#baltigo

She can’t have this happening. Not now. They’ve been after this criminal for months, and she’s had enough encounters with Straw-Hat Luffy’s crew to know that nothing ever goes to plan if any of them are in the near vicinity.

No, she has to do something, Tashigi decides, and with a breath, shoves all her contingency plans and their backups down the drain, along with her better judgement.

Then with her gaze fixed on the pirate seated across the crowded room, knocks back the drink and slides off the barstool.

The dress she’s wearing is a bit constricting, snug around her hips and chest, but the slit up the thigh leaves her legs free; a small mercy where she’s otherwise left with precious few of those. She’d refused the heels that came with it, although Smoker hadn’t exactly been hard to convince (“you’d trip and impale yourself on something,” he’d told her, and with a snort, added, “probably on the damn shoes”), and she’s glad of it now with the drink burning in her stomach and her head distractingly dizzy, as it leaves her steps as certain as her partially liquid conviction.

Shigure’s weight is missing, a phantom limb that begs at itching fingers, and she hates how it leaves her feeling – exposed, and even more than the obscenely cut dress that insists on clinging everywhere, but she shoves it down as she makes to cut across the crowded tavern. And she’s not unarmed; there’s a knife strapped to her thigh, another tucked into her brassiere, and a needle-thin blade slid carefully into the lovely, decorative comb holding her hair back. She came prepared.

Why, then, did he have to be there?

Having been served his drink, the same cheap ale running through the whole tavern’s veins, Roronoa catches her approach before she’s even reached the table he’s claimed for himself, and there’s a second where Tashigi realises he doesn’t recognise her – a fleeting glance spared her way, the barest sweep of his good eye across her form, before he’s deemed her uninteresting. But then –

Something makes him pause, the slightest dip of his brows preceding realisation, before his head swivels back sharply, and his eye fixes on hers – sees her face, and likely the frantic, near-murderous expression contorting it.

“Glasses,” he blurts, with obvious surprise, and Tashigi nearly yells.

Curbing the impulse with some effort, “What are you doing here?” she hisses instead, careful to keep her voice down, and she’s plastered a smile on her face now – one she hopes looks suitable for a woman who’s selected a man to fawn over. Regrettably, she doesn’t really know what that actually looks like, but hopes she’s not completely off the mark.

The fact that it feels like a grimace is probably an indication that she is. And with quite a bit.

Roronoa just stares, as though he can’t decide what to make of any of it, but then, “The hell are you doing?” he counters, before his eye travels downwards, taking in what she’s wearing, the dark, soft-clinging fabric, and it takes physical effort not to rear back at the way his brows climb up at the sight.

She knows the dress is revealing. That was the whole point. She’s not herself tonight – can’t be that, marine and Captain and swordswoman, because a woman like that would attract stares. The wrong sort, at least. The woman she is tonight needs to attract the right kind of attention. She needs to blend in, to slip under skeptical gazes with a pretty, unassuming smile. She needs to hide herself in plain sight.

And the fact that he’s looking at her like she isn’t that woman isn’t exactly helping her sell the part – as though observing her, he can spot all the things Tashigi knows are wrong, too, like the softer slant of her shoulders, because ladies don’t square them like they’re about to go into battle. She catches the way his gaze lingers on her elbows, her hands; knows, suddenly, that he’s looking for all the nicks and scars she usually has on display, softened now with rouge and other cosmetics, not the practical band-aids that usually map her skin. She’s never been afraid of showing her scars, clumsy as some of them are, but the woman she is tonight would be.

He’s making this unnecessarily difficult.

She leans forward, the flat of her palm pressed to his chest, a sensual approach that feels like the single most awkward thing she’s ever attempted in her entire life, and catching the sudden jump of his brows towards his hairline, Tashigi thinks he might have shoved her away if he hadn’t been caught so off guard by the gesture.

Sweet-but-painfully-forced smile in place, “I’m undercover,” she hisses into his ear. The bared skin under her hand is distractingly warm. “And you are compromising my job.”

Drawing back a bit to look at him, there’s a moment where he just stares right back, before the surprise eases off his face. But where she expects amusement – or something worse, something that would imply that he’s about to wilfully make things twice as difficult as he already has – Roronoa shifts his gaze upwards, to her hair, as though looking for something.

“Where did you stash your glasses?” he asks, as though that is somehow remotely important, and Tashigi suffocates a shout with her teeth.

