Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You shouldn’t turn around. You know this. But knowing doesn’t stop you from doing, and so you turn around, and you bite back, and you lash out, and you’re punished for the effort. A fruit that overpowers your own, a fight you can’t win. 

You shouldn’t have turned around. You know this, but when Akainu ignores you and goes for Luffy, you know it, and desperation tastes like the blood in your mouth when you launch yourself toward that inevitability like you can stop the gears of fate from turning by shoving your bare hands into their teeth.

You should never have turned around. In your bones, past skin and muscle and all the way down to the marrow, you know it. Akainu’s boiling fist slams into Luffy while the kid’s looking up, the smoldering scraps of your goddamn vivre card fluttering in his fingers, and reality breaks down around you into fragments of moments. 

Luffy slumps around the fist embedded in him with a strangled cry; Akainu yanks that fist out; globules of magma fall hissing to the ground, and it’s only the acrid stench of cauterization that explains why it’s not blood painting those stones instead.

You say Luffy’s name, maybe, or try to as you fall to your knees next to him, catch him, hold him, beg him. He’s so small. So still. There’s a storm of cerulean and gold fending off the volcano behind you, but you only note it for the way the light hits Luffy’s glassy eyes. 

You say Luffy’s name, but it comes out as a cry that doesn’t sound like his name at all. You don’t know when it slipped from your control but your fire is everywhere, everything, the blood and bricks and dirt beneath turning to flames that roar up into air that’s boiling from the heat of it all, and even the admiral can’t risk staying close. You don’t care about him, don’t care about any of it anymore, because your heart is dead in your arms and no amount of warmth can ever bring him back to you. 

The fire roars, and you—you scream until your voice gives out and when it goes you go with it, you fall into the black, you run—for the first time, running—because the truth is right there and it burns. 

You didn’t save him. 

You can’t save him. 

You failed. 

The world beats this into your head that first time. Then you wake up to a world where Luffy’s still alive and it does it twice. Ten times. Twenty. Fifty. Still you claw at the strings that fate tied around your neck, gasping for air like a fish ripped from the ocean, kicking your feet like there’s anything left below, and you fall. 

You fall, and fall, and fall, and you think there’s gotta be a bottom somewhere you can splatter against in one final miserable contribution to the world that’s hated you from the moment you could in theory exist and despised you ever since you took your first breath and had the audacity to keep breathing, but there’s nothing and no one to stop your hurtling into the abyss. 

A hundred times. A hundred handfuls of a life stacked up on top of each other, a ladder of failure with success nowhere in sight. History doesn’t repeat exactly but it all ends the same way, the same nightmare, the same reality. 

You weren’t actually tracking them, at first. Didn’t understand what was happening. What it meant. Thought you were dreaming. God, you wish you were dreaming. The horror’s familiar these days, tamed like a pet, sitting ready on your shoulder whenever you bother to acknowledge it. 

Tell me this is a dream, you order it when you’re too long from sleep, and it laughs when it tells you no. 

So this might be your hundred and first time. Or it’s your hundred and twelfth, or hundred and fifteenth, or who even cares anymore. You’ve stopped caring about so much. 

And yet, this time, when the ice breaks under his sandal and he plunges into the water, you can’t help screaming his name. Can’t help diving in after him, because at least if you follow the ocean will have all three of you and you’ll be together, maybe, in some stupid and final way, for the brief instant before time resets. 

Even knowing how it ends, you can’t help fighting the ocean’s weight, fighting the water in your lungs, fighting, fighting, fighting, because you can’t give up. Not him. Not if it takes a thousand times and you can’t even speak by the end of it. It’s a promise you made on the fifth attempt and you’re going to see it through no matter how many times it kills you, because you can stop caring about so much but never him.

The ocean takes you, fills you up, and carries you down. Its currents, kicked up by the war waged in and around them, rip you and Luffy apart. You used to be able to swim. You think about that, as you drown, as you endure a way of dying that should be familiar by now but is as desperate and agonizing and slow as the very first time. 

You’re going to save him. You promised.

You think about this when your eyes open to Masked Deuce prodding you awake, the Spade Pirates flag snapping from the top of the mast you’d apparently fallen asleep against after battling a storm you don’t even remember anymore. The ocean is calm, the sun is shining, and it’s a beautiful day.

You’re going to save him, the world tells you, over and over again, as often as it tells you that you can’t. You have no choice. 

You have one choice, though: how. You’ve explored every crevice of that choice, tried every option you can think of, but it always ends the same way. 

Luffy dies. He dies in your arms, he dies in front of you, he dies behind you, he dies before you ever see him, he dies alone or with his crew or with you and he dies and he dies and he dies. He dies and you wake up alive and he’s still dead and it hurts, it always hurts, you refuse to let it do anything other than hurt because you do not want to know who you are if you don’t love him enough to grieve him.

This time, when you wake and the water in your lungs is just a nightmare again, you’re tired. More than that, you’re angry. A hundred pieces of a life that stutters over itself like a scratched record are still a kind of experience, and that experience is a molten core that aches with every beat of your heart. All this time, you still haven’t saved him. What haven’t you tried? What isn’t working? Why aren’t you enough?

You’ll never be enough. Can’t be. You’re not supposed to be here. So why the fuck does the world take him instead?

It’s not fair. It’s not right. 

You’ve tried so hard so many times to save him from the world. This time, you’re too furious to play protector, older brother, family. There’s no place in the fire for any of it.

If you can’t protect Luffy from the world, then you’ll burn the world down. 

Maybe it’s a good thing you get thrown back the moment he dies. Maybe the world that’s doing this to you is hoping you’ll show it mercy by letting you avoid the aftermath. 

You won’t. You are the aftermath, a hundred and however many deaths of it, and you are going to sear your grief into this broken fragment of history just waiting to be overwritten. 

The kid—because he’s a kid, Marco sees, can’t be older than twenty—doesn’t bother getting up when Whitebeard steps into the courtyard of what used to be a marine base. Now, there’s nothing left of the fortress’s mighty battlements but scorched sea stone tossed around like children’s building blocks, bits of slagged metal, and ashes drifting in the midday breeze. This is only identifiable as a courtyard because it’s mostly flat, and that’s only by the grace of the rubble falling elsewhere.

The kid’s just…sitting there, in the center of it all. He would’ve had an easy view of the Moby Dick’s approach with the main gates blown off. Plenty of time to run. But he didn’t. 

As they approach, Marco takes a brief inventory of him. There isn’t much to see: he’s got an orange hat shadowing his features, no shirt, a four-letter ASCE tattoo on his arm with the A and S crossed out, black shorts with a sheathed dagger at the waist, and black boots in dire need of a shine. 

The base, though. Marco’s never seen destruction like this, even when Pops and Roger clashed years ago. This isn’t just destruction, it’s complete and utter desolation. It’ll be years before anything will grow here again, if it ever does. If the wind doesn’t just scour the ashes and dirt away and leave a sad and barren rock behind.

They come to a stop, a line of commanders, Whitebeard a half-step ahead of them. The kid looks up at the strongest man in the world and doesn’t even blink. 

“I asked you to leave me alone,” he says, and Marco almost does a double take. When he opens his mouth, there’s light crawling up his throat, flickering and dangerous with every word. Fire. Even when he’s not burning anywhere they can see, he’s still stoking his flames. 

Marco gets a very, very bad feeling. The kid’s not right, and that’s what they all should’ve expected from someone who can find a way to call Whitebeard’s snail out of the blue and tell him to back off. 

Not that telling an emperor of the sea to back off will ever do anything. Whitebeard had been so surprised by it that his laugh hadn’t come until after Ace—that’s all he goes by now, just Ace, no family or crew or anything to claim him—hung up. 

There’s none of that laughter now, now that they know what prompted that call. Ace might not want any epithets anymore, but he’s earned a new one anyway. Gone is Fire Fist; it’s Hellfire these days. Undirected, wild, and distinctly damned. 

He hates the name, that’s clear in the violence that erupts whenever someone says it to his face. At least, according to the stories. Most of which come from the marines.

“I don’t wanna fight you,” he continues, pushing himself to his feet. Despite taking on this whole base by himself, there’s no sign of injury on him, no hint of strain while he stares at them. More fire flickers intermittently behind his steel-gray eyes. 

And yet, Marco realizes, for all that tightly leashed power, he looks awful. His hair is greasy and hangs over his face, there’s stubble from a beard barely tended, bags like bruises squat under his eyes, and his cheeks are sunken. His fingernails are cracked, his freckled skin covered in grime. His clothes are torn and badly mended, like he couldn’t be bothered to do more than the bare minimum. His whole body is lean with clear signs of deprivation. 

To his left, Thatch purses his lips, having noticed the same. 

“I find that hard to believe,” their captain replies. “You’ve been picking a fight with the whole world, brat.”

When Ace laughs in Whitebeard’s face, it lacks any of the false bravado Marco’s used to hearing. If anything, it’s tinged with a bit of hysteria. He’s heard that before too, but not like this. Not from anyone entirely unbothered by Whitebeard towering over him. 

Whitebeard’s grip on his bisento tightens and his frown turns heavy with displeasure. They hadn’t known exactly what they would find when reports of Ace’s attack on a nearby marine base reached them, but this? This just makes Marco’s heart sink. 

“Is that all you want?” Whitebeard challenges. “Is that why you’ve sailed through my territory? Hurt my family?”

A hint of irritation crosses Ace’s face. It causes the fires behind his eyes to burn brighter, drowning out the gray of his irises in shifting torrents of red, orange, and yellow. “I only sailed through to get where I needed to go. Jinbe was alive when I left that island.” 

Marco shakes his head. Jinbe still kicking isn’t the point. The kid doesn’t get it at all. He really thought a call in the wake of that insult—before Whitebeard had even gotten word of the event—would be enough. 

“If you’re fighting the world, you’re fighting my family, and you’re fighting me. You issued a challenge by attacking Jinbe, brat.”

Ace’s irritation grows. Flames lick at his shoulders. The day, already warm, becomes hot and Marco resists the urge to pull his shirt away from where sweat has stuck it to his skin. “I’m not challenging you. You’re not the problem, old man. The navy, the World Government, they’re the ones causing this. They’re the ones to blame.”

Whitebeard snorts. He’s heard this kind of speech a hundred times; for his part, Marco’s heard it a couple dozen. “You’d find more company with the Revolutionary Army than pirates.”

“I’m a pirate,” Ace snaps, so quick and hot that embers fleck the air by his lips.

“You’re a child lashing out,” Whitebeard corrects. He shifts his weight and Marco knows what’s coming next won’t be pretty. But he thinks of the trail of pain and destruction in Hellfire’s wake, and his pool of sympathy turns shallow. Not every casualty in his crusade was a marine or politician or pirate. His flames weren’t discerning enough for that. He’d razed an entire island just because of a rumor that a navy admiral was born there. And when that admiral had tracked him down, a nearby fleet of merchant vessels had all been caught in the crossfire. 

When Whitebeard moves, the breeze picks up and catches his coat at a better angle to sweep it to one side. The family behind him finally gets a good look at Ace—and Ace at them. 

The temperature spikes so fast Marco’s next inhale scorches his throat. Ace is across the whole courtyard in a blink, killing intent thickening the air and flaming haki-coated fist headed for Teach’s face. There’s a brief flare of flame hanging in the air where he’d used his fruit to alter his course clear around Whitebeard. 

Whitebeard moves faster than anyone, even Marco, who’s half-transformed but knows he won’t make it. He swings his bisento around and catches Ace’s fist and flames on the flat of his blade. The impact makes the legendary weapon ring like a struck bell, and with the sound comes an explosion of black lightning that sends everyone, even Marco, sprawling. Only Ace and Whitebeard are unaffected. 

Picking himself up, Marco realizes with a tightening in his chest that Ace has conqueror’s haki. He’s not just any brat with a powerful fruit. He’s worse. 

With a grunt of effort, Whitebeard shoves Ace back. Ace flips in the air and lands on his feet, eyes ablaze with fury while he skids to a stop. 

“Move,” he snarls, and there’s an animal where the man used to be. Whitebeard squares off with him, bisento in hand catching the light in the wrong way. Marco stares, stunned. 

There’s a crack in the blade. 

“Back!” he orders his family, that bad feeling crystallizing. “Everyone back!”

He moves toward Teach because, for whatever reason, he’s more of a target than Pops. Jozu has the same idea, and it’s a good thing too, because in the next blink, Ace there again. Getting past Pops again. Jozu catches his flaming kick on crossed arms that glitter with diamond skin, but even braced, he’s brought down to a knee before Marco is there to knock Ace away with a swirl of blazing azure wings. Midair, Ace turns to flame and splits in half around Whitebeard’s swinging weapon, then reforms and dodges the follow-ups. 

He’s fighting Whitebeard, he should be, any sane man would focus on that alone, but he’s only defending until his next chance to reach Teach. 

“Coward!” he yells when that chance isn’t quick to arrive. 

“What did you do-yoi?” Marco grunts as he bats aside a couple flaming spears strong enough to leave scorch marks his fruit has to heal. 

“I don’t know!” Teach says, still scrambling for distance. There’s no cover amid the ruins, and the layer of ash makes it hard to tell what’s level ground and what isn’t. Thatch is the one guiding him, hand on Teach’s wrist so the guy can keep an eye on the one gunning for his head. “I’ve never seen this kid before!”

Could’ve fooled me, Marco thinks. Ace is acting like Teach did something unforgivable, but Marco can’t think of anything in Teach’s time since joining the family. Besides, Ace’s trail of chaos starts in the East Blue, and Marco’s pretty sure Teach doesn’t have any notable history there. 

Ace’s furious voice cuts through the clash of weapons and crackle of flames warring against fractures in the air: “Hiding behind your crew when you’d betray them in a heartbeat! You don’t deserve to carry his mark!”

“And your crew?” Whitebeard thunders, incensed at the insults to his family. “Where are they?”

Right. It’s easy to forget, the way he is now, but Ace’s debut was with some rookie crew. The…the Spade Pirates, or something. No one had heard from them in a while. 

“Safe,” Ace growls. “I’m not dragging them into this.”

The answer catches Marco by surprise, and he’s not the only one. The way Ace acts, Marco half-expected that he’d done in his own crew, or that this vendetta against the world was because the world had taken them from him. But no.

That’s the end of the conversation, though, because Teach is almost to the beach and the skiff that can take him back out to the Moby Dick. Ace’s eyes flare blue—blue!—and once again he blitzes across the distance in a blink. Pops is ready for him this time, though, and his bisento catches Ace on the arm, turning his lunge into a backwards tumble while the ground behind him tears itself apart for a hundred yards from the force of the blow and the man and fruit behind it. 

For a second, the ashen haze hanging in the air obscures their view, and Marco dares to hope Ace was taken down by the blow.

But Ace staggers to his feet amid the rubble, scowls down at the arm hanging at his side, and shakes it out while the sheen of haki retreats from the skin. His roll through the ash has left swathes of his body painted black, and his hat dangles over his back, kept in place by the cord around his neck. 

“Fine,” he mutters. He spreads his hands and they break up into flames. His wrists and forearms follow suit, the flames growing and growing, until there’s a tidal wave bearing down on the beach. Its edges move swiftly to cut off their escape. Those bringing the skiff in close have to back off to avoid the fire.

 Marco shifts to his phoenix form and braces behind his wings for the heat of the main wave. He’s vaguely aware of Pops clearing a massive swath of the flames with a single swing only to find that Ace isn’t where he’d been. 

The flames hit, but they don’t hurt. Instead, they seem to part around Marco, warming without burning. Cold realization cuts through the haze. 

It’s not a tidal wave. It’s a smokescreen. 

“Teach!” he yells, voice tinged with panic. Observation haki has Ace all around them; the kid’s split himself up amid the flames, several dozen sources producing ever more fire, making it impossible to tell where his next attack is coming from. But it also makes him a big target, and one of those pieces takes a hit from Pops, another dozen suffer the commanders’ defense, but one—one makes it through. 

Marco’s fast. Not as fast as Jiru, but fast. 

He’s not fast enough. 

There’s Ace, body wreathed in flames, only his head, chest, and outstretched arm made flesh. In that arm is his dagger, and that dagger’s blade is embedded in Teach’s neck. Teach’s haki-coated arm had aimed for Ace’s chest, but he’d misjudged the angle, scraped ribs instead of breaking them.

“You’re never getting that fruit,” Ace snarls, and Teach’s last expression before Ace rips the blade out sideways and his body goes slack is one of complete surprise. 

For a second, as the flames flood back into Ace and Teach’s body settles, no one moves. Jozu, two steps to the right and body smoking from another attack he’d turned aside, is staring. So is Thatch, his grip on his brother released so he could fend off a pair of fiery blue lances still smoldering in the ashes at his feet. 

Ace’s shoulders drop. There’s blood pouring down his body, mingling with the ash, and he’s favoring his left leg. One of his eyes is bruising, and his nose is crooked. He’s holding his left arm a little stiff. That smokescreen ploy hadn’t come without consequences. 

The bit of his chest where Teach’s last attack hit is already turning black.

He sheathes his dagger and, with some difficulty, pulls his hat back onto his head. All his aggression is gone, his overwhelming haki pulled back tight to his skin. 

“I know you won’t forgive it,” he says, not even turning to Pops, who’s just as stunned at his own inability to save his son as the rest of them at their own failure to protect their brother. “Not this time. I…I don’t always get to him. It never ends well if I don’t. I had to do it now.” 

He lets his hand fall from his hat and finally faces Whitebeard. There’s no hint of guilt or shame in his face; just determination. And a little bit of pride. “He didn’t deserve you.”

Pops’s knuckles turn white and his bisento shakes. The ground by his feet is cracking, the air itself trembling. There are tears in his eyes. 

Before he can bring word or weapon to bear, Ace breaks up into flames. Those flames shoot into the air in random patterns that not even Izo can track. 

Marco takes off faster than he’s ever flown before. The traces of Ace’s presence move at dizzying speed, but he’s not angling for the open ocean. Marco understands why a moment later: docked at a small bay on the backside of the island is a bobbing yellow single-person craft. Ace’s ship. 

He and Ace reach it at the same time, and Ace’s net of flames intercepts Marco’s diving kick that would’ve reduced the ship to splinters. Reverting from his Phoenix form, Marco seizes the momentum. They devolve into a flurry of close-quarters blows, their every motion kicking up a flurry of ash and trailing blue and orange. 

It’s not like any other fight Marco’s been in. For one, his main goal is destroying the boat, and taking down Ace is secondary. For another, Ace is going out of his way to not hurt Marco. All his moves are defensive, and more than once he takes a hit he could’ve avoided if he was willing to lose his ship. 

