New World. Dressrosa.
The view from the King's Plateau was, by any objective measure, extraordinary.
The city spread below in warm terracotta and whitewash, its rooftops catching the afternoon light at angles that made the whole place look as though it had been painted rather than built. The harbor was visible from here, and the green of the hills beyond the city walls, and further out the blue that was the sea. It was the kind of view that suggested permanence, the settled beauty of a place that had been inhabited for a very long time and intended to continue.
Doflamingo stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back and looked at all of it.
He had not expected to feel anything in particular about Dressrosa. The plan had always been purely functional: a country at the crossroads of New World trade routes, a revenue source, a base for the Donquixote Family's operations. His ancestors had ruled there before moving to Mary Geoise, but Doflamingo had never attached any sentiment to that history. Sentiment was a liability. He had learned this early and thoroughly.
But the process of building something from the ground up had its own quality that he had not anticipated. Taking a country that was financially gutted and slowly, systematically, making it solvent again. Watching the streets fill back up. Watching the money come in.
"Power," he said, to the window and the city below it. "Status. Money." A brief pause. "Remarkable things."
His expression shifted. The softness left it.
"But not for you," he said, quieter now, and the city was not who he was speaking to. Somewhere above the clouds, past the Red Line, the white towers of a place he had been locked out of as a child caught a different light. "Not for any of you. Just wait."
The Den Den Mushi rang.
Doflamingo's hand moved automatically to his trouser pocket. His fingers found nothing. He stopped.
The ringing was coming from across the room. The pitch was different from his usual devices, slightly sharper, with an odd flutter at the end of each ring that he could not immediately place.
He crossed to the side table, opened the drawer, and looked at what was inside.
The Den Den Mushi was dark red, almost the color of dried blood, and its shell had an angular quality that he had never seen on a standard model. It looked, unmistakably, like a bat had been asked to become a snail and had done so with considerable reluctance.
Doflamingo stared at it for a moment.
Then he remembered. This was the one Mary Geoise had distributed at the Warlords' formation, the summoning line, the device that theoretically allowed the World Government to conscript the Seven Warlords for authorized operations. He had been given one in a formal envelope along with a set of documents he had mostly skimmed and filed away. In his brief time as a Warlord, it had never once rung.
He picked it up and answered.
Silence.
Doflamingo held the receiver and looked at it. Nothing came from the other end. No voice, no ambient sound, no indication of whether the line was even connected.
He considered hanging up and deciding it was a malfunction. That was, objectively, the most efficient response to a Den Den Mushi that rang and then said nothing.
The silence stretched.
Then, from the receiver, in a low and slightly aggrieved voice: "You are still just as irritating, Doflamingo."
Doflamingo frowned. The voice triggered something, a faint signal of recognition that he could not quite resolve into a name. The register was familiar in the abstract way that voices are familiar when you have heard them before but not recently enough for the association to be automatic.
"Who is this?" he asked.
On the other end of the line, Crocodile's expression went through several things in rapid succession, none of them pleasant.
The last time Doflamingo had come to him, years ago, he had been persistent to the point of being difficult to refuse. There had been a sustained period of outreach, of proposing cooperation, of showing up where Crocodile was and making his interest in an alliance abundantly clear. You did not forget the voice of someone who had been that consistently present.
Apparently you did.
Crocodile looked at the Den Den Mushi and said nothing for a moment, which was its own kind of answer to a question he had not been asked.
Doflamingo, to his credit, seemed to recognize that the silence was embarrassed rather than threatening. His second attempt was somewhat more graceful.
"Forgive me. I have been extremely busy since Dressrosa. My head is not entirely where it should be." A diplomatic pause. "Could you perhaps remind me?"
"Crocodile," said Crocodile, in the tone of a man who has said his own name with dignity under difficult circumstances.
The recognition hit Doflamingo immediately, and he laughed. It was the full version, the one that climbed to a cackle at the peak and did not apologize for it.
"Fufufufufufu! Crocodile! It must be seven, eight years since we last spoke? Maybe longer?" The amusement in his voice had an edge to it, sharp and perfectly shaped. "I have to say, I am surprised. An arrogant man like you picking up the summoning line and calling me personally. What could have made that necessary?"
"Before you enjoy yourself," Crocodile said, "look at what you're holding."
The tone was controlled, but something underneath it wanted to be sharp.
"I'm looking at it," Doflamingo said. "The Warlords' summoning Den Den Mushi. Which has never rung in the entire time the system has existed." He sat down, crossing one leg over the other, and let the amusement settle into something more attentive. "Go ahead, senior. What wisdom do you have for me?"
Crocodile chose not to engage with the inflection on the word senior.
"Alabasta," he said. "Mary Geoise's people are in the country and have authorized a Warlords operation. The authorization is at the highest level. I am the senior Warlord involved, and I am extending the call to you and two others."
