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Smoker isn’t meant to hear the officers’ words as he closes the door behind him, but perhaps they don’t care. What could he do that’s in their eyes worse than he’s already done? Or maybe he is meant to hear it; maybe it’s petty darts they’re throwing at his back, but they shouldn’t waste their breath if they’re trying to get a rise out of him.
“I’d almost feel sorry for Tashigi if she wasn’t Tashigi,” one of them says.
The other laughs. “Well, maybe she’ll shape up.”
So they dislike his new commanding officer as much as they dislike him. Well, that could mean anything, really; so could giving him to someone they like. But that’s not quite true; maybe they’re giving up on him. At least there’s some action at Loguetown, more than their is on a base or in the middle of an ocean with one superior or another who never lets him go above deck besides to mop it.
Captain Tashigi is not what Smoker had expected, though he’s not sure what that was. Definitely not a sword-obsessed klutz who’s always losing her glasses or hearing condescension in an ordinary phrase or tripping over air or mishearing everything as referring to coffee or muffins (the woman loves breakfast, though Smoker will concede that she makes good coffee and doesn’t waste time fussing over the food unlike certain captains under whom he’s served). And all of his new squadmates are halfway in love with her or more, forgetting their own duties to cheer her on or compliment her, though she doesn’t seem completely pleased with it. How the hell someone like this got to be captain, and at a place like Loguetown no less, Smoker has no idea.
That is, until a group of pirates attack at the end of Smoker's first week, shouting something about the Roger Pirates’ legacy, brandishing weapons in the middle of the town square. They’re making to blow up the execution platform when the Marines arrive, and all of a sudden everything coalesces around Tashigi. Her men move into formation; Smoker brandishes his weapon, finding a place to slip into, and when one of the pirates takes a stab at Tashigi with his sword, he barely gets it ten centimeters closer before she blicks it, knocking the weapon from his hands. Smoker almost doesn’t have time to wonder if the clumsiness was all an act, because Tashigi’s shouting that they need to defend the platform, raising her sword and dashing into the middle of the pirates, half a dozen Marines in tow. Smoker fends off the explosive, swinging his weapon, turning his torso to smoke and making the target harder to see. But the one think he’s thinking, when he’s finally all back in one piece, fresh cigars in his mouth, and several of his colleagues are hauling the pirates in to the local jail, is how the hell is Tashigi only a captain with skills like these?
Well, he knows the answer. He knows he’s too good for his own damn rank, but she doesn’t look like what people--what the higher-ups--think a good Marine should be. Whether it’s because you disagree loudly with stupid and unnecessary shit supposedly done for the sake of justice but serving on real purpose, or because you seem a certain kind of different, if you stick out in the way they don’t like they’ll just try to hammer you back in. Tashigi drops and nearly steps on her glasses on the way back to their station again, but this time Smoker doesn’t find it quite as annoying.
Smoker gets written up his fifth week by a new recruit, fresh out of training, named Mort or Mart or something, and eager to please Tashigi, for wearing his uniform wrong and for going off the patrol route. Smoker knows the area well enough by now to know where he’s more likely to catch something going wrong, and he’s not here to give parking tickets or stare into empty alleys while something else goes wrong in a place he could have been, and he certainly knows it better than this fresh-faced kid, but whatever. It’s not like he hasn’t been dragged into the office before.
“Captain-chan, Smoker was going off the route!” the new recruit cries, as if Smoker was caught embezzling or making deals with pirates.
Tashigi, seated at her desk, gives an uncertain smile.
“Thank you for bring him, Mott,” she says. “You’re dismissed.”
He looks disappointed, as if he expects more, but heads out, perhaps in the hopes of getting more praise later. Smoker waits.
“Didn’t they tell you I was a troublemaker?”
He sounds combative, maybe, but he knows where this is going. A dressing-down, a threat of demotion, canned phrases that with his fighting ability and experience he ought to be better than this.
“Yes,” says Tashigi, the smile on her face still present and still not quite full. “Is this what they meant?”
“Generally, yeah,” says Smoker. “I don’t follow orders.”
“To the letter?”
“Sometimes to the spirit.”
“Well,” says Tashigi, “Did you have a good reason?”
