Chapter Text
Lieutenant Junior Grade Smoker doesn’t know what he did in a past life to deserve this but it better have been worth it to make up for the situation he’s stuck in. He’s no stranger to getting assigned chores and duties below his rank, but this is a new low. And now he’s stuck on a restaurant ship with the newest recruit and the order to keep her out of trouble while the rest of the crew tries to track down Dracule Mihawk to find out why he decided to visit the East Blue of all places. How they ever lost track of whatever big-ass galleon one of the Seven Warlords would surely travel on, he has no idea.
Or at least he had no idea until he steps through the door of the restaurant and sees the Warlord in question debating the merits of their wine menu with one of the waiters. He just barely has the sense of mind to notice the Chore Girl step forward and open her mouth in time to smother her under his smoke and drag her to the nearest free table.
Now, he doesn’t hate their newest recruit. The Chore Girl has determination, drive and most of all an unwavering confidence in her ideals that would perhaps even endear her to him if they’d left any room at all in her tiny little body for any scrap of the god-given sense of self-preservation that works as a balance to his own ideals.
(It’s not god-given. It’s Garp-given and his skull has several dents from the times the vice-admiral decided to pay the devil fruit class at HQ a surprise visit and give a practical demonstration on why “Logia” doesn’t mean “invincible”.)
Either way, Chore Girl Tashigi is not at all shy about telling anyone and everyone who wants to hear it about her goal to find all the Named Swords in the world and collect them for the side of Justice. Which is adorable all the way until someone who actually owns one of those Named Swords comes to visit at which point it becomes a race to get the kid as far away from that person as possible before she gets herself turned into minced meat. Especially if that person is a legendary swordsman whose attitude towards Marines can at best be described as “magnanimously non-homicidal”.
The Chore Girl glares at him over the smoke gag and he sighs, securing her to the chair a bit tighter. Someone clears their throat and he looks up to see a waiter next to their table, looking at the trussed up girl before raising an eyebrow at him in question. Because he's a tall, muscular man with a young girl tied to a chair and just telling them that it's for her own good probably won't cut it (showing them his Marine Officer ID doesn't help either and he resolutely doesn't think about why that is).
Lieutenant Junior Grade Smoker doesn’t know what he did in a past life to deserve this but he knows that it absolutely, definitely wasn't worth it.
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Chore Girl Tashigi squirms in her seat, trying to slip an arm out of the weird white cloudstuff that's tying her to the chair in a way no weird white cloudstuff should be able to. It also tastes absolutely terrible in her mouth but she's not going to give that jerk the satisfaction of showing how much she wants to cough and gag from the taste. The Officer they told her to go with is trying to argue something with a waiter which serves him right and hopefully distracts him enough that she can slip away.
She's just about to give it another try when the bell above the restaurant jingles. For a moment she hopes that it might be something she can use but the green-haired boy who walks in looks like he's her age so she doubts that he'll be much help, especially with the way he has a sword stuck between his teeth because who does that? Still, he might provide another distraction so she waits a moment to see what he will do.
The boy looks around for a few seconds before spotting Mihawk and Tashigi recognizes his expression because it's the same one she sees in the mirror whenever she thinks about all the criminal scum out on the seas who think they have any right to use the blades they stole. A second later he's walking towards the swordsman in the same way that Tashigi apparently isn't allowed to and she immediately marks him down as another arrogant, self-entitled boy who thinks he gets to do and be whatever he wants just because he wasn't born a girl.
The boy's walk turns into a charge (with three swords for some reason, is that guy a circus act or something? Wait, where did the literal clown sitting across from Mihawk come from?! Tashigi is sure that he wasn't there five minutes ago! Wait, is the clown the boy's boss? Is he actually from a circus?) and Mihawk must have drawn a dagger or something while she was distracted because he stops the attack in its tracks without effort and the only thing on his table had been a wineglass. There's no way he could stop three swords with a wineglass. The glass must have fallen off the table and he's obviously using something else to push the boy back and parry his follow-up attacks. His hand is moving fast enough to blur so it could be any kind of blade that is more sensible than blocking a swordstrike with a wineglass .
