"Ma'am," Smoker said. "We've found something you may want to look at."
Captain Allesia stared at the groove that had been dug in the wall, arms crossed. "Interesting. Tell me more, Corporal. What do you make of this?"
"Well, it's clearly not a feature of local architecture. The shape is too irregular." He crouched and brought up a pinch of wet sand. "We found this rubbish at the foot of the wall. It has to be recent, or the rain would have washed it away. And the trail continues." He pointed at a house across the street. "In that direction. Almost as if someone wanted to show us the way."
"It's a trap," said one of the local Marines, a jittery redhead.
"I wonder." Captain Allesia turned to her assistant. "What did the Marines who just regained consciousness tell you, Miss Cadiz?"
"Donquixote seems to have made a prisoner. A woman in a black coat. We don't think she is a pirate."
"Indeed! Fascinating. Corporal?"
He scrambled for a response. "Uh. Do you think the prisoner may have made a groove in the wall as a sign, hoping we'd come to her rescue?"
She nodded curtly. "Just what I was about to say, Corporal! You've read my mind."
"That would mean she's also a devil fruit user."
"Indeed. The young lady is not entirely helpless. All the same, we should probably go and give her a hand, don't you think?"
As they approached the Navy base, Doflamingo found signs that some lucky bastard had been having fun: trampled gardens, smashed store vitrines, houses collapsed into rubble and, on the road, the imprint of gigantic feet.
The rain had stopped. He took off his sunglasses and wiped them on his coat. As he put them back on, a motion across the street caught his eye.
For some time, he'd been mulling over an excuse that would let him get close to Crocodile and rifle through her pockets without triggering another homicidal episode. He descended from his perch, at the top of one of the last untouched townhouses in the area. "Marines coming this way. Let me bring you up. You're too exposed down here."
She wiped rain out of her eyes and blinked at him miserably, looking like a bedraggled cat. "Fine," she said.
"So reasonable, all of a sudden. I like it." He stooped a little so that she could throw her arms over his shoulders.
She complied, though he immediately felt the cold tip of a blade against his cheek. "Don't try anything."
He did not protest. First of all, it was kind of hot. Second, a woman preoccupied with defending her maidenly virtue would not be paying attention to her pockets.
When they were halfway up, he paused. "I think the Marines are looking at us, but I'm not sure."
He felt her craning her neck to take a look. Taking advantage of the distraction, he slid a hand into her coat, where he'd seen her slide the transponder snail with the big red button.
Only a few years ago, the difference between lunch and a beating had come down to this, one or two deft movements of the fingers. He'd never given up on the skill, though it was more of a hobby now. Useful, though, in situations like this. He opened the box, slid the creature in the sleeve of his coat, where it lay cold and clammy, closed the lid and withdrew.
If she noticed, she gave no sign of it. "They were looking this way, but I don't think they saw us. Now they're heading the other way. Keep going."
He slid the snail in his pocket, careful not to touch the button, and hauled both of them up to the roof, where the proprietor of the building had left a pigeon coop, now deserted, and a telescope.
Doflamingo strolled up casually and peered into the device. There, some five hundred metres away, stood an unmistakeable specimen of Navy architecture, all judgemental white paint and humourless straight lines. The local base.
"Is this the hotel you were telling me about?" Crocodile asked, prodding at the door of the pigeon coop.
"No, but we're almost there." Across the street, he marked, with regret, the uninhabitable ruins of what had once been a luxury hotel, a real classy place, full of fake palm trees and gilded colonnades. At least, the house next to it seemed promising enough: tall, intact, with a nice flat roof on which someone had thoughtfully left two lawn chairs that would make perfect front-row seats to the explosion. "Let's make a run for it."
A detonation was heard in the distance as they crossed the street, followed by a cloud of smoke. The Navy had begun setting fire to whatever pirate ships had not yet raised their anchors. Doflamingo was not overly preoccupied. His own Immaculata had been moored several kilometres from the shore, as per his instructions.
"Keep an eye out," he instructed his companion while he pretended to search for his key in his pockets. When she looked away, he inserted a safety pin in the house's lock. A primitive tool, but then again, so was the lock. The door opened quietly into the darkness.
