to be too young and beautiful to die. He smells like gunpowder and oil and wood shavings and she is weak, Mother, so she kisses him.
It does not work out the way that she had hoped, and then again it does. The world's greatest navigator has trouble navigating the nose. Once that's mapped, however, there is no real extra trouble. Usopp's muffled protests die down.
They are silent, shy, and getting terrible back problems, twisted up there in the dark. Their cheeks are also so red Sanji could fry eggs on them. (Nami can feel her heart pounding in her chest; she can hear his, beating like a caged bird in his ribs.) One of his thick, frizzy locks has gotten between them, and is irritating her nose; they sneeze at each other for about one whole minute before she risks lumbar pain and tries again.
He is shocked. He may, she realises, in fact be dead, possibly from heart attack - he's just her country boy from Syrup Village, who never even got to dream of kissing lovely pale blonde Kaya - and she's kissing him but he's not kissing back. Maybe he is in a coma. (She wishes she could see his eyes - )
"Once," he says, suddenly and arrestingly, "I was kidnapped by a terrible mermaid princess who had fallen in love with me. She kept me in a cage in her undersea palace and refused to let me go due to my pure-hearted chivalry and passion."
She is undone. "What?"
"This is understandable. I'm very handsome - "
"Usopp. Shut. Up."
He kisses her - he kisses her and a part of her that was suddenly lost is Nami again, and she wonders why she was afraid, and she kisses him and roses bloom on the sea - both of them, unfortunately, are naive and innocent kissers, with a great deal of spit and enthusiasm but not a lot else - also, he tastes like breakfast. She kisses him and it's suddenly wonderful, an anxious and helpless mesh of teeth and tongue and lips, they are getting severe cricks in their necks. She can feel the tremors underneath his skin - are you afraid of this like everything else, Usopp? - and he rises to the occasion like everything he is truly afraid of, his hands are on the small of her back and they both have the giggles into each other's lips.
"Usopp," Nami murmurs slyly, "have you ever thought about kissing Luffy?"
"W-what?" (His sudden thoughts - a floating white-picket house, and tiny long-nosed redheads for children, morphs hideously into Luffy also present and some of the children with deranged expressions and stretchy arms.)
She finds one of the long, delightfully springy curls in the dark to curl around her finger. "Come on. You can tell me."
"I have never thought about kissing Luffy! He - he has - boy lips! I have allergies!" Why is she unsnapping his overalls? Having gone from shock to joy to better joy and all the way around to shock again with a good dose of abuse, maybe he... Why is she putting her hands on his chest? Why is she putting her fingers on his nippl -
"Have you ever thought about kissing Sanji?" He is making delightfully strangled sounds in the back of his throat. Drunk on being alive and being in love, Nami thoughtfully gives him a nipple-gripple. "Out with it."
"OW. OW. OW. OW. You were sent directly from hell. OW. I'll never - YES! NO! I DON'T KNOW! I ONCE SAW HIM NAKED PLEASE STOP. I AM VERY DELICATE."
He is incredibly confused and possibly injured - maybe she twisted a little too hard - and Nami pops a vertebrae sympathetically kissing him better. Maybe it wasn't meant to go like this. She feels like a boy - like Usopp is some kind of unpretty girl she's seducing in the closet, brushing her lips over his nipples, only there are heavy weights inside her and she's all girl now and forever. And he's all boy - oh. Yes. Wow. He is all boy, right there against her hip through the tough denim of his coverall, possibly a reaction borne out of sheer terror and the lingering aroma of her shampoo. They are both intensely shy again, and Nami rests her head against his shoulder. (She thinks it's his shoulder. It's shaped like a shoulder. Isn't there a torch somewhere around here?)
"Do you think about kissing Luffy and Sanji?"
"Don't you?"
"What, at the same time?"
"Well, not at the same time - "
" - once, back when I was seven years old, I fought the raging two-headed monster of Monster Valley - please don't do that again."
