-Broadcast-
What does a man see when he's dying?
Comrades. Family. The woman he loved before Dragon's mother stopped being a living person and started being a fact he carried. The things you're supposed to see — the moments that made you what you are, arranged in whatever order the dying brain prefers.
Garp's were not arranged that way.
His mind went to a prison cell. To a man drinking beheading wine with the unhurriedness of someone who has nowhere else to be.
The Sky Screen showed it — shifted to memory, to the perspective of the past, the way it occasionally did when what it had to show was something internal. A prison scene: the Pirate King, arrested at last, sitting across from the Marine hero. The execution scheduled. The unborn child's future not yet decided.
Roger looked at Garp the way he had always looked at him — like a problem that had never resolved itself into anything simpler, and that he had long since made peace with finding interesting rather than frustrating.
"Garp," he said. "I'm leaving my child to you."
Garp had brought the wine himself. A last meal with some dignity to it — he wasn't Akainu, didn't see the children of enemies as continuations of the enemy, couldn't look at an unborn infant and see something that needed to be destroyed. Children were children. What they became was a function of what they were taught and what they chose. Roger's child had done neither yet.
"Will it be a boy or a girl?"
Roger opened the bottle and drank directly from it, the way he did everything — without ceremony, without apology. The alcohol hit him quickly in the way it hits people who have been locked up long enough to lose their tolerance for it, and something in his posture shifted slightly. Not weakness. Release.
"Why limit it to one?" A grin. "What if my woman gives birth to both? A boy and a girl."
Garp rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "Twins. You're about to die and you're hoping for twins."
"A man can have ambitions."
He looked at the Pirate King drinking and being unreasonably comfortable with the proximity of his own death, and felt something that he would never have used the word admiration for, because that word had never felt appropriate for a pirate, but that was approximately what it was. Roger had built a reputation that would outlive empires, had sailed to the end of the world and back, and was now sitting in a Marine prison drinking second-rate wine with the contentment of someone who had finished everything he came to do.
There was always something Garp hadn't understood about that. About Roger going to Loguetown voluntarily — his own hometown, where he'd asked to be executed publicly. The speech he had apparently been planning. What he intended to say, standing on that platform in front of the crowd. Whether that speech had a purpose or whether it was just Roger being Roger, making the largest possible exit because anything smaller would have been out of character.
Roger drank. Got slightly loose. Stopped editing himself.
"Garp. Do you want to know what I found on the final island?" He looked at the Marine hero with a directness that had nothing performed in it. "One Piece is real."
Garp had gone as far as any Marine did without crossing into the kind of territory the Grand Line's end kept for people who had earned the right to it. The islands at the far edge of the New World — he had seen them, had not stayed long, had turned back because the position was tactically indefensible and because what he was chasing had already arrived there and departed. He had never reached the final island. He would not, now.
"You're trying to talk a Marine into going treasure hunting."
"I'm telling you something true." Roger set the bottle down. The amusement was still there, but underneath it was something older. "You and I — both of us have a D in our names. That's not coincidence. Eight hundred years ago, we might have been the same family. The truth of what this world actually is, how it got to be what it is — it's crueler than anything you've been taught. You'll understand eventually. Sooner or later."
Garp had known about the D since he was young enough to make the mistake of saying it out loud in the wrong company. Government agents. A near-execution that had only been averted because his skills had been sufficient and because someone in the Marine had decided he was worth protecting. The D had been nothing but a liability from the start — a name passed down through a branch of a family that had apparently been important enough to be dangerous and not important enough to still exist in any organized way. No one had explained it to him. There was no one left who could.
"The Five Elders have been hunting D's for centuries," Garp said. "That's what I know about it."
"They should be." Roger almost smiled. "One Piece needs the right person to start it. I couldn't be the one — not completely. I put the hope on the future, the people who'll come after." He looked at Garp with something that might have been calculation and might have been certainty. "Maybe your descendants, Garp. Maybe the pirates of the future come from your blood."
Drunk pirate king making prophecies before his execution. Garp had filed it there — drunk man talking, don't give it weight it doesn't deserve. His son Dragon had left the Marine eventually, had gone his own direction, but Dragon wasn't a pirate. His family was of good character and sound lineage and none of them would —
The memory ended there, the way memories do: abruptly, without resolution.
Garp opened his eyes.
The wall was still around him. The seastone that had taken his impact had done its job — he was embedded in it with the comprehensive efficiency of something that had been hit very hard from a very short distance. The inventory his body was providing was thorough and unflattering.
The Multicellular form of Black Sperm stood in the corridor ahead of him, three meters of consolidated cellular mass and disproportionate abdominal definition, looking at the wall with the expression of something assessing its work.
The vision faded slowly. Roger's voice faded with it.
I didn't save your son, Garp thought. Not for the first time. Not for the hundredth. Ace died at Marineford because I didn't move when I should have. If I had. If the moment had gone differently. If.
The if sat the way it always sat — heavy, , irresolvable. The Battle of Marineford had been the intersection of every failure of his career collected into one event. He had been there. He had been in a position to have mattered. He had not.
Roger's son was dead. Roger had trusted him, and he had not been able to keep that trust.
Garp's grandson, however — Roger had apparently seen that coming too, in the particular way drunk men sometimes say things that are more accurate than they should be. Luffy was in the second half of the Grand Line. The Straw Hat Pirates' flag was flying in positions that made the old Marine structure uncomfortable. Morgans was calling him the Fifth Emperor in headlines that Garp read in prison the way he read everything that came from outside — with the complicated feeling of a grandfather who had not raised a pirate and who had raised a pirate.
Roger, you old menace. You were right.
Black Sperm noticed the movement in the wall — the shift in the eyes, the return of deliberate breath, the signs that the old man embedded in the seastone was still operational.
"I let you live," Black Sperm said. "The boss values Straw Hat Luffy, which means you have protective value. You're alive because of your grandson's reputation." A pause. "That's the only reason. Move again, and I revise the calculation."
Garp's vision cleared by degrees. He could see the outline of the form — three meters, defined, the kind of physical presence that had arranged him into a wall with a single punch. Two more states beyond this one, unused, held in reserve.
He registered all of it.
Then he started looking for the opening.