One Piece: Lust Haki

The sky opened up at two in the afternoon and the training yard went from dry to underwater in about ten seconds.

I was halfway through a conditioning circuit when the first drops hit, fat and warm and tropical, and by the time I'd registered the shift from drizzle to downpour my uniform was soaked through and the sand under my boots had turned to mud and the yard was chaos. Recruits scattered. An instructor was shouting about orderly retreat, which nobody was listening to because orderly retreat didn't apply to rain that fell like someone had upended the ocean. A canvas tarp that had been loosely tied over the weapons cache caught the wind and a stack of practice swords went clattering across the mud and nobody went after them.

I ran for the covered walkway between the training wing and the mess hall. The roof was corrugated metal and the rain on it was so loud it killed conversation. Water poured off the edges in sheets and pooled on the paving stones below and the walkway was already crowded with recruits pressed against the back wall trying to stay dry and mostly failing.

I found a spot near the far end where the crowd thinned out and the overhang was wider and the rain was a wall of gray a foot from my face. My uniform was plastered to my skin. My hair was flat against my forehead. I pushed it back and water ran down my arm.

Tashigi was already there.

She'd been practicing blade forms at the far edge of the yard when the rain hit, and she was soaked. Completely, thoroughly soaked. Her dark blue hair was pasted to her neck and her glasses had water droplets on the lenses and she was holding Shigure in its sheath across her arms like she was protecting it from the rain. She probably was. Tashigi would get herself soaked before she'd let water touch a Meito blade.

Her shirt was white. Her shirt was soaked. Her shirt was transparent.

The lines of her bra were visible through the fabric and the shape of her waist and the skin beneath the wet cotton and she hadn't noticed because she was busy wiping her glasses on the inside of her sleeve, which wasn't dry anymore, and her posture was straight and her chin was up and she was looking at the rain through smeared lenses.

I took off my jacket. Crossed the three feet between us. Put it over her shoulders.

She looked up at me. The glasses were still smeared. "Vance-san, you'll be-"

"You're cold."

She clutched the jacket around herself with one hand, Shigure still in the other, and looked down and then her eyes went wide and then her ears went red and then her cheeks went red and the flush spread down her neck and into the collar of the jacket she was now holding shut with both hands while Shigure balanced in the crook of her elbow.

"Oh."

I was already looking at the rain.

She sat down against the wall with my jacket pulled tight and Shigure across her knees and her ears were still red. The rain hammered the metal roof. Neither of us said anything for a while.

I sat down next to her. The stone was cold and wet. My shirt was plastered to my chest and the wind blowing through the rain curtain was cool on my arms. A woman from the maintenance crew walked past carrying a crate of tools, unbothered by the rain, her boots splashing through the puddles.

"Thank you," Tashigi said. Her voice was small.

"It's a jacket."

"I know what it is, Vance-san." She adjusted her glasses. The lenses were still wet. She wiped them again, gave up, and took them off and held them in her lap. Without the glasses her eyes were larger and she was squinting slightly at the rain because everything past six feet was probably a blur.

We sat. The rain continued. The corrugated metal sang under it and the puddles grew and a leaf blew in from somewhere and landed on the paving stone between my boot and her knee and sat there turning slowly in the runoff.

"My instructor before the Academy," Tashigi said. "Warrant Officer Sato. She served under a woman who'd been in Bell-mère's unit before Bell-mère retired."

My hands went still on my knees.

"Bell-mère retired from the Marines years ago. Went to a village in the Conomi Islands. She had two daughters, adopted, from before she left the service." Tashigi was looking at the rain. Without her glasses everything past arm's reach was blur and she was squinting at the storm and talking. "Sato said she was the loudest woman in the barracks. Laughed at everything. Got in trouble constantly. The officers couldn't stand her and the enlisted loved her."

Bell-mère. Conomi Islands. Arlong Park. Cocoyashi Village.

"She had a tangerine grove. Sato said the tangerines were famous in the village. Bell-mère's girls would sell them at the market." Tashigi pulled the jacket tighter. "The older one was called Nojiko. Blue hair. Sato said you could see her from across the village."

"And the younger one?"

"Nami." Tashigi said the name like it was just a name. "I think she was the clever one. Sato said Bell-mère used to say she'd drawn a map of the whole island by the time she was eight."

Sixteen years old. Drawing maps for Arlong right now, tonight, while I sat under a metal roof listening to the rain. The deal that was supposed to free her was a lie. Nezumi would steal the money before it ever reached the threshold.

"Are they still there?" I asked. "At the village."

