-Real World-
Yasuo's presence in the Sabaody Archipelago hadn't gone unnoticed by the Marine. It never did — anything the Sky Screen chose to display became Marine intelligence by default. His travel record placed him in Shakky's bar for ten consecutive days before the broadcast had identified him. Before that, he appeared to have been moving in the direction of the Grand Line's second half, based on the route he'd been tracing. The old man's conversation with Rayleigh had been sold to Fleet Admiral Sengoku by Shakky at what the intelligence community would consider a reasonable price, within hours of the drinks being finished.
It hadn't contained much. Yasuo talked carefully even while drinking, which was either long discipline or natural caution — probably both. His broader background remained opaque. What he had said about Kurozumi Orochi, however, was the piece that was being examined carefully in a number of different rooms across the world.
A wandering swordsman with no declared faction or affiliation, who had apparently had direct experience with the Kurozumi clan at some point in his history, had assessed Orochi as something considerably more than the compliant puppet the outside world had collectively decided he was. That assessment now sat alongside evidence accumulating from other sources. The consensus was shifting.
The Beasts Pirates, for their part, were watching the Sky Screen's Wano coverage from a comfortable distance and declining to intervene. This had been the plan. But they were also genuinely curious — more curious than they had expected to be — about what Orochi would actually do when the pressure reached its peak.
At Marine Headquarters, the SWORD team members currently not deployed were watching their own Sky Screen feeds and discussing the most recent revelation from the broadcast: Todoroki Shoto, the team's youngest member and most unpredictable variable, had been confirmed as a dual-fruit user by the broadcast's character identification.
Kujaku had her whip resting across her knees in the relaxed posture of someone comfortable with where she was in a conversation. "Snow and Flame together. He's my junior in the unit, but I think I need to take that child under my personal supervision. For his own development."
The way she said development was not ambiguous.
"The Snow-Snow Fruit ends up with Elsa," Hibari said, from her position near the window, camera beside her. "Doflamingo's remaining daughter. And the Flame-Flame Fruit goes to Ann — Roger's daughter, based on the broadcast." She turned the camera over in her hands. "There's a timing discrepancy. The Wano Country operation looks like it falls after Marineford, before Dressrosa — but pinning the month requires more intelligence cross-referencing than we currently have access to."
Grus adjusted his hat. "The most logical explanation for a minor with dual-fruit capability is that he's an experimental subject. Someone's scientific project that got complicated." He paused. "The Marine is going to invest in him regardless. If you can get a second Admiral-level fighter out of a boy who already shows this kind of ability, personality problems are a solvable engineering question." He considered this. "Assigning him to SWORD rather than a standard unit suggests the problem isn't solved yet, and the risk profile is high enough that they'd rather he implicate us than regular Marine personnel."
"I ran into Helmeppo a few days ago," Kujaku said, shifting subjects without ceremony. "Before the shaved head. He still had hair — quite a lot of it, actually, and all golden. He was at his grandmother's office talking to Tsuru about Coby. Making arguments for why his friend shouldn't be in solitary."
The logic of Helmeppo's position was, at the time, defensible. Coby hadn't done anything yet. The imprisonment was preemptive, based on what the Sky Screen showed he would eventually become, not what he currently was. Punishing someone for a future that hadn't happened yet — one that the punishment itself might be creating — was a philosophical position the Marine hadn't formally resolved.
The Sky Screen had complicated that argument considerably.
Watching Coby eat a woman's arm in front of Admiral Kuzan with the unhurried focus of a connoisseur was the kind of footage that didn't leave room for nuance. Hibari and Kujaku had watched it as women watching another woman be consumed, and their positions on Coby's imprisonment had relocated permanently. If anyone moved to release him, the two of them would be the first wall he encountered.
"Helmeppo's trajectory is interesting," Hibari said. "Depressed right now, by all accounts. But during the Wano operation, he and I are both still lieutenant commanders. Then by Dressrosa, he's a Rear Admiral and Admiral Gin's deputy." She set the camera down. "That's a fast climb for someone with his background. Without Coby advocating for him before everything collapsed, Morgan's son probably never escapes the service track."
Grus had been quiet for a moment. "I want to raise something uncomfortable. Is it possible that Helmeppo is the only SWORD member who survives this operation?"
Neither woman responded immediately.
"That's not a baseless guess," he continued. "The broadcast shows Helmeppo in the Infinity Castle, years later, as a functioning Rear Admiral in regular Marine structure. We're not shown. We're not mentioned. SWORD as an organization — if it still exists by that point, there's no evidence of it."
"We've gotten out of bad situations before," Kujaku said.
"We have. And we'd have Helmeppo and Todoroki Shoto, which improves the retreat capability considerably against anything below Emperor-level." He pulled his hat back down. "But I'm not ruling it out."
The conversation arrived at Helmeppo and Coby in the Infinity Castle — the footage of the two of them facing each other across years of diverged choices — and everyone in the room found themselves quieter than they'd been a moment before. If SWORD's other members were absent from that scene, the most parsimonious reason was that they were dead.
The prison block at Marine Headquarters was a quieter place since the frequency of certain visits had decreased.
Garp had reduced how often he came. Coby had noticed. In the logic that was developing inside an isolated cell, the reduction was confirmation of what he'd already begun to suspect: his teacher had concluded that he was a lost cause and moved on to more productive concerns. That Helmeppo still came regularly — the golden-haired boy showing up with food, with conversation, with reports of what was happening outside — fit into the same logic in a different way. Coby had started to read the visits as performance. Concern worn on the surface while underneath something else was happening.
The Marine resources that would have gone to Coby — the promotions, the assignments, the trajectory that Garp had imagined for his protégé — were, in Coby's increasingly simplified accounting, migrating toward Helmeppo. His position. His women in the future, if the broadcast was accurate. His chance at being something in the institution.
Helmeppo came anyway.
"Coby, you need to eat something." He was looking at his friend through the cell door, at the body that had been getting smaller. Three meals down to one, one down to every few days, water substituting for food in a hunger strike that had no formal audience and no formal demands. "If you keep this up, you'll actually get sick. You're still growing."
Coby said nothing. He looked at the wall.
The question that was forming in the background of Helmeppo's visits — beneath the food and the conversation and the loyalty that Coby wasn't currently able to receive as loyalty — was one that the visits themselves could never answer. Whether a boy in a cell on the basis of what he would one day become still had a future worth the name.