-Broadcast-
The expected spectacle never came, and the tent devolved instantly.
Thousands of people venting at once is a kind of noise — not loud so much as dense, a wall of sound built from individual grievances compounding into something that pressed against the ears and the chest simultaneously. The audience had been primed by the music, wound tight, and now the only outlet was outward. People shouted at the stage, at each other, at no one. Faces that had looked perfectly ordinary an hour ago were ugly now.
"Damn it — why did they stop the music?"
Sakazuki turned to look at Ellie.
She was on her feet, face flushed, cursing at the stage with the rest of them. He stared for a moment. In however long he'd known her, he could not recall her raising her voice at a stranger, let alone swearing in public. She'd always been the composed one — the one who smoothed situations over and found the reasonable path through them. Emotional stability was the thing she wore like a second skin.
Whatever the music had done to the crowd, it had done to her too.
"Ellie." He touched her arm. "Let's go. It's too loud in here."
She didn't move. Didn't look at him. She sank back into her seat with the rigid obstinacy of someone who had decided something without deciding it, her eyes fixed on the stage, still muttering under her breath. She was not leaving. Not in disgrace. Not before she'd seen what this was.
Sakazuki sat back down beside her.
He could force her out — physically, that was not a problem — but she would resist, and he had no sufficient reason to explain why the exit mattered, only the feeling that it did. So he suppressed the feeling and stayed. He would see what the clown circus was after.
Across the stands, he kept catching Galdino's eyes. The man on the stage was watching him ally — or watching the space around him, glancing left, glancing right, landing back on him each time. The face was familiar in the way a voice heard in passing is familiar: you know you've heard it before, you simply cannot locate when. His amnesia had carved too many gaps.
Galdino, for his part, seemed pleased by the non-recognition. A quiet satisfaction settled over his features. Good, the expression said. This is more interesting if you don't remember me yet.
Then he snapped his fingers.
The sound cut through the noise like a blade. Every mouth in the tent closed. Every pair of eyes went forward. In the span of three seconds, the circus went from bedlam to silence so complete you could hear the candle flame.
Sakazuki had no Logia fruit and still felt the wrongness of it in his spine.
"Admiral Sakazuki." Galdino's voice carried easily through the silence. "You have justice in your heart — or so the story goes. I'd like to see if it holds up. Shall we play a game?"
The title hit him like a physical impact.
Admiral Sakazuki.
The name was a key turning in a lock he hadn't known was there. Something gave way. Memories came up in a flood — not carefully, not in sequence, but all at once, like water through a breach, too much and too fast to process in any order.
A training hall. Admiral Zephyr's voice. Being called a monster in the same breath as Borsalino, and not quite minding. A sword at his hip before he ever touched the fruit. The day the Magu Magu no Mi (Magma-Magma Fruit) changed everything — the way the heat had felt like coming home instead of burning alive. His rank climbing, step by step, each promotion a deliberate thing earned through a precise and absolute commitment to his own understanding of justice. Fleet Admiral Sengoku. Marineford. The chaos of that war pressing in from all sides.
And then: a blow from behind. The back of his skull opening up. Edward Newgate, wielding the Gura Gura no Mi (Tremor-Tremor Fruit) with the full power of a man who had nothing left to lose. The power of a Yonko. An impact that should have killed him, that had instead only taken most of who he was and left the rest adrift on the sea.
And then: a woman in Winter Country, kneeling in snow beside a man who had crawled out of the ocean and still hadn't died yet.
Ellie.
He turned to look at her.
She was still watching the stage. Still beautiful. Silver hair, ruby-red eyes, skin that held a crystalline quality in the light — unchanged, as she had always been unchanged, as she had been every morning he'd woken up beside her and not yet remembered what was wrong.
He understood now what had been wrong.
In the Year Without Summer, when the cold had threatened to take the Kingdom of Winter apart stone by stone, it was Sakazuki who had stopped it. He had saved the kingdom. He had paid the price that salvation required.
