"Imposed?" Finn said, his tone carrying a faint, teasing undercurrent. "Doflamingo, you're a man of rare distinction. If this sort of thing doesn't get handled cleanly, I might have to... hmm. Actually, never mind."
There was a beat of silence, which Doflamingo occupied by wondering precisely where that sentence had been going.
Then Finn laughed.
"Hahahaha. Relax, it's a joke. You didn't actually take that seriously, did you?"
"Fufufu." Doflamingo let out a low chuckle despite himself, shaking his head slightly. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table, and got to the point he'd been building toward. "Admiral, the truth is, I feel some responsibility for how this whole affair turned out. I didn't handle it cleanly and you lost time because of it. Consider this: I'd like to compensate. Help you find another fruit, something you have an eye on. Is there anything you're after at the moment?"
He was not doing this out of guilt. He was not a man who carried guilt for long. What he was doing, and he understood this clearly, was maintaining the current arrangement in the most practical way available to him.
Strength was not his currency with Finn. The Marine was full of monsters, and Finn himself had emerged from the battle against Whitebeard as the acknowledged pinnacle of that institution's combat hierarchy. Doflamingo was strong, but he was not strong enough for his strength to be the thing that kept Finn's attention on him.
What he had was reach. Networks, contacts, eyes in markets and ports that the Marine couldn't officially own. The ability to find things, move things, and make things happen in the gray space between legitimate authority and the world that operated beneath it. That was what he offered. That was what needed to keep flowing.
And if there was nothing for him to do, then he was not useful. And useless was a very dangerous thing to be.
Finn was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. The ambient noise of his outdoor setting, the dry warmth of Alabasta's afternoon air, the distant sounds of a city going about its business, was audible in the gap.
"Actually, since you mention it," Finn said, "I have a junior who's been after me for a while about finding him a specific fruit. A Paramecia type. Nothing with the same complications as the Dark-Dark Fruit." He paused. "The Gum-Gum Fruit. If you have a moment, could you run that through your channels and see where it surfaces?"
Doflamingo turned this over briefly.
The Gum-Gum Fruit. Rubber property, elastic body, fairly well-documented characteristics, none of the volatile reputation of a Logia or the esoteric complexity of the fruits that tended to drive the underground market wild. The kind of fruit that changed hands without drawing the attention of every major player in the ocean.
"That's straightforward enough," he said. "I'll have people start pulling information. Give me some time and I'll have an answer for you."
"No rush," Finn said pleasantly. "It's for the future, not urgently."
A brief pause settled between them, comfortable enough.
"While I have you," Finn said, and his voice shifted to something a shade more casual, the tone of a man making conversation rather than conducting business, "have you thought about coming to Alabasta? The situation here has become rather remarkable. The Revolutionary Army, the CP agency, a handful of the Warlords, the Marine, and Crocodile all operating in the same desert at the same time. It's the sort of convergence that doesn't happen often. Alubarna may not stay quiet for much longer."
Doflamingo's eyes sharpened slightly. "Speaking of which," he said, shifting his weight, "I declined the Warlord summons, as you know. I turned it down because the Dark-Dark Fruit situation came up suddenly and I prioritized that. But I've been wondering since, does Crocodile's recruitment hold any formal authority? I wouldn't want a refusal to create complications with Mary Geoise."
Finn made a short sound, something between a laugh and an exhale.
"I can tell you exactly how that authorization reads. The CP agency, a man named Spandine, holds the highest-level approval for handling the Alabasta situation. His mandate is real and signed. But that mandate is addressed to Crocodile specifically and covers Alabasta's affairs. Within that, Crocodile was granted the ability to call on the Warlords as a resource." A pause. "The authority to recruit Warlords is different from the authority to manage their appointments. Crocodile doesn't have the second kind. He stretched the first one further than it actually reaches. If you didn't respond, Mary Geoise has no grounds to penalize you for it."
The silence that followed lasted a few seconds longer than usual.
Doflamingo sat with that. Almost a month since the refusal, and not a single word from Mary Geoise about it. He had attributed that to their usual sluggish communication rhythms. Now he understood it differently.
"That sly sand bastard," he said quietly.
"Fufufu."
He was talking about information asymmetry, which Crocodile had exploited with considerable skill. Present a fact with enough implied weight behind it, let the listener fill in the rest themselves, and they would rarely think to check the boundaries of what the fact actually meant. Doflamingo had walked into that one, which was the more irritating for how transparent it seemed in hindsight.
He settled the annoyance somewhere he could examine it later and moved on.
"In that case, Admiral, I find I'm rather in the mood for some sightseeing. Alubarna, did you say? Where shall I find you?"
"I'll be in the city soon enough," Finn said. "And Doflamingo." His voice carried just enough weight to make the next part land correctly. "Keep a low profile. Do not announce yourself. Do not, specifically, announce me."
