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Issho despised naval battles. Blind and incapable of feeling his opponents all the way on the other ship, he felt like a massive, clumsy toddler. He fought well and he fought hard, but he needed to hear the enemy, the vibrations around the air, their feet against the solid ground. Here, at sea, he was relegated to doing little more than sense his men run and shuffle around, yell for ammunition and curse at the pirates and so he sat, patiently, asking every now and then about the state of affairs.
That, he explained later to an entirely unreasonable Sakazuki, was why the confrontation against the Straw-hats had found him doing little more than digging nori out of his ramen bowl.
“Admiral!”
Oh, he’d found an egg! He could feel it by the softness of it between his chopsticks. How deliciously lucky. His mouth watered.
“Admiral Fujitora!”
He sighed.
“Yes?”
“It’s the Straw-hat ship, sir.”
“What about it?”
“It’s within range of our cannons, sir.”
He finished the egg in two careful bites, ignoring the faint sound of the soldier shuffling, uncertain, on his heels and then he produced a dice from within his robe.
The split second of incredulous silence that followed was deafening.
“Sir, we have orders to capture the Straw-hat crew,” the soldier said. And then he added, again, as if to fill his mouth with anything but Fleet Admiral Akainu’s name: “sir.”
“Straw-hat Luffy is an honorable foe,” Admiral Fujitora explained, “one that deserves to be felled by my hand rather than my cannons. If I am to be oathbound to his chase, I must let fate decide what’s right.”
He got to his feet towering over his men, impossibly tall. Already the wooden deck felt further from him and, with it, the growing anxiety of his loyal soldier. Already his awareness was focused, with deadly precision, on the small makeshift die in his hand.
“But the Fleet Admiral, sir-” the soldier insisted; a desperate, last-ditch attempt to escape Sakazuki’s wrath without incurring in Fujitora’s own.
Issho frowned to himself. He had seen Akainu’s face several times, way before he ever suspected he would wear his same uniform or bow to his haughty, conceited voice. Sakazuki had been starstruck when he’d met him – he'd called him Fujitora, to Borsalino’s immense amusement.
“It’s Issho,” he had corrected him, politely hiding his bewilderment.
“Not to most people, sir,” Sakazuki had replied, ambitious and bright-eyed.
He’d been a good young man, polite enough, puffing his chest out with pride until his uniform had threatened to burst.
He had spent too much time in Marijoa recently, Issho thought. He could smell its stench on him.
“If it’s black, fire at will,” he ordered, “but if it’s red, take me closer to the Straw-hat ship. I wish to face its captain myself.”
The dice floated upwards and he heard it spin and spin upon itself, writing onto the world Straw-hat Luffy’s fate.
When it fell on his palm, he felt six small carvings against his skin. A one, then.
Red.
“What color is it?” he asked.
The soldier hesitated for a split second and then he sighed. Issho could almost feel his shoulders slump forwards in defeat.
“It’s red, sir,” he said. “I’ll order the ship around.”
It’d been five days since they had left Dressrosa, mere hours after the Straw-hat crew had, and it was by fortuitous chance that their paths had crossed again so soon.
Admiral Fujitora, it had turned out, was perfectly content with ignoring a duty that he found unpalatable – outright defying it, however, was a different thing; and so, he held tightly onto his sword as their ships approached and, unmistakable, he felt Straw-hat’s brimming presence radiating ever closer.
Besides him, interestingly, he felt Trafalgar Law.
He’d long witnessed as treachery – although Straw-hat himself seemed incapable of it – poisoned even the more seasoned alliances among pirates. It gave him a strange buzz on the back of his mind to see this one stand unblemished.
“Oh, old man! It’s you!” the voice came, muffled by distance. “Look, Zoro, it’s the gambler!”
He heard it all like a physical presence – the pattering feet of a thousand men, the waves against the proud hull of the ship and, above all, the staggering cheer of that man’s voice.
