Robin had read enough newspapers, in enough ports, to recognize the shape of a name before it became a headline.
She said the word Blackbeard the moment the gold light set them down, and Sanji, Nami, and Chopper stopped whatever they’d been doing without needing to hear anything else.
None of them questioned her twice.
They simply started moving.
The gate always set them down the same way — back aboard the Thousand Sunny, exactly where they’d left it, the deck familiar and solid underfoot after however long they’d spent somewhere that wasn’t quite real.
Luffy was the first one they found, upside down over the ship’s rail, dangling by his knees and watching fish with the total, undivided focus he gave most things that weren’t currently trying to kill him.
“Luffy.” Robin’s tone alone was enough to make him flip right-side up.
“Robin!
You’re back — did you bring food this—” “Ace is in danger.” That landed properly.
Luffy dropped off the rail entirely, boots hitting the deck without any of his usual bounce.
“What kind of danger.” “The kind that gets worse the longer we wait to warn him,” Sanji said.
Luffy didn’t ask a second question.
He reached straight into his pocket and pulled out a small, thin strip of paper, curled and restless, the way it always was when its owner was somewhere far and moving.
“He gave me this in Alabasta,” Luffy said, holding it flat in his palm.
“Told me to use it if I ever needed to find him fast.” “Then we use it,” Nami said.
“Now.” • • The card came alive the moment true wind hit it, snapping straight, then bending hard toward the horizon like something straining at a leash.
“That way,” Luffy said, and the Sunny was already turning before he’d finished saying it.
Sails caught, timbers groaned, and the ship cut into open water at a speed that made even Sanji brace against the rail.
The sky ahead had already begun turning the deep, bruised color of a storm nobody had asked for.
“Of course,” Sanji muttered, glancing up.
“Of course it’s a storm.” “The card doesn’t care about the weather,” Robin said, watching it bend further, more urgent now.
“Neither should we.” • • The storm found them an hour later, and it found them properly.
Rain came sideways, hard enough to sting, and the Sunny pitched violently enough that Chopper had both hooves locked around the mast before anyone told him to.
“I can’t see the card!” Luffy shouted, cupping both hands around it, rain hammering his fingers.
“Then feel it!” Sanji called back, hauling the wheel hard against a wave that nearly took it from him entirely.
“Which way’s it pulling?” Luffy closed his eyes, letting the thin strip of paper guide his hand rather than his sight, and pointed — hard to starboard, straight into the worst of the wind.
“There!
Cut through it, don’t go around!” “Going around would take too long anyway,” Sanji said, and threw the wheel over.
The ship lurched, caught a wave broadside, and for one long, breathless second hung nearly on its side before the hull found its balance again and cut forward, straight into the wall of rain.
Chopper, still clinging to the mast, shouted something that got lost entirely in the wind.
“WHAT?” Sanji yelled back.
“I SAID I THINK I SAW LIGHTNING HIT THE WATER RIGHT WHERE WE WERE ABOUT TO BE!” “GREAT TIMING ON THAT, THEN!” Robin, remarkably composed through all of it, had wedged herself against the rail with one arm sprouted from the deck itself to steady the wheel alongside Sanji, an extra set of hands exactly where they were needed.
“Faster,” she said, calm even through the noise.
“The card’s pulling harder.
That usually means he’s close to something.” “Close to what, though,” Nami shouted, “is the part I’d like to know before we get there!” Luffy didn’t answer.
His eyes were fixed on the trembling strip of paper in his hand, jaw set in a way none of them saw very often.
• • They broke through the storm’s edge into sudden, startling quiet — the wind dropping all at once, the rain thinning to mist, the sea beneath them settling into something almost gentle, as if the ocean itself had simply lost interest in the fight.
Ahead of them, a small island rose out of the haze, and moored at its single ragged dock sat a ship none of them recognized, black-sailed and unmistakably a pirate vessel, though not one flying any flag Nami could place at a glance.
The vivre card in Luffy’s hand had stopped straining.
It simply pointed now, steady and certain, directly at the island.
“He’s there,” Luffy said.
They found Ace not twenty minutes later, seated alone on a rocky outcrop overlooking the water, Striker beached in the sand below him, entirely unbothered by the fact that he’d apparently been waiting.
He looked up at the five of them with the easy, crooked grin that ran in the family.
“Luffy?
What are you doing all the way out here?” “You need to hear this,” Luffy said, and there was nothing easy in his voice at all.
• • Robin told him everything, plainly, without softening a word of it — Blackbeard, the betrayal already in motion, the capture that hadn’t happened yet but would, unless something changed.
Ace listened to the whole thing without interrupting once, arms loose across his knees, expression unreadable in a way that made Nami’s stomach twist a little the longer it went on.
When Robin finished, he was quiet for a long moment, looking back out at the water.
“Blackbeard,” he said, finally, low.
“Teach.” He looked at the vivre card still curled in Luffy’s palm, and something in his expression softened, just slightly, at the sight of it.
“You kept that.” “‘Course I kept it.” Ace huffed something almost like a laugh, and then let it fade.
“I appreciate you coming all this way.
I mean that.” He stood, dusting sand from his pants, and reached for Striker’s rope without a trace of hesitation in the movement.
“But I’m still going after him.” “Ace—” Luffy started.
“He killed one of my own, Luffy.
I’m not letting that go because someone told me it goes badly for me.” Ace’s voice stayed level, certain, entirely his father’s son in the shape of it.
“If I run from every fight that might end badly, I’m not the kind of captain worth following.
You’d do the same thing.
Don’t tell me you wouldn’t.” Luffy didn’t answer that, mostly because they both already knew he couldn’t.
“I’m not saying it to guilt trip you,” Ace added, gentler now, catching the look on his brother’s face.
“I’m saying it because it’s true.
Some things you go after anyway.
Even knowing.” Robin’s expression had gone carefully still, the particular stillness of someone who had hoped, quietly, that this time might go differently, and was already grieving the fact that it wouldn’t.
“At least take precautions,” she said.
“Whatever we can give you.” “I’ll take whatever you’ve got,” Ace said, and meant it.
“I’m not stupid.
I’m just not stopping.” • • They gave him what they could — supplies, warnings about Teach’s crew, everything Robin could remember from what she’d read — and it still didn’t feel like enough, standing on that beach watching Ace load it all onto Striker with the same easy confidence he brought to everything.
“Watch yourself,” Luffy said, when there was nothing left to hand over.
“Always do.” Ace pulled him into a rough, one-armed hug, brief and fierce.
“Go be an idiot somewhere safer than this.
I’ll see you soon.” He was gone within the hour, Striker cutting a clean line toward the horizon, and the five of them stood on the dock long after he’d disappeared from sight, none of them quite ready to be the one who suggested they leave first.