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Tashigi emerges from the bowels of the ship at 1300, four hours after she’s supposed to have finished her paperwork. Even when she thinks she’s budgeting too much time, it’s never enough, and the day always runs out of hours when she’s not yet done with her normal work and what she actually wants to do. She can’t complain; this is part of the responsibility of an officer of her rank; it’s not something she should put off or delegate. (If she had a subordinate with leadership potential—and it feels like a betrayal of her men, who have good hearts and intentions, to dismiss them; people had once dismissed her like that, but none of them has expressed a desire to become an officer—that’s beside the point, though.)
She wipes her glasses on the bottom of her shirt and replaces them on her nose, so distracted by this that she has to grab the wall in order to avoid bumping into a person as they pass. She looks up. It’s not her men; it’s not Smoker (she would have known, and he might have caught her or gotten her attention before she’d fallen). Lieutenant Jango peers down at her through his sunglasses.
“Oh, Captain Tashigi, hello.”
Tashigi registers that this isn’t proper protocol at all, and then dismisses it from her mind. If Jango is here, Hina must also be here, two days early. (Will she leave two days early, too? Has Tashigi missed out because of the damn paperwork?)
“Rear Admiral Hina was looking for you…I don’t know where she went, though.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Tashigi says, turning herself around.
She doesn’t see Hina on deck, but Hina’s ship is alongside hers, some of her subordinates chatting with Hina. She must be down with Smoker if she hadn’t gone back to her own ship; Tashigi turns once more and heads down the stairs, but down the opposite direction from the tiny spare room she’d been using to store the extra paperwork. She reaches the door to her and Smoker’s quarters, turns the knob, pushes it open, and the toe of her boot catches the threshold and she falls forward.
She’s going to land on her face—break her glasses, break her nose—but Smoker, as he would have above deck, catches her before she lands, strong arms emerging from a cloud of smoke. Tashigi’s face burns like the end of a freshly-lit cigar. She can’t walk through her own door without incident, can she?
“You okay?” Smoker says, body materializing beside her as he drags her back to her feet.
“Yes,” says Tashigi. “Thank you.”
“Don’t spend too much time on that damn paperwork,” says Smoker.
“I don’t lose my balance because of that,” Tashigi says.
“The point still stands,” says Hina. “Hina was just telling Smoker that the two of you need administrative help.”
She’s perched on the edge of the bed, beside a Smoker-sized dent—he must have been sitting there.
“We can handle it,” Smoker and Tashigi both say in unison.
Hina sighs. “Well, Hina won’t push the issue.”
Tashigi gets a better look at her. Hina looks a bit tired, a bit worn at the edges, or maybe that’s the way Tashigi feels right now clouding all she sees.
“Like you’re one to talk about working too hard,” says Smoker, and—maybe Tashigi isn’t.
Maybe Hina’s doing fine, though. She gathers Tashigi into her lap, resuming her topic of conversation with Smoker, about an acquaintance of theirs from Basic who’s been drifting around the South Blue.
The water is so clear and still today, a rarity outside the calm belts, that Tashigi can’t help but lean over the railing, binoculars at the ready. She adjusts the focus and plants her elbows on the railing, keeping them steady enough to see below the surface. At first, she sees only the water, but the shimmering water—but then, movement, that’s a fish. Through the water, its scales seem to catch the light and disperse it, shining like opals. And there’s another, fat and with long fins, a species with which Tashigi is not familiar. All Marines learn how to fish as part of basic training, but it’s not a skill Tashigi’s had much occasion to use since then. There’s no reason to fish now, just a waste of equipment to let what they catch go when they already have rations, and when they need to be alert.
A flash of movement makes Tashigi’s elbows jerk. The binoculars wobble; she loses focus. The flash comes again, but she keeps her elbows steady; the body of the fish is sleek and dark below the surface, sharp fins, a pattern on its scales like gravel. Tashigi leans forward, waiting for it to return a third time, to see it closer, stretching her back, sliding her elbows—until there’s nothing underneath. She pitches forward, dropping her binoculars. A shriek escapes her mouth, embarrassing—and she’s plunging straight toward the water. She tries to grab the deck and misses, reaching out her hand—and clasping, somehow, something metal. Her glasses are dangling off her ear; the piece of metal feels like a hand, but no one would attach a metal appendage like that to a ship. More metal grows around Tashigi, springing up a bar at a time—oh, this is Hina. Of course it’s Hina. Tashigi’s face flushes; she tries to concentrate on her arm—her shoulder aches, not dislocated but wrenched pretty far. Her binoculars are gone, but at least she still has her glasses.
