"Who said it would just be you?" Finn said, with the tone of someone delivering an obvious truth. "You're one Marine among millions. You don't fight alone. You fight with all of them."
On the other end of the Den Den Mushi, Sakazuki's silence had the quality of a man trying to decide if he was being insulted.
"Having said that," Sakazuki allowed.
"Here's what you do," Finn pressed on. "File a report with the Fleet Admiral. Tell him there's unusual movement on the front, that the pirates heard the news from Mary Geoise and have worked themselves into a fury over the fall of the Five Elders. Tell him they're planning an assault on New World positions while the senior command is occupied with the conference. Tell him you need backup. Then I'll come to you. With both of us there, we can handle whatever they throw."
Silence.
"The pirates," Sakazuki said, slowly and carefully, "heard the news about Mary Geoise and were overcome with righteous indignation on behalf of the Five Elders."
"That's the idea."
"And in their grief, they have mobilized for a revenge attack."
"Roughly, yes."
"Finn." A pause. "Champagne. They would be popping champagne."
"Look, the specific reason is flexible, what matters is—"
"I'm not writing that report," Sakazuki said. "But I hear what you're actually saying." Another pause, shorter this time. "If you came to the New World, it would be two Admirals at the front. That changes the calculation entirely."
It was true. Sakazuki had never been worried about the mid-tier engagement; there was no shortage of capable Vice Admirals who could hold a line. The problem was always the upper tier, the handful of individuals whose power operated on a different scale entirely and who had to be matched at that level or not at all. Against Whitebeard, Kaido, and Big Mom together, one Admiral was a difficult proposition. Two was a different conversation.
Hold the top tier in place, let Sengoku and the others finish the conference business at whatever pace they chose to finish it, and then the full weight of Marine Headquarters would eventually arrive and the arithmetic became simple. He could picture it clearly and find nothing wrong with it. He was not a passive man by nature. Standing in defensive posture in the New World while flag officers argued governance structure in Mary Geoise grated against everything he was.
But why was Finn so eager to go? That was the part that didn't fit the pattern Sakazuki had built of him. Mary Geoise, the conference, the moment when the shape of the new world was being negotiated — these were exactly the kinds of things Finn had always been drawn to. The positioning, the architecture of influence. And he had Gion there. And Stussy. And Hina, for that matter.
It took Sakazuki a moment longer than it should have.
Then it arrived.
Gion. Stussy. Hina. All three of them. In the same city. For two months.
Sakazuki was not, by any description, a man of the world in this particular department. He had always regarded the whole domain with a kind of principled disinterest that he was vaguely aware made him unusual among his peers. He knew, in the abstract, that the Marine's culture around these matters was somewhat looser than the institution's public image suggested — he'd been at Marineford long enough to understand that the cheerful pragmatism about relationships that ran through the residential quarter was not incidental but structural, a response to the particular pressures of a life lived near constant danger. He simply didn't participate in it, and had never had particular occasion to think hard about why everyone else did.
He thought about it now, and arrived at the conclusion that two months was probably a very long time under those specific circumstances, and that this might explain rather a lot.
It occurred to him, briefly, that he might be being used as a convenient exit. That Finn might be manufacturing a military emergency because the alternative was remaining in Mary Geoise for however many weeks the conference still had to run.
He turned this over. Against it, he placed twenty-eight years of knowing Finn — not personally, not warmly, but professionally, the way you know someone you've worked alongside in difficult conditions for a very long time. Finn was cunning and Finn was pragmatic and Finn was capable of extraordinary levels of expedient reasoning when he wanted something. But there was a line he didn't cross, a zone of Marine institutional loyalty and internal honesty that Sakazuki had never once seen him compromise. On matters of strategy against the outside world, Finn was as slippery as smoke. On matters internal to the Marine, on the genuine competition between the people who served in it — he was, frustratingly, straight.
If Finn wanted to get away from Mary Geoise, that was one thing. But he wouldn't manufacture a military pretext that left the Marine in a worse position to achieve it. He wasn't built that way.
"Finn," Sakazuki said. "Straight answer. Has the Fleet Admiral been hinting lately that he might be ready to hand things over? Is that what this is about?"
Finn's end of the line was quiet for a moment. The quality of the quiet was odd — not the quiet of someone stalling, but the quiet of someone who had genuinely been caught off-guard by the question.
"No," Finn said. And then, a beat later, more to himself than to Sakazuki: "Come to think of it, has he?"
Which settled that, at least. Sakazuki had never seriously considered that Finn would lie to him about something like this, but it was useful to have it confirmed. He didn't have competition anxiety, exactly — he was secure enough in his own abilities to acknowledge plainly that Finn had the edge and leave it at that, without it curdling into something worse. What he had was a professional's interest in knowing where he actually stood, and right now he apparently stood somewhere that had nothing to do with a succession move.
The question was what it actually had to do with. And the more he turned it over, the more he arrived at the same place.
Two months. Three very formidable women in the same city.
Sakazuki was a man of impeccable personal conduct. He had been that way for the entirety of his career, quietly and without making a particular virtue of it, simply because it had never occurred to him to be otherwise. He did not visit the entertainment establishments in Marineford's residential quarter. He had never had a relationship of any kind that someone paying close attention might have noticed. He had given none of his considerable energy to anything except the Marine and the advancement of the Marine's mission, and this had served him well and made him someone his subordinates could follow without second-guessing his motives.
He could not, from this position, truly understand what Finn was experiencing in Mary Geoise. But he could perform the arithmetic well enough to recognize that the situation contained variables he was poorly equipped to evaluate.
"Fine," he said, at last. "I'll do it. But not with that reason. I'll find something that doesn't make me look like an idiot."
"That's all I needed to hear," Finn said, and there was something in his voice that might have been relief.
"And Finn."
"What."
"When you get here," Sakazuki said, "you fight properly. No half measures. I want this finished."
"Obviously."
"Good." A brief pause. "I'll be in touch." He hung up.
In Doflamingo's garden, Finn set down the Den Den Mushi and looked at the sky through the tree canopy with the expression of a man who had just resolved a significant logistical problem.
Doflamingo watched him from across the table. "He agreed."
"He agreed."
"And the real reason you're doing this?"
Finn was quiet for a moment. Then he said, with complete honesty, "I need to go somewhere and hit something very hard."
Doflamingo considered this. "That," he said, "is the most relatable thing you have ever told me."