"I think so. Sato lost touch after Bell-mère left the service. You know how it is. People retire, people move, the connections thin out." She adjusted the jacket on her shoulders. "I always liked that story, though. A Marine who gave it up for tangerines and two girls. Most people go the other direction."

I made myself breathe. The leaf between my boot and her knee had stopped turning and was stuck against a gap in the paving stones. The Marines knew about Cocoyashi because Bell-mère had served and the connections persisted through people like Sato and Tashigi. They just didn't know about Arlong because Nezumi had buried the reports.

"Vance-san?"

"Yeah."

"You went quiet."

"Thinking about tangerines."

She looked at me. Without the glasses, her eyes were searching and soft and she was close enough that the blur didn't matter. She pulled the jacket tighter and leaned her shoulder into my arm. The fifteen-degree lean.

Isuka appeared ten minutes later. Dry. She'd gotten inside when the first drops fell.

She looked at the two of us. Me in my wet shirt. Tashigi in my jacket. Tashigi's shoulder against my arm.

She sat down on my other side. Without comment. She sat on the cold stone and crossed her legs and the rapier was across her lap and her vermilion hair was dry and she looked at the rain.

"Your jacket is too big for her," Isuka said.

"She's cold."

"I didn't say return it."

The three of us sat against the wall. The rain kept coming. The walkway was empty except for us and two recruits at the far end who'd fallen asleep against each other. The corrugated metal roof rattled and the puddles spread and the gray curtain of water made the training yard invisible.

Tashigi's shoulder was against my right arm. Isuka's knee was near my left. Shigure across Tashigi's lap and the rapier across Isuka's and the rain on the metal roof sounded like the inside of a drum.

"Cards," Isuka said.

The barracks common room was warm and loud and smelled like wet uniforms drying on every available surface.

Recruits who'd given up on the afternoon were scattered across the room. A group near the window was playing dice. Two women were reading on the same bunk, their feet tangled together. A recruit I vaguely recognized was doing pull-ups on the door frame to the latrine, which was both impressive and blocking the only path to the toilet.

Isuka produced a deck of cards from the inside pocket of her uniform jacket, which she'd kept dry because of course she had, and we found a table near the back corner. Tashigi, me, Isuka, and three recruits who'd been sitting at the table already and didn't leave when we sat down. One was Ren, from Gion's track. The other two I'd seen in drills but never spoken to.

"Stakes?" Isuka asked.

"Practice rounds," Tashigi said.

"Money," Isuka said.

"I don't-"

"Money." She was already dealing. The cards hit the wood with the precise rhythm of someone who'd been doing this since childhood. "Fifty berries minimum. Fold or call, no table talk."

I lost the first hand on a bluff I should have seen coming from a recruit whose tells were so obvious that Tashigi, squinting without her glasses, spotted them before I did. I lost the second hand because Isuka had a straight and I had a pair. I lost the third hand because I was thinking about Conomi Islands and a sixteen-year-old girl drawing maps and I played a card that made Ren wince.

"You're bad at this," Isuka said, stacking my coins.

"I'm aware."

"No, I mean you're bad in a way that suggests you've never been good at this." She dealt again. "Most people are bad because they bluff too much or not enough. You're bad because you forget to look at your own cards."

Tashigi won a hand. Her ears went pink with surprise and she collected the pot with careful precision and stacked the coins by denomination and Isuka watched her do it and looked at me and her mouth twitched.

The rain continued outside. The pull-up recruit was on his forty-third rep. The two women reading hadn't moved. I lost another hand and the pile in front of Isuka grew and Tashigi was ahead by a small margin and was refusing to acknowledge that she was enjoying it.

"Last hand," Isuka said. She looked at me over her cards. The vermilion hair was dry and neat and the bandage on her cheek was straight and her brown eyes had the same focus they had in the sparring ring. "All in?"

"You have all my money."

"Then you should probably win this one."

I didn't. She had a flush. I had optimism.

Isuka swept the remaining coins into her hand, counted them, and tucked them into the same pocket that had kept the cards dry. She stood. The rapier went back to her hip.

"Same time tomorrow. The sparring, not the robbery. You can't afford another round."

She left. Tashigi excused herself to go clean Shigure before the rain residue set into the metal. Ren and the other two drifted away. The common room was emptying as evening came.

The rain hadn't stopped. The pull-up recruit had finally gotten down and was rubbing his shoulders. Wet uniforms were steaming on the rack near the heater.

I went to my bunk. The rain was still falling and the barracks roof was quieter than the metal walkway and I lay there staring at the underside of the bunk above me and thinking about a tangerine grove on an island I could find on a chart.

Two years before Luffy set sail. Two years was a long time to draw maps for the man who murdered your mother.

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