— Real World. Whole Cake Island / Global Reactions. —
Charlotte Linlin was going to be a bride again. This was a happy event, and happy events required celebration, and celebrations on Whole Cake Island required a tea party with a guest list that covered the entire scope of Big Mom's underworld business relationships.
The strategic logic was not entirely concealed beneath the festivity. The Beasts Pirates had been attracting attention. The Whitebeard Pirates and the Big Mom Pirates had both, in the world's recent accounting, been somewhat overshadowed. Linlin was dissatisfied with this accounting and intended to use the occasion to demonstrate, clearly and with a full audience, that no challenger had yet appeared who could shake her position. The tea party was a celebration of an upcoming marriage. It was also an advertisement.
Her children moved into the planning with the organized competence of people who had done this before and understood what their mother required.
The wedding dress was the first logistical problem. Hundreds of design sketches were prepared in advance and presented to her for review. She went through them with the pickiness of a woman who has opinions about aesthetics and has had a long time to develop them.
"Too light. Too bright. That one—" she tilted her head— "is acceptable, possibly."
The garment itself, once a design was selected, required an overnight construction effort involving hundreds of people working in coordinated shifts. Her dimensions were not standard. They were not close to standard. Every new garment required fresh measurements because her attitude toward physical management was, generously described, relaxed. The long-arm and long-leg tribe members circling her with measuring instruments were performing a task of genuine engineering complexity.
She was in good spirits throughout. Her children gathered and served her and carefully avoided saying anything that would change that.
Katakuri approached when the mood was favorable.
"Most of your business partners have been notified. They'll make time to attend." He delivered this with the practiced neutrality of someone who has learned that information reaches his mother better without editorial comment. "Morgans confirmed personally. He'll lead the reporting team."
Morgans had been asleep — badly, having stayed up late the night before — when the news reached him.
He was out of bed within seconds of processing it.
Kozuki Momonosuke. Big Mom's next husband. The subject of some of the Sky Screen's more emphatic future endorsements, currently an eight-year-old boy on Whole Cake Island, apparently about to enter a marriage with a woman in her sixties who outmassed him by an amount that made direct comparison difficult. This was not merely interesting. This was the single most entertaining piece of news to cross his desk in recent memory, and the Big Mom Pirates had extended him close-access interview rights.
He could get near enough to record the ceremony. He could get near enough to evaluate the gap between what the Sky Screen had broadcast about Kozuki Momonosuke and what the actual child in front of him resembled. If the gap was significant — and preliminary assessments suggested it was significant — there was a story in that too. The Sky Screen's credibility was a commercial variable. Any opportunity to interrogate it was an opportunity to sell newspapers.
The seagulls moved with their characteristic diligence. Within a day, the World Economic Journal's coverage of the upcoming wedding had reached every port in the world that received regular delivery.
The reactions were varied and genuine.
Some people laughed. The kind of laugh that comes from something so unexpected it bypasses the usual response filters. Some felt something harder to name — a discomfort at the optics of the age gap, the power differential, the circumstances of a child in the custody of an Emperor. Some assumed the story was fabricated, because the story had the quality of something a person invents as a joke. Some concluded that Linlin had simply lost the thread of acceptable behavior, which was a conclusion with some precedent.
Kozuki Momonosuke, whoever and whatever he became in the future, had apparently become the most discussed name in the world overnight.
The Moby Dick received its copy through Squard.
He had boarded with the urgency of someone carrying information he could not decide how to introduce, and delivered the newspaper to Whitebeard directly. The front page was primarily occupied by two images: an old woman in her sixties and a boy who had not yet reached ten years old, separated by a bold headline about matrimonial arrangements.
Whitebeard looked at it for a while.
"Linlin." He set the newspaper down. He rubbed his temples with the two fingers he usually used for this purpose. "She really didn't leave a child alone. Momo isn't even ten years old. This is outrageous."
The situation was also, on reflection, personally complicated.
Whitebeard and Linlin had been on the Rocks crew together. They had not been particularly close — his relationship with Linlin had existed without much warmth in either direction. What had existed was Miss Buckingham Stussy's friendship with Linlin, which he had observed from a distance during the Rocks years and filed as someone else's business.
The complication was the family structure. Whitebeard and Kozuki Oden were brothers — not by blood, by the bonds of men who had chosen each other. Which made Kozuki Momonosuke, by extension, something like a nephew. If Linlin married that nephew—
He tried to work out what that made their relationship.
Linlin and Whitebeard were the same generation. If she married into the generation below him, by the logic of family trees, that created a structural confusion that he did not want to follow all the way to its conclusions. Would she be his niece-in-law? Would she be required to address him as uncle? Would he be required to address her as anything other than "Linlin, what are you doing?"
The generations had tangled in a way that offended some deep instinct for order.
He was also, more practically, offended on Momonosuke's behalf. The boy had been on the Moby Dick. Whitebeard had observed him. He was Oden's son, and he was eight years old, and the institution of marriage as practiced by Charlotte Linlin did not have a good record for the people on Momonosuke's side of the arrangement. Linlin's husbands had a pattern. The pattern ended in a way that was sometimes described, in certain circles, with agricultural metaphors about soil enrichment.
"Dad." Squard had moved closer. He had the tone of a son who is about to say something his father knows is correct and doesn't want to hear. "Our strong captains are all out right now. Marco's group, the others — they're after Blackbeard or they're in Wano getting intelligence. If we go to Whole Cake Island right now—"
"I know."
He knew. The sons who remained were not the sons he would choose to take into a direct confrontation with the Big Mom Pirates on their home territory. The Whitebeard Pirates in their current configuration were sufficient to hold their territory because Whitebeard himself held it; they were not, at this moment, surplus enough to spend on an uninvited visit to Whole Cake Island.
Linlin had not invited Whitebeard or Kaido to the wedding. She had invited her underworld business partners. She had, in doing so, demonstrated either confidence or selective accounting — because she could not have genuinely believed that either of those two would remain uninvolved once the news spread.
The question was not whether Whitebeard would go. He had already decided.
"Oden died and I couldn't avenge him." His voice had shifted. The irritation was still present but underneath it was something older and heavier. "I can't watch his only son walk into that." He was quiet for a moment. "I'll bring the boy to my side. Raise him properly. Maybe he turns into what the future says he becomes."
Being the husband of Charlotte Linlin was not a good outcome for anyone who had done it before. The record was consistent. The men who entered that role had generally not left it in a condition that allowed for independent continuation. Kozuki Momonosuke, if things proceeded as currently arranged, would be blessed with an experience that most people, being aware of the record, would actively avoid.
Whitebeard did not intend to let that happen.
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