fantasyAU and „i promise“ i thought of a knights pledge!! this took ages and i have some wips for the other prompts buuut i‘ll see if i get them out in time :3 the wings of king monkey d luffy!!
it's the 1st of january in australia, so! opgen week is officially HERE!!!! the prompts for today were: celebrations, modern au or "you did WHAT?" and so, like the overachiever i am, i mixed all 3.
@opgenweek
x
Nami knows three things for absolute certain: she does not like surprises, she does not like being emotionally perceived and she does not like that Sanji has figured out both of those things and treats them like a personal challenge.
Which is how she ends up in her own hallway at 7:13pm, half in and half out of her dress, phone clenched in one hand, keys digging into her palm while he leans against her doorframe like a man presenting a closing argument.
“You’re going,” he says, like the matter’s already been resolved and she was present for the vote.
Nami stares at him. The overhead light is too bright; it halos off his stupidly pretty hair and makes him look like a particularly smug saint of Bad Ideas. “You can’t just tell me –”
“I can because you said,” he lifts his hand and actually air-quotes, the bastard. “You wanted to ‘make more of an effort’ this year.”
“I said that in the abstract,” Nami snaps. “Like… charity. Or… I don’t know. Stretching. Taxes. Not a fucking – Galentine’s Day dinner? What is that, even? That’s some made-up capitalist bullshit right there.”
Sanji’s smile goes even brighter, bright enough it should violate building codes. “Well, what’s friendship if not an emotional tax return?”
“I’m going to push you down the stairs.”
“You won’t.” He softens around the eyes as he says it, the line of his shoulders easing just enough to be disarming. That’s the dangerous part about Sanji: the way he can go from relentless to gentle in half a breath, like flicking a switch. It makes people say yes to things. It makes her say yes to things. His reasoning lands too close to the part of her that’s still sore from last month, last year, all the times she told herself she’d try and didn’t. “It’s only one night. And it’s Robin.”
Nami’s stomach does a small, traitorous lurch at the name. Robin’s been in the group for, what – six weeks? Seven? Long enough that Nami’s internal timeline is a blur of coffee shop lighting and group chat notifications and she can’t quite remember when Robin wasn’t replying with dry little comments and perfectly timed reaction images. Long enough that Robin knows Luffy’s burger order and the exact phrase that makes the waiter double-check the fries portion. She remembers the barista at Usopp’s cafe by name and asked about their exam last week. She laughs at Brook’s worst joke with the kind of unforced amusement that makes people bloom under it. Long enough that Nami has watched her, from the safety of the edges: cataloguing tone, posture, exits. Measuring.
Robin’s gentle in a way that automatically triggers Nami’s suspicion. Not sugary or fake, she isn’t that woman who weaponises sweetness and then slips knives between the ribs. She’s just… patient. Attentive. Always orienting herself toward whoever looks smallest in the room, making space with an ease that doesn’t feel like a performance. It’s infuriating, frankly. Nami hates how much she wants to like her.
“I don’t even know her.”
Sanji’s expression goes even more smug at the edges, like he’s been waiting for that line. "Exactly. That’s why you’re going.”
“Why's it just me?” Nami demands. Her dress sleeve flops off her shoulder when she gestures; she shrugs it back up, annoyed, trying to land on a word that doesn’t sound like charity case. “Why am I the chosen one?”
Sanji lifts one shoulder in a lazy half-shrug. “Don't think we're the right fit for the gal portion of the evening.”
“I don’t know her,” Nami repeats, stubborn, like repeating it will make the anxious fizz under her ribs go away.
Sanji just stares at her, eyes moving from her half-buttoned dress to the shoes she hasn’t put on yet, to the earrings she spent fifteen minutes picking out. This time, there’s no tease in his voice at all. “You’re already dressed.”
She glares at him like it’s his fault she lost the argument with herself ten minutes ago standing in front of the closet. “That proves nothing.”
“Mm. Of course not.” He doesn’t push again. He just leans there, shoulder to the doorframe, ankles crossed, letting the noise of the building fill up the silent space between them.
“I don’t like meeting new people,” Nami mutters eventually, more to the floorboards than to Sanji.
