Chapter Text
Tashigi is currently sitting in a roughly-made jail cell in a rocky cave. She had been captured earlier and left in here, hands bound in front of her with metal handcuffs. She didn't notice any keys around nor have any pickpocket tools, but she's still determined to free herself somehow, odds stacked against her. She thinks of trying, with dim hope, to break the cuff chain apart by hitting it against the sharper rocks jutting from the floor. She ignores the numbness in her hands from the continuous impact, determined to escape and complete her mission on this island. She needs to reunite with her team, capture the criminal pirates, report back to Vice Admiral Smoker...
As she struggles, the loud clanks of the chain against rocks distract her from noticing a figure walking towards her, stopping in front of the gated cell door.
“You alright, Glasses?”
Her head turns sharply at the voice, and much to her dismay, she sees that it is no one else but the green-haired swordsman smirking at her, his figure much broader than she remembers as she looks up at him from the ground. Her mouth opens in disbelief. This man somehow always appears when she least expects it. At this point, she's not sure if she should call him a guardian angel or a curse.
“Need help?” He's looking down on her, both literally and figuratively.
“No,” she says, petulantly.
As expected, he doesn't listen to her. He's already bending the jail cell bars apart, creating a gap large enough to move through.
“Here,” he offers, reaching towards her cuffs.
“I can do it myself.” Tashigi says, wriggling around.
“Why are you so stubborn, woman.” he mutters, unable to catch her chained wrists as she swings them in wild arcs out of his grasp.
“You don't need to help me, I— ”
The odd game of cat-and-mouse ends abruptly as Tashigi stretches her arms too far back over her head. Her words cut off when her miscalculated momentum throws her off-balance, and she's about to fall backwards onto the rocky floor.
Her eyes shut, bracing herself for the pain of the hard stone floor that doesn't come. When she opens them, she realizes that Roronoa has caught her the back of her head in his hand while looming over her and glaring at her with a teeth-clenched smile that shows annoyance rather than relief.
”I see. So you'd rather suffer head trauma before getting help from a pirate, right?”
She doesn't say anything because she's mortified. She partially regrets having been so petty when he had initially offered his help. Now she's suffering the consequence of her action as she's flat on the ground in a compromising position, dealing with the fact that he's much too close to her with one arm around her neck, the other arm a solid angle on her right, and his body radiating heat inches above her, with his green coat hanging open to show an obscene amount of the stitched scar that runs diagonally from his oblique to clavicle. She unsure where to avert her eyes to. There's just seems to be too much of him, everywhere.
She's trapped between a rock and a hard place, unwilling to move because she has a sudden irrational fear of accidentally touching him, but thankfully he doesn't linger in this position. Instead, he takes advantage of her shock-still on the ground to reach above her head for her wrists to break apart the cuffs with his bare hands.
This man, she fumes internally...Just how strong was he, anyways? She's feels annoyed, ashamed, and another emotion she refuses to dignify.
“Don't just sit there, Glasses.” His goodwill now done, he gets up to leave without waiting for her.
She looks after him in silence, rubbing her chaffed wrists, trying to regain her bearings. He comes and goes like a storm, she thinks. As he walks out of her line of sight, she glimpses blood on the back of his right hand. With a stab of guilt, she realizes that he must have been scraped when he protected her head from hitting the rough rocks.
She should've thanked him for that, she thinks, too late. He was already gone.
-
After receiving medical attention from a marine doctor for her wrists, Tashigi asks for a spare roll of gauze.
Earlier, she had found out that her mission had been completed with the help of the Straw Hat pirates, and they're already throwing a party to celebrate a job well done. It wasn't even their mission in the first place! She thinks they are too cavalier about these kinds of thing, but she doesn't bother protesting. She has to add gratitude to the debt she owes them, so just for tonight, she'll turn a blind eye.
It's a lovely atmosphere for a celebration. The moon is full and the night sky is clear, the sounds of music and cooked foods crackle in the air, and the makeshift bonfires are warm and inviting, drawing the merry crowd towards their light. She isn't surprised to see her crew now mingling and dancing with the Straw Hats, but she hopes that they won't be making a habit of it. Then she hopes that they would be distracted enough by the festivities to ignore her while she seeks out a certain swordsman. She reminds herself not to make a habit of this either.
She spots Roronoa sitting alone on a crate near the ship Thousand Sunny, drinking a bottle. In this position, the light from the bonfires shines a low, warm glow on him. She notices that his hand has not been treated yet, as though he thought the injury was too insignificant to even bother paying attention to. She takes a breath before taking a step towards him.
He doesn't even acknowledge her when she approaches him; he takes another swig of his drink instead. Well, that's fine too, Tashigi thinks, undeterred. It's easier if he doesn't resist. She'll just settle her debt and go. She sits down on the ground next to him, kneeling on the floor, and gently reaches for his injured hand . When she starts to wrap the gauze around it, she half-expects him to pull away, but he doesn't.
