Chapter Text
Ace wasn’t sure how long he’d been searching for Luffy, but by the time he’d found him at the cliffs that sat at the base of Mount Corvo, the sun had just finished hitting its peak and was beginning to make its descent. Seeing his brother, lying face down in the grass so lifelessly, seemed so abnormal after nearly a year of enduring Luffy’s dogged pursuit.
Ace walked past his prone body towards the edge of the cliff, peeking down at the shores below where the waves were throwing themselves against the rocks. A few steps further, and his idiot brother could fall right off if he ever managed to even stand on his own two feet. Not even Luffy, with his ridiculous rubber body, could handle a fall from this height, and even if he could, the sea would wash him away, just as it had Sabo.
The unnatural silence hung over them. He didn’t know what to say, and Luffy hadn’t spoken since they’d received news of their brother’s death. They couldn’t even get into the city with security as it was, let alone reach the docks where Sabo had been swallowed up by the sea. Ace imagined how lonely it must’ve been, to die with hundreds of strangers looking on with distant, disconnected horror as his ship was attacked.
The clear skies seemed unusually muted and desaturated. Daytime was reserved for hunting for food and scavenging for valuables. Just standing there, listlessly watching the occasional speck of cloud inch across the horizon, felt wrong, but if Ace knew how to fix people, he would’ve helped himself a long time ago.
Making Luffy feel better had been Sabo’s job. Ace bunched his hands into a fist and punched Luffy in the head. Their youngest brother grunted in response but refused to get up, instead curling his tiny fists around the brim of his hat as he shook and sniveled into the grass.
“How long are you gonna stay like that?” Ace demanded.
Luffy didn’t move because of course he wasn’t going to. He was depending on Ace to pick up the pieces as much as Ace was depending on how much Luffy needed someone who could hold himself together. Sabo wasn’t around anymore to comfort Luffy or lift him up. The weight of the burden that had fallen onto his shoulders still rocked him, left him stumbling left and right in an effort to just stay on his feet. He couldn’t be what Sabo had been for Luffy, but at the very least, he could hold himself together.
“The treasure we hid in the forest was all gone,” Ace said roughly, folding his arms in front of his chest. He’d returned to their hideout after the fire to check if it was still there, only to find their tree house trashed and emptied. He wasn’t sure if it was looted by the Bluejam Pirates before the fire or if Goa’s military had stumbled across it while they were hunting down survivors of the Gray Terminal fire, but Ace didn’t have the energy to get upset over the loss. Everything they’d scraped and scrimped together over the past few years felt meaningless with Sabo gone. “There’s no point in gathering treasure if we can’t even protect it.”
“Ace, I…” From under his hat, Luffy let out a big, wet sniff. “I want to get stronger! I want to be so strong, there won’t be anything I can’t protect! I won’t lose anybody again! So please, don’t die, Ace!”
As if Ace could even consider the possibility when Luffy was relying on him. With the silence finally broken, Luffy finally let out an open sob, sniveling into the ground and shaking like a dog. The edges of his straw hat bent and strained in his grip.
“Don’t be stupid! Worry about yourself, not me! Don’t you know how much weaker you are?” Ace shouted, boxing him upside the head again. “Remember this, Luffy! I’m not gonna die! I’m not gonna leave my crybaby little brother—”
Ace stopped when he looked over beside him and there was no one there.
Right.
They both broke the promises they made that day.
Years older and feeling it, Ace stood alone at the top of the cliff, fighting a pull in his chest. Ace remembered Luffy’s arms tight around him, his tears hot against Ace’s skin. His little brother wasn’t okay, but he would get there. Saving Luffy so he would live yet another day was the least Ace could do for everything he put him through.
Ace noted how quickly the light here was beginning to fade. His memories were dull and gray and growing darker. He wondered what it would be like once the light completely went out.
A little lost and his footing feeling nonexistent, Ace approached the edge of the cliff again, this time sitting down and letting his feet dangle over the edge. Beneath him, the distance between him and the endless sea seemed strangely distorted. Each dip in the wave seemed impossibly distant, and each crest came closer and closer to grazing his toes.
Somewhere beyond him he felt—
Disconnect. Suddenly untethered. Severed.
