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Ace is the sun. He is fire, he is warmth, and he brings life and light to Yamato’s desolate world. With a single phrase, he wakes Yamato from the nightmare that he has let his mind become, chained to his villain of a father.
Yamato knows he has no frame of reference to compare, but he’s sure that Ace is a rarity among men upon the sea. If everybody lit up the world the way he does, there would be no darkness anywhere.
When he comes back, Ace will bring liberation to Wano. Yamato will help him free Wano, and then follow him to watch what will surely be Ace bringing dawn to a world trapped in night.
Yamato is certain—so very certain.
He doesn’t expect Ace to burn so brightly that he burns out before he even returns to Wano.
The scrap of the vivre card that Yamato made Ace smolders from time to time, but Ace is a pirate so this is only to be expected. Ace lives his life upon the dangerous seas, but he is more than a match for the world. He is the sun, after all.
Yamato does not doubt that Ace will prevail, but he keeps an eye on the vivre card when it smolders. He cannot be there with Ace to ease his burdens, but Yamato’s heart that Ace untethered from Kaido has gone with him, and if all he can do is watch over the paper that represents Ace’s vitality, then he will do that.
Two years after Ace’s visit, his card smolders for days on end, and though Yamato laments the distance between them and his powerlessness to be of aid, he is not worried. He keeps his eye on it as he always does, a gesture of devotion devoid of doubt. The vivre card is recovering more slowly than usual, and Yamato only wonders what manner of obstacle Ace has encountered.
He does not doubt Ace until the moment the vivre card flares up and rapidly begins to disappear. Even then, he doesn’t believe it until the last ember turns black.
The vivre card is dust in his hands, and Yamato is helpless. He runs as far as the harbor where he last saw Ace, bright and smiling and showing off for Yamato in the morning sun.
Yamato can’t breathe. Ace freed his heart, and at the time, that had seemed like a gift beyond imagining. It had not seemed urgent to go with Ace then and there—not when their lives stretched bright and hopeful ahead of them both. Now Yamato wonders why he didn’t demand to go with him then; why he didn’t find a way to force the shackles off, or simply take the gamble that surely his father would not murder his own son.
He grabs the nearest rock with his right hand and tries to smash his left shackle until his wrist is covered in blood.
The shackle doesn’t budge.
Yamato is trapped on an island that symbolizes the destruction of the land his idol loved, and the one person on whom he had placed his every hope will never return.
Yamato still can’t breathe. His face is wet, and the soil beneath his hands has long since turned to blood with tears and sweat and blood, and he can’t remember why that ought to matter.
Ace is the only light in his world.
Was.
Ace is never coming back, and Yamato doesn’t know how he can live with that.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been slumped looking at the harbor where Ace will never appear again.
Surely the world itself is grieving the loss of its savior. Surely Yamato is not alone in this despair. Surely fate herself is grieving her terrible, unforgivable mistake.
Surely Ace’s little brother is devastated. Surely—
The world stops. Shifts.
Ace’s little brother, who spoke the very same words as the pirate king himself. Ace’s little brother, whom Ace had hardly ever stopped talking about. Ace’s little brother, whom Ace had seemed convinced would become a force to be reckoned with, despite only remembering him as a helpless crybaby.
Yamato always imagined meeting this brother at Ace’s side.
But now that will never be.
But maybe—just maybe—fate has set her sights on the brother who wants the same thing as the pirate king.
And this brother will surely appear in Wano one day—will surely come to take down Kaido.
Yamato resolves to wait for him.
There is still hope for the dawn of the world.
The heavy darkness in Yamato’s heart does not lift with this realization.
Ace would not appreciate Yamato moping this way, he reminds himself, but that thought only brings a fresh flow of tears.
This time, when Yamato sobs, it is not for the world, but for Ace—for all the time he ought to have lived, and all that he ought to have experienced. He cries for the loss of Ace to all the people who knew him and loved him—for the small sun that has gone out in the world.
If Yamato’s own pain of loss is woven into his tears, well—gone as he has into the next world, Ace need never know.