Little by little, Ace gets more desperate. They both know the rest of the Whitebeards are closing in. 

When Ace curses and switches to offense, the level playing field tilts alarmingly in his direction despite his injuries. Hits that merely shoved before now bruise, and Marco finds most of his energy dedicated to healing, and that slows him down—just enough for Ace to get past his guard and land a heavy chop to his throat. 

Choking, Marco falls to one knee while black spots dance in the corners of his vision. Ace doesn’t finish him, though. 

By the time Marco’s blinked his eyes clear and staggered to his feet, Ace is a rapidly disappearing blur on the water, black flag bearing that crossed out A from his tattoo snapping in the wind. 

Chapter Text

You never wanted to fight family. You’ve been a fighter your whole life, and you’ve fought family, hurt family—but you don’t want to, not anymore, not since that crying kid who deserves to live more than you ever will said he thinks you deserve it too. 

So in the days after you trade blows with the only father who’s ever going to matter and turn against yourself the second and no less valuable family you’ve ever had, you take out the pain and anger on everything in your path. 

The world obliges, throwing Cipher Pol and marines and pirates and bounty hunters at you in waves so dense you struggle to breathe. Sleep slips through your fingers, your haki—always active, now, just enough to warn—waking you when an attack closes in. Food is a luxury you rarely afford, but at least some of the ships that break against your rage have stores you can raid before the ocean claims its due.

You’re barely a person, these days. Those words to Whitebeard were the first you spoke in weeks. You’re a wreck and you know it, but you can’t bring yourself to care. This attempt is a waste, doesn’t matter, you know how it ends. It’ll all get reset, you know, but in a plea to the world that keeps digging up your grave: let me let go. Just this once, you need it to let you burn up until you burn out, let you let loose all the chaos and despair tearing up your thoughts, or you’ll lose your mind. 

Maybe you already lost it. Maybe this is how you lose it. You can’t know. What you do know is how to fight, keep fighting, so that’s what you do. You fight, make an enemy of every friend you’ve ever had, make new enemies besides, and stack regret upon regret so you can set them all alight as a pyre to the man you used to be. The man who wasn’t enough.

Whitebeard’s territory is forbidden to you. There isn’t a soul on the seas who doesn’t know the emperor wants you dead. Any confrontation is going to end badly; there’s no way to explain what Teach could’ve been. There’s no proof, wouldn’t be any for years. So you steer clear, only crossing those invisible boundaries when the marines force your hand. You try to make it quick, at least, in apology. You wish this was one of the attempts where you got Pops on your side; those are often the only ones when you can forget, for a brief aching moment, where this all leads.

That’s what you were trying the most, by the end. Getting help. Not at first; you alone were sent back, you alone had to fix things. A litany of failures tore that belief out of your head. You will never be able to do this alone. 

In a few attempts, you tried reaching out to Shanks. Tried explaining what was happening, how it always ended, how you could use his help. Only twice did you succeed in getting that help, and both those times ended the same as the rest, just with two protectors failing instead of one. 

In this attempt, you don’t bother. You’re not a protector, after all. Not this time. As long as you leave Shanks’s people alone, he’ll do the same. You’ve had a couple close calls—more in the past two months than ever before—but so far you’ve been able to avoid any direct confrontation with anyone in his fleet. 

There are some enemies you’ve avoided in the past, too. For Luffy’s sake. This time, they’re targets just like the rest. The marines are your priority, but they’re not the only ones interested in putting a stake in your heart.

Kaido in your eyes is factories choking Wano and poisonous fruits. You dismantle his entire supply chain and relish any encounter with his people along the way. He wants your head; you want his. Time will tell when you both have the opportunity to get what you want.

Big Mom is the only one you haven’t seen much of in your war on the world. It’s coming, you know it is, but for now it’s fine for her to stay out of your crosshairs. Even the greatest fires can go out when they get stretched too thin. 

That’s what you feel like, right now, almost a year after you woke up and threw away everything and everyone you cared about: thin. A fraying bit of rigging struggling to hold the ship steady against the storm of rage that seems to surge any time you dare to think about furling the sails. There can’t be rest. Can’t be anything but retribution. How can you possibly think of resting in a world determined to kill your brother?

But you’re still human, even after everything, and even if the world is your enemy, not everyone in it shares the blame. 

Sabaody Archipelago was never an unblemished bastion of peace and prosperity. Within its groves, thieves and slavers and pirates and black market stalls have always thrived. The only thing that changes with time is how deep in the shadows the underground needs to be. 

These days, the shadow is all but gone. All the cover’s been ripped away, the wounds beneath laid bare for the world to see. 

And too many people are stuck arguing that it’s not really bleeding, or that the bleeding is healthy, or on and on with the inane reasons to justify allowing the worst of the world to carry on unhindered.

Sighing, Sabo leans back in his chair and stares up at the lamp overhead. Connected by a chain to the ceiling, it sways with the gentle rocking of his and Koala’s ship. It’ll be time for him to take watch soon. He should put out the lamp then. No need to burn more midnight oil than necessary. 

His eyes fall back to the paper with his drafted report. It’s all in code that makes it a vapid vacation guide to the uninformed, but anyone in the know will be able to decipher its contents within an hour.

There isn’t much to say. The biggest news is that the archipelago appears to have stabilized somewhat after Hellfire ripped through it several months ago. His attack left eight celestial dragons and countless marines dead, seven groves uninhabitable, and the archipelago in chaos. The marines seem to think things didn’t go any further because of Marineford’s proximity; others are pretty sure it’s only a matter of time until he comes back and attacks Marineford itself.

Sabo’s thinking even the pirate, who’s clearly operating on fewer scruples than most, is smart enough to avoid that flavor of suicide. Then again, he already killed Akainu, and word is he clashed on equal footing with Whitebeard, so who’s to say what he’s capable of.

Either way, Sabaody appears to be settling on a direction of less World Government influence. The number of marine controlled groves has shrunk to barely half what it was before, and maintaining those groves required stationing Aokiji there full-time. For now, seems that’s the status quo, at least until the day Hellfire comes back. 

Sabo taps his pen. He wouldn’t…right?

No point guessing the pirate’s actions right now. He rolls up the report and passes it off to the messenger bird waiting patiently in the open porthole. “Thanks,” he tells it before it flaps away on near-silent wings. It’ll reach Baltigo by morning. Some matters are just not fit for a call. 

Speaking of, his transponder snail is ringing. He closes the porthole and picks up the receiver. There are only so many people who have his number. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end is frantic, the words coming in a deluge of panic and fear. Sabo’s forced to piece it together in the moments the revolutionary on the other end pauses for breath.

Hellfire, headed for Pineyard. Pineyard, a small forest island near the start of the New World with valuable lumber that just rejected the World Government. In the wake of the chaos in Sabaody, their marine protection had been called to the archipelago, leaving them defenseless, and they hadn’t seen the point in staying under the government’s thumb when they weren’t seeing any benefit. 

The revolutionaries had sent a small number of people to help the fledgeling island government make the transition, and those delegates are still there, directly in the line of fire—along with every other innocent on the island. They’re trying to evacuate but need more ships, and Sabo’s is in the area. 

“We’ll head there immediately,” he says. “Do we know when Hellfire will get there?”

A negative in response. They’ll just have to hurry. He hangs up and rushes up to the deck to share the news with Koala. 

Pineyard is chaos. An island so recently thrown into upheaval with the marines leaving and pirates attacking and a whole new government, now forced to evacuate on any and all ships available. 

“We’ve already spread word to everyone on the island,” a harried young revolutionary who looks like she stepped fresh from a newsroom explains when Sabo and Koala arrive. “They’re coming here, through the port town, and we’re loading them on boats as fast as we can. I told them to leave most of their belongings behind—we don’t have the space. Some didn’t listen. It’s been…it’s been a very long night.”

Sabo offers her a reassuring shoulder squeeze. “You did well to get it this far. Take a minute to rest; Koala and I will fill in.”

She sinks onto a nearby barrel with a weary nod. 

“I’ll head into town and see how long the outlying villages will be in getting here,” Koala says. 

Sabo nods. “I’ll keep directing things here.”

He goes down to the pier, a task made difficult by the press of bodies. So many people are in their nightclothes, bleary-eyed and disheveled from the midnight journey. He’s struck by how quiet is. Even the children’s crying is muted by the rumble and swish of so many feet and so many clothes pressing so tight together. The medley of multiple people’s day-old perfume and cologne makes his nose itch. To his left, the shadow of a ship retreats from the dock. It sits low in the water; packed to capacity. He hopes it can still move fast enough to get to a safe distance. 

Checking in with the other revolutionaries and local leaders coordinating the evacuation effort nets Sabo the estimate that they have another hour before everyone’s away. Moreover, there’s a near certainty that people are getting left behind. They can’t know everyone got word. 

He’s mulling over how to handle that issue when he catches a glimpse of a young boy on the edge of the dock dropping his stuffed sea king plushie. The toy teeters over the edge. 

Sabo scoops it up before it can fall and pulls the boy away from a tumble into the water. 

“Are you okay?” Sabo asks the kid, who can’t be older than six. He takes back the brightly colored plushie and clutches it like it’s a lifeline. “Where’s your guardian?”

“W-what?”

Sabo kneels to be level with him. “Your family? Are they here?”

The kid’s lip wobbles and Sabo silently urges him to keep it together. “I dunno.”

“Okay. Are you lost?”

The threat of tears only grows. Sabo switches tactics. 

“How about I pick you up and we can look for your family together? I bet they’re looking for you too.”

A sniffle and a nod. Good. Sabo hauls him up and settles him on his shoulders, and after a second of fear, the kid realizes he’s stable and seems to enjoy being up so high. He rests his arms on Sabo’s hat, which…those dents can probably be worked out later. Hopefully.

Sabo scans the throngs of people for anyone looking frantic…which, aside from everyone who looks exhausted and scared, is still dozens upon dozens of people. 

After a minute, he gets lucky. A bearded fellow catches his eye and then looks over Sabo’s head. Relief carves itself into his face and then he’s swiftly forcing his way through the crowd like a ship cutting through the waves. 

“Vinny, oh, Vinny,” he says, reaching for the kid, who’s reaching back. Sabo hands him over and the two—father and son, he’d guess—embrace. “Thank you, thank you.”

“It was nothing. Stay safe.”

They melt into the crowd. Sabo steps away from it, casting a critical gaze toward the remaining ships. Are there enough? There are only three still boarding, one of which is his and Koala’s, and none of them are large. So many people remain, never mind anyone who didn't get word of the evacuation. He starts running the numbers only to stop when the distant horizon on the other side of the island lights up. Sunrise? But no, it can’t be past three in the morning. 

He sees the newsie revolutionary running toward him and knows what she’s going to say. He hands her back the reins of the evacuation effort and takes off for the other side. Maybe he can delay Hellfire. He has no delusions of talking the pirate down, but every minute is potentially dozens of people saved. 

Koala joins him by the edge of town. “I’m not letting you do this alone,” she says before he can protest. 

The light on the horizon gets brighter and brighter while they sprint through the old forest full of towering trees that is Pineyard’s claim to fame. Centuries old or not, they’ll all go up like matchsticks if Hellfire gets his way. 

Towering forest gives way to a small empty village gives way to shifting sand. He and Koala skid to a stop on the beach, the both of them stunned by the scene in the distance. Destroyed navy battleships, still blazing as they sink and casting the whole scene in bloody light, litter the ocean, their masts and broken timber like bones sticking out above the water. There must be forty of them, if not more, and nearly all are alight. The faint booms of cannon fire are few and far between, and growing fewer and farther between with each ship that goes down in a torrent of flames. 

The scene is hundreds and hundreds of yards away, and still, Sabo can feel the heat washing over his face as one such torrent lights up the night. It’s like some kind of New World weather phenomenon. An unnatural disaster.

“Sabo,” Koala whispers. 

“I know.”

Hellfire. There’s no doubt in his mind. But why are there marines here? And why so many ships? Were they chasing him? His gut tells him the timing is too convenient for that. Hellfire’s ship is notoriously fast, too; a fleet this size couldn’t keep up. 

A shadow blots out the flames, and Sabo realizes there’s a marine vessel limping toward the beach. Somehow, it escaped Hellfire’s fury. 

Or not, he revises when the light catches on all the damage punched through the craft’s hull. It’s a miracle it’s still floating. Or…a miracle that it’s sinking so slowly.

It’s also huge. Not the standard battleship. 

He sucks in a breath. “Buster call.”

Koala stiffens. “They wouldn’t. So soon?”

They both know the World Government can and would make an example of Pineyard. They had other islands with good lumber; there wasn’t anything critical about this place. But if they could stop easy access to high-quality lumber that isn’t under their control in the New World, they would. Is that why Hellfire was headed this way? Chasing the fleet the revolutionaries hadn’t caught wind of?

The battle cruiser is listing in the water. Still dozens of yards out, its keel gives way with a groan and crack and frothing of water at its side like the ocean itself is hungering for what it carries. Marines abandon ship and swim for it as the vessel splits in two and sinks, dragging down a half-dozen of them with it. 

When the surviving marines make it to the beach, none of them are quick to brandish their waterlogged weapons at the revolutionaries. Quite the opposite. 

“Help, please,” begs an ensign, unable to even stand. “He’s coming. He’s coming!”

Sabo’s eyes flick to the water. No cannons are firing anymore. One particular bit of flame, at first easily mistaken for a floating ember, is getting closer. Hellfire on his infamous one-man ship, coming to finish the job. 

Sabo flexes his fingers and spares a moment to be grateful the evacuation is on the island’s other side. 

You’re tired. Tired to your bones. You light the marines up like torches, their ships like braziers, and you watch the reflections on the water burn because your eyes can’t focus on the real world anymore. They would’ve destroyed the whole island, killed everyone on it. It’s luck you ran into the fleet. Happenstance. They would’ve lived, if only you weren’t here, but there’s nothing in you able to mourn them. You can’t find mercy in yourself anymore. There was once enough to cause guilt; that’s dead and gone, withered from lack of care. 

Your body is tired, your mind is tired, but your rage—it burns as hot as it has always burned, solid and steady and searing in your chest. Something glowing under your ribs when the night turns dark enough, something that lives in your throat and shines behind your eyes. It’s from there you find the strength to turn Striker and chase the ship that tried to run while you teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. 

Waves slap against Striker’s hull, a rhythm that’s put you to sleep more than once when you let your guard down. You focus on the beating of your own heart instead. 

The island that won’t be destroyed today looms large; you won’t reach it before the last ship does, but that’s fine. You can already see that vessel breaking up, marines jumping overboard. The town past them is dark. Asleep, probably. You hope the fleet is sunk and gone long before anyone wakes up. The people don’t need to know how close they came to annihilation. They’ll wake, they’ll see you here, and they’ll panic, and you can get them to evacuate before the government tries again. This time, they’ll leave long before any threat gets close. 

You hit the beach, Striker’s hull sliding smoothly up the sand until it comes to rest. You jump out and see the marines in a standoff with two people you don’t recognize. It’s dark, hard to see details, so with a wave of your hand you release a swarm of fireflies to light up the scene. 

The marines flinch and panic at the sight of the lights, but the other two merely tense. 

“Are you here to destroy this island, Hellfire?” the nearest one—a man—calls. Orange light traces a long black coat, white cloth (napkin, you think, cravat, Sabo’s ghost corrects), blond hair, black top hat, blue goggles. In his hand, his weapon: a pipe. 

Sabo’s ghost. Sabo. You stare, uncomprehending. Not enough sleep?

You blink. He’s still there.

Sabo’s alive. It’s not a joke. Wouldn’t be funny if it was, isn’t funny when it’s not. You laugh anyway. You can’t help it. It breaks out of you, a short burst to start, and then your control fails completely. The fury in you looks at Sabo and doesn’t understand what it sees, and that—that—is funny. It doesn’t understand. You don’t understand. The whole world can’t understand. 

You laugh and laugh, and you’d forgotten the feeling, the sound, the helpless little gasps for air between peals that come from so deep in your stomach you can almost taste them. Almost. All you actually taste is salt. 

Sabo’s alive. Luffy’s dead—not yet, he will be—but Sabo’s alive. Sabo’s been alive the whole time. Every time. 

Every. Single. Time. 

Your laughter dies, because it’s not funny and never was. Sabo’s alive, standing there, and all your anger tries to voice itself all at once so all that comes out is a strangled scream when you launch yourself at him. 

If he’d dodged, if he’d deflected, if he’d done anything other than counter, maybe you could’ve taken the reins back from the fury that’s turned brother into traitor. But he doesn’t, because he’s a fighter, just like you, so he fights, and you fight, and it’s a bloody and ugly thing there on that beach with the burning fleet lighting up the whole horizon like the sunrise. 

You don’t want interference, you don’t want the Whitebeards protecting Teach, the marines taking cheap shots, so you detonate the lights and put up a wall of fire that leaves the two of you in a world all your own, and while you know what the grander world deserves, you’re not sure what to do with this one quite yet. 

There aren’t words for the fury seething inside you, so what passes over your lips comes out as snarls, and Sabo who isn’t dead and whose eyes are wild in the firelight responds in kind, and the way he moves is so familiar and foreign it stokes the flames like fresh tinder. 

He splits your lip and you blacken his eye; he gets you in a hold and you break free when you slam the back of your head into his chin; he stands up and you tackle him down again. There’s blood on you and fire in you, but Sabo’s already got the scars, and it’s that, it’s that, that keeps your fire away from him and your hysteria from getting too deep to drown in. 

That’s your reunion. It’s fists and flesh and rage and grief, but you’re the only one crying. 

You’re the only one. But you’re not. Not anymore.

Hellfire tries to kill him for a long time, but Sabo’s still alive when the pirate goes for a punch, misses, falls to the sand, and doesn’t get up. Sabo’s swaying on his feet, but he’s alive, and after a glance at the fleet that’s sunk almost entirely below the waves, its final bits of driftwood still smoldering, he’s wondering how that’s true. 

With the net of flames still roaring, still calling up the worst knot of panic in his stomach that leaves him cold despite everything, still blocking his view of anything except the distant horizon over the ocean, it’s clear Hellfire isn’t dead. Sabo slowly kneels next to him, fingers poised for a skull-cracking strike, but the question in those crackling flames pulls him up short. All that fire, none of it aimed at him. Why?

Hellfire makes a sound. Sabo tenses, ready, but the only movement is the rise and fall of his chest. The sound comes again: snoring, muffled by sand. He’s asleep. 