Crocodile followed him indoors, closing the door behind her. A hint of moonlight filtered through the window. She closed the shutters and pulled the drapes before lighting the lantern she'd filched from the Marines.
They stood in the middle of a living room. A child's toys lay strewn across the floor, where they had been abandoned when the evacuation order had come. Family portraits stared at them from the mantelpiece. Crocodile picked one up and inspected it. "You said this was a hotel?"
"It's more what you might call, uh, a bed-and-breakfast." He peered into the next room, a kitchen. "Shall we?"
"Wait. There's something we need to turn this into a proper business meeting."
He ransacked his brain to find the commonality between all the business meetings that he'd attended before. "Power tools?" he said at last, delighted, though a little surprised, that she should be the first to suggest it.
Her already insincere smile became even more strained. "I was thinking more along the lines of something to drink."
"Ah yes, of course."
"See if you can find anything on this floor. I'll check upstairs."
At her imperative tone, the urge to be contrary battled, in him, the pirate's innate fondness for getting sloshed. "Fine," he said, taking the lantern from her. "But you're leaving this with me."
"Afraid of the dark?"
"I don't have good night vision because of these," he said, indicating his sunglasses. He was not afraid of the dark, nor was he afraid of fire, exactly. He simply did not like it when someone could conveniently set things on fire in his vicinity, unless that person was him.
The curtains in the kitchen had already been pulled. He set the lantern on a chair and rummaged through the cupboards, although their contents were desolating. Not even a single bottle of cooking wine.
The fridge contained a child's half-eaten birthday cake. He grabbed a fork and sat cross-legged on the table to enjoy this light snack. In his eagerness to impress his new partner, he'd pushed his powers a little too far, drawing from reservoirs whose limits he did not yet grasp, and he was starving.
Crocodile's light footsteps resonated above his head and receded away. He shoved a hand in his pocket and took out his own transponder. After only two rings, Giolla's voice came through the receiver. "All is well, young master?"
"Glorious. Say, could you arrange for the rowboat to pick me up about an hour from now?" He paused. "There's someone I'd like you to meet."
So far, the plan was unfolding without a hitch.
Crocodile inched her way forward across the house's second story. Like most cautious people, she did not mind operating in the dark.
The first door led to a bathroom, in which she found some towels with which to dry herself. The result was imperfect, but she already felt more like herself. Soon enough, she'd be able to turn her body into sand again, which would give her an unbeatable advantage in any upcoming fight, if things came to that.
Now for the alcohol. If she somehow ended up, through some horrifying lack of judgment, with a spouse, a child and a suburban home, where would she go to have some goddamned peace? The answer seemed obvious.
The study was located at the very end of the corridor, far from the bathroom and the nursery. Even in the dark, she recognized it from its soothing and familiar fragrance, a mix of leather and dust, tinged with tobacco. One hand on the wall, the other outstretched, she edged her way forward until she found what she was looking for. A desk and an armchair – in fact, a very nice armchair. She appropriated it immediately.
The pirate's voice came through the floor, the words too dim to be discernible, though the self-satisfied tone was not. She was not particularly surprised to learn that he talked to himself, though why did he have to be so goddamn loud about it?
Her hand, reflexively, sought out the drawer where she would keep her stress relief, if the house was hers.
A box of cigars, decent enough brand, though only two were left. Magazines of some sort, which she ignored. And ah, yes, here in the corner. A bottle of malt whisky. Only three quarters full, judging from the weight, but it would have to do.
The voice below droned on.
She reached into the inner pocket of her coat, seeking out her box of pharmaceutics. Each of the tiny cigar-shaped vials was printed with a symbol that she could identify by touch. She lingered on one, pulled it out, and was disappointed to find it almost empty. Right. On the previous evening, after running into a particularly insistent patron at the bar, she'd had taken advantage of a distraction to pour most of the powder in his drink. The gesture had been therapeutic at the time, though she was beginning to think that she could have shown more foresight.
Note to self: get rid of all this other rubbish. Replace with poison.
For now, she took out the sedative powder, poured enough in the whisky to knock out a rhinoceros, considered, added a little more. That ought to do it.
The sound of mad cackling downstairs. Summoning all of her willpower, she closed the drawer and left the study, carrying the bottle with her.
