-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen had shown battlefields and throne rooms and the architecture of empires. It had shown the deaths of legends and the births of new powers and the slow grinding gears of history moving toward whatever it was moving toward.
Now it showed a rainy afternoon in a small village in the East Blue.
Windmill Village — Foosha Village, the place at the edge of East Blue that most of the world had no reason to know existed, which had been producing people who gave the world reasons to pay attention with a consistency that was starting to look like something beyond coincidence. The rain fell on it the same way rain fell everywhere: indifferent, thorough, making the streets muddy and the rooftops percussion and the whole ordinary scene carry the particular weight of weather that was not weather as metaphor but weather as simple fact.
Pedestrians moved through it with umbrellas, hurrying between the business of their lives. The grey sky pressed down. The village was exactly what it looked like: a small, unremarkable place at the edge of things, going about a rainy day.
Then Ann arrived.
The rain evaporated around her.
This was not dramatic about it — not a visible barrier or a deliberate display, but simply the property of a person who ran hot enough at the substrate level that water did not complete its relationship with her skin before ceasing to be water. The raindrops found the heat field and dissipated. Her clothes remained dry. The street around her for a radius of about a meter remained dry, while everything outside that radius continued to be wet in the way the rest of Windmill Village was wet.
People stopped.
Not uniformly — some kept walking, because people kept walking through most things when they had somewhere to be. But enough stopped that a small perimeter of attention formed around the woman moving through the village's main street with the unhurried quality of someone who had come here for a specific purpose and was following the geography of her memory toward it.
She was holding a girl.
The girl's hair was two-toned — red on one side, white on the other — and the rest of the visible information about her condition was not ambiguous. Pale in the specific, thorough way of things that had completed the process of becoming pale. Still in the specific, final way of things that had finished moving.
"Ann!"
The voice came from a woman with orange curly hair who had been standing in the village's main road with a cigarette that the rain was doing its best to inconvenience, doing the loose surveillance of a person who had been keeping an eye on this neighborhood for long enough that keeping an eye on it had become ambient rather than active.
Curly Dadan's face had the quality of a woman who had been made by difficult years into something functional and unsentimental, and whose functionality and unsentimentality were not the same thing as the absence of feeling — they were just the form that feeling took in a person who had been shaped by what she'd been shaped by.
The cigarette fell from her mouth when she got close enough to see the girl properly.
She did not notice it fall.
"Uta?" The name came out with the specific quality of a question whose answer the asker already suspected and was asking anyway, in the hope that the suspicion was wrong. "Uta — you're so grown, the last time I saw you you were —" She reached out and touched the girl's face.
Cold. The specific temperature of something that had been this temperature for long enough that it was not going to change.
Dadan's hand withdrew. She stood in the rain — her white shirt darkening with it, her hair plastered down, the cigarette somewhere on the wet street behind her — and the thing that happened to her face was not the thing that happened when you processed news intellectually. It was the thing that happened when a body received information that the mind was not fast enough to intercept.
She had buried Ace.
Not buried — there was no body to bury, there was never a body to bury, which was its own particular shape of grief because the absence of a body meant the grief had nowhere to go except to construct something to go to. A cenotaph. A marker. A place to stand and say the words to when the words needed to be said somewhere.
And now.
"Why are they always so young?" She was not asking Ann. She was not asking anyone present. The rain had the decency not to answer. "Ace is gone, and now Uta is like this, and one day I'll — will I be picking up Luffy's body too? Will that be the end of it?"
The grief that Curly Dadan had been storing in the specific compartment of herself that was designated for grief about young people dying broke its containment. The tears were immediate and unself-conscious in the way that grief was immediate and unself-conscious when the body had stopped waiting for permission from the dignity apparatus.
Then the anger came in to reinforce the grief, the way it often did with Dadan.