“I’m wearing contact lenses,” she tells him, voice still too low to be heard above the din, but an irritated huff accompanying it. She has the sudden urge to push them up her nose, a nervous habit that itches in her fingers like her missing blade, and curls them into her palm to keep them still. “I don’t need them.”

She doesn’t tell him that she’s far too conspicuous with her glasses, too easily recognised even in these parts, but then she doesn’t have to – that infuriating nickname he has for her speaks for itself.

Roronoa looks at her for a long moment, something behind his expression that she can’t place, and Tashigi doesn’t know what she expects, because she’s given up expecting anything out of tonight, but then, “I prefer you with glasses,” he tells her.

And even with no expectations whatsoever, it’s easily the last thing she’d thought might come out of his mouth, and for a moment she’s so stunned she forgets that she’s freaking out – and that she’s trying very hard not to.

“Hey – you,” a voice says then, and Tashigi starts so violently she has to catch herself on his shoulder, and spinning around – oh, there’s her target, having arrived sometime while she’d been busy trying to salvage the mission coming apart at the seams, and the frustrated shout building in her throat threatens to escape with a hysterical laugh.

He’s a small mountain of exaggerated muscles – a living billboard-sign of overcompensation, and that’s even before factoring in the illegal trafficking of big, military grade weaponry. A stern mouth holding a permanent sneer and a three-day beard climbing up his cheeks, he’s not an unattractive man, but the hard, hungry glint behind his eyes twists it into something that threatens to turn her stomach.

They’d taken to calling him Barrel, on account of having no real name or identity, beyond the vague mutterings of a moniker that Smoker had downright refused to use, on account of it being too on-the-nose for their struggles to pin any actual crimes on him (“The Smoking Gun? Should toss his ass in Impel Down for that kind of cheek alone, what a fucking annoyance”).

He gives her a once-over, and Tashigi might have dismissed it as appreciative, except something like recognition has sparked behind his eyes now.

“I’ve seen your face before,” he says, brows furrowing, and – shit, Tashigi thinks. She’d been careful. All those months spent scoping out his operation, this is the first time she’s put herself in the field, and she’d considered the possibility that he might have heard about her, but had hoped the disguise would be convincing enough – or at the very least, that it would have distracted him enough from looking at her too closely.

So much for that.

A warm hand curves around her hip then, gripping it – a half-possessive touch that might have been fully that, if it hadn’t been for the entirely casual way he goes about doing it. As though he’s done it a thousand times, not claiming anything, simply fitting himself against her like he’s never been anywhere else, and she’s too startled to even react when Roronoa says, wholly deadpan, “You know my wife?”

The words don’t even register at first, before they do, and for a whole, ridiculously long second Tashigi doesn’t even breathe.

She finds her surprise echoed on the face of the man in front of them. “Wife?” Barrel asks, glancing between them.

Roronoa only lifts a brow. The hand on her hip curves further around the crest, his fingers splayed, bunching in the fabric of her dress. “Just married,” he says, sounding almost bored. “Why? You don’t believe me?”

He’s recognised her, Tashigi knows he has, but she catches the slide of his gaze to the hand hanging slack at her side.

Then, lifting his eyes back up, “I don’t see a wedding ring,” Barrel says.

She’s surprised when Roronoa just shrugs. “She didn’t want a ring,” he says, with so much ease he might as well have rehearsed it. The corner of his mouth lifts, a smile that looks suddenly wry as he catches her gaze; holds it. “I gave her a sword.”

Dubious, the man looks at Tashigi, and it’s not suspicion she finds on his face now, but familiar ridicule. “The hell would a woman want a sword for?” he asks.

She presses her lips together, and there’s a familiar rebuttal on its way off her tongue, but she suffocates it with everything she’s got. Because she’s playing a part – the part of that delicate, slit-up-the-thigh kind of woman who doesn’t challenge men to duels for her own honour. That woman has no callouses on her hands, or scars to decorate her skin, and only likes swords in the strictly suggestive sense; the kind that would make a man like that smile appreciatively, and write her off as no more dangerous than the promise found in a sweetly sensual smile.

She almost expects Roronoa to say something along those lines, when the hand on her hip tightens its grip, as though in agreement to her incensed reaction, but before she can even think about what that means, “She’s a collector,” he says, and her breath leaves her.