"Hold on a moment." He paused and listened. When the sound of Crocodile's footsteps above his head resumed, he pulled the transponder closer to his mouth. "If things start heading south," he whispered, "I can always make a dramatic exit and leave her with the tab."
"So ruthless," Giolla said indulgently. She was his favourite kind of listener, sympathetic and thoroughly enamoured with his brilliance.
"But why talk about all the things that can possibly go wrong when I've planned things out perfectly? I've got a good feeling about this. Anyway, I have to let you go. Are the kids still up? Make them a little something special, to celebrate."
"Tequila sunrises? You liked those as a child."
"Perfect. Save one for me, too."
Crocodile walked back into the kitchen, holding a bottle of some sort and two glass tumblers. He gestured and mouthed for her to hand it to him, but she gazed at him without moving. "All right, Giolla, I really must go. See you in an hour, give or take."
"Best of luck, young master." She ended the call.
Crocodile was still staring, looking distinctly unhappy, even by her standards.
"My interior designer," he said. "Don't worry. She's not at all my type."
"Young master?" she said quietly.
He'd forgotten how many otherwise perfectly rational people had bizarre hang-ups when it came to human trafficking. "She's not my slave, she just acts like it because she's my friend."
Crocodile's expression did not change, though she did hand the bottle over to him. He took a swig and spat it back out. "Ugh. What is this shit?"
"Malt whisky. A very fine batch."
He tried again to see if the taste would get better the second time around. It didn't. Wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his coat, he offered the bottle to her. "Sorry. Do you want some?"
"Not anymore."
"Trust me, you're not missing anything." He tried again. The taste did not get better, exactly, but it was the kind of suffering he could get used to.
"How about you get to the point?"
"Right. Before we start, it's little late, I know, but introductions are in order." He dropped his fork and extended a hand majestically. "I'm Doflamingo Donquixote, captain of the Donquixote Pirates. Since we are to be friends, just Doffy is fine."
She studied his hand, and he could see complex and entirely unjustified computations about his personal hygiene going off in her head. At last, she took a glove from her pocket and pulled it on.
A vision came to his head, brief but satisfying, of the lovely fountain of blood that would spurt out of her arm if he severed it at the wrist with a thread. Instead, he pretended to notice some icing and crusted blood on his fingers for the first time and licked them off before shaking her hand.
Her eye twitched a little. "Mr. Donquixote. You already know who I am."
"Crocodile. Is that even your real name?"
"It's the only name you need to know. Start talking, or I'm calling over the Navy."
He'd thought, after their fight, that they had reached a kind of understanding. On the way to the house, she had been, not pleasant exactly, but able to express herself in a way that did not immediately trigger his violent urges. At one point, though – since she'd come back with the alcohol, now that he thought about it – she had regressed to her initial prickliness, and he was losing patience. "You can watch your tongue and listen, or I can make you slap yourself whenever you give me attitude. Your choice."
She leaned back against the counter and shrugged. "Fine. I'm listening."
"Wonderful. Well, then, let's get down to business." He grinned at her, recovering his good humour. After a rapt audience, his next favourite thing in the world was a captive one. "I'm what you might call self-taught. My formal education was cut off prematurely, for reasons outside of my control. In spite of what you might call unfortunate circumstances, I have made some efforts to educate myself. My favourite topic is history. Do you know why, Crocodile?"
"How the fuck – "
He raised his hand and wiggled his fingers. "All right. Why?" she asked through gritted teeth.
"I'm so glad you should ask! Most people think history is about the past. They are wrong. History, read properly, is about the present. The same patterns emerge, time and time again, and if you pay attention, you can learn from them. Let's take war, for example. Who won the last war in your neck of the woods?"
"Wars aren't something that can be won."
"That's a bleeding-heart answer if I ever heard one." She drew up, affronted. "No, no, don't worry, you're still an asshole. Let me tell you something, Crocodile. Someone won that war. And it's the same person that won the last war in my country, and all the wars that came before that. Who do you think that might be?"
He returned to his cake, to give her time to think. "The arms dealer," she said.
"Precisely. Each war makes the arms dealer happier, wealthier, more powerful. Now, I sense many wars in the coming years, and I intend to win them all." Even as he spoke, visions came into his head, of generals and kings who would line up at his door and kiss his hand for a taste of the power that he could impart to them, for a price. He laughed and raised the bottle to his lips.
