It wasn't so different from the first time, back at the G-1 dock.
The advantage this time was that Finn was already sitting down. No stumble, no near-fall. His hands just went unsteady, and a good amount of wine escaped the bowl before he could correct the angle. Around him, the air bent -- a spreading shimmer, the quality of the light wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the snow or the altitude. The breath of time and space rolled off his body in waves, rich and strange, and then, almost as quickly as it had come, began folding back inward, pulling itself into him like a tide reversing.
From less than a meter away, Sakazuki sat very still and watched.
For those two or three minutes, Finn seemed to be somewhere else. Not gone -- still visibly present, still breathing -- but the space around him was distorted enough that his outline looked slightly wrong, like a reflection in moving water. Then the distortion settled. The aura dissipated. Finn exhaled slowly, a long breath of white mist curling out into the cold air, and the world around him went back to normal.
"Huh." He paused. "It's all right."
"The fact that everything is all right," Sakazuki said, in a tone that suggested he had been turning this problem over in his mind for some time, "is itself the biggest problem."
This was the fourth episode in roughly two months. The first had been the G-1 dock. Then, a little over two weeks later, the second. The third had followed the very next day after the second, which had alarmed both of them considerably. Then nothing -- more than a month of silence, long enough that Finn and Sakazuki had quietly begun to wonder if the whole thing had simply resolved itself. Then today.
No pattern. No warning. No apparent trigger.
"The biggest problem is that everything is all right," Finn repeated, turning his wine bowl in his hands. "Do you want me to cough up some blood to make you feel better about the situation?"
Sakazuki didn't answer that.
Finn wasn't being entirely flippant about it. He had been observing these episodes carefully -- more carefully than he let on -- and something had been accumulating in the back of his mind across all four occurrences, a shape of understanding he hadn't been ready to name until now.
"I think I know what's happening," he said, after a moment.
Sakazuki looked at him immediately. "Tell me."
"Each time this happens, a large burst of time-space aura comes out of me, expands outward, and then gets drawn back in. I've felt it all four times now. And it's not the same each time -- the aura is getting stronger. More volume. More intensity." He set the bowl down carefully. "It's building toward something."
Sakazuki was quiet for a moment, processing this. Then: "Building toward -- what, exactly? Are you going to awaken some kind of time-space ability?"
Finn hadn't actually considered that angle. He sat with it briefly, found it interesting, and then set it aside.
"I don't think so," he said. "But it wouldn't be the worst development if true." He smiled faintly, with the kind of equanimity that comes from having already done most of the hard thinking about a subject. "What I actually think is something else. After these four times, the sensation has started to feel familiar in a specific way." He paused. "When Im and Uranus left -- that sudden twist, the way the space around that point distorted and then snapped closed -- it felt like this. Not identical, but the same family of thing."
Sakazuki's expression shifted. "You're saying you might also be pulled into another world. The way Uranus was."
"That's what I think."
The words settled between them in the cold air.
Sakazuki turned that over carefully and didn't say anything immediately. He was not a man who processed bad news by talking through it, and what Finn had just described was, depending on how you framed it, among the worse categories of news available. One morning without warning, Finn simply would not be present in this world anymore. The Marine would have lost a person who had shaped the last several decades of its existence, in the middle of a campaign that was about to require him to walk through enemy lines at full output. And Sakazuki would be left standing in the New World, having just sent the crew of their assault ship off on octopus balloons, holding what remained of the decapitation plan by himself.
He thought about this, in vivid detail, and did not find it comfortable.
Finn, reading the direction of his silence with reasonable accuracy, said, "Don't start catastrophizing. It's not imminent. I can feel that much -- the aura is growing, yes, but it's nowhere near the threshold yet. Whatever this is building toward, I still have time."
"How much time?"
"Enough for what we're here to do." He said it with the kind of quiet confidence that wasn't performance. "Whatever comes after that -- I don't know. But it won't interrupt the operation."
Sakazuki took a long breath and let it out. "There might be another way out of it. Some method to stabilize the aura, stop the buildup. Vegapunk--"
"Maybe," Finn said. "We can look at it after."
He said it lightly. Too lightly, perhaps, for the weight of what he'd just described.
Sakazuki watched him for a moment. "You're not as troubled by this as you should be."
Finn was quiet.
Not troubled wasn't quite right. It was more complicated than that. He had been turning the full shape of this over since the second episode, and by now he had a reasonably honest picture of what he actually felt about it.
There was the obvious layer -- the reluctance, the frustration at the timing, the indignation at having his plans disrupted by something as arbitrary as a dormant ability accidentally activated by proximity to an ancient superweapon. He had spent forty years building a life and a position in this world, and the prospect of being yanked out of it without notice and without a clear way back was not something he accepted with pure serenity. He would have preferred to leave on his own schedule.
