-Real World-
Anyone who had spent time around Admiral Sakazuki at Marine Headquarters — and many had, because he was not a man who hid in an office — would tell you that his head contained two things: the Marine, and the extinction of pirates. That was the full inventory. The idea that such a man could fall in love, let alone be loved in return, was the kind of thought that had never occurred to anyone close enough to him to know better.
And yet.
The woman on the Sky Screen was real in a way that made it impossible to dismiss her as a fabrication. Silver hair, ruby-red eyes, a face that balanced nobility with warmth in a ratio that suggested she had not arrived at either quality accidentally. Her figure was not the exaggerated kind that drew whistles, but she was unmistakably a woman in full, and her personality — cycling between composed grace and genuine enthusiasm — was the kind that stayed with people. The ideal companion, if you were compiling a list. Which nobody standing near Admiral Sakazuki ever had any reason to do.
In a corner of the war room, well away from anyone they had the authority to actually impress, Tashigi and Hina had quietly arrived at the same conversation independently and were now conducting it at a low but committed volume.
"Do you think she's real?" Tashigi asked.
"Hina thinks it's one hundred percent fake," Hina said, with the conviction of someone who has made up her mind and enjoys having made it up. "A violent man like Akainu does not fall in love with a woman. Even with amnesia. Hina absolutely does not believe it."
Tashigi considered this. On the screen, Ellie was laughing at something — genuinely laughing, her head tipped back — and Sakazuki, who had a face built for issuing orders and receiving damage, looked at her in a way that was difficult to describe without using words that had no business existing in the same sentence as his name.
"She must have incredible taste," Tashigi said, "or no information whatsoever about who he is."
"Probably both," Hina said.
Nearby, two of Hina's subordinates — Jango and Fullbody, who had individually and collectively never developed good judgment about what to say aloud near superior officers — had been having a separate but related conversation that was now veering into problematic territory.
"The Kingdom of Winter," Fullbody said, with the scholarly air of a man reasoning his way into something inadvisable. "Frozen all year round. Extreme conditions. Primitive tribal society. And she became a traveling doctor in that environment. That is — that is a remarkable woman."
"The skin," Jango said. "Have you noticed? That particular shade only comes from extended cold exposure. Years of it. It's — I'm just saying, scientifically—"
"Hina," Hina said, which was both her name and, in this instance, a warning.
They did not take the warning.
"If Admiral Akainu weren't in the picture—"
The Ori Ori no Mi (Bind-Bind Fruit) did its work efficiently. Two Marine officers found themselves pinned to the floor by restraints generated from Hina's shadow, arranged in positions that conveyed a certain thematic message about poor life choices.
"You are Hina's people in life," Hina said pleasantly, "and Hina's ghosts in death. Neither of you is going anywhere."
Tashigi watched this happen with a mild expression. The queen's bearing Hina projected in these moments — utterly composed, utterly certain — was something she had spent years observing and had never quite cracked the architecture of.
The mood in the room shifted as the Sky Screen caught up to itself.
What most people had assumed was a convenient fiction — a beautiful wife inserted into the Domain to give the circus its emotional leverage — turned out to be considerably more than that. Ellie had existed. She was not a fabrication of Buggy's Domain conjured from thin air; she was a reconstruction of someone real, built from Sakazuki's own memory with enough fidelity that he hadn't been able to distinguish her from the woman he had actually loved.
And killed. To save a kingdom, in a winter that had nearly swallowed it whole.
The room was quieter after this.
Admiral Sakazuki himself — present, watching, demonstrably not the version currently standing in O'Hara's ash-and-fire reconstruction — had not moved for several minutes. He was watching the Sky Screen with an expression that was neutral in the way that neutral becomes when a significant amount of effort is going into it. No tears. Not for a woman from a future that hadn't happened yet.
But he was watching.
"Sakazuki." Borsalino's voice came from beside him, mild and precise in the way it always was when he was saying something he actually meant. "You should stay away from her. The real one. Whatever version of this actually happens — if you care about her at all, the math is simple. No contact, no danger."
Sakazuki didn't look at him. "That's already my conclusion."
"I know. I'm saying it anyway."
It was the prerogative of old colleagues — the , unrepeatable intimacy of someone who had been called a monster alongside you in the same room, early enough that neither of you had yet figured out who you were. Borsalino's affection for Sakazuki expressed itself almost exclusively in forms that resembled antagonism. This was one of the sincere ones.
He was right. Sakazuki had known since before anyone said it: the most responsible thing he could do for Ellie, for any version of Ellie who existed in the Kingdom of Winter and had not yet met a badly wounded man crawling out of the sea — was to ensure she never would. Pirates had already demonstrated that a Marine's family was not off-limits. Zephyr's tragedy had made that lesson permanent.
"What happens on that screen is a story," Sakazuki said. "I'll see to it that this one ends differently."
Borsalino nodded. He looked back at the screen and said nothing further, which was how Sakazuki knew he believed him.
The circus had changed the setting to O'Hara, and the people in the room who had been involved in the Buster Call were now sitting with what it meant to have that night reconstructed and projected globally.
Nobody was speaking about it directly.
The official position had always been that soldiers followed orders, and that orders within the chain of command served a justice larger than any individual conscience. The official position was not comfortable to hold while watching the Tree of Knowledge burn for a second time.
Kuzan had been quiet since the scene began. He had been involved. Everyone who had been involved knew the shape of what they had done, knew it in the way that things done at night under orders are always known — not forgotten, just filed carefully in a location that you do not open voluntarily.
His sense of justice had not survived that night intact. He had rebuilt something afterward, or tried to, but the rebuilt thing had different load-bearing properties than the original, and he was aware of the difference every time he put weight on it.
If the circus had written a supporting role for him in this story — one Admiral's crisis of conscience mirrored against another's absolute certainty — it had not had to work hard for the material.
He looked at the fire on the screen and said nothing.