The heat from the alcohol had made a pleasant nest in his stomach and was also rising to his head, bringing, with it, a sentiment of euphoria that he'd never known before. It occurred to him that he had been unfairly neglecting hard spirits.
Crocodile stared at him with an expression he could not fathom. "It's just the start, of course," he added. "Sell weapons, and one day you will buy armies. I'll lull the World Government and the Navy to sleep, make them think that I'm just your average profiteer. They might even make me a warlord, thinking that they can control me. Then one day, when they least expect it, I'll walk into their holy city and give them hell."
This seemed to finally take her out of her sulk. She looked at him with the first non-assholish expression he'd ever seen her wear, something that was not quite respect, but could pass for an adequate substitute to someone as inebriated as he was. "You want to take down the World Government?"
"I'll take down the entire world if I have to. But yes, those fuckers in particular. Now, here's where you come in. I've run into a bit of a hitch. Guns and cannons haven't been hard to source, I've even managed to get my hand on some interesting little gadgets here and there, but explosives have given me some trouble. The suppliers I've spoken to have all been reluctant about providing unstable substances to me, some bullshit about them being incompatible with my temperament. Not sure what they mean by that, really. I can be plenty unstable when the occasion calls for it."
"Couldn't you just make your own explosives? It's not hard."
"Sure, I've thought about it. The raw materials are easy enough to obtain, and I've found a nice little illustrated guide, but I'm running out of laboratories too quicky for it to be profitable. Self-teaching shows its limitations, I think, once you start working with nitroglycerine." He scratched irritably at a patch of exposed skin on his calf, just above the top of his boot, where a recent abrasion had begun to scab. "Anyway, I was hoping you'd give me a hand, since you clearly have access to what I'm looking for."
"I'd rather not deal with your kind. I'm a businessperson, not a pirate."
"Believe it or not, but it's not my dream job, either. Everyone needs to make an honest living in this day and age, don't you think?"
"I suppose I could help you find some goods of that nature," she said reluctantly. "They won't be cheap. Like my services."
"You'll find that I am not a stingy client, though my expectations will be accordingly high. Now, on that topic. Before we conclude an agreement of any sort, I want a product demonstration."
"I haven't agreed to anything."
"I overheard you earlier mentioning that you planted some explosives at the local Navy base. How did you manage that, by the way? Quite an impressive feat."
She gave him her smug little half-grin. "It took a few months of planning. They were doing some renovations. I gradually replaced the construction crew with my own people."
"Not bad," he said, and he meant it. "Now, it would be a shame for all that work to go to waste, don't you think?"
Her face took on a horrified expression when she realized what he meant. "No. Not that."
"Yes." He leaned back, delighted at the chance to show off his genius. "Here's what I was thinking. The Navy should show up here within an hour or two, once they pick up on my clues. I'll make a clone of myself to lure them back to their base. Just as they approach – " He mimed an explosion with his hands and cackled. "Blowing up a bunch of Marines into the sky would be a great way to celebrate the start of our partnership, don't you think? With some luck, we may even get the admiral."
"It won't work."
Whenever he thought he'd gotten through to her, she reverted to her overly realistic brick wall impersonation. It was infuriating. "Why not?"
She sounded, when she spoke, uncharacteristically unsure. "The switch to the explosives has to be manually activated. My operative would be long gone by now."
"Is the switch near the base?" He grinned. "My clone is rather primitive, I know, but it can carry out certain basic tasks. Like pressing a switch, for example."
"We're too close. We'll get blown up too." This was an interesting development. He could have sworn that, for the first time in the evening, she was scared shitless.
He could have told her that his asking for her permission was only a formality. He could have whipped out the transponder snail with the big red button, held it out of her reach and laughed at her as she tried to catch it. He could have tied her to the chair, once he grew tired of this game, and waited for the right opportunity to trigger the switch. He found that he did not want to.
