—Broadcast—
The label was imprecise, and Kuzan knew it.
"Conservative" implied a desire to preserve the existing order, which was not what the faction wanted. What it wanted was for the Marine to be something other than a machine that produced corpses on the basis of affiliation rather than action — for the institution to understand that the sea it was policing was not a problem to be solved by attrition, and that the people who became pirates were not, in the main, people who had chosen piracy over a satisfying alternative. That position was not conservative. It was simply less radical than the other position, which made it look conservative by comparison, which was one of the ways that framing does its work in any argument.
—Character Notes: Marine Admiral Aokiji — Kuzan, user of the Hie Hie no Mi (Ice-Ice Fruit)—
He was in a white suit and a dark blue shirt, which his colleagues occasionally mentioned created an odd color contrast and which he found he did not particularly care about. His hair was in its usual configuration — the two curled sections on either side adding what some people described as a playful quality and what he experienced as simply the way his hair had settled after enough years. His green-tinted glasses sat on his face in the way they always sat, neither straight nor crooked, occupying their position as if they had decided to be there independently.
On his left: Admiral Hoshigaki Kisame. On his right: Admiral Aohebi, Gin.
The three of them had arrived in their seats with the quiet efficiency of people who had worked out their shared position before the meeting and had no need to establish it again now. Kisame sat with the contained posture of someone who has learned, over a long career in institutions that were not designed to include him, to occupy exactly the space he was given and no more. His fish-man heritage was evident in his face and in the blue-gray tone of his skin, and in the Marine that Artoria Pendragon was building it was supposed to be a feature rather than a liability, and in the Marine that still existed it was sometimes treated as the latter. The gap between what the institution said about inclusion and what the institution felt about it was a gap Kisame knew better than most.
"I've proposed to the Fleet Admiral that she visit Fish-Man Island," he said, to no one in particular and to Kuzan specifically. "A formal visit."
"Historic," Kuzan agreed.
"Historic only matters if the history it makes is the right kind." Kisame looked at the stage where the Admirals' seats were arranged. "Fish-Man Island is ten thousand meters below the surface and still not safe. The pressures at that depth would kill most of the people who would want to threaten us, which should be reassuring and isn't, because the people who want to threaten us are exactly the people for whom that depth is not a barrier."
The math was straightforward and unpleasant: the fish-men and merfolk had survived for centuries by staying below an ocean that humans had treated as their jurisdiction. Staying below had been the arrangement. The arrangement had never been comfortable, and it was becoming less stable, because the Marine's expanded reach now extended in directions it hadn't previously extended, and because the sky above Fish-Man Island was filling with powerful people for whom ten thousand meters of seawater was a minor inconvenience.
"If the mermen want their descendants to have options," Kisame said, "they need human power structures that are led by people who see them as people." He stopped. "Which requires there to be such people in those power structures in the first place."
He was one. That was the experiment. The results were ongoing.
Kuzan's own argument was the one he'd been making, in various forms, for as long as he'd been senior enough to make it: the radicals were treating symptoms. Every pirate killed was a person who had arrived at piracy through a chain of circumstances, and most of those chains led back to the same structural problems — extraction economies bleeding regions dry, the gap between what the World Nobles collected and what they passed through to the people below them, local rulers who had learned that suppression was cheaper than reform and had been supported in that learning by a Marine that charged fees for riot control.
The Revolutionary Army had been the most coherent public statement of this analysis, which Kuzan found professionally uncomfortable and analytically correct. They were right about the sources. They were wrong about the methods, which were going to produce outcomes that looked like the thing they were fighting against but with different personnel.
The sea needed order. The sea needed order that was trusted by the people living under it, which was different from order that was imposed on them, which was different again from order that was sold to them as service while actually serving someone else. The current structure served the Celestial Dragons, and the Celestial Dragons served themselves, and the entire arrangement would eventually collapse under its own contradictions. The question was whether the Marine would be in a position to provide something better when it did, or whether it would collapse alongside it.
That was the case for the conservative position, and Kuzan believed it, and he was aware that it required the radical faction to slow down and the centrists to show up, and neither of those things was guaranteed.
At the end of the row, Admiral Tenryu Wendy was asleep in her chair.
She was not quite asleep. She was in the position of someone who has decided that the meeting hasn't started yet and therefore does not technically require her attention, and who is expressing this through posture. Her head was tipped back slightly. Her dark blue twin tails had settled against the chair's headrest. The small Admiral — the Marine's youngest, its most catastrophically powerful, its most unpredictable element when startled — had made herself comfortable.
"Is the Fleet Admiral here yet?" she said, without opening her eyes. "I'm very sleepy."
"Not yet." Admiral Kennen, sitting in the smallest chair in the front row — a fact about scale that became more notable when considered next to Ornn's presence at the other end — had the expression of someone who has given up trying to predict what Wendy would do and is simply logging it. "The meeting is at least two days, Wendy. Find a way to be awake for some of it."
"I'll be awake for the parts where things happen."
"Things are going to happen continuously. That's what meetings are."
She did not respond to this. The response she was providing through continued stillness was its own answer.
Beside her, Admiral Yashima Naraku sat in his chair with the quality of someone who had recently arrived in that chair from a significant distance, in a form that had required time to reach, and was still finding that there was something novel about having a body sized for furniture. He was present. He was attentive. He did not appear to find the situation as taxing as Wendy did.
The centrist faction — Wendy, Naraku, Admiral Raizumi Kennen — held between them the intelligence and medical departments, the support architecture that the other factions conducted their arguments in front of without particularly acknowledging. Small in terms of units under command. Not small in terms of what those units did for the people who argued about the direction of the Marine without maintaining its logistical foundations.
Twelve chairs. Twelve Admirals. The room fully assembled.
Radicals: Sakazuki Akainu, Shirousagi Esdeath, Ryokugyu Aramaki, Shirouma Smoker.
Conservatives: Aokiji Kuzan, Kaitora Kisame, Aohebi Gin.
Centrists: Tenryu Wendy, Yashima Naraku, Raizumi Kennen.
No faction: Borsalino, Ornn.
The twelve Admirals who constituted Artoria Pendragon's answer to the question of what the Marine should be — every species, every philosophical position, every approach to violence and restraint — arranged in a room together, waiting.
Outside, the military band had concluded. The hall was very quiet in the way that halls are quiet when the thing they've been waiting for is about to begin.
The Fleet Admiral's seat was empty.
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