Archive of Our Own ^beta

When they were still getting used to each other, Smoker asked, “What should I call you?”

They sit on a park bench outside the Marine base, a bruised little girl and the big white-haired marine with heavy combat boots. Her face is still banged-up from the accident, with a cut lip and a long scar on her brow. She kicks her feet a little. After a silence, she points to the birds building their nests by the bushes. The flightless ones, brown and long-billed, endemic to Loguetown.

“Tashigi, then.” A broad hand lands on her head, hilariously big. Smoker pats her awkwardly.

“Tashigi,” she repeats, brows scrunched together. Somehow it sounds a decibel off, a few letters kicked astray, not-quite-right.

But, she supposes, it’s good enough.

Shigure’s name is more important to her than her own. Rain in late autumn. She named it herself, and loves it because of how right it sounds. It reminds her of another word, one she can't quite recall, but it hovers just out of sight like a cold moon above bare trees, a dojo in a village cloaked in red maple leaves. The memory dances before her, glimmer-quick, and vanishes. Always vanishes.

As she grows older in Loguetown, she has a daily warm-up exercise. Smoker times her on his watch. He’s long since stopped being impressed by her wins, and now starts chiding her for complacency when she takes more than ten minutes to win against two dozen marines.

Tashigi flawlessly trounces her last challenger and sheathes Shigure, sunlight glinting off her deep, deep blue hair, so dark it’s nearly black.

“That’s two scoops of ice cream, I think,” she says.

Smoker lifts his watch. “Ten minutes and eleven seconds. One scoop.”

She sulks in the most dignified manner possible. “Fine. I’m picking the fanciest flavor.”

Kids don’t grow up knowing what the world expects of them. You are five. The only thing you know is the boundless possibilities of childhood.

“Can I be the world’s greatest swordsman too?”

“I’m sure you can do anything you put your mind to,” your father says, smile kind. Then he adds distractedly, for he’s watching the men train: “Despite being a girl.”

Despite.

You are five, and you used to think the world is big enough for you to be anything you want. You didn’t know there were limits of your gender until your father informed you.

When you’re a little older, you learn words like breasts and menstruation and women’s work. You ask your father, “Is the name you gave me supposed to be a joke?”

“It is a tradition in the old country,” he replies calmly, “to name our daughters after birds. So they might travel well and learn much.”

But, you think, gripping your shinai in tight, sweating, furious fists, this bird cannot fly.

You turn eleven this year, and you can already win against adults twice your age. Full-grown boys. They let you get one or two hits in for fun, but then the mocking humor on their faces vanishes as they realize they can’t even touch you. You’re just getting started. Their cheeks redden as you win again and again and again, and they shout for a fight with real swords. You beat them with Wado Ichimonji without so much as a single scratch. You pant and steam with raging triumph in the sun. Your father watches in the shade, silent.

The villagers whisper prodigy as you pass by. The old grandma who sells spicy cabbage gives you extra and tell you that you will bear Shimotsuki’s legacy. You are a once-in-a-century genius. You laugh, bashful and embarrassed.

Listen well, moon-child, the old woman says, in her fiery-red robes marked with the crest of a white bird. The gods of the old country have blessed you.

The village elders talk a lot about the old country when they’re drunk with sake, moon-watching beneath autumn skies. You’ve never really paid attention before, but the compliment makes you proud to be a Shimotsuki. Bearer of the name frost moon, the coldest moon of late autumn.

You thank her and skip home.

You go through every one of your father’s students, every one of his children that he offered to train because he spotted their potential. All of them boys. You beat them into the ground until they yell mercy, tears and snot running down their bruised little faces. You crow in wild joy and turn to your father flushed with victory, expecting to be crowned king. Greatest swordsman of Shimotsuki Village, bravest and strongest of them all, the most worthy inheritor of the great Wado Ichimonji.

Your father merely smiles and corrects Zoro’s form.

The memories strain behind her eyes, as fuzzy and vague as her poor vision.

Tashigi fumbles for her glasses and shoves them on her nose. For a split-second, when her vision refocuses, she glances out the window and a headache catches her. In the blinding light, she sees a crescent moon and flurries of cold late autumn snow, a painting on a paper scroll of a red scabbard.

Daylight sharpens. The dream fades.

In the dead of night, you escape.