“I’m sorry,” says Tashigi, lowering her face as Hina pulls her up to the deck.
“Hina was here,” says Hina. “You should be more careful.”
“I know,” Tashigi says.
(It’s been a while since she’d fallen overboard, at least, though the thought of resetting that counter is no great comfort.)
“You’re all right, though?” Hina says, reaching a hand out to cup Tashigi’s chin.
Tashigi nods, biting her lip, telling herself not to cry here.
“Good,” says Hina. “Smoker did the same thing once, you know.”
“No way,” says Tashigi.
“Yes,” says Hina. “Come, let’s find him and look over your shoulder. Hina will make him tell you.”
“My shoulder’s fine,” Tashigi says, but she knows this is a losing battle.
She’ll fight it anyway, though; Hina likes it when she does.
Clubs aren’t Tashigi’s scene, but she goes with Smoker and Hina sometimes to see them tear up the dance floor in civilian clothes. The way they’re pressed chest-to-chest, Smoker’s hand on the small of Hina’s back, Hina’s hands tangled in Smoker’s hair, moving to the music, makes Tashigi almost forget about the odor of sweat permeating the air like a teenage locker room, the annoying people who hit on her, the sticky floor. Almost.
It’s impossible to forget when Hina drags Smoker from the floor, tipsy and laughing, and Tashigi straightens up her posture to raise herself from the wall she’s leaning on and her foot sticks to the ground and she trips. She reaches out, grabbing Smoker’s shirt, fingers digging into the soft fabric, not at all like his coat on the many occasions she’s had to grab onto that.
“Ugh, drunk people are so sloppy, tripping on air like that,” says another person departing the dance floor, loudly, and Tashigi’s ears burn as if they’ve been pressed to hot kettles.
“Hina will fight them,” Hina says. “For Tashigi-chan’s honor.”
“No,” Tashigi and Smoker say at the same time.
Smoker steadies Tashigi, and she wrenches her shoe free from the sticky patch on the floor. Hina’s pouting, crossing her arms so she’s pushing her boobs together, but it’s a welcome distraction from Tashigi’s embarrassment.
“We should get out of here anyway,” says Smoker, withdrawing two fresh cigars from his pocket.
“Hina could keep going…”
“You were just complaining about the blisters from your shoes,” says Smoker. “Come on.”
They don’t all often get the chance to spar together, two-on-one to two-on-one to one-on-one to two-on-one, switching up formations and techniques. Tashigi fights alongside Smoker often—though, the higher up the chain of command they’re promoted and the more they’re stuck at the base, the less they see real combat—but she doesn’t feel the force of his jitte and his haki pushing toward her; she doesn’t get him at the tip of her sword. She rarely fights alongside Hina, but fighting against her or with her is its own kind of joy, seeing all that Hina can do with her haki and her powers and her raw physical strength and agility.
They all strike; they all pull back. Tashigi’s chest heaves. She’s next to Smoker; he nods to her and she knows he’ll be on the left and she’ll be on the right. They strike forward; Hina sends out her bars; Tashigi sees one coming right at her ankle and lifts her leg, but she’s not quick enough. At least she’s prepared for the fall, tossing her sword to the side so she doesn’t land on it and catching herself on her wrists before her face hits the ground. She can already hear Smoker’s lecture on how that’s the wrong way to fall, but it’s her imagination and not reality.
What she does hear is a grunt, and, rolling over, Tashigi sees Smoker, taking all of Hina’s attention now that Tashigi is dispatched, falling to the floor, too.
“Hina believes that’s her victory.”
“Yeah,” says Smoker. “You win.”
Tashigi’s eyes snap open and she’s sitting up in bed, angling her body around Smoker’s sleeping form to get a glance at the clock, before she remembers that it’s Thursday. She’s not on the early shift today.
“Something wrong?”
Hina’s voice holds sleep like escaped coffee grounds in the bottom of a mug.
“I thought I had to get up,” Tashigi says. “But it’s Thursday.”
“Yes, Hina thought Smoker had said Hina should visit later in the week…”
“Yeah, Smoker’s days are Sunday and Monday. Mine are Tuesday and Wednesday.”
Hina nods, or Tashigi thinks she does—in the near-dawn darkness, without her glasses, it’s difficult to tell. She closes her eyes, but she’s already awake; that won’t get her back to sleep. She rolls over, planting her face into Hina’s chest. Hina draws her arms around Tashigi, pulling the covers up as much as they’ll go, though Smoker is pinning them beneath his weight.