Little by little, the flame net shrinks until there’s nothing left. Sabo’s still kneeling over Hellfire, still ready to kill, and he sees Koala, singed but whole, standing by a pile of defeated marines. Relief spills out from her eyes and she falls to her knees. Sabo looks back down at Hellfire. He’d been crying too. His face is hidden by sand now but Sabo knows what he’d seen. 

He makes a decision and hopes it’s the right one. 

Chapter Text

You wake up in chains. Heavy chains, sea stone chains, and they hold your wrists uncomfortably high and wide over your head while you shiver with cold. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Your fire is gone, drowned, and without it you’re too small in your own skin. Not enough. Never enough. 

One more breath and you get a grip on yourself. The shivers stop. 

Your first thought after they’re gone is Impel Down; your second, that you really should’ve guessed this is how your tantrum ends. The world’s had enough and it’s sent you back to this hole to remind you that it can. Burn, little thing, it says. Burn all you want. It doesn’t matter. It never will. 

You wake up in chains and you fall asleep in chains, uncaring about staying awake because there’s nothing ahead of you but a slow path to a death so you can start again. A couple times you pull on the chains, but your starved muscles start shaking long before the shackles start to protest. They won’t feed you enough for you to get your strength back.

You wish you’d done more, this time. Burned brighter. Hotter. Reduced Marineford to ashes and left Impel Down nothing but a flooded ruin. For that, there isn’t a next time. This was your chance to get it all out of your system, and you couldn’t even get that right. 

You can’t save him. But at least, after this, you’ll have the chance to try again. Again, again, and again. Until one day it works, or until the day the world decides ripping you out of time isn’t fun anymore. 

In your dreams, you chase Luffy around the woods. You kick him off bridges, trigger landslides on his head, and lead him to crocodile-infested waters. Each time, he comes back, and you’re relieved. He keeps coming back. You’ve got no right to do any less. 

You wake up still in chains and Sabo’s ghost is sitting across from you, setting a small plate of food down as he lowers himself into a cross-legged position. 

“Did you ever go back?” you ask, because ghost or real, you need to know. He looks at you curiously, and anyone else would only see that curiosity, but you can look deeper than anyone else, can see the carefully contained and concealed wariness beneath, and as deep as you have to look is how deep that wariness cuts. You don’t want family to look at you like that. 

Your lip is still split from his punch. His eye is still blackened. Hasn’t been more than a day. 

You don’t want to fight family. With your anger still burning but not howling, that’s all Sabo is: family. 

“Back to Pineyard?” 

“Dawn.”

Sabo’s eyebrows lift and you know you’ve caught him by surprise. Some of that wariness slips from his control, just enough to twist your stomach. “Why would I go there?”

Maybe your stomach is twisting from other things, too. Hunger, from the food. Guilt, from attacking your brother. And grief, because that brother is a stranger looking at another stranger. 

You have to ask. You have to, even though you know the answer. “Do you remember me?”

Those eyebrows tick higher and then come down low. After a beat, he reaches for the food and picks up a bowl of stew and a spoon. 

“You should eat,” he says. Your empty stomach feels as likely to reject any food as accept it, but you can’t refuse, not Sabo. 

You weren’t often sick as a child, but once, shaking with fever, you still stubbornly went out to meet your only friend and promptly collapsed on his doorstep two hours after you were supposed to be there. Your memories of those miserable three days are hazy, but you remember a scene like this one, Sabo spooning something warm and filling and bland enough to be safe into your mouth whenever you were coherent enough to recognize what he was doing.

It takes a few minutes of silent work to empty the bowl. Another minute of Sabo breaking up the loaf of bread, soaking up the remaining remnants of broth with its pieces, and offering those too. 

It’s obvious he thinks you’re crazy. He hides it as well as he hides his fear of what you’ve done, what you could do, but it’s still obvious. Maybe he thinks the food can bring you back to your senses, let the two of you have a coherent conversation; you know you look like the wreck you are. And the food does help, it settles your thoughts, quiets your stomach after some initial grumblings, but in doing those things it lets you feel the exhaustion you’ve been ignoring for months. You’re a match, you lit yourself at both ends, and now Sabo’s put out the flames and there’s so very little of you left to burn. 

It hits you, then, that you didn’t wake up. You should’ve, the second Sabo got close. The moment he stepped into this cramped little stone cell that, now that you’re looking, is more just something hewn out of a cave with bars buried in the rock than a tomb a league under the sea. It isn’t like Impel Down at all. 

Your haki should’ve warned you. Your haki, which you’ve trained to recognize threats. Your brother, who isn't one, even when he doesn’t know you. 

You’re so, so tired. 

You sleep. 

Sabo can count the number of times someone’s fallen asleep on him during an interrogation on one hand. One finger, to be precise, and that singular exception sits snoring a step away. 

Hellfire, formerly Fire Fist Ace of the Spade Pirates. A pirate, terrorist, and mass murderer. Even knowing the truth behind the worst rumors surrounding him—the merchant ships were slave vessels, the admiral’s home island destroyed in a buster call because the government thought they could erase Hellfire with it if they caught him by surprise—he’s still, undeniably, one of the most dangerous men alive. 

Toe to toe with Whitebeard. The snoozing kid doesn’t look capable, not in the least because he seems to have not slept or eaten properly in weeks, if not longer. His hair hangs to his shoulders, and the only sign of any grooming at all is fresh stubble where Sabo would’ve expected a beard, or at least mustache. 

He’s also bound by sea stone, which has extinguished the fire Sabo had seen inside him during their fight on the beach. That fire, more than anything, had made him look the part of the demon the marines described him as. Now, he’s just a kid. A kid whose ribs are too prominent when they’re not being backlit to hide the shadows.

Koala would laugh if she heard Sabo call him that, since he’d bet he and Hellfire are almost the same age. He can’t help it, though. There’s something in the gauntness of Hellfire’s features, in his bowed shoulders, in his near-silent breaths, in the freckles scattered over his skin that asks him to soften his assessment. 

Freckles. Why the hell should the freckles matter?

“Are you going to wake up?” he asks. Hellfire gives no answer, which is answer enough. Sighing, Sabo unfolds himself, collects the empty plate, and stands. His knees pop and the myriad bruises all over his body groan in protest. Fire or no fire, Hellfire hits hard.  He tells the guards to let him know when the pirate wakes and takes his leave. 

Koala finds him in the tiny kitchen of this underground base, gaze unfocused as he mindlessly swipes a rag over a bowl that was dry several minutes ago. 

Without a word, she picks the spoon and tray out of the sink, rinses them, and then pulls out a second rag to dry them off. When she reaches for the bowl to put it away, he hands it over on reflex. 

“He’s not a threat,” he says, and she pauses. “Not the way we were worried about, at least.”

There had been, from the moment Fire Fist turned to Hellfire, a pervasive worry in the Revolutionary Army that all that violence would target them. And, sure, some of their people had been caught between his hammer and the World Government’s anvil. Once, part of a team had been captured, and Cipher Pol had tried using them against Hellfire. He’d ignored the hostages entirely and carried on. The threat had been carried out, a complete waste of life. The silver lining: the government had given up on that tactic. And Hellfire had razed every inch of the base where those Cipher Pol agents had been stationed. 

Hellfire hadn’t targeted the revolutionaries. He was uncaring toward them, but he wasn’t cruel. His target was pretty obviously the World Government and anyone who supported them, with a particularly vicious streak aimed at the navy’s upper echelons and Celestial Dragons. In that, he and the revolutionaries were on the same side. 

Plus, he hadn’t burned Sabo. Whatever that meant. 

Do you remember me?

Sleep-deprived, starving, probably out of his mind. Still, an absurd question. 

“Are you going to let him go?”

He sighs, leans against the kitchen counter, and pulls his gloves back on since he’s not washing anything else. “Eventually, assuming he doesn’t do anything to change my assessment. I’ve gotten the answer for the army; now I need my own.” He looks at her in apology. “I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”

She shakes her head. “It could’ve been way worse.”

They’re both silent a moment. If it had come down to a fight—a real fight, not whatever that brawl on the beach had been—could they have won? Or would they have merely become more ashes drifting in Hellfire’s ever-expanding wake?

“Did he say anything interesting?” Koala prompts after a beat.

Dawn. 

Do you remember me?

“Maybe. I need to talk to him more, but he fell asleep.”

She grins. “He fell asleep?”

“You saw him,” he says defensively. “He’s a wreck.”

“Uh huh.”

Grumbling, he pushes off the countertop. “I’m going to give a report to Dragon. He’ll want to know Hellfire hasn’t killed us all yet.”

He’s wrapping up that report when an alarm rips through the base, a shrieking, warbling wail that pierces straight through his brain like a nail. 

“Sorry, I have to deal with this,” he says, and hangs up on Dragon. Pretty awful last words to the man, if he’s right about the reason for the alarm. This tiny little base on a barren rock is many days’ travel from Baltigo even by air. Probably by the time they reach this place to investigate, not even ashes will remain. 

The other people in the cramped command center—really, just a slightly larger lopsided cave chamber with haphazard arrangements of desks, cabinets, wires, and some optimistic throw rugs—are looking to him for their next move. There’s only one he can give: “Evacuate.”

They go, quick and quiet, exactly as trained. Sabo goes against his own training and better judgement when he sets a course to the detention wing. 

With every step drowned out by the ringing alarm, he waits for a tide of fire to sweep around the next bend, but it never comes. The air remains as pleasantly cool as ever even when he reaches Hellfire’s hallway. The guards there, two young men looking terrified but keeping their wits through raw determination, have their rifles aimed solidly at the cell. One of them had been quick enough to reach the alarm snail at the first sign of trouble.

The bars are still intact. If Hellfire wanted out, Sabo doubts that would be the case. 

“S-sir,” one of the men stammers when Sabo gets close. “He, he broke the chains.”

“Sorry,” calls a voice from inside. “It wasn’t comfortable.”

Sabo stops in front of the bars and looks down at Hellfire, who’s still sitting against the wall, absently rubbing at the tattoo on his arm. Unlike before, he’s got his hands in his lap. The sea stone cuffs still weigh on his wrists, but shattered bits of metal and stone, as well as new holes in the walls, show where he ripped the chains and their moorings clear out of the wall. 

Even at his best, Sabo’s not sure he could easily mimic the feat without a better angle for his fingers to get a grip. His bruises ache again; Hellfire’s strength is inhuman. 

“I don’t wanna fight you,” Hellfire offers. 

Sabo gestures to the chains. Hellfire has the manacles and a dozen or so links trailing from each wrist, the last link broken for each. Not only had he ripped the ensemble out of the wall, he’d also broken off the parts that would’ve weighed him down. “Could you have done that this whole time?”

“No.”

Maybe feeding him was a mistake. But he’s making no move to attack, merely resting his hands in his lap again after rolling his shoulders a few times.

Sabo turns to the guards. “Stand down, and shut off the alarm.”

“Should we call everyone back?”

Sabo eyes Hellfire critically. “No. Join them at the ships. I’ll signal when it’s clear.”

“Are you…are you sure?”

Hellfire’s stare leaves his mouth dry, but he sets his jaw and nods. “I’m sure. Tell Koala I’ll just be a minute.”

The guards exchange a look and then hurry off. Sabo gives them a moment to get clear and then opens Hellfire’s cell. He once again sits cross-legged across from the pirate, though now he feels considerably less in control than before. 

“Do you have more food?” Hellfire asks, in the same moment Sabo asks,

“Did you really fight Whitebeard?”

They stare at each other. The alarm cuts out and, in the sudden silence, Hellfire’s growling stomach is impossible to ignore. Sabo sighs. 

“Only if you answer my questions.”

Hellfire nods his agreement. When Sabo stands, Hellfire stands with him, and Sabo stops. 

“What are you doing?”

“Following you.”

“That’s”—Sabo’s eyes slip over to the wall—“fine. This way.”

It’s surreal, leading this man of all men through the empty halls to the kitchen. Hellfire instantly goes for the refrigerator, and Sabo doesn’t bother chastising him as he watches several of his colleagues’ lunches get devoured in two bites. When the feast doesn’t show signs of slowing after the first minute, he sighs and leans against the counter to wait. 

It takes five minutes, and by the end, the kitchen and pantry look like they’ve been set upon by a bear. Hellfire, though, is leaning back in the seat he’d claimed at one of the scattered tables in the small room and looking as content as a man can be, eyes fluttering closed. 

“Done already?” Sabo can’t help sniping, and Hellfire’s eyes snap open while he tenses as though struck. He sits up straight, guard coming up to match. 

“You wanted to know if I fought Whitebeard. I did.”

“Rumor says you were on equal footing.”

Hellfire shifts in what Sabo is surprised to label as discomfort. “The rest of the crew was there, and I wasn’t really trying to fight them. There was a traitor in his crew. I killed him, that’s all.”

“You killed one of Whitebeard’s crew and got away?”

Another uncomfortable shift, but a nod. No wonder Whitebeard wants him dead. But…

“How did you know there was a traitor?”

Hellfire breaks eye contact and starts toying with his sea stone cuffs. “I just did,” he mutters, and there’s an ocean of anger simmering just below the surface of his unease. 

Not wanting to disturb those waters, Sabo changes tact. “What do you know about Dawn Island? Are you from there?”

Hellfire chews his lip, still toying with the cuffs. He broke the chains out of the wall so easily and isn’t bothered by dragging the excess around. Can he break those manacles too?

A cold sweat sends a chill though Sabo. He doesn’t show any sign of it. 

“We both are,” Hellfire finally says. 

“Can’t say I remember someone like you.” Not that he remembers anything besides the need to leave, and fire, and…oh. Oh, god. Is that why? 

Just like before, he keeps all his emotions tightly locked behind a facade of casual interest. And yet, when Hellfire finally looks up at him, the pirate’s eyes go wide with horror. He spreads his hands—a gesture that on anyone else might be reassuring—and hastily says, “That wasn’t, I didn’t—we didn’t know what the barrels would do. I promise, I’d never—it wasn’t—I didn’t have the fruit back then.”

He has no reason to believe him, and in spite of that fact, Sabo finds himself doing exactly that. Some of the tension in him unwinds, but he still feels a little sick. “What barrels? What happened?”

The hands drop. “What do you remember?”

Do you remember me?

A lifetime of training in subterfuge and never giving his cards away wars with a drive to learn what this pirate knows, or claims to know. Like at the beach, like when he walked Hellfire out of his cell, common sense loses. 

“I was sailing away from Goa Kingdom when a visiting Celestial Dragon sank my ship. The revolutionaries saved my life and told me what happened, what they saw, but I lost my memories.” He flexes his fingers and breathes out until he can ignore the way his scars tug at the skin around them. “All I knew was my name and that I never wanted to go back.”

Guilt gnaws at the edges of Hellfire’s expression before he ducks his head and his hair hides it all. He squeezes his hands into fists on the table. “You survived. You—I should’ve been there. I should’ve—fuck!” He slams a fist on the table. Wood splinters but doesn’t break, and that’s the only outburst; Hellfire puts his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry, Sabo. For all of it. For letting them take you, for believing it was better. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. I was a coward.”

Sabo frowns. “You’re upset the revolutionaries saved me?”

“Of course not!” He looks at Sabo askance, because sure, Sabo’s the one saying ridiculous things right now. “They saved your life, I—when I didn’t. I…it’s been so many…” He brings a hand to his chest, and when he exhales, his whole body shakes. His eyes are shining. “I didn’t know I could still feel like this.”

Taking a gamble—what’s one more?—Sabo sits across from him at the table. “If not the revolutionaries, then who? What happened?” How, he can’t bring himself to ask outright, how do you know me?

Hellfire’s biting his lip hard enough to turn it white. He doesn’t bother stopping the tears from falling, and though his voice shakes when he finally talks, his gaze is steady. 

“We met when we were five. The first thing I did was try to steal from your stash. The first thing you did was try to kill me for it.” He manages a crooked smile. “We worked it out.”

Worked it out is an understatement. Hellfire—Ace, his name is Ace—lays out their whole childhood. He doesn’t know everything Sabo did because they had time apart, but he knows a lot, and from the sheer amount of information he can relay on demand, they must’ve spent damn near every day together. 

On and on their history goes. Trawling the Gray Terminal for scrap and treasure; robbing bandits and other rogues for the same; slowly but surely building their combined stash and dreaming of the day they’ll both set out to sea and know freedom like no one’s ever seen before. 

For a decade, Sabo’s been at most mildly curious about his past. Most days, he has more important things to worry about. Besides, he’s always figured one small boy’s time in a tiny East Blue kingdom isn’t very important, and that one certainty—that he can never go back—dampened anything other than a passing inkling of wanting to learn more. 

But here, now, with a fount of information in front of him, he finds himself drinking up every detail like he’d been dying from thirst without ever knowing. So many mysteries about himself get answers, not least of which is why he’s always preferred fighting with a pipe if he’s using any weapons at all. It’s all those little answers that convince him Ace is telling, if not the whole truth, then something close enough to it to still be valuable.

He’s surprised when another name pops up: Luffy. And even more surprised when the truth of their relationship spills over Ace’s lips. 

They were brothers. Are brothers. 

Family. The thought makes his head spin. This whole time, he’s had family that he wanted, that wanted him. Mourned him. 

“Wait,” he says, cutting Ace off in the middle of relaying Luffy’s many training accidents with his devil fruit. “The path we took to reach the Gray Terminal—there was a river with crocodiles, right? And…” he knits his brow, trying to recall what his recurring dreams relay through the blurring lens of wakefulness. “There was a treehouse, wasn’t there?”

Ace grins, and that grin swiftly widens into a proper smile that makes him look even younger. “We pulled Luffy outta those crocs’ mouths a hundred times, and we built that treehouse ourselves. You’re the one who designed it.”

Sabo rubs at his throbbing temples. His whole head is throbbing, really, a bunch of waves trapped in a tide pool, crashing around and stirring the dormant sands beneath. “I dream about it,” he murmurs. “I…I’m following that path, to the treehouse, and there are other people, but I never see them. I just hear them saying my name.” He lets out a shuddering breath and composes himself. “It was a forest, and everyone thought I was raised a noble in the city; I never thought it meant anything.”

His voice twinges with guilt and he’s once more caught by surprise, but this time by his own feelings. He’s guilty? For what? Forgetting? 

“You didn’t know,” Ace says, providing absolution like it’s that simple. But, looking into his eyes, seeing the tightness of his shoulders, the press of his lips, saying is easier than believing. 

Sabo nods anyway. “Can you…finish the story?”

