One Piece: Lust Haki

The mess hall rice was too hot and I ate it anyway because I'd slept through my alarm and the morning drill and half of whatever dignity I'd accumulated in five months of Marine service.

I yawned. The jaw-cracker kind, the one that makes your eyes water. The mess hall was doing its usual six AM thing where every sound competed for my attention and lost, except now all of them were winning because my Observation was still running at the volume it had jumped to two days ago and the kitchen staff were arguing about sardines through a concrete wall.

Isuka sat down across from me. Tray forward, elbows on the table, the white hair tie back. She looked at me like a problem she hadn't finished solving.

"Didn't sleep?"

"Trained late."

She ate a piece of fish. Chewed. Her eyes stayed on my face. "You trained late last night too."

"I train late a lot."

"You train late after every time you get weird."

"I don't get weird."

"You get weird." She ate another piece of fish. "You were weird two days ago. You were weird yesterday. You're less weird today, which means whatever you were doing last night worked."

The sardine argument in the kitchen had moved on to whether the deliveries from the harbor were actually fresh or whether the supply sergeant was skimming. I ate my rice.

Tashigi came in with Shigure propped on her shoulder and her tray balanced in one hand and her glasses pushed up with the other. She sat next to me. Same side. Same proximity as always. Her shoulder close to mine, her tray in its usual layout. Rice here, fish there, miso in the corner.

"Morning, Vance-san."

"Morning."

She set Shigure against the bench. Started on her rice. The morning light through the mess hall windows was hitting the table at the angle that caught the wood grain.

"The assessment scores from Tuesday's drill are posted," Tashigi said. "You scored highest in the reaction-time component again."

"Third time this month," Isuka said.

"Fourth," Tashigi said.

"Third. The one in week two was a tie with Hiro."

"Hiro's time was 0.3 seconds slower on the directional component. It was listed as a tie because they rounded. Vance-san's score was higher."

Isuka looked at Tashigi. Tashigi looked at her rice. They did this. The competition that had nothing to do with me except it had everything to do with me.

I yawned again. Smaller.

Tashigi's chopsticks paused.

She was looking at my neck. The left side, behind my ear, the spot I'd missed in the mirror because mirrors only show you what you think to look for and I hadn't thought to look there. She was looking at it and her mouth went flat and her chopsticks were still in the air and she looked away.

Looked at her rice.

Looked back.

Her ears went pink. The ears always went first with Tashigi. She put the chopsticks down and picked up her water and drank some and set it down and picked up the chopsticks again. A lot of motion for someone eating breakfast.

I didn't know what she'd seen. I put two fingers behind my ear and felt it. A tender spot. Small. The skin was raised.

Oh.

Gion's mouth. Two nights ago, the second round, when I was above her and she'd pulled my head down and her teeth had found the skin behind my ear and I'd been too focused on other things to notice she'd left a mark. She'd done it when I went quiet, when the commentary stopped, when she knew she had me. A small bite in a place I wouldn't check.

Tashigi was eating her rice. Her chopsticks were steady. Her ears were pink. She wasn't going to say anything about it. She was going to sit there and eat her rice and not say a word about the mark she'd catalogued alongside the lipstick on my collar from two weeks ago and the jacket that smelled like perfume I didn't wear.

Isuka was watching both of us.

Commander Ripper's office was small. Everything square, everything labeled, thirty years of reports in identical binders on identical shelves. I sat in the chair across from his desk and he told me that Vice Admiral Momousagi had submitted a written assessment of my Haki development at the Academy Commander's request.

"Breakthrough after sustained training," Ripper said, reading from the document. "Observation and Armament both showing marked improvement consistent with focused mentorship. Not unprecedented for students who respond well to structured development."

He looked up. "The Academy Commander wanted a second opinion on your reaction-time scores. They've been anomalous for two months."

"I've been working with Vice Admiral Momousagi's mentorship group since month two, sir."

"Yes. She notes that." He turned a page. "She writes clearly, I'll say that. Concise. Professional." He set the document down. "Your scores aren't anomalous anymore, Vance. They're exceptional. Keep training. That's all."

I left his office and walked down the corridor.

Not unprecedented.

She knew it was unprecedented. The jump was overnight, not gradual. One evening in her quarters and a glass vibrating on her nightstand and her hand on my arm in the dark and she'd written not unprecedented and signed it.

She was lying for me. In writing. On a document that went into a permanent file.

Gion, who scolded Garp in front of the entire mess hall and rejected Tokikake's proposals for longer than I'd been alive and almost held a rank that only three people in the world held. She'd put a measured professional lie into the system because the truth would raise questions neither of us could answer.

The corridor was empty. My boots on the tile. Someone typing behind a closed door down the hall.

The training ground at midday was hot. I ran the conditioning circuit, did the footwork drills, practiced the combination Isuka had been breaking down for me before the spar that changed. The one where the second step transitions into a pivot and the pivot opens the elbow strike. My body moved through it cleaner than last week.

Tashigi was in the weapons yard working through forms with Shigure. Her footwork was precise through the chain-link divider. The blade caught the sun on each transition and the light moved in the pattern of the form.

She finished the set and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and looked through the divider. At me. I was mid-pivot, my elbow extended, my weight forward. She watched me move through the combination.

Her mouth was a straight line. She followed the combination through its pivot and her eyes tracked my weight shift and her expression was closed in a way I hadn't seen before.

