-Real World-
The Sky Screen had shown many things in the time since it first opened above the world.
It had shown future battles, future powers, future deaths. It had shown the internal workings of organizations that the world was not supposed to know about, and the private conversations of people who believed they were not being watched. People had adjusted to the Sky Screen's revelations with varying degrees of speed and success.
Im on the Empty Throne was different.
The moment the Sky Screen showed the black-robed figure ascending and the Five Elders kneeling, something that had been foundational to the world's self-understanding shifted without warning. Not the World Government as a corrupt institution — many people had arrived at that conclusion on their own, over years. But behind the World Government, sustaining it, outlasting every generation of it: something with infinite patience and a pair of red eyes and no name that anyone had been permitted to know.
The audiences watching the Sky Screen did not immediately find words for this. They found silence first.
In what remained of Alubarna, Baroque Works had begun the work of consolidation.
Cobra had been extracted from the rubble of the outer wall by Baroque Works soldiers, who had found him buried under the dead with both legs so damaged from prolonged blood loss that the decision about what to do with them had been straightforward and irreversible. He sat now in a wheelchair that Baroque Works had provided, which was a particular kind of humiliation — being kept alive in a chair supplied by the organization occupying your country.
He was watching the Sky Screen.
Crocodile stood beside him. After the initial shock of Im's appearance had passed, Crocodile had looked at Cobra's face and read what was on it: recognition. Not surprise, or not much. The kind of expression that said so this is confirmed, then.
"You know something," Crocodile said.
"I know fragments," Cobra said. "Guesses built on fragments. The Sky Screen will probably show the rest of it eventually — it doesn't seem to believe in keeping secrets." He looked at the screen. "I'll tell you what I have. Some of it will be buried with me regardless."
Crocodile did not push. He waited.
Cobra spoke about Queen Lily. Not the publicly known version — the celebrated ancestor who had refused to become a Celestial Dragon, who had led her people back to the desert rather than ascend to Mary Geoise, who had given the Kingdom of Arabasta its founding lineage. The private version, the one passed down in fragments through eight centuries of succession, imprecise and accumulating gaps the way old knowledge did when it couldn't be written down safely.
The connection between Queen Lily's name and the name Im: present in the fragment, unspecified in nature. A relationship of some kind, eight hundred years old, with no documentation of whether it had been friendship or enmity or something else entirely.
And the portrait.
Lily's likeness, preserved in the royal archives, showed a woman who shared approximately ninety percent of her features with the king's daughter.
Crocodile absorbed this.
He had known, intellectually, that bloodlines produced resemblances. He had not connected that general knowledge to the case of Vivi until this moment, and the connection, once made, produced a cascade of implications that he found distinctly unpleasant from his current position.
Buggy had known. The request to release Vivi ally — not just the Straw Hats, but Vivi named separately — had not been a courtesy. It had been a retrieval. Someone in the Joker Pirates' intelligence network had reached the same conclusion that Cobra had just handed to Crocodile, and acted on it before Crocodile had the information to act on.
He had lost that bargaining chip before he knew he had it.
For a moment he considered organizing a pursuit. The Going Merry had a lead, but Baroque Works had ships.
He let the thought pass. The Joker Pirates were allies. Overextending into a dispute with Buggy while still in the process of absorbing a country the size of Arabasta was poor resource management. Crocodile was aware that ambition worked best when it was sequential rather than simultaneous.
He had a country to finish taking.
The transformation was already in progress — senior Baroque Works cadres moving into government positions, the administrative infrastructure being transferred, the Baroque Works organization emerging from its operational concealment into something that would, in the coming weeks, begin to look like legitimate governance. One public moment remained: the formal transfer of the kingship, Cobra on the throne long enough for the ceremony, then the wheelchair again and whatever came after.
As for whether the World Government and the Marines would ratify a pirate-turned-king ruling Arabasta: that was a future problem, and money had solved that category of problem before.
The Going Merry moved steadily away from the Arabasta coast with a Log Pose set and a crew that was, collectively, in poor condition.
Luffy and Zoro had recovered from the desiccation once they had water back in their systems, but recovery from being wrung out by the Suna Suna no Mi was not instantaneous. Both of them were eating with the focus of people who understood that food was currently medicine, not pleasure.
Sanji had been unusually quiet since the ship departed. The okama clothing he had been forced into during his surrender was gone, replaced by his normal outfit, but he had been bathing at a frequency that concerned Chopper professionally. Fresh water on a ship was not an infinite resource, and Sanji's current rate of consumption was treating it as one.
Chopper was awake, upright, and visibly carrying something heavy. He had woken to find Nami and Usopp bandaged and recovering, which meant he had been unconscious while they needed him, which meant he had failed at the thing he had stayed behind to do. The logic was not entirely fair to him, but Chopper's internal accounting rarely was.
Usopp was bandaged from collar to ankle over injuries that had been building since Drum Island and had been added to considerably since. He had been crying since he woke up, which was how Usopp processed pain, and Chopper was monitoring his vitals while pretending to be occupied with something else to give him the privacy of crying without being observed.
Robin and Franky had found each other's company immediately useful. Two people who approached the world with a particular kind of sideways curiosity — Robin's a scholar's, Franky's an engineer's — turned out to have more in common than the surface of either suggested. They had been talking for several hours, occasionally accepting something from Sanji's kitchen when he was in there, which was often.
Vivi had not spoken since she woke.
She was sitting near the stern, facing backward, watching the sea between the ship and wherever Arabasta was now. No one had pressed her. Her father was alive — the information had been passed to her, briefly, by Robin, who had thought the uncertainty was worse than the truth — and her father was in a wheelchair in the custody of the man who had spent years engineering this outcome.
She knew this. She was looking at the sea anyway.
The crew gave her the distance. They understood, most of them, that there was a kind of grief that did not want company yet, and that sitting near someone in that state without speaking was its own form of presence.
The Going Merry moved on.