“It doesn’t have a happy ending.”

Sabo offers a wry smile he knows pulls at his scar tissue. “I know. I want to hear it anyway.”

Even knowing the aftermath—being saved by the Revolutionaries, surviving—it’s disturbing to hear about all the pain leading up to the moment Dragon pulled him from the water. He reminds himself he’s hearing this from a biased source, one who’s been beating himself up over it for a decade, but still. And knowing his brothers grieved him, that Ace would’ve killed himself getting revenge if the bandits hadn’t stopped him, well, that hurts in a way he can’t articulate from a place he can’t source. 

The burning of the Gray Terminal, Dadan’s heroics, Ace’s heroics, all of that pain just to hear in the aftermath of coming home that Sabo will never do the same—Sabo’s breath catches when Ace’s voice breaks, and he wonders how many people have ever heard this story. If he’s the only one. 

He strongly suspects he is. 

Though he has the urge to offer some words of comfort, he doesn’t know what to say, or if there’s even anything he can say. This is an old wound freshly torn open and he’s the reason for it. Maybe all he can do is twist the knife. 

“I’m sorry,” he offers in the wake of it all, that guilt having grown with each new revelation. 

“You don’t need to be sorry.” Ace squeezes his hands into fists. “I’m the one who should’ve looked for you. They never found your body, I should’ve—” 

“If we’re going to talk about shoulds, by all rights, I should’ve been dead, blown apart and sunk just like my ship,” Sabo interrupts gently. “If you won’t blame me, I won’t blame you. Besides, I like how my life turned out.” Ace’s expression twists and Sabo leans back. “You know, on the beach, it sure felt like I was being blamed for something.”

He can see Ace’s gaze flick to his blackened eye. “Sorry.”

Sabo leans forward again and tries to turn the guilt into something more useful. It’s startlingly easy to decide to care about the wellbeing of the man across from him. Natural, almost. “Are you taking care of yourself, Ace? Sleeping, eating?”

“Enough.”

“You passed out on the beach and you just ate a week’s worth of food supplies.”

Ace scowls and fidgets with his restraints again. “If you already know the answer, why bother asking?”

“Because I’ve decided I care, you idiot, and I’d prefer you do the same. Are those bothering you?” He gestures at the cuffs, and it’s a stupid question. He’s a devil fruit user and those are sea stone. Of course they’re bothering him. But there’s a whole new lifetime hovering over Sabo’s awareness like the blade of a guillotine and it is—in a word—distracting. 

“I shouldn’t take them off in here.” He elaborates when Sabo raises an eyebrow. “My fire is gonna be…upset. About being,” he flexes his hands, “caged.”

Sabo’s understanding of devil fruits isn’t as developed as that of someone who’s eaten one, but still: “Isn’t your fire…you?”

“It’s…different. It didn’t used to be like this. It’s more than me, sometimes. More than I can,” he trails off, expression twisting. “It’s just different.”

That was a long way of saying no. Sabo notes that down to think about later. Maybe Karasu would have thoughts on it. He never seemed to have issues with control. Maybe it was fruit-specific? Fire would naturally be more wild than soot. “Regardless, you should try to take care of yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“It won’t matter,” Ace amends. He stands. “I appreciate you taking me in, giving me food, everything. Thank you.” He bows his head and Sabo bristles. He knows that isn’t how Ace would thank family. “I should be going.”

“So you can collapse somewhere else?”

“I’m not gonna collapse anywhere. I’m fine.”

“Funny, I didn’t realize fine was passing out on beaches and eating thirty people’s worth of food.”

“I’ve eaten more.”

“Is that supposed to be a defense? You’re not fine. Maybe I don’t remember everything, and maybe my eye isn’t as good as it used to be, but I can see you’re lying to me, Ace.” He winces and Sabo pushes the advantage. “I’m not asking much. One day. Eat, sleep, maybe shower.” He wrinkles his nose. “Actually, start with the shower. For me. Can you do that?”

Ace works his jaw for a few seconds. “That’s not fair.”

“Most things aren’t.”

Ace’s eyes break from his and roam the room while he fidgets, the swaying chains on his manacles accenting the tiny movements. 

“Fine. One day.” He runs a hand through his greasy hair and frowns when he realizes how long it’s gotten. “Where are the showers? And where’s my stuff?”

Sabo rattles off directions to the showers. “And I’ll bring you your stuff.” He might take his clothes, though, because they look to be in desperate need of a wash. Maybe he has spares stashed in his ship. 

“My ship?” Ace prompts as though reading his mind. 

“Safe.” Sabo gives no other information. Ace grunts, stands, and heads for the showers. But he pauses in the doorway. Doesn’t turn around, but asks:

“Sabo?”

“What?”

“Just…are you happy? Here, where you are.”

Sabo blinks. “Sure, as much as I can be. I don’t think I’ll ever feel real happiness until I stop seeing good people crushed under the heel of the world, and by then I think I might be dead.”

Nodding, Ace taps the doorframe in thought a couple times, then leaves without another word.

Chapter Text

Ace spends a full hour cleaning himself up. Sabo uses that time to wash his clothes—not wanting to go to his ship and risk Ace seeing where it is—and mend a couple of the larger tears. 

“This is the only time I’m doing this for you,” he declares when he tosses the pile of Ace’s things into the bathroom. A deep chuckle echoes back from within the cloud of steam hanging in the air. 

“I figured. Thanks.”

Sabo shuts the door and waits outside. He’d picked up some reports and a den den mushi while he was grabbing Ace’s things, and now he sets to catching up. The snail he’d snagged looks as nervous as Sabo feels while he dials Baltigo. 

“Sabo?” It’s Dragon, and he’d picked up on the first ring. 

“Still alive, sir.”

“And Hellfire?”

“Also still alive. Currently taking a shower.” A very long one, too. “He broke out of his restraints because he claims they were uncomfortable, and that prompted the alarm. I’m inclined to believe his reasons. He’s keeping the sea stone on. I evacuated the base; it’s just us two.”

Dragon digests that for a moment, the snail doing its best to convey the gravity of his glower. “What did you learn?”

“He claims we’re sworn brothers.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Everything he’s said that I’ve been able to cross reference with what I know holds up. Yes, I do.” The water stops and Sabo lowers his voice. “The fact I’m alive and not burned is significant.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. What is his plan?”

“Honestly? I don’t think he has one. He seems the type to go after Impel Down and Marineford no matter how reinforced they are. He doesn’t care about consequences. I’ll see if I can get anything more specific from him so we can keep our people out of his way.”

“Do that.” Another thoughtful silence, then: “Keep an eye on him?”

“Sir?”

“Set aside that he’s your brother. If he targets those installations, we should be there to examine what’s left in the aftermath before the government can cover it up, in addition to making sure we’re not there for the preceding fight.”

It’s a salient point. “Understood.”

“I’ll reassign your missions. Have Koala return to headquarters.”

“Roger that.”

Dragon hangs up without another word. No goodbyes or well wishes from him; just practicality. But he’d picked up right away, and the way he’d said Sabo’s name—he’d been worried.

Sabo blows out a breath and begins paging through his reports. He’ll have to put together a summary so Koala or whoever picks up his slack isn’t getting tossed in the deep end. 

His eyes flick toward the door. Staying close to Hellfire. It’s risky, but no one else can do it. Dragon hadn’t said it aloud, but the message came through clear enough anyway: be careful. 

He’s drafted a summary and had a very calm and controlled discussion with Koala by the time Ace emerges from the bathroom. 

“What was all that yelling?” he asks. 

“Don’t worry about it.” Sabo has to admit, the pirate cleans up nicely. The food he ate earlier has had a disconcertingly swift effect; though Ace is still skinnier than he ought to be, the sickly gauntness is gone. So is the dirt and grime and grease. He’s even shaved and cut his hair back to a length Sabo recalls from his early bounty posters. His dagger hangs once more from his hip, and he even spot-cleaned the sheath. “How do you feel?”

“Better.” He slicks back his damp hair, and Sabo reflects that he’s probably used to drying off right away thanks to his fruit. The manacles on his wrist disrupted that routine. 

“I didn’t see any shirts with your things.”

He waves a hand, hitting Sabo with a few stray water droplets pulled from his hair. “Don’t have any.”

“You…You don’t have any shirts? Why?”

Ace pauses. Pauses pauses, like he’s genuinely tripping over the question. His expression rolls through a number of waves Sabo can’t parse and settles on forced casualness as he shrugs. “Don’t like how they feel.”

It’s a lie, and a bad one. But Sabo can’t figure out why it’s a lie worth telling, so he lets it be. “Well, then I’ll stop worrying about how I could’ve missed them. Do you need a hand with anything?”

“No, I’m good.” His stomach growls, and he amends, “Maybe I’m a little hungry.”

How that’s possible, Sabo struggles to fathom, but he leads Ace back to the kitchens. Another four lunches get devoured, Sabo adds another four lunches plus interest to the debt of apology he owes his colleagues, and then Ace starts rummaging in the refrigerator like he’s actually looking for something instead of eating the first thing he sees. 

“What’re you hunting for?” Sabo asks, peering around him. 

“Was looking to see if you had any meat I could cook.” He extracts himself from the refrigerator. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“This base’s next supply shipment isn’t for a while.”

“Oh.” He glances at the refrigerator, and then at the pantry, both of which are looking far emptier than they had before he arrived. “Sorry. I, uh. I don’t have any money.”

He’s sunk whole fleets and destroyed dozens of marine bases, and while Sabo could’ve guessed as much, here’s proof it hasn’t been for profit. He’d checked Striker thoroughly before towing it to this base, and there hadn’t been any beri stashed in it at all. 

“It’s fine,” Sabo deflects. “Are you still hungry?”

“I’ll be good for a while.” Based on precedent, that estimate translates to an hour, maybe two. “Listen, if I’m gonna stay, these need to go.” He holds up his wrists and the sea stone cuffs still wrapped around them. 

“I thought you said—”

“Yeah, you need to go too. Hang out with your friends on the water for a minute, enjoy the show, and then come back.”

Something about Ace’s tone rubs Sabo the wrong way but he can’t put his finger on what. “Is it really going to be that bad?”

“Maybe. I’m not risking you.”

“I’m touched.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get on with it. Go on, go.”

“Right, because I’m gonna let you do that down here. Do you even know the way out?”

“I’d find it.”

“By all means, lead the way.”

Ace hesitates in the doorway and then slowly eases his weight toward the left. Sabo makes a quiet negative hum, which he repeats louder when Ace eases toward the right. Muttering to himself, Ace steps aside and gestures Sabo forward. He rolls his eyes in response to Sabo’s smile.

Having Ace behind him isn’t comfortable; his observation haki is so fixated on the guy that Sabo’s given himself a pounding headache by the time he opens the last door and muted sunlight floods through. He steps out and holds the door for Ace while he squints and blinks until his eyes adjust. Even with the low and dreary clouds, Ace doesn’t fare much better, bringing one arm up to shield his eyes while he peers around the barren landscape.

“Not much here, huh?”

The door swings shut and Sabo locks it. Closed, it’s indistinguishable from the rock around it, and hopefully relatively immune to fire. “Not much to invite interest, yes.”

“I’m guessing those are your friends.” Ace uses his other hand to point to the northern horizon, where a small fleet of craft bob in the choppy water far from shore, but not so far they can’t see what’s happening. And what they might see right now is an Ace seemingly freed—the manacles on his wrists won’t be as obvious as the freedom with which he moves his arms—marching Sabo out into the open like a prisoner.

“Right,” Sabo says, abruptly spinning on his heel to face Ace, who stiffens at the sudden movement. He holds out the key to Ace’s manacles. No need to force the man to break them and risk his wrists. “I imagine there’s at least one boat left for me. Why don’t you head off in that direction and start your little show once I’m far enough away?”

Ace’s unwavering gaze is disconcerting, but after a few seconds, he takes the key and nods. “That’s fine. Sabo—” he cuts himself off, but Sabo’s already paused mid stride.

“Yes?” he prods.

Ace works his jaw for a moment, but finally closes his mouth and shakes his head, something resigned in the lines of his face. Again Sabo gets that niggling feeling. He sets it aside to interrogate later—and most likely interrogate Ace about later—and takes his leave.

The walk across the island is swift and uneventful. He spends part of it doing exaggerated signals to the waiting ships to indicate he’s fine and the rest thinking about what it means to have Hellfire declaring brotherhood. Will he tell the world? Will it matter? He isn’t known for holding conversations with those he’s chosen to fight.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. A problem for later. Right now, all he needs to do is confirm that Ace isn’t following him. He doesn’t expect the man to do it, but that feeling remains, that suspicion that Ace isn’t being honest with his intentions. Even if he did follow Sabo, though, none of the ships in this hidden little cove are his. That ship—Striker—is moored in a far smaller cove on the opposite end of the island, about as hidden as a thing can get. 

He sails his tiny boat out to the patchwork revolutionary fleet. One ship moves ahead of the rest to meet him, and Sabo can see Koala stepping up to the prow. Their ships draw level and Sabo furls his sail before tossing up a rope, which Koala expertly ties to the railing. Sabo jumps up and onto the larger vessel.

She punches him in the arm and then wraps him in a hug before he can even feign pain. “Just a minute, right?” she says into his shoulder. “Just a minute.”

“We did a lot of talking,” he placates. “I’m okay, really.”

She pulls back and he braces himself for another hit, but she just shakes her head, wipes her eyes, and plants her hands on her hips. “What’s going on, then? Why are you here and he’s not?”

“He claimed there would be a bit of a show when he took off those manacles.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just trying to get you off the island so he can search for his boat?”

Sabo shakes his head. “I believe him.” And it’s not just a decade of spying and subterfuge and secrets that have him trusting Ace when he says it’ll be dangerous; it’s something deeper. Something that’s also been giving him the feeling that, while Ace had told the truth, he hadn’t told the whole truth. “I’ll give him another few minutes. If nothing happens, then—”

Something happens. Something is a huge pillar of fire that blasts up from roughly the center of the island and punches into the clouds, filling them full to bursting with molten light like pouring metal into a cast reversed. Flickers of orange lightning arc between denser clusters and the choppy water swiftly becomes dangerous as a shockwave rocks the ocean. 

“I think he took them off!” Koala yells from where she’s clutching the railing. Sabo staggers a few steps and then follows her example while the rest of the people on the boat scramble to handle the new conditions.

Light and shadow roil within the low clouds and with a lurch in his stomach, Sabo realizes the shadows are shapes, and they’re large enough to send the clouds swirling and rolling across the sky in a mirror of the waves kicked up below.

Angry winds whip across the deck and threaten to snatch the hat from his head. He holds it down with one hand and holds the railing with the other, and the moment he has to look away from the light show in the sky is the moment Koala lets out a gasp that carries over the chaos.

He steadies himself, looks up, and words fail. There’s a dragon, a real dragon, descending from the heavens. Its body is rippling flame, its furious horned visage wreathed in hues of red, orange, and searing yellow. Wicked claws extend down, brushing the ocean and sending up billowing clouds of steam. 

The analytical part of Sabo’s brain kicks into gear, calculating the sheer size of the thing. It’s bigger than the island, of that much he’s sure.

He gives up when it opens its maw and roars. It’s silent, but the gleaming teeth and searing plume of blue flames are more than enough to grab his attention. That plume punches even deeper into the ocean than its claws, kicking up even more steam. Another shockwave hits; Sabo’s eyes dry out in an instant and then start to water. 

The dragon starts flying around the island, encircling it like a snake—and then a second dragon breaks from the clouds to join it looking just as angry as its predecessor. By the time the third dragon appears, the island is a hazy blur amid the steam and Sabo’s really, really happy Ace chose not to use his flames on Pineyard. 

When the dragons are done roaring and have settled into a kind of sinuous dance over the island, Sabo dares to relax just a little. He glances at Koala, whose thoughts about Pineyard mirror his own if the look on her face is any indication. 

He licks his lips, swallows, and goes to make sure everyone’s weathered the storm all right. Koala joins him, and for ten minutes, it’s easy enough to lose himself in that task. When he ends up back on deck, though, the dragons are still there, and while the sight is awe-inspiring enough, that bad feeling is growing.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Really?” Koala asks dryly from behind him. “How do you figure?”

“I’m going.”

“What? Are you nuts? Look at that!” She flings out an arm at the circling dragons. They’ve kicked up a healthy amount of steam, blurring their forms and making the whole island appear like a desert mirage. Or an entrance to Sabo’s personal hell. “You go into that, you’re not coming out. I get he’s important to you, but that’s no reason to be needlessly reckless. He’ll tire himself out eventually. You don’t need to put yourself at risk.”

Sabo squeezes the railing. Two shadowy figures call out his name from between the trees. One of them, so quick to smile. The other, too inclined to scowl. 

“Yes, I do.”

You leave. 

It’s like ripping a part of yourself clean away to do it, to abandon your brother, to push him out when all you want to do is drag him close and hold him until you’re sure you’ll never forget the shape of him, his smile, his laugh ever again—but the pain dulls when you remind yourself: he’s happy.

Demon’s inferno has done what you needed it to do and provided a distraction and smokescreen while you searched the island. You hadn’t lied to Sabo, exactly. Your fire was unhappy, lashing out at your surroundings like a wolf with its leg in a trap, and that had been fuel enough for the beginnings of the show. Keeping it going, though. That was all you.

You don’t need to ruin him with the ruin you are. Don’t need to drag him down with you. There’s a next time; you tell yourself that as Striker cuts through the water and grows the distance between you.

You’ll give him the brother he deserves next time.

That bastard. That’s all Sabo can think when he steps onto the beach and realizes that, amid the spectacular fiery distraction, Ace had searched the island, loaded up his one-man boat, and taken off in the opposite direction. 

The dragons had broken up into nothing in the time it took him to reach the island. Now it’s just him, air that’s hot enough to hurt when he breathes it in, and steam so thick his clothes are clinging to him like he took a dip in the ocean that would probably boil him alive if he actually tried that right now.

That bad feeling. Some piece of him had recognized what Ace meant to do, had clocked the sadness in his eyes as a resigned intent to leave, and Sabo had been too dumb to realize what his own mind was trying to tell him.

“Sabo?” Koala asks, coming up beside him. “They finished a full circle. There’s no sign of him.”

“His ship’s gone,” he says before she can, so she just nods to confirm. He closes his eyes and lets frustration swell in his chest, lets it flow down to his toes, out to his fingertips, and up around his head. Then he breathes it out. “Plan’s the same.”

“What? But—”

“I’ll track him down. He’s my brother.” There’s a snarl in his voice, on his face, when he finishes, “I won’t let him kill himself like this.”