I finished the combination. Stood straight.

"Your elbow is two inches high on the transition," she said through the divider.

"Show me?"

She opened the divider gate and came through with Shigure sheathed. She stood next to me and adjusted my elbow with two fingers on the joint, pressing down. "Here. The strike line needs to come from below the shoulder plane, or the force dissipates before contact."

Her fingers on my elbow. Her face was back to instructor mode. Flat, focused.

"The Vice Admiral's assessment of your improvement was posted today," she said. "I read it."

"Yeah?"

"It was accurate." She removed her fingers from my elbow. "Your reaction time has been improving at a rate that's statistically unusual."

"Ripper said the same thing."

"Ripper said you were exceptional. I said statistically unusual." She picked up Shigure and went back to the weapons yard. Through the divider, she turned back. "Those are different observations, Vance-san."

She went back to her forms. The opening kata, the blade catching the sun on each transition. She didn't look at me again.

Statistically unusual. Like sword metallurgy. Like data she was putting next to other data. The mark. The assessment. The reaction times. Tashigi was building a picture with a shape she could see and a subject she couldn't name.

I forgot my wraps.

I was three corridors past the mess hall after lunch when I realized I'd left them on the bench, and I turned back. The mess hall was emptying. Most of the lunch crowd was gone. I pushed through the door and my table was empty except for Isuka.

She was sitting where she'd been sitting at breakfast. Her tray was pushed aside. In front of her was a notebook.

Small. Dark cover. She was writing in it with a pencil, her left hand flat on the page to keep it steady, her right hand moving in quick short strokes. Her handwriting was tight and slanted to the right.

I was five steps into the mess hall before she heard me. Her head came up. Her hand moved and the notebook closed and her palm was flat on the cover and she was looking at me.

"Forgot my wraps," I said.

"Under the bench."

I walked to the table. My wraps were under the bench, rolled in a loose coil. I picked them up. Isuka's hand was still on the notebook. The cover was plain. No label.

I straightened up. The same look from breakfast, from the yard when I'd read her three moves ahead and she'd stopped and said what happened to you and I'd given her a shrug she didn't accept.

"What's the notebook?"

"Notes."

"On what?"

"Training observations." Her jaw was set. The bandage on her cheek was fresh tape, straight lines. "I track my own progress. Drills, sparring performance, areas to work on."

She held my eyes. Steady. Isuka lied the same way she fought. Head-on, without flinching, daring you to call it.

"You track your own progress."

"Yeah."

I looked at her hand on the notebook. Her fingers were spread. The pencil was between her index and middle finger. Under her palm, the edge of a page. Dates. My name.

My name, written in her tight slanted handwriting, next to a column of dates.

I looked at her. She looked at me. The mess hall was almost empty. A cook was wiping down the far counter with a rag that needed replacing.

"See you at the spar," I said.

"Three o'clock."

"Three."

I left with the wraps in my hand and the back of my neck cold. My improvements, mapped against a timeline I hadn't been keeping and she had. She didn't know the variable. She didn't know that the dates she'd written down corresponded to nights in a woman's quarters and mornings where the world sounded different. She had the WHEN and the WHAT but not the WHY.

But she was looking for it.

Tashigi found me on the walkway between the barracks and the training block. Late afternoon. The light was going amber and the harbor was gold and the execution platform was a silhouette against the water.

She fell into step beside me. Shigure on her shoulder. Glasses clean.

"The weapons cache has three more entries from yesterday's seizure," she said. "I'm cataloguing them tomorrow if Commander Ripper approves access."

"You'll get it."

"I filed the request this morning." She walked beside me. Our pace matched. It had started matching weeks ago without either of us deciding it. "Vance-san."

"Yeah."

She was quiet. Her glasses caught the amber light. "The mark behind your ear."

My hand went there. The tender spot. "What about it."

"It isn't from training."

She was looking straight ahead. Her profile against the harbor light, the glasses, the chin-length dark blue hair, the straight line of her jaw. She'd said it flat. No accusation. No question.

"No," I said. "It's not."

She kept walking. Her pace didn't change. Her shoulder was close to mine.

"I noticed the lipstick on your collar two weeks ago. And the jacket that smelled different." She adjusted her glasses. The adjustment took longer than it needed to. "I notice a lot of things about you, Vance-san. Most of them are about swords or training and those are easy. Some of them aren't about swords or training."

A gull came in off the harbor and landed on the railing ahead of us. It looked at us and took off.

"Tashigi."

"You don't have to explain. I'm not asking." She stopped walking. I stopped next to her. The walkway was empty. "I'm saying I noticed. That's all."

She was looking at me. The brown eyes behind the red-framed glasses, the amber light through the lenses making the irises warm. Her mouth was that straight line from the training ground. Her ears weren't pink. That was the part. When Tashigi was embarrassed her ears went pink. Right now her ears weren't doing anything. She was past the part where it showed on her skin.

"You're important to me," I said.

"I know." She turned and started walking again. "That's the part that's difficult."

She walked ahead of me. Shigure on her shoulder, the blade catching the last of the light. The harbor was gold behind her and the execution platform was a dark line on the water and she didn't look back.

The wraps were still in my hand. I'd been holding them since the mess hall. The knuckle tape was starting to unwind.

I wound it back up and went to the spar.