-Broadcast-
The third-level prisoners had spent time in Still Water Prison imagining many things. Some of them had imagined rescue. Most of them had concluded it was not coming. A select few had been in the process of making peace with the idea that these particular walls were the last walls they would ever see.
Then the gate came down, the dust cleared, and the thing standing in the gap was a knee-height creature with a pale face and a trembling antenna.
The silence stretched.
"Is that a pet?"
"Who brings a pet on a prison break?"
"Maybe the actual person is coming. Give it a moment."
The Black Sperm collective received this with the particular fury of small things that have heard one too many comments about their size. The pirates who had been loudest about it learned their lesson quickly — the Black Sperms moved fast, hit surprisingly hard, and had no interest in proportional response. A female pirate who had been especially vocal found her face being used as a floor. The Black Sperm responsible for this was delivering a point-by-point rebuttal at volume.
"Say it again. Say I'm short again. I've got time."
After a few minutes of this, the third-level population had arrived at a unanimous and practical understanding: the small black creatures were dangerous, and anyone who had additional opinions about their appearance was welcome to keep those opinions internal.
The room settled. The Black Sperms ignored the remaining prisoners with complete disinterest. They had not come here to conduct a mass breakout — that was a side effect, not a goal. They had come for one person, and the rest of the population could sort themselves out after the departure.
Several of the units began rummaging through what they'd brought. Wanted posters, creased from travel, extracted one by one.
"Red hair, one arm, former Yonko." A pause. "Did anyone bring enough of these?"
Black Sperm had not researched this assignment ahead of time. The mission had come fast, and his personal knowledge of the Red-Haired Shanks extended precisely to the wanted poster level — a face, a name, a number that had been large and was now presumably outdated. He had never met the man. He had no particular feelings about the former Four Emperors as a category.
"Found one. Red hair, missing arm."
The search moved through the crowd.
Shanks and Dragon had not announced themselves. They stood in the middle of the prisoner population and watched the proceedings with the particular composure of people who had been in difficult situations before and understood that patience was usually the correct response. When the Black Sperms began working through the crowd systematically — holding up the poster, checking faces — Shanks waited.
The unit that reached him stopped. Looked at the poster. Looked at him. Looked at the arm.
"The poster says one arm. He's only got one arm."
"The poster's right."
"But why only one arm?"
"That's just how he is."
A brief internal debate. Resolution.
"He matches. This is who Boss Buggy sent us for."
The colony surrounded Shanks and began the process of confirming he was who he appeared to be — touching his arm, checking his hair color, assessing the degree to which his face matched the printed image. Shanks endured this with a patience that had been cultivated over several years of imprisonment and was therefore considerable.
Buggy, he thought. Buggy sent these.
The last time he had seen Buggy in person had been Marineford — chaos, smoke, that stage entrance that had somehow worked despite being Buggy. Back when Buggy's crew had been a collection of useless people held together by their captain's talent for convincing others he was more than he appeared. Half the credit for the Warlord appointment had been Shanks' own recommendation, and he had made it half as a joke and half because the Marine deserved whatever they got for taking it seriously.
He had known, before everything went wrong, that Buggy ran a circus operation that had quietly branched into maritime enterprise of the less regulated variety. That was Buggy. Always more running underneath than was visible on the surface. But cadres who could break seastone — that required a different explanation. There were not many people in the world who could do that.
"I want to bring someone else," Shanks said.
The Black Sperms looked at him.
He pointed to the man standing beside him. Intact limbs, half his face covered in tattoos, watching the conversation with an expression that revealed nothing. "He's a friend. Dragon — leader of the Revolutionary Army. Father of Monkey D. Luffy." Shanks kept his voice straightforward. "Getting him out does more good than harm. For the world."
The Black Sperms turned to look at Dragon.
There was a consultation. It took longer than the confirmation of Shanks' identity had, but the outcome had a certain inevitability to it.
"Luffy's father."
"Luffy's the one who always wants to eat everything."
"He tried to recruit me. I said no."
"The food situation on that ship was unacceptable."
The Black Sperm who had spent time as Luffy's sparring partner — a role that had been educational for both parties, in the way that fighting someone who refuses to stay hurt is always educational — did not have strong feelings about Dragon ally. But Luffy was Luffy. Hard to spend time around that particular person and come away wanting to obstruct his family.
"Fine. He comes too."
Dragon received this information with the same expression he used for all information.
The rest of the third-level population was not invited. Black Sperm was performing a job, and loose variables made jobs complicated. The other prisoners were not his problem.
He did not say this unkindly. He simply didn't say anything about it at all.
The gap in the gate was wide enough for the group to pass through. As Shanks and Dragon followed the Black Sperm escort into the corridor beyond, the remaining prisoners watched the opening.
One heartbeat of silence.
Then the room uncorked.
The shouting started before half of them had moved — pure released pressure, years of it, expressing itself as noise first and motion immediately after. They had observed how the gate had been opened. They were not going to wait for a second invitation.
Dragon fell into step beside Shanks in the corridor, moving with the unhurried competence of someone working through a checklist.
"My father," he said. "Was he on this floor?"
Shanks kept his expression neutral. He had seen Garp this morning, same as most mornings — the old man making his circuit of the prison level, hands behind his back, looking for things to pay attention to.
Black Sperm's pace continued ahead of them. Several of the units exchanged a rapid series of glances that carried a great deal of information between them.
"An old man," Dragon said. "Scar at the corner of his eye. Looks a bit like me. He would have been near this section."
The glances between the Black Sperms intensified.
There was, technically, a version of this situation where they said nothing and hoped the geography of the corridor resolved the question naturally. They would pass through the relevant area. Dragon would either see Garp or not see Garp, and whatever had happened to Garp would be evident without anyone having to provide an account.
The problem was that this approach required Dragon not to ask follow-up questions, which seemed unlikely.
One of the Black Sperms cleared its throat. Approximately.
"There may have been an old man," it said. "Somewhere on the route we took."
"May have been."
"There was definitely an old man. Strong old man. Started the fight himself, if we're being accurate about the sequence of events. We were simply — responding."
Dragon stopped walking.
The Black Sperms kept their pace, very slightly, then also stopped.
"He should be fine," another unit offered. "He was breathing when we left. Old bones, but solid. Anyone who could block the first hit from a consolidated fist is not going to die from a pile-on."
Another unit: "We may have been slightly heavy-handed after the initial exchange."
A third: "The prison official dying first made everyone emotional."
Dragon looked at them for a long moment. The tattoo on his face did not move. His expression did not particularly change. He turned and continued walking.
"Show me where he is," he said.
The Black Sperms fell back into formation.
The fact that Garp was Luffy's grandfather — that the person currently folded against a wall somewhere behind them was the biological grandfather of the person they had sparred with, eaten with, been offered crew positions by — this piece of information, arriving now, produced in the Black Sperm collective something that could only be described as retrospective discomfort.
If they had known ahead of time, perhaps they would have stopped at the first punch. Or the second. Probably by the fifth.
Possibly.
"We were responding to provocation," one of them said again, to no one in particular, as the group moved back toward the crime scene.