“She’s not new anymore,” Sanji answers, quiet, like he’s not going to poke at the real answer sitting just behind that. “She’s just… someone who’d be really happy if you showed up.”
Nami presses her lips together. The words land annoyingly soft. Annoyingly true. She tucks her phone into her pocket. Closes her hand around her keys. “Fine. But if it’s weird, I’m leaving after twenty minutes.”
x
It is, of course, weird.
Nami climbs the steps with the faint dread of a person walking into a social situation without armour: her clothing feels too thin, her heartbeat feels too loud. She’s brought a bottle of wine she can’t really afford and a small bouquet of supermarket flowers because arriving empty handed feels like a crime and Nami is, above all else, a woman committed to paying her emotional debts on time. Even if she resents the interest.
She gets out exactly one polite tap before the door opens, Robin barefoot in a long black dress, hair half-pinned up like she did it absentmindedly while reading something dense and never bothered to check a mirror. She looks like a painting anyway – something from a gallery with a plaque that uses the word melancholic in a good way. The air that spills out smells… not like a candle, exactly, but warm and layered: cloves, orange peel, maybe cinnamon, something faintly floral underneath, like tea in the next room.
Robin smiles. “Nami,” she says and the way she says it makes the name feel oddly important, like a word she’s been waiting to take down off a shelf and hold. “You came.”
Nami’s throat tightens around six different responses. She manages: “I was coerced,” and holds up the bottle like evidence in a trial.
Robin’s gaze drops briefly to the label, then back up. Her eyes flicker with amusement. “By Sanji?”
“By everyone, technically,” Nami lies. The second it’s out she regrets it because Robin’s expression doesn’t really change but something in her gaze softens, the focus shifting from teasing to noting.
Inside, the apartment is… gothic. Not Halloween-store gothic. Not I bought one skull candle and a black mug and now I have an aesthetic gothic.
This is curated. The lights are low: there’s not a single overhead glare. Just lamps with warm shades, their light puddling onto bookshelves and rugs. The curtains are drawn but soft enough that streetlight seeps through around the edges. Black taper candles burn in mismatched brass holders along the windowsill, flames tall and steady, dripping wax in deliberate drips like part of the decor. On the coffee table a vase of dark red roses sits like a focal point: full bloomed and almost indecently lush, petals velvety enough that Nami can tell how soft they are even from across the room. Nearby, a shallow bowl holds pomegranates and figs arranged with such casual precision that Nami briefly suspects an art director.
In the middle of all that, the coffee table itself is a small miracle: a spread of food arranged with terrifying elegance. Tiny sandwiches stacked like architecture, crusts cut clean. Strawberries dipped in dark chocolate, the shells shiny and thin. Little pastry spirals dusted with powdered sugar, the white clinging to flaky layers like fresh snowfall. Cheese and crackers in a neat fan. A bowl of olives with a tiny fork that looks like it has a fucking PhD.
Nami turns her head slowly, half expecting a raven to swoop down and announce her death date. Instead, what she sees is absence.
There’s a neat little line of hooks by the door. Only Robin’s coat hangs there: a long, dark thing with a high collar. A second pair of shoes sits by the mat for guests. The dining table has two place settings. Two wine glasses on the counter. A small stack of coasters: two pulled out, the rest untouched.
“Is everyone else… late?” she asks before she can stop herself.
Robin pauses in the act of sliding the bouquet out of its plastic. For half a second, something complicated crosses her face before she smooths it away with the easy grace of someone very practiced at it. “Just you and me.”
Nami’s spine tries to leave her body via the roof.
“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t quite manage to disguise the octave jump. “You said it'd be a few people in the text.”
Robin tilts her head, lashes lowering briefly as she considers her own words. “Did I?” she says. “Old habit, perhaps. It sounds less intimidating than ‘come to my apartment and let me bribe you with snacks into being my friend.’”
The honesty hits Nami like a small, warm punch.
“I hope it’s okay,” Robin continues mildly, rearranging the bouquet into something far more beautiful than Nami could have. “I researched how, perhaps, a Galentine’s event might –”
“You did what? You... researched it?”