His soldier stood beside him. Like a wardrum, his heart beat noisily in his chest. Issho caught echoes of his thoughts: uncertainty, trepidation. Fear. He was scared of Straw-hat, they all were.
Issho took a step forward.
“Straw-hat Luffy!” he bellowed. “In the name of the Marines, you are under arrest!”
The laughter that followed his words was a merry thing, bereft of all pretensions.
“Are you sure, old man?”
Something cut through the air and his men screamed. The presence of the other man became a vibrant thing, glowing in the darkness that surrounded Issho. If he had eyes, he’d have covered them.
Monkey D. Luffy entered his boat. Fujitora raised a hand.
“Leave,” he said to his men. Their consciousness roared, all at once, in indignant disbelief. Calmly, painstakingly, he repeated: “leave.”
His knees made an unseemly noise when he moved to unsheathe his sword. The last time he’d looked at himself, he’d been only forty years old and still up to his full strength, all full of cowardly self-pity. He touched his face sometimes, in the morning, and wondered if he still looked like that man – hollow and trapped and ever so slightly nauseated.
He wondered if his hair had gone grey around the temples, if his pupils had scarred.
“Are we fighting?” Straw-hat asked, audibly amused, walking circles around him.
“It depends,” he replied. “Will you come willingly and surrender to justice?”
He imagined Straw-hat had smiled at that; sardonically, he guessed. Or perhaps he had thought it funny, perhaps he smiled leniently, almost politely, at the whims of a somewhat entertaining old man.
“Get ready! I’m going to start with several punches!” he announced happily.
His voice was youthful, fresh like clear water. Issho traced its echo to his own back.
His haki thrummed, reverberating through his tired body and he felt each hit before it came. They were quick and steady, almost surgically precise in a way unbefitting of the man he had begun to know – impulsive and capricious and more than reckless.
He held the attacks back with ease.
“Are you going soft, Straw-hat?”
The other man chuckled.
“Do you want more, Admiral?”
Admiral. This was a challenge. Issho was grinning now, he could feel it on his own face – the rejuvenating, simplistic joy of it, of an uncomplicated fight, of a kindness that surprised him, that he had not expected to find in the violent waters of the New World.
“Do not underestimate me, Straw-hat.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
For each blow, the other man called out his intentions. Each time, Fujitora positioned himself to repel the blows before the pirate could announce them and still, each time, he did, as if honor-bound.
“How old are you?” Issho asked all of a sudden.
Straw-hat hesitated for a second, thrown off-kilter.
“Twenty,” he said. “Well, almost. Why?”
Oh. So young. He was just so young, so full of life – brimming with it, spilling through his fingers like liquid gold.
“I’m curious about you,” Issho replied, slashing three times in quick succession through the air and repelling a series of quick blows.
He attacked then, applying just enough pressure over the pirate to keep him pinned.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, his voice distorted by Issho’s own power. “I’m not all that tall and I really like meat. Sanji’s is the best, of course, but I like all meat. My favorite is cow meat, but Sea king is also great, especially with potatoes. Dadan was really good at it, back in my village!”
There was a moment of stunned silence before Issho, gleefully holding onto his shaking belly, laughed.
“What?” Straw-hat snapped back, irritated. “You asked.”
He hadn’t, but he had appreciated the admission nevertheless.
“No, nothing,” Issho replied. “Keep going. Where are you from?”
He wondered what the men thought, seeing him stand there, a flowing ease in his words that struck even himself as strange while the pirate he had sworn to apprehend stood mere meters away. Issho, the Wisteria Tiger, said to be feared by the Fleet Admiral Sakazuki himself; Issho, the Wisteria Tiger, blind and inescapable, who had emerged from the ranks of the Government scarred and changed and had donned the mantle of justice.
Issho, the Wisteria Tiger, who looked at his opponent with a small smile on his face as he launched himself into a tale. He had grown in the East Blue; raised, if you could believe it – he could – by a ragtag band of rascals who feared his grandfather more than they despised little kids.
