One Piece: Lust Haki

The world was louder.

I opened my eyes and the first thing was the sound. Heartbeats through the wall. Two rooms down, someone asleep, the rhythm slow and steady. Below, on the third floor, footsteps. Two people walking, one heavier. Further out, the harbor. The pylons creaking against the current and the hull of a ship rubbing its mooring line and the water lapping against the seawall, each sound distinct instead of the blur they'd been yesterday.

I lay still. Gion's leg was hooked over mine. Her breathing was slow and even and the air moved through her lungs with a slight catch at the top of each inhale where something compressed on her left side. I'd never heard that before.

The scratches on my shoulders stung against the sheet. The half-moons on my chest were tender. My body was sore in places that had nothing to do with training and the soreness was specific and recent and good.

I tested the Observation. Pushed it outward. The room sharpened. Gion's body heat was a map beside me, every gradient from her core to her fingertips. The bathroom door was ajar and the basin tap was dripping and each drop hit the porcelain at a frequency I could almost count. Beyond the room, the corridor. Two Marines on early patrol, their footsteps and heartbeats and the weight of their sidearms pulling their belts left.

I turned my head. Gion was asleep beside me. The curl along her jaw, the mole, the bare mouth. The blue sheets tangled around her legs. Her face was unguarded in sleep and the fine lines at the corners of her eyes were visible in the early light.

Her breathing changed. She was waking up.

I closed my eyes. Pretended. She lay still for a while. Then the bed shifted and her leg unhooked from mine and the warmth on my left side went cold and her feet hit the floor.

The bathroom. Water running. The tap cutting off. A drawer opening. Fabric.

She came out dressed.

Uniform. The coat with "Justice" on the back. Hair pulled up and pinned. Heels on. Lipstick reapplied, the waxy red precise on her mouth. The mole framed again.

She looked at me in her bed. Sitting up on one elbow with the blue sheet half-covering me and the nail marks on my chest and the scratches on my shoulders and my hair a mess.

Her mouth did the half-smile. Then it reset.

She walked to the bed. Her fingers found my jaw, tilting my chin up, the correction she used for my guard position. Her thumb brushed my cheek.

"Don't let them see you grinning like that," she said. "They'll know."

"I don't grin."

"You're grinning right now."

I was.

She leaned down and kissed me. Quick. Lipstick and all. Then she pulled back and wiped the smudge off my mouth with her thumb.

"Go. Different route from last time."

I dressed. My shirt had been on the floor all night and it was wrinkled and the collar was loose. She watched me button it. At the door I stopped.

"Tonight?"

"Thursday," she said. "We have a schedule."

"We just changed the schedule."

"Thursday." But the half-smile was back.

I checked the corridor. Empty. Went left instead of right and took the back stairs down. The corridor was different at this hour, quiet and cool, and my footsteps echoed on the stairs and someone was snoring through a door I was passing and the specific rhythm of it was slow and congested and I was hearing too much.

The mess hall was a wall of sound. Every conversation, every clatter of chopsticks, every scrape of bench on tile.

I sat down with my tray and the table across the room was debating whether the new Vice Admiral posting in North Blue was a promotion or a punishment.

I tested Armament under the table. My right fist hardened. The skin went dark, dense. One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. Clean. Stable. The tremor that usually hit at three was gone. I relaxed it. Hardened again. Five seconds. Clean again.

Three had been my limit yesterday.

Tashigi sat down across from me. Shigure propped against the bench.

"Morning."

"Morning." A cook dropped a pan in the kitchen and I flinched and the ringing overtone went on too long and Tashigi looked at me.

"Are you okay?"

"Loud morning."

"It's the same volume as every morning."

She pulled out a folded list and unfolded it next to her plate. The sword cache. She'd been cataloguing for two days and the list was already long and covered in her tight handwriting.

"Forty-two bladed weapons so far," she said. "Mostly mass-produced. But there are three that have forging marks I don't recognize and the steel quality on one of them is significantly above the rest."

"Named?"

"I won't know until I can compare the tang markings against the registry in the archives. Commander Ripper said I can access the archives tomorrow."

"Good."

She ate her rice and studied the list and I ate my rice and listened to too many conversations at once and tried to figure out how to turn the volume down. A recruit at the next table had a squeaky laugh that went through my skull.

The training ground. Seven AM.

Isuka was on the sand. Rapier drawn.

"Morning," I said.

"You're late."

"Two minutes."

"Late."

She came in.

The rapier moved and I read it. Three moves ahead. The opening feint, the doubled-back pattern, the finish aimed at my ribs. I'd always read the first move and sometimes the second. The third was there now, clear, the trajectory and the timing and the angle laid out before she'd committed to the second.

I sidestepped the finish. She adjusted. I was already moving. Her rapier found empty air.

She reset. Came again. A combination she'd been developing for weeks, transitions sharp, the finish hard. I read every transition before it started and moved through the gaps.

She backed off. Sweat on her temples. She went again. Harder. A new angle. I read it and was past her before the rapier arrived and my hand tapped her shoulder on the way by and she spun and I was already out of range.

She came at me with everything. Fast, precise, angry, creative. Combinations I hadn't seen. Some of them were genuinely good and I read all of them. Every one. Before they started. I moved through her attacks without blocking, just not being where the blade was, and the rapier never touched me.

She stopped. Her rapier at her side. Sweating hard. Her vermilion hair dark at the temples and her brown eyes on me and her chest heaving.

"What happened to you."

I shrugged.

She took a step closer. "Last week I could hit you. Today you're reading me like I'm standing still." She was searching my face. "What changed?"

"I had a breakthrough."

"When?"

"Recently."

Her jaw tightened. She looked at me for a long time. Her eyes moved across my face, my neck, my shoulders.

"Same time tomorrow," she said.

"Yeah."

She racked the rapier. Walked toward the showers. Her back was straight and her steps were measured.

I stood in the training ground. The morning sun was warm and the sand was bright.

Above the training ground, on the officers' balcony, Gion was standing with her hands on the railing. Uniform. Coat. Konpira at her hip.

She'd been watching the spar.

Her hand tightened on the railing. White knuckles, visible even from three floors down with Observation that was sharper than yesterday's.

I looked up at her. She looked down at me. The morning sun was between us.

Soon.