Robin’s mouth twitches, like she’s been caught with her hand in the cookie jar and is trying to decide whether to pretend it’s on purpose. “I did.”
Nami narrows her eyes. “You researched… Galentine’s Day.”
“I researched,” Robin says, solemn as a priest delivering a blessing. “How to be a good friend to other women.”
Nami stares, something small and mean and tired in her – something that usually keeps her upright – giving a sharp, treacherous ache. Because the thing is: yes, she’s guarded. Yes, she’s insular. Nami is the kind of person who can host a party, pour drinks, laugh in all the right places, and go to bed later feeling like she spent the whole night pressed against glass while everyone else had fun on the other side.
And Robin, apparently, has looked at that glass and gone home and typed how to friend a person like that into a laptop.
“I don’t need… research,” Nami says, aiming for flippant. It comes out thinner than she’d like.
“I needed it. It helps to have a map.”
There’s something so quietly earnest about that that Nami wants to kick something. Instead, she grabs the nearest lifeline. “So what’d the internet say?”
Robin’s eyes brighten the way they do when someone mentions an obscure book or an interesting murder. “It said we should do an activity.”
“No.” Robin gestures toward the dining table, where two chairs face each other across its width, like a very polite interrogation setup. Between them is a neat arrangement of little plastic trays, spools of string, a small pair of scissors. “We’re going to make friendship bracelets.”
Nami blinks. “That’s…”
Robin tilts her head. “Too earnest?”
“It’s… very grade seven,” Nami says, dubious. She can almost smell chalk and cheap perfume and crushed grass.
Robin’s smile goes a shade sly. “Yes. But I read that nostalgia can be soothing.” She reaches for one of the trays and nudges it closer to Nami’s chair. “Also, I bought beads shaped like tiny skulls.”
Nami’s mouth betrays her by twitching upward. She eyes the tray with its pastel hearts, glassy seed beads, shiny pearls… and, yeah, tiny skulls with ridiculous hollow eyes. “You’re insane.”
“Thank you.” Robin sounds absurdly pleased.
“Who even sells skull beads?”
“The craft store near my place. She gave me a very specific look.”
Nami snorts, the sound coming out more like a laugh than she meant it to and Robin looks quietly delighted, like she’s spotted the first hairline crack in a fortress wall and has no intention of shoving through it just yet.
Nami sits and picks up a skull bead, turns it between thumb and forefinger. It’s heavier than it looks. Cool. Smooth.
Robin threads a length of black cord off the spool with nimble fingers. “I thought we could each make one for each other.”
Nami’s heart does a weird skip. She covers it by rolling her eyes. “Next you’re gonna start braiding my hair.”
Robin laughs under her breath. “One step at a time.”
They start and it’s awkward at first, a little stilted, two adults sitting down to do a craft that belongs firmly to schools and playgroups. But the quiet work of it is… disarming. Nami has to look down. She has to pay attention to the tiny holes in beads, to the way the string frays if she tugs too hard. She has to share bowls and space and those tiny scissors. She chooses a little little gold star, then a round blue one, then a skull as her brain clicks into the familiar hum of pattern making: balance, symmetry, weight. The same part of her that plans routes and budgets, that counts tips and forecasts storms, latches onto it and relaxes by a hair.
Across from her, Robin works with easy, economical movements. She chooses dark beads mostly, with occasional pops of pale colour like low, quiet jokes and for a while the only sounds are the soft rattle of beads in plastic, the occasional clink of glass and the swell of violins coming from the speaker.
“So,” Robin says eventually, voice mild. “How are you really, Nami?”
Nami’s hands still because there it is, there's the real activity. She makes her fingers move again on sheer stubbornness. “Busy. Work. Inflation. Whatever Franky’s latest project is. But fine.”
Robin doesn’t pounce. She doesn’t say I don’t believe you or you can tell me. She just nods once, eyes on her own bracelet, as if Nami’s answer is a bead she’s threading onto a mental string. “I’m glad.”
The words are simple but they land heavier than Nami expects. She jams a skull between two glass beads a little harder than necessary.
