Luffy explored the tower the way Luffy explored everything: with his hands, his feet, his nose, and an absolute zero regard for the concepts of "personal property," "royal protocol," or "please don't touch that, it's a priceless artifact from the Void Century."
He bounced off the walls. Literally. The walls of Shirahoshi's tower were made of a coral composite that had just enough give to be springy, and Luffy discovered this within approximately four seconds of beginning his exploration and immediately dedicated the next several minutes to testing the elastic properties of every vertical surface in the room by launching himself at them headfirst and seeing how far he bounced back.
"BOING!" He hit the north wall, ricocheted off at an angle, sailed across the room trailing laughter like a comet trailing light, and slammed into the south wall. "BOING!" Back across the room. "BOING!" Off the ceiling. "SHISHISHI! This room is GREAT!"
Shirahoshi watched him.
She watched him with those enormous blue eyes—eyes that had not left him since the moment he'd crashed through her window, eyes that tracked his erratic, pinball trajectory across the room with the patient, unwavering focus of someone who had been given a gift so precious that looking away from it, even for a moment, felt like a crime against the universe.
She had stopped crying.
This was, for Shirahoshi, remarkable. Tears were as natural to the Mermaid Princess as breathing—a constant, ever-present phenomenon that accompanied every emotion from joy to sorrow to mild surprise. She cried when she was happy. She cried when she was sad. She cried when she stubbed her tail on furniture. She cried when she remembered something nice. She cried when she forgot something nice. She cried, essentially, all the time, and the cessation of tears was an event significant enough to warrant notation.
She had stopped crying because she was too busy smiling.
The smile had started small—that tentative, fragile curve that had appeared through the tears when Luffy had asked about the kitchen. But it had grown. Steadily, persistently, fed by each "BOING" and each "SHISHISHI" and each moment of watching this tiny, indestructible, incomprehensible boy treat her prison—her cage, her gilded cage, the walls that had contained her for years—as a playground.
The smile was now enormous. Not just proportionally enormous (though it was that too—everything about Shirahoshi was proportionally enormous, from the curve of her lips to the dimples in her cheeks to the way her eyes crinkled at the corners when the smile reached its full, devastating width). It was enormous in the way that mattered more than dimensions—enormous in its openness, its vulnerability, its complete and total absence of the fear and sadness and resigned despair that had been the default configuration of Shirahoshi's face for as long as she could remember.
She was watching a boy bounce off her walls, and she was happy.
When was the last time she had been happy?
She couldn't remember.
That was the saddest thing, and also the most beautiful thing, and the collision of those two truths in the center of Shirahoshi's chest produced an ache that was unlike anything she had ever felt—not the ache of loneliness, which she knew intimately, but the ache of loneliness ending, which was somehow more painful because it illuminated, by contrast, exactly how much loneliness there had been.
"Ne, ne!" Luffy called from somewhere near the ceiling, where he had gotten one stretchy arm tangled around a chandelier (made of luminescent deep-sea crystals, worth approximately the GDP of a small surface nation, currently being used as a swing by a boy who would be King of the Pirates). "What's THIS thing?"
He was pointing at a large, ornate chest that sat against the far wall—a treasure chest, or what looked like a treasure chest, decorated with the royal crest of the Ryugu Kingdom and sealed with locks that were themselves works of art, intricate mechanisms of coral and metal that would have challenged even the most skilled locksmith.
"That's—" Shirahoshi began, her voice still carrying the residual thickness of recent tears but warming rapidly. "That's a chest of letters. From my mother. She wrote them for me before she—before—"
The tears threatened. The smile wobbled. The enormous blue eyes shimmered with the sudden return of the grief that was always there, always lurking beneath the surface, the grief of a daughter who had lost a mother to an assassin's arrow and had never fully healed because how do you heal from something like that, how do you fill a hole that is shaped exactly like the person you loved most in the world—
"Your mom wrote you letters?" Luffy said, and his voice was—
Different.
Not softer, exactly. Luffy didn't do "soft" the way normal people did soft. He did "soft" the way a thunderstorm did "soft"—still enormous, still powerful, still fundamentally Luffy, but with the edges rounded, the volume reduced, the energy redirected from "explosion" to "warmth." It was the voice he used when his crew was hurting. The voice he used when someone he cared about was sad. The voice that communicated, without words, without explanation, without any of the emotional vocabulary that Luffy had never bothered to learn: I'm here. You're not alone. Tell me.
