Work Text:
Somehow, Luffy had found a four-pack of crayons deep in the Gray Terminal debris. They were relatively intact, aside from the blunted tips and missing color blue, which was mourned appropriately.
“Blueprints can’t be red, dummy,” teased Ace, though Sabo knew he hardly cared. Messing with Luffy came as easy as breathing.
Luffy rubbed an eye, holding back the waterworks. “Makino can get me blue.”
“She doesn’t visit for another month,” Sabo said. He was the only one of the three who knew what days were what. “And blueprints aren’t really blue, so it doesn’t matter.”
Their heads came together to review the back of an old newspaper Luffy had scribbled on. He’d drawn a tree. It was shaped like a slingshot frame, forked into two branches. A blob haloed the top in place of foliage, and atop the trunk was the lower half of a circle.
“That’s a basket,” critiqued Ace.
“S’not!” cried Luffy, voice pitching high. He sat back on the cliffside, crossing his arms. “It’s like what the birds have.”
“A nest?” That had Ace doubling over in laughter. “Squeak!”
Before Luffy could explode, Sabo gave an affectionate flick to his straw hat. “Good idea, Luffy. We might need a roof for when it rains, but we can add a crow’s nest over the main house for a lookout point.”
Sabo waited for the gears in Ace’s head to turn until his brother gleamed at him in approval. “Like a real ship,” Ace said, nodding his head.
“Real ship!” echoed Luffy in glee.
Luffy’s plan was in need of slight adjustments. Sabo pulled out the green crayon and spent a minute ripping off the wrapping to use the rest of it. He added a roof. He diagrammed a crow’s nest. As they waited, Ace and Luffy played with the bits of paper Sabo had thrown onto the dewy grass, rolling them up to launch as ammunition.
“We gotta find a good spot,” Ace announced, once he saw Sabo was finished. He looked over his shoulder at the treeline behind them. The ocean spray had salted his dark hair, matting to the base of his head.
Sabo nodded. “Then the materials.”
Luffy crawled over to Sabo on his knees, dirtying his wrists and the hem of his shorts. Instinctively, Sabo rested a hand over Luffy’s head.
“Can I make the Jolly Roger?” Luffy implored, eyes wide and watery.
“Sure,” Sabo said, before Ace could let out any snark.
Ace had inched nearer to tickle Luffy, who screeched in delight. The sun waned lower with the rising tide, marking the end of a summer day. Three children laid on the bluff until the sea air prickled their tongues and windburn blistered their cheeks. It took the dreary purpling of the skies to send them scuttling back to Mt. Corvo, the older boys taking turns piggybacking their sleeping brother.
Lost in thought, Sabo bumped into Ace, who nearly stumbled over Luffy. Deep within Midway Forest, tree roots pooled around trunks like chunky ropes, testing their footing as they hiked through brambles and shrubs. Sabo hitched up his slipping rucksack and followed Luffy’s finger to where it pointed at a distance.
He didn’t need to speak. It was obvious which tree he meant. There was an impressive thickness down the trunk up to where it first sprouted limbs, a diameter besting that of a Foosha windmill. Its branches were honest and untwisted, a place of good foundations. The once-unrelenting thicket seemed to part for this ancient beast.
Sabo had heard of sirens at sea, and how they lured sailors to their deaths by song and beauty. He wondered if any had ever crawled up to die on land. If they then grew roots.
They spent the first two days camping at the base. The boys climbed the trunk top to bottom, investigating every swirl bark and hollowed-out cavity. Sometimes Ace and Sabo leaped from one giant branch to another. Luffy befriended toads in the undergrowth. At sunset, they settled at the crown of the tree to act-out battles with rival pirates, stopping only when their eyelids got heavy.
On the third day, it was back to business. Ace traipsed the Grey Terminal looking for corrugated steel panels, only to come back with a handful of tinsel. As a result, Sabo sent out Luffy to collect all the twigs and rocks he could carry, then swiped Magra’s splitting maul from the Dadan Family shed. Between Sabo and Ace and the countless Midway conifers, they gathered enough wood to feed a years-old fire.