The gentle pull in his chest suddenly became a violent tug and suddenly he was
somewhere else.
Waking up on hard, uncomfortable surfaces wasn’t anything new to Ace, but it had been a long, long time since he’d ever felt cold.
Ace stared up at the light hanging over him, his eyes struggling to adjust to the stark brightness. It took several moments of quiet blinking for him to realize he was staring at was a patch of vivid blue sky. What at first seemed like a skylight was just a hole in the ceiling, and beyond that he could hear distant conversation and the rhythmic pounding of a hammer striking wood.
His throat was sore, and his tongue sat strangely in his mouth. Ace stretched his jaw, thrown by how wrong everything felt, from his face to the rest of his body. The dimensions were all off.
Ace raised his hand over his face, trying to determine what was so different now. Bruises and cuts that he didn’t recall getting decorated his skin, and his knuckles stung under the bandages that were wrapped around his hand.
The injury that he did remember…
Ace sat upright, hand pressed against his chest. There wasn’t a single blemish where Akainu’s fist had burnt through flesh and bone.
Beside him was an empty operating table and several carts loaded with what looked like various surgical equipment. Ace wasn’t sure what kind of hospital this was. He didn’t have much experience with them, but it didn’t seem normal that he was left to rest and recover in an operating room rather than a hospital bed. It seemed even stranger when he felt the familiar, gentle sway underneath him. It wasn’t a hospital, or at least not an ordinary one.
Whose ship was this? How did he survive Akainu’s attack? Where was Luffy?
Ace jumped off the operating table and felt a tug on his chest. The medical electrodes still attached to him yanked his heart rate monitor off its cart and sent it falling to the floor with a crash and a loud blaring sound as it lost connection with him.
“You brothers,” someone called out irritably, “are so much more trouble than you’re worth.”
He tracked the voice to a chair across the room where a man Ace didn’t recognize sat slumped with his arms crossed in front of his chest. He was glaring up at Ace with bleary eyes, as if he’d just woken up. He might’ve been sleeping, actually, but the seats didn’t look very comfortable, and judging from the bags under his eyes, what rest he’d gotten must not have been very restful.
“Where am I? Where’s Luffy? Is he here?” Ace asked, his hoarse voice sounding strange to his ears. Judging from the way the medical carts were arranged, it looked like there’d been another patient.
“You’re on my ship,” the man answered, which really didn’t answer any of Ace’s questions. His messy, unwashed hair stuck up in places, and the man brought his tattooed hands up to scratch at his scalp only to cringe at the oily strands. He grabbed a hat that had been resting in his lap and shoved it down on his head, no doubt making it worse but hiding his hair from view. “And your brother is beyond my ability to help.”
“What? What happened to him?!”
“He got upset when he saw your body!” a new voice called out. Ace looked up to see the figure of a man looking down at him through the hole in the ceiling. They gave him a little wave, which Ace mutely returned in surprise. “Hi! He ran off into the jungle before we could stop him. Ergo, he’s beyond our reach?”
“...Why didn’t you say that?” Ace demanded, turning his attention back to the tattooed man.
“I said what I said,” he waved him off. He looked like he wanted to do nothing more than sink back into the sleep that Ace had likely disturbed, but with a heavy sigh, he abandoned the minimal comfort of his seat and stood up. After briefly stretching his legs, he grabbed an empty first aid kit and began filling it with various items from around the room. “But my point still stands. He was in recovery, and now he’s run off in a panic. If his wounds are reopened, he may die.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Ace asked.
The man gave him a dirty look in response to his question, his scowl made even more severe by the presence of dark circles under his eyes. “Because I’m pissed.”
“He’s hurt! What could he have…?” The man pointed up towards the ceiling with a tattooed finger, and Ace followed his direction, looking back up to really take in the hole in the ceiling and where more members of the unknown crew were starting to gather. It was a very Luffy-sized hole. “Ah.”
“In any case, we’ve been given refuge on Amazon Lily on the condition that none of our men leave this spot. If we violate their customs, we’ll have Boa Hancock to contend with, and your operation took a lot out of both of us.” The man, apparently the doctor of the crew, gave Ace a wry smirk that left him under the impression that he was missing something. “She might not have a problem with you, though. I’ll show you where we last saw him.”
