Chapter Text
A door at the end of a hallway.
A ticking clock, thumping like a heartbeat in the walls.
And the siren song of static overwhelming his senses.
Sabo would always startle awake before he could get anywhere near the door.
And as they were getting closer and closer to the source of the static, Sabo had to wonder what was hiding behind it.
———
Ace wasn’t talking to him beyond the occasional hissed whisper of direction as he led them both through the forest. Despite how little Ace had talked before, Sabo found himself missing Ace’s voice. There was nothing to fill the dreadful silence left behind by Luffy, for neither of them wanted to fill it. It almost felt wrong to try.
So they walked through the forest in a tense silence, not unlike that which had plagued them before Luffy had joined them. Listening for the tiniest of sounds, wondering if the distant crunch of grass was something stalking them from the shadows, or their own muted footsteps. Straining to distinguish reality from paranoia, their heartbeats sometimes becoming too loud to distinguish much of anything.
And while these silences still happened with Luffy around, they weren’t nearly as constant. Luffy understood when they needed to be quiet, but he always wanted to fill the air with idle (perhaps useless) chatter. He’d talk in a voice barely above a whisper as they wandered. About the things he’d heard from other children he’d encountered, about other monsters he’d outrun, and (most strangely of all) about what they should do once they found somewhere safe.
Both Ace and Sabo knew it was a pipe dream, monsters were everywhere after all. They were unavoidable. The best that you could hope for was to keep wandering and to survive.
Sabo was sorely missing Luffy’s optimism. Nearly everything was dreadful without it. He was convinced that they’d never get Luffy back.
The Hunter had definitely gone in this direction when he’d nabbed their brother (they’d followed the sound of Luffy’s yells for as long as they could), but that didn’t guarantee anything. Even if they found Luffy, he’d probably be dead.
Sabo pulled on their joined hands to stop Ace from walking into a bear trap. He released Ace's hand and grabbed onto a fallen branch. He slammed it into the bear trap, and they both jumped at the noise. They held their breath for one second. Two.
Nothing changed.
They joined hands once more and continued on with Sabo taking the lead.
———
They entered the house, fully intending to be quiet as they searched, but both Sabo and Ace rushed for the basement as soon as they heard Luffy yelling their names.
“Ace!” His voice sounded incredibly hoarse. “Sabo!” He must’ve been shouting for hours.
“Luffy!” they yelled back in unison as they scurried down the stairs, uncaring of who or what might hear them.
Ace and Sabo came to a locked wooden door, with Luffy shouting behind it. Sabo eyed the wood, noticing its questionable structural integrity. There were several large cracks through which he could see Luffy moving frantically from side to side.
He stuck his hand through a crack that was big enough to fit it and Luffy was quick to latch onto it.
“We’ll get you out Luffy, just calm down and hold on,” Sabo said quietly. They couldn’t risk yelling anymore.
Luffy took a breath, and tried to swallow his fear to keep it silent. It was something they’d all learned to do.
Sabo smiled proudly before glancing around briefly, finding nothing useful. “I’ll be back in a second, okay?,” he said to Luffy through the door before turning to Ace. “Stay here with him, I’m gonna go find something to break this with.”
Ace nodded and switched places with Sabo, doing his best to keep Luffy calm.
Sabo found an ax in the other room and dragged it over after pulling it free from a crate. It seemed to weigh as much as he did (if not more), but Sabo figured that he could still swing it hard enough to break the weak wood of the door.
Ace was startled by the sound of the ax dragging across the floor for a second before moving out of Sabo’s way, immediately catching on to what he was going to do.
“Get away from the door Luffy,” Sabo said as he prepared to swing.
He turned out to be right, as the wood gave way after three good swings at it. Luffy rushed out as soon as he was able, and Sabo was quick to drop the ax before he got tackled in a hug. He wrapped his arms around Luffy and let out a sigh of relief.
Luffy was alive. They’d made it in time.
He was content to continue laying on the floor with Luffy in his arms but was interrupted by the muted creaking of floorboards. Sabo looked up to find Ace standing above him, looking vaguely like he wanted to join in on the hug before apparently deciding against it.
“The Hunter,” Ace reminded him quietly. “We need to keep moving.”
Sabo nodded and looked back down at Luffy who was still crying into his chest. “Let’s get out of here, Luf.”
Luffy clammed up, looked at him, tears still in his eyes, and nodded with determination.
———
Sabo’s ears were still ringing from the thunderous bang that roared from the shotgun, and his body was still reacting to the shock of being launched into the crate from the recoil, but he scrambled to get up. He had to check if the Hunter was still alive.
He quickly scrambled up to the massive hole in the door and looked outside to see the Hunter’s corpse. He waited for any movement, even the most miniscule twitch of the muscle, but there was nothing.
“He’s dead,” he told the other two as the ringing in his ears faded.
Luffy laughed triumphantly with a quiet ‘shishishishi!’ “Serves him right!”
Ace crossed his arms and smirked. “It’s what he gets for messing with us,” he said with a nod of his head.
Sabo allowed himself to laugh a bit as well. “Let’s rest here for a bit,” he suggested, knowing that they’d all need a bit to recover from the inevitable adrenaline crash.
———
“So where’re we going now?” Luffy asked after they took a few minutes to recoup.
Ace looked at Sabo, expecting an answer as well.
It was a sort of unspoken agreement between the three of them that Sabo would take the lead most of the time. Ace was plenty smart and had just as much experience as Sabo did, and Luffy had some damn good instincts, but Sabo kept them out of a lot of trouble.
Ace had the bad habit of never running from a fight. At first, Sabo had thought that he had a death wish. After all, the threats they faced were huge and monstrous. They were constantly being hunted like prey, so Ace’s insistence to never run away made no real sense. But after a while, Sabo came to realize that it came from Ace’s desire to protect the people he cared about, regardless of how much he had to sacrifice of himself. Sabo was sure it was going to get him killed one day, but he couldn’t deny how stupidly sweet it was.
Luffy on the other hand wasn’t nearly as stubborn, since he was at least willing to run if a situation was hopeless enough, but he was recklessly impulsive. He picked fights that he couldn’t possibly win, he rushed into dangerous situations without a proper plan, and often acted on the first thought he had without thinking it through. His determination and optimism were both incredibly admirable though, even if Sabo could never understand where he got it from. (His unconditional love was something that Sabo wasn’t sure he could live without now that he had had it for so long).
Sabo wasn’t free of flaws of course. He tended to overthink and overplan to the point where he’d be paralyzed from indecision. And ever since he’d taken over a kind of leadership role, he’d started feeling responsible for any harm that befell the other two. Any harm. He’d learned to carry the weight of his guilt with him, but he feared that it was going to overwhelm him soon.
Sabo never really had anything that was guiding them to their next destination. Often he was just operating under the strategy of ‘keep moving, find food and water whenever you can.’ He had no particular goal beyond that. There wasn’t any sort of ‘safe haven’ for them to find after all.
As of late however, Sabo had found himself being guided by the siren song of static humming in his ears. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but it whispered promises of safety and security to him. Something within him told him that he needed to follow it. Perhaps Luffy’s optimism had been rubbing off on him more than he thought. (Perhaps he was just tired of constantly running).
He debated telling the other two, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to explain it properly. Besides, he was the leader. He had to be sure of his decisions.
Sabo closed his eyes and listened closely. “We’re going across the water,” he decided. “To the Pale City.”