Doflamingo smiled. "Of course. I wouldn't dream of disturbing your holiday."
He meant it. Finn on vacation in an active theater was Finn operating at a remove, and Doflamingo had the self-awareness to understand that being the person who shattered that arrangement would be an exceptionally poor decision.
"One more thing," he said, before the Admiral could disengage. "The situation with our mutual friend from the Whitebeard Pirates. He's been traveling with me since Franks Island. How do you want to handle that?"
"Mm? Who is it? Marco?"
"Someone lower profile. A man named Marshall D. Teach. Second Division, but not the division commander. Claims he's hunting Lucci over the murder of his crewmate, a man named Thatch. Very committed to the hunt. Very eager." Doflamingo kept his tone neutral. "Should I find an opportunity to remove him quietly before we leave Fish-Man Island?"
A burst of laughter crackled through the Den Den Mushi, loud enough that Doflamingo pulled it slightly away from his ear.
"Hahahaha! Marshall D. Teach. Doflamingo, you've underestimated him. I didn't expect he'd manage to take you in as well."
Doflamingo's eyebrow rose fractionally. "There's something I missed about this man?"
"Quite a lot, actually." Finn's voice settled into something more direct, the easy humor still present but the sharpness coming through beneath it. "Thatch wasn't killed by Lucci. Teach killed him. He's been after the Dark-Dark Fruit himself, for his own reasons, and the revenge story is a cover to justify the pursuit. He spent decades deceiving Whitebeard. Now he's been running the same act on you." A brief pause. "Think back over his behavior. Does it read differently now?"
Doflamingo did think back. He had the uncomfortable experience of watching a pattern he had accepted as normal rearrange itself into something he should have caught earlier. The urgency. The impatience at Fish-Man Island, the insistence on moving faster, the sharpness that didn't quite fit with the grief of a man avenging a friend but fit perfectly with a man afraid that something valuable was going to be consumed before he could get his hands on it.
"Ambitious," Doflamingo said.
"Exceptionally," Finn agreed. "Which is actually why I don't want him quietly disposed of at the bottom of the Grand Line. He interests me. There are questions I want answered, and he may be the only person who can answer them. So here's what I'd like you to do. Keep him with you. Feed him enough information to keep him convinced that Lucci is reachable in Alabasta. He wants to chase the man to the ends of the ocean? Let him. Let him do exactly that, all the way to Alubarna."
Doflamingo absorbed this. Then he nodded slowly, even though there was no one to see it. "That's manageable. He wants to find Lucci. As long as I'm the one pointing toward him, he'll stay close and cooperative."
"Good. Be careful with him. He's stronger than he presents himself."
"Noted." Doflamingo said it with the confidence of a man who had already filed this information in the appropriate mental drawer and was not particularly rattled by it.
"Contact me when you reach Alabasta," Finn said. "We'll arrange things from there."
"Understood, Admiral."
"Good. That's settled."
The Den Den Mushi clicked off.
At the table in the outdoor corner of an Alabasta tea house, Finn set the small transponder snail back on the wood surface and reached for his skewer, which had gone thoroughly cold while he was talking. He bit the end of it anyway. A passing local merchant nearby was fanning himself against the afternoon heat, looking deeply uninterested in whatever a very tall man in a broad hat was doing at the next table over.
Across from Finn, Vergo had made notable progress through his portion of grilled scorpion. He was, characteristically, unaware that a scorpion claw had migrated to the corner of his mouth at some point during the meal, where it now rested at a slightly jaunty angle.
Hina watched this from several feet away, her own plate of honey pastry held with the defensive posture of someone who had firmly decided that certain dining choices were contagious. Her expression communicated, without words, that she had agreed to accompany Finn to Alabasta on the understanding that this would not become a recurring pattern.
Vergo swallowed the last of his current skewer and turned to Finn with the thoughtful look of a man who had been listening quietly and was now ready to ask something.
"Admiral. The Dark-Dark Fruit. You've had people tracking it for over a decade, and now that Teach has come up, it sounds like this fruit was significant to him too." He turned the empty skewer between his fingers. "What exactly makes that particular fruit worth all of this? And Teach hiding in the Whitebeard Pirates for that long, without a bounty, without making a move..."
Finn reached over and, with the casual certainty of someone who does this frequently, plucked the scorpion claw from the corner of Vergo's mouth and set it on the edge of his plate.
Vergo blinked.
Finn leaned back in his chair, tilting his face slightly toward the desert sky, and the expression that settled onto his features was something between calculation and genuine amusement.
"The Dark-Dark Fruit," he said slowly, as if tasting the name. Then he glanced at Vergo from the corner of his eye, and his mouth curved. "Tell me something first. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to have a special ability of your own?"
He let the question sit there in the dry afternoon air for a moment.
"Because there happen to be quite a few people with very impressive abilities currently being held in Impel Down."