You pack enough food for a week of sailing, and you tuck in maps of East Blue in your knapsack. You make it to the small boat on the edge of the village when your father catches up to you. He slips out of the forest in cloaked shadows, arms tucked in his robes, his mild face with its round black glasses betraying nothing.

He doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t tell you to stay. He isn’t even angry.

He says, “Leave the sword.”

You knew this would happen. You knew this legacy would never be yours.

But you are glad it is your father. It would’ve been much harder if it was Zoro. This, you are prepared for.

You take Wado Ichimonji off your back, and you offer it to him in outstretched palms, head bowed in respect. You tell him (because a small part of you thinks he might not know, and if he does, maybe, maybe he might start to care), “The elders say I carry the blessing of the old country.”

“In the old country,” Shimotsuki Koushirou replies, “there are no female shogun.”

You bite your lip. Your eyes water, because you are young and naive and you still love the people who will never see your true worth. Your last words to your father are thus: "I understand now the cruelty that made you name me after a bird that cannot fly.”

You leave Shimotsuki Village behind. It is better this way, better to be free from the story that someone else is writing for you. You will go find Dracule Mihawk and beg him to train you. And if he refuses, you will search for the Snake Empress, or Big Mom. You will journey into the Grand Line on your own with nothing but your love of the blade, and you will become the greatest of them all.

This is the start of your legend.

You raise your fists to the sky and declare your name will roar across the world.

The world replies by smashing your boat into Loguetown’s rocky coast.

When she wakes up, she doesn’t remember her name. She sees a blurry tatami mat, a heavy, sure weight on her palm like a katana’s handle. But her hands are empty. There’s a man sitting next to her hospital bed. A young man, puffing on two cigars. The marine that fished her out of the water. His name is Smoker, twenty-four and recently promoted to Captain. The guardian of Loguetown. He’s got a scary glower.

“My sword,” she whispers faintly.

Smoker glares. It’s terrifying. But his brow is only furrowed because he’s thinking so hard. He says, “Must’ve drowned with your boat. Though it also could’ve washed up on the beach. What’s it look like?”

“It’s...” A million colors flash in front of her eyes. She scours the encyclopedia of meito she has in her head, searching for one she recognizes. (Meito? Did she have a meito? Why doesn’t she know this?) She’s silent for so long she starts feeling embarrassed.

Smoker shakes his head. “We’ll get you a new one. What’s your name?”

Her small shoulders lift up and sink down.

“Your family?”

“I chose the blade,” she says solemnly.

Smoker scratches his cheek. “Okay, kid. Well. Okay.”

She gets discharged from the hospital and Smoker takes her out for ice cream.

She walks a bit funny now; the accident hurt something in her brain. She’s clumsier, and her limbs don’t move as smooth as they should. She trips over three curbs, walks into two walls, and almost stumbles into oncoming traffic before Smoker rescues her by grabbing the back of her shirt. He suggests they get her glasses.

There’s a voice in her head. A memory-voice that speaks like a boy, curt and fierce and hungry for a fight. It desperately wants a sword, and the yearning she feels becomes unbearable. Smoker finally shows her the Marine armory and finds her a rusty katana. She’s so happy that she wants to duel someone, anyone, right now.

Puffing on his cigar, Smoker shrugs at the startled marine standing guard.

She shakes her head. “Not enough,” she says, and raises her fingers. “It needs to be at least three.”

Captain Smoker has never been one for following rules or sensible grown-up logic. She’s a strange kid and he’s curious, so he rustles up two more marines and directs them to the training ground. She follows, occasionally stumbling over her feet and blinking disconcertedly in the bright sunlight.

“Are you serious, Captain?” a marine hisses. “She’s a child.”

They glance at the kid again. She just tripped over herself and is now picking herself up off of the ground, wincing and muttering and squinting at the marines like she can barely make out their faces.

Go easy, Smoker mouths.

They get into place, surrounding her. The marines shoot each other exasperated looks over her head.

She closes her eyes and spreads her feet apart. Her left hand grips the katana’s sheath at her waist and her right hand hovers above the handle. She is completely still.

She exhales.

The first iaido strike is so fast only Smoker can see it. Then the second. Then the third. Not a single movement wasted, her footwork silent and perfect as she comes to a stop. When the last marine falls to the ground, disarmed and bleeding, she opens her eyes and smoothly sheathes her shitty, dinged-up katana with its blunted blade.

