Work Text:
“Heeyyyy, heeeeeyyyy!!”
“What do you want, Luffy?” Ace snapped, leaning back on the tree branch and glaring down at their younger brother.
“I wanna help!”
Ace gave Sabo a look. Sabo shrugged. “We can make him haul stuff for us? I’m not trusting him with construction.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Ace agreed, and looked back down at Luffy. “Move the woodpile over to the base of this tree. Me an’ Sabo are gonna need all of it.”
“And you could use the workout.” Sabo pitched in, pre-empting any objection Luffy might’ve raised.
“Ohhh. On it!” Luffy beamed, and flashed them a thumbs up.
“Well, thank the gods that worked.” Ace huffed, turning back to nailing a board to the tree branch.
“How long do you think that’ll keep him busy for?” Sabo wondered aloud, grabbing another board and scooting it up against the one Ace was nailing down.
“At least today.” Ace drove the last nail home, and grinned at Sabo. “So we’d better get the frame up before he runs out of shit to haul.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Sabo grinned back, handing his brother another handful of nails.
---
“But I wanna help!” Luffy stomped his foot, and Sabo rolled his eyes.
“No.” Ace repeated, arms firmly crossed over his chest. “Last time we let you ‘help’ we had to spend a day and a half fixing it.”
“You can keep hunting lunch and dinner for us, if you really wanna help.” Sabo suggested, and Luffy stomped his feet again.
“I wanna help make the tree house!”
“Quit acting like a baby, idiot.” Ace snapped, smacking Luffy upside the head with his pipe.
“Quit treating me like one!” Luffy yelled back, and Sabo clicked his fingers.
“You can make our flag!” he declared, and both his brothers turned to stare at him.
“Our flag?” they asked in synch.
“Well, yeah.” he grinned, feeling rather proud of himself. “We’re pirates, right? And this is our base until we save up enough for a ship, so it should have our flag flying over it.”
“We’ll have to put up a flagpole.” Ace mused, already looking thoughtful.
“Yosh!” Luffy cheered, leaping up in the air with both lists raised. “I’m gonna find some paint!” he bolted for the Dadan House, and Ace turned to Sabo with an expression of bafflement.
“How do you do that?”
Sabo shrugged. “Call it brotherly intuition.”
“Whatever.” Ace scoffed, turning to grab the rope ladder they’d strung together once the floor got finished enough they couldn’t just keep climbing up the trunk to get inside. “C’mon, we’ve just got the last bit of wall and the crow’s nest and we’re done.”
---
“I’m done with the flag!” Luffy yelled up a while later, and Sabo grinned as he hammered the last nail in on his end of the board.
“Bring it on up, then.” he called back, and crouched to hammer in more nails on the final loosely attached board near the floor. He’d gotten most of the nails in when he heard Luffy flop onto the floor with a grunt
“Ta-da!” he exclaimed, and Sabo turned to see... honestly not as big a disaster as he’d expected. If you squinted you could kinda tell that the big blobs were supposed to be his and Luffy’s hats?
“You idiot!” Ace yelled, throwing his hammer at Luffy. It caught their little brother in the gut, knocking him down, then ricocheted back to embed itself claw first in the tree trunk that ran up through the middle of the treehouse. “That’s not a pirate flag!”
“Is too!” Luffy argued, holding it up in front of his face. “See, it’s got bones and everything.”
“Yeah, but what’s the rest of that meant to be?” Ace snapped.
“Our hats!” Luffy lowered the flag so he could pout at Ace. “But you don’t have one, so I did this instead.” he pointed at a red blob that Sabo couldn’t discern for the life of him.
“I can kinda see the hats, but what’s the red thing?” he asked, walking over and placing himself just slightly between Ace and Luffy.
“A fist!” Luffy beamed at him. “Cuz Ace is good at punching things.”
“I’ll punch you ya little-”
“C’mon, Ace.” Sabo chuckled, grabbing his brother’s elbow. “Let’s just make a better one.”
“We’ll need something else to put on it, though.” Ace huffed, pulling his arm free and crossing them over his chest.
“Oooh, ooh, our names!” Luffy bounced in place, disaster flag forgotten in favour of doing something with the two of them. Sabo couldn’t deny that his enthusiasm was endearing.
“That’s dumb.” Ace wrinkled his nose.
“How about our initials?” Sabo suggested instead. Ace shrugged his shoulders with a noncommittal grunt. “Yours can be first.” he offered, and Ace smirked.
“Alright, I can get behind that.”
“Yosh!” Luffy cheered, popping to his feet. And promptly tangling them in his messy flag, sending him pitching headfirst out the ladder hole.
“Luffy!” Sabo and Ace lunged forward, and Ace managed to catch their stupid baby brother by the ankle while Sabo kept him from being pulled out himself.
“Whoops.” Luffy laughed, and Sabo shared a heavy sigh with Ace. They’d have to install a trap door later.