Shirahoshi nodded, her pink hair swaying with the motion like a sea of silk. "She—she wanted me to have them. For when I was older. For when I could—"
"That's really cool," Luffy said.
He dropped from the chandelier, landing on the floor with a rubbery thwop, and walked over to the chest. He didn't touch it. He stood in front of it and looked at it, and the expression on his face was one that most people never got to see—an expression of quiet, genuine, sincere respect for something that mattered to someone.
"Your mom must've been really nice," he said. "To write you letters and stuff."
"She was," Shirahoshi whispered. "She was the nicest person in the whole ocean."
"Yeah." Luffy nodded, once, with the simple gravity of someone who understood—who understood what it meant to have someone important, and to lose them, and to carry them with you in the spaces they left behind. "She sounds like it."
He didn't say "I'm sorry." He didn't say "I know how you feel." He didn't offer any of the conventional condolences that people offered when confronted with grief—the rehearsed phrases and the gentle platitudes that meant well but landed nowhere, that filled the silence without touching the pain.
He just said "she sounds like it," and he meant it, and that was more than enough.
Shirahoshi's smile returned. Trembling. Fragile. But present.
"Thank you," she said, and the words were almost too quiet to hear, even at her scale—a whisper from a person the size of a building, carrying more weight than a shout from a person of any size.
"Shishishi!" The grin snapped back. The energy returned. The storm resumed its normal intensity. "Okay! What else is in here? Are those books? What about that thing? Is that a weapon? Why is there a weapon in your room? Wait—is that a THROWING AXE stuck in the wall?!"
He was across the room in an instant, staring at the object in question with a fascination that shifted rapidly from "cool, a weapon" to something else, something sharper, as he noticed details that even his meat-focused brain couldn't ignore.
The axe was embedded in the coral wall approximately four feet above the bed. Not hung decoratively. Not mounted on a plaque. Embedded—driven into the wall with enough force to crack the surrounding coral in a spiderweb pattern that radiated outward from the point of impact, buried to the haft in material that was strong enough to withstand thousands of atmospheres of water pressure but which had yielded to this weapon like butter to a hot knife.
There were other marks on the walls.
Now that Luffy was looking—really looking, with the focused attention that he usually reserved for meat and occasionally deployed for things that triggered his protective instincts—he could see them everywhere. Scars in the coral. Patches where damage had been repaired, the new material slightly different in color from the old. Cracks that had been filled and smoothed over but which still showed, faintly, like healed wounds on skin.
The room wasn't just a room.
The room was a target.
"Shirahoshi," Luffy said, and his voice had changed again. Not to the soft-Luffy voice, the one he used for sad crewmates and hurting friends. To the other voice. The quiet voice. The flat voice. The voice that preceded the shadow falling across his eyes.
"Y-yes?" Shirahoshi responded, and there was a tremor in the word that hadn't been there before—not fear of Luffy, but fear of the topic, the instinctive flinch of someone who had lived with a particular terror for so long that even thinking about it too directly caused the terror to stir in its den.
"What happened to your walls?"
Shirahoshi's enormous hands came together in her lap, fingers intertwining, squeezing. The tail coiled tighter around her body, the instinctive self-protective gesture of a creature making itself smaller, trying to occupy less space, trying to present less target.
"It's—it's because of—there's a man," Shirahoshi said, and each word was a stone dropped into water, heavy and reluctant, sinking through the silence between them. "A fishman. His name is Vander Decken. He—"
She stopped.
Her eyes darted to the window—the intact window, not the one Luffy had shattered—and in that dart, in that quick, involuntary, terrified glance at the world beyond her walls, Luffy saw everything he needed to see.
He didn't need the details.
He didn't need the full story—the obsession, the Devil Fruit power, the Mark-Mark Fruit that allowed Vander Decken to target anything he had touched and throw objects that would follow that target across any distance, through any obstacle, unerringly, endlessly. He didn't need to know about the marriage proposal that was really a threat, the "love" that was really possession, the years—years—that Shirahoshi had spent in this room because stepping outside meant becoming a target, meant living in the path of weapons that would follow her wherever she went, thrown from across the ocean by a man who believed that wanting someone and being entitled to them were the same thing.
He didn't need the details because he had seen the dart.