Somewhere inside himself, there’s a ten-year-old who wants nothing more than to punch Ace in the face. Come hell or high water, Sabo’s giving him that opportunity.

Chapter Text

Tracking Ace down is tricky. For one, Ace moves fast. That ship of his has unrivaled speed, and with Sabo being a solo act, he can’t reliably catch up whenever Ace has to sleep because he’s busy doing the same. For two, Sabo’s not the only one giving chase.

Mostly, he only sees the aftermath of other people’s attempts. Floating wreckage on the water, a lingering smell of smoke that leaves him coughing and covering his face, sea birds pecking at the bodies the fish haven’t already consumed is all that remains of those unfortunate enough to find what they’re looking for. 

Though it’s easier to navigate through in the daylight, he prefers passing through the wreckage at night. Harder to see the details. The faces.

The smell always lingers.

He reports his progress when he can, using coded messages just in case someone’s listening. That caution pays off when he has a run-in with cipher pol. They’re after Ace and they’re scared of catching up; they don’t expect trouble to come from behind. Sabo deals with them, steals their intel, and keeps moving. He does this several times.

Reporting cipher pol’s movements is the only productive thing he can manage. Ever since Ace destroyed Ennies Lobby, they’ve been hard to track. He hopes the other revolutionaries can make something useful out of the movement patterns, encrypted notes, and vague maps he relays.

Just over a month into his pursuit, he comes across wreckage that puts all that came before it to shame. This isn’t on open water; it’s an island, a navy shipyard. Or it was. Sabo docks—as much as he can dock at the ashen ruins where there was once a pier large enough to service multiple warships at once—and hops ashore. He sinks ankle-deep into ashes that are still warm.

Ace might be here. He doubts it, but he has to check. These warm ashes are the closest he’s come so far. 

There’s something specific to the aftermath Ace leaves. It’s akin to the sensation Sabo gets in the middle of a winter island that’s just experienced a blizzard. There, the snow muffles everything and turns even the richest landscape into a white void with occasional peaks and valleys. Ace’s fire scours everything nearly flat and leaves a blanket of gray ash that muffles sound as effectively as any snow. Sabo kicks up small swirls of it with every step. 

He sneezes a few times until his body adjusts to the thick odor of burnt…everything. Probably a kind of mercy that he can’t smell the people who were no doubt here when Ace struck.

The smoke that’s turned the midday sunshine into a midday haze has also chased away the birds and anything else that would make noise. Sabo’s left to tour the ruin alone with only a mournful breeze for company. He wishes it would quit mourning and pick up already, carry some of this away, give anything still alive below the ash a chance.

And then the breeze does pick up. A lot. He snatches his hat out of the air and puts it back on his head while something fast and very dangerous abruptly enters the radius of his observation haki. 

Too late to run. He faces the new arrival with equanimity that’s swiftly ruined when the wind blows ash straight into his face.

Coughing, he blinks his eyes clear in time to see azure wings wink out of existence and become normal human arms on the very much not normal—albeit still human—Marco the Phoenix. That tattoo, that power, and that face; there’s no mistaking any of them.

Right. The other group chasing Ace that Sabo had hoped to avoid. Easier to do when he was farther away from Ace, but now he’s neck-and-neck with the other pursuit.

Marco makes a show of dusting himself off. Sabo doesn’t bother, since he’ll only smear the ash Marco so kindly buffeted him with during his landing. He does take the opportunity to glance around, and sure enough, there’s the Moby Dick, just a blur on the opposite horizon. He’d never have seen them coming until it was far too late to escape.

He refocuses on Marco. Ace might be Whitebeard’s enemy, but the emperor is largely ambivalent toward the Revolutionary Army as long as they don’t drag his people or territory into trouble. That doesn’t mean he wants Whitebeard thinking the revolutionaries are also interested in Ace.

What to do, what to do.

“Dangerous seas to sail alone-yoi,” Marco says blandly now that they’ve finished silently sizing each other up. Sabo knows he personally doesn’t want a fight. He’s pretty sure Marco knows he could offer one worth having anyway.

“Seems anyone who could cause me trouble here is long gone,” Sabo replies with equal blandness. “Though I might have to correct myself on that.”

“Will you?”

“I’m not sure yet. Are you?”

“I don’t expect trouble-yoi. Not here. Not today.” If he expected Sabo to react with wounded pride, he’s disappointed. He does, at least, choose to quit wasting their time. “Who are you, and why are you chasing Hellfire?”

“I’m chasing Hellfire?”

Marco shows teeth. It’s not a smile. “Yes, you are.”

Right. Not a time for games—not that kind, at least. “I’m a reporter.”

“A reporter-yoi.”

There’s a notebook and pen he’s taken to keeping in his coat. In his bored moments crawling around the ocean, he’s even seen fit to scribble some nonsense on it that a journalist might bother to write. A flimsy cover just to have something better than no cover at all, because his odds of running into Whitebeard’s people had been low but never zero.

He produces them both and makes a show of flipping to a blank page. “So, the rumors that Hellfire attacked Whitebeard—care to confirm?”

Marco’s eyes scrape over him and Sabo knows he’s looking for a weapon, but Sabo’s pipe is safely stashed on the ship, the ship that’s been carefully scrubbed of any revolutionary markings. A flimsy cover is still a cover, and he’s not about to blow it when he can be just as dangerous with his bare hands as he is armed.

“Or the rumors that Hellfire killed one of your crew—”

Marco’s gaze sharpens and Sabo stops talking, because there might as well be a blade held at his neck. Raw wound, that. And exactly the kind of insensitive question a journalist stupid enough to chase Hellfire around the world would ask. So he forces his voice and knees to shake.

“I-I’m just searching for the truth. No harm meant. No disrespect, either.”

His pen is still hovering over the page. Marco scowls and some of the killing intent leaves the air. 

“I don’t like your type,” he says, which Sabo could interpret a dozen different ways. That’s more work than he cares to put in, so he doesn’t bother. “What brought you here?”

Sabo taps the side of his nose with his pen. “Trade secret.”

Those half-lidded eyes slide just a hair lower as Marco lifts his chin, and that’s all it takes for Sabo to feel like Marco’s judging how best to disembowel him.

“O-or,” he hastens to clarify, every inch the journalist stupid enough to try bargaining in this situation, “perhaps we could make a trade. A little quid pro quo never hurt anyone, right?”

“Like I said,” Marco replies, and that quiet menace is back and deafening in the slow and deep violence that lurks under his words, “I don’t like your type-yoi. This isn’t a negotiation. By the time my family reaches us, I intend to have useful information for them. You appear to have some. You can share it freely, or I can take it. It’s your choice.”

He makes it very, very clear which choice he would prefer. Not in the mood to be eviscerated, Sabo declines the implied offer.

“I really don’t have much.” He pages through his notebook, which has precisely nothing of value on it, while he pages through his memory for viable options. “I’ve been following Hellfire’s general course on his tour of any significant naval installations in this area. My course was going to take me well clear of this shipyard—it didn’t seem like his normal target, being used more for shipbreaking than shipmaking—but I smelled the smoke from miles away.”

Marco tips his head. Not enough.

Sabo stifles a frustrated sigh. He has to give the Whitebeards something if he wants to leave here in peace, but to hell with actually giving them something useful. It just had to seem that way.

Fortunately, Ace has given him a lot to work with.

“I’ve seen his fire,” he finally says. “I was at Pineyard when he attacked. What happened there motivated me to pursue him.” Not a lie, but not the whole truth, either. “He didn’t attack any civilians, only the marines sent to wipe the island from the maps. But the fire I saw—these great, twisting dragons that could swallow a warship whole—you should understand how badly I’d like a picture of that, Phoenix. Imagine how it would look on the front page.”

After a long beat, Marco slowly shakes his head, shoulders dropping while understanding lends his voice a certain drawl. “You’re a fool.”

In that, they are both in complete agreement.

It’s enough to buy Sabo his freedom. He’ll have to be more careful in the future; if the Whitebeards see him and Ace interact, there will be no hiding behind a facade of journalistic or even artistic curiosity.

You’re not in the habit of retracing your steps. In most of your attempts, repeating past mistakes is a waste of time, and never are the new outcomes whenever you break away from established patterns new enough to matter.

This whole attempt doesn’t matter, though, so you go back to Sabaody. There are marines there, and Celestial Dragons who are too stupid to have gotten the message the first time. Oh, they’ll all die eventually. But the stupid ones can die first.

You don’t need to go to Sabaody, but you’ve cleared out the other bases nearby and now the marine presence on the archipelago is the second-largest in Paradise. You’re not about to leave that at your back.

It’s storming when you roll up, thunder and lightning and rain coming down sideways in sheets that’ll soak a man through in a second. The waves toss Striker around like a toy and you end up gunning the engine to ride a particularly tall wave right over one of the mangrove roots, and there your boat sits, beached a few dozen feet above the usual waterline.

No one in their right mind is walking around in this weather, so you take a second to orient yourself. No way to know which grove you’re at—visibility is about thirty feet in any direction, and the number of the trunk is way farther than that—so you head for the nearest shadow that’s probably a building and knock on the door. Your knuckles rapping on it coincides with a boom of thunder so loud it makes your teeth ache, and it also makes whoever had gotten up to answer let out a panicked yell loud enough you can hear them through the door.

You knock again.

“W-who is it?”

You have to lean in close to hear them, practically pressing your cheek against the blue-painted wood turned slick and shiny with water. “I got stuck in the storm,” you call over the cacophony, “and I lost my way. What grove is this?”

“What?”

“What grove is this?” you repeat, louder.

“You want to borrow my stove?”

When there’s a flash of lightning that leaves spots dancing in your eyes, you consider, for just a moment, kicking in the door. But this person’s done nothing to you, their only crime being a bit hard of hearing during a storm that’s got the ocean in a frenzy, so they don’t deserve it. They don’t. Even if there’s so much rain hitting you and steaming off you that it’s getting genuinely harder to see the longer you stay in one place. 

You repeat yourself a third time, and this time, they get it and give an answer: grove thirty-seven. One that’s still likely to have a marine presence. Good.

Hunting, true hunting, isn’t something you’ve done since the wild days on Dawn Island. Finding tracks, following the trail, setting the trap or just going in on the attack—it was a simple formula, and it worked. Whenever it didn’t, you had Sabo at your back, and later on, Luffy too. 

It’s just you now, though, just you and this thing pumping rage through your chest, and that’s for the best. It’s just you in danger when you find the first miserable marines forced out on patrol, just you when you make them lead you back to their base, just you when the captains and vice-admirals fight back, just you and only you when the rain freezes into hail that punches into the ashes and admiral Aokiji stands a dozen feet away.

Just you.

Any hail that hits you bursts into steam instantly, and within a couple of breaths, it stops. The storm still rages, the thunder still rolls and the lightning still blinds, but every raindrop that reaches his event horizon freezes and hangs there, a shield against the storm, and more than that, ammunition. He’s holding off for now, though, seeing how the first salvo just made steam. Both of you have observation haki but that doesn’t mean it feels good to only read your opponent’s intent rather than lay eyes on them.

You lay your eyes on him and see only his coat waving in a light  evening breeze while he pulls back his hand from the ice sculpture that was once your brother, and if you’re seeing that then Luffy’s still alive, still feeling all of this and you open your mouth to scream or do something and right then is when you wake up on that beautiful day with the sight of Aokiji’s bored expression seared into your eyelids.

Reality snaps back into focus with an icicle as large as Striker spearing you from temple to hip and you let it, let it split you down the middle and half of you gets to scream, gets to shake and rail against the memory that’s squeezing your lungs and the rest of you is rage so hot that not even the ice can touch you anymore.

It’s in his eyes, the realization. He can’t stop you. Can’t really slow you down. He puts up walls of ice dense enough to stop a hundred cannonballs and you walk right through. Freezes the rain for a mile in every direction and sends those needles through you, trying to use that to close the distance and strike with haki before your fire can eat him alive. Doesn’t expect your other half to come down from its fit overhead like a diving dragon to obliterate the ice and everything else for a half mile in every direction. 

You’re whole again, two halves united in fury against a man who was only ever doing his job and that’s enough, that’s all it takes, just doing a job and killing a boy and killing and killing and killing because it’s what the government said to do and there’s no point in resisting as an individual but it’s hundreds of individuals, thousands, all of them carrying out their orders believing it doesn’t matter what they do or don’t do.

Maybe you’re yelling, at this point, yelling at him and everything he’s ever stood for and stood by and watched. It’s not about him hearing but just spitting it all out before you choke on it. Maybe he hears you, maybe he doesn’t, but he’s still putting up ice and you’re still burning it down and there are three groves that are just gone thanks to what you’ve done here, the explosions of his ice against your fire enough to level the landscape, and you should feel something about that, you should, but there’s a howl in your ears and throat and chest that won’t stop until he’s dead and he’s not dead, he’s not, why isn’t he—

The sword that absorbs the punch meant for his head is as black with haki as the fist that strikes it, and the shockwave of clashing conqueror’s haki blows away the grass, the rain, the clouds—all of it. The great tree of this grove, weakened by the fight, groans and shakes but manages to stay standing despite the gashes in its trunk deep enough to look like caverns from so far away.

Aokiji, on his backside against the base of that trunk, stares up at you. His remaining arm is upraised and coated in ice, a feeble defense against the fire that would’ve followed your fist and annihilated him. Fire you can’t direct at the one who intervened.

“I think,” Silvers Rayleigh says mildly as he looks into your eyes and his haki wars against your own, “that it’s time we talked.”

Intervention isn’t Rayleigh’s usual game. He’s in the archipelago because it’s an interesting spot to watch the world from, to keep an eye on the marines and, more importantly, any up-and-comers about to try their luck in the New World.

Hellfire, Gol D. Ace, Roger’s boy because Rayleigh would know his captain’s likeness anywhere, even on his son’s face, once qualified as one of those up-and-comers. Rayleigh isn’t sure what he qualifies as now.

Well, right now, he qualifies as a smoldering fire still steaming off the sweat and water dripped on their heads from the branches above during the walk to an intact bar. It’s not Shakky’s—Rayleigh wouldn’t risk her, wouldn’t risk her business any more than the woman herself—but it’s a decent hole-in-the-wall he’s enjoyed after a few gambling runs, and being so close to where Ace made landfall, it’s nice and deserted. 

Rayleigh helps himself to some rum behind the bar and silently offers to pour a glass for the man still standing in the center of the floor like he can’t decide whether he wants to leave or bring the whole building down. Rayleigh would hope for the former; he likes this place, and it would be a waste of perfectly good alcohol.

Seeing as Ace isn’t responding, Rayleigh skips pouring him anything other than water and vaults back over the bar to take a seat on one of the stools. His hands didn’t shake during the whole process, which is good. He’d spent most of the walk trying to steady them after the act of blocking Ace’s attack left him numb up to the shoulders. 

Aokiji isn’t a pushover; Garp himself saw to that, if Rayleigh heard the rumors right. And while Ace is a little bruised, a little bloody in a few places where haki cut through his defenses, he’s far from anything Rayleigh would classify as seriously wounded. To go up against an admiral, to have Aokiji barely standing and down a limb, and to pay so little a price? 

He’s honestly somewhat surprised Ace was willing to leave Aokiji alive. He attributes that more to his own interference than anything; whatever grudge Ace has with the world, it seems Rayleigh isn’t part of it.

Yet. The longer Ace stands there, the steam dissipating, the heavier the gaze on Rayleigh becomes.

“Why?”

It’s the only natural question. Rayleigh sips his drink and considers an answer. He doesn’t have a good one, nothing beyond curiosity and figuring that in the aftermath of all this, there have gotta be a few powerful people who aren’t pirates out in the world. He can’t pretend Aokiji is a good person; nor can he pretend that the world without him is necessarily a better one.

A world without the world government, though. That’s something worth considering. Something that had been beyond the realm of consideration until a little hellion crashed through everyone’s expectations of what one man could do.

“Curiosity,” he finally answers.

Ace clenches a fist. There’s light bleeding out of his chest and throat and even flaring behind his eyes, a fire that won’t go out, and that’s a question, there, just how long that fire’s been burning. “I don’t want to fight you, old man.”

“Good. I’d rather not fight you either. Sit down, stay a while. I’ve been looking for some interesting conversation lately, and you’re the most interesting person on this archipelago by far.”

So interesting, in fact, that the reinforcements from Marineford are less looking for him and more looking to stay away from him while they evacuate their forces. Sabaody Archipelago, it seems, has been deemed a lost cause.

More’s the pity.

He’s halfway through his rum and contemplating a refill before this qualifies as one full drink when Ace slides into a stool, leaving one stool between them. Probably for the best; Rayleigh’s skin prickles with the heat he’s putting off. The steaming has stopped, at least.

“Quite an impression you’ve made,” Rayleigh says, an opening gambit that leaves room Ace can fill however he likes.

“It won’t matter.” The kid looks down at the glass of water and, after a wince and scowl at nothing in particular, downs it all in one go. The glass slams back down onto the bar. “None of this will.”

“I could name a few people who would say otherwise.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you could. Why’d you wanna talk, huh? Is it about your bastard of a captain? I don’t know anything about him, and I don’t want to.”

Rayleigh’s too old to pick fights, but there are some lines he doesn’t enjoy watching people cross right in front of him. “He wasn’t your captain, sure, but I have fond memories of him.”

“Good for you. Who else knows?”

“Anyone on his crew suspects, I’m sure.”

“You don’t talk?”

“No, not unless they pass through and say hello. We don’t do that often. People get nervous. Now, they might not care as much.” He pours himself a new drink, a different flavor of rum, and when he drinks it he wrinkles his nose at the spices mixed in. After a second, though, they resolve into a pleasant aftertaste and he decides to stick with his choice. “I take it you’re not doing any of this for him.”

Ace’s whole face goes dark and his eyes go molten. “No.”

“I figured. Felt I had to ask, though. I don’t suppose it’s for your mother?”

Ace blinks and some of the fire recedes. “What do you know about her?”

Defensive and curious and desperate all in one. His heart hurts, a little, for the childhood and parents his captain’s son never knew. “Not much. Roger was always secretive about her, and it was safety as much as anything else that kept us away. He told me a few things, though, the last time we talked.”

He doesn’t mean to torture the kid, making him wait while he sips his drink again, but he really does have to take a second to let the rum settle in his stomach before he speaks or the spices will have him coughing. 

“Will it matter?”

Ace scowls, the flames in his chest flaring bright as he bites out, “Yes.”