Robin plucks up a crescent moon bead and slides it on with deliberate care, the metal catching in the candlelight. “I didn’t invite everyone because I didn’t want you to feel like you had to perform.”
Nami’s fingers fumble, just enough to make a bead slip and ping against the table. “I can handle people,” she says automatically.
Robin lifts her gaze, meeting Nami’s eyes over the bowls of colour. “I know. You handle everything.” The words are so gentle they feel like a hand pressing against a bruise.
Nami’s jaw tightens. “That’s just… what you do.”
Robin considers her for a long moment, her expression soft but unflinching. “Is it what you want to do?”
Nami laughs because the alternative is something messier. It comes out sharp. “You’re very direct.”
“I’m trying,” Robin says. There’s a ghost of a smile, but the seriousness is still there underneath. “The articles said women appreciate honesty in friendship.”
Nami stares at her. “So you. You really did read articles to figure out how to… be my friend?”
“Yes.” Robin doesn’t look embarrassed. If anything, she looks relieved to be able to admit it. “I thought it deserved research.”
The string pulls tight in Nami’s fingers, biting into her skin and she looks down quickly, pretending to be fascinated by the stupid skull bead in her palm, the way the hollow eyes seem to grin up at her. She breathes in the smell of citrus and spice and melted chocolate wraps, letting the idea slip around her shoulders like a blanket she hasn’t decided if she’s allowing yet. “Okay. Then… honesty back.”
Robin’s hands still. She looks up, attentive.
Nami threads the skull onto her bracelet, right in the centre. “This is terrifying. Being the only one invited. Being… seen. Without other people to bounce off.” Her voice softens, almost against her will. “But also… weirdly nice.”
Robin’s smile this time is small and bright and utterly unguarded. “Then the research wasn’t a complete disaster.”
Nami does laugh this time, unable to help it. “Jury’s still out until I see the snack refills.”
Robin reaches for a chocolate square and slides it across the table, like an offering. “Bribery was also highly recommended.”
Nami snorts despite herself. “Who wrote all this, a man selling a course?”
Robin’s smile widens, slow and unflashy. “Possibly. But I thought…” she hesitates for the first time all night, lashes dipping. “I thought you might be lonely.”
Nami’s freezes again. Lonely is such a small word for something that lives so wide under her ribs. She has friends. She has a group chat that never shuts up, friends who would fight god for her, a doctor who cries if she sniffles too hard. She knows she’s loved. But there’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being the one everyone leans on. The person who books the tables, makes the plans, sets the alarms, texts are you home safe? at 2am. The one who knows who’s out of coffee, whose rent is due, whose birthday is coming up. The glue, quietly terrified that if she stops holding all the pieces, the whole thing will slip apart.
“I’m not,” she says automatically because reflex lives closer to her tongue than truth. SHe threads one more bead purely out of stubbornness. It slips and rattles against the table. “I don’t… I dunno. Sometimes.”
Robin doesn’t smile like she’s scored a point. She doesn’t make a moved-you-haha face. She just nods, once, like Nami’s let her hold something delicate and she fully intends not to crush it. “I understand.”
Suspicion flares, automatic. Nami’s eyes narrow. “Do you or are you just… good at saying the right thing?”
Robin’s expression turns inward, thoughtful. “Both,” she says after a moment, with the kind of honesty that makes it hard to stay prickly. “But mostly… yes. I do. Because when you’re new somewhere you learn how to be careful. You learn how to read people very quickly. You learn how to fit yourself into a space without taking up too much room.”
Her mouth tilts into something that isn’t quite a smile. “And sometimes you become so good at it that people forget you’re trying at all.”
Something loosens and aches at the same time in Nami’s chest. She looks down at the beads in her hand again and they’re blurry for a second, just a smear of colour and tiny skulls floating in her palm. She blinks hard. “God, this is supposed to be a stupid celebration.”
Robin’s eyes warm. “It can be both. Stupid and important.”
Nami gives a small, helpless ghost of a laugh. “You’re annoying.”
“I’ve heard the same about you,” Robin replies, utterly serene.
Nami’s mouth twitches, traitorously, into a smile.