“Yes. Thank you,” Ace said. The rushed tumble of words came out a little more sarcastic than he’d intended—the man might’ve let Luffy run off with his injuries, but he did seem to have saved the both of them, after all. Judging from the dirty look he got in return, the sarcasm didn’t go unnoticed, and Ace quickly looked away. All that time he’d spent learning proper manners from Makino, and he’d forgotten it the moment he lost his cool.
Ace looked up towards the hole in the ceiling and pushed off the ground. He meant to leap through the hole, but his body didn’t respond to his commands nearly as well as it normally did, and his Flame Flame abilities—what happened to his abilities? Baffled, Ace failed to stick the landing, catching himself on the edge of the shattered floorboards and tumbling across the deck.
One of the deckhands lifted his sunglasses to get a better look at Ace. Between the sunglasses, the sea green hat, and the thick jumpsuit whose collar covered most of his jawline, Ace couldn’t see much of his face. He had a hawk-like nose and a broad chin, and messy brown hair jutted out of his hat and fell messily around his ears.
“Gotta adjust to your new sea legs, huh?” the man said with a small laugh, though Ace wasn’t sure where the joke was
Ace looked down at his legs. Had they been broken or something? They seemed fine, though the crew had, for some reason, changed him out of his usual shorts and into a pair of navy blue pants and boots. He felt confused and a little violated.
“Would it kill you guys,” the doctor grunted as he scrambled up after Ace, not quite able to make it up all the way either, “to use the damn door?”
“Haha, need a hand, Law?” The crewmate with the sunglasses offered his hand to the doctor, who ignored it with a disgruntled expression.
The doctor, Law, looked bad in the operating room and even worse in the broad daylight, bringing a hand up to shield his bleary eyes from the sun. His skin had a sallow look in the daylight, and the shadows under his eyes only seemed more pronounced. He squinted, mouth slightly ajar, as he surveyed the area around them.
Amazon Lily, a name Ace only vaguely recognized to be the home to the Pirate Empress, Boa Hancock, turned out to be a summer island with a tropical climate. The crew had maneuvered their ship carefully along the shore, positioning it as closely to the rocks as they could without getting thrown against it. Further inland were thick groves of trees, apparently untouched by settlements.
“I'll be heading onto the island with Fire Fist-ya to find his brother,” the doctor said, snatching an impressive looking blade out of the hands of a mink crewman as he headed toward the railings. “Unless any of you have objections.”
The testy comment was met with a general sense of tension, but it was quickly broken up by a man wearing a hat labeled 'Penguin'.
“No objections, so long as you tell us what the ladies are like!” he said brightly.
“We’re not here to check out the locals,” Law said. He raised his first aid kit for his crewmate to see. “Also, Penguin, I'm borrowing this.”
Penguin had a striking pair of blue eyes—one brown, and the other blue—that lit up when he noticed the kit in hand. “You sure you wanna be seen with that cheap ass first aid kit?”
“Curb the sass,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back later. Don’t do anything stupid.”
And with that, Law took a running leap off the deck of their ship. He landed on the very edge of the island’s small cliffs, only barely managing to avoid slipping off the edge of the wet rocks.
Ace followed him down, only marginally more graceful than Law had been, a fact that most of the crew jeered about from the ship.
“Looks like the stupid's all accounted for!”
“You good, Law?”
“Nice landing!”
“Don’t make us fish you out of the water!”
The crew waved as they left. They seemed friendly enough, with the exception of their doctor. It struck Ace as a little odd, actually, that it was Law leaving for this little excursion rather than literally anyone else on the ship.
“Hey, if you’re the crew’s doctor, wouldn’t it be better if you stayed with your crew?” Ace asked as they headed inland. “Someone else could take me to Luffy.”
“I’m the captain. I can do whatever I want.”
“Oh,” Ace said, a little surprised. “Sorry, I know most of the captains in our fleet, but I don’t recognize you. Or your ship.”
Which was odd, because even if he couldn’t recognize the crew or the captain, they ran a very distinctive ship. It was smaller than most of the vessels he'd typically encountered in the New World, equipped with a single mast and rigging. Despite having some characteristics of a sailing ship, it clearly had underwater capabilities, Luffy's breach in the hull notwithstanding. Underwater vessels were an interesting but uncommon choice of travel that Ace never really saw in the New World. The unpredictable weather was difficult enough to contend with for most seasoned pirates, but the further down the Grand Line one got, the less charted the waters were.