“You- why did—” She starts, but winces internally. Her tone is too wired to sound genuinely grateful. She wonders where her tension is coming from. He decides to interject before she can craft something more coherent.
“I didn't help you so you could repay me like this.”
She flinches, pausing in her work, only because that line almost sounds like the same type of insinuation she often hears when dealing with lecherous criminals and smarmy superiors, and her mind traitorously flashbacks to earlier when his body was looming over hers.
She narrows her eyes, “Then how did you want me to repay you?”
He blinks, then says indignantly, “Not like that! I meant that I don't need your thanks or your guilt.” He shakes his head. “You- …you really think the worst of me, don't you?”
Tashigi softens. She knows that she was being unfair because she knows that he's never treated her like that . He just says other kinds of hurtful things to her instead.
“Tell me, how I'm supposed to think about you, Roronoa, when you don't try to explain yourself? It's easy to misinterpret someone's words when the intentions behind them are unknown.” She thinks about how they've been repeating this same song and dance, ever since they first met. Her next thoughts slip quietly past her lips,“Like... back in Loguetown. I still don't really understand what you meant.” She forgets what exactly he had said back then, but she clearly remembers the strange desperation in his expression.
“That's not important anymore.”
She huffs at his dismissive response. It seemed pretty important when he was shouting at her.“Then what changed?”
He avoids her eyes. Did he really need to say it out loud? Because the answer was her, obviously, but she wouldn't understand it even if he told her so. If he explains that her face has matured, her hair has grown longer, her body has become more feminine, because she has scars that she's endured and survived-- he's not sure that'll go over well. His eyes unconsciously flit to her right shoulder, where he remembers she was bitten during her fight with the harpy-woman.
“How's your shoulder?” He asks, suddenly.
She's confused by his sudden tonal shift. It seemed like he was asking about her past injury, but the incident at Punk Hazard already felt like a lifetime ago, and he had asked that question in a way that could have fooled her into thinking that he still cares about it. He must really want to avoid the topic, she guesses.
“Alright, I understand. I'll stop prying,” she sighs, turning her attention back to her task at hand.
He grunts, dragging his interest back to his drink when he sees her focus has shifted elsewhere.“Forget it.”
In the following silence, Tashigi feels a bit more sensitive. She used to never care about the reasoning behind a pirate's actions, but now, that's the only thing she wants out of him. Somewhere down the line of their continual convergence, he's piqued her intrigue and she wants to figure out the vexing puzzle of him. She balks at her own admission. She tells herself that when she's done here, she needs to head straight to bed and stop thinking about everything.
But when his hand is neatly wrapped up, she stays where she is, her fingertips resting lightly on his, her thoughts lost in the pattern of the gauze. She thinks about just how much she's changed since she's first met him. Before, she couldn't have ever imagined being in this situation: being thankful to him, feeling comfortable in his proximity, even caring for his wound... But she's not ready to let go of her own convictions yet, even though she could almost be tempted right now, hypnotized by faint music and flickering shadows dancing across his face. Safely, quietly, in the dark corner of the night- she could allow herself to forget their titles, and see him as just another man.
He studies her in her stillness.“Are you waiting for me to thank you? Didn't think you'd want to hear something like that from your worst enemy...” She doesn't catch the tease in his voice, doesn't look up to see the upward quirk of his mouth, so instead she stiffens. “N-no! You're right. Not from a pirate. I'll be taking my leave now.”
His words brought her back to reality. They both still have their roles to play. They were still each other's enemies in name, and it was her duty to keep up appearances and be a moral beacon and shining example for the other marines. She cannot be fraternizing with an enemy. She quickly lets go of his hand, compensates by gripping the leftover bandages tightly, and retreats back to the bonfires.
“Hey-!” He calls after her, but he's not sure if she didn't hear him or if she's choosing to ignore him. He exhales loudly as he watches her go. Ridiculous, he thinks. He can't even joke without her running away. He knows she's uptight regarding the relationship between marines and pirates, but he thinks it's stupid and all he wants is for her to admit that it's stupid too. He pokes and prods at it each time they meet, hoping that she might have already come to terms with it, but today he's wrong again.
“Shit.”
-
Chopper later wanders by as the party is winding down. Zoro is still drinking, but nearly spits out the sake when Chopper pipes up innocently, “ I'm glad you let Miss Tashigi bandage your hand, when you refused my help earlier.”
“I didn't ask her to, alright! She just did it, okay!” That frustrating woman!
“There, there.” Chopper placates, patting Zoro's arm with his hoof, even though he's confused to why he got so riled up in the first place. “Just because it's a small wound doesn't mean that you can just ignore it. It's nice that she cares about you, right?”
Zoro doesn't respond.