“Did they teach you to thieve?”
“Thieve?” he sounded confused here, endearingly so. “No, I don’t think so. I trained with my brothers. I don’t even like treasure anyway – that’s Nami. She loves it.”
What kind of pirate was this, who shrank from power and treasure as if they sullied him? What kind of man?
Rain of punches! Straw-hat exclaimed. With a powerful swing, Issho threw him to the side. He heard him collapse against the railing, dangling precariously over the water and immediately getting up.
“Why did you set out to the sea?” he asked.
If he focused, he could conjure the outline of a scene – a quaint little harbor entrenched in a colorful village and a small fishing boat, solitary against the rocking waves. Upon it flew a black flag, with all the pride of a Yonkou, covered in uneven symbols, drawn by an uneven hand. There would be a child on that boat, almost a man. Issho, drunk on his artistic liberties, imagined a smile on his face. Had he cried when he left? Had someone cried for him?
“To be free,” Straw-hat replied. “To be the freest man in the world.”
There was such determination in his voice, such naked joy – Issho shivered. It was electrical to the touch.
The scars on his face itched.
“I’m sure your grandfather has things to say about that,” he murmured.
“Oh, right!” Straw-hat exclaimed. His voice sounded as if he’d bit down onto something that had given him pause – uneasy, he examined it. “You know him.”
Issho thought of what he knew of Monkey D. Garp – precious little, other than general information available to the public. His career had been stellar, he had risen through the ranks unstoppably and had soon been on track to become the youngest Fleet Admiral in history and then he had, unexpectedly, stagnated. Once, Issho had thought Sengoku the Buddha, Garp’s closest friend, had risen above him and kept him back.
And then he had met him, unburdened and cheeky and derisive of the stars on Sengoku’s lapel and the weight on his shoulders, a man who ate his fill and fought with glee, and he’d understood.
You’re more like him than you know , Issho thought of telling the pirate, but he decided against it. Whatever the reason for his reticence, he didn’t think it was something the boy wanted to hear.
He would realize it someday, given time.
“Are you free?” he asked instead. “Forced to flee the Marines? To cower from them?”
“I don’t cower from anyone,” Luffy replied, indignant. Then his voice turned gentle, as easily as the breeze changed directions. “And I don’t flee from you.”
Their fight had trickled down into nothing. Issho thought, heart beating wildly, of the few feet that kept them apart.
“May I see your face?” he asked.
He felt Straw-hat’s curious hesitation without the need for reaching out with his consciousness. A pause in his circling steps, and then a sharp intake of breath.
“Old man,” the pirate started, uncomfortable – no, not uncomfortable; disconcerted. “Your eyes- huh-”
Oh, right.
Fujitora put his hands out, extending his fingers and showing Straw-hat his palms, naked and calloused. He’d worn rings and bracelets, once, back when he was a different man – a careless man, burdened with the inescapable rot of the world – but he needed his skin now, to see.
It had been a relief at first, to unshackle his fingers and wrists from their gilded cage and set them loose upon the world, like a baby, born anew. Then his skin had felt it, as surely as his eyes had seen it – the purulent wound at the very center of the oceans, festering.
“I understand things when I touch them,” he explained. “The outline, the shape, the texture – it’s all easily revealed.”
Straw-hat whistled. Issho could hear the excitement in his voice when he spoke, unchecked.
“You see with your hands ?”
Issho paused to smile. “You could say so.”
“That is so cool.”
Then steps – one, two, three and there was a body before him, barely brushing his. The world hushed, drowned out by the unavoidable presence of the pirate, as if his men and the ocean all held their breath.
A hand, warm and small, slithering into his own. Unblemished skin on the palms, smooth and unscarred, youthful; his knuckles, however, were covered by rough tissue, terse and uneven.
He wasn’t sure why, but he’d expected to find rings on his fingers; instead, he wore none.