“That’s because I’m not a part of anyone’s fleet. We’re the Heart Pirates.”
The Heart Pirates sounded familiar, but Ace had trouble placing them. They weren’t a crew from the New World, he was certain of that at least.
“Your crew called you Law?” Ace asked, and as he repeated the name, it jogged his memory. “I’ve heard your name before!”
“It’s also a noun. So.”
“Well, yeah, but you’re that pirate from the North Blue! Trafalgar Law! How did a rookie like you end up saving me?”
“Technically you died. I have a Devil Fruit ability that lets me swap things around, to put it simply. So I grabbed a marine on the way out and I replaced everything,” Law said, pride warming his voice. He cracked a small smile at the memory of his own achievement. “You might not understand what a feat it was, but no doctor could have pulled off what I did.”
“I don't know if I get it, but I'm definitely appreciating it,” Ace said, poking at his chest. It kind of explained why everything felt off. “I really died?”
“Clinically speaking, yes,” Law said. “Biologically? More or less. I'm curious if you've suffered any brain damage, but without knowing your baselines, it's hard for me to confirm anything. What was dying like?”
The abruptness of his question caught Ace a little off guard. It would have been morbid and rude coming from anyone else, and it wasn’t really that much different coming from Law, but he did seem genuinely curious, if a little impolite.
“It hurt,” Ace said simply, because he wasn’t sure what more there was to say or what Law was interested in hearing. Was he interested as a doctor looking for details about his injuries or as a captain looking for what information he could get on Akainu and the marines themselves? “I remember seeing Luffy start to fall. Akainu’s haki is better than mine. I could’ve maybe resisted some of the damage if I’d been fire, but then the attack would’ve simply passed through me and hit my brother. He targeted Luffy specifically because of that.”
Even remaining solid, the magma had still burned through him. It all happened so fast, he’d barely even registered his searing flesh at first. He remembered the smell of sulfur that had filled his nostrils and the burgeoning heat in his chest expanding outwards until a molten fist began to creep through the front of his chest. He shouldn’t have survived that.
“Yeah, okay,” Law said dismissively, “but what happened after that?”
“I don’t know. I woke up, I guess. Had a dream about the island Luffy and I grew up on, but it was nothing remarkable.”
“Indeed,” Law agreed, sounding unimpressed by Ace's account.
He might have just been agreeing with Ace, but Ace couldn't help but feel a little offended anyway. “Hoping for something?”
“I don’t know,” Law shrugged, as if a war between the two of the great powers of the world hadn’t been enough to satisfy him. “Any sudden shifts in belief? You meet the creator or whoever you people worship in the east? If there was ever a situation that called for an out of body experience, I would think it would be this one. There’ve been reports of people coming back from those kinds of things feeling enlightened or with some sort of divine purpose in life.”
“No, nothing like that,” Ace said, a little thrown from this line of questioning. There were a lot of things he knew he had to do, but none of them came from a sense of enlightenment. He had to get back to the rest of his crew. He had to beg forgiveness from them for all the trouble he’d brought upon them. He had to see who made it out alive. Pops hadn’t intended to leave Marineford with everyone else, and Ace couldn’t bring himself to ask Law for the details. This was the opposite of enlightened. “I just want to find my family.”
“Well, there’s your brother here if you move fast enough. Despite your truly touching sacrifice, he still ended up taking a direct hit from Akainu,” Law said. They reached a clearing, and Ace understood why Law had to lead him here. It wasn’t an area easily visible from the shore, but as they got closer, signs of Luffy were everywhere. Wide swaths of trees had been smashed to pieces, and some of the trunks were smeared with blood.
Law took his sword and sheared off the jagged top of a splintered tree trunk. Cut at an angle, the upper half slid off and fell to the ground, and Law promptly laid on top of it, heedless of the way his long torso didn’t quite fit and left his neck craning backward off the edge.
“You’re just going to... nap like that?” Ace asked as Law closed his eyes and basked in the sun with his head tilted back. He didn’t look like the type to sit back and sunbathe, though he did look like the type that typically needed to.