They fall quiet again, but it’s a different quiet now. Less like the pause before an exam, more like the comfortable silence of train windows at night. The music hums, strings and piano. Wax drips in slow, perfect curves down the black candles. When Nami finally knots her bracelet, she holds it up between thumb and forefinger and Robin lifts hers too: darker beads, deep red glass and onyx black, a crescent moon charm catching the light, a single rose and a small silver shape Nami can’t quite make out until she squints.
“A... key?”
Robin’s gaze flickers to her, amused, voice deadpan. “It's a metaphor.”
Nami groans. “Of course.”
Robin laughs, properly this time. It’s quiet, but real, slipping out of her like it surprises her on the way.
They swap bracelets, Robin tying off each knot with neat efficiency, checking carefully that two fingers can slide under the band. The bracelet sits snug against Nami’s skin, catching the candlelight each time she flexes her hand. It shouldn’t mean anything, god. It’s string and glass and probably five bucks’ worth of charms..
But it's proof, her brain supplies, unhelpfully. Proof someone thought about her long enough to choose colours. To buy lemons and chocolate and a deck of terrifying questions because a search bar said that’s apparently how girls do friendship now. Not because Nami booked the restaurant or because she organised everyone’s schedules but just because Robin wanted her there.
Her throat tightens so abruptly she has to cough to cover it. “So what else did the internet say, oh scholar of female bonding?”
Robin’s smile curves into mischief. “It said we should do affirmations.”
Nami’s on her feet before the sentence finishes. “Absolutely the fuck not.”
Robin laughs. “Nami –”
“No,” Nami repeats, pointing at her like she’s issuing a restraining order. “I will not stand in your gothic apartment and tell you you’re special while you stare at me like a benevolent vampire.”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Nami mutters, sitting back down anyway.
Robin considers this with exaggerated gravitas. “Alright, no affirmations. But we could play a game.”
Suspicion slams back into place. “What kind of game?”
Robin gestures to the coffee table. There’s a deck of cards sitting there Nami somehow didn’t notice before, black-backed, gold-inked, like tarot that got a graduate degree in psychology. “They’re supposed to be conversation prompts.”
Nami sighs, exasperated, and rolls her eyes. “Lemme guess, it’ll be shit like what’s your deepest wound?”
Robin fans the cards out, offers the deck. Nami takes the top one warily, flips it over. “What’s a truth you never say out loud? Oh my – Robin.”
“Yes?” Robin asks, all innocence.
Nami drops the card back onto the stack like it bit her. “Next.”
They find their rhythm eventually. The questions bounce back and forth across the low table, some of them ridiculous – What’s your most irrational fear? “Men,” Nami says without missing a beat and Robin kindly points out that it’s the most rational fear they could both have.
What did you want as a child?
Nami rolls a bead between her fingers, feels it dig in. “To not have to be responsible for everyone else,” she says before she can pretty it up.
Robin nods, once, like she suspected. “To have a library no-one could take away,” she says in return.
When do you feel safest?
Nami’s answer gets stuck somewhere between her chest and her teeth. The silence stretches but Robin doesn’t fill it. She flips to the next card and starts talking instead, about getting lost in books on purpose, about memorising lines like talismans, about cities she’s left behind and ones she doesn’t plan to, about how loneliness is sometimes so quiet you don’t know it’s there until someone hands you a cup of tea and asks if you’ve eaten.
At some point, Nami realises the game has stopped feeling like being pinned under a microscope and started feeling like being invited into something. A slow, strange braid of shared information. Later, much later, the wine sits nearly empty on the coffee table. The candles have burned down enough that the room’s gone from dramatic to hazy, everything softened at the edges.
Nami sinks back into the couch, bracelet cool around her wrist, and watches Robin move around the little kitchen nook.
Robin's competent in the kitchen in the same way she’s competent everywhere else: without fanfare. She doesn’t clatter or perform. Two mismatched mugs. A lemon sliced into neat half-moons. Honey drizzled with unhurried precision. Nami watches her and thinks, not for the first time, that Robin reminds her of Sanji sometimes, in a different shape. Someone who gives without demanding credit. She reminds Nami of Zoro, sometimes, in that she's someone who notices. She reminds Nami of herself, in that she's who has probably had to be careful to survive.