And beneath that, the personal weight of it. Gion. Stussy. Hina. Forty years of accumulated ties, relationships that had become the furniture of a life. The thought of that separation, the uncertainty of whether he'd ever be able to navigate back to this particular set of world coordinates, sat in his chest with a dull persistence that he could acknowledge without being undone by it.
He had caught himself, more than once, wanting to reach across the distance Im had disappeared into and demand answers. He didn't know where she'd gone, whether she had arrived safely wherever she was heading, whether the world she had originated from still existed in the form she remembered. He didn't know what the journey was like, or whether it was survivable for someone who hadn't already endured it once before. He didn't know any of it. And the not-knowing was its own particular kind of anxiety, different from the anxiety of facing an opponent who might kill him. An enemy you could measure. The void was harder.
But when he peeled all of that back -- the reluctance, the frustration, the worry for Im, the grief of separation -- what was underneath it was not dread.
It was anticipation.
He recognized it for what it was, because he'd felt its cousin once before. Forty years ago, or what now functioned as forty years ago, a different version of himself had arrived in this world with nothing but a body, a set of memories from another life, and a very basic understanding that the rules here were different. He had been terrified and disoriented and completely out of his depth, and underneath all of that he had felt the pull of it -- the world presenting itself as something entirely new to be understood. New rules, new structures, new people, new scales of possibility. Everything to learn from the beginning.
He had not expected to feel that pull again.
And yet.
Imlia -- whatever her faults and her centuries of complicated choices -- had left behind a door, however unintentionally. A door in the shape of whatever she had activated in him by the simple act of seeing him clearly in that ancient hall and naming what he carried. He had been carrying it his whole life here, apparently, this time-space aura and whatever the world coordinates meant, dormant and undetected for forty years, waiting for the precise conditions that would bring it to the surface.
He wanted to grab her by the collar, when he thought about it. Hold her down and demand an explanation of what she had done to his carefully constructed retirement plans. The image almost made him laugh.
But he also felt, quietly and without any logical basis he was willing to examine too closely, that this wasn't a one-way door. The mechanism that was building in him was bidirectional -- it had to be, or what was the point of world coordinates? You carried a location in your soul so that the universe could find you, or so you could find your way back. After forty years of living in this world, of building something that left marks, of loving people who now had immortality and could wait an arbitrary span of time without changing -- after all of that, surely there was something here that would call him back.
Maybe the time flows were different between worlds. Maybe decades there would be weeks here. Maybe he would step through and step back and Gion would barely have finished her tea.
He didn't know. There was no answer to find. But the possibility wasn't small, and once he had let himself sit with that possibility honestly, the fear had lost most of its sharpest edges.
He was an ostrich about it, and he knew it. Guessing what was coming and choosing to treat it as unknown, neither resisting nor rushing toward it. Waiting for the moment with a kind of chosen passivity that was not quite acceptance and not quite avoidance. Something in between.
People were sometimes complicated. He was not exempt.
"Forget it," he said, and waved a hand. He meant it as much as anything he'd said today. "Fate does what it does. I'll deal with it when it arrives."
Sakazuki, who did not have a gift for comfort and knew it, found that under the circumstances the best available response was simply to nod. "Fortune follows the fortunate," he said.
Finn gave him a long look. "That phrase is traditionally used for people who are already dead."
Sakazuki paused, replayed the phrase in his head, and concluded that this was technically correct.
They looked at each other.
Then they both started laughing, and the cold air over the New World carried the sound of it away.
Three days later, the snow was behind them.
The assault ship had passed out of the winter island climate zone entirely, and the deck was warm now under a brighter sky. The meltwater had long dried. Both of them were back in lighter clothes.
They had been training the whole route.
It wasn't new -- Finn and Sakazuki had studied coordinated technique since their early days at Marineford, and the Marine as an institution placed significant emphasis on joint operations at every level. But this stretch of travel had given them the time for something more intensive than their usual schedule allowed. A large magma sphere floated and tumbled in the air off the starboard rail, intermittently threaded through with pulses of light purple haze and dark gravity-weight. The two of them adjusted it between them, feeling out the points where their respective abilities reinforced each other and the points where they clashed, mapping the edges of the combined output.
When they had what they needed, Sakazuki drew all the magma back into himself cleanly, and Finn released his Haki reach. Both of them were quiet for a moment. The satisfied kind of quiet.
They had also been running similar drills with Gion, Kuzan, and the others -- each pairing its own technical problem to solve, its own interference patterns and synergy opportunities. The Marine's strength had always been systemic, not just individual, and the admirals took that seriously.
A Marine lieutenant stepped onto the deck holding a chart and a log-pose. "Admiral Finn, Admiral Sakazuki. Per the chart and the log-pose, we have now entered the waters above Beehive Island."
Both of them looked up. Their expressions sharpened in the same instant.
"Is the crew ready to disembark?" Finn asked.
"The octopus balloons are deployed and ready, sir."
Finn nodded. "Good. We'll take you directly over Beehive Island. Once we're in position, I'll send you down. Activate the balloons, land on your own, and wait for further orders."
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