Stronger
prologue - for starters

It was a lovely night, really. One of the loveliest that the kingdom of Albasta had seen in years. The rains had come, and gone, and left in their wake a sense of relief so palpable she could taste it, even over the harsh salt tang of the dockside air. The grime of a thousand and one sandswept nights had been washed away, just like that. The blistering heat and fled, tail-between-legs, for greener pastures. All that was left were gentle tradewinds and a killer sunset and the unshakable feeling that she should be pulling a deck chair onto the bow and drinking lemonade, just to honour the spirit of the moment.

Instead, Tashigi settled for leaning on the starboard looking pensive. Her glasses were off. The mainland looked prettier with the details blurred out.

There'd been a time, just after Tashigi had been chosen to serve under the legendary White Hunter, when she would have sold her sword for a night like this. It should have been an honour, working for the likes of Captain Smoker. Should have been. And it was, of course, but not in the way they'd intended. It hadn't taken her long to figure out that Headquarters had given him some skinny little twig of a girl freshly out of the enlisted ranks as his junior officer because they fully expected him to break her. It wasn't about her skills, it was about the fact that they didn't want to waste their real potential on a man who went through assistants like tissue paper. So she'd decided that she'd show those men exactly what a skinny little twig of a girl could do. And sitting back, with a glass of lemonade... when she'd been working to keep up with him, without stumbling and sending things scattering all to hell like she usually did, it had seemed like an impossible luxury.

Now, zeitgeist or no, it just seemed boring. After the Alubarna battle and her embarrassing breakdown he'd given her a couple of days off, and it seemed boring.

When had she become spoiled for relaxation? Why hadn't she noticed it, before now? Was it the Grandline? Captain Smoker? That thrice-damned Roronoa Zoro?

... if she started training, the midshipmen would probably think that she was insane. And they already had that problem with Smoker and his... 'direct' command policies. The enlisted men had to be able to count on her to be sensible. Dammit.

"You need anything, Lieutenant?" Jenkins asked her, climbing down from aft rigging.

Lieutenant. Hunh. She'd gotten her reward for sticking it out with Captain Smoker after all. Victory tasted like saltwater, and ashes.

"No, I'm fine," Tashigi tried not to snap at the man. He wasn't mocking her. It wasn't his fault. "Does the Captain have anything that needs doing before the ceremony tomorrow? I think he'd like to pull out of port as soon as possible."

Smoker had told the crew that if anyone called him Commodore "like those shitheads at Headquarters" he'd rip their lungs out and use them to swab the decks. Tashigi knew that she could order them to do the same for her, and get them to call her Sergeant-Major again, but that wouldn't make any difference to what the rest of the Marines. The label of her promotion was her cross to bear, for failing in to enforce her own justice in Alubarna. Every time she heard it, it would remind her that she had to become stronger and live up to the name.

"Uh, no?" Maybe she should start training, after all. Jenkins was looking at her like she was insane anyways. "You have the night off, ma'am! It's so great out, and we're in port, too... you're really lucky."

He probably thought that she'd hit her head or something in Alubarna. Tashigi was unfortunately... accident-prone.

"Besides, Captain Smoker left to go see Captain Hina an hour ago, while you were still sleeping." Jenkins, an incurable gossip, looked about as pleased to get hold of this information as a starving man with a bowl of rice. Their ship had become pretty boring for the gossips, after they'd spent the first couple of weeks at sea puzzling through who was buggering who in the aft grain storage cabin.

"I hear," Jenkins was excited about his new toy, and tried to look like he was confiding some great secret in her. That meant that half the ship probably already knew, "the Captain and Madame Hina are playing cards."

"Apparently," he coughed, "they 'played cards' in officer training school. If you know what I mean. And I think you do. If you know what I mean. The guys from C-deck have a pool going on whether or not he comes back to the ship tonight."

Jenkins was clearly impressed by this turn of events.

"I'm sure Captain Smoker will have a good time reminiscing with his old friend," Tashigi said dryly, secretly wishing that there were some way she could pour lye directly into her skull, so that she could forever burn the image from her mind of the Captain and... with... doing... AUGH. If her superior officer had... 'needs'... Tashigi definitely didn't need to know about it, even if Captain Hina was a good Marine and respectable person. It was like... like... when mom's old boyfriends had stayed the evenings over. There were places she did not need to go. "And I don't want to hear about you betting on the personal lives of your superior officers again, Private Jenkins. Ever."

She knew that he still would, of course. The men had to occupy their time with something on the high seas, besides backbreaking labor.

"Sure thing, ma'am," Jenkins ran off. Maybe she'd snapped more than she'd intended.

