-Broadcast-
Charlotte Hikaru's body pulled itself out of the nightmare before her mind was ready.
She was sitting upright on the bed before she was fully conscious, gasping in short ragged pulls, her hand pressed flat against her chest as though she could physically hold her heartbeat to a manageable pace. The flaming hand was still vivid — the heat, the scale of it, her own voice saying I don't want to die — and it took several seconds of staring at unfamiliar walls before the present reasserted itself over the past.
She was alive. She was sitting up. This was not Cake Island.
The room was small and spare — a bed, a lamp, and nothing else. The walls were not stone or timber or plaster. They were flesh. The surface of them shifted faintly when she looked directly at it, textures of muscle and membrane visible beneath a translucent outer layer. Blood vessels ran across them in branching networks, thick as rope in some places, carrying blood in directions she could not map. The vessels pulsed with the slow, indifferent rhythm of something enormous and sleeping.
Hikaru stared at this for a moment and did not allow herself to panic. She tried to stand and found that her body had opinions about that. The Mangekyō Sharingan's debt came due at inconvenient times, and today it presented as every limb feeling like it had been filled with wet sand. She settled back and did not shout for help — she didn't know where she was or who was near, and announcing herself to strangers in an unknown location with no combat capacity was exactly as bad an idea as it sounded.
She didn't have to wait long.
She heard footsteps first — two sets, one heavy and familiar. The door opened and Charlotte Katakuri walked in, bandages covering most of his torso and both arms, moving with the slightly-too-careful gait of someone whose body was cooperating under protest.
He crossed the room in three steps and pulled her into his arms, one large hand settling on top of her head with the gentleness he reserved exclusively for her.
"Thank goodness. You've been out for a full day and night — I didn't dare wake you." He exhaled something that was not quite a word. "I'm glad you're awake."
The familiarity of him — his size, his smell, the weight of his hands — disassembled the last of the nightmare's grip. Hikaru pressed her face against his chest and let the tension leave her in one long breath.
"It's good that we're both alive," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she intended. Her eyes had gone wet without her deciding they would. "This whole fight was a disaster for Totto Land. We almost—"
"We didn't."
"Admiral Kaitora is stronger than we estimated. Even with Three-Eyed Tien Shinhan, our combined strength might not have been enough for a direct confrontation. But if we'd stayed together from the beginning—" She stopped herself. Retrospective strategy was a comfortable way to avoid the more uncomfortable conclusion, which was that they had been outclassed. She filed it for later.
She heard the second set of footsteps stop outside the door, and then an old man's voice came through it, measured and calm.
"You'll recover faster than you think. You're young. Overusing pupil techniques shortens your life expectancy — but you have years to build the physical foundation to support them. Don't try to stand yet. Rest a while longer."
Pupil techniques. The phrase stopped her thought process entirely.
She looked at her brother. He read her face and answered before she could ask.
"He's the one who caught us in the net. We were already being carried toward the stomach — he pulled us out." A pause. "There's no one else here. Just the three of us."
Hikaru relaxed the tension she hadn't noticed she'd started building, and replaced it with curiosity. An old man living inside a giant ancient creature's digestive system, who knew what pupil techniques were and could identify the effects of overusing them on sight — that was not a combination that arranged itself naturally. What kind of life produced a person like this?
Her stomach answered the question of what came next before her brain did. A day and night without food or water, and the protest from her midsection was immediate and embarrassing. The flush that crossed her face had nothing to do with the fever.
"Come outside," the old man called. "There's grilled fish. Eat something first and talk after."
Outside was stranger than the room.
The interior of Leviathan was its own world. Blood vessels ran across the walls and ceiling in thick braided networks, carrying their contents with a pressure you could hear — a low, continuous pulse that set the background register of the entire space. Bones rose from the floor at intervals like columns that had grown organically rather than been placed, and the arches between them held a ceiling made of the same fleshy material as everything else. Bioluminescent patches on the walls provided a dim, wavering light that had no obvious source.
Things lived here that had no business being anywhere else. Creatures ranging in size from insects to trailing translucent masses drifted between the blood vessels and bones, at home in the ecosystem that Leviathan's body had generated without particularly intending to. They paid the siblings no attention.
Hikaru walked beside her brother, each of them steadying the other where the floor's slight organic give made footing uncertain. The familiar pulse of the creature beneath their feet was something between disturbing and oddly reassuring — it meant Leviathan was still alive, still sleeping, still not actively digesting whatever was in here with it.
"Nakime wasn't able to reach us," she said quietly, reading the situation. "Or something prevented her from trying."
She didn't elaborate. Being swallowed by a being of Leviathan's category while inside Infinity Castle's spatial structure was not something Nakime would have had a contingency for. The Joker Pirates' planning had not included it. The brother and sister had gone into a gap that no one had mapped.
For now — one step at a time.
The old man had set up his cooking arrangement at a distance from the walls, where a flat area of cartilaginous floor gave better footing. Stone slabs, thick ones, were positioned between the fire and the surrounding tissue — a precaution that spoke to long practice, someone who had learned through trial what the interior of this space would and would not tolerate.
The fire itself was burning well. Hikaru watched him feed it.
He placed his hands together in a configuration she recognized as a seal, moved through the sequence with the efficiency of muscle memory, and exhaled a controlled stream of fire from his mouth that caught the dry wood and held steady at the temperature he wanted. He adjusted it without seeming to think about it, turning the fish skewered above it with the same practiced ease. In under a minute, the smell that filled the strange space was simple and real and good.
Fire Style. Different element, same school of technique as Admiral Kaitora's Water Style. She hadn't expected to encounter ninjutsu in Leviathan's stomach.
She filed that detail beside his knowledge of pupil techniques, and the picture of the old man continued to assemble itself without yet having a name.
"The jar is salt," he said, not looking up from the fish. "Sprinkle what you like."
Hikaru accepted the skewer and looked at him properly — the face creased with decades of living, the clothes patched in enough places that the original garment was probably academic, the frame that was too lean to look imposing and moved in ways that quietly suggested that impressiveness was not the point.
She was very curious about who he was.
She was also, right now, very hungry. She ate the fish, and saved the rest for after they were done.