“So all you need to do is touch my face?”
He made it seem so simple, so uncomplicated, as if there was nothing in the ocean worth fearing, as if no harm stirred among the shadows of the world.
When the Whitebeard pirates had attacked Marineford, Portgas D. Ace’s death had been plastered onto every corner of every country– the evil vanquished, the rotten blood of the King of the Pirates purged at last from the seas. The Marines victorious and order prevailing.
Issho had wondered even then at the footnotes, at the young man mentioned in passing like a nightmare – son to the dreadful revolutionary, grandson to the hero of the Marines. He remembered the undertone of awe in his subordinate’s voice as they read the newspaper for him: awe that a young man could have stood to the level of Sengoku the Buddha for his brother, doomed to die; awe that he had somehow survived.
He remembered the rage in Akainu when he’d asked.
“If you find him,” he’d told him, voice rough and teeth gritted, “you must strike him down. Remember that, Admiral. Whatever else happens, you must strike Straw-hat Luffy down.”
Straw-hat closed his hand around the Admiral’s wrist and put it, with a gentleness that felt like needles on his throat, to his face. With his right hand on his cheek and his left hand on the back of his neck, Issho learned him.
The first thing he thought was that he was small. He could feel before, from the direction of his attacks, that he was taller than the pirate but he was shocked nevertheless to realize the other man barely got up to his chin.
Straw-hat’s body was like a furnace pressed against his, radiating heat and a trust so uninhibited that he was almost afraid to tarnish it with his touch. He felt for the rim of the hat and let it fall backwards, hanging from the other man’s neck. There was the faintest of sounds, like a wild mane of hair coming loose.
The pirate’s cheek was round and soft and, though Issho sought it with his fingertips, he found no trace of stubble. There was a scar under his eye, thin and well-healed, old. He felt the outline of his eyes: big, very big and round.
“You are very young,” he muttered as if to himself. “Very young indeed to have come so far.”
Beneath his palm, a grim blossomed, wide enough to split the face in half. Breathless, he felt a dimple form and he caressed it with his thumb, learning its placement. Towards the corner of his eye, at the level of his nose; he’d remember that.
“You guys keep saying that,” Straw-hat replied, amused.
Issho touched his lips – thin and dry, cracked by the salt of the ocean and swollen by the recent fight against Doflamingo. The skin that covered them was uneven, as if Straw-hat bit it; in nervousness, he wondered? Or perhaps in focus, as a way to center himself?
“Are you bruised?” he asked.
Straw-hat nodded, then he grabbed his wrist.
“Here,” he said, putting Issho’s fingers on his lips. “And here, here, here and here.”
His left cheek, his arm, the side of his neck, his hip.
And then he felt his skin brushing against something strange, something massive.
“And this?”
He put his hand against it and discovered, with a strange twist in his guts, it was a scar – massive and mangled, covered by thick collagenous tissue. Like the aftershock of an earthquake, violence radiated from it; if he placed his hand against it, he could feel the distant reverberation of hatred.
“Akainu,” the pirate replied, curtly. A darkness, unbecoming of this man, descended upon his voice and Issho realized he could wear grief just as easily as joy. “When Ace died, he did this. Jinbe saved me.”
He had read about it when it happened, first in the papers and then in the reports, swallowed already by the cloak of justice. He’d read of the impossibility of those events, the enormity of it – the spearhead of the Revolutionary Army and a renegade of the Ouka Shichibukai cutting through wave after wave of marines, all for this man; the proud Newgate pirates holding the way open for him; Sir Crocodile, the butcher of Arabasta, lending his power to the man that had defeated him.
All of them, the most powerful men in the world, held together by the same tremulous instinct, the same tightening of the throat that had brought Issho to a halt back in Dressrosa. The same dizzying understanding that had, for the first time in his long life, stayed his hand.
And he, cursed fool, had thought he had seen everything.
