The elevator descended without ceremony.
Level 6 had a reputation, built on whispers filtered upward through the prison's other five levels and eventually out into the world, of being something uniquely terrible. The reasoning was understandable. Infinite Hell. The name alone carried weight.
The reality was more complicated. The cells down here were quiet, well-maintained by Impel Down's standards, and lit steadily. No theatrical environmental torment like the burning desert of Level 3 or the freezing cold of Level 5. The horror of Level 6 was simpler and more durable than anything a physical environment could produce: the people here had been removed from the world entirely, placed in stone rooms below the ocean floor, and left to understand that no one outside was thinking about them anymore.
Most of them had already been here long enough to believe it.
The aisle between cells was wide enough for several people to walk abreast. Finn moved through it with Magellan and Vergo behind him, the sound of their footsteps carrying in the silence. Crates of fruit followed on a cart, pulled by two Marines who were doing their best to project the casual indifference of people who were not currently walking through a prison housing the most dangerous individuals alive.
In the third cell on the right, a figure was sitting with his back against the stone wall.
He had one arm.
Shanks who supposed to be the Red-Haired Pirate but become known as the Strawhat Pirate and then, for a brief period in his own mind at least, something larger than that, something on the cusp of the kind of name that the New World remembered for generations. Then he had run into Finn, and the cusp had not materialized. His left arm was gone below the shoulder, the wound long since healed into a flat scar. He had been sitting here long enough that the initial fury of his confinement had compressed itself into something quieter and, in some ways, more dangerous: a cold, focused resentment that had nowhere to go.
He opened his eyes at the sound of the elevator. Meal deliveries didn't use the elevator. Transfers arrived in shackles with escort noise. Whatever was coming down was something else.
Across the aisle, in the cell directly opposite, a different figure stood from the shadows.
Silvers Rayleigh had aged visibly since arriving at Level 6. There was no avoiding it down here, with no sun and no particular reason to fight the passage of time. The golden hair that had once framed his face was white now, and new lines had settled into his features. His shackles shifted as he moved, the chain scraping stone. But his eyes, when they caught the corridor light, were as sharp as they had always been.
"Elevator again," Shanks said, mostly to himself. He rubbed his chin with his remaining hand. "We just had a meal delivery. Either someone interesting was caught, or..." He trailed off with a short, dry sound that approximated a laugh.
"The cell beside you is still empty," Rayleigh said, across the aisle. "Maybe you'll have company."
"Someone to talk to. I'd almost welcome it." Shanks considered the ceiling. "Who do you think?"
Rayleigh made a dismissive sound. "The Marine has been busy enough lately. I wouldn't be surprised if it were Whitebeard."
"That would be something."
They heard the footsteps then, coming from the direction of the elevator, measured and unhurried.
Shanks straightened slightly. "Sounds like more than a few people. Not a transfer."
"No chains either," Rayleigh said, his expression shifting. "Someone's touring."
Shanks turned toward the corridor and then his jaw set hard as a voice drifted toward them from the darkness, carrying easily in the still air of Level 6.
"Still able to laugh down here after all this time. That's something, Shanks. Truly. Must be the Roger Pirates bloodline."
The voice was conversational and unhurried and Shanks had spent enough time in this cell replaying the circumstances that had put him here to know it instantly.
"Finn," he said, and the name came out with everything he'd been storing up for a long time behind it.
Across the aisle, Rayleigh's expression shifted into something more measured. He watched the corridor.
The footsteps came closer and then Finn walked out of the shadow at the end of the aisle, marine cloak over his shoulders and a cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth, moving with the easy confidence of a man walking through a space he considered his own, which he effectively did. Magellan and Vergo followed, and behind them the two Marines with the fruit cart.
Finn's eyes moved to Rayleigh first, with what looked like genuine surprise.
"Rayleigh," he said, stopping. "They put you across from him."
"Hello, Finn," Rayleigh said, with the measured calm of a man who has had considerable time to decide how he intends to conduct himself. "You look well. I, as you can see, look somewhat older."