“The assigned route left a lot of open spaces where it’s easy for people to do shady shit. Places where I’ve caught them before. It’s not a very good one.”
Tashigi’s shoulders drop. “I’m sorry.”
Smoker nearly chokes on his cigars. This is a new one, being apologized to by a superior when he’d disobeyed orders and done the right thing--ideally, yeah, that would happen more, but what the fuck?
“The patrol routes haven't been updated in three years. I thought they were still adequate, but--there’s just no time, and that’s no excuse,” says Tashigi. “How are the others? Are they just as bad?”
“I don’t know,” says Smoker. “I haven’t done them all. Some are okay, though.”
“You’re promoted,” says Tashigi. “Master Chief Petty Officer. Fix the routes. I’ll get the paperwork in tomorrow, if I can find the forms.”
“Yes, Captain,” Smoker says, almost automatically (the Marines have drummed that much into him after all these years).
“You’re dismissed,” she says. “Just don’t crow about it to Mott. He meant well.”
Smoker snorts; Mott hadn’t meant well at all--but he doesn’t really want to spend more time with that guy in the first place, so it all works out.
It’s not hard to see why everyone acts like they’re in love with Tashigi. Well, maybe most of them do because she’s easy on the eyes and doesn’t reject them all completely and come down with a firm hand, or because of her skills with the sword, but she’s actually easy to talk to, and despite her own prejudices and misconception, she doesn’t treat any of her men like they’re incorrigible or deserving of suspicion. Smoker’s not used to that, especially when it comes to himself. And they argue--the more time they spend together, the more they argue, about Smoker’s impulsiveness and about Tashigi’s inability to delegate her work (and he wrestles the papers from her, because it’s not her job to do all of that and that’s why she has subordinates, and then she asks him if he’s insinuating that she can’t handle it, but no one could and he ought to do something even though he doesn’t exactly want to be filling out forms) and about how she drinks too much coffee and how he’s too harsh on the new recruits (he says he’s just welcoming them to the real world; she says that East Blue is hardly that).
But still, it’s enough to make anyone--well, in theory. It’s not like Smoker feels that way himself.
Smoker still hasn’t stopped smarting from his defeat at the hands of the Straw Hats (and their last-second luck and allies) when he and Tashigi run into them again at Alabasta, where everything--pirate-hunting Shichibukai Sir Crocodile, the nation in distress under a weak king--is a lie shattering around them. Once a pirate, always a pirate, that’s how Smoker sees it, except the Straw Hats save him. But pirates are pirates. He thinks of the words he’d thrown back at Tashigi, the ones she always says to him (the ones he already knows, has already been living by for years without articulating them)--find your own justice.
Her way of doing that is, apparently, protecting the Straw Hats, and Smoker’s a little bit mad and a little bit--something, he doesn’t know, but he gets the feeling that when Captain Hina comes to chew Tashigi out, she’s feeling the same way.
“Hina is--not surprised, but disappointed,” Hina says, crossing her arms over her chest.
“There were pirates on the other side, too,” Tashigi says, shorter but standing no less upright, no less heat in her gaze.
“You can’t afford a mark like that on your record, oh yes, you’ve just been moved out to the Grand Line, but Hina can’t always bail you out!”
“I can’t afford to not do the right thing,” says Tashigi. “If they punish me, that’s not on you.”
Hina sighs, turning to the side, and just then seems to notice Smoker for the first time. Smoker holds out the reports he’s collected from a few of their subordinates. Hina looks back to Tashigi, then back to Smoker, a look almost of amusement on her face.
“What,” Smoker snaps.
“Please, Smoker, try to be respectful.”
“Oh, nothing,” says Hina, but it’s clear that whatever it’s about is not nothing. “Hina was only thinking.”
They’ve long since left Marineford behind them. The ship has been quiet since they’d been nearly a kilometer out, but Smoker has to stop himself from getting up every few seconds just to be sure that nothing’s going on. The events of the past day have made him a little jumpy, and he shouldn’t be; everyone else is on edge, and he’s not the one on watch. He hears the click of the door to the main cabin, shoulders squaring, but it’s Tashigi, not an enemy. She looks as exhausted as Smoker feels, barely stopping herself from tripping three times, not even registering that she’s done it, not blushing. And she looks like she’s been crying, or is about to cry, or both.
