Only Bentham kept drinking his tea calmly. Perhaps another important reason why many members of the family felt genuine interest in him—Johnny in particular—was Mr. Two's attitude. Their family had effectively destroyed Baroque Works, nearly killed Bentham himself, and slaughtered a whole pile of his comrades, friends, and acquaintances. Yet instead of loud vows of revenge, furious threats, or liters of tears, Mr. Two was more upset about not being allowed to dance in the kitchen than anything else. Such a view of the world certainly could not be called normal, and it stood far outside the familiar picture. Then again, Bentham himself stood even farther outside the familiar picture. A person who, whenever he wished, could be either a man or a woman could hardly possess a typical mindset. It was difficult to imagine what influence the power of his fruit had exerted—and continued to exert—on his psyche. This was clearly something on the level of Luffification, if not even more extreme.
The entrance door opened and a large long-nosed snowman rolled inside.
"T-that's it, f-fuck all of y-you!" Usopp chattered through his teeth, immediately starting to peel off hundreds of layers of clothing that, together with the snow, had made him resemble the aforementioned snowman. "I-it's c-cold, w-windy, and y-you can't s-see a damn th-thing! I f-froze like... l-like hell knows wh-what!"
Despite the way he spoke, predictably, he found no sympathy.
"Sanji, pour him some tea so he'll shut up and stop whining," Nami said.
That was the absolute maximum Usopp could hope for.
"So, who's going out to freeze next?" Luffy asked.
"..."
"..."
"..."
Silence answered him. Unlike the warm galley, the temperature outside was around minus twenty. Add high humidity and wind, however, and those twenty degrees began to feel like all fifty below. Nobody wanted to stay out in that kind of cold. In East Blue, there had never been weather anywhere near this horrible.
"I suggest we vote," Luffy declared, not at all upset by the lack of volunteers. "Raise your hand if you're in favor of kicking Ryu out into the cold," he asked, immediately raising his own hand.
The result of the vote surprised no one.
"I don't want to go out there!" Johnny protested.
"Are you our dragon or not?" Sanji asked him.
"Exactly!" Luffy supported him. "You'll be fine as long as you keep breathing fire on your balls."
"I'm not breathing fire on my balls!"
"That's up to you. Decide whether you need your balls or whether you'd rather let them freeze off and fall away," came the tactful reply.
"I'm not staying outside until my balls fall off!"
"Johnny, if we hit an iceberg while you're standing here arguing, you'd better drown yourself immediately afterward," Nami advised him.
"If you're so worried, then why don't you, just once in your life, keep watch over the sea yourself?" an unhappy Johnny suggested.
Since joining the family, Nami truly had never once sat in the crow's nest. In fact, one could spend a very long time listing the things she had never done. Why? Same reason as always.
"I can't. I'm too beautiful."
An argument that was impossible to refute.
"You weren't this beautiful before, and you still never watched the sea even once!"
"That was before, and back then I had different reasons. Now I'm simply too beautiful for this shit."
Everyone understood perfectly well that Johnny had lost this argument before it even began. No matter how much he whined, he would still have to go outside. In truth, Johnny himself understood that too; he argued only because his sense of justice had been wounded. Why was he always the one who got stuck with everything? Unfair! However, before the unhappy boy had even finished dressing, the entrance door opened again and let Tashigi inside.
"How's Vivi?" Nami asked her immediately.
"Bad," the girl answered at once, shaking snow from her head. "I think you'd better go down to her right now. A little more and she'll have another episode."
Nami sighed heavily and rose to her feet, intending to follow Tashigi's advice immediately. At the same time, she did not forget to throw Luffy an irritated glance, which he noticed but, as usual, ignored. There was no point appealing to the conscience of someone who simply did not have one. Much the same could be said about compassion, though in that respect the entire male half of the family was guilty. On top of everything else, Nami strongly suspected that even Luffy had not expected such devastating consequences for Vivi's psyche. And no wonder. The moment the girl emerged from her prolonged stupor, it quickly became clear that her condition had not really been caused by the events on Little Garden at all. Certainly, the bloody killing of two Baroque Works agents had played an important role in her current state, but it had only served as a catalyst. The real cause lay much deeper. The real cause lay in what had happened back at Whiskey Peak. After two months of diligently suppressing her emotions, the eventual result had been inevitable. The moment a suitable trigger appeared, Vivi's emotions flared like a match, swept away every barrier in a wave of fire, and practically burned the girl out from within. At this point, they could only be grateful she had not immediately turned into a vegetable.
"While I'm with Vivi, watch Robin for me," Nami asked, taking her white down jacket from Tashigi and putting it on. "Most importantly, don't let anyone near her. With Robin, you're the only one here I trust."
"I think I've said this before, but you're the only person here who absolutely should not be trusted with Robin," Luffy shot back. "Terrifying to imagine what you might do to the poor girl while she's this defenseless."
"I don't know, I don't know," Johnny shook his head, still shifting from foot to foot near the door.
"Personally, I'm not scared to imagine that at all. After several months at sea, it's actually pleasant," he finished with a lecherous grin, waggling his eyebrows suggestively at Nami.
Naturally, she was not the sort of person such hints could embarrass, nor was she ever at a loss for words.
"Then go outside and imagine as much as you like, preferably for as long as possible," she said, pointing toward the crow's nest on the Going Merry's mainmast. "Maybe everything down there will freeze off, and you'll do every woman in the world a huge favor. Someone like you shouldn't be allowed to reproduce anyway."
"Would everyone stop talking about my junk already?!" the boy protested sincerely again. "I haven't even gone outside yet, and just listening to you is making me cold!"
The entrance door slammed, and the still-bickering Johnny and Nami found themselves in the middle of the bad weather.