It’s not said derisively, or mockingly, the way she might have expected, a joke of the ‘oh, I just humoured my little lady’ sort. But no, it’s just…matter-of-fact. And it’s not a lie, and even if it’s not the whole truth, it catches her so off guard she forgets her anger.

The expression on Barrel’s face still hints at doubt, but she catches the drop of his eyes, glancing off the three swords on Roronoa’s hip, and – “Wait. You’re that pirate hunter guy,” he says then, and Tashigi’s stomach plummets. “Roronoa Zoro.”

Roronoa doesn’t even flinch, or remove his hand from her hip. “Name rings a bell,” he muses, but the slight shift of his head is deliberate; the soft clink of the three earrings seeming too soft for the general din of the tavern, but Tashigi sees how it draws her target’s gaze.

When he looks at her next the doubt is gone, replaced with something like amusement. “I thought I’d seen your face in the navy records,” he tells her, “but if you’re married to a pirate, I guess you can’t be her.”

Tashigi thinks she might have gaped, if she wasn’t so busy scrambling to catch up with everything that’s happening, leaving her expression curiously blank instead. And she isn’t given the chance to do or say anything as her target turns on his heel, moving back to the bar and hollering for the barkeep to pour him a drink.

She doesn’t breathe for several seconds.

Then, the hand that’s still on her hip registers, and it takes every ounce of restraint within her not to throw herself out of the casual half-embrace, if only to stop thinking about the warmth creeping through the thin fabric of her dress. But if she does, she might as well drop her entire disguise, and her mission with it.

Swallowing thickly, “Wife?” Tashigi asks, the furious whisper practically shivering with disbelief.

Roronoa just looks at her. “You’re welcome.”

There’s that hysterical laugh again, inching up her chest, and she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

She’s never in her life missed her sword so much.

A deep breath – for control or for something else, Tashigi doesn’t know – and with every muscle in her body strung tight, she eases herself out from under his hand.

She tries very hard not to think about the way it slides down her hip, skirting her thigh before he curls his fingers around the mug of ale on the table, wholly at ease with the situation.

The words burn at the back of her throat, and she doesn’t want to speak them, but – damn it, she has to. If it hadn’t been for him, she might have outed herself as a navy officer, and they would have lost their best chance of catching him. He’d obviously been keeping an eye on who might potentially be trying to root out his operation, and it was a small miracle he’d chosen to take Roronoa’s words for what they were. Tashigi doubts he would have been so quick to take her word for it.

The realisation is too old and too familiar to raise her hackles, and instead she only feels tired.

But she owes him her gratitude, and she’s always paid her debts, and so, “Thank you,” Tashigi says stiffly. She straightens, then lets her shoulders go slack, her pose more submissive. It takes effort to remind herself to be soft.

Hands too restless to stay still, she reaches to tuck some of her hair behind her ear, fingertips brushing against the comb, and the blade hidden there. It’s not Shigure, but it succeeds in stilling her fretting, if only enough to rein in some of her control.

She thinks she might have expected some cheek for that admission, but Roronoa just looks at her – then at her target, now seated at the other end of the tavern. “Big job?” he asks instead.

Tashigi pushes a breath past her lips, and is surprised when her first impulse isn’t to snap at him to mind his own business.

“A crucial one,” she says, and doesn’t know why she’s discussing her mission with a pirate – and with this pirate, no less.

Roronoa is quiet a moment, before meeting her eyes. “I’ll help you,” he declares, and Tashigi balks.

“Help?”

He shrugs, as though he’d just offered to foot her bar tab, although even that seems a more likely prospect than this. “You want to catch this guy, right?” he asks. Then, his mouth curving in a slow grin, “And isn’t this what married couples do? Team up?”

She’s gaping at him now. “Mar–” She clamps her mouth shut when she almost lets slip a choked shriek, and in a fierce hiss, “We are not married!”

“Big guy over there thinks so,” Roronoa says, nodding towards her target, now halfway into his second glass in as many minutes.

“Only because you told him!” Tashigi whispers.

“He would have recognised you if I hadn’t,” Roronoa says, lifting his mug to his lips. “And he probably wouldn’t have caught you if you hadn’t been drawing so much attention to yourself when he walked in.”

“The only reason I was even talking to you is because you’re not supposed to be here!” she snaps.

Her anger has precious little effect. “I just came to drink. You’re the one who came over to my table,” he points out. Then with another sweeping glance at her getup, although there’s little of appreciation in it, just a wry sort of humour, “I probably wouldn’t have recognised you if you hadn’t.”

