-Real World-
The man in the Sky Screen was elegantly dressed. His hair was arranged in a style that communicated someone who had considered how he wanted to present himself and acted accordingly. He sat with his considerable size contained into a posture that was, by any reasonable measure, that of a man who had spent time in rooms where decorum was expected and had concluded that decorum was a reasonable investment.
He was making conversation with his subordinates in a voice that had texture to it — warmth, precision, the measured quality of someone who listened before he spoke and chose what to say with some deliberation.
Gecko Moria stared at this image with his mouth slightly open and the specific expression of a man who had been certain about something and had just watched that certainty dissolve in real time.
This was Kaido. Years from now. The same man who was currently behind Moria on this ship, radiating the particular aggressive energy of someone who was occasionally drunk, always volatile, and fundamentally convinced that the resolution to most problems was the immediate application of significant physical force. This was that Kaido.
"This can't be right," Moria said, to no one in particular, the words emerging with the quality of something that had bypassed the usual editorial process. "Is that actually you?"
His fat fingers gestured at the display above them, at the composed figure in the expensive clothes, at the demeanor that belonged to someone from a noble family rather than someone who had built an empire through decades of combat and the liberal application of a club.
He did not quite say: you were supposed to keep convincing people with your fists, not your words. He was thinking it loudly enough that the sentiment was present without requiring articulation.
Aboard the ship, drifting in the Devil's Triangle while the world's powers made their various preparations for what was coming, the current Kaido was watching himself with the specific quality of interest that arrived when a man saw his own future and found it considerably more surprising than he had anticipated.
He was not drunk at this particular moment, which meant the observations that were moving across his mind were doing so with more clarity than they sometimes managed. The figure on the Sky Screen was still recognizably him in every physical dimension — the size, the horns, the scale-tattoo visible at the wrist where the sleeve rode up slightly — but the bearing was different. The way the future-him occupied space was not the way the present-him occupied space. Something had settled.
Why drums?
He genuinely did not know. He had never, in his current life, experienced any particular pull toward percussion as a leisure activity. The future version of himself had apparently decided otherwise at some point in the intervening years, and with the kind of commitment that manifested as an entire courtyard full of instruments and what appeared to be genuine musicianship.
He did not know what to make of this.
And what is Nika?
He turned the word over. It had surfaced in the character notes beside his image with the particular placement that the Sky Screen used for information it considered significant — not buried, not incidental. He had heard it before, he was almost certain of that, but the specific context was escaping him in the way that things escaped when you had processed a great deal of information over a short period and the volume of significant things had exceeded the available storage.
Perona, whose role on this ship had drifted without anyone formally announcing it from captive-adjacent to something more like staff, was refilling a cup she had been keeping topped off for the better part of the afternoon. She noticed Kaido's expression. She rolled her eyes in the small, private way that she had developed for exactly these situations — registering her thoughts about the immediate circumstances in a way that was technically not visible to anyone with authority over her current wellbeing.
Adults talked about things. She refilled cups. The hierarchy of who interrupted whom was a fact of life on this ship.
Gecko Moria, who did not have Perona's survival instincts about when to keep his commentary internal, had arrived at an alternative interpretation.
"You're pretending," he said, with the tone of someone who had convinced himself he had figured something out. "You've always been this way, haven't you. The whole reckless-brute performance is the performance, and this —" he gestured at the future-Kaido playing drums with evident genuine enjoyment "— is what's underneath."
Kaido looked at him.
Moria had learned, through expensive experience, to read what was in that look. He had learned it specifically through the incident involving the Nega Nega no Mi (Wish-Wish Fruit) and a joke about Kaido's future that had gone from interesting conversational territory to a hand around his throat in a span of time he had not entirely been conscious for. The look that had preceded that moment and the look that was currently directed at him were from the same family.
The second half of the thought — the half about possessing another's body, about the King vs. Mount question that nobody on this ship wanted to be the first to say out loud, about what it meant that the Sky Screen had labeled Kaido's future self with the name of an ancient mythological being — arrived at his teeth and stopped there.
He had learned.
The silence that followed was occupied by the sound of water against the hull and Perona quietly removing herself from the immediate vicinity.
"Who's-Who briefed me on some of it," Kaido said, finally. His voice had the weight of something being considered rather than stated. "Joy Boy. The history. What the fruit is actually supposed to be." He looked at the character notes displayed beside his future image — the annotation that had sent the Five Elders into the particular kind of controlled panic that expressed itself through increased activity rather than visible distress. "A lot of interesting things seem to be waiting for me."
He paused.
"If the worst case happens." He said it without obvious emotion, but with the focus of someone who had decided this was worth thinking about clearly rather than avoiding. "If what happened to the Empress happened to me. What does the Beasts Pirates do then?"
