Doflamingo did not move immediately after hanging up.
He stood with the summoning Den Den Mushi in his hand and let Monet wait, which was a small habit of his, a way of establishing that her news would arrive on his schedule rather than its own. Then he turned and set the device on the table.
"Tell me exactly," he said. "Where is it?"
Monet had been his secretary long enough to understand the difference between his moods. The particular quality of his attention right now, very still, very forward, was not the attention of the King of Dressrosa managing a routine matter. She kept her voice level and precise.
"Franks Island. One of the major dark exchanges in the New World. A caravan accepted our bounty posting and confirmed they have the fruit. They're delivering it to Franks for collection." She paused. "Diamante is already en route. He asked me to bring you the news directly."
Doflamingo turned the information over. Franks Island.
He had been searching for the Dark-Dark Fruit for three years, at Finn's specific request and with a-billion-berry bounty posted through the Donquixote Family's underworld network. Three years of watching the dark exchanges, tracking rumors, following leads that dissolved at their ends. In that time, he had learned everything publicly available about the fruit: a Logia classification that did not behave like any other Logia, unable to transform the user into an element, capable instead of releasing a dark gravitational force that neutralized other Devil Fruit abilities on contact.
The intelligence community called it the most dangerous fruit in history. Doflamingo could not determine why from the available information alone. Whatever Finn knew about its deeper nature, he had not shared, and Doflamingo had enough sense not to ask in a way that would reveal how much he wanted to know.
The answer would become clear when the fruit reached Finn. And Finn's response to that delivery was going to be worth considerably more to Doflamingo than the mystery of the fruit itself.
"A promise from the strongest Admiral in Marine history," he said, and the evil satisfaction in his voice was entirely genuine. "That is not something a person lets sit on a shelf."
He waved at Monet.
"Prepare a ship. I want to reach Franks before anyone else does."
Her expression asked the question without her voicing it.
"Diamante is capable," Doflamingo said, anticipating it, "but capable people still need someone to remind them what the priority is. I want to see this fruit with my own eyes before we notify anyone." He picked up his feathered coat from the chair back and settled it across his shoulders. "Go."
Monet turned and left with the quick efficiency of someone who had learned that when Doflamingo said go, he meant immediately.
Doflamingo looked out at the city of Dressrosa one more time. The afternoon was still long. The harbor was visible below, and the ships in it, and the sea beyond.
He smiled.
The Roland Sea, New World.
The Moby Dick moved at reduced speed through the afternoon swell, which was how she typically moved these days. Not slowly, exactly, but without the urgent forward press that had characterized her during the years of Whitebeard's unquestioned dominance. The crew went about their tasks with the same discipline they always had, but there was a quality to the atmosphere that had not been there before Jam Island, a subtle recalibration around the fact that their father was still the strongest man any of them had personally met, and was also no longer quite what he had been.
Nobody said this directly. It simply existed in the ship, the way certain truths exist in families.
On the main deck, Marshall D. Teach had a chopping board, a kitchen knife, and three large sea fish that he was processing with the focused pleasure of a man who genuinely enjoyed this task. The knife moved efficiently through the first fish, and Teach hummed something tuneless to himself.
Around him, other crew members were setting up for the evening banquet, carrying tables, arguing about the best way to heat the soup, dropping things. The deck had the comfortable, productive noise of a large crew that functioned well together.
"Teach."
Rob Lucci came up behind him without appearing to have come from anywhere specific. After years on this ship, he moved through it the way he moved through any environment: as though he belonged and as though no particular corner of it required explanation. He kept his voice low, calibrated to carry only as far as Teach's ears.
"Something's happening."
Teach did not look up from the fish. "If it's about the mustard, I said we were out. Someone needs to talk to the supply officer."
"It is about the Devil Fruit you have been looking for."
The knife came down.
It did not simply stop. It came down with a full extension of force that drove the blade through the fish, through the chopping board beneath it, and into the wood of the deck below that with a sound that several nearby crew members registered and then immediately decided not to investigate.
From the front, Teach's face was different.
The easy, simple warmth that he wore around the ship every day, the expression of a man who found everything mildly amusing and harbored no particular intentions beyond enjoying the next meal, was gone. What replaced it was not anger, not fear. It was something considerably more focused than either. The lines of his face had reorganized themselves around an entirely different interior, and the ambition behind his eyes was not a small thing.
He pulled the knife out of the deck, set it on what remained of the chopping board, and turned to face Lucci.
"Tell me," he said.
"Franks Island. One of the larger dark exchanges in the New World. Someone took the Donquixote bounty, which means they have the fruit and they're bringing it to Franks for the handoff." Lucci kept his tone neutral, the tone of a man sharing intelligence rather than interpreting it. "From what I tracked through the underworld listings, this appears to be a straightforward transaction. The people involved likely do not understand what they're carrying. To them, it is simply a high-value Devil Fruit moving through legitimate channels."
Teach was already calculating.
