-Broadcast-
Kaya had been gone for close to an hour.
The reception room had exhausted its novelty approximately twenty minutes in. Sanji had conducted a methodical inspection of the furniture, the wall hangings, the carved table surface, and the general layout — the Kamabakka Kingdom's mandatory art curriculum had left him with opinions about interior design that surfaced in idle moments — and concluded that whoever had built this space had genuine taste and no interest in impressing anyone with it. He filed this assessment and sat back down.
"Has anyone reported her?" Robin said, from where she was sitting with Chopper across her lap. "The strange doctor. In any newspaper, anywhere."
"I haven't seen it," Sanji said.
"I heard her name when I was still with the Revolutionary Army." Robin's tone was the particular even one she used for information that came attached to significant events. "One of Sabo people. She survived Baltigo. The Marine had it surrounded. The strange doctor was on the island at the time." A pause. "She was one of very few who came out of that situation alive."
The room took this in.
"Kaya has changed," Nami said, after a moment. Not an accusation — an observation, and a careful one. She looked at Usopp. "You know what happened, don't you."
Usopp had been sitting with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor. He didn't answer immediately. The expression on his face was the one he had when something was heavy enough that the usual management techniques weren't working.
"There's no reason to keep it," he said, finally. "It's not something to be ashamed of."
He looked up.
"Syrup Village is gone. There are only two of us left."
The silence afterward was the kind that follows something the brain recognizes as language but needs a moment to process as meaning.
"Usopp." Nami's voice had changed register. "Don't —"
"I'm not joking." He said it quietly. He wasn't dramatic about it. The absence of drama made it worse. "A plague. It moved through the village in about two days. The older you were, the faster it killed you."
It had been Merry who found it first.
Not the ship — Kaya's Merry, the butler who had managed the Syrup Village manor since before Kaya could walk, who had given the Going Merry its name. He had noticed the first symptoms in the village's elderly, understood what he was looking at, and gone immediately to tell Kaya and her three small companions to get to the coast and away from the population center. He had not known that the disease was already in him when he told them.
He died in his room that night. The plague's progression in older hosts was fast and thorough — internal tissue failing first, the body liquefying from the inside over hours, blood blisters forming on the skin and rupturing in sequence. By morning he was gone, and the disease had crossed into the manor.
By the following afternoon, Kaya's skin had begun to show the dark bruising of internal collapse.
She sent her three companions out. Piiman, Ninjin, and Tamanegi — Usopp's crew, his childhood squadron of aspiring adventurers, the ones who had maintained their post at Syrup Village after their captain sailed. She had been teaching herself medicine since Usopp left, working through Hiriluk's texts and anything else she could find, because she had always wanted to know how bodies worked and there was nothing stopping her now. She went to the pharmacy, assessed what she had, and began injecting herself with a sequence of compounds calculated to slow the disease rather than cure it.
It bought her time. Not enough time, but enough.
The three boys, once she'd driven them away from the manor, had come up with the only plan available to people too sick to sail and too stubborn to give up. Piiman had set fire to several houses along the coast. Smoke visible from the sea. Someone passing would see it. Someone passing might stop.
Someone did.
The strange doctor had arrived at the island following the smoke, found the manor, found Kaya unconscious with pharmaceutical compounds fighting her blood for her remaining functional cells, and injected her with something that entered the battle at the cellular level. Kaya had woken up on a clean bed with clean clothes, and the doctor was sitting across the room reading.
The three boys had been in worse condition than Kaya. They had held on long enough to do the one thing they needed to do. Piiman had walked the doctor to Kaya's door, made sure she was inside, and then the last of whatever had been keeping him upright gave out. He had died at the threshold with a smile on his face, going down to wherever his two brothers had already gone to wait for him.
Their ashes were in the cherry blossom forest now. Kaya visited them on the anniversary of their deaths.
Before leaving Syrup Village, she had set fire to what remained. The only way to fully eliminate the plague was temperature and time. She had watched the village burn down to the foundation and then sailed away with the strange doctor, who had accepted her as a student because it seemed like the correct response to someone who had managed to partially cure themselves of a lethal disease using improvised pharmaceutical logic.
"She didn't tell me any of this," Usopp said. "During the calls. She told me she'd left the village — she said she'd gone to train as a doctor. She let me think she left because she wanted to." He stopped. "She didn't want to interrupt my journey. She thought if she told me what happened, I'd come back."
His eyes had gone red at the edges. He was not crying, but the effort required to not be crying was visible.
"She faced all of this alone because she didn't want to disrupt me." He laughed once, a sound that had no humor in it. "I'm a terrible man."
"You didn't know," Nami said.
"That's not the same as it not having happened."
The room was quiet for a while.
Nami was looking at the wall. Somewhere in this cherry blossom forest, Piiman and Ninjin and Tamanegi were under a tree — three boys who had wanted to be craftsmen and bar owners and novelists, who had held on past their breaking point to do one last thing for someone they'd considered their captain's lady. The tree above them was taller and healthier than the ones around it.
Outside, through the open window, the petals continued to fall.