The cigar falls from Smoker’s mouth.

“I’ve never lost a swordfight before,” she says dreamily in her memory-voice. “Not once.”

That day, Smoker tells her he’ll be in charge of her training. She’s too young for marine enlistment right now, but she’ll be his second-in-command when the time comes. He takes her to the park later, where flightless brown birds are building their nests, and there they agree on the name Tashigi.

She hunts meito, mostly for fun, partly because there’s an urge inside her she can’t stifle. She’s searching for peerless, high-quality blades. She’s searching for something she doesn’t even know. She dreams of a sword she can’t name or picture, only feels its deft arc and wakes up with tears running down her cheeks. 

Shigure is a Grade meito sword. Less than Supreme, less than Great, less than Skillful. It's verdant-green and lined with gold, and it glides like running water in her hands. It is an exceptional katana, and despite its lesser-forged quality it is reliable and resilient. A little bit like herself. She loves this katana.

But Shigure is not the katana in her dreams.

When she slices a falling leaf in half from thirty feet away, the memory-voice whispers that she could've sliced that leaf, the ladybug on it, and all the dandelion puffs around it with the meito she can't remember. There are weirder things that make her shiver. Sometimes she’ll catch herself in the mirror with her glasses on and feel a hazy sort of dislike. When Smoker took  her to the optometrist, she picked out red square glasses for herself. Never round and black.

She pushes open the window, the city spread out beneath her. Loguetown is a temperate city, and it has no forests. Autumn passes by easily as a leaf floating on water. It’s not the hard autumn Tashigi wants to feel, the cold that cuts right to the bone.

She watches the crescent moon rising in the east. Her heart aches.

They meet in a swordshop in the Metal District.

Green hair. Wolf smile. The Devil’s luck.

He flexes his arm, which is whole and unscarred after taming a cursed sword. It’s no wonder she staggered back in sheer awe. He grins at her, a bit show off-y, a bit rude and annoying. But what she’s feeling is—is pure jubilance. This is a comrade. A fellow practitioner of the steel religion. He gets it. He’d sever his own arm to profess his love to the blade.

She knows, in an instant, that they are of the same soul.

Then she sees the white katana on his hip.

“Wado,” the mosshead introduces—

Ichimonji, a voice finishes in her mind.

Want stabs Tashigi right in the gut. She wants, no, she needs that sword. That beautiful meito with its good, sure weight, full of promise. (How does she know that? She can’t know that.) It doesn’t belong in Roronoa’s hands. It belongs in... in...

In yours.

The first time Tashigi meets the Pirate Hunter Roronoa Zoro, she knows two things.

First: he is a superb disciple of the blade.

And second: she hates him.

It’s not just that he’s a pirate, or that he owns the prettiest meito she’s ever seen. It’s because something surfaces deep in the depths of her lost memories when she looks at him. It’s a resentful feeling, an angry feeling. When she looks at him, she is sure that whoever she was before waking up on Loguetown must have been an angry person. They must have been angry for a long, long time.

Late autumn rain falls over Loguetown. Tashigi pushes her glasses over her brow and turns her face to the storm clouds, breathing in deep to calm herself. He’s angry, too. He snarls that her face is too familiar, that she looks like a ghost he once knew.

The memory-voice laughs. She can feel it. She can feel you.

There are only two people that carry the blood of the old country standing here, but on the ground there are three shadows.

She thinks that if she chases this man, if she takes Wado Ichimonji from him, she might understand what she’s feeling. She might give a name to the voice and its anger. Her heart pounds in excitement, in knee-shaking relief.

Finally, finally, finally. She knows what she’s been searching for.

“Maybe we were fated to meet.” Tashigi flicks rain off Shigure. “Maybe this was an act of destiny by the man writing our story.”

Roronoa licks rain from the corner of his mouth. He grins, all swords drawn. “Sorry, but I don’t believe in God.”

“Good,” you both answer, you and her, because you’ve been fighting this narrative for as long as you two can remember. “I have no need of him either.”

Tashigi swings Shigure with relentless grace, and her hands are your hands, the steel in her eye is your steel. He has three fangs. She has one.

But she also has you, and you’ve never lost a swordfight before.

Somewhere to the east, a flightless yanbaru kuina lifts its wings.