She thinks, calmly, that she wants to scream. She’d come prepared – had anticipated so many ways this could have gone wrong, and how to turn it around to her advantage, but she has no idea how to work around this. She hadn’t counted on a fake husband.

As though having read her mind, “So do you want my help or not?” Roronoa asks, and with a grin that tells her he’s well aware of how much trouble this is giving her.

Tashigi stares at him for a full second. Then, and with all the conviction she can muster without actually shouting the words at the top of her lungs, leans forward, and hisses,

“Absolutely not.”

—

She should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

“So what’s this guy’s deal, anyway?” Roronoa asks, voice drifting down to where she’s crouched in the alley, her gaze fixed intently on the street ahead. Her dress is riding up her thighs, impractical thing that it is, but she doesn’t have a mind to spare her partial indecency. Not when she’s so close, her own operation salvaged by some stroke of luck – good or bad, it doesn’t matter which if she can get what she needs from this, Tashigi thinks, although she suspects it might be the last one.

Pushing to her feet, she might have snapped that his talking isn’t exactly helping her attempt at covert eavesdropping, except he’s keeping his voice low, and hasn’t made a sound, seeming to have eased into the shadows at her back, as though comfortable in the dark. The black bandanna wrapped around his hair keeps even that from standing out, and it keeps stealing her attention whenever he enters her periphery. It is, in all fairness, a little distracting.

Of course, she doesn’t tell him that.

“Weapon trafficking,” Tashigi says at length, turning her eyes back to the street. Her target is standing some ways off, idling at the dark mouth of another side-street. He’d just finished relieving himself, and there’d been a second where she’d thought she’d followed him outside for nothing other than to see him take a piss, but when he’d lingered she knew she’d made the right call.

There’s a deal waiting to be brokered, and if she can just catch him in the act, they’ll have him, after months of struggling to pin so much as a tax evasion on him. They can finally root out this buried hornet’s nest, and leave the world a little better for it.

“Why don’t you just arrest him and be done with it?” Roronoa asks then, and Tashigi’s hands clench together in response.

It rankles to admit it, she realises. “Smoker-san…” she begins, before letting the words loose with a sigh, “Smoker-san suspects he might have connections. Within the navy. That it’s why we can’t find anything on him.”

She expects him to say something to that – some gleeful remark that her precious Government is as corrupt as the criminals she’s trying to catch, but Roronoa just makes a low sound of understanding.

“So you need hard evidence,” he says simply, and – Tashigi waits for the jibe, but it doesn’t come, and when she glances up at him it’s to find him watching her target.

She doesn’t know what to make of that. She doesn’t know what to make of anything about tonight.

Turning her attention back to the task at hand, she slips out the recording Den Den Mushi from where she’s kept it tucked away, all the while studiously ignoring the fact that she can feel his gaze on her. She half expects him to make a comment on where she’d kept the snail hidden, but Roronoa says nothing to that, either.

They wait in silence. An hour past midnight, the dark is both a hindrance and a comfort, keeping them hidden from sight but making it harder to peer through the shadows.

She knows she probably should have reported back by now, especially when things had nearly gone south earlier, but she’s handling it. Smoker will give her this one. And she’s so close – so close to finally catching this guy, if she could just get the evidence she needs…

The thought of her partner prompts another, and, “Where is the rest of your crew?” she asks then, before she can stop herself.

Roronoa shrugs. “I lost track of them a couple of hours ago. They’re probably fine.”

She blinks up at him. “Probably?”

The look he gives her is dry. “No one’s sounded any alarms yet,” is all he says. Then, and with a surety that’s so calmly uttered it sounds more like a statement of fact than a personal belief, “They’ll find me if they need me.”

She’s gaping now, she realises, before she blurts, “How have you people not been caught yet?”

She gets an arched brow for that, a flicker of humour in that lone, dark eye. “You tell me,” he says, mouth quirking. “You’re the navy officer. Aren’t you supposed to be slapping me in handcuffs?”

“I’m a little busy right now!” Tashigi whispers, before adding pertly, nose lifted, “I’ll arrest you when I’ve caught this criminal.”

“Hey,” Roronoa says, poking her shoulder lightly, and Tashigi starts at the contact. “That’s no way to show someone gratitude for offering you assistance,” he adds, and she very nearly shrieks.

“I didn’t ask for your help!”