Doflamingo was quiet for a moment. He had inherited a capital city that functioned at roughly sixty percent capacity and a treasury that required careful management, and the Donquixote Family's transition from pirate operation to administrative government was still in the stage where his personal attention was not entirely optional. He did not have spare time in the way that he might have had a year ago.
"Dressrosa has a great deal of ongoing—"
"Highest level authorization," Crocodile said again. "Which means the people above you have the standing to revoke your title if you decline without sufficient cause."
The sentence landed precisely where Crocodile had intended it to land.
Doflamingo was not afraid of many things. The abstract authority of the Five Elders was not something that kept him awake at night. But the Warlord designation had specific, concrete value: it was the credential that would get him through the gates of Mary Geoise at the next World Conference as a king rather than a criminal, and he had been planning that particular entrance with a level of personal investment he would not have admitted to anyone. Arriving at that conference with his Warlord status intact was not optional.
He heard the silence on the line become slightly more satisfied. He also heard that Crocodile was enjoying it, which was its own kind of irritant.
"Walk me through the actual situation," Doflamingo said.
"Alabasta is a country I have been operating in for some time with specific goals. Recently the Revolutionary Army decided to involve itself, Dragon personally, which complicated my timeline. Mary Geoise also has plans of their own regarding the Nefertari family, and they want Warlords to serve as the mechanism for certain actions." Crocodile's voice remained level. "The Revolutionary Army entered the country and made a mess of the existing landscape. We are being asked to clean it up while also ensuring the outcome aligns with Mary Geoise's preferences."
"So," Doflamingo said, "you created the conditions for the mess, Dragon made it worse, and now the rest of us are being recruited to come sort it out."
"Your comprehension ability is as limited as ever."
"Fufufufufu." It came out warm and unhelpful. "Stop performing, Crocodile. I know exactly what this is. You need the numbers and you don't want to ask directly, so you are dressing it in obligation." A pause. "Are you going to refuse for me if I decline? You offered earlier."
"Happily," Crocodile said, in a tone suggesting the opposite.
There was a beat of silence in which Doflamingo appeared to be genuinely weighing it.
"Fine," he said. "I will come to Ala—"
The door opened.
Doflamingo's head came up sharply, and he moved the Den Den Mushi down and away from his mouth in a single, automatic motion.
Monet stopped in the doorway. She had long, pale green hair that she wore loosely, and her expression was carrying the specific quality of someone who had been moving quickly and was making an effort not to show it. Her eyes went to the Den Den Mushi in his hand, registered its unusual shape, and she stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind her.
Her voice dropped to something just above a whisper.
"Master. There is news on the matter the important person mentioned."
Doflamingo's eyes sharpened. "The Logia type?"
Monet gave a single nod, then silently formed two words with her mouth.
Dark-Dark Fruit.
The quality of Doflamingo's attention changed. It was not excitement exactly, but it was something adjacent: the focused, forward-leaning state of a man who has been working toward something for a long time and has just received evidence that the gap is closing.
He smiled.
Lucci had been feeding reports from the Whitebeard Pirates' ship for months. Teach's obsession with that specific fruit was a known quantity. And now.
Finn had tasked him with finding the Dark-Dark Fruit, had offered the Warlord position and everything that came with it as part of the arrangement. Delivering a result of this magnitude would not simply fulfill an obligation. It would significantly upgrade his standing in whatever Finn was building, and Doflamingo had long since concluded that standing in Finn's architecture was worth considerably more than standing in Crocodile's operation in a desert country.
He waved Monet toward the corridor, took his hand off the receiver, and said: "I won't be coming, Crocodile. Something more important has come up. Handle your own situation. I'm sure you'll manage."
"Doflamingo—"
"We will be in contact at a better time. Fufufu."
He hung up.
The room was quiet. Monet stood in the doorway with an expression that suggested she understood the outlines of what had just happened.
Doflamingo set the summoning Den Den Mushi back in the drawer.
In another drawer, under a different key, his regular line to Vergo was already waiting.
In Alabasta, Crocodile held the dead receiver and looked at it for a long moment.
The Den Den Mushi had the expression of a device that had relayed an awkward communication and was not entirely apologetic about it.
Crocodile set it on his desk.
He was not going to call back. That was a clear, uncrossable line. Crocodile did not call Doflamingo back. There was no version of that sequence of events that preserved the appropriate distribution of dignity.
He picked up a fresh cigar and did not light it.
"Hmph," he said, to the aquarium. "I was not counting on him anyway."
This was, technically speaking, a position he was taking after the fact, but the aquarium did not know that, and the Bananawani had no opinion on the subject, and Daz Bonez was not in the room.
The two remaining calls would go more smoothly. They would have to.
He picked up the summoning Den Den Mushi again.
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