Chuckling to himself, Rayleigh parts with what few tidbits he knows. “She was a proud woman. Proud but loving, and more than a match for Roger in any battle of wits. She once tried to get him to go away by telling him to get her a hibiscus flower. They didn’t grow on her home island, so Roger said. Crazy fool scoured the East Blue until he found a while patch, then dug up half the lot and took them, dirt and all, back to her. Picked the first one and gave it to her, then gifted the rest as the start to a garden. Was properly floored when she laughed and told him he could’ve brought seeds, but saved some face when he explained he wanted her to enjoy the sight of them now, not next season.”

Leaning more of his weight on the bar, he can’t help a soft smile at the memory of Roger’s gregarious storytelling. “When we talked, they’d already picked out potential names for their kids. Anne, if it was a girl. Ace if it was a boy.”

Ace stiffens. “Who—”

“Roger’s idea, Ace. He liked the name, imagined it gave his offspring a certain predestination. Ace in the hole and all that. Even if Roger had no talent for gambling, he understood the principles just fine. Odds always seemed to be in his favor, too.”

That revelation goes down on his audience like a lead balloon, and Ace chews on it like he’s chewing rocks. “He chose my name.”

“Your mother was no passive audience,” he reminds Ace gently. “If she didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have it.”

That’s a concept that’s apparently a little easier to swallow. Rayleigh waits for Ace to ask more questions—though really, he doesn’t know much else—but Ace takes a different tack.

“If you…If we were strangers again, if you never knew about my bounty or anything. If I found you. Would you still tell me about her?”

Rayleigh’s known monsters, fought monsters, fought alongside monsters, and every publication he’s read and rumor he’s heard would paint Ace as the same—but the kid looking at him with guarded hope carefully contained behind his thundercloud-gray eyes doesn’t qualify. Maybe out there, when he’s got an admiral at his mercy and fury fueling his fire. But here? No.

“If you asked and I had the time, I don’t see why not.” He’s curious about the relief that flits across Ace’s face at that, can’t figure out why that affirmation is so valuable. If Ace is in a better mood, though, perhaps the kid’s willing to share a little more. He takes another drink and resettles his arm on the bar. “Well, then. For the sake of asking: why are you doing this?”

Ace blinks and looks down at his empty glass. Licks his lips, really mulls over the question in a way someone could interpret as him never having thought about it before, but that’s not it. Close examination hints that it’s a careful consideration, an inspection of his answer from every angle, a pearl held this way and that and considered carefully for any kind of display at all. 

“There’s someone I’m trying to save,” he finally says, in a tone that means it’s all he’s going to say.

Of course it’s about saving someone. Nothing ever got Roger as fired up as protecting those he loved.

Long after Ace is gone, Rayleigh is still sipping rum in that bar, fingers tapping the old wood absently when he gets too deep in his thoughts. If this is what trying looks like, he’s not sure what succeeding would change.

There’s no real pattern to it, no strategic plan. Ace just goes places, and if those places have marines, those places do not continue to have marines. Any strategist worth their salt would plot a very different course, either focusing on the weaker installations before moving onto the biggest or targeting the biggest between the weaker ones right when they think they’re safe behind their walls.

At one point, Ace does a three-day detour to chase down a rear admiral who fled from one of the bases. Three days. There’s no plan, there never was, and Sabo can’t help feeling like he’s wasting his time trying to figure out Ace’s next move before he makes it.

The chaos theory breaks when Sabo takes a moment on the open sea to think. He just got himself through a Grand Line hailstorm and sea king attack, so he won’t be going anywhere until his body feels like it isn’t about to crack right in half if he asks too much of it. His brain is the only thing he can flex without pain.

He pulls out his map of Paradise and stares at all the pins he’s stuck in it to represent Ace’s targets. Black pins for small bases. Red ones for big. There’s no pattern in the order, but if he looks at the locations, there are two glaring omissions.

Sure, everyone would think it’s because either one is too big of a target for a single person. That Ace is doing the smart thing and avoiding them.

As if Ace has done the smart thing at any point prior to this.

All of the bases facing Ace’s wrath right now are the ones best positioned to give support to Marineford and Impel Down, from the return trip to Sabaody Archipelago to the tour of everything nearby.

The smart thing, for something already dead set on doing the most reckless thing imaginable, was to soften up the biggest targets, remove their support so any attacker wouldn’t have to wage a war on multiple fronts.

Sabo has no business sailing into a war. He charts a course for Impel Down anyway.

He smells the prison long before he reaches it, and it’s a smell he’s grown very familiar with in these months following Ace. It’s one ingrained in his bones from a time he cannot remember and he can’t say he’s enjoying experiencing it with every single breath he takes.

Anyone on approach could mistake the gentle flakes drifting down from the hazy sky as snow. Black snow, some kind of Grand Line phenomenon best left unquestioned. 

But Sabo’s had smoke coating the back of his throat and tickling his lungs for hours now, and he could never mistake the ash falling around him for anything else. He’s never been close enough to Ace to witness this aspect of his destruction. In its breadth, in its silence, in its deceptive tranquility—it’s haunting.

Hellfire indeed.

In the disquieting ashfall, Sabo sails alone, though he keeps an eye out for any other ships. The Whitebeards, in particular, worry him. With their resources, he has no doubt they’ve kept closer to Ace than anyone else. The question is whether they’ve pieced together Ace’s last target, and if they have any means of getting to Ace before he gets to Marineford. Or if they’re perfectly fine picking at his bones in the aftermath.

Ash alights on his lips and he spits it away, unable to wipe away the scowl that remains. This anger in him has been building with each new hornet’s nest Ace decides to kick, and Impel Down is one of the biggest nests of all. It’s not any logical feeling; the revolutionary in him is thrilled that Ace is wiping all of these strongholds off the map. The man in him, though, and maybe it’s even the brother Ace used to know—that part of him is furious at Ace for doing this, even more furious he’s doing it alone.

Stubborn, self-sacrificing bastard.

The thought, so loud and cutting, catches him by surprise. It’s the clearest those old feelings have ever been, and maybe, just maybe, there’s a door in his mind that’s now been cracked open just enough to let things through.

He ignores the door. Time enough for that when Ace isn’t running around with the whole world looking to plunge a knife in his back.

Impel Down itself, the great prison of the world, long considered impregnable and inescapable, is nothing but a ring of barren rock around another barren rock sticking out of the water when Sabo finds it. He sails clean past it three times before realizing the shadow in the waves is his target.

Gone is the massive outer wall that once encircled it. Gone is the inner wall, and the inner sanctuary, and the dozen warships that once protected it.

He clenches his jaw and fights to keep his breathing steady as he disembarks and takes slow, careful steps onto the ruin. He doesn’t go far; the ashes ahead of him are undulating in a way that makes him pretty sure Ace breached the walls and the whole prison flooded.

Did the prisoners get out?

His heart clenches. Did Iva…?

He’s spared from considering that thought further when a breeze disturbs the ash around him and shakes a little of it from his hair and the brim of his hat. This is the Calm Belt—there shouldn't be a breeze. He turns and isn’t surprised to see Marco the Phoenix standing a few steps away. Silent on approach, slipping past Sabo’s haki this time because he’s just that fucking good at containing himself and wants Sabo to know it. It would be terrifying if Sabo wasn’t pretty sure Marco didn’t want him dead.

“Reporter,” Marco greets, in the kind of cheerfully flat tone that indicates he never bought the cover and Sabo would be wise not to bother with it again.

“I wasn’t aware Whitebeard was in the area.”

“Suffice to say I saw fit to go on ahead. Imagine my surprise, finding you here.”

He doesn’t sound surprised. “Imagine my surprise, beating you here.”

Marco’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes and Sabo considers that perhaps poking at one of the most powerful pirates in the world who would love to see Ace’s head on a pike isn’t in his best interests. “Why are you at Impel Down-yoi?”

What’s left of it, Sabo thinks. “Process of elimination. He took down all the nearby bases. This and Marineford were all that remained. It was a fifty-fifty shot. Less than that—they’d probably send reinforcements from here to Marineford, but not the other way around. They’d know Impel Down wouldn’t hold out long enough, but Marineford probably could.”

It’s logic enough to satisfy, and it’s true, so Marco nods. “Word is he made contact with Rayleigh in Sabaody during his second rampage-yoi.”

“Rumors are dangerous things.” He’d heard from his own contacts about the Sabaody conflict, hadn’t bothered sailing that way because Ace would be long gone by the time he made it. The revolutionaries haven’t been able to confirm Rayleigh’s involvement, and Aokiji’s survival is a matter of similar debate. Not even the marines know what’s become of him. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s gone rogue. Maybe none of that matters at all.

“So they are. Some of them even say his crew is trying to chase him down-yoi. Get revenge.”

“I’m not a pirate. Never have been. But I think we both know better than to believe the Spades have any interest in killing him.”

Maybe they’re giving chase, same way Sabo is. Trying to keep family from going too far, getting too deep, drowning. And failing as badly as he is. Unlike the Whitebeards, they’re not powerful enough to cross whatever seas they like in their pursuit. 

“And you?” Marco presses. “What’s your purpose?”

Are you my enemy? A blunt question, one Sabo knows better than to answer outright. “I was at Pineyard. That was truth. And he really attacked the marines and left the island’s people alone.” Ignoring his brawl with Sabo, at least. “I want to know why.”

Another truth. He’s not here to stop Ace, only help him, and he’s also determined to figure out what made the man so determined to be the world’s own funeral pyre. Nothing like that happens without a reason, a damned good one.

“He’s going to Marineford,” Marco says after a beat, and it’s not really a question. Sabo nods anyway. They both know it, because the both of them are too familiar with Ace’s reckless disregard for his own life. Whatever his mission is, he isn’t careful about making sure it’s done, only that he blazes as destructive a path as possible toward his goal. He doesn’t care if he dies on the way. Just that he tries.

And he’ll try. The marines will have pulled everyone back to there even before his attack on Impel Down. It’s suicide. Even more than this prison raid. Sabo won’t find him in time, probably won’t be able to talk the idiot down if he managed to pull off that miracle.

Marco’s turned away, is chatting with someone who can only be Whitebeard via a small snail, giving Sabo a second to think.

Okay. Why is Ace doing this? Why? He has the power to do anything and he’s choosing this. It’s not just about Sabo or the celestial dragon that tried to kill him. It’s too much for that.

His memory’s still spotty, but he’s getting more every day—including that Ace’s dad is Gol D. Roger. This could be revenge for Roger’s death, but no, that doesn’t make sense. Ace hates him. Hates him. So what else?

There’s only one other name that bubbles up in response to the question of what or who Ace would kill for, and that name is Luffy. Is Luffy dead? Is this revenge for that? Sabo doesn’t think so, because Luffy being dead surely would’ve come up while he and Ace were talking.

So why’s Ace gotta burn the world down for Luffy? The only thing the kid’s got to his name is that straw hat. Or maybe it’s the name itself. Monkey D. Luffy. 

And Sabo feels like an idiot.

Monkey. Monkey. Not a common surname, and there’s some faint but undeniable resemblance, and Dragon had demonstrated a tendency in his moments of what he thought was unobserved solitude to face East Blue. Dragon is Luffy’s dad.

Dragon, the World Government’s number one enemy, the most wanted man on the planet, is Luffy’s dad. 

And Ace, protective older brother that he is, is taking out anyone and everyone who has reason to want Luffy dead.

Well, fine. Luffy’s, what, sixteen right now? Fifteen? Somewhere around there. Odds are good he’s still on Dawn Island.

“You know you’ll die if you follow him to Marineford-yoi. What are you planning?”

Deep in his thoughts, Sabo had almost forgotten about Marco. The man’s finished his call and is eyeing Sabo with justified suspicion. You’ll die. Either the marines kill him or the Whitebeards do, because yeah, if he gets to Ace, he’s damn well going to try to protect his brother from the people who want him dead, stupid as it is. Maybe Ace’s stupidity is contagious.

He draws a breath in, a deep breath—it’s coughing. Just coughing. Ash, smoke. Not conducive to calming breaths. He hacks up half a lung, wipes his eyes, and tries to face Marco with as much dignity as he has left.

“I don’t have a death wish,” he manages, then coughs again to clear the last of it. “This is as close as I’ve gotten, and you were still right behind me.” He pauses, throat still raw, and collects himself for the biggest lie he’s ever told. “I’m giving up.”

Marco lifts his eyebrows.

“Chasing him, it’s too easy to forget I have a brother I need to take care of back home. I’ve been away too long already.”

Chapter Text

You get a message. Its contents are nearly as unexpected as the method of delivery.

But you’re getting ahead of yourself.

There was a time, many many attempts ago, when you thought Marineford was the end of it. If you made it through Marineford, if you avoided Marineford, if you destroyed Marineford, things would be different. And they were. Until they weren’t. 

You can’t save him.  

Even so, there’s something satisfying about bringing ruin to this place. You’re not so far gone that you enjoy killing thousands, but there’s just enough wrong with you to feel pleased that this place is charred and broken. Sure, there are survivors. Gramps, for one. The families who evacuated before you started your attack, before your firestorm turned the ocean for half a mile in every direction into a boiling death machine. However many managed to cross the ice bridge that appeared out of nowhere and held up against that heat for nearly thirty minutes. A few dozen others strong enough to endure and recover from their wounds, given time. 

But the rest are gone. The navy is, as far as the world could care, gone. You stand there staring up at where your execution platform sat and enjoy the view of the blackened mountain of rubble where the stronghold used to be. You can’t take credit for all the destruction; your clash with every remaining admiral, vice admiral, and on and on down the hierarchy was a multi-hour gauntlet for the ages, and the land paid the price. You’re pretty sure a lot of this is Sengoku’s fault; your flames just scoured what was left.

They hadn’t even had time to call the Seven Warlords in for backup. You’re pretty sure the warlords wouldn’t have come even if they did. At least, you hope not. You don’t want to fight Jinbe again. Bad enough you fought him once already, worse that it made Pops your enemy even before Teach. 

Maybe they did call, and the Warlords, sensing the tide coming in, refused. They had enough time to bring all these reinforcements.

In a few minutes, when you’ve got most of your strength back, you’ll head to your ship and chart a course for Marijois. The Celestial Dragons are probably terrified. You hope they’re terrified. If they’re not, they will be. You’ll make sure of it. 

And because you’re tired, because you’re distracted, because you dare to think it’s almost over and because you cannot save him, your guard slips. It slips, and someone slips through the gap.

“Hellfire,” Marco greets, landing behind you amid a rush of silent blue flame. You curse as you spin to face him, because if he’s here, the rest can’t be far behind. And they’re not: to your horror, the Moby Dick erupts from underwater, a fresh bubble coating leaving it iridescent for a moment before it pops. Sea spray rains down while the ship bobs its way into port. In the late afternoon sun, it casts a very long shadow. 

“Ace,” you say, searching the swarms of people jumping down and bringing your world crashing down with them. “My name is Ace.”

Marco smiles in a way that’s distinctly unfriendly. “I know.”

There’s Whitebeard—coming up over the figurehead and leaping down. Lost amid the swarm headed for you. For a second, you wish you’d left Gramps conscious. He would’ve made a good distraction. 

They’re surrounding you, every single one of them spoiling for a fight. You clench your hands into fists, fighting yourself to stay corporeal in the face of that hostility. It’s harder to think when you give yourself over to the flames. 

“How’d you know?” you ask Marco to distract yourself. That coating they’d used to sneak up on you required preparation. 

“You think you were making this some big secret-yoi? Everyone knew you were going to show up here eventually.”

“You knew I’d do it now,” you snarl, needing someone other than yourself to blame for this fuckup. 

“We had scouts in the area. Impel Down’s destruction was also a good sign.”

You never saw anyone. Then you realize that those scouts, like the Moby Dick, had probably been underwater and far enough away that your haki hadn’t picked them up as threats.

“By the way,” Marco continues in a conversational tone while the Whitebeards converge on them, “I spoke with that revolutionary who’s been chasing you.”

You go cold. Spoke with. If Marco hurt Sabo—if he—if Sabo’s—

You don’t know what you’ll do, but the fire that bucks your control and bursts to life along your shoulders has some suggestions. 

“He gave up the chase all on his own.” Marco almost seems amused by your unspoken response. “Claimed he had a forgotten brother to take care of and left. Don’t expect him to save you.”

The ground tilts under you. Sabo’s fine. Sabo’s alive. Sabo’s…Sabo is…

Sabo is sending you that message and he’s using the first division commander of the Whitebeard Pirates to do it.

You can almost see the devious little smirk on his ten-year-old face transplanted onto the adult you’ve come to know. Forgotten brother. Marco has no idea what message he’s just relayed. 

You laugh a little. Can’t help it. This is how it goes. How it always goes. You think you’re in control, you think you’ve planned for everything, but there’s one thing, one person, one coincidence that pokes out one of the pillars holding up your world and then it all comes crashing down right on Luffy’s head. 

“Of course it’s him,” you tell the sky through a smile that’s almost a grimace. “That bastard always knew how to cut me down to size.”

You don’t bother with anything else. You take off running for your ship, evading Marco by hairs only to see Whitebeard himself standing right by Striker. You freeze. One wrong move and that ship, the only ship fast enough to outrun everyone who wants you dead and get to Dawn before the worst can happen, is so many splinters. 

Whitebeard’s eyes are cold enough to chill the fire inside you even more than the fear of what could happen if trouble follows Sabo, but even looking at him now you still see your father, and so when you skid to a stop in front of him the word falls hoarsely from your lips:

“Please.” You almost say Pops, almost, but bite it back. Instead, you manage, “He’s my brother.”

Footsteps behind you. No look or haki needed to know the rest of the Whitebeards have turned around and fanned out, a wall of bristling fists and weapons. 

“Teach was ours,” Marco says. 

You scowl, because no he wasn’t, not really. He never believed in the family. It was all a show. A mockery. 

But you still have no proof. 

The ocean breeze rolls through, tries and fails to carry away the noxious smells of burnt flesh and ammunition. Marineford is gone. Impel Down is gone. Ennies Lobby is gone. All the navy’s seats of power are gone. All that’s left, really, is Mariejois. You’ll see the head of the World Government burn one day, you’re sure. But with Marineford and Impel Down scoured from the seas, you can tell the fire inside you later, and it feels like it might actually listen. For now, anyway. For long enough to make sure Luffy’s okay.

You look at Whitebeard. The world looks back. 

You cannot save him. 

It takes biting your lip hard enough to hurt to keep everything bottled up inside, but you feel it pulse and twist in your chest anyway, and the Whitebeards behind you all shift and mutter at whatever they see. 