“But you don’t mind that I’m here,” he says, and her mouth snaps shut, cutting off her retort.

It’s another one of those statements of fact, she realises – nothing grand about their speaking, no flourish to suggest gratification at being right, just a calm, unshakable certainty. I prefer you with glasses, and they’ll find me if they need me.

You don’t mind that I’m here, and there’s nothing gleeful about it; it’s just the truth.

She hates him a little, for being right.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Tashigi whispers under her breath, “How did I get myself into this?”

“Considering a divorce, wife? I’m hurt.”

She glares up at him. “Is this amusing to you?”

She gets another shrug, and the corner of his mouth crooking. “A little bit, yeah. I was bored earlier. I’m not bored anymore.”

“I’m so glad I could provide entertainment,” she hisses, and is about to follow up with a sharp reminder that she’s trying to do her job when a soft oath catches on her tongue instead.

“That,” Roronoa says, no amusement in his voice now and one-eyed gaze fixed on the street ahead of them, his brows knitting beneath the bandanna, “looks like trouble.”

She’s regrettably inclined to agree. A whole group is gathering – she counts fifteen in total, all heavily armed, seemingly with the weapons they’ve met to barter. Maybe it’s just a demonstration of strength, or an assurance of product quality. Either way, they’re vastly outnumbered.

Tashigi swallows. “Just a little.”

“Where the hell is your backup?” Roronoa asks then, sounding curiously irritated. “If I wasn’t here, who’d be covering you?”

She waves him off, eyes still on the group. “They’re on standby,” Tashigi says. “Smoker-san attracts too much attention. But I would have been fine on my own.”

“You don’t even have your sword on you,” he points out.

She lets out a breath. She feels Shigure’s absence keenly, but, “I would have managed,” she tells him firmly, and with a glance up at him, her gaze hard and cutting through the dark. “I manage.”

There’s a look on his face that she can’t place – the pull of his brows suggests familiarity, the press of his mouth displeasure; as though he’s heard the words before, maybe from someone else, but he says nothing, not to disagree with her or to give her any kind of indication as to why her rebuttal would rub him the wrong way.

He says nothing, and she turns away from him, holding out the Den Den Mushi. They’re standing close enough that if she concentrates, she can pick out what they’re saying, although they’re keeping their voices down, same as them. But the snail will pick it up, she knows – or hopes, but it’s the best she can do from this distance. Moving any closer is out of the question, and this is the only vantage point that allows her to observe what they’re doing.

They stand there for several minutes, Tashigi holding the snail, while simultaneously trying to listen in on the conversation taking place further down the street, and – there’s that thought again, creeping back from where she’d shoved it away earlier; the fact that she really doesn’t mind that he’s there. He remains a steady presence at her back, calm and unmoving; she can feel the warmth seeping off him, and there’s a strange comfort in it that Tashigi doesn’t want to think about too closely.

She’s used to having a partner at her back is all. The fact that it’s him doesn’t have anything to do with it.

So she tells herself, anyway.

She’s kept from considering the thought any further when the Den Den Mushi in her hand gives a strangled little chirrup, the kind that signals a snag in the recording, and the sound is so piercingly loud in the quiet, her heart stutters in her chest.

Then – “Shit,” Roronoa says, the exclamation soft and hard all at once, and Tashigi glances up just in time to see that the group they’re observing are looking right at where they’re hiding.

She hasn’t even had the chance to consider their options before there’s a hand clamping down on her shoulder, dragging her away from the alley mouth, and the startled sound on its way off her tongue doesn’t make it far before she finds her back shoved against the wall, and his mouth covering hers.

There’s less than a full second between the two sensations, the brick pushed up against her shoulders and the hard slant of his mouth over hers, before his hand is pushing into her hair and his tongue against hers, and for a moment Tashigi is so surprised she doesn’t even react.

Roronoa kisses her, and it’s less than five heartbeats of her life, although it feels like ten times that, and like time doesn’t move at all, even as she feels the beats, loud in her ears, filling her chest – and they’re his, she’s fairly certain, because her own heart has stopped dead, and there’s a vague inkling somewhere at the back of her mind that she should push him off her; that it’s what she should do.

“What–” she squeaks, and finds his hand fisting in her hair, slipping under the loose half-bun where she’s tucked the pretty comb. And she thinks she means to protest further but it dies on her tongue, dies with the slight flutter of her eyes and the sigh that shudders out, soft, and she isn’t that, has never been that and yet.

