—Broadcast—
Kaya had taken a hangover pill before Nami poured the third round.
She had done this quietly, without announcement, because announcing it would have invited commentary, and because she had been living with Tsunade for long enough to understand that cherry blossom wine at forty years was not the same thing as the fruit wines she had tried before. The pill blunted what would have been the worst of it. She was still drunk for a while. She still lost consciousness.
When she woke up, she was lying on the grass.
Usopp was asleep beside her with his arm around her and his hand in a location she was fairly certain he had not placed there while awake. She took his hand and moved it and made a note of the incident for the next time she could bring it up properly.
He was talking in his sleep. Not clearly enough to make out words — just fragments, and her name in the middle of them, which was impossible not to find charming even at this hour, in this condition, with her head feeling the way it felt.
She sat up.
The banquet ground was a ruin. Three large jars of wine — a year's worth, by Tsunade's own accounting — had been emptied. The food waste was distributed across the grass in the pattern of a meal that had been eaten with complete disregard for aesthetics. The Straw Hats were arranged across the area in the various configurations of people who had not planned how they would end up when they stopped being able to stand.
Luffy was asleep with an octopus head. Not a small octopus head. A full-sized cephalopod head, apparently taken from the Sea King Marlin had caught, which was just large enough to function as an adequate pillow if you had no opinions about pillow materials.
Zoro had won his swords back from Nami at some point in the evening — she must have bet them and lost them in a moment of overconfidence fueled by the wine — and was drooling against the flat of one of them with the peaceful expression of someone who had no unresolved concerns.
Robin was lying on her back with Marlin in the crook of her left arm and Chopper in the crook of her right. She was smiling in her sleep.
Brook and Franky were together on the ground. Whether skeletal or mechanical constitutions were susceptible to alcohol in the same way as biological ones was a question for another day; the outcome was indistinguishable from the others.
Sanji had made it as far as Nami's legs before losing the rest of his evening. He was using her thighs as a pillow, which would have been more enviable if his face wasn't sheened with cold sweat and his expression cycling through whatever a dream was putting him through.
Nami and Tsunade had found each other at some point in the latter half of the night and committed jointly to finishing what remained. They were currently collapsed against each other in the grass, Tsunade still technically upright against a tree, both of them wearing the peaceful expression of the thoroughly victorious.
"I have to do all of this myself," Kaya said, to nobody who was conscious.
She began with the waste — separating what the small animals on the island could eat from what needed to go into the sea, working her way around the scattered bodies with the systematic patience she had learned from years of managing things that nobody else was awake to manage. The work took half an hour. At the end of it, the ground looked like it had been used for a large meal rather than a disaster.
The bodies were a different problem. She was not strong enough to carry most of these people anywhere, and most was a generous estimate. Tsunade, even unconscious, was a structural undertaking.
A sound came from the wine jar nearest to her — a small sound, like something shifting inside a container — and then a shadow vaulted out of the jar and landed on top of her head.
Kaya reached up and identified Ban by texture.
He smelled strongly of cherry blossom wine. His small stomach had, apparently, found the jar before anyone sealed it.
"I thought you went home," she said.
"I stayed for the wine," he said. He sounded clear-headed. He always sounded clear-headed, regardless of how much he had consumed, which was one of the several qualities about him that Kaya had stopped trying to explain. "Do you need help moving them?"
"Please."
He jumped off her head and a puff of white smoke expanded outward from his small frame, filling the space above the clearing and rolling across the ground, and when it cleared there was a white wolf standing where the lucky cat had been.
Kaya always found this moment startling even after years of seeing it. The white wolf was nearly ten meters tall and covered in fur so bright it carried its own kind of light, silver in the morning sun, his long tail sweeping behind him like something moving through deep water. He was large enough to make her feel small and calm about it — there was a quality to his presence in this form that settled the space around him rather than alarming it.
He looked at her, waiting.
"One by one," she said. "Separate by gender."
He picked them up with his mouth by the backs of their shirts, gently, and placed them on his back. Kaya supervised the sorting. They moved the crew into the building complex efficiently, distributed into the appropriate rooms. The bumping of the wolf's gait was unavoidable, and Nami woke partway through and contributed the cherry blossom wine back to the general environment of Ban's back before she was fully conscious of what was happening.
Ban held still long enough for Kaya to get Nami into her room. His expression was the expression of a creature that has a sense of personal dignity and has been wronged against it.
"I know," Kaya said. "I'm sorry. Come outside."
She ran a water pipe out from the building and Ban stood in the open space and allowed himself to be bathed, which he managed to frame as an indignity while clearly enjoying. He moved through various positions to ensure even coverage, turning himself in the water with the self-regard of a creature that knew he looked exceptional and wanted to know he looked exceptional consistently. The morning sun hit the wet fur and broke into light. Kaya worked down his back with the pipe and thought that she was, essentially, bathing a very large pet who also happened to be a Great Demon and would take offense at the phrasing.
She thought about the Straw Hats leaving.
The thought arrived the way it had been arriving for days — not suddenly, but steadily, the way water levels rise. They would find a time. The visit had been longer than any of them had planned, and Chopper was awake, and the reason for being on Sakura Island was complete. There was no reason they would not leave soon.
She had been a pampered young lady before the plague. She had known that about herself without particularly minding it; she had been sheltered by her family's money and by the good fortune of having people around her who wanted to take care of her. The plague had taken all of those people and left her with a choice about who she would be afterward, and she had made the choice.
She did not want to be a weight on anyone. Not on Usopp, not on the adventure, not on anything important. She had her own work. She had Sakura Island and the patients who arrived here and Tsunade still had things left to teach her.
Sometimes she wanted to go anyway. To be on a ship with the wind changing and Usopp's voice carrying across the deck.
The water pipe kept running. Ban posed in it. Kaya stood there with the pipe and let herself have the feeling without deciding anything about it yet.