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By the time the second new year Smoker and Tashigi spend with G-5 rolls around, Tashigi is spending more late nights in Smoker’s quarters than not. Phrasing it like that makes it sound like something it isn’t, something Tashigi can’t deny anymore that she wants and hopes for--she is used to wanting things that are unattainably far away and going for them anyway, but this has ceased to be that long ago. Smoker is the one who invites her, who begins to keep her favorite brand of coffee in his quarters (not the regulation standard). It is friendly; it is born from a desire for mutual success--they spend most of their time looking at strategy or practicing their haki against each other, using the other’s response as a barometer of success. But the way he looks at her sometimes, the way his voice goes low, and the way he has almost reached out for her hand on several occasions, the twitch so obvious she doesn’t need observation haki to see it, all add up to an immovable object Tashigi can’t ignore any more than she can ignore her own feelings.
And still, she says nothing; she does nothing; she makes no move. It is hers to make, if anything is to happen, and now is as good of a time as any. The winter deepens; the nights they spend together are longer. She should, before she waits too long and the chance escapes her and she’s left with nothing but regret and the imprint of her own cowardice pressed deep into the skin of her back.
The clock on Smoker’s wall, ticking two to the motion of the boat, has already reached midnight. It is, officially, New Year’s Eve. Tashigi yawns, wiggling her shoulders to ease the tension. Her coffee cup is empty; half a page remains on her form. Smoker’s stack is larger; he looks at Tashigi and her face heats up as she reaches for more papers.
“I’ll do them,” Smoker says. “I’ve been going slow. You go to bed.”
She glares at him; if he’s going slow then he’s more tired than she is, or distracted, or some other feeling that he doesn’t need to stay up for. He’s still looking at her, eyes like a bare winter forest at night, backlit by the moon and overcast sky. She should speak up, but she really is tired; she stands, and something brushes her bare wrist--smoke. Smoker’s last cigars are long-since dead in the ashtray; there is no mistaking this for what it is, and she’s about to cup her hand around it when the smoke recedes.
“Don’t stay up too late,” she says.
Smoker nods, and Tashigi fixes her stare on him--he doesn’t look as worn-out as she feels, which can only be good. She wants to open her mouth, but it nearly feels stuck.
“Good night,” she manages finally, as she stands up and pushes her chair in.
“Good night,” Smoker says.
Pirates are quieter at the turn of the year, or at least they are where it concerns the Marines. They stay on their own ships and throw parties, or lawfully patronize inns on pirate-friendly islands; most of them are, in the end, people celebrating the same things that Marines and ordinary citizens do. But there are enough of them now, launched by Whitebeard’s proclamation, that when Tashigi spies the silhouette ship on the horizon in the middle of the morning, she is not terribly surprised when the flag comes into view and it is an unfamiliar jolly roger, a skull flanked by what looks like trees.
The pirate ship dodges the initial cannon fire, veering closer and closer and returning with its own shots; G-5’s ship does not move so quickly or make such easy hairpin turns, but Tashigi finds it easier and easier to cut through the cannonballs as they reach her on the deck--if nothing else, it’s good practice. (And if she can spare the thought to that, she’s getting really good at it.) But even a well-armed pirate ship has only so many cannonballs (or so many they’re willing to fire), and just as Tashigi’s getting a damn good feel for it, they stop coming. The ships are drawing nearer to each other; Tashigi’s senses are as attuned as they get—she smells no blood, but fresh metal; swords and guns and axes gleam in hands. Next to her, Smoker’s hands twitch (when did he get there?) and she can tell it’s taking a good deal of patience for him not to reach for his jitte.
He grabs her hand as he lets his lower body dissipate, pulling both of them over the railing and the water and the railing on the other wide, setting Tashigi down between two axeen, and then she loses track of him as she parries the first blow. She stabs one of them in the hand; he drops his axe and one of her men swoops in to take care of the rest. The next is a tougher win, but hers for the taking; his blows are fast and strong but she meets them with her sword, and then willing her haki to course through the weapon, knocks him back against a wall, his breath escaping to where he can’t catch it. The pirate crew is large, and they’re not bad (they have survived for some time in the New World, presumably) but G-5 is better. Pride surges through Tashigi, cutting off the pain of her scratches, pulling in adrenaline with it the way Smoker had pulled her across to this deck, and again she pushes forward, chopping through the barrel of a rifle, dodging a blow and blocking it with her arm, sensing the next before it comes and delivering her own first.
And then she drives her sword forward, as if to impale the pirate before her—she has killed before; she can do it again, and she will have to, yes—but the sword, instead of cutting, slows and is swallowed, as if in some sluggish, thick liquid.
Oh. He’s a logia user—what is this, syrup, sap, molasses? His laugh comes in thick waves, the smell of his breath all the sweet staleness of an abandoned candy shop.
“Too much for you, Marine?”