The dart of the eyes. The quick, fearful glance at the window. The motion of a person who had spent so long being afraid of what was outside that even looking at outside was an act of courage.
Luffy had known people who lived in fear.
Nami, chained to Arlong, drawing maps in a room that was both sanctuary and prison. The same eyes. The same dart. The same reflexive flinch at the mention of the thing that kept her trapped.
Vivi, carrying the weight of a kingdom on her shoulders, running from a warlord who played with nations like a child plays with toys. The same shoulders. The same tension. The same held breath that came from living in the shadow of someone else's cruelty.
Robin, hunted for twenty years, running from a world that wanted her dead for the crime of knowing things. The same tiredness. The same resignation. The same look that said "this is my life and it will always be my life and there is no version of events where I am free."
Luffy had seen that look before.
Luffy hated that look.
Not with the white-hot, explosive hatred that he directed at the people who caused it—the Arlongs and the Crocodiles and the Spandam, the petty tyrants and the grand villains who built their power on the suffering of others. That hatred was volcanic, immediate, a force of nature that erupted and consumed and left craters in its wake.
This was different.
This was the hatred he felt for the look itself—for the fact that the look existed, that there were people in the world who wore it, that the world was constructed in such a way that people needed to wear it. It was a hatred born not of rage but of sorrow, the deep, aching sorrow of a person who believed with every fiber of his being that the world should be better than this and was constantly, painfully confronted with evidence that it wasn't.
"He throws things at you," Luffy said. Not a question. A statement.
Shirahoshi nodded. A tiny motion—tiny relative to her size, enormous relative to the courage it required. "He—yes. He touched my hand, once, when I was very young. And now—anything he throws—it comes here. To me. No matter where I—no matter how far—it always—"
Her voice broke.
Not into tears this time. Into something worse. Into silence. The silence of someone who had run out of words for their own suffering, who had described it so many times—to guards, to family, to the empty walls of a room that had become a world—that the words had worn thin, lost their edges, become smooth and hollow with repetition until they couldn't carry meaning anymore.
"That's why I can't leave," she whispered, and the whisper was the size of Luffy's whole body. "That's why I'm here. In this room. Because if I go outside—if I leave the tower—he'll find me. He'll throw things at me. And they'll follow me. And someone might get hurt. Someone always gets hurt, because the things he throws—they're big, and they're fast, and they don't stop until they hit me, and if someone is between me and—"
She couldn't finish.
She didn't need to.
Luffy understood.
She stayed in the tower not because she was afraid for herself—or not only because she was afraid for herself. She stayed because she was afraid for everyone else. Because leaving meant becoming a moving target, and a moving target attracted projectiles, and projectiles didn't discriminate between the target and the people standing next to the target.
She was in prison because leaving prison endangered everyone she loved.
That was the cruelest thing Luffy had ever heard.
And Luffy had heard a lot of cruel things.
The shadow fell.
It fell across his face like a curtain coming down—the brim of the straw hat tilting forward, casting his eyes into darkness, leaving only the lower half of his face visible. The jaw. The mouth. The thin, set line of lips that were not smiling, that had not smiled for several seconds now, that would not smile again until a certain matter had been resolved.
Shirahoshi saw the shadow and flinched.
She flinched because shadow meant anger, and anger—in her experience, in the limited, fear-circumscribed experience of a girl who had been locked in a room for years—anger meant danger. Anger meant violence directed at her. Anger meant Vander Decken hurling another weapon at her tower, the crash and the crack and the shower of coral fragments and the heart-stopping, breath-stealing terror of not knowing if the next one would come through the wall entirely.
She flinched, and she pulled back, her enormous body curling in on itself, the tail wrapping tighter, the hands coming up in a protective gesture that she had practiced so many times it was muscle memory—shield the face, protect the core, make yourself small, make yourself less, maybe if you're less he'll stop, maybe if you're nothing he'll leave you alone—
"I'm gonna beat him up."
The words cut through the room like a blade.
Five words. Twelve letters. One simple, declarative sentence spoken in a voice that was not loud—that was, in fact, remarkably quiet for Luffy, who did everything at full volume as a matter of principle—but which carried a weight that made the air feel heavier, that made the walls seem to lean inward, that made the very concept of "doubt" pack its bags and leave the room without looking back.
Shirahoshi's hands lowered.