When had she become so... authoritative? How had that happened? Tashigi was supposed to be the goofy kid that tripped over her own shoes and blushed tomato-red at the mere mention of... she was NOT revisiting that image. This was almost as bad as that time she'd gone looking for an extra slide ruler in the hull and come upon... no, she wasn't revisiting THAT image either.

Maybe it was good that they were stuck in Nanohana waiting to be humiliated by Headquarters. The persistent itch that tugged at her to get back onto the seaways and after Roronoa-bloody-Zoro instead of lounging around was, for once, almost equaled by the sudden urge to get off of the damn boat RIGHT NOW.

"I'm going into town for a walk," she told Private Dvorak as she jumped down from the railing to the docks. "If Captain Smoker comes looking for me, you can tell him I'll be back in about an hour."

At the mention of Captain Smoker, Private Dvorak let out a decidedly unmanly snicker, "Can do, ma'am."

Tashigi pushed the bridge of her glasses up, shuddered a little, and then left.

***

Smoker was happy that the weather was good. He felt like he'd finally gotten all of the sand out of his cigars. Plus, the boat wasn't rocking, which made it a hell of alot easier to play a goddamn game of poker.

For a few seconds, when he'd got there, and he'd been waiting outside of her door with nothing but a deck of cards, he'd felt a bit unsure about this whole thing. Smoker didn't do things like this. Catching up with old friends was for old Marines who had alot of time on their hands to tell boring-ass stories, instead of Marines that were out and about in teh world maiming pirates like they were supposed to.

Yet standing outside her door, preparing to knock, he couldn't help but wonder how the years had, and... if it would be the same as when they used to... and she looked so different now but she'd always been really.. and they'd never... but he'd always wondered about... and now there were both real, well-known Marines, out in the field kicking ass instead of taking the names down at Headquarters... and he's always really respected her even if she was...

Then he'd decided to stop being such a pansy and just go the fuck in, because she'd invited him and it would get his mind off the stupid-ass ceremony he was waiting for. Headquarters was forcing him to stay here on pain of court martial. And while he really could not give less of a rat's ass about what Headquarters thought, he sadly did have to care about Hina's devil-fruit powers and large fleet of gunnery ships. Hina'd always been by-the-book, and tenacious as a pitbull.

Infuriating woman. He shouldn't have worried about their get-together. All these years, and it was exactly the same.

"Full house," the Black Cage announced over the rim of her gin-and-tonic, and laughed her odd breathy little laugh. "Hina victorious! You really haven't changed at all, 'Smoker'."

Fortunately, Smoker wasn't drunk enough yet to have bet anything good. Goddamit. Why wasn't he drunk yet?

Hina always drove him to drink.

"Shut up," Smoker glowered into his rum. "Didn't this used to be more fun?"

Hina was still snickering. He wondered how long she could keep that up. "I think we just used to be cheaper drunks. And Jesse and Walter were around to keep you from losing every round."

Smoker stabbed out his cigar, and started working on a new one. He never really missed the nicotine until it was gone. "... Point."

A thought struck him, like a bolt out of the... er... carcinogenic haze, which for once was not entirely his fault, "Wait. If I'm a Commodore now, I could order you let me get my crew the fuck out of here before those sissies decide to parade my subordinate and I around like goddamn beauty queens."

"You think I'd listen? Don't be foolish, Smoker," Hina snorted, delicately. Delicacy was criminally wrong on most Marines, but on Hina it just looked classy. He knew that she worked very hard on that. It part of Hina's essential Hina-ness, even if he didn't understand quite why. Women. "I'm not going to be the one who has to explain to Headquarters why their heroes-of-the-day didn't show up for a ceremony with Nefertari Vivi herself. And you owe me for those ships whose time I wasted running around after Straw Hat. And in any case? They'd probably give me a medal for stopping you. Hell, if I could get you back to Loguetown they'd give me two. They've got that incompetent Lyle in there now..."

"Heh," Smoker grinned, "Remember that time during survival training where that little fucker..."

Hina smiled a secret smile, and lit another cigarette. "... was trying to get over the netting in the obstacle course..."

"And Walter and I cut the moorings so that he ended up stuck in a tree, and Staff Sergeant Fujiwara wouldn't let him down until he figured out a way to cut himself out."

"That was terrible," Hina said, wryly. "He couldn't get down for three days!"

"I know. The degenerates in Loguetown will eat him alive," Smoker looked almost maybe sort of happy. The rum was finally kicking in.

"Hina alarmed," Hina smirked. "I'll have to go to the funeral, of course, and Lyle will make for an awfully ugly corpse."

She shuffled the deck.

"Rematch?"

