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Sabo’s hair is still black when Koala finds him. Even though it feels like it has been months and not weeks since he’s last seen her face, the color of his hair is enough proof. His roots haven’t started growing out yet; ink drips from his crown, dark like the dirt on his clothes and the ashes surrounding him. He sits in the corner the furthest to the back, shrouded in shadows, the walls providing as much security as this cell mercifully grants.
It isn’t much, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Not that Sabo begs. It makes him a horrible spy, really, because he can never quite bring himself to cower properly.
“’lo, Koala,” Sabo says with a weak smile.
He doesn’t try to get up, much too aware of the fact that his legs will give out under him. They’d fucked up his ankles good. They aren’t broken or shattered, just damaged enough that walking is agony. Sabo hasn’t needed to walk much in a cell as wide as he is tall, so it has been alright.
It does make escaping a little harder.
“Finally got my message?”
Koala sighs and they’re back to their usual banter, exasperation masking worry and fear. Sabo can’t quite recall when they started with this act. It serves them well on missions like this – well, versions of missions like this that don’t go wrong. It calms the people they free when their saviors aren’t terrified but confident enough to crack jokes while aiding them with gentle hands.
Sabo’s fingers are calloused and his gloves rough, so he has an easier time climbing, but he always tries his best to be gentle when the situation calls for it.
“Causing trouble like usual, aren’t you?” Koala returns. “You’re the last. We found all the other slaves. Are you okay?”
Well, Sabo has been better and he can’t claim to have been worse, except for that one terrifying moment where he’d woken up ten-and-twenty years old, two brothers dead.
Nothing could ever be worse than that.
“I’m okay.”
That moment has passed.
Ace’s still dead, but Luffy isn’t, so Sabo’s only half a failure, really. He’s still sorting out memories, relearning all the reasons for his instinctual fears, but most of the time, he feels like a full person again.
That hasn’t always been the case in the past month.
He thinks it has been a month.
“Of course, let me help you up.”
Koala takes a step forward and Sabo flinches, presses his treasure deeper into his chest, ready to rip the intruder to shreds, dig his claws into their head and crush their—
Koala pauses.
Blinks.
Sabo exhales.
Okay, maybe, he isn’t as good as he said, but everyone miscalculates their damage when they are still hurting.
“Just, give me a moment,” Sabo says, frantically trying to recall any of the grounding techniques he has been taught. “I need a moment to know it’s really you.”
As absurd as it sounds, the fear is not exactly irrational, and Sabo is logically aware that he has been through some hell, even if he isn’t ready to examine that any closer, but he’s also only been free for like three minutes.
Fact is, there are people capable of mimicking others. Dragon made them memorize a list of all devil fruits capable of altering senses, people, and perceptions.
It is a very, very long list.
Sabo stretches his senses as far as he can, remembers Koala for her sunshine brightness, vicious snarls, and bloody knuckles.
“Okay,” he says because Sabo also really wants to get the fuck out of here and maybe he can do it without a breakdown. “Okay, we got this. Sorry, it’s become a bit of an instinct. I need somebody to carry us.”
“Us,” Koala repeats. Her eyes dart to the bundle in Sabo’s arms. Another time, when he is less malnourished, Sabo would be able to tell what exactly she is thinking if she noticed what he is trying to protect when she stepped into the cell.
“Whose baby is it?” Koala finally asks.
Sabo smiles at her, a little lopsided, sheepishly, like his fingers aren’t holding as tight to the child as he could, as if the baby hasn’t been his whole world for as long as he’s been caught in this prison.
“Mine,” he answers, claims, complicates his paperwork. “The baby’s mine. His name is Alda.”
Koala opens her mouth to say another thing, then she closes it only to gather her thoughts. “I’ll get Hack.”
And that’s that.
X
Alda sleeps through the whole ordeal. Sabo knows very little about babies, so he’s fairly sure they shouldn’t be this quiet and calm, but he isn’t going to complain. Alda being quiet saved them, kept them both alive, so he considers it an asset.
His clinginess, obviously, doesn’t go unnoticed, but Koala refrains from commenting on it.
It’s a coping mechanism, Sabo knows. Trauma bonding. His brain is trying to find a purpose after he screwed up so bad during his simple undercover stint that he got captured. Stuck down there as a slave to be sold, he’d clung to the one sense of purpose and self he’d had.
He doesn’t know the name of Alda’s mother. She hadn’t wanted her child to know her by a name her owner had given her and couldn’t name Alda in turn. According to her, it wasn’t right to name a child she didn’t want. Sabo couldn’t claim that he had wanted the baby then, but he’d been attached enough to the newborn that it counted.
Ten perfect little fingers and toes, and his hair black like the night sky. Not his mother’s coloring, but it almost matched Sabo’s pretend.
“Alda,” he’d said, “for my brother.”
“A good name,” she’d replied and soon after, her breathing ceased entirely, leaving Sabo with Alda and another corpse to burn.
The slavers hadn’t cared – why would they? – and only removed her body once it had become revolting enough to warrant removal. And Alda had stayed in Sabo’s arms the entire time, turned away from his mother’s body, the center of Sabo’s sanity.
It wasn’t fair to make such a tiny thing carry the weight of Sabo’s burdens and by all means, Sabo should stop now, free again, but he can’t let go of Alda.
So he doesn’t.
He sings half-forgotten lullabies to Alda that have Koala raise her brow at him. They’re all drinking songs taught by bandits, pirates, and a marine, a poor replacement for actual nursery rhymes, but Alda sleeps to them all the same.
Koala doesn’t offer to help and Sabo’s glad for it. He can’t quite stand to put Alda down, never mind let him out of his sight.
It’s an issue; he pretends to be working on it.
The travel back to Baltigo goes smoothly enough right until he’s standing in front of his baby brother’s father and Nico Robin, his baby brother’s declaration of war, is lounging in the corner. Alda is asleep in the makeshift sling Sabo acquired somewhere in the past week and Sabo feels a little like passing out.
Too early, he thinks.
He shouldn’t have taken that mission so quickly after regaining his memories, but Sabo’s always been burning bright, and maybe if he’d burned a little brighter, he could have changed the world enough for his brother to still be alive.
Instead, all Sabo can do is hold on to a baby that reminds him of his dead brother and ask whether he can keep him just a moment longer.