Monkey D. Luffy is everything Yamato had hoped.
He accepts Yamato as an ally. He liberates Wano and accepts Yamato’s wish to join his crew.
And yet.
Yamato likes Luffy a lot. He likes his crew a lot, too.
But none of them inspire in him the fire, the joy and yearning that he embodied when he was with Ace.
And oh, isn’t that just the worst way to learn what love songs are talking about?
Yamato has already shed so many tears, though he is sure Ace wouldn’t appreciate all this crying. But he needs more, because this time he needs to cry for himself.
He’s not crying for the loss of Ace’s brightness or his smile or the sound of his voice. He’s done that already, and he has a feeling Ace would want him to keep smiling and moving forward. But Yamato needs to cry for himself, this once. For all he wants that can never be, for all he never said and all he never realized until it was far, far too late.
Nami is the one to find him.
“I was wondering where you disappeared to,” she says casually. “Mind it if I join you?”
“Go ahead,” says Yamato without looking at her. His tears have dried and his voice is steady, but his eyes feel puffy and he suspects that if she got a good enough look at him, she would be able to tell what he’s been doing.
“You’ve been quiet today,” says Nami. “It must be such a change, after all your life on that one island.”
“It is,” Yamato agrees. And then, because he can’t bear to hold it in just now, he admits, “I spent so long thinking it would be Ace.”
Nami is quiet for a long moment.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice quiet, gentle as if she knows. “He was a good man.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Only very briefly. He appeared out of nowhere and rescued us from a marine with a logia fruit before Luffy knew how to control his haki, and then dropped by the ship to say hi and give Luffy his vivre card. It was so brief, but he left an impression—his strength, of course, but also his personality. We hadn’t even known Luffy had a brother, much less one so much stronger and polite.”
“Ace loved Luffy so much,” Yamato murmurs. “When he was happy and relaxed, he seemed to just…find any opportunity to bring up his brothers.”
“Brothers? He told you about Sabo too?”
“Hm? Yeah—he told me about how the three of them grew up. Their dreams, their sorrows, their hopes.”
“You were close,” Nami says, and there is a depth to her tone that makes Yamato look at her. There is a soft sorrow, a deep compassion in her eyes like she knows how much he grieves. Like she understands.
“He was only around for a few days,” Yamato murmurs. “I can’t claim that.”
Nami shakes her head. “It’s not about the length of time you spend with a person. It’s about the bond you build with them, and the place you give them in your heart.”
“I suppose,” Yamato says. “I don’t know that he knew he had a place in mine. He was the one to point out to me that my father could chain my body, but it was my choice to let him chain my heart, too. Ace set my heart free, but I don’t know if he knew that I—”
Yamato cuts himself off. He doesn’t want to say the words aloud—not now, far too late, where the person those words are intended for is no longer around to receive them.
“He knew,” Nami says, and there is an undercurrent of steel to her tone. “I promise, he knew.”
How do you know? Yamato wants to ask, but he looks at her, really looks, and realizes that he believes she does know.
“You have a person like that too,” he says, a statement more than a question.
“I do,” Nami smiles.
“Still alive?”
“Very much so,” Nami says.
“Tell me about them?”
And so Nami tells him about a girl gentle of heart who they met as an enemy; a brave girl in over her head but unwilling to give up, who never showed a tear until she was at ease with the Straw Hats—at which point she cried often, revealing how much she had needed a shoulder to cry on. Yamato hears of a girl who challenged Luffy and was challenged in return, whose kindness and love was never chipped away by the tremendous weight upon her shoulders.
Yamato has never heard of the kingdom of Alabasta, much less its princess, but he thinks Nefertari Vivi sounds like someone he would admire and respect.
At the very least, he can see how Nami loves Vivi, adores her through the years and the distance that lie between them, and he feels a little less alone.
Four Years Ago…
Ace only went to Onigashima to fight Kaido. Staying for days on end had never been part of the plan.
Yamato was a worthy opponent, but he was more than that.
