-Broadcast-
Helmeppo shouted.
He didn't process what he was seeing fast enough to do anything else — his body simply reacted, the call for medical personnel coming out of him before any conscious decision was made, loud enough to carry across the deck.
Kujaku reached for him. She extended her arms toward the man in the wheelchair, trying to reach him before he could do something that would hurt his wounds, and her arms broke apart in the middle of the motion. Not slowly. Between one moment and the next, the limbs that had been reaching for him weren't there anymore — fragments of something that had been Kujaku, white against the deck, already disappearing.
"Don't shout," she said. Her voice was steady. The pieces near her feet were already gone. "There is nothing to be done. The entire medical staff already confirmed it. Just stay here and talk with us for a little while longer. That's all we want."
Aramaki, watching from the far end of the deck, placed his hand against the wooden railing. The wheelchair reshaped itself — growing, extending, the Mori Mori no Mi working the grain of the wood into a bench with a back, wide enough for three people.
Hibari sat on Helmeppo's right. Kujaku moved to his left, more carefully now, conscious of how little of her body still answered her intent. Together they settled into the bench Aramaki had made them, and looked out at the horizon.
The sun was still below it. The sky was the color of the moment just before it decides.
"I never noticed how much there was to look at," Hibari said.
Helmeppo's breathing had gone wrong. The excitement and the pain were working together against him, making each breath an effort, and the tears came before he could find any reason to stop them. He had never been good at holding things in. He had never tried particularly hard to be.
Kujaku rested her head on his left shoulder. The weight of it was light, and getting lighter.
"You really are ugly when you cry," she said. "Even worse than when you smile, and your smile has always been terrible." A pause. "I'm going to go see the captain. I will tell him you said hey."
Hibari leaned her head against his right shoulder. She had been trying to say this for a long time and was now out of time and past caring about the form of it. "Don't forget me too quickly. I hate being lonely. Visit sometimes."
"I will," Helmeppo said. "I—"
He turned his head to look at her.
Hibari's body shattered.
It didn't break the way things break — it shattered the way crystal does, into fragments that caught the first light coming over the horizon and held it, briefly, each piece sparkling before it was gone. He reached for her, both hands trying to catch something, and caught nothing. The fragments slipped through his fingers like they weren't solid, because they weren't anymore.
He turned to his left.
Kujaku was already almost gone. Whatever remained of her gave him one last look — a particular expression she'd had throughout the Wano operation, the one that meant she knew exactly what was happening and had decided to face it on her own terms. She took it with her.
What was left on the bench were clothes. Hospital gowns, still warm from the bodies that had been in them a moment ago, still carrying the faint presence of two people who had been here.
Helmeppo held them and couldn't move.
The sun cleared the horizon. The light came across the water in the flat, indifferent way that light comes across water — beautiful the way the world is beautiful when it doesn't care what's happening on it. He knelt on the deck without deciding to. He held the clothes against his chest and looked at the sea.
He could not feel the warmth at all.
The medical staff found him there and brought him back inside. Helmeppo was not going to die — not from this, not yet. He had a meeting with the Marine Admiral still ahead of him, and a future that the Sky Screen had already shown in outline. SWORD still had a mission, even if most of the people who had made SWORD what it was were gone.
He fainted before they got him back to his berth.
—The Sky Screen's Wano Country broadcast ends here. Before returning to the present, a brief flash-forward:—
The Marine Cemetery was built at considerable personal expense by Fleet Admiral Artoria — a formal burial ground for sailors who had died in the service of justice. It was the kind of institution that didn't exist before her administration and would not have been built by the one before it.
Most of SWORD had died without recoverable remains. Their graves here were cenotaphs. But cenotaphs counted. The names were real.
Helmeppo came once a month when he wasn't on assignment. He carried white flowers and went to each grave in turn, and spent time there the way people spend time in places where someone they miss used to be.
He stopped in front of Hibari's and Kujaku's cenotaphs. Their photographs were mounted on the stone — young faces, younger than they'd seemed during the operation, the way people always look younger in retrospect. He had never quite been able to stop seeing the gap between those photographs and the things that had come after them.
"SWORD is gone," he said. "The Marine doesn't need that kind of unit anymore. Artoria built something that doesn't require people working in the dark behind it." He was quiet for a moment. "I don't know whether to be glad or not."
He'd been made Rear Admiral. He was working as Admiral Gin's deputy now, which was a legitimate career outcome and more stability than SWORD had ever offered. He had no complaint he could name. He just hadn't fully decided, in the years since Wano, what to do with the version of himself that had existed inside the unit.
The God's Knights had never recovered from what Wano Country cost them. Garling alone couldn't substitute for an entire institution. The Five Elders had been watching the Marine's increasing independence with expressions that suggested alarm and doing nothing actionable about it, because the Marine had leverage now that it hadn't had before, and everyone understood that. The initiative had shifted.
Wano Country had done that. The people buried in this cemetery had done that.
"Your leave is almost up."
Tsuru walked up beside him. She was older than she'd been during the operation — time had continued doing its calculation — and she moved with the particular care of someone who had stopped pretending that movement was effortless.
She stood beside her granddaughter's cenotaph.
"I know," Helmeppo said. "I just wanted to see them."
Tsuru looked at him for a moment — the serious expression, the resolution in it, the part of him that had never finished grieving and probably never would. She had told him, at various points over the years, to look forward. He understood the advice. He had just never quite implemented it.
She didn't say it again. She put her hand on his shoulder instead.
She had buried Kujaku. She had outlived her granddaughter. After that, the shape of life and death had rearranged itself into something she'd made her peace with, because the alternative was not an option. Kujaku had always had a tendency toward the kind of path that ended early. That was who she'd been. It was not a failure of anyone's that it had worked out accordingly.
What she wanted now was simple: she wanted this man to outlive her. That was not a complicated request. Just one more thing to ask of someone who had already been asked for quite a lot.
She patted his shoulder once, and left her hand there.
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