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Perona came back to herself against a wall she did not remember reaching.
Her arm was broken — the specific wrongness of a joint at an angle it wasn't designed for. Her forehead was open; she could feel the blood tracking down the side of her face and had the distant, concussion-adjacent thought that she should do something about that. Her memory had the texture of something that had been shaken loose from its chronological order and was reassembling itself in pieces.
The tomb. The woman. The arm in Moria's stomach.
She was on her feet before the reassembly was complete.
The main chamber was quiet in the way that places are quiet after something irreversible has concluded. She moved toward the light of the remaining candles.
The first thing she saw was Moria on the floor, and the nature of what she was looking at arrived without the softening that distance sometimes provides. Shichibukai. The man who had given her a home, a crew, a purpose that fit her particular collection of abilities and preferences. His eyes were open. He was not breathing.
She sat down next to him without making a sound.
She was still sitting there when the voice came from the jade bed.
"How was your sleep in my grave? Was it comfortable?"
The woman on the bed was not the woman who had been on the bed.
The process of watching someone age in reverse is disorienting in the specific way of things that should not be possible presented as present fact. The mature figure, the measured proportions — these contracted and refined themselves into something younger, more compact, more immediately alive. Dark blue skin where the black substance had settled into her. Red eyes, the color of banked coals. Short black hair that moved in air that was not moving.
[Sky Screen Character Notes: Shadow Queen — Jade. User of the Paramecia-type Kage Kage no Mi (Shadow-Shadow Fruit).]
"Are you two father and daughter?" Jade said, looking at them with curiosity rather than cruelty. "Different blood. Another orphan raised by a pirate." She considered this. "People who enjoy turning others into zombies tend to eventually meet the consequence of that. It's not a moral judgment — it's just a pattern."
She snapped her fingers.
From the shadow beneath Moria's body — not the shadow he'd used for zombies, but his own — something emerged. It had the form of an insect without legs, its body the black of compressed shadow-material, its mouth sealed. It moved across the floor with the certainty of a thing that had done this before, reached Moria's shadow, and entered it.
Perona watched without speaking. There was nothing to stop it with.
Moria moved.
The first movements were wrong — the specific wrongness of a body operating on instinct before reasoning. He rose without coordination, his eyes open and dilated and empty. The smell arrived with him: something cold, something that processed rather than breathed. His attention fixed on Perona with the focus of hunger rather than recognition.
Not for her flesh. For her shadow.
Jade clapped twice.
The chamber filled.
The shadows on the walls — which had been decorative, or had seemed decorative — detached and multiplied and resolved into figures. Hundreds of them, each identical to the others, dressed in the same dark uniform, standing with the specific quality of units rather than individuals. The Ghost Ninja Group, or whatever they had been called when Jade was alive, moving at her instruction without requiring instruction.
They descended on Moria from every angle.
Most of them struck with hands. Some threw darts. Several brought blades. The assault was not designed to injure — it was designed to wake him up, specifically, to locate whatever remained of Moria's self in the body now operating on zombie instinct and give it something to push against until it surfaced.
It took some time.
When Moria's pupils came back — not to what they had been, not with warmth or color, but with the specific quality of someone behind them — he knelt.
"Lady Shadow Queen," he said. "Welcome back."
The voice was his. The cadence was his. The deference was not previously something Moria had done, but the situation had updated considerably.
Perona stared at him.
He looked at her with the expression of a man who was aware of what he was now and found it less comfortable than he would have preferred, and who still, despite this, had something to communicate.
"Perona," he said. "Don't stand there. Come and greet our master."
It was his voice giving the order, which was the thing that moved her, more than any fear of the woman on the jade bed. She came forward. She knelt, because her captain was kneeling and because the situation's geometry left limited alternatives.
From this angle she could see Jade watching them both with the interested attention of someone who has returned to a world she left a very long time ago and is assessing what has changed.
The Shadow-Shadow Fruit. The original user. Perona had carried fragments of knowledge about the fruit for years, absorbed through proximity to Moria's practice of it. She understood what it could do in the form she'd watched him use.
Jade had just demonstrated what it could do in a form Moria had never approached.
Resurrection that retained memory. Shadows deployed as autonomous units rather than extracted individually. A fruit used by someone who had developed it over a lifetime rather than inherited it secondhand.