Any fool could force someone else to do what they wanted by holding a gun to their head, but over the years, he had grown to understand the power of love. Why resort to violence when he could make people love him instead, so that they would feel what he felt, want what he wanted? Most humans, it was true, lived in loveless realms of cruelty and carnage, far beyond his reach, but he was reluctant to give up on her just yet. There was still had time, before the night was over, for him to awaken her love and convince her that he was worthy of it.
"Fair enough," he said. "There's plenty of other deserving targets out there for us to blow up. Do we, at least, have a deal?"
She relaxed. "Get me out of here, and I'd be willing to discuss the matter further."
"Great!" He raised the bottle to his lips to celebrate.
Her eyes widened. "Wait."
"Are you sure this is the house?" Smoker said, torn between unease and anticipation. This would be his first real skirmish. A taste of war.
"Miss Cadiz?" Captain Allesia said, turning to her subordinate.
"There are voices coming from the house, and light, if you look closely enough. It's either Donquixote, or someone else who has no business here."
The captain nodded. "That's good news, in a sense. Our hostage is most likely still alive."
"I could infiltrate the place and take out this clown before he even catches on," Smoker said. "Ma'am."
"None of that, Corporal. As I've told you before, I want him to come to us. He has to admit that he needs help. Our help."
Smoker scratched his chin and opened his mouth to speak. A glance from Miss Cadiz made him reconsider.
Captain Allesia made her announcement. No response came from within the house. "There's something off about this," he said as she lowered the loudspeaker.
"What do your instincts tell you, Corporal?"
"Who is this woman he's captured, exactly? How do we know they're not working together? We can handle one devil fruit user – two could mean trouble."
"I've called the base. She's not part of his crew."
"It doesn't sit right with me, the way he let her lead us to his location like this. Is it unthinkable that they might have run into each other and formed an alliance?"
She looked at him, infuriatingly, with something like pity. "Pirates like Donquixote are incapable of cooperation, Corporal. It goes against their nature. A partnership, like all things, requires discipline. One must say what one means and do what one says, compromise, and, above all, resist the urge to throw one's partner to the wolves at the first sign of an obstacle. All of which is impossible to the likes of our young man."
"I guess you're right." He'd wanted to be a pirate, once, had even been told by irritated teachers that he'd be better suited for it than for the Navy. He was glad he hadn't listened. Pirate life sounded pretty depressing, when you looked at it this way.
"Of course, I am. I know that you think I'm naïve, Corporal, but I am, in fact, terribly cynical." She gestured for her assistant to aim her massive gun at the door. "What I mean to say is that if those two have indeed formed, as you say, an alliance, then we hardly need to do anything at all. They'll take each other out for us."
Wait.
Through the euphoric haze that filled Doflamingo's mind, a suspicion rose. "What is it?" he asked quietly.
Crocodile avoided his eyes. "Slow down. That isn't a bubblegum martini."
"Don't worry, I've been drinking since I was twelve. I can hold my alcohol." "He took a sip and wiped his mouth with his sleeve so that she wouldn't see him spit out the liquid. "Pass me one of those tumblers."
She complied, with an air of affected indifference that failed to conceal her dread. He poured a few ounces of whisky into it and handed it back to her. "Why don't you have a drink now, to our partnership? Nonono, please. I insist."
For a moment, he thought she was going to throw the drink into his face. Instead, she tilted her head back and gulped it down. He watched her closely, to make sure. Once she had drained the glass, she smashed it on the floor and gave him a defiant glare. No poison, then. Just some truly top-notch booze. "Wonderful. Now as I mentioned earlier, we probably have around an hour to kill before our Marine friends track us down." He gave her his most winning smile.
A woman's voice rang from outside the house, heightened by a loudspeaker. "Mr. Donquixote. We know that you're inside. Come out immediately with the hostage. Let's negotiate."
They stared at each other. The woman repeated her message.
Doflamingo uncrossed his legs and tried to hop off the table. His knees buckled, and only a desperate grasp at the doorframe prevented him from falling. For some reason, the remnants of the birthday cake were now hilariously spread all over the kitchen floor.
Could the Marines have picked a worse time to show up? Not only was he unlikely to get laid, but he wasn't sure he could use his powers anymore. Hell, he wasn't even sure he could walk. From the look on Crocodile's face, he could see she had come to the same realization. "We're – "
"Completely fucked," he said, and because there was nothing else to do, he laughed.