Nami doesn’t want to jump ahead but she can feel it anyway, like scars recognising each other. She can feel the way the word friend moves carefully through her mind, testing the space. She sinks deeper into the cushions, letting her spine uncoil, the tension leaking out of her shoulders like air from a too tight balloon.
“Alright,” she sighs, trying to sound casual about it. “Next year, I’m hosting.”
Across from her, Robin tilts her head. One dark eyebrow lifts, amused. “Oh?”
“And it won’t be gothic,” Nami adds in a rush, before Robin can get ideas. “It’ll be normal.”
Robin’s smile curves, slow and wicked, like she already knows the answer will be incriminating. “What does normal mean to you?”
Nami snorts, bracelet sliding softly against her skin as she flicks her wrist. “It means fewer skulls. Maybe even zero skulls.”
Robin presses a hand to her heart, wounded. “A tragedy for the ages.”
Nami laughs, no edges to it this time. It rolls out of her easily, like it hasn’t had to fight its way past her guard.
Robin’s gaze softens. “Perhaps you’ll let me bring one ominous candle.”
“We’ll negotiate,” Nami says. “I’m very good at contracts.”
“I know,” Robin replies quietly. “I’m counting on it.”
The room hums around them, like time has folded in on itself, leaving a small, safe pocket where nobody needs anything from Nami except that she just. Be here. She looks down at the bracelet circling her wrist and back up at Robin, curled into the opposite corner of the couch, cardigan slipping off one shoulder, her own bracelet glinting when she reaches for her mug.
Nami smiles, tucking into her own tea, beads biting gently into her skin, across from a friend who searched how to be close to someone like you and then actually followed through.
x
if you are considering participating in opgen week pls do, the prompts are SO fun!!!
we are excited to announce the prompts for op gen week! with this, the creation period officially starts 💫 you may mix and match prompts for each day as you see fit, and interpret them however you wish so long as your creations follow the rules. posting for op gen week will be from january 1 to january 7, 2026. while posting, please tag this account + use the tag #opgenweek2026 so we can reblog everyone's works!
for more details, check out our carrd.
plain text prompts under the cut:
day 1 (1/1/26)-
celebration
modern au
"you did WHAT?!"
day 2 (2/1/26)-
storm
memories
"Here is my hand, he said / here is my hand that will not harm you"
day 3 (3/1/26)-
stargazing
fantasy AU
"I promise."
day 4 (4/1/26)-
time
childhood au
"And I'm only me / Who I wanna be / Well, I'm only me when I'm with you"
day 5 (5/1/26)-
survivors
found family
"though the truth may vary / this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore"
I saw the prompt for day 2 and immediately thought of these two.
more details under the readmore :)
i just wanted to zoom in on little Kidd's face because he makes me so sad :(
in this piece, Kidd is 11 and Killer is 15, hence the big size difference.
we don't know much about their backstories, but I hc that there was a big, impactful moment back when Kidd was too young and weak to protect himself and Killer defended him with excessive violence.
this piece is from Kidd's POV. it's him reminiscing on this memory. he doesn't quite remember what Killer was wearing or the colors of his clothes, but he associates Killer with the color blue, he associates *safety* with the color blue. and in his most scared state, even after witnessing Killer murder people right in front of him, he doesn't fear him. he's safebwith Killer. Killer *is* safety to him.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: One Piece (Anime & Manga)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nico Robin & Trafalgar D. Water Law, Nico Robin & Tony Tony Chopper, Tony Tony Chopper & Trafalgar D. Water Law
Robin and Law celebrate the publication of their recent articles.
AKA: Law and Robin are Usopp's worst nightmare, Except it's Chopper's turn,
Tag: One Piece Academics
Day 1 for @opgenweek: Celebration
Adjacent to @nehswritesstuffs Peer Review and Scientific Convention. Also to my own Doctors Checking Out Doctors, and The Day Law Lost his First Really Important Job (mind the rating). Links to those pieces are on the AO3 story.
