-Broadcast-
Still breathing when we left. Dragon turned that over in his head as they walked.
He had not panicked. Panic was not something he permitted himself, and the habit had calcified over years to the point where it no longer required active suppression. But the image that assembled itself despite his control — Garp, crumpled against a wall, a pile of small black figures still piling on — was not a comfortable one.
Garp had survived everything. That was the baseline fact Dragon returned to. The man had navigated fifty years of the most dangerous situations the world had produced, had stood in front of things that ended other people, and had walked away from all of them complaining that the opposition hadn't been worth the effort. A prison break was not going to be what finished him.
He's probably in a coma somewhere, Dragon told himself. We pass by, confirm he's breathing, and move.
He did not say any of this aloud.
Shanks, walking beside him, caught the shape of what was happening anyway. He had known Dragon long enough to read the silences, and the particular quality of this one told him everything. He thought about saying something and decided against it. The Monkey family communicated in fists and exits, mostly — three generations of people who felt things intensely and expressed exactly none of it through words. You could map the emotional intelligence of all of them onto a very short list.
"He'll be fine," Shanks said, and then wished he hadn't, because Dragon's expression made it clear this was not the kind of thing that benefited from being said.
They walked.
Shanks used the time to take stock of himself. Two empty sleeves — the left arm gone since long before Marineford, the right one a more recent loss that he was still adjusting to. Eating was an exercise in patience. Getting dressed required assistance that he accepted with more grace than he felt. The first thing he intended to do after leaving this prison was find someone who could address the situation mechanically.
"The crew that sent you," he said to the nearest Black Sperm. "Is there anyone with that kind of expertise? Mechanical arms, cellular reconstruction — that sort of work?"
The unit didn't hesitate. "Orochimaru can do it."
"Grow you new arms from special cells," another offered. "They'd be functional. Might even test stronger than the originals."
The name Orochimaru stuck in Shanks' memory. He would ask Buggy directly when they met — walk in, point at the relevant cadre, and make the request without preamble. He had a vague sense that whatever the procedure involved would be expensive, but that was a problem for after the escape.
He was also, in some quieter part of his mind, still processing the larger picture. Buggy. The Buggy who had sent these people — the Buggy whose cadres had broken a seastone gate and walked through Still Water Prison and were currently escorting a former Yonko and the leader of the Revolutionary Army toward freedom — was not the Buggy he had last seen at Marineford. That Buggy had commanded a crew of enthusiastic misfits whose primary combat value had been their captain's talent for making the audience believe the performance was more than it was. Shanks had recommended him for the Warlord position, partly as a favor, partly because he had always suspected there was more underneath.
Apparently considerably more.
He thought about what he knew of Kozuki Oden, which was quite a bit — they had sailed together, in different configurations, across years of parallel Grand Line experience. Buggy had been a trainee then. Younger, less comfortable in his own skin, slightly sideways around Oden the way people sometimes were around someone whose confidence left no room for apology. Buggy had found Oden's habits irritating; Oden had found Buggy mildly baffling; they had coexisted.
And now Buggy had sent Kozuki Oden's son — apparently grown and apparently capable of punching through Still Water Prison's outer wall as a dragon — to help retrieve Shanks.
He really did change, Shanks thought. Or he was always like this and hid it.
Either answer was more interesting than the version of Buggy the world thought it knew.
They reached the corridor.
The bloodstains were there. The body of the prison official was still against the wall, undisturbed. The pool of blood where Garp had landed was visible — and beyond it, a trail, intermittent drops following a path that turned a corner and then stopped. At the point where the drops stopped, there was no body. No Garp.
"He ran," one of the Black Sperms said. Impressed, against its will.
"Or walked," another said. "Slowly. With significant injuries."
"Either way he's gone."
The colony worked the area, looking for continuation — a smear on a wall, a disturbed dust pattern, anything that extended the trail. There was nothing. The Marine hero had apparently reached some point on the route, assessed his situation, and made a decision about leaving evidence behind.
"He's not dead," Dragon said.
This was not quite a statement and not quite a question.
"No signs of it," the nearest Black Sperm confirmed. "He was mobile enough to plan his exit. That's not someone who's dying."