She doesn't, and just rubs her thumb over the odd pucker of his nipple - explores him, reads his latitude and longitude, wishes she could see him so much that she wants to explode with it. "But - them being boys - "
Usopp wishes fervently for death, then and there, out of want and humiliation and something he can't quite describe. "No."
"What?"
"It's not about them being boys. It's about them being Luffy and Sanji."
He said it better than she could, ever could - "and Zoro."
Usopp's silent, then; she cherishes every ripple underneath his skin, wants to lock him away like so much treasure. And then: "How many times have you done this? Because I wouldn't want to hurt you, considering I, suave and beloved Captain Usopp, have, um, done... it, ... one thousand forty billion times - "
"Once. Including this."
" - eleven hundred forty billion ti - what? I thought you knew what you were doing!"
"I don't know what I'm doing!" Well, she probably did, a bit more than Usopp did. Actually, a lot more than Usopp did. Nami endured the cruel jeers of Arlong's men as a sideshow to her awkward puberty; and for one thing, she's read those vile romance novels. She has one year on Usopp. That's enough. "Do you even know what we're doing?"
"... you can't get pregnant if we're not married and keep your clothes on."
Nami gives up and kisses him again. Somehow the shut-in dark is adding something urgent to the way their hands are moving - is it always this needy? She would have been ashamed to shake this much in front of Zoro, and Usopp's shaking too: his tenative departure of his fingers down his spine, her aggrieved yelps as his fingers go under her skirt to the goosebumps of her thighs - she finds his ribs and he hastily pulls away from her skirt, as if ashamed to be caught there, only then he takes his long clever marksman's fingers and unsnaps her bra. Nami has the giggles again: she buries her mouth at Usopp's throat, missing once and banging her nose painfully on his jaw, which just makes her laugh harder -
It is at this point that Zoro, master of timing, pulls open the doors with a grunt and a tug.
iii.
The light is blinding. He looks at them, and they squint at him; hands everywhere and too tangled up with the contents of the closet to really discern where Usopp stops and Nami begins. They choose to artfully cover up the moment by going red. (Nami - despite everything - is at a loss for words.)
Surprisingly enough, Zoro goes red too - so red that it is, in fact, a shade of purple, gawping at them wholesale. He is rumpled and slightly sunburned from sleeping out on the deck: with an air of let's never mention this again, he starts to shut the doors.
Nami tumbles out, sticking out her shoe before he can do it - Usopp comes out with her, but he is trying to feign death on the floor, as if everything can be explained away through him appearing to no longer be alive. Quicker than she thought - panic-stricken, running on adrenaline and an unclasped bra and her first kiss, her first here kiss, the first everything - she grabs Zoro by his shirtfront and Usopp by his ear and drags them both back into the closet. She curls her pinkies into the doorknob screws and slams the doors shut with a resounding bang.
(The closet is, needless to say, mildly cramped now.)
Zoro recovers. "What the hell - "
His katana are sticking into her legs and she has, in fact, twisted something appalling in her spine. Nami doesn't care. She flings both arms bodily around Zoro's warm neck, the solid length of him pressed against her as she goes on tiptoes - and she kisses him, the second kiss, just another rock flung in the water, desperate and unwise and true. Zoro is more tactical than Usopp: he doesn't, for the first thing, bother to protest with words. He protests by pretending that he is a block of Zoro-wood who cannot, in fact, be kissed, except then he gets pissed off that she has put him on a defensive and pretends that he has been kissing her from the very beginning. He is rough - rough everywhere, chapped lips and forceful hands at her waist until she's drunk on it and her toes curl. She reaches up one hand to the back of his neck - just to feel the short crop of hair at the nape, imagining it all sea-green and fuzzy underneath her fingers.
Nami pulls away and pushes him forward; rocking him into Usopp, her hands suddenly underneath Zoro's shirt until she can hear him choke, straining so that she can kiss the sensitive lobe of his ear where his earrings hang. She tugs with her teeth. Zoro makes a noise as if she has just kneed him in the groin. "Kiss Usopp."