Nobody answered this, because nobody had an answer, and the question was one of those that existed not because it required a response but because the person asking it needed to have asked it.
King, watching from the courtyard, was conducting his own parallel accounting.
The future version of himself had the Tori Tori no Mi, Model: Phoenix (Phoenix-Phoenix Fruit) — Marco's fruit, the one that the Nine Snake Island broadcast had shown giving its carrier a King-level threshold of recovery, the ability that became more terrifying the closer to death it brought you. It was a mythical Zoan of a caliber that bore no comparison to the Ryu Ryu no Mi, Model: Pteranodon (Dragon-Dragon Fruit, Ancient Species) currently occupying space in his physiology.
The ancient Pteranodon fruit had given him things he had not needed to give it anything in return. Some recovery. Some mobility enhancement. Compatibility with flight that he already had natively, which made it a redundancy at best. And the standard package of Zoan liabilities: the seawater weakness, the Sea-Prism Stone vulnerability, the basic structural exposure that every Devil Fruit user carried regardless of how powerful the fruit itself was.
The Lunarians did not have those vulnerabilities. His race, before almost every member of it was erased from history by the World Government's ambitions toward the Seraph program — before Vegapunk built child soldiers with their faces, their black wings, their brown skin — had been something close to complete as a physical form. They burned. They flew. Their bodies shrugged off things that would end other creatures. None of that required a fruit.
The Pteranodon had added a layer he had not needed on top of foundations that had not required improvement, and taken away a cleanliness of capability in exchange.
But the Phoenix fruit was different. The Phoenix fruit was something you built toward rather than something you simply had — a ceiling that kept receding as the gap between your current state and death closed, a recovery mechanism that took everything thrown at it and returned it with compounding interest. If the future version of him was carrying that fruit, it meant Blackbeard was involved in the transfer, which meant there was a specific event in whatever path led from now to then in which Marco was defeated and the fruit changed hands.
Marco was alive, currently. He was somewhere in the Grand Line, working through whatever the present-day version of his grief and purpose was organizing itself into. He would not be happy watching this.
"Nika," Kaido said, quietly, still watching the character notes. "Joy Boy. Whatever name it goes by, something is waiting inside the fruit I'm carrying. Something with its own agenda." He looked at his hand — the size of it, the scale tattoo moving over the knuckles — with the calm of a man assessing a known variable rather than discovering an unknown one. "I've had longer conversations with the Azure Dragon than most people manage with their crewmates. I've never had any indication it wanted anything other than what I wanted."
"The Empress didn't have any indication either," Moria said, almost quietly.
This was perhaps the most accurate thing Gecko Moria had said in the entire duration of his residency on this ship. The accuracy of it produced a silence that lasted for several seconds.
"No," Kaido acknowledged. "She didn't."
He looked at the Sky Screen a while longer. The future version of himself was moving through the courtyard with the measured ease of someone who had made peace with whatever internal negotiations had been running, and whatever he had arrived at seemed to have produced a man who could sit with drums and guests and the ordinary afternoon of a warlord in a quiet hour without carrying visible weight.
Whatever had happened. Whatever had been resolved, or come to terms with, or simply outlasted.
He would find out, one way or another.
On Marco's ship, somewhere in the New World's lower waters, the first officer of the Whitebeard Pirates watched the Sky Screen broadcast the scene from Onigashima's courtyard and arrived at the same conclusion King had arrived at from the other direction.
The Tori Tori no Mi, Model: Phoenix was on King's body. In the future. And in the future, Blackbeard Marshall D. Teach was the only person who could have arranged that transfer.
The emotion that moved through Marco's expression was not grief and not quite rage and not quite either of the manageable things. It was the specific feeling of watching someone else carry something that belonged to you being held in a future that had already been written somewhere, waiting for him to arrive at it.
He had known Blackbeard would be involved in whatever came for him. He had known since the Marineford War, since everything that had come apart there. Knowing it had not made watching it any easier.
He filed the information.
He would need to be stronger.
In Pangaea Castle, the word in the character notes beside Kaido's image had landed in the Five Elders' deliberations with the particular impact of a confirmation rather than a discovery. They had suspected. They had more than suspected. The King vs. Mount framework that the Sky Screen had been circling for weeks now pointed in a direction that the God clan could not afford to wait for history to confirm at its own pace.
Another potential vessel.
Another name from the mythology they had spent eight hundred years suppressing.
The operation's timeline did not need revision. It needed acceleration.
The king of beasts would not be permitted to reach whatever the Sky Screen was suggesting he was capable of becoming. Not in six years. Not in six months. Not at all.
The room's atmosphere had the particular quality it always had after a decision was confirmed: not conversation, just the steady work of beings that had been managing this kind of threat for a very long time, reaching for the tools they had always used, and beginning.
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