The harbor district of Fish-Man Island smelled of salt brine and deep-sea kelp, the bubble membrane overhead casting everything in that familiar filtered blue. It was a place that had once bristled with hostility toward anyone wearing a Marine uniform or a feather coat, but those days had settled into something more complicated, a tense neutrality maintained by economics and exhaustion.
Doflamingo stepped off the gangplank and surveyed the dock with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once considered that a room might not want him in it. His pink feather coat caught the artificial current of the underwater city's ventilation, the collar lifting slightly as he descended to where Gladius was waiting.
"Did you find anything?" Doflamingo asked, without preamble.
Gladius had arrived two days ahead of the main group, as instructed, running the Family's intelligence contacts through every trading post and dark exchange on the island. He was a precise man by nature, and his answer reflected this: he nodded first, then shook his head.
"Young Master. He's no longer on Fish-Man Island."
Beside Doflamingo, Teach folded his massive arms and cut straight through the ambiguity. "You nodded and then shook your head. Which is it?"
Gladius glanced at Teach without expression. The look said, clearly, that Teach was not the person being reported to here. He returned his attention to Doflamingo.
"There are credible reports that Rob Lucci departed Fish-Man Island in the company of Jinbe, Knight of the Sea."
A silence.
Doflamingo did not visibly react, but something behind his dark glasses shifted. His jaw worked once, slowly, like a man solving a problem he had very nearly finished solving already.
Teach's expression changed in a different way. His broad face went still, and the calculation that moved behind his eyes was the kind that came not from surprise but from an old fear being confirmed.
Lucky Roux's words. That bastard's final claim, that Lucci was Marine.
Why else would he leave with a Warlord? Why seek that specific kind of protection unless the protection was not a favor asked but a hand being extended by an organization he already belonged to?
And if that was true, if it was actually true, then where was Lucci going next? Marineford? Judging by the timeline, he was probably already there, already debriefed, already sitting somewhere comfortable while the thing he had been carrying was locked away in the deepest vault Marine Headquarters possessed.
No one, and Teach was very clear about this, absolutely no one was pulling anything out of Marine Headquarters by force. You needed an army to even get close, and even then the math didn't work. He had watched Shiki try. He knew how that ended.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Doflamingo asked Gladius again, without looking at Teach. "Where are they heading?"
"The Sabaody Archipelago trading channels show no record of Jinbe's ship transiting the coating docks," Gladius said. "The latest intelligence came in this morning. Jinbe's ship was last sighted on a course toward the Sea of Water Seven. We have no confirmed final destination yet, but no one appears to have disembarked en route. Lucci should still be aboard."
Doflamingo was quiet for a moment.
He was thinking about Alabasta.
He had been supposed to go to Alabasta himself, before all this had derailed everything. Crocodile's summons, which he had declined, had been pointing in that direction. And now Jinbe, a Warlord, was personally escorting a man with a Devil Fruit of enormous value toward the first half of the Grand Line.
The threads were pulling in one direction.
"All right," Doflamingo said. "We've been running long enough. Rest today. Get the fastest ship ready and we leave tomorrow."
Gladius acknowledged without objection. He was, in all things, an extension of his Young Master's will.
Teach was less accommodating. "We can rest on the ship. Why waste a day sitting here?"
"Because I'm waiting on intelligence and confirmation of their final destination," Doflamingo said, with the tone of a man who was explaining something simple to someone who was making it complicated. "If Jinbe doesn't stay in Water Seven, charging after him blind is a waste of a fast ship. Unless," he added, glancing sideways, "you're so eager that you'd rather go ahead on your own? I certainly won't stop you."
Teach made a sound in the back of his throat, turned, and walked away.
He knew Doflamingo had figured something out. The way the man had gone quiet, the quality of his silence, the slight adjustment of his posture, it all pointed to a conclusion being reached. He just hadn't shared it.
Fine. Teach had his own conclusions.
He kept walking.
After Teach disappeared into the harbor crowds, Gladius spoke again. "Young Master. Our current analysis is that Jinbe and Lucci are both bound for Alabasta."
"Same as mine," Doflamingo said, and his mouth curved into something between a smile and a grimace. "Which means the timing would have been perfect, if none of this had happened. I should have been heading there myself." He pushed his hands into his coat pockets and started walking toward the nearest establishment worth sitting in. "Contact the appropriate parties. I need to confirm something. There may be a misunderstanding here that needs sorting."
