With Im gone, there was no one in the world who could hold Finn. Sengoku understood that as clearly as anyone in the room. Finn and Sakazuki together at the New World front would make a coalition assault from three Emperors something the Marine could manage comfortably, and having Finn here as ballast at a governance conference he had no investment in was a waste of everyone's time, his included.
"Go," Sengoku said.
The word was barely out before Finn was on his feet.
Gion said, "Then I'll go with—"
"No." Finn didn't slow down. "Mary Geoise still needs a command presence, and there are more delegations arriving every week. I need someone to represent me at the conference while I'm gone." He glanced back at her. "Sakazuki had Kuzan cover for him. You'll cover for me."
He said it cleanly, without drama, and he did not look at her in a way that invited argument. Gion held his gaze for a moment, then looked away and said nothing. Sengoku nodded, confirming it.
Finn said his goodbyes quickly — a word to each of them, unhurried but brief — and then he was out of the Five Elders' office and moving down the corridor toward the port elevator.
Half an hour later, he and Vergo walked out of the elevator into the harbor. The warship was already being prepared at the dock. The sea air hit him after two months of marble and conference rooms and recycled political language, and it was genuinely good.
Doflamingo was already there. He was leaning against a bollard in the pink feather coat and the orange sunglasses, hands in his pockets, a mild smile on his face that suggested he had been waiting for some time and had enjoyed the wait.
"Fufufu," he said. "The New World?"
Finn looked at him. "Aren't you a sitting king? Walking out before the conference closes?"
"Dressrosa doesn't need anything from a conference," Doflamingo said, pushing off the bollard. "And watching people squabble over ministerial positions is not how I want to spend the next several weeks." He fell into step beside Finn. "The real business is in the New World now. The last act. I'd rather see that."
He wasn't wrong, and Finn had no particular objection. "Then come."
Doflamingo did not board his own ship. He followed Finn up the gangway and onto the warship's deck, and an hour later they were at sea, the white peaks of Mary Geoise receding behind them. The New World's sky was its usual register of distant strangeness — clouds the wrong color, light that came from slightly the wrong angle. Finn put both hands on the rail and looked at it and felt something in his chest unknot after two months of conference rooms.
After a while, he said, without any particular buildup, "Rosinante is out of Impel Down, by the way."
Doflamingo went still beside him.
The smile disappeared. His profile didn't change much — Doflamingo had excellent control of his face — but the quality of his silence was different from before. He looked at the water for a long moment without speaking.
It had always been going to happen once the situation in Mary Geoise was resolved. Sengoku had arranged it through proper channels years ago, quietly and with patience. Rosinante had served a reduced sentence and was done. He couldn't rejoin the Marine — the violation was too formal, and besides, he apparently couldn't bring himself to ask — but he was free. Sengoku had long since forgiven him. The incident's consequences had, in the end, fallen mostly on the Mary Geoise faction rather than the Marine.
"You ruined my mood," Doflamingo said, a little flatly. "Why mention that?"
"Thought you should know."
"I don't need to know." He paused. "What is he doing?"
"Back in Marineford, apparently. Living quietly." Finn turned the information over briefly. "Law is a Marine now. Inherited what Rosinante started for him. Rosinante seems content to stay near that."
Another silence. Doflamingo's jaw shifted slightly, the way it did when he was working through something he didn't want to show.
"Neither of you come out of that history looking particularly good, you know," Finn said. "For what it's worth."
That snapped the silence cleanly. Doflamingo turned. "What exactly am I supposed to have done wrong?" His voice carried genuine irritation. "When we left Mary Geoise, I made sure he ate first. I gave him water when I had any. He was my younger brother and I was eight years old and I made sure he didn't die in the street — which, given our circumstances, was not guaranteed. When he grew up and came back to me, I kept him around and I protected him and I didn't ask him to explain himself or prove anything. Everything that happened to him happened because he was connected to me, and I accepted that responsibility." He turned back to the sea. "Then he turns out to have been a Marine spy the entire time, working against me, his own flesh and blood. And then he betrayed me for a dying child he'd known for five minutes. So tell me. What exactly did I do wrong?"