The halyards creak above them. Tashigi sits down at the table across from Smoker. Her finger is bloody, just from a bitten-off hangnail, but for all the stumbles and scrapes she’s gotten herself into, for all the times she’s cried in front of him, as long as they’ve known each other, Smoker has never seen her less put-together.
“You okay?”
He hates it when people ask questions to which they know the answer, but he does it anyway because Tashigi doesn’t, and because maybe she’ll use it as permission to say she’s not. She nods, but sniffles, and again starts to cry.
“I’m sorry, Smoker--I--I didn’t know anyone who died very well, and I wasn’t in the middle of it, but I just...fuck, I can’t stop crying.”
She pushes her glasses up onto her forehead and wipes her eyes on her sleeve, already damp. Smoker fumbles in his pocket; he’s pretty sure he still has a commemorative handkerchief from some stupid event or other in there somewhere. He pulls it out; it’s cheaply made but better than a used sleeve, and yet handing it to her feels inadequate. He wants to hug her, pull her into his arms, tell her he knows it sucks and that he’s worried that things have been shaken up too much in the wrong way. Are they not friends? Would he not do that with a friend? He’s not so touchy-feely, but even if they are friends, she’s his commanding officer, and though neither of them is exactly the most proper of Marines, this would be crossing a boundary Smoker tries not to think about.
He can’t not notice it once he has. If he hadn’t, maybe Tashigi wouldn’t--maybe she wouldn’t anyway, but he’s not going to take advantage of her emotional state. And she probably would; things feel different, tentative, and they have for a while. (For how long? When they'd gotten promoted after Alabasta instead of Tashigi getting reprimanded and they'd both felt weird and guilty about it? Longer?) Tashigi wipes her eyes and blows her nose on the handkerchief; it’s not particularly effective. Smoker snorts, and Tashigi catches his eye and then her face breaks out into a smile. Her laugh is a little hollow, but it’s real.
“I shouldn’t burden you with all of this,” Tashigi says. “You’re my subordinate—”
“Just because you’re in command doesn’t mean you don’t get to have feelings,” Smoker says, and though he doesn’t regret it he sees what Tashigi’s thinking of.
When they’d arrived at Marineford and someone from another squad had called Smoker her dog and she’d nearly drawn her sword on him, her eyes glinting behind her glasses, and Smoker had thought for a moment that she’d cut him down. So had that guy. An impulse, perhaps, but rooted in feeling, maybe rooted in the same feeling that makes him want to reach those few centimeters across the table and clasp her smaller hand in his. She looks like she’s going to start crying again.
“Anyway,” Smoker says, practically biting the cigars in his mouth, “it’s always personal, even if you didn’t know them well.”
(It could have been any one of their men; that it wasn’t is just luck.)
She takes the handkerchief when she gets up. He doesn’t ask for it back.
Smoker shifts in his seat. He hates being back at the base, hates having a bunch of superior officers visiting and breathing down his and everyone’s necks to nitpick at what they’re doing. Even when they aren’t saying anything out loud, it’s clear when they disapprove or when they’re searching for something to disapprove of--well, to be fair, not all of them are like that. Still, with Tashigi in meetings with one or another officers, and Smoker stuck with all the paperwork (and all the critique of his handwriting, and all that those people somehow decide reflects on Tashigi, as if she’d been his primary school teacher) and all the supervision duties, it’s less than a fun time.
By the third day, he feels almost itchy, like he needs to be out at sea; he knows Tashigi must be feeling the same way. Even at Loguetown, her eyes were always trained on the ocean, like a moving target she just had to figure out how to slice straight through. And she’s dealing directly with the officers, too; though her reputation has improved since Smoker had first been assigned to her squadron, she’s still not their favorite person (and he can tell she’s steeling herself for the ordeal every morning when he comes out to the mess hall early to find the pot of coffee nearly empty).
After dinner, finally free, she approaches him. “Do you have some time to talk?”
It’s not the usual way she orders him into their office, or drops by and starts a conversation. This must be something bigger, but--what, exactly? Smoker is nearly at the ends of his cigars, but he feels like he shouldn’t light more when they’re done.
