The waters near Franks Island had gone quiet again.
The battle had been brief and entirely one-sided. The Fourth Division of the Whitebeard Pirates operated in this stretch of the New World with the casual authority of a regional power that had not faced a meaningful challenge in some time, and a merchant convoy of a dozen ships, however well-armed, was not going to change that record. The escort vessels were destroyed. The merchant ships were seized and boarded. The whole operation had taken less than two hours from first sighting to conclusion.
Thatch, captain of the Fourth Division and the Whitebeard Pirates' head chef, had the specific distinction of being a man who dressed like a cook at all times and fought like a swordsman at all times and seemed entirely comfortable being both things simultaneously. Swords and kitchen knives were, in his view, not different instruments so much as different scales of the same skill.
He kicked open the cargo hold of the largest merchant vessel and dropped inside.
The hold was packed with sacks stacked from floor to ceiling. He selected one at random and drove his blade through the burlap. Fine granules cascaded out, pale and fragrant, and the smell that followed them was warm and complex and immediately identifiable to anyone with a professional nose.
Thatch crouched, scooped a pinch, and raised it to his face.
He touched it to his tongue.
His eyebrows went up.
"Top-grade spice," he said, to no one in particular, with the tone of a craftsman recognizing excellent materials. He looked down the length of the hold at the stacked rows of sacks. "Every single one of them?"
His men confirmed it, enthusiastically.
"Then this caravan had money," Thatch said, straightening. "Go through every hold. The intelligence said there was gold. Find it and do not sink the ship it's on, or I will personally make the person responsible dive down and retrieve it with their teeth."
The gold was found on the third ship they checked. A treasury's worth of it, packed in chests, each coin privately minted with a gold content that Thatch assessed in a single glance as genuine and substantial. He turned one over between his fingers, reading the weight, checking the color under the light from the open hatch.
"Counterfeit," he said, "but honest counterfeit. Someone found a gold mine and decided to do the sensible thing with it." He tossed the coin to the nearest crew member. "Which means there are no serial numbers for the World Bank to trace. Better for us."
He did not know, and had no reason to suspect, that the coin he had just tossed was Amway Group currency, minted on a Marine-controlled island from gold extracted by Impel Down labor in the Calm Belt and circulated back through New World trade networks to fund Marineford's institutional independence. The Black Rose Merchants had purchased a legitimate shipment of it and had been trying to bring it to Franks Island for an exchange when the Fourth Division intercepted them.
In any other context, robbing an Amway Group partner in the New World carried consequences that could accelerate considerably. Charlotte Linlin had stolen from Smoker's operation once. That particular miscalculation had eventually contributed to the battle that reshaped the entire New World's power structure and cost her an arm.
But the Black Rose Merchants were a partner, not Amway Group itself, and Thatch had no information that connected the coins to anything protected. As far as he was concerned, it was simply a wealthy merchant fleet in the wrong stretch of water at the wrong time.
"Captain." One of his crew dropped into the hold from the hatch above. "There's a full shipment of weapons on the fourth vessel. Automatic rifles, new manufacture."
Thatch whistled softly. "Spices, gold, and arms. Somebody was running a full-service operation." He started toward the ladder. "Tally everything. When we're done, the Second Division gets thirty percent for the intelligence. Make sure the accounting is clean before I see it."
He was halfway to the ladder when he noticed the box.
It sat in the far corner of the hold, set apart from the cargo stacks with the deliberate separateness of something someone had been careful with. It was smaller than the treasure chests, and it was a different shape from any of the supply crates, and it had the kind of intentional simplicity that people use when they want an object to be overlooked.
Thatch recognized the format immediately. He had seen enough of them.
He crossed to it, took hold of the lock, and broke it with a short application of force. The lid opened.
Inside, nestled in a fitted interior of dark velvet, sat a Devil Fruit. Its surface was black in the way that something is black when it seems to absorb rather than reflect light, with a spiral pattern that moved across it in a way that felt faintly wrong to look at directly.
Thatch studied it for a moment, his head tilted.
"Well," he said.
He thought about the bounty that had been circulating in the underworld networks for three years, the Donquixote Family posting for a specific fruit with a specific description. He was aware of it in the abstract way that a pirate captain is aware of major underworld transactions in his operating area, which is to say he had registered its existence and moved on.
He had not, in this moment, connected what he was looking at to that particular bounty.
It was a Devil Fruit. He had found it on a merchant ship. This happened. Not often, but it happened. He closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and climbed the ladder.
"I'll have Teach look at it when we link up," he said, to himself and anyone nearby. "He knows his fruits."
On Franks Island, Doflamingo stood at a window on the second floor of the exchange house his people had arranged, and his expression was the expression of a man whose careful plans have just encountered a variable he had not accounted for.
Diamante stood behind him, in the specific posture of a subordinate who is aware that a significant portion of the current situation is technically not his fault and is being careful about whether and how to make this point.
"The Black Rose Merchants lost contact," Diamante said. "Our support fleet was dispatched but could not reach them in time. Based on the timeline and the Fourth Division's known patrol routes in this area, the most probable conclusion is that Thatch's fleet intercepted the convoy."