Actual construction began once the boys could level the timber over the base of the branches. They’d made the mistake of pulling them up without an adhesive, and for a whole afternoon Luffy hung on for his life, arms outstretched around twenty feet of planks while the other two searched for things to keep it all together.
“Sabo! Gotta blow m’nose, Sabo,” complained Luffy, dangling from above. Drops of snot were rolling down his upper lip.
“Ace, go blow his nose,” said Sabo. He had found some vines and was weaving pieces together so they could last. He was, of course, the only one of the two capable of braiding.
When his brother didn’t budge, Sabo knocked him with his elbow, and begrudgingly Ace stood to climb. Sabo listened while he finished the ropes, a sudden good mood upon him.
“Do waves get this high, Ace?” asked Luffy, voice muffling when Ace pulled the kid’s collar up to his face. “In the ocean?”
“Uh-huh,” humored Ace.
“Are there frogs there?”
“Guess so.”
“Trains? Cake? Meat!” Here, Luffy nearly lost his hold from excitement alone, and Ace had to tug his grip back into place. Sabo held in his laughter. “Ace, I got’n idea.”
“Yeah?”
“When we’re pirates,” said the boy, “we’ll go to Partys where Makino’s gonna cook everybody meat. And Dadan an’ the rest’ll be here, and Gramps and Shanks! Don’t ya like parties? Everybody likes parties at Partys, Ace. Then we go to our ships and leave till we do it all over again. And we can do it every month. Week. Everyday! Good idea, huh, Ace?”
Ace took his time to answer, bowing his head to meet Sabo’s eyes below. “Yeah,” he said, his face unreadable. “Good idea, Luffy.”
Sabo had never considered Dawn Island as his home. He knew Ace felt the same; it was a docking point, a means to an end. But like Luffy, it was all they’d ever known.
Sabo knew the tides that rode up on cliff sides during full moon nights. The Edge Town lampposts lighting at dusk. Dogra and Magra’s after-drink snoring. The face Ace made when they’d spent too long at the Foosha hillsides and saw his freckles had doubled.
Some nights, they were almost enough. Every other night, only this was clear: Sabo was Sabo, his brothers were his brothers, and this was the place that raised them. There was nothing else to blame except the island that birthed sons too hungry for East Blue to feed.
Luffy told them he practiced his letters before he painted them on. Sabo believed him because they looked cared-for. On one of her Mt. Corvo visits—where the boys still came around to steal their portion of meals—Makino fished out black fabric and three canisters of paint: red, blue, and yellow. It was the first and perhaps last time that Luffy got distracted enough to pull away from a meal.
Ceremoniously, the three made it up to the crooked crow’s nest to mount the Jolly Roger. The breeze cooled the summer sweat on Sabo’s forehead. What was past Dawn Island cleared before him, spilled open like water from a cracked globe.
Their initials were divided by colors of Luffy’s choosing. Ace’s was obvious, red as passion, and yellow-gold for Luffy had to have been deliberate. Luffy had lauded the blue paint, its appearance here a roundabout irony, and Sabo was surprised when he was bestowed the honor.
Ace flattened Luffy’s straw hat over his head. “Get someone on your crew who can draw better than you, Luffy.”
Pulling down the brim to his cheeks, Luffy grinned wide. “Gonna get a musician. And a chef! And, and… Sabo?”
“Mmm?”
“You’ll come? For the party?”
“Oh, that?” Sabo asked, hopping over the nest to sit at the edge. Luffy copied him and almost lost purchase on the banister before Ace caught him. He smiled. “‘Course, Luffy. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
The treehouse was nearly complete, though far from perfect; the roof leaked in rainy weather, and a few bugs got in at night. Some days, the framework shifted under their feet. But it was home—as much as anything on land could ever be. Fluttering in the wind, the Jolly Roger marked the embarkation of something new. ASL was a starting line to a race that would never end. For now, as they hoisted their flag, they did so together.