He’s warm, shockingly so in the chilly air and with her thin dress the only fabric between her chest and his, and she feels everything – the tight coil of the muscles in his forearm where it’s pressed against her back, and the hard planes of his chest. The hard-calloused fingers cradled around the back of her head tilts it, deepening the kiss until it sinks into her bones, into her whole body, and with such insistence that instead of pushing him away she sinks back against the wall instead.

There’s a light dusting of stubble on his jaw, rough like the kiss, like the fingers in her hair and the brick wall against her back, but then the palm of his other hand presses flat between her shoulder blades and the wall, keeping it from scuffing her skin. And the hands she hasn’t known what to do with all night finally finds purchase in the fabric of his coat, gripping so hard the slight tug pulls him closer, his large frame pushing her further against the wall, and the gasp that stutters out of her against his mouth has the hand in her hair jerking, as though from a shock.

“The hell?” a voice asks, the surprised utterance cleaving through the night and her mind both, and Roronoa releases her – breaks the kiss, like he’s surprised at having been caught.

Tashigi has no breath to catch; can’t even remember how, slumped slightly against the wall, but even having broken the kiss, he’s still pressed up against her, still supporting her weight. She has the half-delirious thought that if he hadn’t been, she would have lost her footing.

The hand in her hair leaves it – sword-calloused fingers snagging in the locks, before she feels the press of his knuckles between her shoulder blades, as though meant to jar her out of her shock, and she might have gathered herself, except she can’t seem to focus past the fact that he’s still standing so close, and she’s feeling all of him–

“You two again?” another voice asks then, Barrel’s voice this time, and that does it – drags her mercilessly out of her thoroughly-kissed daze into the cold night, and the group looking at them from the mouth of the alley.

Roronoa still hasn’t stepped away from her, and there’s nothing casually intimate about the half-embrace this time – hip to hip with less than a finger’s width of space between their bodies and the weight of a clenched fist pressed against the small of her back.

“Did we put up a sign that said we wanted an audience?” he asks, voice entirely level but carrying a hard note, suggesting irritation, even as she couldn’t have hoped to find her own, let alone summoned the mind to make a show of pretending to have been caught being indecent in public.

She’s not pretending, Tashigi realises, and would have laughed if she’d had any of her faculties with her. As it is, it takes all her focus just to locate her breath.

The clenched fist digging into her lower back that had been previously buried in her hair slides further down, around her hip to seek the hand hanging slack there, his fingers brushing her wrist where her pulse throbs a still-startled pace, and Tashigi feels the edges of the comb pressed against her palm, the blade slipped free of its confines.

She doesn’t know what’s more surprising – the fact that he’d managed to slip it out of her hair without her notice, or that she’s not even surprised that he’d realised it wasn’t just there for decoration.

But it’s what finally succeeds in dragging her fully out of her stupor, and despite the level weight of his voice and the casual remark, she feels the suggestion in the offer. Fingers gripping the blade, she steels herself, ready to launch into a defensive stance –

But it’s not suspicion that settles over Barrel’s features, just a wry sort of understanding, and, “Goddamn newlyweds,” he snorts, with a shake of his head, before he makes to turn away with an offhand comment about there being better places for a good fuck, earning a round of chuckles from the group, and Tashigi is too stunned to even make note of the appreciative glances offered her way.

Their business appears concluded, and they take their leave, disappearing back into dark corners until it’s just the two of them left in the alley.

The coast clear, Roronoa finally steps away, and Tashigi starts so violently she nearly collides with him, realising with a furious blush that they’d been standing in a rather compromising position for several minutes.

The sudden absence of his warmth hits her before the cold does, and, “Sorry,” he says then, no trace of amusement on his face now, and for a second all she can do is stare at him, too shocked even for outrage.

But even when she looks for it, that familiar anger that’s always at her fingertips whenever they meet, she can’t seem to grasp it. Instead it slips through her fingers, and she’s – reeling, like she can’t catch herself, can’t find purchase anywhere, and it’s at once terrifying and exhilarating and absolutely mortifying and there’s part of her that still wants to scream a little bit.

“Here,” Roronoa says then, rooting something out of his coat, and – it’s the Den Den Mushi, Tashigi realises. She hadn’t even noticed him taking it from her hands to hide it away.

