The knock came in sets of three, patient at first.
Teach stood at Thatch's cabin door with the Devil Fruit Encyclopedia tucked under his arm, its worn spine familiar against his forearm. He had carried that book for years. He knew its weight the way he knew the weight of everything he had decided to keep.
No answer.
He knocked again. Waited.
The ship around him was settling into its post-banquet quiet. Distant voices, the creak of rope and timber, someone laughing somewhere on the lower deck. Normal sounds. He kept his face neutral while he stood in the corridor and waited.
Footsteps came from behind him. Uneven, slightly deliberate, the footsteps of a man managing the distance between one foot and the next with more attention than usual.
Teach turned.
Thatch came down the corridor with one hand on the wall and an expression of mild embarrassment.
"Sorry, sorry," he said. "Drank more than I thought. Had to make a stop."
Teach let out a laugh that had nothing performed about it. "The great captain of the Fourth Division, undone by his own party."
"Whose party was it? You were pouring." Thatch reached past him and pushed open the cabin door. "Come on, then. Let's see what kind of fruit the sea gave me."
The light inside clicked on.
The cabin was a working captain's space: charts on one wall, a desk buried in papers, a cot that had seen better years. Thatch moved to the corner where a small table held a teapot and two cups and began pouring without being asked. His back was to Teach.
Teach's eyes went straight to the box.
It sat on the table near the porthole, small and unremarkable, the kind of container that people who moved Devil Fruits used because it looked like nothing. He had known what it was before he registered consciously that he was looking at it. He had spent enough time imagining this moment that recognition came before thought.
"Water?" Thatch said, still facing away. "I always get thirsty after."
"Sure," Teach said. "Cut back on the drinking."
"Can't do that." Thatch turned with a cup in each hand, smiling. "I would be dead within the week."
"Then be dead," Teach said.
The smile on Thatch's face shifted. "That joke is getting old."
He held out the cup.
Teach took it.
He set the encyclopedia on the edge of the desk. He held the cup in one hand and looked at Thatch's face for a moment, the open, unsuspecting face of a man who had spent a decade never giving him a reason to guard against him.
Then he put the cup down.
The dagger came out fast.
Thatch did not move in time. He had never had a reason to develop the reflex of moving away from Teach. That was precisely the point, and Teach had known it from the moment he decided.
The first strike took him in the abdomen before the recognition of what was happening could reach Thatch's expression. Teach's other hand came up and covered his mouth, cutting off the sound, and then the dagger moved again, and again, working with the focused efficiency of someone who had committed fully and was not stopping until the job was done.
Thatch's legs went wrong beneath him. Teach held him up by the grip on his mouth, controlled the descent, and then let him down when the resistance stopped.
Thatch lay on the deck.
His hands had found his stomach. His eyes were open and looking upward, and the confusion in them was doing something complicated that Teach did not allow himself to study.
The silence in the cabin was very loud.
"Why," Thatch said. His voice was almost nothing. His hands pressed against the wound but the motion was already becoming uncertain. "Why... Teach..."
Teach looked at him.
"The Dark-Dark Fruit was in your way," he said. "And you were in mine."
"Dark..." Thatch's mouth formed the word slowly, as if testing it. He did not seem to understand it. The light in his eyes was going through its stages.
He said nothing else.
Teach crouched and watched until it was finished. He did not look away. He had decided that he owed Thatch that much: to not look away.
When it was done, Teach stood.
He looked at the blood on his hands for a moment. Then he looked at the small box on the table by the porthole.
He crossed to it and picked it up.
His hands stopped.
The weight was wrong. He knew the weight of that box, had held similar ones, knew what a Devil Fruit added to a container that size. This was nothing. This was an empty box.
He opened it anyway.
A folded piece of paper sat in the velvet interior, and nothing else.
Teach turned the room apart.
He went through the desk, the chart drawers, the shelf above the cot, every place in the cabin that could contain something small enough to hide. He checked behind the maps on the wall. He checked under the bed and under the pillow and inside the pillowcase. He moved the teapot and the cups and the tray they sat on.
The Dark-Dark Fruit was not in the cabin.
He stood in the middle of the room with blood drying on his hands and looked at the letter in his fist. He had avoided opening it because opening it meant receiving news he was not ready for.
He opened it.
The handwriting was neat and unhurried, the handwriting of someone who had time to compose their thoughts.
Senior Teach,
By the time you read this, Captain Thatch is probably already dead. I am sorry for that. He deserved better than to be collateral in someone else's plan.
You will want to know why. The honest answer is the same reason you are standing in that cabin: I came to the Whitebeard Pirates for the Dark-Dark Fruit. I have been waiting for this moment as long as you have. When you started using the word "seize" on the boat, I understood that we had arrived at the same destination by different roads, and that only one of us was going to leave with the fruit.
Since you would like a proper introduction:
Rob Lucci. Commander, Marine Headquarters Intelligence Division, attached to the Nonexistent Organization under the direct authority of Admiral Rodriguez Finn.
I want you to know that I am genuinely grateful for the years. I mean that without irony. You brought me aboard when I was ten years old and you never had reason to regret it. That is not nothing.