Ellie was dead. He had killed her himself. His own hands.
The woman beside him — warm, real-seeming, present — was his memory of her made into something that breathed. The Domain had reached into the deepest part of him and built a version of the person he had lost, and it was so precisely right that he had not been able to see around it. The reason he'd been afraid of losing her was that he already knew what losing her felt like.
"Galdino." His voice came out level, which was not how it felt from the inside. "You think playing with a dead woman's face is sport."
Heat was building in his body. Not the controlled warmth of technique — something older and less disciplined, the magma moving before he could direct it, the air around him carrying the first faint bite of sulfur.
He reassessed Galdino in the time it took to let out a breath. Baroque Works cadre. Former subordinate of Crocodile, one of the old Shichibukai. Survived Marineford by being careful and small and keeping out of the way of everything that mattered — his performance in that war could be charitably described as not counterproductive. The Doru Doru no Mi (Wax-Wax Fruit): limited, defensive, useful primarily for restraint tools. Two Vice Admirals on a clear day could handle him. His bounty had barely changed in years because no one had considered him worth escalating.
But he was here. He had been placed here, in a position, to trigger a response, and he'd done it precisely on schedule. That meant someone had planned for this. That meant Galdino was a mechanism, not an actor, and the actual intelligence sat somewhere else in this tent.
The black fog, Sakazuki thought. Rome. The lecture hall. This is the Domain — this has always been the Domain.
The realization sharpened everything. The circus, the crowd, Ellie — a constructed space. A spiritual cage with a fabricated population. He was still in Rome. He had always been in Rome, and his mind had been locked inside someone's imagined world, and the thing that had kept him inside it was sitting next to him wearing his dead lover's face.
Galdino snapped his fingers again.
The circus dissolved.
Where tiered stands had been there was open sky. Where the audience had been there was forest, or what remained of it. They stood on an island now — small, defined by a single feature that dominated its center: an ancient tree, enormous beyond any natural proportion, climbing until its crown disappeared into smoke. Fire was eating it from the base up. The burning was systematic, patient, total.
The air smelled of ash and old paper.
Sakazuki knew this island before Galdino said a word.
"Familiar?" Galdino asked.
"O'Hara." The name required no searching. "West Blue. The Tree of Knowledge." He looked at the burning. "This is where you practice justice, Admiral — isn't that what you're about to say?"
Galdino smiled. An unpleasant thing.
Sakazuki had killed archaeologists here. Not with his hands — with an order, with the administrative weight of a Buster Call endorsed by the Five Elders. A group of scholars with no weapons and no war-making capacity, whose only transgression had been learning things the World Government had decided should stay unlearned. There was no version of Sakazuki's doctrine of absolute justice that cleanly accommodated what had happened on O'Hara. He knew it. He had known it at the time. He had done it anyway.
Those who know too much draw doom to themselves and everything around them. That was the logic. The logic was not wrong. It was also not the whole of what had happened here.
"Galdino. Are you going to summon the dead? Put them in front of me and ask if I regret them?"
The intent to kill had reached its ceiling. He wanted Galdino gone — not for the circus, not for the game, but because too many people already knew about O'Hara, and every additional person who knew was a thread connecting back to things the World Government had classified at the highest level. Some doors stayed closed for reasons that had nothing to do with pride.
His gaze moved to the Tree of Knowledge.
The fire hadn't finished it yet. Somewhere in his memory, underneath the cold administrative certainty of the Buster Call, was the echo of something Ellie had said once — the real Ellie, before the Year Without Summer. She had wanted to study there. Had wanted whatever the tree held to still exist when she arrived. It had not.
He had added fuel to that fire himself.
Nico Olvia and her colleagues had died in it. The tree would finish burning. And the Domain had chosen this island, this moment, this sin, to show him.
Sakazuki looked at the flames and said nothing.