Crocodile had known something was wrong before Lindsay opened his mouth.
This was the specific knowledge that came from spending enough time with a particular kind of person — not understanding them, exactly, but developing a calibrated sense of when they were about to do something that would require rapid response. Lindsay had shifted his posture on the deck. His feet had found their anchor position. His hands had come down to the rail with the deliberate placement of someone preparing to absorb a significant reaction force.
He's going to do it here, Crocodile had thought. On the deck. Not on the shore. Here.
The problem with Evan Lindsay was not recklessness, precisely. Reckless people could be predicted — they moved toward danger without thinking, which was a consistent and therefore mappable behavior. Lindsay moved toward things because he found them interesting and had decided to pursue them, which was different. It was purposeful. It followed its own internal logic completely and someone else's external logic not at all.
Unpredictable was the word. Not unreliable — Lindsay followed through on things with complete consistency. Just unpredictable, which for Crocodile, who had built an entire operational philosophy around controlling variables, was its own particular variety of problem.
He had approximately two seconds between recognizing what was coming and when it arrived.
He used them well.
The Sand-Sand Fruit's elemental form spread up the mast and across the sails — not carefully, no time for careful — and Crocodile shredded his own rigging with a single dispersal pulse, reducing the sail surface to fragments that the wind could move through rather than push against. Then he grasped the railing, elementalized his feet, drove gravel into the deck planking like roots, and held on.
The roar came.
Crocodile's understanding of held on was revised significantly upward in the half second after the roar arrived. His body lost the concept of weight. The deck ceased to be a surface pressing up against his feet and became a thing he was clinging to as it moved. The ship — a medium sailing vessel, built for long passages, constructed with the solidity that long passages required — rose.
The sky appeared where the horizon had been.
The horizon appeared where the sky had been.
Crocodile, elementalized from the feet up and gripping the rail with the specific grip of someone who had made a decision and was committed to it, observed clouds at approximately eye level and made the rapid assessment that they were no longer on the water.
He looked down.
The Sabaody Archipelago was below them, growing smaller with a speed that suggested the roar had not been a modest application of the Wind Demon's authority.
Of course, he thought, with the weary equanimity of a man who had stopped being surprised by specific outcomes and was now only occasionally surprised by scale. Of course it launched the ship.
---
The ship came down.
It took longer to come down than it had taken to go up, which was a function of how far up it had gone, and it landed with an impact that the hull handled with the structural complaint of something that had been asked to do something outside its design parameters but was managing. The sea received it. The ship settled.
Crocodile released the railing, reconstituted his feet, and stood on a deck that was no longer where it had been five minutes ago.
He took out his Log Pose. Checked the bearing. Adjusted the mental heading. Stood quietly for a moment doing the small navigational calculations that reset their position in the larger picture.
Alabasta was still in the same direction.
He lit a cigar.
From behind him came the sound of Lindsay releasing the Earth-Wind Composite Form — the gradual unwinding of the transformation, the specific sequence of the scales receding, the ghost horns shrinking, the dark coloring returning to the normal skin tone that the crew of any ship would still find unusual but that Crocodile had grown accustomed to in the way you grew accustomed to recurring inconveniences.
A thin trace of something dark at the corner of Lindsay's mouth. Armament Haki residue — imprecise, incompletely gathered, present nonetheless.
Lindsay wiped it away with the back of his hand.
"How was that?" he said, turning to Crocodile with his arms open and the expression of someone who had just confirmed something they had been thinking about and was pleased with the result.
Crocodile looked at him.
At the shredded rigging.
At the sail fragments.
At the water currently visible through a stress fracture in the starboard hull that had not been there before the landing.
"Fine," he said, and meant several other things by it, and went to find caulking material.
---
The noise from the port side came twenty minutes later, while Crocodile was managing the course and Lindsay was sitting cross-legged on the bow, eyes closed, working through something internally with the focused stillness he applied to theory-building.
A hand appeared on the rail. Red-skinned, large, gripping the net rope with the ease of someone for whom climbing ship rigging from open water was not a significant undertaking.
Fisher Tiger pulled himself over the rail and onto the deck in a single motion, shook the water from his hair, and stood.
Crocodile watched him with one eyebrow elevated slightly.
The fishmen's reputation at sea was well-established and accurate — in open water, a skilled fishman was more mobile than most vessels, faster over short distances than anything without a Devil Fruit advantage, and essentially uncatchable once they reached deep water. That Tiger had kept pace with a ship that had been launched by the Wind Demon authority and had come down somewhere well outside the archipelago's harbor boundaries said something specific about Fisher Tiger's particular capabilities.
Tiger looked at Crocodile.
Crocodile was an immediately readable type — the cigar, the hook, the unhurried assessment that made no attempt to conceal that it was an assessment. Tiger did not like what the aura communicated, which was the aura of a man who valued everything in terms of what it was useful for.
But it was Lindsay's ship, and Lindsay's journey, and Tiger had climbed aboard for a reason.
He nodded once, briefly, and went forward to the bow.
Lindsay opened his eyes.
