The Roland Sea, New World.
Less than two weeks after Thatch's Fourth Division had intercepted the Black Rose Merchants' convoy, the flagship of the Delicious Cook drifted at anchor while its captain threw a banquet.
Thatch threw banquets the way other people breathed, which was to say frequently and without requiring much justification. Tonight's occasion was the reunion of three men who had departed the Moby Dick together and returned separately, and the size of the Fourth Division's haul, which was the kind of number that warranted celebration on its own terms.
The deck was loud and warm. Meat turned on improvised spits. Sake moved from hand to hand. Someone had found a drum somewhere, and the resulting rhythm was enthusiastic if not technically proficient.
Teach had his arm around Thatch's shoulders and was in the middle of a story that was getting louder with each refill. Lucci sat a few feet away, eating grilled fish slowly, and contributed to the conversation at intervals that suggested he was engaged while actually maintaining the particular quality of attention that kept track of everything.
He had confirmed, within the first ten minutes of boarding, that Thatch had not eaten the fruit. The Dark-Dark Fruit was in the captain's cabin in a small locked box, and Thatch was still moving like a man who had no particular relationship with gravity. No Devil Fruit. Not yet.
Teach had confirmed the same thing. Lucci could read it in the slight relaxation around Teach's eyes, the way the performance of easy warmth became fractionally more genuine once he had verified the essential fact.
"Two billion," Thatch was saying. "Final count. Maybe more when we finish cataloguing the spices."
"And the Second Division's thirty percent of that," Teach said magnanimously.
"Of course, of course. Without your people's intelligence, I let that whole convoy sail right past me." Thatch refilled his cup and raised it. "To Lucci, the man who apparently knows where all the money in the New World is hiding."
Several crew members near enough to hear raised their cups in agreement.
Lucci inclined his head and said nothing.
Thatch leaned back, and the good humor shifted into something quieter, the specific quality of warmth that comes out in a man when he has drunk enough to let his actual feelings show.
"We need to be honest with ourselves," he said, to no one in particular. "Things are not what they were. Dad's health is going in one direction. We're not the operation that could walk into any situation and know it was going to walk out the other side." He turned his cup slowly in his hand. "We have to get stronger. The crew has to get stronger. I've been a capable swordsman for years and that's not enough anymore." He paused. "So this time, when I found that devil fruit in the hold, I decided. Whatever it is, as long as it's not completely useless, I'm eating it."
Teach went still for exactly one heartbeat.
It was not visible from a distance. Lucci caught it.
"Don't worry," Teach said, and his voice had recovered perfectly, returning to the warm, slightly teasing register he used with Thatch. "The Devil Fruit Encyclopedia is with me. After the banquet, I'll come find you and we'll look at it together. With any luck it's something strong. Logia, maybe. Or a Mythical Zoan."
Thatch laughed and thumped him on the back. "That would be the day. Me, a Mythical Zoan. I'd settle for anything that makes my cooking faster, honestly." Then, more seriously, putting a hand on Teach's shoulder: "You know, if you ever run into something you can't handle, you come to me. That's what we're here for. Looking out for each other."
Teach's smile was entirely natural and completely warm.
"I know," he said.
In a stretch of open water south of their position, Doflamingo landed on the deck of a small merchant vessel without announcing himself.
He had been doing this for two weeks. Land on a ship, eat, drink water, use the Parasite technique to hold the crew in place long enough to ask them what he needed to know, then get back in the air and keep moving. The Heavenly Yaksha method of travel, which involved threading strings through clouds and moving between them at speed, covered distance quickly, but it was not indefinitely sustainable without resupply. The merchant ships he encountered along the way had become a kind of refueling station.
The captain of this one stood at the center of the deck with his limbs responding to someone else's instructions and his eyes communicating that he was aware this was happening and was very unhappy about it.
"You've seen the Fourth Division," Doflamingo said. It was not a question. He had read the captain's initial flinch when he landed.
"A few days ago," the captain said. The voice had the careful flatness of someone trying not to make things worse. "They left heading south. Didn't stop us. I think we weren't worth the trouble."
"They were full," Doflamingo said. "Going south." He released the threads. The captain staggered slightly and did not move otherwise. "Good."
The strings found the clouds above the ship. Doflamingo was gone before the captain had fully processed that he was now free to move.
He did not think much about the Whitebeard Pirates as an obstacle. Thatch's fleet was formidable, but Doflamingo had survived encounters with people considerably more formidable than a division captain. The issue was time, and whether the Dark-Dark Fruit was still unclaimed, and whether he could reach it before Thatch did something impulsive.
