44 – Dinner
The fish was the same as yesterday. Rectangle of grilled white fish, crusted darker on one side where the kitchen grill ran hotter on the left, sitting on its rectangle of rice. The mess hall served the same fish every evening except Thursdays, when it served a different fish that tasted identical. I'd stopped wondering about the species around month two. It was protein. It did its job.
I sat at the table. Our table. Against the far wall where the window faced the inner courtyard and the evening light came in at an angle that made the trays look slightly better than they were. Left side, facing the room, back to the wall. Six months of this chair and at this point my spine had an opinion about the wood grain.
Tashigi sat down next to me.
Closer than usual.
I didn't register it immediately. She put her tray down and it clinked against the table, and she arranged her rice and fish and miso in the precise order she always arranged them, chopsticks aligned with the edge, miso in the far corner, and she sat. Close enough that her elbow was inside the space where her elbow usually wasn't. Half an inch, maybe less. The kind of shift you don't notice unless you've spent six months calibrating where a person sits.
Isuka was across the table already. Tray pushed forward. Elbows on the wood. She'd tied her hair back with the red one tonight.
"The evaluations list is posted," Isuka said. "Final rankings."
"Where'd I land?"
"First. Hand-to-hand."
"And you?"
"First. Bladed." She picked up a chunk of fish with her chopsticks. "Which you already knew because you watched every match."
"I watched several matches. Yours happened to be one of them."
"You left fingerprints on your own kneecaps."
"I grip things. It's a habit."
Tashigi's knee touched mine under the table.
Her knee pressed against the outside of my thigh and stayed. Warm through the fabric.
I glanced at her. She was eating her rice. Her chopsticks moved carefully, precisely. Her glasses reflected the overhead lamp. She didn't look at me.
She didn't pull away either.
In six months of sitting at this table, Tashigi had never touched me under it. She sat close and her elbow came near mine and sometimes her hand passed me the soy sauce and her fingers grazed my palm and that was the geography. Knee contact was new.
I ate my fish. The mess hall was loud around us, the post-evaluation energy still running through the room. Two tables over, the recruit who'd gotten knocked out in the second round was telling the story of how he'd almost won. The story was getting longer every time he told it.
"The fish is worse today," Isuka said.
"The fish is always the same."
"The fish is always the same level of bad. Today it's a different level."
"It's the same fish. Same grill. Same cook."
"The char is uneven." She held up a piece with her chopsticks. The dark crust was heavier on one end. "This is sloppy work."
"You're critiquing the grill pattern on mess hall fish."
"I'm noting inconsistency. Inconsistency in preparation reflects inconsistency in standards."
"It's a rectangle of fish."
"A badly prepared rectangle of fish."
Tashigi's knee was still against my leg. Her body shifted with each exhale, small enough to feel through the contact, and I didn't look at her again because looking would make it a thing and right now it was just a knee against a leg under a table in a loud room.
Through Observation, both of them registered.
It had gotten sharper since Gion's quarters last month. Two bodies within touching distance were readable. Tashigi on my left ran warm. Even, sustained, like a room someone had been heating for hours. Her heartbeat was calm and the warmth wasn't a spike. It had been building for weeks, maybe, and I'd only noticed because her knee was making me notice things adjacent to her knee.
Isuka across the table was focused. Her attention ran narrow, pointed at the space between me and Tashigi. She was eating her rice. Her eyes tracked the table and the gap between our shoulders and her face gave away nothing.
"Did either of you get the notice about the convoy exercise?" Tashigi said. Her voice was level. The same voice she used for discussing sword metallurgy.
"Next week," Isuka said. "Three-day coastal patrol. Training ship."
"Who's assigned?"
"Everyone from Block C and half of Block D. Forty recruits." Isuka ate her fish. "Tight quarters."
"Have you done a multi-day exercise before?"
"Twice. The hammocks are terrible."
"The hammocks can't be worse than these bunks."
"The hammocks are worse than the bunks."
Tashigi adjusted her glasses. "I read that the naval exercises use standard-issue canvas hammocks with a twelve-point suspension system. The specifications say they support up to-"
"Tashigi."
She stopped.
"You're about to quote hammock specifications."
Her ears went pink. "The specifications are relevant to comfort expectations."
Isuka looked at me. Then at Tashigi. At the gap between Tashigi's shoulder and mine, which was smaller than it usually was.
"The hammocks are bad," Isuka said. "The food is worse. The watch rotations make you want to die. That's the exercise."
She took my fish.
Her chopsticks were across the table and on my tray and the rectangle was gone before I'd finished my rice. The motion was smooth and practiced and she was chewing before I'd registered the empty space.
"Tax."
"For what this time?"
"Existing."
Tashigi looked at my empty fish space. Her chopsticks moved. I watched her look at her own fish, at the empty spot on my tray, at Isuka chewing across the table. Her mouth opened. I waited for it.
She pushed her fish onto my tray. Chopsticks precise, the rectangle sliding from her tray to mine and settling in the empty space.
"I'm not hungry."
She was hungry. She'd had the same lunch everyone else had and she'd trained for two hours after and she was hungry. But her fish was on my tray and the pattern had completed and Isuka was watching it happen.
I ate it. "Thanks."
"Mm." Tashigi was looking at her miso. Her knee hadn't moved.