"You are somewhat older." Finn exhaled slowly. "That's the thing about time."
"And yet you aren't." Rayleigh looked at him with the particular attention of someone filing things away. "Remarkable." He shifted his wrist, and the shackle chain rustled. "Since I pose no serious threat to you at this stage, and since keeping me here costs food and administrative attention, it seems like you could simply let me go. I'd be very little trouble."
"You'd be very little trouble," Finn agreed. "Until you weren't. You can stay." He paused. "You look like you've been managing."
"I've had Shanks for company. It's been instructive."
From the cell beside Rayleigh's, there was a short sound that was not laughter.
Finn turned toward it. The cell to the immediate right of Rayleigh's was occupied by a figure who had been sitting completely still since their arrival, arms folded, back straight, watching with the focused blankness of a man who has been calculating since the moment the elevator opened. Broad-shouldered, with the physique of someone who had dealt with confinement by treating every day as training. He had not moved or spoken.
Douglas Bullet.
He was watching Finn the way someone watches a lock they think they can pick, looking for the mechanism, looking for the angle.
Finn started to turn toward him.
Bullet moved.
The arm came through the cage gap fast, fast enough that Magellan actually flinched, and closed toward Finn's throat with the economy of motion of a man who had spent years in a confined space doing nothing but practicing being fast and lethal.
Finn's hand came up. There was no dramatic gesture to it, no visible preparation.
An invisible pressure hit Bullet's arm a foot short of its target and stopped it cold, like a wall that hadn't been there a moment before. The repulsive force of the Press-Press Fruit, generated without any apparent effort, held the arm in place for a full second.
Then Bullet withdrew it and stepped back to the center of his cell, sat down, folded his arms across his chest again, and said nothing. His expression hadn't changed. He had made one attempt and it hadn't worked, and he had already moved past it into whatever calculation came next.
"Douglas Bullet," Finn said, like he was reading a name off a list. He studied the man. "You only get one of those."
Bullet looked at him without answering.
From the other cell, Shanks had his hands on the bars. "You bastard," he said, and there was not much left in it except the fact of the feeling itself, which was still real even if it had been worn down by months of nowhere to put it. "You absolute bastard, showing up here—"
"You look like you're struggling," Finn said to him, almost gently. "That's not ideal."
Shanks said several things after that. Finn let them wash past him and turned back to Bullet.
In the original shape of things, before all the deviations and redirections that Finn had introduced into the world, Shanks would have become something. A name. A man whose raised hand had stopped a war and whose reputation had kept whole seas calmer than they might otherwise have been. That version of Shanks had a particular gravity, the earned authority of someone who had lived large enough to deserve the room he occupied.
This version had one arm and a cell on Level 6 and was telling Finn at length what he thought of him.
It wasn't that Finn felt nothing about it. It was more that he had made decisions, those decisions had produced outcomes, and standing in the corridor arguing with those outcomes wouldn't change anything. Shanks was young enough and strong enough and stubborn enough that killing him had never seemed like the right move. This, here, the daily erosion of isolation without any horizon of release, was probably worse in the ways that mattered.
He moved his gaze back to Bullet.
Bullet had not looked away. He watched Finn approach the cell with the stillness of someone bracing for something they don't know the shape of yet, which was unusual for a man who seemed to have categorized most of his possible situations.
Finn reached his hand through the cell gap.
Bullet's eyes dropped to it. The hand was ordinary until it wasn't, until the darkness started to show at the edges of Finn's fingers, seeping out of his skin like something that had been waiting to be released. Black and dense, it spread across his palm and curled upward, and the temperature around Bullet's cell seemed to drop by several degrees for no physical reason.
"What is that," Bullet said. Not quite a question.
The darkness pulled. Bullet's body slid toward Finn against his will, dragged by an attraction that bypassed muscle and intention entirely, his feet scraping the stone floor. The seastone in his restraints made it worse, dulling the edge of what he might have put against it.
Finn's hand closed around his throat.
Bullet looked into eyes that had gone entirely black, no white, no iris, just darkness all the way through.
"Goodbye," Finn said.