“Let me save him,” you say, and amend, “let me try. You can have my head after.” It won’t matter. You’ll fail. You always fail. This will all be wiped from the world’s memory, and your father won’t look at you like this again if you can help it. 

You don’t want to fight family.

Whitebeard doesn’t move. You do. You go down to one knee, to both, and you press your forehead into the ground. 

A memory surfaces, an old one, back from the first time you ever lived. Pressing your forehead into this same ground, a war raging on your behalf you never asked for but will never stop being grateful for, a father asking if he was good and yes, by all the seas yes, there will never be anyone else who can claim that piece of your heart. 

It’s hard to breathe, to speak, but here and now you manage to force out: “Please.”

No one moves. Hostility radiates from them all in waves that crawl over your skin like needles. 

Asking alone isn’t enough. Promises alone aren’t enough. 

“Dawn Island,” you whisper, fighting everything you are and believe in to say it. “That’s where I’m from, and it’s where he’s going. Where I need to go. Please. I’ll be there, I promise, you can do whatever you want to me, just please, let me make sure they’re safe first.”

It’s dangerous, leading them there. Leading anyone there. But it’s all unraveling anyway, so what’s the point? Always better to have you die for the reset to happen. Better you than Luffy. Always. 

You stay like that, prostrated, begging, desperate and feeling the ice crack underfoot and watching Luffy sink again. 

There’s a distant shout. A surge in the muttering that breaks into more shouts. You think they’re calling for your head until you pick out the words: Red Force. Red Hair. Shanks. 

Your heart thuds in your chest. Shanks?

You lift your head and see that it’s true. Out on the sea, cast in sharp silhouette by the setting sun, is the Red Force. Shanks’s Jolly Roger is emblazoned on its white sails and its red dragon figurehead cuts easily through the distance to shore. The closer it gets, the thicker the tension. No one moves; they think Red Hair is here for a fight. They think you did something to piss him off and he wants your head, Whitebeard’s grudge be damned. 

You don’t know if you did. You really, really hope not. 

“Quiet,” Whitebeard orders, and silence sweeps through the air as the Red Force docks next to the Moby Dick. Both ships are legendary, but the Red Force looks like a toy in the shadow of its counterpart. 

And in the shadow of them both, Striker is trapped. Closer to shore because it’s lighter, can handle shallower water, it’s now boxed in. You have no escape. Even if you tried to fly, either Marco would catch you or you’d run out of strength before the next island, fall into the ocean, and drown. You’ve done it before. You don’t want to do it again. 

A couple of the Red Hair pirates jump over the side to moor their ship and ensure the wicker fenders are in place to protect the hull. Down goes the gangplank. And down that gangplank walks Shanks. 

Your heart squeezes. Black cape, white shirt, loud pants, sandals. He looks the same. 

A different Shanks—bloodstained, scarred eye just a hole in his head, but still standing—yells at you from across history: “Take Luffy and go! I’ll hold them back!”

He was strong. But even he couldn’t hold back the world. Fate had caught you all by the neck by then, and there was nowhere left to run. Before Luffy died, though, you made one hell of a final stand. Fighting back-to-back with Shanks; it’s an experience you doubt you’ll ever repeat, but it’s one you treasure. Luffy’s unwavering faith in the man, something you’d trusted implicitly, had been justified a hundred times that day. 

“Seems I’m interrupting,” this Shanks says mildly. He’s got his forearm resting loosely on the hilt of his sword, but there’s no tension in his posture. Whitebeard, his back to you now, stands between him and you. No haki yet, but you brace yourself for it just in case. 

“Why are you here?” Whitebeard asks. His grip on his weapon isn’t nearly so casual. Then again, he’d been planning to take your head. Seems Shanks isn’t, which is good. You’ve been careful this time, but there’s always a chance you slip up in the chaos of your many fights and injure someone he cares about. 

“Same reason as you, I think.” He nods at you. “Him.”

“Why?”

Shanks’s crew has lined up behind him now. They’re staring at Whitebeard’s men, and they’re staring back, and you’re feeling a little sandwiched between them. 

“Call it curiosity.” It’s flippant and the situation is anything but, so he elaborates. “I’d prefer to speak to my captain’s son at least once before he dies.”

The silence after Whitebeard’s order had been suffocating. The silence after Shanks’s words is deafening. Only the gentle lap of the ocean dares to defy it. 

Your travel always takes you back before you ever meet Shanks. This one doesn’t know you, doesn’t have any of the history piled up in your chest and making it hard to breathe. 

“I know you’ve noticed what I have,” Shanks continues after a moment. His tone turns pointed. “I never saw you take his head.”

With the silence broken, murmurs rise up from behind you. They didn’t know. The Red Hair crew is quiet. They knew. You stare at them in shock. They knew, they know, and they look back at you with a mix of wariness, sympathy, and curiosity. 

“You’re right,” Whitebeard finally replies. “You are interrupting.”

Your breath catches in your throat. They’re going to fight. What can you do? What should you do? You don’t want to fight family and you sure as hell don’t want family fighting over you. You’re not worth that. 

Instead of swinging, Whitebeard relaxes his hold on his bisento and steps aside. A sigh emanates from both crews. Relief? Disappointment? It’s impossible to tell. 

Shanks nods his thanks and strides across the ashen ground toward you. You straighten up onto your knees, not trusting yourself to stand quite yet. When he gets close, he stops and crouches down to your level, uncaring of the ash on his cape. His gaze feels like it cuts straight through to your hollowed-out core, and your throat goes as dry as it did when you confronted Whitebeard in the ruins of that far smaller marine base. 

“Quite the resemblance,” he murmurs. “Even stronger in person. You feel similar, too.” Then he blinks and he’s looking at you, not at you. “Freckles are from your mother, I’m guessing?”

It takes you a second to find your voice. “I never knew her.”

He nods to himself. “Must’ve been quite the woman to catch the captain’s eye.”

“She deserved better than him,” you bite out. “And better than me.”

“Maybe. We all make our own choices.” He stands straight, knees cracking. “I have a request, Newgate. I’ll owe you one.”

Shanks makes the offer blithely. He’s already talked it over with Benn, with the whole crew. 

“Let me take a look at him,” he’d asked.  “I’ll decide then.”

There hadn't been any other choice, not really, not when he saw the third series of bounty posters they put out and his captain stared out at him from across time. Younger, freckled, a softer face in general—but the resemblance was uncanny. And his name, before Hellfire took over. It stood to reason Roger’s son would carry the Will of D.

What would cause a kid like that to declare war on the world, and to abandon his name and crew in the process? What changed? He hadn’t looked surprised at all when Shanks described his heritage, so he has to know who his father is—but this mission to destroy the world hardly seems like revenge.

Maybe it’s nosy. Maybe it’s foolish. Maybe it’s an old wound weeping once more. But he has to ask, at least, and stubborn bastard willing, he’ll get the answers to all of his questions.

And maybe, just maybe, he can help this kid to return a little of the help Roger gave him.

He’s seen him, and he’s decided. So he makes his offer blithely, but with full awareness of the weight behind it, what it means for one Emperor to be in the debt of another. Everyone else understands that he understands that instantly. 

Everyone except Gol D. Ace. He shoves himself to his feet and protests, “You can’t!”

Shanks raises an eyebrow at him. “I can’t?”

The kid fumbles his words, looking at him with strange desperation. Though fire still lights up the inside of his chest and throat, his eyes are uninterrupted gray. “I don’t need your help.”

Looks and pride to match his dad. How the whole world hasn’t seen it by now, he’ll never know. “Who says I’m helping you?”

That gets the kid to back down, but only slightly. Now there’s orange flickering behind the gray. There’s a fine line to tread here to keep him from doing something stupid. 

His eyes snag on a bit of stitching poking up from a well-worn bit of his shorts by the blue pouch. At some point, either Ace found the time to patch his clothes, or someone cared enough to do it for him. But who would Ace let get that close? He didn’t even stay with the crew that followed him to the Grand Line.

“Your request?” Whitebeard asks. He’s erring on the side of annoyed curiosity rather than offense, which is about as good as Shanks can hope for, showing up unannounced and uninvited like this and getting distracted besides.

“Let me have tonight with him. We’re overdue a conversation.”

Ace stiffens. So, he’d had no idea Shanks was putting out feelers to talk to him. Unsurprising, with his single-minded focus on havoc. 

“You can sit in on it if you want. After that,” Shanks shrugs, “he’s yours. Or maybe I have another favor to ask.”

Several of Whitebeard’s crew scowl at that. He gets it, really; Ace killed their crew mate. With the way the kid’s acted everywhere else, though, he can’t help feeling there’s more to that story. What’s left of Marineford makes it clear that if Ace wanted to pick a fight with Whitebeard, he could. And if he did, he wouldn’t bother with pinpoint attacks against random pirates that leave the rest of the crew unharmed—assuming the news that only one man died in that clash is true.

And if he’s anything at all like Roger in more than looks, there is absolutely more to that story.  

“How’s that sound?” Shanks asks Ace, who looks far more inclined to bolt than hold a conversation. His ship being blocked in is, for the moment, making him think twice. Even he can’t get the Red Force out of the way fast enough to avoid Whitebeard or Shanks’s wrath. 

So they all hope, at least. 

Ace swallows and looks away, expression shadowed. “It won’t matter.”

“Maybe not to you.” Arguing with the kid isn’t going to go anywhere, but it seems agreement, even partial, really gets under his skin. He turns and faces Whitebeard. “Well, Newgate?”

Whitebeard’s gaze roams over his own crew. Many of them are feeling bloodthirsty; Ace has been escaping their retribution for longer than anyone else has ever managed. The killing intent is thick enough that Shanks can’t comfortably take his arm away from his sword. 

Whitebeard’s feelings on the matter are somewhat more contained—the composure required of the captain and strongest man in the world. And for all that Shanks hadn’t glimpsed a near future in which Ace’s head rolled, nor had he seen one where Ace was left to walk free. For better or worse, for good reason or bad, he killed one of Whitebeard’s sons. That simply cannot go unanswered. 

All of those calculations and more run behind Whitebeard’s eyes. Finally, he nods, but he’s far from happy about it. “One night. We’ll talk.”

Shanks smiles, letting only some of his relief show. “Agreed.”

Shouts arise from Whitebeard’s men but a look from the captain quiets them down. They start making arrangements; Shanks signals Benn to break out some conciliatory sake and whatever other spirits they have in storage. Several people go to see if any of Marineford’s storage rooms survived. Then he looks back at Ace, who’s watching the buzz of activity with a resigned expression. 

“For someone who was begging for his life, you’re not looking thrilled about getting another night.”

Ace’s eyes flick to him. The fire’s tamped down now, but it’s still pulsing softly in his chest like a glowing heart. “I wasn’t begging for my life.” He exhales long and slow and dusts off some of the ashes on his knees and elbows. There’s still a smudge on his forehead. “I need to help my brother.”

Shanks blinks. Brother. Brother. Roger had two kids? “You have a brother?”

“Not by blood.” He sounds vaguely annoyed, like he’s had this conversation before. “You know him: Luffy.”

Shanks blinks again. “Luffy? Little anchor Luffy? Scar-under-his-eye Luffy? That Luffy?”

“Yeah. He’s still got that straw hat you gave him.”

Roger’s son is the one telling him Luffy’s still got Roger’s straw hat. He can’t help a smile. “That’s good, real good. I knew he’d take good care of it.”

“The idiot values it more than his own life.” He sighs, the bitterness turning to resignation while he tries and fails to wipe ashes from his hands. “It’s his treasure.”

“And he’s yours?”

Ace whips his head up. “What?”

“You were begging for his sake. You. Not something you have a reputation for.”

“And you know so much about my reputation.”

“It’s no secret.”

Ace scowls. “You gave up a favor just to have this conversation?”

“Not this one, no. I won’t have that one without Newgate; I did promise, and I do try to keep my word.”

Pain flickers across Ace’s face.

“Why is it so important for you to get back to Luffy? What’s the threat?”

But Ace has clammed up, and he refuses to look Shanks in the eye. Shanks lets it go for now; he’s got hours to figure out how to get the kid to open up.

For a while, it’s all logistics. Who goes where, supplies for what, doing that because. His crew is self-sufficient but with tensions so high, best to have Shanks keeping an eye on things to make sure nothing sparks into flame.

The flame himself is surprisingly calm, sitting off to the side, Marco and Jozu standing cross-armed over him and looking less like they’re enjoying guard duty and more like they’re waiting for Ace to give them an excuse.

Then Shanks looks closer at Ace. Ace’s eyes are bright, bright orange, not a hint of gray, and tongues of flame intermittently light up the shadows of his hair. The glowing heart of fire in his chest, visible even in this hazy daylight, beats at a rhythm nobody could mistake for calm.

He catches Ace’s eye. The kid stares back, unblinking, not really seeing Shanks at all. 

Probably thinking about his brother.

“Newgate?” Shanks calls, figuring that Ace’s agitation isn’t likely to recede with time. He’d rather not find out what the limit is or what Whitebeard’s family considers sufficient excuse.

For all that time has you by the throat, it loves to slip by like so much sand the moment you’re unable to do anything with it, the moment it matters. Time you should be on the water. Time you should be using to get back to Luffy.

Time you’re spending sitting here, doing nothing, being nothing besides a carnival exhibit for the pirates to gawk at. For a while, you ignore them. Not because you’re trying to, but because your own mind is doing its best to torture you with all the things Luffy could be going through right now. Sabo could lead the remnants of the marines in East Blue to Dawn. Goa Kingdom could’ve seen your poster and somehow connected your face to one of the trio that used to terrorize them, and from there hunted Luffy down. 

Or maybe, since you’ve decided dreaming up hypotheticals you can’t do a damn thing about is a good use of energy, a fucking meteor fell from the sky when Sabo and Luffy dared to be on the same patch of land together and obliterated everything.

You know the last one isn’t possible, because you’re still here. Luffy’s alive. That’s all you know. Luffy’s alive, but he could be hurt, crying, wondering where you are and why you aren’t there to save him when he’s not even—

He wouldn’t think that, and that’s Sabo’s voice, gentle but firm in its reprimand, because he’s right and you know it.

Your thoughts are not a safe place to be. You focus on the pirates, realize they’ve been staring, and snarl at everyone who dares make eye contact. Next to you, Marco rolls his eyes and Jozu frowns harder.

You miss your hat, lost during the fighting. Would’ve been nice to have the brim as a pathetic little shield. Miss your dagger just as much, but they weren’t going to leave you with a weapon like that.

And then a shadow falls over all of you. Whitebeard. Next to him, a flask of sake over one shoulder, is Shanks.

“I’ll hold them back!”

Yeah. Still hurts.

“Mind if we borrow him?” Shanks asks. It’s not a question.

You all end up around a little campfire—tiny, compared to Whitebeard. Some ash-coated bits of wood dug up from the wreckage that crackle and pop like the whole fortress did once you got it good and burning. You’re sitting on the ground—not much a little more ash can do that hasn’t already been done—legs drawn up enough that you can throw your arms on your knees and stare at the seam where Sabo mended a tear in the hem of your shorts. 

Someone’s scrounged up a chair for the old man, while Shanks had waved off someone’s effort to do the same for him and now sits cross-legged to your right. Whitebeard is technically to you left, not quite directly across the flames but close.

There’s significance, you know, in Shanks being closer to you than equal spacing would require. You try not to think about it too much. Try not to think about any of this too much.

It won’t matter.

You can’t save him.

They’ve picked a spot far enough from the rest of the crews to allow for privacy but not so far they can’t all be there in a heartbeat if you decide to take your chances. Whitebeard and Shanks and all their people…they could stop you, you’re pretty sure. Particularly because you do not want that fight. Family, and all. You can burn so much, but not that. Never that.

“So, Ace,” Shanks says. “I think it’s about time you told us what you’re really doing here.”

You scoff and scrub a boot in the ash. What you’re doing here is obvious. It’s already done. Shanks waves that away.

“Too broad of a question. Let me—”

“Why Teach?” Whitebeard cuts in without ceremony, without remorse, without anything but a weight-of-the-world gaze bearing down on you like he can force an answer out with his eyes alone. Shanks sighs but doesn’t do anything else.

You can’t look Whitebeard in the eye for long. Instead, you look at the fire, which is—as fires go—about as calm as a fire can be. Stuck in one place burning the same fuel until it burns out.

The fire in your chest shifts a little. Settles when you swallow it down.

It won’t matter. So it won’t matter if you tell the truth. Either Luffy dies while you sit here or they kill you and none of it ever matters anyway.

Maybe someone smarter would be able to give up on an attempt. Would be able to walk into the ocean or into the path of a bullet and just—let it end. Start over. You thought about it, a few times, but never—you can’t. Can’t give up like that, because that’s giving up on Luffy, that’s saying there is a point I stop caring about you and that’s nothing short of complete anathema.

And you have to hope. You have to keep hoping that any attempt, any of them, can be the one where things work out. You have to hope, because if you don’t, there is a very deep and very dark sea inside of you that is just waiting for you to stop treading water.

So maybe it’d be smarter to just let them kill you quick instead of letting them rip your heart out slow, or just do that for them, but you’re a fighter through and through so that means you get to fight right up to whatever miserable end the world’s got in store. You can’t help it. 

You can’t save him, yourself, or anyone else.

“He had to die.” Your voice barely carries over the flames. “He had to. He only joined your crew because he figured it was the best way to get the Yami Yami no Mi, and whenever it was found, he’d kill whoever found it—his own family—and run. He’d bring nothing but shame to your family, your name.”

“You killed one of my sons because of what he might do?”

“What he would do!”

You glare up at your father and he glares back, and the fire’s dancing like someone poured fuel on it and you’re both a twitch away from letting the haki loose when Shanks finishes taking a drink, sighs, and interrupts.

“How’d you know, Ace? What he would do, how did you know?”

You blink, lean back. “You believe me?” It’s never been that easy.

“I believe you believe yourself. So c’mon, out with it. Why’s a supposed traitor in Whitebeard’s crew got anything to do with a spitfire from East Blue?”

Spitfire is as diminutive as Hellfire is annoying, but your scowl is less at Shanks and more the whole situation.

“Why,” Shanks pushes when you don’t respond, “is all of this not going to matter?”

The flames dance and you watch them. You know what you said before to make Shanks believe, to make Whitebeard believe, but circumstances were so different then and you’ve never managed Whitebeard when he wants you dead.

Never had Shanks be the one to chase you down and ask, either.