Isuka's Observation signature was sharp and it was pointed at Tashigi's knee under the table, which meant she'd tracked the contact from Tashigi's posture. She didn't need Haki. She read bodies for a living. Six months of combat training had made her literate in how people held themselves, and Tashigi was tilted half a degree toward me with both shoulders angled in. The sentence was legible.
I ate Tashigi's fish. A recruit across the room dropped a tray and the clatter echoed off the high ceiling and someone laughed and someone else swore. The mess hall settled back.
"Vance."
I looked up. Isuka had her chopsticks flat across her empty tray.
"Your form in the third evaluation match. When you cornered him against the south wall. You switched from orthodox to southpaw mid-exchange."
"Felt right."
"You've been drilling southpaw?"
"When you're not stealing my sparring time."
"I don't steal your sparring time. I improve your sparring time."
"You take my sparring time and replace it with your sparring time. That's theft."
"That's efficiency." Her mouth pulled at one corner. "The switch was clean. Two months ago it would have been sloppy."
"That sounds dangerously close to a compliment."
"It's an observation. Compliments are for people who need encouragement. You need a better left guard." She stood. Picked up her tray. The rapier handle tapped her thigh. "I'm going to the armory. My blade needs oiling."
She looked at me. Then at Tashigi. Then back at me.
The look lingered for one extra beat. She picked up her tray and left.
Her boots were quiet on the mess hall floor and the door swung behind her and the noise from the corridor came in and went away.
Tashigi's knee was still against my leg.
The common room was empty when we got there. The usual post-dinner crowd was elsewhere. The lamp on the corner table was on and someone had left a mug on the bookshelf and the window was cracked open and the evening air smelled like salt and stone.
Tashigi put the Marine law textbook between us. Regulation and Legal Framework of Marine Operations, Third Revised Edition. The spine was cracked at chapter seven because chapter seven was the part about jurisdictional authority and it was on the exam and nobody understood it.
"The amendment procedure for inter-branch coordination requires a joint petition from both commanding officers or a unilateral directive from Headquarters," she read. "Unless the coordination involves a combat engagement currently in progress, in which case the senior officer present assumes unified command regardless of branch assignment."
"That's stupid."
"That's the regulation."
"What if the senior officer present is an idiot?"
"The regulation doesn't account for that."
"The regulation should account for that."
Her shoulder was against mine. We were sharing the textbook, both of us leaning over the same page, and her shoulder had settled against my arm. Her shampoo was something clean, closer to tea than floral.
"Section four-point-seven," she said. "Duty reassignment procedures in the event of-"
"Why do I need to know duty reassignment procedures?"
"Because you're going to reassign yourself to wherever seems most interesting and I want you to at least know the correct form to fill out while you're ignoring it."
I laughed. Her shoulder pressed against mine a fraction harder and she kept reading. Her voice was steady. Her hands on the textbook were steady. Everything about Tashigi tonight was deliberate in a way I hadn't seen before, like she'd made a decision about where to put her body and was holding it.
She turned the page. Her finger traced the margin and stopped on a subsection about transfer eligibility.
"Vance-san."
"Yeah."
"Are you happy here?"
The common room lamp buzzed. The air through the cracked window moved the curtain and the salt smell came in stronger for a moment.
I thought about it. She deserved an honest answer because she'd asked an honest question.
Happy was a complicated word for where I was. Six months ago I'd woken up in a body that wasn't mine on a ship heading toward the most dangerous military headquarters in a world where people punched through buildings. I'd had a crumpled note and no plan and a power that grew through a mechanism I couldn't explain to anyone. I was sleeping with a Vice Admiral who could kill most people in this building. I was sitting next to a girl whose knee had been against my leg for an hour. I was in an institution I didn't believe in, getting stronger for reasons I couldn't share, and somewhere in the back of my head the clock was always counting down to Marineford and the war that killed Ace and Whitebeard and rearranged the world.
"Getting there," I said.
Tashigi looked at me. The glasses reflected the lamp. Her eyes behind them were brown and she held my gaze. She usually looked away. The elbow brush, the hand graze, the soy sauce, and then her eyes sliding to the textbook or the table or anywhere else. Tonight she stayed.
"Good," she said. Quiet.
She went back to the textbook. Chapter seven. Jurisdictional authority. Her shoulder against mine and her voice reading regulations and the common room was empty and her heartbeat through Observation was sixty-four beats per minute.
I thought about the rules of where I came from. One person, one heart. You met someone and you chose them and the choosing was exclusive. Clean and simple and I'd never questioned it because I'd never had to.
In this world, Gion was in her quarters. Isuka's hand had been on my wrist in the corridor and the burn scar had pressed against my skin and her look leaving the mess hall tonight was a sentence she didn't finish. Tashigi's shoulder was against mine and she'd held my gaze. Steady. Six months since she'd done that and the word she'd used was "good."
I didn't feel guilty. I kept waiting for it, the way you wait for a bill after a meal. It didn't come.
Tashigi turned the page. Section four-point-eight.
"This part is about permanent posting assignments. You should pay attention to this."
"I'm paying attention."
Her reading voice was quiet and careful. The common room lamp buzzed. The window curtain moved. Somewhere down the corridor a door closed and boots went past.
I let her read. My eyes were on the page. Her shoulder was warm.