—Broadcast—
Gecko Moria was many things — a Shichibukai, a survivor, a man who had cheated death more times than he deserved. He was not, however, a man accustomed to being told what to do.
And yet, here he stood, completely at peace with it.
The Shadow Queen's mark had settled into his mind the moment she resurrected him, quiet and absolute, like a seal pressed into cooling wax. His reason remained his own — he could still think, still observe, still feel the faint absurdity of his situation — but his instincts, those deep animal impulses that might have urged him to resist, had gone entirely still. The girl in front of him inspired obedience the way a deep ocean trench inspired silence.
"What's your name?" Jade addressed Perona with the calm authority of someone who had never once needed to raise her voice. "Please help him get sewn up. His internal organs are about to become someone else's problem."
She was not wrong. With every movement Moria made, the wound across his abdomen shifted, and the contents beneath threatened to make themselves visible. For a zombie, it was more inconvenient than painful, but the Shadow Queen was, apparently, a woman of aesthetic standards.
Perona needed a moment — a brief, blinking moment of pure incomprehension — before Moria's voice broke through it.
"Just find something and get it done," he said, entirely unbothered. "I don't feel pain anymore. You can be as rough as you want."
That was perhaps the least reassuring thing anyone had ever said to her.
She reached into her small bag with trembling hands, her fingers closing around needle and thread. The cold metal of the needle caught the dim light. She breathed in slowly, breathed out, and made herself look at the wound.
It was large. It was ugly. It was her captain.
Her hands stopped trembling.
She worked carefully, each stitch placed with a precision born from the kind of focus that pushes fear entirely out of the room. The needle drew the thread in slow arcs back and forth across the wound, and sweat beaded at her temple, and she did not look away once. It was not surgery — it was stubbornness shaped into something useful. Every stitch was a small argument against falling apart.
By the end, the flow of blood had slowed to almost nothing. Moria offered her a thumbs-up.
She chose not to comment on how strange it was to feel relieved about sewing shut a zombie.
Once the immediate crisis of Moria's escaping organs had been resolved, the Thriller Bark crew turned to the more practical matter of orientation. One by one, they introduced themselves to the Shadow Queen — their names, their roles, the shape of the world she had woken into.
Jade listened with the posture of someone who had seen several ages come and go and found this one roughly equivalent to the others.
"So the sea is ruled by pirates now," she said, not quite as a question. "And the only things that haven't changed are the World Government and the Celestial Dragons."
The contempt in her tone was mild and enormous at once — the kind that doesn't need volume to carry weight.
It was Moria who answered. He spoke with the authority of someone who had personally witnessed the Battle of Marineford and barely survived it to have opinions about it.
"The Marine has been gutted since Marineford. They've lost their hold over the seas. Every ocean has turned into a paradise for pirates — or a hunting ground, depending on which side you're standing on."
The Shadow Queen absorbed this with the same expression she might wear while watching clouds rearrange themselves. Predictable. Familiar. Humans building things up only to tear them down again.
"The Shichibukai." Moria's mouth curved into something self-aware. "I was one of them. Hawkeye Mihawk still is, technically. He's been growing vegetables on his island."
There was a pause.
"And you," she said, "were digging up graves on small islands."
"Research," Moria said, with dignity.
"Of course."
The Shadow Queen had settled herself with the natural ease of someone who understood that comfort was a form of authority. Two ninjas worked at her legs; a third addressed her shoulders. The rest of the Shadowkhan moved through the tomb's chambers in efficient silence, gathering the burial goods that had waited centuries for their mistress to want them again.
She placed a jewel-studded crown in front of Perona.
"I broke the one on your head," she said simply. "This replaces it."
Perona stared at it.
"In the future," Jade continued, with the brisk tone of someone reading from a contract she found perfectly reasonable, "you and Moria will work hard for me. As the boss, I don't intend to be unfair about it."
She patted Perona's shoulder — a gesture that managed to be both genuine and subtly territorial — then directed two ninjas to set the girl's broken arm and apply a splint. A break like that wouldn't heal quickly. Better to fix it properly now and let the body do the rest without complications.
Moria watched the Shadowkhan empty the tomb with an expression somewhere between admiration and existential humiliation. They moved the burial goods into the shadows, where they vanished without a crease — available the moment their mistress wanted them, invisible until then.
Moria reached instinctively for his connection to the Kage Kage no Mi (Shadow-Shadow Fruit). Found nothing. Watched the Shadow Queen's ninjas perform, with absolute fluency, techniques he had spent decades not discovering existed.
"Captain," Perona said, turning her new crown over in her good hand while a ninja adjusted her splint, "why didn't you ever use the Shadow-Shadow Fruit like that?"
Moria stared at a point in the middle distance and said nothing.
She looked at the ninjas, then back at him. "There really is no harm without comparison."
He continued saying nothing, very firmly.
The Shadowkhan worked with the kind of thoroughness that suggested their mistress would be displeased by evidence of intrusion. Every grave-pit that Moria had dug during his earlier excavations was filled back in. Every displaced stone was replaced. Every trace, erased. When they finally emerged from the tomb, the island's jungle looked as though nothing had disturbed it in centuries.
Because, as far as the island was concerned, nothing had.
They had entered during daylight. They emerged in the early hours of the night, the sky overhead a deep, unreadable black. Moria moved as a zombie, his stitched wound holding — barely, but holding. Perona wore her splinted arm and her new crown with the air of someone determined to find dignity in whatever circumstances presented themselves. The Thriller Bark Pirates filed out behind them, each carrying the particular expression of people who had gotten far more than they bargained for and were tentatively deciding it was a net positive.
The town at the island's shore received them in silence.
It was the heavy kind. The thick-veil kind. Not a single light moved in any window; not a single voice drifted from any alley. The street lamps pushed small halos of yellow into the dark, doing little against the pressing weight of the night. The buildings stood closed and indifferent, their shuttered windows like eyes that had stopped looking.
"It's too late to build a boat tonight," Moria observed, his voice carrying easily through the empty street. "We'll wait until morning. Recruit some of the locals as labor, get it done by afternoon."
Jade glanced at the town around them. Something almost like amusement moved through her expression.
"Living people?" she said. "We've only just arrived, and we've already made a little impression on this place." She let the silence hold for a moment. "There are no living people in this town anymore."