"What!" His masculinity flares back, and he starts to try and pull away - thank their lucky stars and the calm sea, no room. "Nami, you - "
She hisses it, then, a mantra, begging, - takes Usopp's hand in her own, can hear his indrawn breath, nearly weeps in desperation - "kiss him, kiss him, kiss him, kiss him."
It is probably the first and only time Zoro does exactly as she says: maybe he even does it just to be contrary, maybe he doesn't know why, maybe it's just the dreamy urge to abandon all Not Kissin' Usopp urges and maybe it's because it was his first kiss too - but he does it. She wants to see it so much. Usopp's hand goes limp in hers and he squawks, all of them shifting and stuck and ferocious and forgotten - and it goes on for quite a while before Zoro pulls his head back up and bellows, "What the fuck am I doing?"
"Kissing us," Nami explains, as if he is a small child. She starts to unbutton his shirt. (Why does Zoro think he looks good in orange and blue palm-tree pattern? It is a mystery. Actually, she decides, he looks so incredibly insanely adorable in it he should wear nothing else - no, she changes her mind, he shouldn't wear a shirt at all. The devils on Nami's shoulders announce a new naked dress code.) "Please kiss me too."
He swears into her mouth, but it is the first time she has ever really asked him for anything - for this and for all of them - and he gives and it stops her heart. He also then obviously decides that it is a romantic thing to do to punch Usopp very hard in the arm, as if it is his fault, and kiss him too. Nami had not actually known it possible for a man to sulk and kiss somebody at the same time. Now she does. She also knows now that she was born a voyeur, and she'll die a voyeur.
"If boys kiss you you go blind," says Usopp. (Usopp has, she thinks, gone past the consciousness barrier, and is existing in a rosy Wonderland of not being there.)
"What the hell am I doing?"
She leans back into Usopp - squeezing past Zoro, in some vague attempt to barrier their rising panic over cooties - but Zoro, she thinks, is also far gone, and he pushes them both back against the side of the closet and kisses Nami so hard she nearly suffocates. She feels Usopp's lips at her shoulder; he is muttering dire predictions - his hands are at her hips - and she feels both boys' mouths meet over the strap of her top, and the pushing forces and her some kind of near excuse: Zoro can't decide if he wants to bite Nami's shoulder or bite down on Usopp, but it doesn't matter because now there are three sets of hands and Usopp and Zoro can pretend that Zoro really doesn't mean to have one hand firmly on Usopp's butt. Nami sighs blissfully, and paws at both of them as if they're all three teenage boys.
"Goddamnit, stop elbowing me!"
"That's not mine!"
"Can we get through this without arguing like children?"
" - what the hell am I doing - "
"Is that all you can say?"
"You better be good for something, 'cause it's not your brain." (Nami and Usopp join each other in mean, pathetic snickers. Nami closes her eyes until she sees bright things behind her eyelids: somebody got her shirt down around her waist and her bra is a limp, pathetic tangle, and somebody is touching her breasts - Usopp's hands, then - no, Zoro's flaked fingertips. Too many hands are exploring the phenomenon of her embarrassingly tender nipples. First kisses, and now she's half naked - boys, her heart sings, trust boys.)
"Zoro, not there I am very delicate - "
"Stop whining."
"Maybe we should wait for the others," Nami suggests, more than mildly breathless, and she feels more than hears Zoro's breath hitch as she fiddles with the ties of his trousers.
"You call that fucking waiting?"
"Zoro, how many times have you... done it? Me, I can tell you that I - I seduced Nami, of course - they know me across the seas as 'Heartbreaker Captain Usopp' - "
Nami's fingers tremble a little and she presses them against the fabric at his thighs - slinks them down and she can feel him, unrepentantly hard against her hand, which is maybe why he hollers: "I'm a virgin!"
(Both Usopp and Nami choke a little on that one. Zoro would sulk, only there are hands and they are touching him.)
"Is nobody around here not a virgin?" Nami asks, as if she's cross about it - moves one hand and throws caution to the wind and presses it against Usopp's hips, groping in the dark, moving down until she has both of their pulses in her palms - and can't bear it any more, because Zoro's hand is right next to hers on Usopp's and that is something she is going to tease Zoro about for ever. This is gold. This is gold, this is silver - she raises one shapely foot and kicks the doors hard.
