One Piece: Lust Haki

The common room after evaluations was louder than usual because everyone who'd won a match was reliving it and everyone who'd lost was arguing about why.

Isuka was arguing with me.

"Your stance is too narrow for a power striker. You're generating force from the arms instead of the base."

"I'm generating force from Armament."

"Armament amplifies existing force. A wider base generates more existing force to amplify. The physics don't change because your fists get harder." She was standing in front of me, demonstrating. Her feet spread. Her hips squared. "Like this. Feel the difference?"

"I feel you taking up a lot of space."

"I'm making a point." She poked my chest with her index finger. Hard. The callus on her fingertip pressed through my shirt. "Your second match today. You closed distance by walking forward instead of driving from the rear foot. That's why the body shot at the south wall took two steps instead of one. The power was in your arms. It should have been in the floor."

"I knocked him out."

"You knocked him out slowly." She poked my chest again. Same spot.

I caught her finger. Wrapped my hand around it and held. Her finger was warm and her knuckle was rough against my palm and I held it there between us.

"Two pokes is the limit."

Her mouth opened. Closed. She pulled her finger free and her ears went red and she shoved her hands behind her back and took a step away.

"Fine. Stay narrow. Break your own feet."

"That's anatomically unlikely."

"I'm going to the armory. Your stance is wrong and I'm done caring." She grabbed her bag from the bench, slung it over her shoulder, and walked toward the door. Fast. The bag bouncing against her hip. The vermilion hair catching the lamp light as she passed under it and out.

She walked out. The door swung shut behind her and I was still looking at the spot where she'd been standing and my face was doing whatever it did when I stopped managing it. Amused and soft and a third thing I didn't have a name for.

The common room was still noisy. A recruit near the window was showing his bruise to a friend who didn't care. Someone had spilled tea on the table and nobody was cleaning it up.

Tashigi was across the room.

She was sitting at the corner table with Shigure propped against her chair and a report in front of her and her glasses pushed up and she was looking at me. Her hands were flat on the table.

She'd been watching. The argument. The finger catch. My face after Isuka left.

Her mouth was flat. Her eyes were level behind the glasses. She looked at the door where Isuka had gone. Looked at me. Looked at her own hands on the table.

She picked up the report. Adjusted her glasses. Started reading.

I went to get tea. When I came back the spill was still there and Tashigi was gone. Her report was on the table, page three, where she'd stopped reading. Shigure was still propped against the chair.

She'd left her sword. Tashigi didn't leave Shigure.

I picked up Shigure. The scabbard was heated from the room. I took it to the barracks. Her door was closed. I leaned Shigure against the frame and knocked. No answer. I left the sword there and went to my bunk.

Tashigi

The training ground at night was empty. The sand was cool and the lamps were low and the only sound was her breathing and the blade cutting air.

Shigure was heavier tonight. Not actually heavier. But her arms felt shorter and her grip was tighter than it needed to be and every fourth kata she lost the transition between the third and fourth form because her mind was somewhere else.

She started the set again. First form. The blade forward, weight centered. Second form. The pivot, the cut, the return. Third form. The extension, the reach, Shigure at full length with the tip drawing a line in the night air.

Fourth form. She lost it. Her foot dragged in the sand instead of stepping clean and Shigure came around too fast and the edge bit air where a throat should have been but the angle was wrong. It was wrong because she was thinking about something that had nothing to do with swordsmanship.

She lowered the blade. Stood in the sand. The lamp across the ground made her shadow long and thin and Shigure's shadow was a dark line extending from her hand.

The jacket in the rain. Three months ago. He'd put it over her shoulders without asking and the fabric had smelled like him and she'd worn it for twenty minutes before she'd realized she was pressing her nose into the collar. She hadn't given the jacket back for two days.

The hands. On the patrol ship, during the storm. Her hands had been shaking on the rail and he'd put his hand over both of hers and the shaking had stopped. He'd held on until the ship steadied. She hadn't let go first.

The blanket. The common room at midnight. She'd fallen asleep reviewing the Meito registry and when she'd woken up there was a blanket over her shoulders and her neck was stiff and the registry was still open to page forty-seven and his handwriting was in the margin next to an entry she'd been researching. He'd added a note: Check the Kano Country archives. This smith's tang mark matches a school that moved north in the 1490s.

The sword question. Last week. He'd asked about the Skillful Grade blade's provenance report like it was the most important thing he'd heard that day. His eyes had tracked her hands while she explained the tang markings and he'd asked follow-up questions that proved he'd been listening to every sword lecture she'd given since the first month. He remembered the grain that never repeats and the carbon content argument and the Wazamono grading system and the fact that Shigure's edge had been folded by a smith from Wano who died before she was born. He remembered because she'd told him and he'd listened.

She'd been collecting these moments and cataloguing them under "warm" and "comfortable" without examining what the collection meant when you put it all together.

Today she'd looked.

Kael and Isuka in the common room. Isuka poking his chest. Him catching her finger. The moment between them, electric and close in a way she could feel from across the room. Isuka's ears going red. Kael watching her walk away and his face going soft. Unguarded. The face of someone watching a person they cared about leave the room.

She'd seen that face and looked at her own hands and understood.

He was warm with her. He was kind. He remembered her swords and adjusted her elbow during training and gave her his fish when Isuka stole hers.

He didn't look at her like that.

She wanted him to.

"Oh," she said. Out loud. To the empty training ground and the lamp light and the sand.

Then: "Oh, no."

She sheathed Shigure. The blade slid home and the guard clicked. She sat down on the sand. The ground was cool through her trousers. She pulled her knees up and put her head in her hands and her glasses pressed into her forehead and her palms were over her eyes.

She hadn't meant for this. He was her friend. He was the person who sat next to her in the mess hall and talked about steel like it mattered and listened to her lectures and corrected her elbow angle and made her ears go pink by saying things that were kind and specific. She hadn't meant to want more than that.

But she'd looked at his face watching Isuka leave and the sting had arrived. She was the cataloguer. She noticed things about him that he didn't notice about himself and wrote them down in a mental file that she was now realizing was not a file about a friend.

She sat in the sand for a while. She didn't know how long. The lamp buzzed. A moth circled it.

She got up. Brushed the sand off her trousers. Picked up Shigure.

She'd left Shigure in the common room. She never left Shigure. He must have brought it back.

She walked back to the barracks. Shigure was leaning against her door frame, right where she would have put it. She picked it up and held it against her chest.

Inside. The door closed. She set Shigure in its rack. Took off her glasses. Put them on the nightstand. The lenses caught the moonlight through the window. She lay down. The pillow was cool.

His face watching Isuka walk away. Soft. Warm. She wondered what it would look like aimed at her. Whether it ever had been and she'd missed it.

The glasses sat on the nightstand. She didn't sleep for a long time.