Tashigi doesn’t dignify that with a response, especially because it looks like it is, the sap (she’s pretty sure that’s what it is) now attaching itself to her fingers, but the pirate isn’t making any move. He’ll underestimate her, and what is it that Smoker says about that? It makes it easier if she lets them. Tashigi doesn’t want to make things easier, but they’re already hard enough, and this is her men, her life, Smoker’s, on the line if they let this pirate get the upper hand (in the end, Smoker will probably bail her out if he can, but—she won’t force him to do that). Tashigi slowly tries to twist the sword; it moves. The pirate continues to laugh, but Tashigi closes her eyes. Her heart is hammering against her rib cage; she wants to choke on the air, but the smell of blood is now clearer than the sweetness, and she focuses on that. Blood. Solid. Armament. She has no name for this attack; she has never really tried it, but she pushes forward, as if to shove all of her energy into Shigure, and then rears back, yanking like pulling out a rotten tooth.
The sword comes out, as it should from a body, as if it’s not sap but flesh, blood, bone, muscle. THe pirate screams, and the sap around her hands turns to warm, bright, slippery blood; Tashigi stumbles back. It’s not as bad as if she’d ran him through like she’d thought she would, but the blade has cut and scraped him, and it’s—still pretty fucking bad. Tashigi’s heart is pounding yet harder, as if it’s her whose blood is escaping.
A hand lands on her shoulder. Smoker.
“That’s the last of them,” he says. “Good work.”
The glow of Smoker’s approval can make Tashigi reckless, but she stuffs it down inside of her (easier when she’s this tired), finishes her watch shift and listens to the report of the few small sustained injuries among their men (and of those among the pirates—the logia user, apparently their first mate, is expected to recover, but though his blood has been scrubbed from her skin and her sword, thinking about that is enough to snap Tashigi's giddiness to a halt). She delivers her own account to Vice Admiral Vergo back at base; he assures them he’ll take care of bringing the surviving pirates to justice--of course he will. That goes without saying.
That evening, Tashigi ends up back in Smoker’s quarters, fresh paperwork under her arm and fresh ideas in her mind for how to further train. She’s beaten a real logia user with only a sword, and taken by surprise; she’s nowhere near ready to take on someone with years of experience and an awakened devil fruit, but the possibility of getting there doesn’t seem as far away as it had the last time she’d fantasized about it. But when she enters to find Smoker with his feet up, usual cigars in his mouth, those thoughts fall out of Tashigi’s mind as if it’s made of cheap wood waiting to splinter and crack and let everything through.
She sits down in the chair that she recognizes as hers, the same one she always sits in, the one in which she has never seen anyone else sit--always, when Smoker has a guest or invites someone else into his quarters, they take the third. Smoker has neither his pen nor his jitte nor a book at the ready; it’s as if he’s inviting her to speak--not quite daring her, but giving her the room, getting her to speak up and take what she ought to.
Their feelings sit on the table between their two empty mugs from last night, still not cleared away. Their shape is already unwieldy; already it should not be balanced in Tashigi’s uncertain hands, the ones that are so used to dropping and losing grip. They’ve stepped over so many boundaries already, and this one is just as real and just as arbitrary as the others, written only in their minds but visible to them both, a line drawn every morning in the sand to be washed away by the high tide and redrawn in the same place. The ache in Tashigi’s chest is not from gulping down her evening coffee too quickly, nor is it from the fight. She cannot live with the regret of having left this here--there may be other moments, but this longing cannot spin out, holding its weight, forever.
“Smoker-san,” she says.
Tashigi has heard it said that it is better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, but here she will ask for neither. She rises halfway, leaning over the table, and places a kiss on Smoker’s mouth; she sees, as their lips collide, his expression turn--to what, she doesn’t have time to process, because she’s kissing him, and his hand is gripping her wrist, and his nose is touching hers—-cold, shockingly so, and then her elbow buckles and connects with something solid, and she flinches back, expecting the familiar crash of porcelain breaking against wood.
In outstretched fingers, Smoker has caught the handle of Tashigi’s mug, halfway between the tabletop and the floor. Tashigi’s eyes burn; she’s messed it up--the mug isn’t broken, but she’s no longer kissing Smoker and she can’t read his face.
Smoker clears his throat. Tashigi bites her lip. She won’t cry; that has to stop being her go-to response; she has to stop allowing herself to be so easily overwhelmed. Smoker’s other hand is still on her wrist; she focuses on that, though he can probably feel her overactive pulse.
“Here,” he says, and stands, replacing the mug on the table, no farther from the edge, and stepping aside. Tashigi, too, steps aside from the table; now there is nothing between them but air. Smoker tugs at her wrist, letting her cross the distance between them herself.
“There,” he says. “No interruptions.”
And before she really does start crying, he’s kissing her again, filling every one of her senses everywhere, their bodies pressed flush against each other.
(She kisses him at midnight, before her watch starts.
“Stupid tradition,” Smoker says, but he can’t keep anything close to annoyance in his voice.)