Ace had seen a lot of things in Wano that made his heart burn with fury, but Yamato’s excuses for remaining chained to Kaido rubbed him particularly the wrong way. Yamato was a beacon in the darkness that is Wano, a full moon to light up the night. How dare he not see that? How dare he let the darkness of Kaido dim him?
But when Ace pointed this out, Yamato listened. He listened, and looking into his eyes, Ace thought he could see the shackles around his heart fall away.
And in some part of his heart, at that moment, Ace felt something far warmer than metal and far gentler than chains bind him and Yamato together.
He stayed several days on Onigashima, even sending his crew away, just to drink and talk with Yamato. When Yamato asked for a hair or a nail clipping, Ace plucked out a few strands of hair and handed them over without question. Ace slept whenever he got sleepy, be it in the middle of a conversation or a meal, but Yamato needed more scheduled sleeping breaks.
It was during one such sleeping break when Ace woke up and rolled onto his side to look at Yamato’s sleeping face facing his own.
Ace had met any number of people across the seas, but he’d never met anyone like Yamato. He’d never met a person whose very presence made him so compelled to open up that he found himself telling them all about his childhood, including Luffy’s ridiculous dream.
It was like something about Yamato was making Ace try his absolute best to open up his own chest and show him his very soul, and he didn’t know what to do with that.
There was a want he felt to be around Yamato, even just gazing upon his face as he slept—a complicated tangle of emotions all coalescing into a reluctance to leave him behind. It wasn’t reasonable. Ace was a pirate captain, and he didn’t want to remain here in Onigashima indefinitely—except he did want to remain with Yamato indefinitely, and this was a dissonance he’d never experienced before.
Ace wished he could remove the shackles around Yamato’s wrists as easily as he’d removed the shackles around his heart. He wished he could take Yamato with him—he wanted to stay with Yamato, and Yamato wanted to come with him. How much easier the world would have been if only those shackles could have been taken off.
And yet—the want he feels to keep Yamato was not quite like the want he’d felt recruiting any other member of his crew. This was far more intense, far more…selfish, in a way that went beyond his pirate crew.
Ace found himself wondering if Yamato found him as pretty to look at as he found Yamato. He caught himself wondering what it would be like to have Yamato by his side every morning to gaze upon, and every evening to drink and talk and laugh.
Ace sensed that he had to leave soon—that the longer he stayed with Yamato, the more difficult it would become to leave. He was a pirate. He’d had no intention of becoming Kaido’s subordinate before coming to Onigashima, and now that he had met Yamato, he would rather die than join the force that kept Yamato tethered to a place he so desperately wanted to leave.
Yamato’s eyes fluttered open, and Ace found himself drawn to him like gravity. He very nearly reached out across the distance between them to do—what? Something.
Whatever it was, this much he knew: if he did it, it would make it that much harder for him to leave.
Ace held himself in place and grinned at Yamato.
“I’ve got to set sail today.”
“Of course,” Yamato grinned back, and Ace felt sure it wasn’t wishful thinking that Yamato’s eyes echoed the sorrow of parting in Ace’s own heart, underneath the knowledge that parting was the only way forward for them right now.
As Ace was stepping off Onigashima, Yamato handed him a paper made with Ace’s hair, tearing off a corner to keep for himself—a corner that would inch toward Ace, Yamato demonstrated, allowing Yamato to find him wherever he might be in the world.
As he was sailing through the harbor, he heard Yamato’s voice and spun the striker around to look back—and there was Yamato, grinning and waving from the top of a cliff, white and luminous in the pale of dawn.
My moon, Ace found himself thinking, my guide in the darkest nights.
He was glad for the distance between them, which meant he was too far away for Yamato to see how his face was flaming at the leaps his own mind was making.
He would be back, he knew—if Yamato didn’t find his own way off Onigashima and seek Ace out first.
Ace waved to Yamato, letting his eyes feast on the sight of him on that cliff to carry him through the coming separation.
And maybe next time they saw each other, they would be in positions where Ace could call Yamato his.