Sanji hears the explosion in the early evening. It's not very close — somewhere on the island, for sure, but not close enough to shake the house itself. He tilts his head towards it, pauses for a moment from slicing scallions, but doesn't pay it much more mind than that. Things explode all the time, around Big Mom and her family. So long as they're nowhere near him or anything important to him, Sanji does his best not to think about it. That's not his place. It becomes his problem when, five minutes later, Pudding shoulders open the door to his rooms, anger licking off her like flames. Sanji carefully places his knife to the side and turns to face her. She crowds him against the counter, glaring. "Did you know about this?" she demands in a hiss, leaning forward. “Are you in on whatever hairbrained scheme they're trying to pull off right now? Do you have fucking contact with them?" In a slightly different world, Sanji is made even more his mother's son.

In the wake of the Straw Hats' passage, Pudding finds an unexpected source of understanding in her third-eldest brother. “Look,” he said, and then paused, as one of his hands twitched in turn to his pocket and then his scarf, “I’m not— I didn’t come here to accuse you of anything.” “Why are you here, then?” Pudding took a deep breath. He wouldn’t know about her betrayal. He couldn’t. “Straw Hat,” said Katakuri, dropping those two words into the air like they weren’t loaded bullets.

Snip, snip, snip, go the scissors, as Pudding cuts herself out of her mother's life. She won't be going alone.