Finn let him finish. Then he said, simply, "You killed your father."
The argument deflated. Doflamingo didn't respond.
"And before everything went wrong," Finn continued, "you were planning to use him. The surgery. He would have known that."
Doflamingo was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice had lost the edge. "Our father was a coward who chose his principles over his sons' lives. I don't regret that." A pause. "The other thing." He stopped. "If the fruit had never appeared, I wouldn't have thought of it. It was an obsession. Something that felt necessary. It doesn't." He stopped again. "I know how it looked to him."
He didn't try to explain it further. There wasn't a way to explain it that made it better, and Doflamingo knew it.
He stood with that for a moment. Then something changed in him — a visible settling, like a decision being completed rather than made. He looked out at the horizon, and his expression cleared into something that was neither cheerful nor pained but simply finished.
"Do you want to go to Marineford?" Finn asked. "See him?"
The question sat in the air. Doflamingo was still for longer than Finn expected.
Then he shook his head. "No."
"No?"
"On Minion Island." His voice was even. "We pointed guns at each other. I fired. I believed he was dead. There's a version of that where you can come back from it and another version where you can't, and that one is the second kind." He looked at the water. "He has his life and his quiet and the kid he saved. I have mine. We don't need the same story to end with us in the same room." He turned up one corner of his mouth slightly. "And frankly, having a brother who was a Marine spy was embarrassing enough when it was a secret. I don't need to go make it a reunion."
Finn didn't push it. It wasn't his place. He'd passed the information on; what Doflamingo did with it was his own business.
They stood at the rail together for a while after that, not talking. The New World spread out ahead of them. Behind them, Mary Geoise was already gone below the horizon.
Eventually, Doflamingo said, "I've been thinking."
"About?"
"Dressrosa." He was looking at the sea, not at Finn. "I've been away from it for two months. It's a real kingdom now — a legitimate one, mine, built from nothing. There are people there who depend on it running properly." He paused. "The final curtain call of this era can be watched from anywhere. I don't need to follow you to the New World to see it end." He straightened up. "I'm going home."
Finn looked at him sideways. "Just like that."
"Just like that." Doflamingo smiled. "What, are you going to try to keep me?"
"How could I?" Finn said. "I'm an Admiral of the Marine and a representative of justice. I don't keep company with villains."
"And yet." Doflamingo spread his hands.
"And yet," Finn agreed, and laughed.
Doflamingo raised his hand. A white line shot upward from his fingers, catching a distant cloud formation, and he gathered himself to launch off the rail.
"Wait," Finn said.
He reached into his coat and came out with a small vial — glass, stoppered, containing something that caught the light like water but held it differently. He held it out.
Doflamingo took it. He turned it in his fingers, and his eyes went to Finn's face for a moment with something that might have been a question. Then his gaze dropped back to the vial, and understanding moved through his expression.
He had seen Tsuru recently. Sengoku. He had noticed, without entirely processing it, that neither of them looked quite their age anymore.
"I see," Doflamingo said. He turned the vial over once more, then closed his fist around it. "Don't expect me to say thank you."
"Get out of here," Finn said.
Doflamingo grinned. He kicked off the rail and the white string carried him upward, the pink coat catching the wind as he rose — loose and bright against the gray-blue sky, exactly the kind of silhouette that was impossible to take seriously and impossible to look away from. He rose until he was small against the clouds, and then he paused.
He looked back down at the ship. At Finn, who was still watching.
"Thank you, Finn," he called.
Then he was gone, the pink coat vanishing into the weather of the New World.
Finn stood at the rail a moment longer. "Didn't I tell you not to say that?" he said, to no one in particular. A smile settled on his face and stayed there.
He turned away from the rail. Behind him the sea stretched on, the sky ahead bright with the particular quality of light that meant distance still to cover.
"Speed up!" he called to the deck. "Target: G-1!"
Every gathering has an end. Doflamingo had found his, and he was walking toward it. That was enough.