He pulled himself south and thought about what Finn's reaction would be when this was resolved.
The strongest Admiral in Marine history.
The phrase still felt useful to turn over, even now.
The banquet wound down with the gradual, comfortable untidiness of all Thatch's banquets. Crew members drifted back to their posts or found places to sleep. The drum fell silent. Thatch walked Teach to the gangway between the ships with his arm loose around the other man's shoulder, the walk of someone who had drunk exactly the right amount.
"Later, then," Thatch said. "Come find me. Bring the encyclopedia."
"I'll be there before you miss me," Teach said.
He watched Thatch go.
Then he walked back to the Second Division's attached vessel and found Lucci in the engine room, where Lucci had gone before the banquet formally ended, quietly, the way Lucci moved when he did not want the movement noticed.
"He's decided," Teach said. His voice had changed. Not dramatically, just enough to be a different thing from what it had been at the banquet. The warmth had settled into something cooler and more considered. "He's made up his mind to eat it. I heard it in how he talked about it. Once Thatch decides something, you cannot talk him back from it. He is stubborn about his decisions even when they're not smart ones."
Lucci was leaning against the wall. He said nothing.
"Once I move on this, there is no road back," Teach said. "Dad does not forgive this kind of thing. The one rule on that ship, the only real ironclad rule in twenty years of sailing, is that you do not harm your crewmates." He looked at his hands for a moment. "I will not be able to explain this in a way that lands correctly."
Lucci watched him.
"So here is what I am thinking," Teach continued, and the calculation in his voice was entirely undisguised now. "If I simply take it and run, I am the villain of the story and Dad will hunt me indefinitely. The Whitebeard Pirates are still the largest fleet in the New World. That is a problem." He looked up. "But if the Whitebeard Pirates become occupied with something else, something that requires all of their attention and draws their aggression in another direction, the story changes. I provoke a conflict, I make them look outward instead of inward, and then I operate in the space that creates." He paused. "The Marine. Or one of the other Emperors. Whoever creates the most useful disruption."
A brief silence.
"And the Admiral," Lucci said quietly.
Teach almost smiled. "You have been paying attention."
"You have not exactly hidden it."
"Finn," Teach said, and the name had a specific weight in his mouth, different from how he said most names. Not quite admiration, not quite calculation. Something that included both. "Jam Island showed me something. Newgate, who was the strongest thing I had ever seen, who I had sailed with and measured myself against for years, went into that battle with every advantage and came out of it finished." He shook his head slightly. "Not because he made a mistake. Because Finn was better. That is a different thing." He was quiet for a moment. "The Dark-Dark Fruit can nullify Devil Fruit abilities. Even Logia transformations. Even his gravity."
Lucci held very still.
"If I can catch him in the right moment," Teach said, "with the Dark-Dark Fruit deployed before he knows what's happening, then I take the Press-Press Fruit afterward." He spread his hands in a gesture that indicated the obvious conclusion. "Two Devil Fruits. Both of them rule-type abilities. Both of them in the hands of someone who knows how to use them."
He looked at Lucci with complete directness.
"I am going to do this," he said. "From the moment we left the Moby Dick together, you have been part of this. I am asking you, now, directly: are you with me?"
Lucci looked back at him.
In the space of that look, he was briefly aware of the full weight of everything he carried: the years on the Moby Dick, the genuine warmth the crew had shown him from the beginning, Thatch teaching him four different ways to break down a fish, Newgate watching them leave and saying only be careful in the voice of a man who trusted them to come back. He was aware of all of it, and he set it aside, and the thing that remained was the commitment he had made long before any of this, to a man in a Marine Admiral's coat who had understood, when Lucci was six years old and being trained by Zephyr, that he would be worth more in enemy territory than anywhere else.
"Of course," Lucci said, and his voice was easy and warm. "Call me whatever you like. Captain sounds fine."
Teach laughed, full and genuine, the sound of a man who has crossed a line and found the other side lighter than he expected.
"Get the ship ready," he said. "I will go now with the encyclopedia, spend some time with Thatch, look at the fruit with him, and when the moment is right, that is when we move. Under cover of night. Clean and fast." He headed for the door. "Wait here."
"Understood," Lucci said.
Teach went up the ladder and out.
Lucci listened to his footsteps moving away across the deck. He counted to thirty, then he moved. Not up the ladder. Out through the secondary hatch on the engine room's portside wall, the one he had noted on his first pass through the vessel. Out onto the narrow walkway between ships. Across the gangway, smooth and quick, without the kind of sound that carries.
He was back on Thatch's flagship before Teach had reached the Second Division's vessel to retrieve the encyclopedia.