—Broadcast—
The preparations took a full day.
Marlin went into the sea himself and came back with enough seafood to feed the crew twice over — including one octopus-variant Sea King that was significantly too large for any available pot. Sanji looked at it for a long time with the expression of a man mourning a meal that almost was. He cooked the rest.
The gamblers had organized themselves before the banquet even started.
The game was simple: dice, compare the size, loser provides something of value. In principle it was a small friendly wager to pass the time. In practice, it had been going on for three hours and the landscape around Nami had changed considerably.
She was wearing Luffy's straw hat — acquired when the captain, who did not understand that Nami cheated at everything she treated as a competition, had sat down with cheerful confidence and lasted approximately four rolls. Robin's sunglasses sat on her face; Robin had gone bankrupt once, assessed the situation correctly, and withdrawn. Zoro's four swords were stacked against Nami's right leg — she had beaten him four separate times because he had the stubbornness to keep insisting that this time would be different. Kou-san-san, Kaya's summoned lucky cat, sat in Nami's arms with the resigned dignity of a creature that had been used as currency against its will.
And Chopper, who was eating sugar tablets steadily from a large pile beside him, had signed a contract indentured to work for the navigator for multiple decades. He seemed more confused about this than troubled by it.
"Master." Kaya had both hands on Tsunade's arm, using the tone of someone who has said this several times already. "Please stop. If you put more pressure on Sakura Island you will lose everything you've saved."
"Sakura Island has been very lucky for me historically," Tsunade said, with the conviction of a person at a gambling table.
"You've lost your house."
"I'm getting it back."
Kaya looked at the pile in front of Nami and calculated what getting it back would require, and felt something behind her eyes that wanted to become crying. She had met pirates before, through the course of her apprenticeship, and she had assessed them on the basis of whether they seemed like people who would hurt her master or her patients. The ship's navigator was apparently a natural disaster in a different category entirely.
"There is no emotion at the gambling table," Nami said, adding Tsunade's most recent contribution to her pile without looking up. "If you want to gamble, you play to the end. No special rules, no second chances."
She had lost her memories of the last five days. She did not appear to be particularly bothered by this. She had Luffy's hat, Robin's sunglasses, four of Zoro's swords, one summoning cat, and a doctor indentured for decades, and the gap where her recent memories had been was adequately filled by the present moment.
Her smile, large and genuine and carrying the particular quality of someone who has just had an excellent run of luck, had been doing something useful for the mood of the whole camp. The past months on the Grand Line had been their heaviest in a long time. Chopper's coma had put a weight in the crew's atmosphere that didn't lift. Even Luffy had been smiling less.
Nami, winning extravagantly at dice with a stolen straw hat on her head, was an excellent correction.
Robin had settled beside Chopper with a glass of water and the expression of someone exercising considerable restraint.
"Eat slowly," she said. "I bought enough for a year. No one is taking any of it."
Chopper looked at the pile of sugar tablets, then at Robin, then went back to eating at the same pace. He had been awake for a few hours and his body was still making up time. He had been visibly thin in the final weeks before this morning; even now, fresh from waking, there was a deficit in him that food was the first answer to.
She had bought the sugar tablets in advance — she and Nami both had, working separately and ending up with a collective year's supply between them. They had known when Chopper woke up, the first thing he would need would be sugar, and they had also known there would be no time to go find it. So they had found it earlier.
Chopper looked at her when she told him this.
He looked away again quickly, which was his way of receiving something that mattered too much to look at directly.
"I haven't tried most of these flavors," he said, into his pile of tablets.
Robin was already touching his fur — she had been waiting months for this, with more patience than the waiting deserved. She ran her palm along his side and felt immediately what was different: the texture was off. Not wrong for a reindeer that had been bedridden for months, but not right either. Dry at the surface, the natural oils depleted. He would recover, but right now it was uncomfortable to touch and she touched it anyway, gently, because the discomfort was temporary.
Then she found the gap.
The lock of fur at his chest — the heart-guarding tuft that she had kept track of across every weekly care session, that had still been there when she checked him yesterday — was gone. Not shed, not groomed away. Pulled free from the root.
She looked at it for a moment.
Then she looked across the campsite at Nami, who had just won whatever remained of Tsunade's non-essential property and was arranging her prizes with the focus of someone doing something they are genuinely good at.
I'm overthinking this, Robin thought, and went back to the fur that needed attending to.
Usopp was sitting far enough from the gambling table to maintain plausible deniability, which was where he liked to be when things were going well without his involvement. Kaya was occupied with managing Tsunade's catastrophic decision-making, which gave him a clear view of both.
He was using his Observation Haki, which had developed over the years into something that could pick up sound clearly from several kilometers if he was paying attention. He was not doing this deliberately. He had simply learned that when Kaya spoke quietly to someone, he could hear it if he wanted to, and he usually wanted to.
He had not meant to overhear the conversation between Kaya and Tsunade about the succession, and about the lifespan.
He was sitting with it now, quietly, in the corner where nobody was paying attention to him.
Medical lineage of the strange doctor's line: longer-lived than ordinary people. Much longer-lived. Long enough that Kaya, having inherited the full training, would outlast not just Usopp but possibly his children. His grandchildren, even.
Usopp was not, in this moment, thinking about any of that directly. He was thinking about the fact that Tsunade had objected to him not because she looked down on pirates, or because of his nose, or because she had opinions about his character. She had objected because she was watching a future arrive that she could already see the shape of, and she was not sure whether Kaya had thought about it enough yet.
Kaya had, apparently, won the argument anyway.
He watched her drag Tsunade back from the gambling table for the third time by the sleeve of her coat, reasoning with her in a voice that was patient and affectionate and entirely unyielding, and thought that Kaya had always been better at the long view than he was.
He would think about the rest of it later. Tonight there was a banquet, and Chopper was awake, and Nami was laughing, and Luffy was making noise somewhere to his left with the volume of someone who had not smiled properly in months and was now making up the deficit all at once.
Later was sufficient for the hard questions.