“You’re just going to stand there and ask pointless questions? Your brother is probably reopening all his wounds and bleeding out in the middle of the jungle. I treated his wounds, but as you can’t tell from this mess, he’s not resting as much as I would have recommended. He may very well undo my hard work and die.”
It was a good point. Without another word, Ace ran into the jungle. As a kid, Luffy had a habit of slingshotting himself all over Goa, Ace hoped he hadn’t done so here.
“If the locals catch you in their jungle,” Law called out after him, “my crew had nothing to do with it!”
Ace wondered when a man had last set foot on the Kuja tribe’s land and how the Heart Pirates had managed to earn their limited protection. ...It probably had to do with Luffy. He could charm anyone, and apparently that included Boa, judging from her actions at Impel Down and the very coincidental timing of Luffy’s jailbreak. With a little bit of context, her sporadic behavior at Marineford made a lot more sense.
Rushing through the jungle should have felt comfortable and familiar, but everything felt foreign, from the length of his stride to the momentum of his swinging arms. He felt weaker, too, but that was to be expected given the injuries he’d suffered. Even his vision seemed off. Ace glanced down at his hands, wrapped in bandages. As much as he willed it, the flames he’d grown so comfortable with over the years failed to appear.
It’s what he got for dying, he supposed.
Ace heard a distant scream, and he ran faster.
“Luffy!”
The foliage he passed through was still ripped to pieces, but the further he got, the less there was as Luffy started running out of steam. He could only hope it was because he was tiring himself out, rather than slowing down to his wounds, but considering everything Luffy put himself through at Marineford, he worried the distinction didn’t mean much.
“Luffy! I’m here!” he shouted, and as the sounds of screaming and sobbing grew louder. At the end of the wreckage, Luffy collapsed to his knees, slamming his forehead into the ground in blind distress.
“Leave me alone!” Luffy’s voice was hoarse. How long had he been out here, been screaming alone and in pain? The bandages, which had been so meticulously wrapped around his body that there wasn’t an inch of skin left exposed, pulled free and loosened as Luffy beat his fists into the dirt.
“You’re hurting yourself!” Ace took one of Luffy’s arms to try and stop him only to have Luffy swinging at him instead. He jerked his head to the side, narrowly avoiding Luffy’s fist as it shot past his ear.
“It’s my body! I’ll do what I want to it!”
Ace saw red. He grabbed Luffy’s outstretched arm and pulled, slung his brother forward so he could punch him in the face. “You need to worry about yourself, you stupid little crybaby!”
Luffy dropped backwards onto the ground with a heavy thud and just laid there lifelessly, and Ace’s heart nearly stopped, unsure his attempt at a Fist of Love was the straw that killed his brother, but he watched as Luffy’s eyes began to well with tears and he relaxed just a bit.
“Y-you can’t call me a c-crybaby,” Luffy began to hiccup.
“I’ll stop calling you a crybaby when you stop crying over everything!” Ace said.
Luffy’s hands stretched up from the ground, looping several times around Ace and pinning his arms to the side. Ace only had a split second to register what was happening as Luffy snapped forward and his forehead smashed into his nose.
“Ow! Shit, Luffy!” Ace shouted, unsure if Luffy was continuing his attack or not, but his chest was wet where Luffy was sobbing against him. “That better not be snot!”
“Ace?” Luffy looked up at him, giant eyes wet and snot dripping pathetically down his nose. If Ace’s nose hadn’t been bleeding, the sight of it would’ve broken his heart.
“Why are you looking at me like I’m dead? You’re the one wrapped like a mummy. And loosen up!” Ace wriggled in Luffy’s crushing hug, a little afraid that if he fought too hard, he’d hurt Luffy worse. His wounds were exposed where the bandages failed to cover up the stretched out arms, leaving Ace uncomfortably aware of his brother’s condition, but that discomfort began to shift as he followed Luffy’s grip to his own shoulders.
His bare shoulders.
The shoulders that were bare of cloth and ink.
The shoulder that was missing his tattoos.
I have a Devil Fruit ability that lets me swap things around, Law had said.
I replaced everything, he had said.
Technically. You died.