Dragon wiped the cold sweat from his face before it reached his jaw. He did it quickly, without drawing attention to it, and reassembled his expression before Shanks could comment.
"Let's go," he said. "We're wasting time."
"You're not even a little worried?" Shanks asked.
"I'm leaving as quickly as possible," Dragon said. "That's what I'm doing."
If his father was still in a coma, a son could be at peace, Dragon reasoned privately. If he had woken up injured and furious in a prison currently experiencing a breakout, the possibilities were significantly less predictable. Speed was the correct response to uncertainty.
The Black Sperms began to disperse — most of the colony spreading through the upper levels ahead of the group to navigate routes and locate Momonosuke. Coordinating the exit required finding him, and Still Water Prison's signal jamming made Den Den Mushi useless. They would have to do it on foot.
"Kozuki Momonosuke has the that item with him," the remaining escort unit explained. "It can wrap around everyone and carry them through the Dead Water to the surface. Without it, leaving is theoretical."
"How long has he been fighting Magellan?"
"Long enough that the mission was completed while they were occupied."
One of the Black Sperms made a sound that might have been satisfaction. Whatever else you said about the deputy director, his commitment to that fight had been the entire reason the plan had succeeded. Every minute Magellan spent with the half-dragon was a minute the lower levels had gone undefended.
Shanks turned something over. "Kozuki Momonosuke." The name came with associations — the surname, ally. "There was a samurai. On Roger's ship, for part of the Grand Line. Kozuki Oden." He said it more to himself than anyone else. "Got a lot done in a short time. We heard years later that he'd died in Wano."
He looked at the Black Sperm.
"Is this his son?"
"That's the claim."
Shanks let that sit. The surname had declined in Wano; everyone who paid attention to Wano knew that. Kaido had seen to it comprehensively. But descendants had a way of persisting in the margins of things that tried to erase them.
And Buggy took him in. He almost laughed. Oden's kid. Buggy, of all people.
The group moved upward through the prison levels, each floor bringing them closer to the surface and shortening the eventual transit through the Dead Water. The higher they went, the less time the natural water would need to carry them through. The pursuit, when it came, would be coming upward — getting ahead of it was calculation.
The Black Sperm colony, scattered ahead, traced bloodstains where it found them and found nothing leading anywhere that suggested Garp was still in their vicinity. At some point the trail simply ended — clean stop, no continuation, no body. The Marine hero had, by all available evidence, gone somewhere and declined to leave a forwarding address.
A reasonable operational decision, under the circumstances.
Above them, in a place that required more balance than it seemed to, Garp held himself against the ceiling.
He had found a joint in the structural framework — a recess where a support beam met the upper wall — and had put himself into it in the dark, pressing into the shadow, keeping every unnecessary system as quiet as possible. The blood had been a problem. He had done what he could about it.
Observation Haki, spread wide enough to be useful but not so wide it became a drain he couldn't sustain: he could track the movement of the group below. He could see his son. He could see Shanks, walking under Black Sperm escort, moving toward the upper levels.
He could not do anything about it.
His body had given him its honest assessment of the situation, and the honest assessment was that he had been in significantly better condition at various points in his career, and that engaging again, in this state, against that many opponents, would not produce a favorable result. Logic that was difficult to argue with, and which Garp had never particularly liked.
The group passed below him. Dragon's face, angled forward, unreadable. Shanks moving with the adapted efficiency of someone who had recalibrated after losing both arms. Neither of them looked up.
When the last of the Black Sperms had rounded the corner and the corridor was empty, Garp exhaled. Very slowly. Very quietly.
"Artoria," he said, to nobody, to the ceiling, to the general direction of whatever future had produced this situation. "You're really not a human being."
He had stayed. He had kept fighting. He had used every reserve that decades of building the Marine's reputation had given him, because that was what the Marine hero did, and it had not been enough — not today, not against this. And here he was, burning through whatever was left of his life energy to keep from being captured in his own prison, watching his son walk out of it.
He held the ceiling and said nothing else.
Below him, the group moved upward, and Still Water Prison continued its slow, damaged breathing around him.