Doflamingo repeated the phrase quietly to himself, almost testing it. "Pursuing your ideals." He let it sit for a moment. "That's a nice thing to still have."
The reason the two of them had grown as close as they had over the past two months came down to something simple: they were both, at this particular moment in their lives, adrift.
Finn had spent the better part of three decades building toward something. The Admiral's seat, Marine independence from a power structure that had spent eight centuries corrupting everything it touched, the kind of authority that came from having done what others couldn't or wouldn't. He had it all now, more or less. The summit he'd been climbing had turned out to have an actual top, and he'd reached it, and the view was — fine. Good. Genuinely good. And also, in some way he hadn't anticipated, a little empty. He'd spent enough time with Imlia in those final hours to understand something about what happened to a person who achieved everything they'd set out to achieve and then found that the horizon hadn't moved. The wanting had been the fuel. What powered the engine after the wanting was gone was a question he didn't have an answer to yet.
He'd turned over various possibilities in the quiet moments the conference afforded him. He could study things. He had time now, and Imlia's example was genuinely impressive — she'd spent eight centuries mastering every discipline that caught her interest, language and history and philosophy and physical arts, accumulating competencies the way other people accumulated possessions. There was something appealing about that model, at least in principle. What form it would take for Finn specifically he hadn't worked out. He had never been particularly drawn toward mastery for its own sake; he had always been pulled by problems that needed solving. Without a problem of sufficient size, the motivation had a way of collapsing.
For Doflamingo, the situation was structurally similar and arrived at by a completely different road. The thing that had oriented his entire adult life — his hatred of Mary Geoise, his need to see the Celestial Dragons brought down from the heaven they'd constructed for themselves — had been the engine behind nearly every decision he'd made since the age of eight. That engine had been running for thirty years. And then, over the course of about seventy-two hours, it ran out of fuel entirely. The Five Elders were dead. The Celestial Dragons who had populated the God's Abode were gone. The institution that had made his childhood a systematic horror had been dismantled and was being replaced by something else. There was nothing left to aim at.
So he had, with the characteristic straightforwardness of a man who solved problems by throwing money at them until they went away, purchased the former Donquixote family estate in Mary Geoise at considerable expense and moved in. It was, from the outside, an almost absurdly simple response to an existential problem. From the inside, Doflamingo found it oddly satisfying. The house existed. He now owned it. Whatever else was unclear, that much was settled.
He attended conference sessions when he had nothing else to do, which was most of the time. He wasn't interested in the proceedings themselves anymore — that appetite had faded along with the ambition that fed it. He went because the alternative was sitting alone in a very large house with his thoughts, which was worse.
Two people with nothing immediate to do, sitting in each other's proximity day after day, tended to talk. And talking, over weeks, had a way of turning into something more honest than either of them had necessarily intended at the start.
"We should have set bigger goals," Doflamingo said, with a short, dry laugh. "Something that couldn't be finished. That would have been the smart move."
"Agreed," Finn said. "Though I suspect the problem with that plan is that at the time, neither of us was thinking past the immediate obstacle." He turned his water glass in his hands. "Imlia had eight hundred years. She apparently spent a reasonable portion of them becoming proficient in things that had no bearing on world domination at all. That might be the answer." He paused. "I just haven't found what the equivalent would be for me."
He didn't say it with particular sadness. It was a practical observation about a gap he intended to fill; he just didn't know with what yet.
"Anyway," he said, pushing the thought aside. "Enough of that. You hear things. What's actually happening in the New World? I was told the three-way coalition was forming up — why haven't they moved?"
Doflamingo gave him a sideways look. "You have a CP Director General who knows everything that happens everywhere, and you're asking me?"
Finn coughed. There was a brief, loaded silence.
"Let's just say I've been somewhat... managed, during this conference," Finn said, with the careful dignity of a man who has decided not to elaborate. "Consider it independent verification."
"Of course," Doflamingo said, with a smile that was only barely contained. "Anything for the Admiral."
He leaned back and considered. "There was movement. Sakazuki's been watching it from G-1. Whitebeard, Kaido, Big Mom — they put together something that looked like it was building toward a real offensive. Tentative probes at the frontier positions over the past few weeks." His expression shifted, becoming more analytical. "Then the Birdcage came down yesterday. The news about Mary Geoise hit the world this morning. And from what I've heard since, everything in the New World has gone completely quiet."
