Happy World Book Day. Read a lot, write a lot, and never stop dreaming.

Ashes of justice

The world was falling apart around Kaku when he came to his senses. He couldn't see anything, and there was only pain, flaring up in his torso in every direction with every breath he took. The first instinct, ingrained by training, was to analyze the situation. He tried reaching up with his hands, and the found solid material. Concrete. He was buried under rubble.

He remembered now. He had fought Roronoa Zoro and lost, and while he had been unconscious something must have happened to the Tower of Justice. Well, something other than him slicing it in half. At least his had been a clean hit, unlike the style of other colleagues he'd not mention.

He needed to get out and rejoin the fight, if it was still ongoing. He could hear cannons in the distance.

With a deep intake of breath, he pushed up, and despite the sharp pain, the concrete moved with more ease than he had expected. As soon as his vision cleared up, it was apparent why.

"Thought I heard you moving under this disaster," Jabura said, tossing the piece of rubble aside. "C'mon, move fast or I'm getting out of here without you."

It was easier said than done, but Kaku had never let pain get in the way of what he had to do, and he wasn't going to make a habit of it now.

Now that he could see his surroundings, he realized that the tower was barely standing, and even that didn't seem like it was going to last for long. The wall that oversaw the island had disappeared, and when Kaku looked in the direction of the Puffing Tom's tracks, he saw warships and a rain of cannonballs and bullets. Enies Lobby was being consumed by the flames, and Kaku felt that he had never fully understood before the meaning of the phrase "hell on earth".

"This is a—" He began, but Jabura cut him, seething.

"A fucking Buster Call, that's what it is, and it's gonna bust us too if we don't get a move on. Are you coming or not?"

"Pleasant as always," Kaku said under his breath, trying to keep steady on his feet and failing.

Jabura caught him by the back of his tracksuit before he could lose his balance. "Oi, monkey, don't tell me you're that injured."

"I don't know I've you've noticed, but I've got eight new cuts on the chest."

"Well, I got a flaming foot to the stomach and you don't see me complaining."

Now that Kaku took a good look at him, he saw that his companion wasn't much better for wear then him. He let out a humorless chuckle. "Lucci's going to have a field day when he sees you."

He pulled on Kaku so hard that the younger man almost fell again. "Move your ass, giraffe."

"Watch your tone!

"Are you two arguing again? Pitiful."

"Kalifa."

The men halted their quarrel to look at the new arrival. Kalifa adjusted her broken glasses with a hand while she carried Kumadori's unconscious form with the other. Despite the burns all over her body and the poor state of her dress, one would think by her dignified posture and demeanor that she hadn't been injured at all. She'd always had the ability to keep that grace about her.

Jabura turned away immediately when he realized what he was looking at, and Kalifa, unconcerned, let Kumadori down gently to take a discarded bedsheet from the floor and wrap herself in it. She coughed lightly, prompting a small jump from Jabura, and he turned his head around to make sure it was safe to look again.

Kaku and Kalifa shared an amused glance while she picked up Kumadori.

"Blueno is over there with Fukuro," she signaled to the way she had come from. "He's in bad shape, but says he can open a door to bring us closer to the fight. There are several battleships near the Bridge of Hesitation, and it seems that Lucci is still fighting Straw Hat."

"Still having trouble with the brat? Tsk, so much for 4,000 douriki."

"I don't see you faring better," Kalifa replied in monotone.

"You hag—"

"Now, now," Kaku intervened. "We all know Lucci's not going to lose. Let's go and make sure no one interferes."

—

Lucci lost.

It was unthinkable. Lucci was indestructible, invincible. The unspoken leader, the prodigy, the man all of them –even if grudgingly in some cases—looked up to.

Kaku was twenty-three and a hundred years old when he saw Cipher Pol's legend fall on the remains of Enies Lobby.

The aftermath of the battle was the worst part.

Blueno stepped out of one of his doors carrying Lucci on his shoulder and put him down against the remains of a wall. Nobody dared speak.

Lucci's unconscious form was more unnerving to be around than when he was awake. Kaku had spent the past five years working hand in hand with him every day, and even the times he had seen him sleeping, he'd always had the impression that he was perfectly aware of his surroundings, ready to pounce at his prey at any given moment.

This went beyond being wrong, it was a physical impossibility, or so all of them had always believed, and it was why Rob Lucci's defeat in a straight fight had hit CP9's members much harder than being killed during an infiltration could ever have.

