One Piece Fan Fiction ❯ Tangerine Orange ❯ Prologue ( Chapter 1 )

Author's Note: A wonderful idea I had, because it allows me to use all the characters that I love. And SanjiXNami stories were just meant to be used in fairy tales. Why? Because Sanji is Mr. Prince! I hope you enjoy it, and please don't flame me.

Disclaimer: One Piece is owned by Eichiro Oda and Toei Animation. Not me. I wish. Don't' sue, I have no money to give you.

Tangerine Orange

Once upon a time in an island kingdom far, far away, there lived a king and his queen in a castle surrounded by tangerine groves. For years they remained childless, but not for lack of want. Many days the queen would sit in the gardens and pray for a child. She would tell her husband, "I wish I had a baby girl, with eyes like amber and hair as orange as the tangerines we grow."

One year, to their delight, a baby girl was born to them. Just as her mother wished, her eyes were as dark as fine amber and her hair was like a ripe tangerine. Her mother was so ecstatic that she decided to name the child "Tangerine Orange". However, the name was a bit on the silly side, so they nicknamed her Nami.

Unfortunately, a few years after Nami's birth, the queen grew ill and died, leaving the little girl without a mother. The king did not want to leave his daughter motherless, so he married again. But the new queen was vain and cruel, and although she treated Nami well in front of the king, when he was not present she regarded her the same as if she would vermin. She stripped Nami of most of her royal duties, keeping her locked away in the castle. As a result Nami grew to be headstrong and afraid of making friends, for every friend she did make her cruel stepmother would send away. It came to be so that her only pleasure in life was drawing maps and tending to her mother's tangerine groves.

During Nami's sixteenth year her father died on a hunting trip, leaving her stepmother in charge of the kingdom. Without her father's restraining presence, the wicked queen became even crueler to Nami, making her work as a maid in order to hide her royal heritage. When not running the kingdom or making Nami's life miserable, the queen would lock herself in her chambers and consult her magic mirror. She would say, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in all the four seas is the fairest of them all?" To which the timid and highly abused mirror would reply, "You of course, Alvida-sama, are the fairest of them all."

During the process of all this, Nami became more and more despondent, and would spend every moment she could spare in the tangerine groves, for they were the only place she could find solace. However, unbeknownst to the evil queen, Nami was growing more beautiful by the day, so that even her lowly state as a maid could not hide her beauty. By her eighteenth birthday she was as beautiful as her mother once was, albeit very lonely and very touchy. It is shortly after her birthday that we begin our story . . ..