One of the doors falls off. That's okay.
Zoro, who has had enough of them both - picks them both up bodily and drops them on the floor, on the particularly ugly rug they picked up somewhere along the line in Loguetown, Nami forgets really where - and drops to sit with them with a clatter. His shirt is falling off. His trousers are coming undone - Usopp has one hell of a lovebite on his neck and he has amazing shoulders; he lost his bandanna and his hair is everywhere - and if she looks down at herself, finally abandoning modesty over comfort and taking off what remains of her top and bra - there they are, Zoro and Usopp and she loves looking at them: she could look at them all day. Usopp is looking at them both with this peculiar expression, like he's saving them up in his mind and like he could paint them with his fingers, and Zoro tries for impassive and fails forever and he flops to his back. Usopp - Usopp's not used to this: Zoro's arm is flopped over his leg just to touch him and it's their awkward, hungry intimacy, all of them just wanting to touch each other and never let go. Nami - lit up like a candle - absurdly, just for a moment, feels like weeping. Possibly it's because she knows that her hair is just everywhere.
"No wonder Sanji calls you a moss-head," she says, stupidly, and threads her fingers through the short fuzzy stuff on top of Zoro's scalp. He snorts at that, but does not bat her hand away.
"It looks more like seagull sick," Usopp says wisely - she can see him still trembling, and she takes his hand to kiss it - and Zoro punches him again. The marksman retaliates by pulling an elastic band out of his pocket and firing it squarely at Zoro's forehead - and they're in a stranglehold of punching, brown skins and Usopp's dark curls everywhere and half-straddling Zoro to elbow him in the eye - and Nami just watches, indulgently, watches the dust motes dance in the sunshine coming through the window and watches Zoro bite down on Usopp's shoulder and did they really have to do their foreplay like that? They roll on to her in a kicking, biting fuss - she boxes Zoro's ears as Usopp shrieked about blood loss, from the tiniest cut ever, from Zoro's blunt teeth - and then a tomato rolls by her foot.
Because the door is open, and because Sanji never drops groceries, and he just dropped an entire wrapped bundle on the floor which the tomato rolls out of as he stares at the tableaux of them: just stares.
iv.
"Zoro, you shitty bastard," Sanji bellows, "you raped Nami and poor Usopp! I'll kill you!"
That falls immediately flat.
"What the fuck? Shut your stupid goddamn mouth - "
"'Poor' Usopp?"
"What! If you'll excuse me, nobody raped me - in fact, I raped Nami. And Zoro. Numerous times. I raped them ten times each and now Zoro is pregnant - "
"What?"
"What?"
"Everyone be quiet!"
Zoro and Usopp have leapt to their feet. Nami thinks they shouldn't have; it doesn't help their position any that their clothes are falling off. And Sanji stands there still like a statue - not looking - not looking until she pulls the curtains over the windows, shuts out the gentle dull roar of the sea, shuts the door behind their cook and takes him by the tie.
"Sanji," she says, gentle for the first time with him - real, more real, a little embarrassed for it, but the problem is that she's in love with him. She also has the damn bad luck to be in love with Usopp, and Zoro, and Usopp and Zoro and Sanji, and the problem is also that every cell of her and them has always bowed down in adoration and clung to every cell of the Captain's dreams - "Come here."
He looks at her. Then he looks down. He takes off his sunglasses. He keeps looking down.
"Mellorine," he says, and a slow smile crosses his mouth like sunrise. "Your breasts are divinely inspired."
She kicks him. It all goes downhill after that. He takes her in his arms and kisses her, long and suave and more romantic until her organs have all dried up with it, until the others decide that this is mainly Sanji just being jealous until the blonde takes Usopp amidst the kerfuffle and kisses him with equal smooth suaveness until Zoro tries to trip him up. That prompts a momentary streetfight between the two until Nami and Usopp recollect themselves attack-wise - Nami kisses his cheek for luck - and they hurl themselves on Sanji and force his face into the ugly rug as they strip him bodily. (His protests don't actually sound too sincere.)