"I WILL defeat you," and Smoker was back to business. Bloody Hina. He WOULD defeat her!

... after they heard from whoever was knocking on the door.

"Come in," said Hina.

"Are you sure it's okay?"

"Yes," she shrugged.

"Sir!" One of his men entered cautiously, and then saluted.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Smoker turned hopefully, thinking that maybe some kind of freak emergency had happened that would call his crew away before that godawful ceremony. Admittedly, tmost people would be hard-pressed to tell that his tone was hopeful. Ten years of chain-smoking and a naturally impassive disposition had given Smoker all the vocal expressiveness of a trash compactor. He liked that. It helped keep other people in line.

Except for Hina knew, damn her. She knew him all too welll, and seemed vastly entertained by this whole scenario.

Oddly, Dvorak looked disappointed rather than pale or intimidated. The hell?

"It's Lieutenant Tashigi, sir."

"What about her?" Smoker ground at his cigar. "Corporal Brewer didn't let her near the gunpowder again, did he?"

For one brief, horrifying moment, Smoker pictured his beloved bike and half of the hull blown out by one of Tashigi's bizarre accidents. His bike.

"No sir," Dvorak quickly assured him, and the world righted itself. "It's just... it's four in the morning, sir. The Sar-er, the Lieutenant went out into town by herself, and said that she'd be back by eighteen-hundred hours. Except she's not. We thought you should know."

Shit. There were still Baroque Works agents out there, and you could always trust Tashigi to do some damn fool thing like trip over her own shoe-laces and spend twelve hours lying unconscious in a rain gutter.

"Hina disappointed," Hina sighed. "A night on the town? You've been teaching that poor girl to pick up your bad habits."

Smoker tried, and failed, to imagine Tashigi in one of the seedy pirate bars he frequented because they felt a little like home. He wasn't a very imaginative man at the best of times, and when he did imagine things they usually involved punching stuff, or chaining people up in the brig. What the hell did Hina think that she was saying?

...Then he refrained from mentioning that at least his junior officer, unlike Hina's crewmen, wasn't a complete and utter nancy-boy. Disco should be a court-martialable offense.

"I doubt it," his rum buzz was wearing off, and he'd gone back to glowering again. Smoker's brow was used enough to being furrowed that it didn't mind. He stood. "Send out squad four and squad two to search the town. We don't want to cause any alarm right off."

"Sir!" Dvorak ran off. That was good. It gave Smoker more room to start pacing.

"She'd better not have done something dumbassed because of what that punk Roronoa pulled with Straw Hat in Alubarna."

Which had reduced Tashigi to tears, for some mysterious and indescipherable feminine reason. After he'd told her to smarten up and get stronger so that she wouldn't cry like a pansy every time these kinds of things happened, Hina had treated him to an icy glare and a refreshing lecture about 'sensitivity' which had only served to confuse him further. Feh. Whoever had put Hina through management training ought to be keelhauled.

Hina looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. And for all those finicky manners, her laugh sounded like she was trying to chuckle up a hairball. "Hina amused! You're worried the girl's still upset about Straw Hat."

Smoker growled, "Damn strait I'm worried. I'm worried about having her back in time for that fucking ceremony, so that we can get the hell out of there."

"Naturally. I suppose I'll take care of my own business, then, now that our game's over," Hina started to leave. As she passed by, she leaned in to purr mockingly, "And don't worry about being worried about the kid. I think it's... cute."

Smoker felt like hitting something. Sadly, it wasn't his ship.

-TBC-

***

Author's note: This is my first OP fic. Is it craptastic? Yes? No? Maybe so? Please do let me know :) This is a bit shorter than my typical fic-chapterage, on account of it's my first OP experimenting.

I hope Hina is characterized in a... relatively okay manner. Hell, I hope that for all of the characters. All I really have to go on are manga translations, and badly-subbed pirated anime DVDs (which, though not strictly legal, are oddly appropriate) that have yet to reach the Hina stages.

I have Tashigi down as a Lieutenant because she and Smoker were promoted after the Straw Hat Crew defeated Crocodile, obviously. The rank after Sergeant Major in the Marine hierarchy, according to Oda, is actually "Warrant Officer", with Second Lieutenant coming after that. I just thought that a Warrant Officer sounded like some sort of prison official rather than a real field-officer, so I skipped her up two. I suppose I'll lose my Continuity Whore Club Membership Card for that.

Yes, this probably is going to be Smoker/Hina eventually. I love the Zoro/Tashigi dynamic (and am lukewarm on the 'ship), but I couldn't really think of a way to plausibly insert Zoro into this fic, so I doubt there'll be much of that.