"Franks Island," he said. "That is more than a month from our current position."
"Closer to five weeks at standard speed. Three weeks if we push hard day and night." Lucci paused. "The Donquixote Family is involved. The bounty originated with them, which means Doflamingo is going to have people at Franks. If we arrive after the handoff is complete and the fruit is in Donquixote hands, retrieving it becomes considerably more complicated."
Teach's jaw moved. He was running through the variables.
"Are there Whitebeard crews near Franks?" he asked.
"The Fourth Division operates in that area."
"Then we contact Thatch." Teach had already decided. He pulled off the bib, which was marked with fish blood in several places, and dropped it on the table. "Ask him to intercept the caravan before it reaches the exchange. Tell him it is carrying gold. The Fourth Division will not ask questions."
"He will find out eventually what he actually intercepted."
"By then, I will be there." Teach raised his voice, projecting across the deck toward the distant figure of Edward Newgate, who was seated in his usual place with the authority of a man the ship arranges itself around. "Dad! You all go ahead and eat. Lucci and I have an errand!"
Newgate turned his head with the deliberate motion of a man who does not feel the need to hurry any motion.
"Mm," he said, looking at them from under his brow. "Be careful."
Since Jam Island, the relationship between Newgate and Teach had shifted in the specific way that shared danger shifts relationships between people. Teach had jumped into a situation where Teach's participation had cost him nothing and might have cost him everything, from Newgate's perspective, and Newgate had absorbed this fact into his assessment of the man. He did not press Teach on the captain's position anymore, and he did not ask where Teach was going.
He simply watched them go.
"Don't worry, Dad!" Teach waved back with the cheerful simplicity of a man completely at ease with the people around him.
Then he walked down toward the small boat Lucci had somehow already arranged, and his expression was the other one again.
In the cabin of the small boat, with the Moby Dick falling behind them and the Roland Sea open ahead, Lucci said: "Thatch is ambitious in his own way. He has been talking about becoming a Devil Fruit user for some time. If the Fourth Division intercepts the caravan and Thatch identifies the fruit, his right under ship rules is to take it."
Teach was quiet for a moment.
"He would need to know what it is first," he said. "The Devil Fruit encyclopedia on this ship has been in my possession. He can't identify it without seeing it."
"The bounty notice describes its abilities in enough detail," Lucci said. "He would not need the encyclopedia."
Teach's expression tightened at the edges.
"Can you not," he said, "just say something encouraging? Why is everything you say designed to make my situation worse?"
Lucci looked at him.
"Tell Thatch," he said. "Directly. Tell him you have been waiting for this specific fruit for years. Tell him what it means to you. The relationship between you and him is not the kind where he would steal something this significant from you. You know this."
Teach was silent.
A long silence, the kind that has something complicated in it.
"I said something I should not have said after drinking," he said finally, quietly. "A few years back. About how I had never eaten a fruit because I was waiting for the right one. Thatch put the pieces together. He knows I have been looking for something powerful." He paused. "If I tell him directly, he understands everything. The Dark-Dark Fruit is not an ordinary find. If Thatch decides that its value to him outweighs our friendship, he has a legitimate claim, and I cannot prove he decided that. He could eat it and then give me any explanation he chose." His voice had gone somewhere hard and flat. "I cannot tell him."
Lucci stared at him for a moment.
"That," he said, "is not rational."
"I know."
"Thatch has never given you a reason—"
"I know," Teach said. "I said I know." He looked out the small porthole at the water sliding past. "He probably would not. He probably would hand it to me without hesitation and think nothing of it. I know him. But the Dark-Dark Fruit has been the one fixed point in my life for a very long time. Longer than I have been on this ship. Longer than most things." A pause. "When something matters this much, you do not put it in someone else's hands. Not even someone you trust."
Lucci was quiet.
He considered pushing back. He considered pointing out, again, that the logic did not hold. Then he looked at Teach's profile against the porthole light and recognized the specific quality of the irrationality he was looking at. This was not a flaw in reasoning that could be corrected by better information. It was the irrationality of someone who had been carrying something for so long that the weight of it had changed the shape of how they thought.
He let it go.
Teach was already somewhere else. His eyes had gone to the middle distance, and his breathing had slowed and deepened, and the expression on his face was not a careful one. It was the expression of a man projecting forward in time, laying out a sequence of events in the specific detail of something he has rehearsed many times. The Dark-Dark Fruit. Then what comes after. Then everything that comes after that.
"Zehahahahahahaha," Teach said.
It started as something almost private and built quickly into something considerably less so, rolling through the small cabin with the total unselfconsciousness of a man who has forgotten, for the moment, that anyone else is in the room.
Lucci watched him laugh.
His expression did not change. But behind it, he was filing everything: the quality of the obsession, the specific shape of the irrationality, the gap between the man Teach presented to the Whitebeard Pirates and the man currently laughing alone at his own future in a boat cabin on the Roland Sea.
He would include it in the next report to Admiral Finn.