—Broadcast—
The hangover was comprehensive.
Every member of the Straw Hats who had participated in the cherry blossom wine experiment woke up with the kind of headache that arrives when good wine has been treated as an endurance event. The wine had been worth it. The heads had been not worth it. Both things were simultaneously true.
Nami walked out of the women's room, stood in the doorway facing the morning sun, stretched until her spine protested, and felt herself come back into alignment with the world.
She had matched Tsunade glass for glass toward the end of the night. When the rest of the crew had gone horizontal, the two of them had kept going. She was not sure which of them had won, or whether it was the kind of contest that had a winner, but she had not felt this settled in a long time. Something that had been wound tight in her chest for the better part of a year had finally released.
She looked back into the room. Chopper and Marlin were folding quilts with the quiet industry of people who had grown up not leaving messes behind. Chopper's fur was catching the morning light coming through the window — still not quite right yet, still recovering, but better than yesterday. Watching him do something ordinary was better than she had words for.
She turned and started toward the men's quarters, and heard Zoro before she saw him — the sound of blade strokes repeating, fast and controlled, the rhythm of someone who had woken up from a heavy drunk and processed it as an argument for training harder. He was shirtless, working through a series at a pace that left afterimages. She navigated around his practice radius without slowing down. She was not going to interrupt him; she had not come to find him.
"Nami."
Luffy dropped from the roof and landed in front of her in a crouch, then straightened up. He had gauged the distance correctly this time. "You're looking for me?"
"We've wasted almost a year," she said. "It's time to go. We can't stop halfway."
He looked at her. "Someone already came to ask me to stay two more days."
"Two days, then." She had expected this. Whoever had asked had probably been right. "Two more days and we go."
Luffy nodded without argument. The easy agreement told her he had already done the calculation — they had stayed for Chopper, Chopper was back, the next thing was already in his head and had been for a while.
"We still have to find Momonosuke," he said. "We promised we'd come to Cake Island."
Nami's expression communicated her personal opinion of Momonosuke concisely. "Be careful with that one. He's capable — more than capable. Just be careful about how much you trust him."
"I know he does tricks," Luffy said, with the complete absence of concern of someone who finds tricks mildly entertaining rather than threatening. "It's fine."
She decided not to pursue this.
The two days were not idle.
Nami sat with Tsunade, who was remarkably coherent for someone who had consumed as much as she had, and worked through navigation records. Sakura Island sat at an unusual junction of New World currents, and Tsunade had decades of observation data on the surrounding sea that no chart had ever recorded. Nami copied what was useful and asked for the rest to be explained.
Franky and Marlin divided the ship inspection between them — Franky for the structural and mechanical, Marlin for the hull below the waterline, where his Sea God abilities gave him a diagnostic range that human inspection couldn't match. They worked in parallel and compared notes.
Robin had been in and out of Kaya's library since the first day on the island. She came away from the two extra days with a stack of mythological records that covered traditions she had never encountered before — things that connected in small ways to the Outer God material she had encountered at O'Hara, at angles she had not expected. She said very little about them to anyone.
Chopper went back to work. A year of absence from the medical post had created a backlog in his mental inventory of what the ship needed, and he went through it with the focused efficiency of someone who had been restless about being unable to do this. Local materials on Sakura Island gave him access to compounds he would not find elsewhere on the New World, and he prepared methodically — analgesics, antiseptics, the components for his Rumble Balls, several specialized compounds for conditions to the crew's particular physiological range.
Sanji disappeared into the forest and came back twice, dragging fresh ingredients. He stocked the refrigerator to capacity and then prepared long-preservation stores beyond it — dried meat, sealed provisions, quantities designed around Luffy's consumption rate rather than a normal crew's. He had done the calculation on what the next stretch of Grand Line required and added twenty percent.
Zoro and Brook handled the water barrels. Dozens of them, filled from Sakura Island's stream, enough for the crew to drink comfortably for weeks. Franky's cola-powered seawater purification rig existed as a backup, which everyone was glad for and nobody wanted to rely on.
Luffy sat in the sun and ate and waited. This was his pre-departure process. Everyone who had sailed with him had made their peace with it.
For Usopp, the two days had a different character.
He and Kaya spent most of both days walking. Sakura Island in ordinary daylight was not the island of the previous days — no forest horror, no dark forest, no things moving in the wrong directions in peripheral vision. Just the mountain paths, the cherry trees, the way the light came through the blossoms at different hours. Kaya knew every path and walked them with the ease of someone who had learned this island the way she had learned everything else about her life here — thoroughly, out of necessity, and then come to love it.
They did not talk very much. They did not have to.
On the second evening, standing at the base of the cherry blossom hill with the light going orange above the trees, Kaya said: "Don't go back to the dormitory tonight."
Usopp looked at her.
"Where would I sleep if I didn't —"
"Usopp."
He stopped.
She was looking at the cherry trees rather than at him, and her face was the color of the evening light plus something additional, and the meaning of what she had said arrived in his understanding approximately three seconds after it should have.
She turned and walked away quickly, back toward the clinic building, without looking back.
He stood there for a moment.
First time asking, he thought. She asked first. He was a man in his mid-twenties who had kept a photo of this woman on his person for years, and she had just invited him, directly, in clear language that he had failed to parse immediately, which was its own kind of embarrassing, and he was standing in the cherry blossom hill thinking about it instead of doing anything.
He went and took a very thorough shower.
The dormitory was quiet when he slipped out. The others were either asleep or had the decency to be asleep.
He walked the path he had learned that afternoon, going by memory, arriving at the correct door. He stood outside it for a moment.
The door opened before he knocked.
Kaya was in a thin nightgown and she looked like she had been waiting and was trying not to look like she had been waiting, and the care she had taken was visible and was not the sort of thing Usopp intended to make her regret.
"I thought you weren't coming," she said.
"I took a shower," he said, which he had determined was a reasonable explanation.
She put her arms around him and held on, and he held back, and the rest of whatever sentences either of them had been planning to say became unnecessary.
There were years of letters and phone calls behind this moment, and a plague that had changed everything, and the gratitude of having made it through and being in the same place at the same time at last. Usopp was not a person who analyzed his feelings in the moment of having them, but he knew what this was and he knew what it meant, and he held on.
"I love you," he said, into her hair.
She didn't answer with words. She didn't need to.
The cherry blossom trees outside were quiet in the wind, and the light through the window was the last of the evening fading into night, and what followed was no one's business but theirs.
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