-Real World-
Kagura's laughter carried.
It was not intended to be cruel in any way — the silver-bell quality of it, high and clear in the desert air, seemed to belong to someone who found the world funny rather than someone making a point. But the distance between Kagura's category of existence and the Marine's was precisely what made the sound land the way it did. She was not laughing at Borsalino. She had simply moved on before he had finished mattering.
He watched her bird disappear into the glare until there was nothing left to watch.
His fists were closed. He noticed this and did not open them immediately.
I could kill her. The calculation ran quickly and automatically. Kagura was powerful, but she was not untouchable — not for an Admiral with a light-speed Logia at full expression, not in open air with no complicating terrain. He was confident in the calculation.
What he was not confident in was the part that came after. Naraku's response to the death of his clone would arrive with the patience and precision of something that had demonstrated, on a corpse-covered field outside this city, exactly how it treated problems it had decided to stop tolerating. An Admiral's life, weighed against the operational statement of killing Kagura here, was a trade Borsalino was not authorized to make unilaterally.
He unclenched his hands.
"Fleet Admiral Sengoku," he said, to the empty air and the distant horizon, "assembling twelve Admirals is not going to be as simple as the Sky Screen implies."
Admiral Demon Pig. The soul of Rengoku Kyojuro which Naraku had absorbed just before death.
The Sky Screen had shown a future where he stood among the twelve, but the Sky Screen had also shown the trajectory that led him away from the Marine entirely, toward a second life that moved in the opposite direction. That figure could only be visited in the broadcasts now. His slot in the twelve was a vacancy with a ghost in it.
Sometimes being counted upon was not the same as being available.
He looked down at Ace.
The son of the Pirate King was bound with white silk and unconscious, face-up on the dirt, wearing the evidence of Blackbeard's custody as a collection of fist-shaped impressions distributed across his face with the spacing of someone who had done the work systematically. Teach had not broken bones — a consideration that was presumably meant as a gesture, and which Borsalino recognized as being the minimum version of one. Seastone handcuffs were already on. The silk was redundant, but Blackbeard had included it anyway.
He was very young. He had not been an adult for very long, and the face under the bruising had a quality that faces at that age have — not soft exactly, but not yet fully committed to whatever it was going to become.
Borsalino placed one foot on Ace's chest and pressed down slowly.
He did not need to do this. He knew he did not need to do this. The prisoner was already secured and already unconscious and there was no tactical purpose to the pressure. He was doing it because Kagura's laughter was still somewhere in his ears, and because the Marine had just picked up a very significant prisoner without a single casualty, and because Portgas D. Ace was a pirate and the son of a pirate and was going to Impel Down regardless of what happened in the next few minutes.
He pressed until the lungs compressed enough to interrupt the rhythm of unconsciousness.
Ace woke up gasping, disoriented, blinking against a face he did not immediately recognize and a weight on his chest he did not immediately identify. Borsalino withdrew his foot.
"There you are." He kept his voice light. "You're a prisoner of the Marine now. Get up. Prison is your home until further notice."
Ace lay still for a moment, assembling the information available to him. The seastone handcuffs. The silk bindings. The city walls visible at a distance. The fact that he was alive and his injuries were serious but not immediately fatal. The face above him, which he recognized after another moment from a dozen Sky Screen broadcasts.
Admiral Kizaru.
He tried to push himself upright and found that his legs were still bound together. Borsalino looked at this for a moment, then extended two fingers and put a laser through the silk threads at ankle and knee height. The threads parted cleanly. Ace stood.
"Blackbeard was considerate enough to provide the seastone cuffs," Borsalino observed. "Saved the Marine a set."
He turned and started walking toward the port. Ace followed, because there was nothing else to do and both of them understood this.
The road was long enough for questions but not long enough for long ones.
Garp had been a complicated figure for Marine politics even before the Sky Screen had made the complications public. His biological son led the Revolutionary Army. His biological grandson was a pirate. His sworn godson was the posthumous child of the Pirate King, now a Marine prisoner. The Hero of the Marines title had been a designation attached to the man's record for so long that its removal was more symbolic than substantive — he remained a Vice Admiral, he remained Garp, the record remained what it was — but the symbol mattered to certain people, and certain people had made their displeasure audible.
The complicated network of Garp's family obligations was not a problem Borsalino had caused or could resolve. He walked and kept his Observation Haki spread wide and thought about other things.
"Do you have any news about Luffy?"
Ace asked it at roughly the midpoint of the road, at a volume calibrated to not project past the two of them. He had been building to it for several minutes. Borsalino had been waiting for it since the moment the man regained consciousness.
"The Straw Hat Pirates set sail," Borsalino said. "The battle in Arabasta was bad for them — they were captured. But they were released." He paused a half-second. "For reasons the official record describes vaguely."
He watched Ace absorb this.
"There were no crew losses. There is a princess with them now. A fallen country's worth of complications, probably, but they are at sea and moving."
Ace was quiet for several steps. Borsalino did not fill the silence. He was watching the perimeter with his Observation Haki, tracking signatures, confirming that Marco and Vista were somewhere in the desert recovering from their injuries and making no approach calculations. If they tried to come for Ace here, in open ground, with one Admiral between them and the harbor — that would be a transaction that resolved badly for two seriously injured men, and they were not stupid men.
They did not come.
Good. He had not wanted to do that math today.
The port was in the condition that ports were in after wars — half the docked ships reduced to material by whatever the fighting had required from them, the water at the quays carrying a film of things that had been in the city when the city was less damaged. The Marine warships sat apart from this, intact and white, which was the most immediate argument available for being on the winning side.
The crew saw Ace and understood what this meant and made the sounds that crews make when they have accomplished something they expected to be difficult. Borsalino accepted this without particular expression.
Ace stood at the gangplank and looked back.
The desert stretched behind the port walls. The rooftops of the ancient capital visible above the battlements. The quality of the light at this hour that was to this part of the world — the particular color that sand gave to the late sun. He had been in Arabasta for a short time, and most of that time had been the wrong kind of time, but some of it had been the right kind, and the right kind had been with Luffy.
They had eaten together. He could remember the food. Luffy's style of eating, which was not compatible with sharing a table but which Ace had never found difficult to be near. The brief weeks of being close again after months of open sea between them.
He looked at the city for as long as he could see it.
"You should stop thinking about rescue scenarios," Borsalino said, behind him. Not unkindly. "No one can reach you at the moment. Use the time to rest."
Ace was pushed gently inside by the Marine soldiers at the gangplank, with the efficiency of people who had been given clear instructions and would follow them.
The cabin had no windows.
This was not accidental. The Mera Mera no Mi (Flame-Flame Fruit) was a Logia, and Logia users with solar-cycle abilities were given accommodations without natural light as a baseline precaution. There was no lighting inside either. The seastone cuffs remained on.
Ace sat in the dark and let his eyes adjust to nothing and found nothing to adjust to.
The injuries reported a consistent inventory. His breathing was functional. He was tired in the way that came from too many consecutive bad days after too many consecutive months that had each had their own particular problems.
He lay back.
Old man. He was not asking for rescue. He had been clear on this with himself since before Arabasta, and the capture had not changed the conclusion — it had only made it more concrete. The Whitebeard Pirates coming for him would cost the Whitebeard Pirates something they could not afford to pay, and the old man's life was worth more than one son in a cell, regardless of what the old man's feelings on the subject were.
He hoped the dreams would be kind about it. Whitebeard's face and the sound of the ship and the particular quality of the crew's loudness at night. He wanted those things in his sleep. He did not want the old man to come.
He was asleep before the warship cleared the harbor.
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