The silence that permeated the ruins of Enies Lobby fell on its only survivors like a tombstone too heavy to lift with strength alone. It pressed on them for minutes, or maybe they were hours, as they looked at each other, at the destroyed buildings that had been a city that stood taller than justice, and they along with it.

'Stronger than Justice.' It was the motto of Cipher Pol 9, drilled into each of them since they were children barely able to tie their own shoelaces. But if the strongest of them had fallen in battle against a mere rookie pirate, the man that had unquestionably proved to be above justice, most capable than anyone else, what was left in this world that could stand between the common people and chaos of the Great Age of Piracy?

"This is bullshit," Jabura exploded, smashing to bits the near sanctity of the moment and bringing them down to the real world again. "We know better than to stand here moping like old mourners. I'm gonna take a look around."

"You're right. I'll come with you," said Blueno. "Sooner or later, there will be soldiers sweeping the terrain who can help."

Kaku could understand the need to keep active, to avoid dwelling on what had happened. And they were right, being passive was a luxury they couldn't afford, nor they would have wanted to. CP9 was made for action, precise, fast cutting and always successful.

At least until today.

Kalifa shuffled, the ragged sheet she was using to cover herself brushing against the debris, and she sat on a broken stone near Kaku.

She raised her head, proudly, the only way she knew, and as she stared at Lucci's broken body, the shattered glass of her spectacles glinted under the neverending sunlight of Enies Lobby.

"We are better than this," she declared, with the certainty of a person who had been born with the knowledge that she was meant for something greater than life. "The world needs us. This isn't the way we end."

And she took off her glasses and tossed them aside, as if defying whatever deity there was up there to try and stop her.

Kalifa was the youngest of them, but, Kaku thought, there was a reason why she was the only female agent of CP9. While their dysfunctional team was struggling with doubt, she knew, and douriki levels didn't matter at all, because she was far, far above any of them at that moment.

—

"Yoyoiii, reduced to fugitives, if Mother knew—!"

"Will you shut it? You should get a zipper on your mouth like Fukuro's."

"Stop taking out Gatherin's rejection on us, chapapa."

"What does that low blow have to do with anything, stupid—" A ragged bedsheet fell to the ground as Kalifa tossed it aside to step on the sea train's tracks. "The fuck are you—" Jabura's eyes went up and down her body, unsure where to look because this was Kalifa and no one mildly sane would have wanted to incur her wrath. "Uh, Kalifa, your dress—"

"That's sexual harassment."

"Gah! No, I meant—ah, fuck it," Jabura took off his cheongsam and tossed it at the woman. "Cover yourself before somebody gets his balls cut off."

Kalifa caught the piece of clothing in the air and slipped it on without shame. "Thank you. This is uncharacteristically courteous of you."

"Yeah, yeah, don't get used to it."

Kaku suggested taking the railroad to St. Poplar, because he had worked on it two years ago and could vouch for the solidness of the track, and because the city's carnival had just ended and it would be easy to pass unnoticed between the remaining tourists.

Jabura offered to carry him, which was a polite way of saying that Kaku's hobble had made him stumble and almost fall into the sea, and the older man had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck when Kaku's nose had been inches away from immersion, and he had grumbled, "If we can't trust you to walk straight we can't trust you not to knock us into the water," as he slung Kaku's arms over his shoulders.

Kalifa had found Jabura's newly developed sense of comradery funny enough to nag him about it all the way to the next island. The others followed closely behind, with Kumadori carrying Lucci and Hatori flying above them, cooing in a lament that went along rather well with Kumadori's emotional declamations.

It occurred to Kaku that they must have resembled a strange funeral procession, oddly befitting of their agency's state.

CP9 was no more, but its agents remained.

—

Kaku and his companions were, to put it mildly, resourceful people. The walk from Enies Lobby to St. Poplar had served them to get over the betrayal they had suffered at the hands of the superiors that should have actually ensured they could do their jobs smoothly. Although they found themselves fleeing from the Marines' own warped vision of justice, there was something that could fuel a CP9 agent's willpower when professionalism wasn't something they could hold onto anymore, and that was righteousness.

Improvisation was their forte, and this was nothing more than a mission with very loose guidelines, which were everybody's favorite kind. Especially Lucci's.

The objective was clear: find a place to stay and regroup, and find a doctor for Lucci. The injuries he had sustained would have killed any non-Zoan Devil Fruit user, and even with that inherent resilience, recovery wasn't likely if he had to tough it out by himself.