The sun hasn’t quite set behind the fortress, and they can hear the sea and the gulls even from here, and the shouts from evening training somewhere below. Tashigi adjusts her gloves, then removes the right one, folding it and tucking it into her shirt pocket.
“They’re promoting me again.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, right?” says Smoker.
“I’m being reassigned to G-5 out in the New World.”
Doesn’t she mean they’re both being reassigned? The cigars seem to turn to only ashes in Smoker’s mouth; he plucks them out and lets them burn between his fingers.
“They’re promoting you, too,” says Tashigi. “But only to Captain. I tried to pull for--anyway, the point is, and this isn’t--I’m standing in your way.”
“For what?”
“Promotions,” says Tashigi. “Anyone can see you’ve got all the skills of a good leader, and you’re a quick learner, and you’re stuck here behind me. I can’t promote you to my level and they won’t do it, so--the only thing, really, and I don’t want to lose you but I’ll have to manage, is to transfer you somewhere else.”
The words come out of her mouth in a rush, and Tashigi looks guilty and sad and not at all like she’s presenting an opportunity or whatever the hell she’s doing a terrible job of framing this as. Smoker drops the cigar butts and crushes them under his heel, grinding them into the stone. She wants to get rid of him--he can’t say that in bitterness; it’s obviously not true. She thinks she has to, even though she doesn’t really believe the bullshit she’s saying, and there’s no way he’d be where he is without her.
But promotions and transfers, for all the endless bureaucracy and reams of paperwork it entails, move too quickly here, and what if this is the last time he sees her and she’s just waiting to pull the trigger? She wouldn’t have done it already, but fuck, if they’re on opposite sides of the Grand Line they’ll never see each other again. He’ll never get another chance at this, and he’s not too chickenshit to do it.
He ducks in and kisses her, and he knows that if she was carrying anything she’d drop it. But she’s kissing him back, hard and rough and open-mouthed; even this late in the day she tastes so much of strong coffee and Smoker wants to inhale it all as if from a cigar, keep her in him. She fists her bare hand in his jacket, and then, seeming to realize just what it is she’s doing, pulls away.
“And that’s why, too,” Tashigi says, her voice almost at the level of a whisper. “I--we can’t.”
She doesn’t believe it. “Bullshit.”
Tashigi doesn’t even have it in her to glare at him.
“Look, I don’t mind following where you lead. I’d never see you if you were anywhere else, and even if you really don’t want this, I’d rather see you every day and be at whatever rank than work with a bunch of people who aren’t you--who gives a shit about rank, anyway?”
“A lot of people,” says Tashigi.
“Have I ever?”
“I just want you to get the recognition you deserve,” says Tashigi.
“Again, I don’t care about it,” says Smoker. “I’ll do my job no matter what arbitrary title I have--and just because you’re my superior doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you out.”
Tashigi swallows. “Smoker.”
Her voice doesn’t waver, though it nearly does, water in a precarious glass. She is still holding the front of his jacket, her thumb millimeters from his chest. He can feel her pulse, too fast, from that distance, and the warmth of her skin. He leans down slower this time, not stealing the kiss but letting her know exactly what’s coming and when. She could pull away. She doesn’t. She could close her eyes, but she doesn’t do that either until Smoker’s lips are pressed to hers, until her hand fists tighter in his jacket, her knuckles touching his chest, her other hand in his hair. He’s the one who breaks the kiss, nearly out of breath, and Tashigi’s eyes are sparkling the way they do in the heat of battle.
“Smoker,” she says again.
There’s no use pretending that they’re just two people and they don’t have all these damn trappings around them--and if they were just two people, would they ever have found each other at all? It’s too philosophical of a question for Smoker’s mood, for this moment.
“Yeah,” he says, less a question than a statement.
“Please don’t go back on your word.”
It’s a request, not an order, not given in that capacity. Though she could if she wanted to. Smoker nods; regardless of the context, he’d meant it and he means it.
“I won’t.”
She takes his hand, fingers threading through his, and peeks up at him almost shyly. This time it’s Smoker, for once, who nearly trips over his own (tied) shoelace, but Tashigi is far too kind to rib him about it.