—Broadcast—
The annual military meeting turned the Sabaody Archipelago into a different kind of place.
Marine Headquarters in Rome had been under full martial law since morning — troops at every access point, the warship docks arranged with the precision of an institution that knew exactly how it wanted to look on days that mattered. The commanders and military leaders coming in from every division had been arriving since the previous night, each one trailing their own staff and jurisdiction and accumulated opinions about how the year had gone.
The spillover reached Sabaody without anyone needing to announce it. The archipelago simply stopped doing what it normally did — commerce contracting, taverns emptying, merchants doing the mental calculation of compliance versus complaint and landing, as they always did, on compliance. The pirate crews who might have been moving through the mangroves had gone elsewhere or gone quiet. The intelligence dealers who made their living in the archipelago's information ecosystem sat in their establishments and waited for the day to pass.
In one tavern near the market district, the proprietress was washing wine glasses by herself.
The bell above the door rang.
She looked up.
The man who had pushed the door open was wearing the specific makeup of someone who had made it a permanent feature of his face — white base, red detail, the exaggerated geometry of a clown's smile that had long since stopped looking like a performance and started looking like a choice. He moved through the doorway with a lightness that had no obvious source, found a seat by the window, and sat down with the ease of someone visiting a place they've been before.
He had not been here before. The ease was just his.
"Buggy." The proprietress set down the glass she was working on. Her voice carried the particular flatness of someone choosing their words with care. "You're brave, showing up in Sabaody today of all days."
—Character Notes: Predecessor Emperor of Amazon Lily, Rayleigh's widow — Shakky—
She was tall and spare, with short black hair that curved slightly at the ends, and a cigarette that had been lit long enough to be at the halfway point without her having appeared to pay it any attention. Her face, partially obscured by the smoke, was younger-looking than anyone who knew her history expected it to be. The gap between her appearance and her actual age was one of the several things about her that people who didn't know her tended to misjudge.
"Does the tavern not welcome guests, Ms. Shakky?"
She had limited history with Buggy the Clown — knew he'd been on the Oro Jackson alongside Rayleigh, knew the rumors about his relationship with Shanks, had the broad outlines that anyone tracking the post-Marineford political landscape had assembled. What she had not fully accounted for was twenty years of dormancy in the East Blue followed by a trajectory that had landed him, somehow, in the chair that Red-Haired Shanks had vacated.
The numbers that had followed his name for two decades had been modest. The numbers that followed it now were not. The list of Marine officers who had died at his hands since Dressrosa was not a short list.
She prepared his drink without discussion. It was something new — a cocktail she hadn't released publicly yet, the red liquor sitting in the glass with the specific luminance of something that had been assembled with genuine care. An untested audience was still an audience.
Buggy considered it for a moment before drinking it. Then he drank it properly, with the attention of someone who takes flavor seriously when flavor is worth taking seriously. The glass emptied in stages, each one slower than the last.
"Ms. Shakky's craft is still exceptional," he said, when it was done. "Rayleigh always spoke highly of—"
The temperature in the room changed.
Shakky's face had closed in the specific way of a door being shut from the inside. She set the empty glass down with a precision that communicated several things simultaneously.
"Don't use that name in my tavern." The cigarette smoke moved between them. "The glass is three hundred million Berries. No negotiation. Pay and go."
Three hundred million Berries for a cocktail was extortion by any reasonable standard. She had been charging prices like this for years, and the people she charged them to paid them, and the people who didn't pay them didn't come back, and that arrangement had functioned well enough that she saw no reason to revise it.
Buggy did not immediately produce payment.
"I came to Sabaody for the meeting — Headquarters is nearby, and I had a detour to make." He reached into his suit pocket and produced a box — medium-sized, plain, the kind of container that does not announce its contents. He pushed it across the bar toward her. "I brought you something. It cost me effort to get it back to you."
Shakky looked at the box.
"Devil Fruit?" The question was the practical one — Four Emperors didn't make personal trips to deliver ordinary things. "Something in there you want to trade?"
"Open it."
She looked at the box for a moment longer. Then she opened it.
It was a skull.
Carved — she could see that immediately. Worked over, intentionally shaped, the kind of object that had been someone's work rather than something incidental. The surface had darkened unevenly from years of use, the pale bone gone brown in places, browner in the spots where hands had gripped it most often. Worn in the way that things are worn by handling, by being held, by becoming familiar to a particular set of hands over a long period.
There were marks on the surface. Engravings. Faint, visible if you looked.
Shakky's hands stopped moving.
The box sat on the bar between them, and the skull sat in the box, and the tavern was very quiet except for the distant sounds of the archipelago going about its restricted day outside.
She had seen Nine Snake Island go dark, had seen the coalition that had tried and the cost it had cost, had watched Rayleigh's name leave the living roster in the specific way of someone who had already made peace with death and simply followed through on it. She had composed herself after, in the way she had composed herself after things before — quietly, internally, putting the grief somewhere managed.
What she had not had was this.
"If I hadn't pushed you to go," she said, and the sentence did not finish in the way sentences are supposed to finish, and she did not try to finish it.
She lifted the skull out of the box with both hands and held it against her chest, which was the only thing there was to do with it. The warmth of the living against what remained of someone who had been warm and was not anymore. Her eyes were closed. The cigarette had gone out at some point during the last thirty seconds without her noticing.
Buggy watched this from the other side of the bar.
He did not say anything. He had said what he came to say, and the rest of it belonged to her, and he had enough instinct — beneath the makeup, beneath the reputation, beneath twenty years of strategic obscurity and whatever had happened since — to know when he was in the presence of something that did not require his participation.
After a few minutes, he placed the three hundred million Berries on the bar — coins and folded notes in the specific arrangement of someone who has spent years in situations where payment is both obligation and communication — stood up, and walked to the door.
The bell rang when he opened it.
He stepped into the Sabaody morning, turned in the direction of Rome, and began walking.