"Oh, by the way," Usopp reminds him, kicking off Sanji's shoes for him - "I, however, am a man-about-town, Captain Usopp, with a thousand wives and only some of them actually mermaids and some of them are really women with legs, and, - and the other parts, - I have sired ten thousand children for my loyal Usopp Family army of the night - "
"Are you a virgin," Nami finishes.
"My darling, my sweet angel, my light of my life - "
"Can it until she's goddamn naked, love cook." (Zoro kicks him in the face, which isn't very nice.)
" - yes," says Sanji, slightly squashed and bleeding, and there is a chorus of groans. "What? Look, fuckin' Zeff wasn't about to let me get any on the Baratie while he had breath in his shitty old-man lungs - "
"We can always have lunch instead," offers Usopp hopefully.
There's not much to answer to that but shrieking. "After all the trouble I've been to?"
"I'm not going to kiss Sanji," Zoro announces sulkily.
"That's fine. I'm not going to kiss you."
"Well, I wasn't going to kiss you anyway."
"I was never going to let you kiss me."
"I'm not some kind of fag homo."
"You grabbed my butt."
"Shut up, Usopp. - Anyway, I'm not going to kiss you."
"If I had to be kissed by you I would throw up."
Making love to them - all together - is, in fact, a great deal like dinnertimes. Nami thinks that she was rosily insane to believe that it would be anything else: anything other than a lot of shouting and noise, everybody reaching over each other to grab what they want, argument and laughter and apparently a competition to see who can yell the loudest. Usopp is still punch-drunk dizzy at the idea of it, having to make a lot of noise to make up for the fact that he's terrified. Afraid like she is, and she still wishes that she could tell him but she feels like she's been dunked underwater - and Sanji, who's taking it in his stride, and Zoro, who still looks pissed off. Since when did they all get naked? - and what the hell, Zoro was giving Sanji a lovebite there? Is this legal? -
v.
"Boy, that was awesome!" says Luffy, popping up unexpectedly out of the clumsy ebbing tide of argument and bare flesh and hands, when everything is dark, hours and hours later. (He is naked. He is, however, wearing his hat.) "Okay, I'm going to sleep now. Wake me up for dinner. Make sure there is meat."
vi.
Silence.
Sanji fishes around on the floor; he comes up with his cigarettes, and lights one. He then passes it to Zoro, who takes a lungful before passing it on to Nami. She breathes in the smoke with numb fingers and passes it to Usopp, who attempts to intelligently honk in the smoke but nearly chokes. Luffy has fallen asleep immediately as promised, snoring gently and contentedly.
"Did anyone else see him come in?" Sanji ventures.
Usopp goes white. "So that's what that was. I - Oh. Oh." (Nami hits him on the back helpfully as he has another coughing fit, and Zoro retrieves the cigarette before he can set them all on fire. There is a tiny fistfight between him and the cook as the cook throws the stub end in a potplant. Great.)
"Whatever," Zoro announces. "He has the right idea." Cheek on Luffy's stomach, Zoro curls up fetally and closes his eyes. He can sleep anywhere, and possibly especially on Luffy's stomach. Nami, mildly aggravated, watches as Usopp follows suit - only Sanji's there, on his hip, watching her through nearly-closed eyes as she roots around for a blanket. She puts it over them, slips under - Sanji puts his arm around her, and Luffy's hands are everywhere - fingers nearly up Zoro's nose, the other flopped near Sanji's hair, everywhere. She feels a little bereft.
"I love you," she says to the ceiling.
There is no response. Zoro makes a half-asleep noise, and Usopp twitches terribly and Sanji's warm against her back. Except then - Luffy's cracked open one dark eye and is giving her a grin of pure jubilation, confident and assured.
"I knew that."
And that's that. He closes his eye again. (There are scratches all down his arms. Who did that?) Nami gives in and pulls her knees close to her chest and steals most of the blanket.
"And you all owe me money," she mutters.