Finn nodded slowly.
"They're reading the situation," Doflamingo continued. "Think about what they actually know, and what they don't. They've understood for years that the Marine is strong — stronger than it's been in living memory. Strong enough that they concluded three of them together might be needed to create a meaningful standoff. The calculation has always been: if we can force a stalemate, neither side wants to commit to the kind of war that destroys everyone. The Marine can't afford the losses. The Emperors can't afford the losses. Both sides walk away intact, and the pirates keep their territories." He tilted his head. "That logic only works if the Marine's strength is roughly what they think it is."
"And now," Finn said.
"And now they wake up to news that Mary Geoise is gone. The Five Elders are dead. The structure that's been the immovable backdrop of the entire world for eight hundred years ceased to exist sometime in the last seventy-two hours. That's not a small piece of information. That changes every assumption their strategy was built on." Doflamingo spread his hands. "I'd go quiet too. I'd want to understand what I was actually dealing with before I committed to anything."
He didn't add what he was privately thinking, which was that the three Emperors also didn't know what he knew. They didn't know that one of their own number was a Marine Admiral operating under a Warlord's flag. They didn't know the full picture of what the Marine had built over the past two decades — the financial independence, the intelligence network, the depth of institutional alignment. They were looking at the visible surface of the Marine's strength and building their models on that. Doflamingo had spent enough time at Marine Headquarters and in the conference rooms of Mary Geoise to understand that the visible surface was a significant underestimate.
Whatever the three Emperors were planning, it had been constructed around a premise that was no longer accurate. They just didn't know it yet.
"They want to watch and wait," Finn said, after a moment.
"That's what I'd do."
"Right." Finn reached into his coat and produced a Den Den Mushi. "Then I won't give them the time."
Doflamingo looked at him.
"I've been sitting in that conference room for two months and I'm about to go completely to seed," Finn said. "We're going to be righteous about this. The sea has scum on it that needs to be cleaned up, the Marine has an obligation to the people who live on it, and as an Admiral of this institution I cannot in good conscience allow —"
"You just want to leave Mary Geoise," Doflamingo said.
"I want to fulfill my duties to the sea and to justice," Finn said, with great dignity, and dialed.
Doflamingo settled back in his chair with the expression of a man watching a performance he has already seen twice and still finds entertaining.
The Den Den Mushi connected. Not to Fleet Admiral Sengoku's office, but to G-1 Marine Base in the New World.
Three rings. Then Sakazuki's voice, flat and familiar: "Finn. Any new developments at Mary Geoise?"
"Nothing I caught," Finn said.
A beat of silence. Sakazuki, apparently, was trying to work out why he was being called.
"Then what is it?"
"How's the situation in the New World? Have they made their move yet?"
"Don't get me started." There was an unmistakable edge of frustration. "I had them lined up. Something was finally going to happen. And then the news from Mary Geoise dropped and now they've all gone dead quiet." A short pause. "Cowardly rats."
"Right," Finn said. "Here's what I think. You shouldn't be waiting for them anyway."
"Oh?"
"Waiting around on defense — that's not you, Sakazuki. You know it isn't. Why stand there holding the line when you could be pressing forward?"
On the other end of the Den Den Mushi, something shifted in the quality of the silence. Sakazuki was actually considering it.
"I'm not saying you're wrong," he said, after a moment, with the careful voice of a man who had just noticed a possible trap. "I've been saying for months that standing defensive in the New World is the wrong posture. You know that."
"So declare war. Stop waiting for them to decide when this starts. We take the initiative."
More silence.
"Finn." Sakazuki's voice had gone a shade quieter and considerably more precise. "Right now, basically every flag officer we have is sitting in a conference room at Mary Geoise. Sengoku, Garp, Tsuru, you — all of you. The only senior command presence in the New World is me."
"That's right."
"You want me to launch an offensive against Whitebeard, Big Mom, and Kaido simultaneously. With what I have here. While all of you are at a conference."
"Think of it as an opportunity to show some initiative."
"Finn." A pause. "Tell me the truth. Are you trying to set me up?"