One Piece: Lust Haki

Isuka's third thrust went wide by six inches and Kael didn't need Observation to know she was somewhere else.

She'd been off since they'd started. The attacks were sharp, the speed was there, but her footwork was sloppy in a way it hadn't been since their first week. She was stepping too far on her lunges and not resetting her base, which meant her follow-ups came from the wrong angle and Kael was dodging them without trying. He'd won three of their first four exchanges, which never happened. On a normal day he won one out of four if he was lucky.

He slipped her fourth thrust and stepped inside her guard and she didn't adjust. He could have hit her. He pulled the punch and stood there and she looked at him with the flat brown eyes and the bandage on her cheek and didn't say anything.

"Again," she said.

"You're not here."

"Again."

He came at her this time. She parried and the parry was clean but the counter was late and he read the delay and sidestepped it. She reset. Came again. Her rapier tip was accurate but her feet were wrong and the combination fell apart halfway through and she stopped mid-sequence and stood in the sand with the practice rapier hanging at her side and her jaw working.

"What's going on?"

"Nothing."

He waited. Isuka's version of nothing lasted about ten seconds before the pressure of being watched by someone who wasn't going to look away cracked it open.

"There was a dispatch this morning. A village in South Blue. Pirates burned it. Forty-seven dead. The Marine patrol was two islands away when it happened." She drove the practice rapier into the sand, point-first, and left it standing there. "Two islands. That's hours. They had hours and they were doing a supply run instead of patrol and the village burned because nobody was where they were supposed to be."

She sat down at the edge of the sparring ring, in the loose sand. Kael sat next to her. The afternoon sun was hot and the training yard was mostly empty because the other recruits were in weapons rotation and the dust in the air caught the light.

Isuka sat with her forearms on her knees. The scar on her right hand was visible and she was staring at it, or through it, at the sand or at a village in South Blue or at a village in East Blue that had burned when she was seven.

"That's why I'm here." Her voice was flat and tight and controlled and underneath it she sounded like she was about to break a table. "Not for rank. Not for the uniform. Not for swords or postings or promotions." She picked up a handful of sand and held it in her fist. "A village burned because nobody was there. That's what I'm going to be. The person who's there."

He sat with that. The sand was warm through his trousers and Isuka's knee was against his, the side of her thigh pressed against the side of his thigh, and she hadn't noticed because she was looking at the sand in her fist and he'd noticed because his brain cataloged contact with women in his proximity whether he wanted it to or not and this was a spectacularly bad time to be aware of the warmth of someone's knee through two layers of Marine-issue cotton.

He didn't move. She didn't move. Her knee stayed where it was and his stayed where it was.

"Then get stronger," he said.

She looked at him. Sidelong. The bandage tape had a crease at the corner from where she'd been clenching her jaw.

"That's it? A village burned and forty-seven people are dead and your advice is 'get stronger'?"

"You want me to tell you it's tragic? You know it's tragic. You want me to tell you the system failed? You know the system failed. The patrol was two islands away and nobody moved fast enough and that's going to keep happening until there are people stationed where they need to be who are strong enough to make a difference when it counts." He picked up his own handful of sand, let it run out. "So get stronger. Get posted. Be the person who's there."

"You're terrible at sympathy."

"Yeah. I'm better at getting up and doing the thing."

Her jaw eased. A fraction. The fist with the sand in it opened and the sand fell in a thin stream between her fingers and she watched it go and the tight controlled fury loosened by a degree. Enough to breathe.

"I asked about the village," she said. "The dispatch office. Asked if there was a follow-up. If anyone was sent. If the pirates were identified." She brushed sand off her palm. "The clerk told me that Chore Boys don't have clearance for follow-up reports and I should focus on my training."

"What did you say?"

"I told him I'd focus on his throat if he said it again."

Kael looked at her.

"I didn't touch him." She paused. "I wanted to."

He believed that. She was holding her shoulders tight, the muscles in her neck standing out like cables. The rapier was still jammed in the sand two feet away and she was looking at it and thinking about picking it up and hitting something with it.

"The clerk was right about clearance," he said. "He was wrong about everything else."

"Mm."