"Shanks," she said, in the tone of beginning a sentence that would end somewhere specific and unpleasant. "Isn't Shanks supposed to be powerful? Isn't he one of the most powerful men on the sea? Then why — why couldn't he — what is the point of all that power if you can't even —" She moved through a register of words that the Sky Screen's watching audience could hear but that the narrator declines to transcribe fully, directed at Shanks and at Garp and at the general category of powerful men who collected power and then demonstrated its insufficiency at the moments that mattered most.
She said most of the dirty words she knew. She invented some new combinations.
The audience watching the Sky Screen — across every ship and every island and every shore where people had gathered to see what it would show next — received this without commentary. Some of them had their own feelings about powerful men who couldn't protect the people they were supposed to protect. The words landed differently depending on where you were standing.
When the watching had grown enough that it was becoming an event rather than a moment, Dadan pulled herself together with the practical discipline of a woman who had been managing a household of criminals and feral children for a long time and knew when the situation required logistics rather than grief.
She took Ann up the mountain road toward the bandit hideout, into the house, out of the rain.
She had met Uta only a few times — the girl had passed through Windmill Village on the occasions she'd passed through, the same way the other children who had orbited this place had passed through, leaving impressions that Dadan filed under the category of "children I did not expect to love but apparently did." The girl singers were like that. You met them and they were difficult and demanding and full of ideas about how the world should be arranged differently, and then they were gone, and then it was too late for the filing system to be useful.
There was no coffin. There was no coffin because no one had expected to need one.
Dadan went through the house and found a quilt — clean, the best one, not a consideration she articulated but one that her hands arrived at without being asked to — and wrapped Uta in it from end to end, careful about it, with the specific attention she gave to things that mattered. The rain outside made burial impractical for now. She put the girl on her own bed. When the weather cleared, she would have the ground prepared next to Ace's cenotaph.
So they could be near each other. Two children who had never properly met, who had shared the specific experience of being left at the margins of someone powerful's life because the power required a certain kind of distance from the people it might otherwise have protected. They could be near each other on this hillside at the edge of East Blue where the windmills turned.
It was not enough. It was what was available.
When Dadan came back to the main room, Ann was standing in the doorway, still. Looking out at the rain without any indication of having moved while Dadan was in the bedroom.
"You're not staying," Dadan said. It was not a question. She knew Ann's character by this point — the coming and going with the quality of fire, present intensely and then gone, leaving the people in the vicinity processing the heat that remained.
Ann turned her head slightly. Shook it.
"I have things that need handling," she said. Her voice had the specific quality of someone who had been carrying something heavy long enough that the weight was no longer something she commented on but simply something she moved with. "Dadan. Tell the people around you — tell them not to go out to sea for a while. Something large is coming."
The warning had the quality of the specific kind of warning that people who knew things about the future gave when they were not in a position to be more specific but were not willing to say nothing.
Dadan looked at her.
"Ann —"
The fire came up from the ground around Ann's feet without ceremony — not a performance, just the manifestation of a decision made, the flames rising and wrapping and the fire tornado climbing to the height that it climbed to when Ann was leaving somewhere. The circle of heat expanded briefly, pressing the doorway backward, pushing the rain further from the house.
Then it went out.
The rain closed in where the fire had been. The doorway held only rain and the smell of something recently burning.
Dadan stood in her own doorway in the wet and looked at the place where the woman had been.
She was still standing there — not coming in, not going anywhere, caught in the specific suspension of someone whose grief was too large for the available gestures — when the quilt moved.
Not the small movement of fabric settling against an uneven surface. Not the movement of the house shifting in the wind. The quilt moved with the specific deliberateness of something responding to an internal decision, the fabric shifting with direction, and then from the wrapped end of it — from the end that contained the girl's arms — a single hand emerged.
White. Young. Reaching upward with the particular quality of something that did not know quite where it was but was certain that upward was the correct direction.
Curly Dadan turned around very slowly.
The hand was still raised.
Outside, the rain continued its indifferent work on the rooftops of Windmill Village, making its crisp percussion sounds, not commenting.
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