But I am a Marine soldier, and I always was.
I'm sorry, Senior Teach.
Teach read it twice.
Then he tore it into pieces.
He held the pieces in both hands and breathed.
The sequence of thoughts that moved through him in the next two minutes did not announce themselves in any particular order. There was the rage, which was the loudest. There was the recognition of exactly how completely he had been managed, from the day Lucci had appeared on the Moby Dick at ten years old, through every conversation, every shared meal, every piece of intelligence that had led Thatch's fleet to that caravan. There was the specific, suffocating humiliation of realizing that the one person he had trusted enough to bring on this operation had been a Marine asset reporting to Finn from the beginning.
And then, underneath all of it, moving faster than the emotion, the calculation.
He had killed Thatch.
He was standing in Thatch's cabin, covered in Thatch's blood, with Thatch's body on the floor.
And the only other person who had been in this part of the ship tonight had just sailed away with the Dark-Dark Fruit in his possession.
Teach dropped the torn pieces of the letter.
He looked at Thatch's body, at the open eyes that were aimed at nothing now, and he thought about how it was going to look when the crew found them. He thought about what story required the fewest moving parts and would land with the most force in the shortest time.
He picked up his dagger.
He wiped it on the inside of his coat where the blood would not show against the exterior fabric.
Then he opened the cabin door and walked into the corridor and started shouting.
"THATCH!" His voice broke like a man who had just found something terrible. He moved fast toward the nearest cluster of crew members. "Someone get in here! THATCH IS DOWN!"
The crew came at a run.
They found their captain on the floor of the cabin, and they found Teach kneeling over him with blood on his hands from where he had grabbed Thatch's shoulders, and they found Teach's face doing something that could not have been manufactured by anyone who had not spent years watching what grief actually looked like on the faces of people who meant it.
"It was Lucci," Teach said. His voice was raw. He let it be raw. "I came to get the encyclopedia and I found the door open and Thatch was already— " He stopped. He pressed his fist against his mouth for a moment. "Lucci was here. He went through the cabin. He took the Devil Fruit."
The crew members looked at each other, then at their captain's body, then at Teach.
"He can't have gone far," Teach said, and now his voice shifted into something harder, something that gave people direction when direction was what they needed. He stood up. "Get the searchlights on the water. Every one of them. Find the assault ship. Find Lucci."
The Fourth Division moved.
Teach stood at the deck railing and watched the searchlights sweep the dark water until one of them caught the small assault vessel, already at the edge of range, making south at speed.
He could see Lucci's silhouette at the stern.
It was small at this distance, but visible, and he was standing in a way that might have been interpreted as watching the ship that was watching him. A slight angle to the posture, relaxed, the posture of someone who had expected this and was not in a hurry.
One arm came up in a brief, clear wave.
It was the gesture of someone saying goodbye to a friend.
"LUCCI!" The name came out of Teach from somewhere below his chest, full and cracking with the force of it. "Every bone in your body! Every single one! I will find you at the end of the world if I have to, you hear me! I will take everything you care about apart piece by piece until there is nothing left and I WILL FIND YOU!"
The small silhouette at the stern of the retreating vessel gave no response. The distance between them was growing.
Around Teach, the crew of the Fourth Division had gathered at the railing. Their faces were doing what faces do when someone has just given them a reason that is larger than themselves: anger finding a target, grief converting into purpose, the specific fire of people who have been hurt by something they did not see coming and are now very ready to act.
Look at how Brother Teach grieves, their expressions said to each other. Look at how deep the loyalty runs.
Teach stared at the water until the running lights of Lucci's vessel disappeared below the horizon.
His breathing slowed.
He thought about the letter. He thought about a ten-year-old boy coming aboard the Moby Dick and becoming, over the following years, one of the most useful people Teach had ever worked alongside. He thought about every conversation, every operation planned in the engine room with the sound of the ship around them, every piece of intelligence that he had believed was Lucci working for the same future they both wanted.
He thought about Finn.
The Dark-Dark Fruit was going to Finn.
Lucci had taken it and was delivering it to Marine Headquarters, to the Admiral who had come out of Jam Island having defeated Newgate and taken Charlotte Linlin's arm and sealed Rayleigh in a gravity sphere, and who had a spy inside the Whitebeard Pirates who had just handed him the one ability capable of stripping other Devil Fruit users of their powers.
Teach gripped the railing.
He was not finished.
He had no Devil Fruit. He had lost Lucci and lost the Dark-Dark Fruit and lost the cover of the Whitebeard Pirates in a single night's work, and Thatch was dead on a cabin floor for nothing.
But he was not finished.
The next move existed. It always did. He simply had to find it.
"Raise anchor," he said. The Fourth Division captain's crew heard the authority in his voice and responded to it without stopping to ask whether it belonged to him. "We move at first light. We will find Lucci and we will bring back what was taken."
He stayed at the railing after they dispersed.
The night was very dark and the water was very still, and somewhere to the south Lucci was sailing toward a Marine rendezvous point with the most significant Devil Fruit in the world tucked in a box under his arm.
Teach thought about gravity.
He thought about a black blade cutting the sky.
He thought: not yet. But eventually.
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