Mihawk sends two of the boy's swords flying and Tashigi focuses on their conversation so she can
ignore that wineglass
make a plan. The boy goes on some kind of tirade about being the best and dying, which seems kind of stupid to her because how can he be the best if he's dead, but that's boys for you, thinking they can do whatever they want just because they're born a little stronger. Tashigi definitely isn't planning to die before she reaches her goal (she also doesn't have time to let a Legendary sword just pass her by so when she heard about Mihawk being in the East Blue she made plans. Mostly plans to just grab his sword and run, but still. It's not stealing if you're taking a sword back from a pirate after all. And from what she heard he carries it everywhere on his back without trouble so it can't be
that
heavy, right?).
She tunes back in just in time to hear Mihawk offering to make the boy his apprentice and that's just typical , isn't it? Of course a dumb boy would become another pirate criminal and of course he's the one who gets the special treatment for charging in headfirst like an idiot. Not just that, it turns out he'd already been planning to be a pirate from the start! Tashigi fumes silently behind her gag, glaring at the boy's back as hard as she can and trying to set him on fire with her mind.
Then some other girl shows up dragging a giant teddy bear along with her, and Tashigi loses track of the conversation a little as they throw around a bunch of names she's never heard of. The girl does something and the clown does something and it makes one of the waiters act really weird, and then even more people show up including another boy that rubs her the wrong way from the second he opens his mouth.
Because the girl may be a bit of a brat but at least she acknowledges that, unlike the new boy who talks down to her the same way adults talk down to her whenever she wants to follow news on pirates or train with a real sword instead of the wooden training bokken. He talks like girls can't be strong and wild and competent and it makes her nearly bite all the way through her gag from the urge to grit her teeth at him. He just keeps talking like girls can't fight and can't protect themselves and like they need some boy to do anything they could do just as well if the adults would just let them and–
“I said stop it!”
Tashigi blinks, yanked out of her downward spiral for a moment because that's what she wants to scream but she's pretty sure she's still gagged so how–?
"Stop treating her like she is weak. She is not weak! Women are not weak! They don’t have to be protected or coddled!”
That's… what? Tashigi doesn't… She… What?
“You are not showing them respect! And they are not delicate!”
Tashigi's head is spinning because that's not what happens! That's not how these things go! People don't say things like that out loud, in the middle of a restaurant, for everyone to hear. Especially not boys. Especially not boys with real swords who go around challenging adults to fights just because they can (because they're allowed to). Why is a boy saying those things when Tashigi didn't get to say them (yell them (scream them)) and who is Kuina and…
“She was the best swordsman on the island, stronger than adults, stronger than me! And she would have become even better. But she thought she couldn’t be the best because of people like you. Even Sensei told her that she would have to give it up since she was a girl but it was stupid, it’s not like growing up was going to make her weaker and she could already defeat grown men. I told her so, I said that I would defeat her because I would train my ass off not because she was a girl. We promised one of us would be the best. We promised…”
Tashigi is pretty sure she's crying and she doesn't want to but the boy is also crying so maybe it's okay and nobody is going to make fun of her for it.
"Kuina was not weak but she thought she was going to be because of you. She cried!”
Ah.
So that's who Kuina is.
Kuina is Tashigi.
Not really of course. Kuina was probably born on a completely different island, looking nothing like Tashigi, with different parents and different adults and kids and boys around her except she wasn't because it was the same adults and the same boys and the same people everywhere Tashigi goes, all the same people except for green-hair who is different and Tashigi is kind of a little bit jealous of Kuina because they're the same but Tashigi never had a green-hair growing up.
She really wishes she could meet Kuina but she's pretty sure the girl is dead. Maybe she can still meet green-hair though. Maybe he can tell her about Kuina. Maybe he can tell Tashigi that she is
not weak
strong, too.