She stares at it for several seconds, sitting in the palm of his hand. Then, reaching out, she curls her fingers around it, the gesture feeling suddenly awkward, and she’s got the snail in one hand and the comb with the hidden blade in the other, and doesn’t know what to do with either.

The look on his face suggests that he’s about to say something, and panic shoves up her throat, along with the words, and she makes no attempt to stop them this time.

“I – I have to go,” she blurts, and sees his brows furrowing, the gesture tugging at the scar over his eye, and before he has the chance to say anything at all she’s shoved away from the wall and down the street, half-stumbling and with her heart threatening to break through her ribcage. Roronoa doesn’t follow.

She doesn’t know what to do with the fact that she’s surprised that he doesn’t.

Although the worst realisation by far is the fact that she’s not surprised there’s a part of her that considers turning back.

—

“The hell took you so long?” Smoker asks when she wanders into the safe house later, still a little dazed, and cold to the marrow. “The kid I sent to check on you reported that you finished up over an hour ago.”

She stops just beyond the door. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders, the comb still gripped between stiff fingers. She catches the direction of his gaze – sees from the slight furrow to his brow that he knows things haven’t gone the way she’d planned.

Tashigi doesn’t answer at once, because answering would require telling him she’d spent an hour walking around aimlessly just to collect herself, and hopes he won’t push her for an explanation. He respects her privacy enough to allow her whatever secrets she wants, and she doesn’t have any injuries that would suggest anything more than a slight scuffle taking place. Not even an accidental nick from her own knives.

True to form, Smoker doesn’t pry. “Did you get the recording?” he asks instead. There’s something strange in his expression that she can’t quite put her finger on, but she chalks it up to her current state, and makes to hand over the Den Den Mushi, but – fingers tucked around the snail, a thought strikes her suddenly, making her pause.

He could have attacked them, in that alley. Having seen him fight, Tashigi doubts they would have proved much of a challenge for Roronoa. He could have easily decided to draw his blades and taken them all out, and outed them both in the process. And she knows how operations like that work – at the first sign of smoke, the rats would scatter to far corners, expecting a fire. Her target would have had contingency plans, too. A second-in-command ready to wrap up any business and disappear into the shadows if their boss didn’t return on time, or at all.

Of course, his plans hadn’t accounted for Roronoa Zoro any more than Tashigi’s had.

She doesn’t know what to make of it – the decision to maintain their charade, salvaging her mission. She has her evidence, her target none the wiser. He’d helped her. He’d had no reason to assist her in the first place, and somehow, Tashigi doubts even Roronoa could have successfully written this off as a simple case of alleviated boredom.

Unbidden, the memory finds her of how he’d reacted when he’d kissed her – that startled jerk when she’d responded, as though she wasn’t the only one who’d been surprised, although at least she could say it was because she hadn’t seen it coming. She doesn’t know why he’d reacted like that – as though he’d expected something else than what he’d gotten.

Or – maybe she does know why, the thought finds her, thinking of the way she’d gripped his coat. The wall against her back, and his hand between her shoulder blades, holding her up even as she’d pushed back.

Blinking to dispel the image – and the warmth curling through her stomach, down her limbs, still stiff from the cold, it feels like the greatest effort in her life to drag her thoughts away, and to place the Den Den Mushi into Smoker’s waiting hand.

She can’t think about it. What is she doing, thinking about it?

She needs a bath, Tashigi decides. Her hair smells like the tavern she’d spent the evening squatting in, and it’s not helping that it’s the kind of smell she associates with him – cold frost-smoke and the sharp burn of a strong drink, and another smell she has no name for, rising from his skin.

“Bath!” she shouts, and Smoker arches a brow, surprised. She touches her forehead; presses her now-sweating palm against it, suffocating a whimper. “I need a bath,” she says, softer.

She makes for the door like she’s escaping, and is suddenly relieved she didn’t have backup with her at the bar, and that Smoker has spent the night at the safe house. She doubts the mission would have been a success if he’d been with her – doubts he would have ever let her live it down, if he knew what she’d been up to.

There is some comfort in that, Tashigi concedes. The only one who has to know about what went down tonight is her.

And Roronoa, comes the thought – along with that slow, curling warmth, remembering.

“Oi, Tashigi,” Smoker says then, when her shaking fingers have wrapped around the doorknob to the bathroom. A glance over her shoulder finds his severe expression knowingly amused, and she has the sudden, sinking fear that she knows what’s coming, even before he asks, dryly —