"This weather is fucked!"
"Hope you freeze properly!"
"Not a chance!"
And with that they separated. The boy, with great reluctance and still muttering complaints under his breath, climbed toward the crow's nest, while the girl headed for the captain's cabin. Yet when she had already gone down the ladder to the middle deck and opened the door leading inside the ship, she unexpectedly froze in place. Unexpectedly even for herself. Considering the weather around them, one could almost say she had been frozen to the spot. Looking around in confusion, she slowly moved toward the money storage room, following some vague sensation. Nami did not understand what exactly she was feeling, but she was definitely feeling something.
"Observation Haki?" she whispered involuntarily. "But doesn't Haki only work on living..."
Before she could finish, her eyes widened in sudden realization. No longer wasting a second, the girl rushed toward the storage room and flung the door open. Nami's gaze immediately landed on Marianne hanging from a hook. Bound with ropes, gagged, miserable, frightened, tear-streaked, and freezing. Already looking like a small child under ordinary circumstances, she now seemed especially tiny and pitiful. For several long seconds Nami simply stood there staring in shock at the scene before her, but then her expression began changing rapidly, while the doorframe under her fingers cracked and crumpled. Despite the sudden desire to charge straight back to the galley, the girl first dealt with freeing Marianne. She took her off the hook, pulled the gag from her mouth, untied the ropes, and only after making sure the girl could walk on her own did she head back toward the galley with her.
Despite all her attempts at restraint, the entrance door nearly came off its hinges, and the metal handle groaned pitifully as it deformed in her grip. One glance at the returning Nami dragging Marianne behind her was enough for the startled Sanji, Yosaku, and Usopp to scatter instantly and hide in different corners. None of them wanted to end up between the girl and Luffy sitting at the table. Normally Nami, despite all her beauty, resembled a warm sunny day. Right now she looked more like a merciless forest fire. Like a legendary Valkyrie taking the warpath, terrifying and beautiful at the same time. That was why Bentham, lacking the others' developed immunity to the girl's beauty, took much longer to assess the situation. Fortunately for him, he still possessed enough brains to follow the example of the other boys. Only Luffy remained seated at the table, unable to take his eyes off Marianne, half-dead from the cold.
"...Damn. I knew I'd forgotten something," he cursed.
Normally the Grand Line had warm summer or spring weather, so originally Marianne had not been in any serious danger. Who could have known that outside would suddenly turn into this complete nightmare of snow, cold, and wind? Luffy, naturally, did not feel guilty. He was more annoyed by the unforeseen inconvenience. Nami could forgive many things, of course, but even the last idiot could understand there would be no forgiveness this time. And that was exactly how it turned out. On top of that, Luffy's line about having forgotten not only failed to help him but noticeably made his position worse.
"Honestly, this time I didn't do it on purpose!" he tried to justify himself and, at the same time, calm the furious girl.
It did not work. Nami clearly had no desire to listen to excuses. Perhaps on any other day she would not have been so categorical, but Little Garden had happened only yesterday. Just yesterday Vivi and Robin had been wrecked, Tashigi had nearly been wrecked, and now this situation with Marianne had surfaced as well. All of it could be described with one word: they'd gone too far. From Nami's point of view, she had gone soft the day before, and the monsters around her had immediately started losing all sense of limits. And it was hard to say she was entirely wrong, especially where Luffy was concerned.
"Okay, okay, I admit it, my fault!" the boy went for broke as Nami inexorably advanced on him. "I was wrong! I'll definitely do better! I swear!"
Her answer was a spinning kick that nearly knocked him out of his throne-chair. That arrangement did not satisfy the girl, however, so she dragged him into the middle of the galley by his hair and threw him onto the floor.
"At least spare the ship!" the boy begged, seeing the foot already raised over him.
Nami did spare the ship. By the time she finished putting Luffy back on the path of righteousness, warmed Marianne with hot tea, and then left to see Vivi, the galley had barely suffered at all. But the moment the entrance door closed behind her, everyone gathered there, including Tashigi and the rescued Marianne, involuntarily breathed a sigh of relief.
"Why does everything on this ship always go completely to hell?" an unhappy Usopp asked. "In the morning we have to be afraid of one person, by evening we're hiding from another. Can't we just live normally?"
"Luffy, what the hell?" Sanji put it more concisely.
"I forgot, I forgot!" the annoyed boy exclaimed, sprawling in his throne-chair again. Despite the beating Nami had given him, there was not a single scratch or bruise on him. "I seriously forgot, no jokes! And everything would've been fine if not for this damn weather! How was I supposed to know the Ice Age was about to start around here? Only Nami can wake up in the middle of the night because she smelled a tornado coming in her sleep."
By the way, that had actually happened.
"Still, once the Ice Age started, you could've remembered that you had someone hanging in the storage room," Yosaku said.
"It's Rooster's fault. He made me completely forget I had another hostage."
He had supposedly admitted his guilt already, yet still did not miss the chance to shove part of it onto someone else.
"Why did you even need a little girl?" the still-displeased Usopp asked.
"Because it's fun!"
"Miss Goldenweek, how happy I am to see you!" Judging by Bentham's expression, he was once again desperate to dance. "I thought I was the only survivor, but now there are two of us! My happiness knows no bounds! I want to dance, dance!"
WHAM!
"Rooster, goddammit!"
"This is some kind of madhouse," Tashigi muttered.
Turning her gaze to Robin, she noticed that the towel on the woman's forehead had already dried out, so she wetted it again. Then she looked around at the madhouse surrounding her. A madhouse that, admittedly, had long since become familiar, but today one particular note was missing. Zoro, even when he did not participate in the general commotion, at least usually snored in rhythm with the bedlam around him. And right now Tashigi missed that very much.