Chapter Text
Ace wasn’t sure how long he had been back on the Moby Dick. Or, he thought it was the Moby Dick. It had to be…
The passage of time had for him, slowed to a crawl before snapping forward like a band that had been stretched too far. He could remember the screams, angry and otherwise as Luffy charged into the fray and he remembered heat hotter than his own flames as pain sheared his side as both brothers had been yanked unceremoniously from the jaws of death and defeat.
After that, things began to blur again.
Marco and Deuce circled him in shifts, checking on him, bandaging burns that even treated with phoenix flames wanted to stubbornly blister. They both refused to allow him to move, with one or the other sitting on the bed with Ace while wounds were recleaned and bandaged again and again. The whole process exhausted him even without the seemingly endless poking and prodding.
Slipping in and out of consciousness became the norm. Ace’s usual voracious appetite dulled through the joint efforts of pain and sickness. Other than his two attending physicians coming in to treat him and coax him to eat, he couldn’t remember anyone else passing through and on top of that, his room felt alien and strange. With the two men hovering over him, if not the Moby Dick, where could he be? He had to wonder how he got there. He should have been dead, or maybe he was dead and this was just some kind of fucked up memory.
Sleep became less of a release and more of an addition to his personal hell. Nightmares bled into delirium and hallucinations as the walls in the room more closely resembled his isolated cell in Impel Down than anything else. If this was what dying felt like, he was grateful he wouldn’t have to do it again—especially now, and if he wasn’t, he sure as hell was asking for it now—anything to stop the nightmares and the pain.
“Marco,” Deuce’s anxious voice cut through Ace’s nightmares with a scalpel’s sharpness, “Marco, he’s burning up.”
Hands that felt like ice pressed against Ace and he winced, eyes barely cracking open in response. It hurt too much to move and everything felt hot—hotter then he was used to. He could feel someone cup his face as they called his name, but it all sounded so far away...
Deuce swore as he darted out of the room. They needed ice and cool towels—anything to drag down Ace’s inhuman fever down. His heart hammered in his chest as he sprinted across the deck and down to the medical bay. Without a second thought, he began barking orders to the rest of the staff, throwing a cache of supplies together and began his return dash toward Ace’s room.
“Smoker…Smoker we need your help,” the young doctor blurted out as he caught the man in transit as his words ran together in a torrent. “Get anything you can to cool him off, he’s…” —sick, dying, I don’t know! He didn’t want to finish those words, unsure of what impact they would have, knowing that the marine had literally destroyed his own life for Ace’s.
In the room they’d set aside for Ace, damp, cold towels took turns pressed against his face and neck as Deuce watched Marco set the young pirate’s IV line to get fluids back into him, coupled with a cocktail of medication to fight whatever infection had decided to set in. As they checked and double-checked Ace’s responses, desperate to make sure that he was still actively conscious, the only words they received for their efforts came slurred and mumbled. It seemed the perfect kind of cruel joke, to have Ace brought back to them only to die from something as simple as an infection. Cruel, sick, and just unfair—he couldn’t die, not when they’d gotten this far. Not when... Deuce held his breath as Ace groaned, almost less responsive than he’d been before.
“With how hot he naturally runs, we need to keep cycling things a lot faster than we normally do. Just…swap and I’ll have a nurse bring us more on fifteen minute cycles until we get him back down to his normal.” Deuce could feel the stress headache starting to build behind his temples. It was one that had lingered far longer than he liked, but with their ongoing nightmare, it wasn’t likely to get better any time soon. He knew Marco didn’t need the instructions, but it felt better to say out loud, to have something in his ears other than the rasp of Ace’s breathing.
Except it didn't get better until it got worse...
The boon was, at least, despite the growing panic the two doctors watched unfurl from their new marine charge—despite every shitty slip of attitude Smoker carried constantly—for Ace's sake, he took orders without a second thought. He asked questions as he grasped for clarity even as his hands shook, and applied everything he learned immediately even as he struggled under the weight of his own barely managed pain.
"Hey, come on kid, stay with us. Ace—"
And while Smoker grappled with his own shifting identity, neither quite here nor there in a sea of loyalties where the world often demanded too loudly that a side be chosen and heeded—Marco and Deuce watched between baited breaths over their brother's faltering condition, as the marine who had bridged a gap so furiously wide and still found it in him to empathize with one of them.
"Don't do this to me—hold on!"
It took nearly two days to bring Ace back down...
Finding a wall for support, Deuce slumped against it. Exhaustion had long begun to set in and the ache in his joints remained a constant reminder of how much work they had done so far. Ace’s fever had broken, more or less, and he'd actually begun sleeping soundly. Sprawled out loosely in his bed next to his seated lover, Ace's head pressed up against Smoker’s thigh as one of the marine’s large hands pressed a damp cloth to the back of Ace's neck.
As Deuce collected himself and moved toward the open door, he lingered—for a moment hesitant to leave, not for the care he left Ace in, but for fear of fate choosing to turn on them again and snatch Ace up for once and for all.
“Watch him, please. Holler if it starts to get bad.”
Looking up only briefly, Smoker nodded, mute in his concentration.