-Broadcast-
Lavi and Weevil were noise at the edges. The fight that mattered was somewhere else entirely.
Buggy the Clown walked through Pangaea Castle alone.
The path behind him was what it was. CP0 and CP9 had been stationed at various points along the route, and they were no longer stationed there. The God's Knights who had come to reinforce them were no longer reinforcing anyone. Buggy had not encountered an opponent that required him to stop moving — only opponents that required him to move through them — and the blood of several species had done various things to his shoes, none of them good.
He was smiling.
Not the performed smile, the one he used for crowds. The one he was wearing now was something he had rarely found occasion to put on his face, because it required a particular kind of feeling that most of his life had not produced. He had come a long way through other people's versions of his story to arrive at this point — the clown, the joke, the man who shared a ship with Roger and emerged as the punchline of the era — and the thing he was learning, step by step through this castle, was that the joke had never been about him.
Everyone had a script. The invisible hand had been writing parts for centuries. The comedy was not a tragedy that had gone wrong; it had always been a comedy, structured for an audience that was never in the seats, running the same material over and over with different casts and calling it history.
"Roger," he said, to the empty corridor. "Shanks." He pushed open the gate with both hands. "I made it."
The interior of Pangaea Castle's deepest chamber was dark and cold and exactly as large as it needed to be to contain what it contained.
The Empty Throne stood at the far end.
Hundreds of steps rose toward it. At the base of those steps, arranged on both sides like a display of historical irony, were the weapons that the Twenty Kings had surrendered when they made their agreement — the swords and axes and instruments of war that the founders of the World Government had left behind as a promise that no single hand would ever hold supreme power. Eight hundred years of accumulation on metal that had once ended the Ancient Kingdom. Now they were rust and ceremony.
The agreement had been kept by nineteen of the twenty. One had broken it from the first day, and had been breaking it ever since, from behind the people who were nominally in charge of the world's most powerful institution.
Buggy stood at the base of the steps and looked up.
His Observation Haki found them before they stepped out — five presences moving from the shadow of the throne's canopy, descending to take positions in two rows below the dais. They knelt in formation with the practiced synchrony of people who had been doing this for a very long time.
Saint Saturn. Saint Warcury. Saint Nusjuro. Saint Mars. Saint Ju Peter.
The Five Elders, who held the formal apparatus of the World Government in their collective hands, were here to receive someone. Not Buggy. The clown understood this immediately. He was incidental to this moment. An unexpected witness to something that would have happened without him.
The footsteps that followed were steady and unhurried, descending from above — from somewhere higher than the throne itself, from the dark above the canopy that no light reached. The Five Elders heard those footsteps and each of them lowered to one knee, heads inclined, the full formal reverence of men who answered to no one except the entity now descending toward the seat.
Buggy watched.
The figure that took the throne was clothed entirely in black — head to foot, face covered, no feature visible except a pair of eyes that the black cloth framed at the correct height. Red and circular and entirely without warmth. They surveyed the chamber with the patience of something that had been surveying things for a very long time and had not been surprised by any of them in centuries.
The figure sat, and the room changed. Not physically — nothing moved. But the quality of the air shifted in the way air shifted in a room where the correct authority had arrived, and Buggy felt it the way he had felt weather coming in on open water, a pressure change that preceded the actual event.
The Five Elders did not look up.
Buggy looked directly at the red eyes.
There was a pause.
"You don't seem surprised," the figure said. The voice came from beneath the black cloth in a register that resolved to neither male nor female, neither old nor young — a voice that had been used so long it had worn its distinguishing features smooth. "I expected more reaction. Buggy. You are the first outsider to stand here in several hundred years."
Character Notes: Lord of this Century, God of the Celestial Dragons — Im
The name had come to Buggy through Doflamingo.
Doflamingo had developed ambitions appropriate to someone who understood more than most about how the world's power was actually distributed, and those ambitions had led him to pursue the Ope Ope no Mi (Op-Op Fruit) with intent — not for himself, but because he had calculated that more than eight hundred years ago, someone had already used that fruit's Immortality Operation on a living person.
Reading the memory extracted from the man who had called himself Heavenly Yaksha had given Buggy the name Im, and with the name the shape of everything snapped into place. The World Government's apparent structure — the Five Elders as its summit — was a facade. Behind it, outlasting every generation of Celestial Dragons, holding continuity across centuries of staged history, was a single fixed point.
Eternal life brought eternal power. Im had watched the world run its cycles from the Empty Throne, touching what needed touching, removing what needed removing, making sure each comedy completed its arc and the next one began.
Buggy had carried the seed of this understanding from the moment Doflamingo's extracted memory had made the structure visible. He had carried it the whole length of the path through this castle, through everything that path required.
He looked at the red eyes on the Empty Throne — the eyes of the person who had designed the scaffold on which every life in the world was hung — and he was not afraid.
He found that amusing, in the way that only someone who had finally understood the joke could find anything amusing.
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