-Broadcast-
The engagement with Dark WarGreymon lasted half an hour. When it ended, Aramaki had completed what he'd come to do — the Marine warships and the World Government vessels had time to clear the waters, no direct confrontation with the Emperors, the institution's strength preserved. He'd kept the monster occupied. That was the mission's last requirement, and it was met.
He went directly to the medical ship when he returned.
The female military doctor examined Kujaku and Hibari thoroughly, and then she left the room without saying anything.
She found her superior officer and gave her report there instead.
After that, several other doctors came through the ward in succession, each one arriving with the expression of someone hoping to find something the previous examiner had missed. None of them did. The faces that walked back out told the story before anyone said a word.
"How is Helmeppo?" Hibari asked. "He was hit the most."
The answer came back quickly: Helmeppo's Arhat Fruit was a Mythical Zoan, and Mythical Zoan users carried a natural constitution that resisted certain categories of corruption. His body was processing the damage on its own. He would recover.
Kujaku lay on her hospital bed and looked at the ceiling for a moment. "Of course he does. He escapes everything. We don't have that kind of luck."
She said it without particular bitterness. She had joined SWORD understanding the math of it. The missions that couldn't be assigned to anyone official went to people who had formally stopped being official. That arrangement had a cost built into it from the start, and she had accepted the cost.
She considered calling her family. She thought about it for a while, and then decided against it. She wanted to die the way she had lived inside this unit — without making her grief someone else's problem to carry.
Hibari buried her face in her knees. The tears came without her permission. She could feel the weakness deepening in her body with each hour — not pain, which would have been easier to orient around, but an absence spreading from the inside outward, the sense of something essential running out.
Aramaki arrived at the ward and did what he could.
He pressed his palm against each of them in turn and pushed natural vitality into their bodies — the Mori Mori no Mi's life force, concentrated and genuine, the closest thing he had to medicine for something that wasn't a disease in any conventional sense. It helped, briefly. The color came back to their faces for a little while.
But the Flying Guillotine's wasn't something that could be topped off. The blood holes it had left behind — invisible from the outside, distributed through both bodies in the dozens — were not closing. Whatever the seventh form had put into those droplets had taken full occupation of the tissue around each entry point and was working outward from there. Aramaki's vitality went in and leaked out through damage that couldn't be sealed from the outside.
The bodies were structurally compromised. No amount of life force changed the structure.
He sat with them afterward, and the weight of what he was sitting with was visible on his face in a way he didn't try to hide. He was a soldier. He understood that his people died sometimes. That didn't make watching it manageable.
"You won't reach Headquarters," he said. He said it directly, because they deserved that. "Whatever you want, say it now. I'll do what I can. Don't leave things unsaid."
It was Kujaku's idea to go up to the deck.
"Hibari," she said. "Get Helmeppo. We should all watch the end of the night together. SWORD sees things through."
Hibari wiped her face and nodded.
Aramaki built a wheelchair from the wood the ship's deck offered him, shaped it with the Mori Mori no Mi into something functional in the time it took Hibari to find Helmeppo. The bald man was asleep. He was loaded into the chair without waking up and rolled through the corridor to the outside, blinking into the pre-dawn air when the sea breeze finally registered.
He looked around. Kujaku. Hibari. The ocean. The sky beginning to pale at the horizon.
Dawn. The particular quality of light just before the sun comes up — not darkness anymore but not quite day, the world in the moment before it decides what it's going to be. He felt something in his chest loosen that had been tight since Grus went down.
"You're going to catch colds in those," he said, looking at their hospital gowns.
Kujaku's mouth curved. "We'll manage."
Aramaki found a reason to be somewhere else and gave them the deck.
Kujaku pushed the wheelchair. She pushed it slowly, keeping pace with Hibari walking beside them, the three of them moving along the rail in the quiet before the sun.
"You really are lucky," Kujaku said, behind Helmeppo. "Every time. Every single time." A pause. "Don't waste it. Take care of yourself. Don't overdo it when you're back."
Helmeppo had been thinking something was wrong since they came outside. Kujaku and Hibari were pale in a way that couldn't be explained by a hard night and a long medical examination. Pale like paper. Pale like something further gone than injury.
Hibari stopped beside him.
She had been trying to find a way into what she wanted to say for the entire walk, and had not found one, and had now run out of time for finding one. She reached over and pinched his face with both hands.
Helmeppo blinked at her.
The tears were already running down her face before she spoke. "Be more aware of other people. Be kinder to the women around you." Her voice was mostly steady. "Don't forget me."
He looked at her eyes and understood what he was seeing — not what the words were, but what was underneath them, and why she was saying them now instead of any other time.
He had not noticed. He had spent all this time not noticing, and now there was no time left in which to have noticed earlier.
The cracks appeared on her hands first.
They spread like lines in old ceramic, branching outward from the knuckles and climbing toward the wrist, each one a pale fracture in the surface of her skin. She looked down at them. Her expression moved through something that was not quite fear and not quite acceptance, but lived in the narrow space between them.
The hand that was still touching Helmeppo's face broke apart at the fingers. The pieces didn't fall — they dissolved, absorbed by something that wasn't there, leaving less of her than had been there a moment before.
"You want me to go so quickly?" Kujaku's voice came from behind the wheelchair, quiet and dry. She was looking at her own hands, the same network of fractures spreading across her palms. "How rude."
The sun broke the horizon.
The light came across the water in a flat gold line, reaching the ship, reaching the three people standing at the rail, and the two women who were cracking apart in it looked, for a moment, like they were made of light themselves.