“Too late to go back to sleep?”
“Yeah,” says Tashigi, through a yawn. “But I’m tired.”
Hina strokes her hair, and Tashigi adjusts her position, scooting over so she’s most of the way on top of Hina. Despite lacking the covers, Hina is warm, and her touch is sure, Hina rolls them bot to the side, and Tashigi brushes her foot against Hina’s ankle, making to drag it up her leg, and then, tangled in the covers, Tashigi rolls backward and off the edge of the bed, falling to the floor.
“Oh!”
It doesn’t hurt, but she’s definitely awake.
“What?” says Smoker.
“Hina pushed Tashigi-chan off the bed.”
“I fell,” says Tashigi—she’s not proud of it, but the distinction needs to be made.
She pushes herself up into a sitting position, and then stands. Hina is sitting up, the old shirt of Smoker’s she sleeps in hanging off one shoulder. She yanks the covers out from underneath Smoker.
“Don’t hog them if you’re not using them.”
Tashigi climbs into the bed, over Hina and back into the middle.
“I could tell you to get back to what you were doing,” says Smoker. “But…”
None of them will be getting back to sleep now. But Tashigi won’t be complaining.
Tashigi sees Smoker and Hina fall overboard out of the corner of her eye, and as if drawn by a vacuum her head snaps in that direction. She wouldn’t have heard the splashes as more than cannonballs, wouldn’t have felt it through her haki—hers is not so acute, and she specializes in armament, not observation—but her body is moving before she tells it, sprinting over to the side of the deck. She jumps, sheathing her sword, and if they’re clinging to the side of the boat she’ll hit the water and resurface. They aren’t. Like a calling half of a cannonball herself, Tashigi hits the ocean.
Pressing her glasses to her face, she looks, and there, below her, are two shapes. She reaches out with her haki as she kicks; down here, where incoming shrapnel is muted and slow, she can confirm without a doubt. So stupid of one of them to jump and the other to follow, to go without anything to hold onto—the pressure is getting to Tashigi’s ears. She has to hold her breath; she has to pull them up. Her glasses escape her face, but she’ll take the loss; she reaches out and grabs one, then the other by the arm, digging her fingers into the folds of their clothes.
They’re worse than the seastone weights Tashigi sometimes practices with, dragging them around the track, but far more important, and she’s damn glad she keeps up with that training, no matter how horrible. Her lungs are straining; her eyes are shut but surely she must be near the surface. Just a little longer, just a little longer; she chants it in her head like a mantra, pushing the three of them up, up.
She breaks the surface, Smoker and Hina’s weights threatening to drag her back down, but she hears their gasping breaths beside her, through the booming cannons and the shouting from above, mixed with her own. Tashigi has no idea which is the closest boat, one of theirs or one of the pirates’.
“Which way?” Tashigi says, her voice straining.
“Left,” says Smoker. “Then forward.”
Practicing for Tashigi’s lifeguard certification never included towing two fruit users at once, but she kicks, and moves; Smoker doesn’t correct her direction.
“Hey!” Smoker yells as they reach the ship. “Throw something down!”
Somehow, they’re all hauled up on deck without the lowered rope getting shot through; the cannon fire is growing less frequent, though. Hina resumes command, as if she’s not dripping with water, but Smoker sits with Tashigi.
“You have my spare glasses?” Tashigi says.
“Yes,” says Smoker. “Right-side pocket.”
He lets Tashigi fumble for them herself, which means the battle must be over, but Tashigi’s still winded and soaking wet. They’ll call this one a draw with the pirates. She wipes the glasses dry and places them on her face—Smoker looks like a cat caught in the rain. Ridiculous. She could laugh, but she thinks of how deep she’d had to go, and the laugh dies and nearly catches in her throat.
“You and Hina need to get checked out. Why did you do that?”
“I fell,” says Smoker. “Hina jumped. I guess she knew you’d fish us out.”
Tashigi sighs. “It would have been easier if it were just one of you, you know.”
(But—they’ve both caught her when she’s fallen, countless times, though she’s never been in the same kind of danger. Maybe it all adds up.)
“Thanks,” says Smoker. “Don’t worry. I’m not inclined to repeat that soon.”
Tashigi does smile this time. The pirate ship hurls one final cannonball, but it lands ten meters short of the warship. Hina’s coat, wet as it is, flaps in the breeze.