Slowly.
Trembling.
Her enormous eyes—wide with the flinch, wet with the ever-present threat of tears, dilated with the adrenaline of reflexive fear—found his face.
The shadow was still there. The eyes were still hidden.
But the mouth—
The mouth was set. Not in a grin. Not in a frown. In something between—a line of absolute, immovable, granite-hard resolve that communicated, more clearly than any grin could have: I have made a decision, and the universe can either accommodate that decision or get out of the way, because those are the only two options and I am not accepting feedback at this time.
"I—what?" Shirahoshi breathed.
Luffy looked up.
The shadow retreated. The eyes appeared. And they were—
Not angry.
Not anymore.
They were clear. Clear the way the sky was clear after a storm, the way water was clear when it was deep enough that nothing could disturb it. Clear with purpose. Clear with certainty. Clear with the absolute, unshakeable, bone-deep conviction that what he was about to say was not a hope, not a wish, not a promise in the conditional sense of "I promise to try."
It was a promise in the Luffy sense.
The only sense that mattered.
"This Vander Decken guy," Luffy said. "He throws stuff at you."
"Y-yes."
"He makes you stay in this room."
"Yes."
"He scares you."
"...Yes."
"And you can't go outside because he'll hurt people."
"Yes." A whisper now. A whisper that ached.
Luffy nodded. Once. The nod of a man who had heard enough, who had all the information he needed, who had completed his assessment of the situation and arrived at his conclusion with the same speed and certainty that he applied to everything—from choosing a crew member to declaring war on a world power to deciding what to eat for lunch.
"Okay," Luffy said. "I'm gonna beat him up."
"You—you can't—he has a Devil Fruit power—anything he throws will follow me—he's dangerous—the guards couldn't—my father's army couldn't—"
"I'm gonna beat him up," Luffy repeated, as if he hadn't heard a single word of the objection, which—knowing Luffy—he possibly hadn't, because counterarguments occupied the same category in Luffy's brain as "reasons not to eat the entire roast" and "explanations for why punching a Celestial Dragon is a bad idea": acknowledged, dismissed, forgotten.
"But—but he's—"
"And then you can go outside."
Shirahoshi's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
No sound came out.
Because what do you say to that?
What do you say to a boy—a small, scarred, ridiculous, impossible boy who you met fifteen minutes ago, who broke into your room through a window, who asked if you could poop, who bounced off your walls like a rubber ball in a box—what do you say to that boy when he looks you in the eye and tells you, with the same casual certainty he would use to say "the sky is blue" or "meat is delicious," that he is going to dismantle the cage that has held you for years?
What do you say when someone offers you freedom like it's obvious?
Like it's simple?
Like the idea that you would remain in this room, afraid, alone, imprisoned by a stalker's obsession and a world's indifference, is so self-evidently wrong that the only possible response is to fix it, immediately, without hesitation, without negotiation, without any of the political considerations and strategic calculations and risk assessments that every other person who had ever tried to help her had been paralyzed by?
What do you say?
Shirahoshi said the only thing she could say.
"...Promise?"
The word came out small. Not small relative to her body—everything Shirahoshi said was technically large, projected through vocal cords the size of bridge cables—but small in the way that mattered. Small and fragile and trembling, the voice of a child who had been let down before, who had been promised safety and protection and freedom before, who had watched those promises shatter against the reality of Vander Decken's power and the world's inability to stop him.
Promise?
It was a test. Not a deliberate one—Shirahoshi was not calculating enough for tests, was not strategic enough for games, was too open and too honest and too raw to deploy words as weapons or tools. It was an instinctive test, the kind that the heart conducts without the brain's knowledge, the kind that bypasses intellect and speaks directly to the part of a person that has been hurt and needs to know, needs to know, before it can bear to hope again: Is this real? Are you real? Is this going to be different from every other time?
Luffy grinned.
The grin returned like the sun emerging from behind clouds—total, immediate, radiant, transforming his entire face from the stone mask of resolve to the open, joyful, absolutely incandescent expression that was his default state and his greatest weapon and the thing that made people follow him to the ends of the earth.
"Yeah," he said. "I promise."
Two words. Five letters. One million percent sincere.
And Shirahoshi—who had been promised things before, by soldiers and guards and officials who meant well but couldn't deliver, who had heard "we'll protect you" and "he won't hurt you" and "everything will be fine" from people who believed what they were saying but couldn't make it true—Shirahoshi heard these two words from this boy, and she knew.
