-Real World-
The war room had reached a consensus on Borsalino.
The consensus was that they had been underestimating him, possibly for years, possibly deliberately, and that this was irritating in proportion to how significant the gap had turned out to be. Time reversal. Future displacement. Both manifesting from the Pika Pika no Mi (Glint-Glint Fruit) at its awakened ceiling — a Logia that had always been classified as exceptional and had now demonstrated that "exceptional" was considerably short of the actual description.
The logic was uncomfortable: every situation where the Marine's best efforts had fallen short, every moment where a few more seconds of tactical flexibility would have changed an outcome — any of those, theoretically, had an answer that had been sitting in the room the whole time, trimming his nails, declining to apply himself.
"You've been hiding this," Sakazuki said, which was less a question than a territorial claim on an answer that was going to be given whether Borsalino wanted to give it or not. He had moved to sit directly beside him, which was how he conducted interrogations of people he could not formally interrogate. "When we were fighting Kaido. You weren't using your full capability."
"Do you believe me," Borsalino said pleasantly, "if I tell you I don't actually have that ability?"
Every person in the war room with sufficient rank to have formed an opinion had one, and every opinion was the same, and it was not the one he had just proposed. Sakazuki's expression communicated this without requiring words. Sengoku was watching with the expression of a man who had known Borsalino for decades and had arrived at a conclusion about this exact kind of statement. Garp was watching with something between amusement and exasperation, the way he watched most things Borsalino did. Kuzan had said nothing and was looking at him with an icy attentiveness that said everything he wasn't saying.
The problem, Borsalino reflected, was that he had spent many years playing dumb at precisely calibrated moments, and the calibration had been effective enough that when he said something he actually meant, nobody knew what category to put it in.
"Let's see how long you can hide," Sakazuki said. "I don't believe for one moment that when the Marine is genuinely in crisis, you won't use it."
This was, Borsalino did not say, a more accurate statement than Sakazuki realized. The key word was genuinely. He had his own standard for what met that threshold, and it was not the same as other people's standard, and he saw no reason to resolve the ambiguity.
He said nothing. The war room continued watching him with collective suspicion, and he received this with the equanimity of a man who had been receiving collective suspicion for a long time and found it peaceful rather than uncomfortable.
The parallel Marineford sequence had found its audience.
The image of three generations fighting together on the same side — Garp, Dragon, Luffy, coordinated, present — had produced the quality of silence that followed things that were beautiful and also painful. Sengoku waited a moment before speaking.
"If that damn red hair hadn't gone to the East Blue," he said, to Garp, "a lot of things would have been different. That's the version where the hat never changed hands."
Garp was quiet for longer than Sengoku.
"In that world, Dragon didn't leave," he said eventually. "Luffy didn't eat a Devil Fruit. His path through combat looked like mine. We were all in the same place. Could see each other." A pause. "It's not like here, where I'm in Marineford by myself."
The words did not invite response, and no one gave one.
He was an old man with a son who commanded the Revolutionary Army and a grandson who was trying to become Pirate King, and both of those trajectories had been set in motion by the shape of their childhoods, and the shape of their childhoods had been set in motion by decisions and accidents and the particular version of the world that had happened to exist. One different decision — Shanks staying on the Grand Line, Roger keeping his son instead of entrusting him to Garp — and the geometry changed entirely.
Whether the other version was better was not a useful question. It was a different question. In this version, Garp had fewer people left within reach, and the ones he did have were on the other side of a political line, and the funeral was probably the place they would all be in the same room together.
He looked at the Sky Screen and did not say any of this, because saying it would not help it.
In Arabasta, Ace was cataloguing the implications with the focus of someone who had recognized something important and needed to think it through before the weight of it landed fully.
Blackbeard Teach — Teach, who had in this world obtained the Yami Yami no Mi (Dark-Dark Fruit) by killing Thatch, who had betrayed the Whitebeard Pirates for it, who had become the threat that everyone now knew he was — was, in the other world, throwing himself at the Marine line to protect Ace. Taking an injury from Sakazuki's fist and surviving through sheer constitution. Being the kind of brother that Ace himself had been trying to be.
Without the fruit. Without the ambition the fruit had apparently enabled, or revealed, or both.
"Teach didn't get the Dark-Dark Fruit in that world," he said to the people beside him, who had been watching the same thing and arrived at the same place. "Thatch kept his life. Teach never showed what he was actually planning." He stopped. "He was good at pretending to be what he wasn't. We knew him for years."
Nobody was comfortable with this, including him. The alternative history didn't change what had actually happened. It just made visible that what had happened was contingent — that the version of Teach who had become the threat was not the only possible version of Teach. That the decision point had been a single fruit, available or unavailable, and that around that single point everything downstream had organized itself.
Destiny was not interesting when it felt inevitable. It became interesting when it became clear how thin the margins were.
The multiverse discussion had moved, with the predictable efficiency of people who spend time analyzing threats, toward Bonney.
The logic was straightforward: Miss Multiverse, as the Sky Screen had designated her, accessed power by imagining herself as a counterpart from a parallel timeline and drawing on that version's capabilities. Which meant she was, in functional terms, navigating the multiverse without a black hole, without a speedster fight, without any of the apparatus that Borsalino and Barry had required. She was doing it by imagination alone.
The strategic implications were being calculated by a significant number of people simultaneously, and most of them were arriving at conclusions they found concerning.
On whichever island Bonney was currently hiding on, something was making itself felt across the back of her neck.
She sneezed. Again. Rubbed the back of her arms.
"I feel like a significant number of people are thinking about me right now," she said.
The fishermen who had come out with her — the people who had followed Big Bear's daughter because there was no one left to follow him — exchanged a look.
"We should move," one of them said.
"Before the government people get here," said another.
"Before something happens to Kuma," Bonney agreed. She stood, gathered what needed gathering. "We need to find him before they move him somewhere worse."
She did not explain the shiver. She did not have an explanation for the shiver that didn't involve admitting that the Sky Screen had just broadcast her strategic value to an audience of billions, which was not a development she was in a position to undo.
She moved. The fishermen moved with her. The island got smaller behind them.