"The most probable conclusion," Doflamingo repeated, without turning around.
"Yes, sir."
"The Whitebeard Pirates' Fourth Division happened to be in the area." The words came out very evenly, which was worse than if they had been sharp. "And the caravan carrying the Dark-Dark Fruit happened to sail through that area."
"It appears to have been coincidental, sir."
Doflamingo was quiet for a moment.
He had refused Crocodile. He had dismissed the Warlords' summoning, declined Mary Geoise's highest-level authorization, and turned his back on an Alabasta operation that had real institutional weight behind it, and he had done all of it on the basis of intelligence suggesting the Dark-Dark Fruit was within reach. Finn's appreciation for a result this significant would have been worth more than anything Crocodile's desert operation could offer. He had run the calculation carefully and decided.
And now the Dark-Dark Fruit was on a Whitebeard Pirates vessel.
Doflamingo turned from the window.
He looked at Diamante without particular expression.
"Prepare a ship," he said.
Diamante hesitated. "Sir, if the fruit is already aboard a Fourth Division vessel, then Thatch's full fleet—"
"I did not ask for an assessment," Doflamingo said. "Prepare a ship."
"Of course, sir. But perhaps if we sent a larger force—"
Doflamingo had already walked to the window, and before Diamante finished the sentence, the strings were out and climbing, threading upward through the air and finding purchase on the clouds above the island with the practiced ease of a man who had been doing this for years. The Heavenly Yaksha moved differently from other people. When he wanted to be somewhere, the distance between where he was and where he intended to be became a problem that strings could solve.
He stepped out of the window and was gone.
Monet, who had been standing near the doorway throughout this exchange, pushed her glasses up and watched the space where Doflamingo had been.
She looked at Diamante.
"Pursuit fleet," she said. "Now."
"Yes, right, of course." Diamante was already moving.
In the cabin of the small vessel making its way toward the Franks Sea, the Den Den Mushi on the table between Lucci and Teach began to ring.
Lucci picked it up.
"Lucci." Thatch's voice was in good spirits, which was Thatch's default register after a successful operation. "Your intelligence was excellent. I am calculating the take at two hundred billion berries, possibly more. Top-grade spices, gold, weapons. Full shipment."
"Congratulations," Lucci said. "The Second Division's thirty percent is appreciated."
"Generous to a fault, that's me." Thatch laughed. "Listen, I found something else in one of the holds. A Devil Fruit. I have no idea what it is and I did not bother asking the prisoners. Is Teach with you? He knows the encyclopedia better than anyone. We should link up and let him take a look."
Lucci glanced at Teach.
Teach's breathing had changed. His hands, which had been resting loosely on his knees, had tightened.
"He is right here," Lucci said pleasantly. "He mentioned missing you, actually. Send us your position and we will adjust our route."
"Done. I will make you something proper when you arrive. I found some exceptional spices today, it would be a waste not to use them." Thatch sounded genuinely pleased. "See you soon."
The line closed.
Lucci set the Den Den Mushi down.
Teach was looking at him with an expression that had shed most of its surface layers.
"He does not know what it is," Teach said.
"He did not ask the prisoners."
"Because he is careless. I told you." A sound that was almost a laugh came out of Teach, short and slightly unsteady. "He will bring it straight to me. He always does when he finds a fruit he cannot identify. He trusts my encyclopedia."
He stood up.
"And then," he said, mostly to himself, "it is mine."
Lucci watched him move to the porthole and look out at the water, and he watched the anticipation moving across Teach's face in the way that something moves across a person's face when they have been waiting for it for so long that the waiting itself has changed the shape of their wanting.
"Seize it," Lucci said quietly.
Teach turned to look at him.
"That is the word you keep using," Lucci said, with a mild tone that had something careful underneath it. "Not 'take' or 'ask for.' Seize."
"What does it matter?"
Lucci's expression did not change. "Nothing," he said. "It does not matter at all."
He looked away from Teach and back at the water.
Thatch was careless and generous and inclined to trust the people he worked alongside. Teach knew this better than most, had spent years watching it, had benefited from it repeatedly. And still, in the presence of the Dark-Dark Fruit, the instinct that activated in him was not trust but seizure.
Lucci filed this.
He filed Teach's laugh in the boat cabin days ago. He filed the irrationality around Thatch. He filed the specific texture of the obsession, which had its own character entirely separate from the question of what the Dark-Dark Fruit actually did. He filed all of it in the careful interior record that he had been maintaining for years, the one that fed, in encrypted fragments through secure channels, to Marine Headquarters.
To Admiral Finn.
Teach was still looking out the porthole with the expression of a man rehearsing something he has been rehearsing for a very long time.
"Zehahahahahahaha."
The laugh built from somewhere internal and came out full and rolling, filling the small cabin without apology, the laugh of someone entirely alone with a vision they find magnificent.
Lucci turned his face slightly away.
He allowed himself, in the privacy of a direction Teach was not looking, one small expression. It was not quite pity. It was the expression of someone who has developed genuine fondness for a person and who knows, with complete clarity and without any pleasure in the knowledge, exactly how that person's story ends.
Sorry, Senior Teach.
The thought was fully formed and entirely silent.
I am actually a Marine.
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