"Together?" he said, with the easy warmth of someone who had been hoping for this and is not surprised it arrived.
Tiger settled himself onto the deck, cross-legged, the same posture as Lindsay. The sea moved around the ship. The Grand Line's weather was doing something complex to the northeast, but it was doing it at a comfortable distance.
"I can't," Tiger said. "Not yet."
Lindsay waited.
"There are things I need to do first. Fish-Man Island. And then — " He stopped. The plan that lived in his chest — Mariejoa, the return, the liberation he had been building toward since the chains went on — was his plan, and he did not want to hand it to someone else to carry. Not yet. Not until it was done. "Other things."
Lindsay looked at him.
He understood, without needing the specifics, the shape of what Tiger was carrying. Five centuries of watching the world had given him a particular sensitivity to the weight that people moved under when they had decided something irrevocable and were living in the space between the decision and its execution.
"Whatever it is," Lindsay said, "do it."
Tiger's mouth moved.
"That's what you were going to say, isn't it," he said. "Before I said it."
Lindsay blinked. Then laughed — a short, genuine sound. "You're faster than I expected."
"I've been around humans long enough to know how the good ones talk." Tiger paused. "You're one of the strange ones."
He looked at the water for a moment. Then at his hands. Then at Lindsay with the directness of someone who had decided to ask a hard thing and was not going to soften it into something easier.
"I have a question."
"Ask."
Tiger was quiet for a moment, finding the words for something he had been turning over since the residential street on Island 23 — since the pirate captain, since the Navy soldiers pulling rubble, since the boy with the stone, since all of it accumulating into a confusion that his characteristic directness had not been able to cut through.
"In Mariejoa," he said, "I saw what humans did to fishmen. To my people. I decided I hated them. That I would save my people from them and want nothing to do with them beyond that." His jaw was set, but his eyes were working. "Then today — the civilians who had nothing to do with any of it. The navy soldiers pulling people out of rubble. The boy who threw a rock at you because he was scared and angry and had lost his house." He looked at Lindsay directly. "I couldn't hate them. I tried and I couldn't."
He spread his hands slightly, which was the gesture of a man showing you what he is carrying.
"Princess Otohime says coexistence is possible. That humans and fishmen can share the sea without one destroying the other. I've always thought she was naive." A pause. "Now I don't know what I think. And I don't know which is right — my anger or her hope — or whether choosing between them is even the question I should be asking."
The ship moved. The Grand Line moved around it.
Crocodile, standing at the helm with his back to the conversation, was listening with the quality of attention that looked like indifference and was not.
Lindsay was quiet for a moment.
Then: "I have a question too."
Tiger looked at him.
Lindsay pointed to his own head. Then to Tiger's. Then, with a slight nod, toward Crocodile at the helm.
"The three of us. Different ideas about everything. Different reasons for being on this ship. Different things we want from the world." He lowered his hand. "Even people who grew up together, who share blood and history — they aren't the same person. They don't want the same things. They don't see the same world."
Tiger said nothing.
"So here is my question," Lindsay said. "Why should any person's life be defined by which side they land on? Why should your life — your specific, individual life — be the life of a position rather than the life of a person?"
Tiger looked at him steadily.
"Otohime's hope and your anger aren't two sides of a choice you have to make once and live by forever," Lindsay continued. "They're both true things you've felt. Both real. The anger is real because what you saw in Mariejoa was real. The not-hating is real because what you saw today was real." He paused. "You don't have to resolve them into a single position. You just have to be the person who holds both and decides what to do from that, one day at a time."
The sea was very quiet around the ship.
Tiger looked at the water for a long time.
"That's easy to say," he said finally.
"Yes," Lindsay agreed. "Most true things are."
Tiger was quiet again. Then, slowly, something in the set of his jaw changed — not softened, Tiger was not the softening type, but shifted, the way a fixed thing shifts when it finds a slightly better position to hold from.
He stood.
Bowed — a genuine bow, the full inclination of someone who means it.
"I'll go now," he said. "There are things I need to do."
"I know," Lindsay said.
Tiger went to the rail. Looked back once, at Lindsay, at Crocodile's back, at the ship and the sea and the Grand Line spreading out in all directions.
"Maybe we'll meet again," he said.
"We will," Lindsay said.
Tiger went over the side.
The water took him without sound, the way it always took the fishmen — completely, cleanly, as though the sea had simply opened for him and closed behind him, and he had always been there and the surface had always been where it was, undisturbed.
Crocodile watched the water where Tiger had entered for a moment.
Then he adjusted the heading and looked at the Log Pose.
"Alabasta," he said.
"Alabasta," Lindsay agreed, and settled back on the bow with his eyes open on the horizon, thinking about Armament Haki and composite forms and the specific problems that remained unsolved, and about a fishman somewhere beneath the surface already moving faster than the ship, carrying his own weight toward his own decision.
The Grand Line moved around them, vast and indifferent and endlessly, generously full of things worth finding.
---
Advance chapters are uploaded on- patreon.com/Immortal_Lotus
---