And then he felt a hand on his own face. He froze, startled. The pirate traced the scars that crossed his face with his own hands.
“What happened to you?” Straw-hat asked.
“I saw things I didn’t want to see.”
Luffy made a noise, as if he understood. Perhaps he did.
“They look good,” he said, as if it was nothing.
That was Straw-hat Luffy’s kindness, he had come to understand – delivered unconsciously, with no understanding of it. Unavoidable and uninterested and made all the more precious for it.
“What color is your hair?” he asked, more choked up than he knew how to admit.
“Black,” Luffy replied. “My eyes too.”
Black. He pictured it, painstakingly, in his mind as he dug his hands on his hair, feeling the strands between his fingers – unkempt and wild, falling over his eyes. It was quite long, he could feel it curling slightly behind his ears, over his nape.
“Oh, and I always wear a hat,” the pirate exclaimed, excited to talk about it. “It’s made of straw with a red ribbon. You can touch it if you want.”
Issho laughed. Before Gol D. Roger had died, the Marines had almost collapsed in on themselves in their search. He’d been too young to remember it well, too preoccupied with his nascent career in Marijoa to spare his attention elsewhere, but the ripples had reached even him, huddled all the way up in his office on the Red Line.
The ocean, they’d told them, seemed to have folded in on themselves to protect their prodigal son.
“The pirate king’s crown,” he murmured, and he wondered, at Luffy’s delight, if the seas would do the same for him. “I recognize it.”
There had been silence for a long time when Gol D. Roger had died.
“Do you know me now?” Straw-hat asked and he took a step back when Fujitora nodded.
With empty hands, he sheathed his word, letting it rest at his side.
“If I see you again,” he said, calmly, “I’ll take you in, Straw-hat Luffy; and if you don’t come willingly, I will have to kill you.”
Kind face and all. Dimples and beautiful round cheeks and inviting joyous grin and all.
Straw-hat laughed with mirth.
“I like you, old man,” he exclaimed. “I hope to see you again!”
He heard him leave, his feets pattering cheerfully against the wooden deck and he felt his radiant presence diminishing, bit by bit, until it became nothing but pleasantly smoldering embers that he could, if he chose to, prod at with his haki.
There came four seconds of stunned silence before a cacophony erupted – Admiral! What the hell! from his men and Luffy! What the hell! from the pirates, all intermingled into a choral cry of discontent.
He heard Straw-hat’s laughter booming over the water like a parting gift.
“Farewell!” he screamed. “Farewell, old man!”
***
Vice-Admiral Bastille sat beside him with a heavy sigh, extending a tray of rice cookies towards him, long after their ship had set sail and the unrest among the men had been quieted. The sun set, peacefully, over the horizon.
“Issho,” he murmured. Not Fujitora, not Admiral.
“You have questions, old friend.”
“Why?”
He turned his head towards the source of the voice, biting down on the dessert. He made a noise of appreciation, like a rumble deep within his chest, and he suspected Bastille had smiled at that. He’d always been too fond of him and Issho had never had qualms nudging that affection gently in his favor.
“These are good,” he said, offering the chance to drop the conversation. “Thank you.”
Bastille didn’t budge.
“Issho.”
The air was pleasant around them, warm and dry, as calm as the seas themselves, inviting. Bastille’s hand closed around his forearm, softly.
“That boy has a purpose,” Fujitora said after a while. “I can see it, I can touch it – incandescent and bright. He’ll change this world; you have felt it, I know you must have.”
“Perhaps,” his friend replied. “But will he change it for the better? It’s a gamble, Issho; a dangerous one.”
He thought of the people of Dressrosa, their voices rising above the terrifying silence of the dead and chanting Luffy’s name – in hope, in fear, in delight, in abandon. All of them, in unison, calling for that man and his round cheeks and his jet black hair and the scar under his eye.
Issho shrugged.
“Oh, friend, you know I’m good at that.”