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After their whole tiresome body or mind or whatever-switching ordeal, Tashigi takes to stalking after him with a look she generally reserves for particularly loathsome pirates and dog shit on the bottom of her shoe. It's mildly entertaining at first, but it gets old pretty fast.
“Just spit it out, Tashigi, would you?” Smoker sighs at her when they finally manage to get five minutes in private.
“You humiliated me in front of the men,” Tashigi hisses, blushing furiously.
Smoker stares at her, unimpressed.
“You let them see my. . . ” she trails off, waving a hand vaguely in front of her chest.
“What, your tits? So?”
“So!” she shrieks, before coming to her senses and lowering her voice to an angry whisper. “I have a hard enough time making them take me seriously.”
“Yeah? And that's somehow on me?”
“Permission to speak freely?”
He almost cracks up; it's kind of adorable how his captain seems to think the way they usually talk to each other in any way resembles the way they should, according to those stuck-up assholes in the New World, anyway.
“Sure, captain, go ahead.”
“With all due respect, fuck you, Smoker-san. Fuck you for fucking up all my hard work, for always giving me shit in front of the men and then turning your back when they act like I'm some kind of crew follower instead of their superior officer. How am I supposed to do my job when they treat me like a— a— ”
“A woman?” he suggests dryly. “You done now?”
She nods. If her expression is anything to go by, she's already regretting her little outburst—as she should.
“Seems to me like you're operating under the serious misconception that I give a flying fuck about your delicate sensibilities, Tashigi. Honestly? I don't. None of your men do, either. You're having difficulties keeping them in line not because you're a hundred-pound woman with tits, but because you keep acting as if that should matter. It doesn't.
So they saw your tits—big fucking deal, they will see them again eventually when Roronoa or some other asshole you're so keen on beating finally manages to cut you into ribbons, and the hand of one of those pigs out there is the only thing between your guts and the ground. So what you need to decide here is, are you a shrinking violet or are you a goddamn Marine officer.”
The thing is, Smoker is quite aware that no one—not even the idiot in question—gets how or why he ended up making some skinny, half-blind little girl with a chip the size of the Grand Line on her shoulder his protégé. And that's fine. He's high up enough on the ladder not to owe anyone a fucking explanation.
But if he had to give one, he'd describe her as she is now: infuriated (because she has her pride and he drags it through the mud on the regular), shamefaced (because she knows her little hissy fit was unprofessional, and most of the time she's nothing if not professional), her head held high all through the dressing down (because she stomachs bullshit about as well as he does).
Smoker is under no illusion that your average Marine is anything but a paid government thug. They're exactly like pirates but worse; they don't even have the guts to steal openly, to let the world see what a bunch of opportunistic scumbags they really are.
Tashigi is the rare diamond in the rough: talented and brave, soft-hearted and steel-spined, flawlessly competent when she's not goofing off and smart as a whip when she remembers to be.
“I'm a Marine officer,” she says clearly, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind his left shoulder. “I apologize for my outburst.”
“Apology accepted. Now go see what those idiots have managed to fuck up in the five minutes or so we left them unsupervised. I have letters to write so whatever it is, I don't want a report. Deal with it.”
“Understood.”
He doesn't expect her to turn into Hina overnight or anything—and there's a nightmarish thought right there. But in a few years, she's going to be a fucking marvelous officer, and he has no intention of letting her occasional bullshit get in the way of her own progress.