They sat. The yard was quiet. A bird landed on one of the striking posts and sat there for a while and then flew off. Kael didn't know what kind of bird it was. Brown. Small. It sat on the post and then it didn't.

Isuka pulled her hands back and started wrapping her knuckles with tape from the roll she kept in her belt. She did it without looking, the wraps precise and tight, muscle memory from years of doing this exact thing after every drill. Her knee was still against his. She still hadn't noticed.

"You know what I think about, sometimes?" she said. She was looking at the tape on her hands, winding it between her fingers. "I think about whether the people on my island had time to run. Whether there was a moment where they heard the cannons and knew what was coming and had time to grab their kids and go. Or whether it was just fire, all at once, and they never had a chance."

She pulled the tape tight and tore the end with her teeth.

"I was seven. I don't remember the details. I remember the heat and I remember the smoke and I remember the sound of the roof falling in. I don't remember faces." She flexed her fingers inside the tape. "I should remember faces. I should be able to close my eyes and see my neighbors and tell you their names and I can't. The fire took that too."

"You were seven."

"I know." Old hurt. Settled. "Seven-year-olds remember things. I remember the roof. I remember running. I remember the Marine ship in the harbor three days later and how it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen because it meant someone had finally come." She stopped wrapping. "Three days, Kael. The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen took three days to arrive."

She finished the tape. Flexed her fingers. The wraps were even and tight and professional and her hands didn't shake while she did them but the knuckles underneath were white.

Kael knew more than she'd told him. He knew the fire hadn't been random raiders. He knew her mentor, the Marine officer who'd taken her in and trained her, was the one who'd ordered it. He knew because he'd read it in a story and the story was real and the girl sitting next to him in the sand with her knee against his didn't know yet and the knowing sat in his chest like a stone he couldn't cough up.

He kept his mouth shut. The sand was warm. The bird was gone. Isuka's knee was warm against his and she was looking at the training yard and he was looking at the training yard and neither of them said anything for a while and that was okay.

Tashigi found him in the common room that evening. She had her books and her thermos and her glasses were already slightly crooked, which meant she'd been reading on the walk over. She sat down across from him and poured tea and didn't say anything for a minute, which was unusual because Tashigi usually started talking before she sat down.

"You read the dispatch," Kael said.

She looked up. Her eyes were red at the rims. She'd been crying, recently, and had washed her face to hide it but the redness was still there around her lashes and at the inner corners.

"Forty-seven people," she said. Her voice was careful and level, held steady, close to spilling over. "The patrol was two islands away."

"I know."

"We're supposed to be the good guys, Kael-san." She was looking at her tea. The glasses had fogged slightly from the steam and she hadn't wiped them. "The Marines. We're supposed to be the ones who protect people. That's the whole point. That's why- that's why any of us are here."

He could have told her about Nezumi. About Arlong. About the chart in his boot with the names of Marines who were the opposite of good guys. He could have told her that the system wasn't broken, that it was working exactly as designed, that some Marines were the monster and some Marines were the wall and the uniform didn't tell you which was which.

He didn't.

"Yeah," he said. "We are."

She looked at him over the tea. The red rims. The careful level voice. The glasses fogged from steam she wasn't wiping away. Tashigi believed in the Marines. She believed in them completely and specifically, as a fact she intended to make true through sheer commitment, and he wasn't going to be the one to put cracks in that. Her idealism was a choice. She chose to believe the institution she served was worth serving, and she'd fight to make that true, and taking that from her would be cruelty dressed as honesty.

"The dispatch said the South Blue Fleet Command is sending an investigation team," she said. "That's standard procedure. They'll find the pirates. They'll hold the patrol commander accountable." She paused. "That's how it's supposed to work."

"That's how it's supposed to work."

She drank her tea. He drank his. The common room was quiet and the lamp hummed and Isuka wasn't there because Isuka was probably in the training yard hitting something and Tashigi was here because Tashigi processed grief by sitting near people she trusted.

After a while she opened her metallurgy book and started reading. Kael went back to the regulations handbook. The page he'd left off on was about patrol jurisdiction in the East Blue. Conomi Islands were mentioned in paragraph four.

He turned the page.