She knew.
Not in the rational, evidence-based way that a person knows something they have verified through observation and analysis. Not in the cautious, hedged way that a person knows something they have been told by a reliable source. Not in any of the ways that knowing typically worked, with its requirements of proof and precedent and the basic epistemological framework that separated "belief" from "knowledge."
She knew in the way that you know the sun will rise.
She knew in the way that you know the tide will turn.
She knew in the way that you know, sometimes, when a person says something and means it so completely, so totally, so absolutely that the words stop being words and become facts—physical laws, immutable truths, certainties as fixed and as fundamental as gravity.
He was going to beat Vander Decken.
Not "try to." Not "attempt to." Not "make a noble effort that might or might not succeed depending on various factors outside anyone's control."
He was going to beat him.
Because he had said he would.
Because he had promised.
Because he was Luffy.
The tears came back.
But they were different tears. Not the tears of loneliness. Not the tears of fear. Not the tears of grief or despair or the quiet, corrosive sadness that had been dissolving Shirahoshi's spirit one day at a time for years.
These were the tears you cried when you had been drowning and someone pulled you to the surface.
These were the tears you cried when you had been cold and someone gave you warmth.
These were the tears you cried when you had given up hope and a boy broke through your window and gave it back to you with a grin and a promise and the absolute, terrifying, magnificent certainty that he was going to keep it.
"Thank you," Shirahoshi whispered, and the words were waterfall-sized, and they carried everything—every lonely night, every axe in the wall, every time she had pressed herself against the floor of her room and waited for the next projectile to arrive, every moment of the years she had spent in this tower wondering if this was all there was, if this would always be all there was—they carried everything, and they laid it at the feet of a boy who was already turning toward the window.
The window he had broken on the way in.
The window he was clearly intending to leave through.
Right now.
"W-wait!" Shirahoshi said, reaching out one enormous hand—a hand that could have encircled Luffy's entire body, a hand that moved with the desperate urgency of someone watching something precious move toward an exit. "You're—you're leaving? Now? Already? But you just—we just—you only just got here and—"
"Yeah!" Luffy said, one foot on the windowsill, one hand on the frame, his body already oriented outward, toward the world beyond the tower, toward the enemy who needed to be beaten, toward the promise that needed to be kept. "I gotta go beat up that Decken guy!"
"But—but you don't even know where he is!"
"I'll find him!"
"You don't know what he looks like!"
"I'll figure it out!"
"You don't know anything about his powers or his crew or—"
"Don't need to!" Luffy was grinning again—the full, enormous, ear-to-ear grin of a man who was about to do something reckless and was thrilled about it. "I just gotta hit him until he stops! That usually works!"
"But—"
"I promised!" Luffy said, and the grin softened—just for a moment, just enough to let the sincerity show through the excitement, just enough to remind Shirahoshi that beneath the rubber and the recklessness and the bottomless appetite and the attention span of a particularly energetic goldfish, there was a person of absolute, unwavering, indestructible integrity.
"I promised you I'd beat him up. So I'm gonna go beat him up. And then you can go outside. And it'll be great! You can see the whole island! And eat stuff! There's SO much stuff to eat here! I found this takoyaki place that—but anyway, I gotta go! I'll be back!"
He jumped.
Out the window.
Into the ocean.
Without a plan.
Without a strategy.
Without any of the things that a rational person would consider essential prerequisites for confronting a Devil Fruit user with the power to track and target anyone he had ever touched with unerring, unavoidable, literally-impossible-to-escape projectiles.
He jumped because he had made a promise, and promises were things that Luffy kept.
Not because keeping promises was the right thing to do (though it was).
Not because breaking promises was the wrong thing to do (though it was).
But because a promise, to Luffy, was not a conditional statement. It was not a declaration of intent subject to revision in the face of new information. It was not a verbal agreement that could be voided by changing circumstances.
A promise was a fact.
"I promise I'll beat him up" was, in Luffy's mind, functionally identical to "the sky is blue" or "I am made of rubber" or "meat is delicious." It was a statement of reality. A description of what was. The beating up of Vander Decken was not a future possibility to be pursued—it was a future certainty to be enacted. The only question was timing.
And the timing was now.