He said it lightly. But the word "misunderstanding" carried a great deal of weight, because a misunderstanding could mean he had spent the last several months burning energy chasing something that had been designated for someone else entirely.
He needed to know.
Fish-Man Island's upper district was quieter than the harbor, the kind of quiet that came from establishments that understood their clientele valued discretion over atmosphere. Doflamingo found a suitable corner, ordered nothing, settled into the chair with the comfort of a man who was comfortable anywhere, and took out his Den Den Mushi.
He turned it over in his hand once. Then he placed his thumb on the dial and dialed.
It rang four times. Then a click.
"Oh? Doflamingo?"
The voice on the other end was cheerful, unhurried, colored by what sounded like the ambient noise of an outdoor setting. Warm air, distant activity. Finn.
"Ah, yes. You received the Warlord summons too, didn't you? Are you on your way to Alabasta?"
Doflamingo's face twitched slightly. From three sentences, he had already extracted enough.
"Admiral Finn," he said, keeping his voice even. "If I'm reading this correctly, you're already in Alabasta."
"That's right! Alubarna, actually. Remarkable place. Oldest civilization on this ocean, and it genuinely shows. The architecture alone is worth the trip, and the people are extraordinarily hospitable once they stop being nervous about you. Desert countries have a particular character to them that you don't get anywhere else. Hahahaha, I had grilled scorpion this morning and it was honestly quite good."
Doflamingo could hear, beneath the easy commentary, the sound of a man eating something on a skewer. He could also hear, somewhat distantly, what he was fairly certain was a woman's voice expressing displeasure about someone else's menu choices.
He let Finn finish. Then, before he could continue, Finn added:
"Ah, before you ask, I'm on holiday. So if you need Alabasta intelligence or a situation report, I genuinely can't help you. Hahahaha."
Doflamingo had not been planning to ask about the situation in Alabasta.
"Admiral," he said, keeping his voice pleasant and carefully neutral, "I'm calling to confirm one thing, and I'll ask it directly. Rob Lucci, currently carrying a bounty courtesy of the Whitebeard Pirates. The man the entire New World underground has been quietly aware of for the past several months." A pause. "Is he yours?"
Silence on the line.
Not a long silence. Just enough for the sound of someone setting a skewer down on a table, and the quiet swallow of a man who has just taken a drink.
"Hm," Finn said, and his voice had changed texture, not suspicious, not sharp, just engaged in a way it hadn't been a moment before. "Are you telling me that the merchant convoy Lucci's people raided, the one the Dark-Dark Fruit was in, that was a Donquixote convoy?"
Doflamingo's self-control was, at that moment, genuinely tested.
He reigned it in with the practiced ease of someone who had learned very young that visible emotion was a liability.
"That's right," he said, with almost perfect calm. "The Dark-Dark Fruit was taken from my people. So it seems he is, after all, your man, Admiral."
A short laugh from the other end. The warm, slightly rueful laugh of someone who has just seen the full picture of a coincidence and finds it genuinely amusing rather than infuriating.
"So that's how it happened. Lucci accepted his mission over ten years ago, when he was still young enough that most people wouldn't have looked at him twice. He's been embedded in the Whitebeard Pirates ever since." Another pause. "I genuinely didn't know the fruit had passed through your channels. That's a strange loop." His voice settled into something more direct. "So your operation and his happened to intersect at exactly the wrong moment for you."
"That is one way to describe it," Doflamingo said.
"I'm sorry to have caused you this kind of trouble," Finn said, and he sounded like he actually meant it, which was its own particular form of disorienting. "You've spent real resources on this. Years, by the sound of it. What I promised before still stands. Think of it as a debt I owe you, or a request I'll honor whenever you decide to call it in."
Doflamingo had been sitting rigid for the last minute and a half. Now, something in his posture shifted, settling from the tension of bracing for a bad outcome into something considerably more relaxed.
He leaned back in the chair.
The Dark-Dark Fruit had never been the point. Not the fruit itself. He didn't eat it, wouldn't have known what to do with it even if he'd had it in hand. The entire months-long chase had been for exactly this, a promise, a favor held in reserve from a man who kept his word and controlled more of the ocean's operational landscape than anyone outside a very small circle truly understood.
And he had it.
He had lost some time. He had lost some resources. He had declined the Warlord summons and irritated Crocodile, which was, honestly, a modest bonus.
But he had what he'd been working toward.
He arranged his features into something appropriately sheepish. "Admiral, really. I couldn't possibly impose."
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