Step one of the plan was, naturally, get enough money to cover their expenses. Stealing would have been easy, but it was completely out of the question. They refused to stoop to the level of petty criminals, and, ideally, civilians shouldn't have to bear the consequences of their government's ineptitude. Or, in this case, the man who had been their boss and, for a few uncertain hours, everybody had silently hoped dead.

Now that they knew who had sold them out, they just wished him dead out loud.

The second thing that could power a CP9 agent to the ends of the ocean in the face of loss was competitiveness, and it so had happened that Jabura had made a few unfortunate cracks at the expense of Kaku's new Devil Fruit, which may or may not have included one about the sexual behavior of giraffes.

Kaku, justifiably offended at the insinuation that five years working in a place full of sweaty men had to take its toll on a guy and "Hey, no one would blame you for making eyes at the kitty-cat if the only woman in sight was the Harpy Queen", had said that he could easily make more money than Jabura with his Zoan transformation, and Jabura was too macho to back down from a dare.

What bothered him wasn't that Jabura had implied that he was gay. It was the insinuation that he'd only be interested in Lucci as a last resort. This man thought everybody shared his atrocious taste in partners.

At any rate, Jabura had laughed at him and said that if he managed to make even ten more belis than him, he'd take him out bowling so they could imagine the ball was Spandam's head. Kaku had taunted him, "Are you so afraid you'd lose that you'd only pay for my part? Might as well invite everybody else if you're so sure of yourself."

Again, too macho to back down.

Kaku won by seven thousand and fifty-three belis.

—

A week after their arrival to St. Poplar, Lucci awoke.

Before he could open his eyes, before he could take full notice of his throbbing head and the rare sensation of bandages restraining his movement, Lucci heard Hattori's unusually happy coos, and he knew he had lost.

He didn't remember the last moments before he lost consciousness, a likely consequence of head trauma that he was so used to inflicting and so unfamiliar with suffering.

Unexpectedly, as so many other things seemed to be happening to him lately, he wasn't in a military hospital. He would have placed his bets on a private clinic, if the room's cozy decoration and the view from the window were anything to go by.

He wanted answers, but they could wait. He needed time to think, and he let Hattori ramble in pigeon speak for as long as he felt like it while he gripped the white sheets covering his legs and reflected.

Kaku was the first to find him conscious, and he was grateful for it, because Kaku was the last person he'd expect to make a fuss over his recovery. His colleague was wearing a black t-shirt and pants instead of the standard tracksuit he used as a uniform. His cap was still there, and in the middle of so much uncertainty, which Lucci wasn't used to feeling (Lucci wasn't used to feeling, period), it was like a rock to hold onto.

Lucci looked at Kaku in the eye with a neutral expression and said, "I lost." It wasn't a question.

"We lost," Kaku replied, and proceeded to tell him of Spandam's betrayal.

To say Lucci had never been fond of the man would be an understatement. The years long infiltration in Water 7 had been a blessing in disguise, far from the meddling of somebody he considered unredeemably inept, and if his incompetence had accomplished anything good at all, it was that his faulty plans gave Lucci as much leeway as he wanted as long as the mission ended in success.

Spandam wasn't going to walk away scot-free from this. Not while Lucci drew breath.

"We know what to do, then," Lucci said, conviction regained, and a lesser man would have cowered before the intensity of his green eyes. But Kaku knew him well, and Lucci knew he had been anticipating this reaction, "We find him and settle the score."

Kaku's smug smile confirmed that, indeed, the younger man had been looking forward to this declaration.

—

Kaku would consider the rest of their stay in St. Poplar wholly unremarkable.

They went bowling, they caused some moderate destruction at the venue, and it was promptly forgotten when they stopped a pirate crew from raiding the city. The locals didn't appreciate their methods, but it was to be expected. CP9 operated in secret because the common public wouldn't stomach them, and that was a good signal. That civilians didn't approve of violence meant that they were constructing the peaceful society their government strived for. Theirs was a thankless job, but one that must be done.

A small girl seemed to understand, though, and gave Kalifa a flower while their idiot companions watched horrified. Maybe they had been half expecting Kalifa to kick the girl, but Kaku thought that she'd rather have adopted her and made her the next killer queen of the agency. She showed promise.

They left St. Poplar with one more thank you under their belts than they had expected, and took the pirates' ship to their next destination. There was much to do, and they wouldn't wait for others to do it for them.