Because right now was always the right time to keep a promise.
Shirahoshi stared at the broken window.
At the empty space where, moments ago, a boy had been standing.
A boy who had listened to her story—the story she had told so many times, to so many people, with so little result—and had responded not with sympathy, not with strategy, not with "we'll form a committee to assess the situation and develop a comprehensive response plan," but with five words.
I'm gonna beat him up.
And then he had left.
To do it.
Right now.
No plan. No preparation. No doubt.
Just a promise and a grin and the absolute, lunatic, beautiful certainty that he would succeed because he had decided he would succeed and the universe could either go along with this or get out of the way.
Shirahoshi pressed her enormous hands to her enormous chest—to the place where her heart was, where it was beating so fast and so hard that she could feel it in her fingertips, in her tail, in the roots of her pink hair—and she stared at the window and she breathed.
For the first time in years, she breathed without fear.
Not because the fear was gone. The fear was still there—still lurking, still whispering, still reminding her of every axe and every spear and every piece of debris that had come hurtling through the walls of her prison, thrown by a man who called it love.
But the fear was quieter now.
Quieter because there was something louder.
Something that drowned out the whisper of fear the way a symphony drowned out a single, discordant note.
Hope.
A boy had promised her hope, and she believed him.
She believed him the way the tide believed in the moon.
She believed him because she had looked into his eyes and seen something that she had never seen in anyone else's eyes—not in the eyes of the soldiers who had guarded her tower, not in the eyes of the ministers who had debated her safety in council chambers, not in the eyes of her father, who loved her with everything he had but who was a king, and kings had to weigh one person's freedom against an entire kingdom's security, and kings could not simply decide that a problem would be solved and then go solve it with their fists.
What she had seen in Luffy's eyes was certainty.
Not confidence—confidence implied the possibility of failure, the awareness that things might not go as planned, the implicit acknowledgment that the world was uncertain and outcomes were probabilistic. Confidence said "I think I can." Confidence said "I believe I will." Confidence said "I am going to try."
What Luffy had was not confidence.
What Luffy had was certainty.
Certainty said "I will."
Not "I think I will."
Not "I hope I will."
Not "I will, assuming everything goes according to plan and no unforeseen complications arise and the enemy turns out to be beatable and the odds are in my favor and the stars align and the universe cooperates."
I will.
Full stop.
End of sentence.
No conditions. No caveats. No fine print.
I will.
And watching him jump out that window—watching his straw hat disappear into the golden light of the Sunlight Tree Eve, watching his silhouette shrink against the vast, shimmering backdrop of Fishman Island, watching a boy the size of her thumb leap into an ocean to fight a monster because a girl he had met fifteen minutes ago was sad—Shirahoshi had believed him.
Completely.
Totally.
With every cell in her enormous body.
He will.
She pressed her hands harder against her chest.
She smiled.
And she waited.
Because waiting was all she could do.
But for the first time, waiting didn't feel like suffering.
Waiting felt like anticipation.
Outside the tower, falling through the water encased in his personal coating bubble, descending toward the seafloor of Fishman Island with the graceless but enthusiastic trajectory of a rubber cannonball, Monkey D. Luffy was talking to himself.
"Okay! So there's a guy! And he throws stuff! At the big mermaid! And she can't go outside! Because of the stuff! So I gotta beat up the guy! So she can go outside! Simple!"
He was grinning. Of course he was grinning. He was falling through an underwater paradise toward a fight with an unknown enemy who had unknown powers and an unknown number of allies, and he was grinning, because this was exactly the kind of situation that Luffy loved most: a problem that could be solved by punching, a person who needed help, and an adventure that was already in progress.
"Vander Decken! Hey, VANDER DECKEN! WHERE ARE YOU?! I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!"
He screamed this into the open water, at full volume, because subtlety was something that happened to other people.
Somewhere below, on the seafloor, in a ship shaped like a flying dutchman, a fishman with a very bad idea and a very dangerous power heard a distant, muffled screaming that was somehow audible through several hundred meters of water.
The fishman did not know what the screaming meant.
The fishman would find out shortly.
The fishman would not enjoy finding out.
In the tower, Shirahoshi waited.
She waited, and she smiled, and she did not cry.
And for the first time in years, the walls of her room didn't feel like a cage.
They felt like a waiting room.
And the thing she was waiting for was coming back.
He promised.