“It’ll get erased.” You focus on the flames and try to ignore how the ones inside you refuse listen when you try to calm them down. “I die, or Luffy dies, and it all starts over. The first time, Teach killed Thatch. I chased him down, lost, and they tried to execute me here. You,” you tip your head toward Whitebeard, unable to look at him directly, “brought everyone to save me. I did something stupid, Luffy died when I should’ve instead, and…it just keeps happening. One way or another.”

“You were on his crew?”

It hurts to swallow around the lump in your throat. The words you should say bitter on your tongue. All the ways you’ve betrayed Whitebeard, all the lives you’ve lived without his mark on your back, more time on the seas without than with, do you still deserve any bit of the pride you cling to? 

“Second division commander. Thatch—Thatch was my friend. He found the Yami Yami no Mi and Teach killed him with a knife to the back. I…I found his body.” You drag in a breath, bring one hand to your chest and breath out slow until the world stops threatening to tip off its axis. “Every time Teach gets the fruit, things get worse, Luffy doesn’t—we don’t—I…I’ve started trying to get rid of him as early as I can. Sometimes I can do it without anyone knowing what happened. Sometimes I can’t.”

In the silence that follows, the only sound is the ragged crackling of the fire, which is starting to run low on flammable bits of wreckage. You coax it back to life, letting it feed on your power instead, and that’s what finally gets the fire inside you to stop swirling like a storm about to break.

“That’s why I need to get back to Luffy. If he—if he dies, then none of this matters.”

Shanks and Whitebeard exchange a long look, the both of them looking ten years older in the flickering firelight.

“And if you die?”

You shrug. It’s the same either way, but better it’s you. Always better if it’s you.

Another long look. A silent argument. You glance over your shoulder, at the water, at Striker. Just to see. 

Marco, standing directly in front of the ship, stares back at you.

“Proof,” Whitebeard says. “Power alone doesn’t mean anything. If you’ve lived and died so many times, if you’ve been my son,” that one hurts, the skepticism in it, “then you would know something.”

“Teach gave Shanks his scars,” you finally say. “And Shanks…you tried to use your family name, once, to help. It didn’t work. They didn’t care.”

Shanks’s eyes go wide. You turn to Whitebeard, can’t bring yourself to look higher than his boots.

“The nurses think you’ve got less than five years to live, and they keep taking the sake out of your bedroom but you keep convincing Thatch to smuggle it back in. You keep trying to talk to Marco about what comes after but he keeps pretending someone’s calling for him before it goes anywhere.” You work your jaw, and finish: “Thatch’s favorite food is takoyaki, which is why he almost never makes it for the crew, because he’s never been able to get it to taste exactly like he remembers from when he was a kid.”

More silence, more tending the flames, and even though you never wanted to fight family at least it was easier than this, than sitting and waiting for judgement while you’re helpless to do anything other than wallow in the worst possible outcome.

Whitebeard sits back in his chair; you hadn’t even realized he’d leaned forward. The wood creaks and groans while he regards you like a weapon he’s not sure how to pick up. “You find your brother, you save him. What then? More of this?” He gestures at the ruins, at the trails of ash the wind is blowing off the highest pieces like snow off mountaintops, darker shadows trailing off into the night sky.

“Just one,” you say, softly, because any louder will kick up your fire into something wild and painful. “Marijois.”

“Suicide,” Shanks says. You shrug. You don’t intend it to be, and even if it is, you’ll learn something.

“Luffy won’t be safe until it’s gone.” You don’t realize how true that is until you say it, the fire inside you leaping at the words and flecking them with sparks. You bow your head because you know whatever’s in your eyes isn’t what they need to see. “I need to save him. Please.”

Head down, you don’t see whatever passes between Whitebeard and Shanks. You feel it, though, a kind of push-and-pull, a tug of war with the tension in the air that has everyone in both crews pausing what they’re doing to glance over, more than a few failing to realize their hands are sliding toward their weapons and encouraging others to do the same.

Head still down, you sense Shanks jump up to the armrest of Whitebeard’s chair, and you hear the murmur of their voices—the rumble of Whitebeard’s easily felt even when the man speaks quietly—even if you can’t hear the words.

No one from either crew is moving. They’ve realized where their hands have drifted and now they wait.

Waiting isn’t your strong suit. Your fire prowls inside of you in a way that makes you slightly nauseous. It wants to break away. Wants to make so many pretty lights that can drift among all these people standing between you and Luffy and blow them up, and you’ve felt like you’ve had to leash your fire before but this is the first time you’ve looked inside yourself, grabbed it in both hands, and slammed it down into the dirt snarling no because they’re not Luffy but they’re still family and you’re not doing a fucking thing to them unprovoked. You agreed to talk. This is the price you pay.

With your head still bowed, you know no one can see your face, but they can probably see the light show in your chest and for a minute it’s apparently distracting enough that no one gets to killing.

And then Shanks is hopping back to the ground, Whitebeard is letting out a grunt that could mean a hundred things, and you’re raising your head because one of those hundred things is permission to leave.

“We’ll take you to Dawn Island,” Whitebeard says, and that little bit of hope shrivels and dies. “You’ll wear sea stone.”

Does he really think you’re going to set the ship on fire in the middle of the ocean, burn them all or drown them all? 

Or maybe he just can’t take the risk. Can’t put his family on the line like that.

“The Moby Dick isn’t exact slow,” Shanks says before you can find a way to argue. “It’s the best deal you’re gonna get, kid. The Red Force will be following—seas are dangerous right now, and if someone powerful is gunning for Luffy, if the world’s so upset about it it’ll erase itself and start over, I’m not standing idly by. I don’t have to see the kid, but I can patrol nearby, warn off any idiots. Or,” he scratches at his chin with a small, fond smile, “maybe I’ll say hi to Makino.”

Hardly slow but hardly as fast as Striker. Then again, you have to sleep—occasionally, usually when your body refuses to let you go another minute without it—and that always makes you lose a little time.

You hold tight to the fact you’re still here. Luffy’s still alive. And Sabo—Sabo’s strong, not as strong as you but strong, and you have to believe even without his memories he knows Luffy’s worth fighting for.

You have to hope, knowing that every time you’ve trusted hope before, it’s broken up under your weight and cut you with the shards.

So you hope, and you agree to go on the Moby Dick, and you don’t let any of them see the look on your face when the cuffs go on and Luffy’s life slips fully out of your hands.

Chapter Text

You’re not welcome on this ship. You’re on it, sure, but not by choice, and if the crew had a say, you’d be overboard and left as food for the sea kings that pass as indistinct shadows below. Animosity turns the salty wind sharp with hate.

Once, more than once, this ship was yours as much as it’s now theirs. The low groans of the masts, snap of the sails, creaking of the rigging, and constant slush of the ocean against the bow form a song you know by heart. This spot up on the figurehead, the whole expanse of the ocean in front of you and the wind in your hair, should be calming. In other attempts, it has been.

Not this time. Your empty back is to the deck and the deck is full of glares that punch into you like arrows. Worse now than before, at Marineford, because you expect hatred there. Were used to it.

You don’t need to turn around to know they’re there; the sea stone on your wrists doesn’t stop your haki, and there’s plenty of intent in every one of those hostile looks. More than a few of the people you’ve called brother would happily push you overboard and probably sleep all the better for it, never once able to think they once dove after you fucked up and fell in, and that the both of you laughed about the whole thing after.

That’s kind of why you’re forcing yourself to sit up here, if you bother to think about it. Back to the whole ship, don’t have to see their expressions and can ignore the glares, too far to hear the muttered conversations and still, as required, on full display so they can keep their eye on you. 

You would’ve preferred riding on the Red Force, even if it risked Shanks asking more about the good-for-nothing the world would declare your father if they knew. But Shanks already asked all his favors, and that one is one step too far. Your head is Whitebeard’s, one way or another.

By the narrowest of margins you’ve managed to avoid another conversation with him. Or maybe he’s just letting you think that. As long as it means you don’t have to talk about the unforgivable sin lying fetid between you, that’s fine.

Up on the figurehead, too, you can tell yourself you’ll arrive at Dawn Island just a little bit sooner than if you were elsewhere on the ship. The Moby Dick is fast, you know this, all its sails meant for more than decoration and its navigators some of the best on the seas for avoiding currents and weather that would slow it down. The wind in your hair attests to her speed.

Doesn’t change that all you can see in any direction is empty ocean briefly interrupted by the Red Force trailing a few hundred yards behind. There’s nothing to mark the passage of distance, only the passage of time, the sun that was long set when you departed Marineford now having risen and fallen a half-dozen times. For the moment, it’s sunk below the horizon again, its last light choked off by a distant band of rainclouds you’ve been gaining on for the last day.

Someone breaks from the pirates behind you, crosses the invisible line that separates you from the ones who belong here, and sets something down next to you.

You say nothing, ignoring the way your empty stomach claws at the rest of your insides. Without the fire taking the place of everything inside you, there’s nothing to muffle the feeling. You’ve already fallen asleep more times than you can count on two hands, often waking up sprawled on your side because a strong enough gust of wind or big enough wave tipped you over.

The only time you’ve strayed from the figurehead is when necessity demands it—water, bathroom, storm. Nothing else. Too much risk of talking to someone otherwise. 

Not much you can do about someone coming to talk to you. 

Thatch stays behind you, but he uses his shoe to nudge the dish closer. “Look, you might be a prisoner, but everyone deserves to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Yes, you are. I can hear your stomach from the kitchens.”

“Sorry for the inconvenience.”

He sighs and drops down into a squat; his knees pop. “Look, it’s not poisoned or anything, okay? I wouldn’t ruin perfectly good food like that. I know you’re hungry. It’s been days, kid. Just eat. I’m not asking you to swim across the Calm Belt. If you show up to help your brother and collapse instead, what good does that do?”

You bite your lip and squint against the memories trying to take your focus. He always does this. Every time. No matter what horrible thing you do, Thatch is there. Helping. Even if he doesn’t want to. Because he’s a pirate second and a cook first, at least as far as his own code goes.

“What are you trying to prove?” he pushes, and you’ve heard that exact line a dozen times from half a dozen people and it stabs deeper than any of the nasty looks. You hunch your shoulders, bite even harder so it hurts, and then—without tearing your gaze from the blank expanse of the figurehead—reach over and grab the plate, having to move both hands to do it. 

Bowl, not plate. Your thumb dips into the contents. It’s stew, some kind of meat with chopped vegetables and Thatch’s familiar blend of spices that makes your eyes water.

Thatch sniffs. “I didn’t make it spicy, I think.” His tone shifts lower, darker. “Unless someone else decided to—”

“No,” you interrupt, voice catching. “It’s not that.”

You start eating before he can think to ask more about it. The smell, the taste—combined with being on the Moby Dick and the clink of the chains connecting your wrists, your flimsy hold on your composure breaks.

You never wanted to fight family. You never wanted to lose family, either, and you’ve lost this one time after time after time. Often by your own hand, sometimes by others, but even when you step on this ship as a son you know, you know, that it won’t last. 

This is a family you have to find. A family that has to claim you. This family, the one you want, the one you love, doesn’t always take you, and even when they do, the world never recognizes it.

There’s only one man whose claim on you persists unasked for, and you hate it. Hate that there’s nothing you can do about it. Hate that everyone who knew him looks at you and sees him in some way, even if it’s Shanks’s curiosity or Rayleigh’s fondness or anything benign because that just gets under your skin. If they were hostile you could justify lashing out, but they’re not. They talk about that bastard like he’s worth their words and talk about you like you only matter because of him.

That blood in your veins, the family it represents, brings no love. But it’s the only blood you have. And the family you have left doesn’t want you anymore. Or shouldn’t, if they knew the truth.

You cannot save him.

The bowl’s empty, your cheeks are damp, and Thatch is still behind you. You shiver, because your fire’s out and the warm stew is gone and the wind is blowing and the spray from the water has cooled you past what’s comfortable for someone who’s shirtless, and you hate how pathetic you feel.

Fucking Thatch. Every time, without fail, that you end up on this ship as a prisoner—all five of them—he’s right there.

You gather up the bowl and spoon and shove it blindly up in his direction. “You should go,” you manage, voice rough. “Nothing good happens around me.”

Your stomach, traitor incarnate, growls again, because one bowl of stew isn’t nearly enough. Thatch takes that bowl from your hands and stands, knees cracking again.

He goes, and you draw your own knees up to your chest and hold them there, manacles pressed into your shins. Curled up like this is the closest you can get to warm.

“You don’t have to be nice to him.”

Thatch ignores the words; he can’t blame the member of his division who says them. Nor can he blame the other dozen brothers who questioned his decision to bring their prisoner some food.

“What’s it matter?” One had questioned. “He’s going to die anyway.”

“Then he’ll die with a full stomach.”

And that had been that. Until Thatch came back and started preparing a second, larger bowl.

“Seriously,” the cook continues. “He killed Teach. He doesn’t deserve—”

The knife comes down harder than it should, producing a sharp tok against the cutting board. Thatch leaves it there, partway embedded, a mistake he hasn’t made in a while—at least, one he hadn’t made consistently in a while. Ever since Teach…He’s been forgetting his own strength, remembering too well how easily Hellfire had overcome them all. 

He takes the carrot pieces he’s chopped and deposits them into the pot, ignoring the rest he hasn’t gotten to yet. “Everyone deserves to eat.”

When he’d said it while preparing Ace’s first bowl, it had been by rote, habit without desire. Now, there’s a little more behind it.

He’d cried. Cried.

Nothing good happens around me.

Without his fire, he’s just a too-thin kid who for some reason has decided to carry the world on his shoulders even as he burns it down. A kid who’d put his back to a crew that wants him dead, who’d kill one of them without mercy and then look like he’d rather be shot than attack anyone else.

Out there, he’s Hellfire. Here, right now, Thatch looks at him and sees Portgas D. Ace.

The way he’d pressed his forehead into the ash-strewn ground of Marineford, his voice cracking on that please. Thatch hadn’t seen a monster there, either. And he’s not the only one who’s struggling to reconcile the withdrawn and solitary kid on their figurehead with the demon they saw before, the wildfire who could match Pops blow for blow.

They had thought, in the wake of Teach’s murder, that Hellfire didn’t know what family meant. That he had no idea the damage he’d done, the pain he’d caused, the retribution he’d invited. Those were easy thoughts to think. Easy excuses. He’s just a wild animal, something striking without reason, words in the moment be damned.

Thatch doesn’t like remembering that day. That’s why he can’t forget it. 

“I know you won’t forgive it,” Hellfire had said. “I had to do it now.”

It hadn’t been mindless violence. There’s a reason, even if it’s one that Thatch will never find sufficient for executing a member of their family.

The kitchen’s cleared out. He hadn’t even noticed. Probably for the best, and better yet that even while caught up in his thoughts, muscle memory can carry him through the steps for this stew, shattering only one knife on the way. Helps that he went with something simple, something filling, and with the right spice blend he’d spent a couple months perfecting, on the tastier side of hearty. Just one of the benefits of his many attempts at recreating his childhood favorites.

One of his cooks—not the one questioning his choice to feed Ace—left behind a couple wrapped hard candies. Thatch’s stomach twists with an emotion he hasn’t had enough sleep to parse as he pockets them to hand off later. Behind him, the door to the kitchen swings open.

“I figured I’d find you here.” Marco lets the door close behind him. Thatch focuses on the stew while Marco’s footsteps carry him to the counter on the wall nearby, where he leans.

Marco lets the silence lie. Thatch stirs until he can acknowledge he’s over-handling the stew. He sets the ladle aside on a plate meant for that purpose and braces his palms on the cool edge of the counter, away from the burning stovetop.

“It’s hard to believe how young he is.”

“I know-yoi.”

“He’s so thin.”

“I saw it on your face when we first laid eyes on him.” Marco’s wry grin comes through in his voice. “I’m not here to lecture you about doing what you always do. You’re the cook; you feed people.”

Thatch’s shoulders relax a fraction. He should’ve known better than to question one of his oldest friends. At this stage, the soup only requires a bit of stirring now and then, so he leans his hips against the countertop next to the stove and regards Marco.

“No one wants him here.”

Marco nods.

“But Pops allowed it anyway.”

Another nod.

“You don’t know why.”

A third, more displeased than the rest, this time followed with, “Whatever it is, it has him rattled-yoi.”

“Rattled?” That’s never been a word Thatch would associate with Pops. Amused, grumpy, eager—sure, any of those would work, depending on who’d crossed his path that day—but rattled?

“He didn’t share details.”

Implied in that: Marco asked for them. Rattled and not talking with Marco; two unprecedented events in the same week as a whole host of unprecedented things.

Thatch sighs and rubs at the bridge of his nose. He’s had a headache for weeks now, and he’s not the only one, all of them too tense and too stressed and working too hard to try to catch this guy, most of their divisions split up across the turbulent seas, and really it was Marco’s intuition more than anything that saw the Moby Dick crossing over into Paradise in time for their flagship to be the one to finally find him.

“There’s something wrong with his devil fruit-yoi,” Marco says into the quiet that’s undercut by the gentle burbling of the stew.

“What makes you say that?”

“This.” Marco taps his chest. “I’ve known many logias. In a fight, they’ll always blur the line between body and element. I’ve never seen any of them do it constantly-yoi, and apparently unconsciously.”

“He wasn’t giving any sign he was hungry until those cuffs went on. Can a logia do that? Sustain themselves like that?”

“I didn’t think so, but it would explain how he’s lasted this long.”

“He didn’t look like he had much longer to last, back then.”

“No. Someone else intervened.”

“Who?”

Marco crosses his arms. “The revolutionary-yoi.”

“Really?”

“Short list of suspects. We know he didn’t go back to East Blue, which rules out his brother, if he exists.”

Thatch snorts quietly. “Oh, he exists all right. Either that, or Ace is as crazy as the stories say. I saw the look on his face when the sea stone went on, Marco. Taking away his ability to go after his brother was the worst thing we could’ve done to him.”

“He’s still alive. Teach isn’t.”

“I know, I know. Not excusing that. But whatever that revolutionary sees, whatever Pops and Red Hair talked about that got Pops to agree to this and Red Hair following, whatever’s going on with his devil fruit—I bet it’s all connected.”

Marco tips his head. “You’re curious.”

“Of course I am! Aren’t you?”

“Teach is dead. Ace isn’t.”

For a moment, they stare at each other, assessing. Both in full agreement, but neither able to find the words to that common ground right in that moment. Thatch licks his lips and turns his back on Marco to stir the soup.

“He cried, you know. When he ate. My cooking is good, but this was something else. I fully believe he loves his brother. He’s desperate not to lose him.” Around and around the ladle goes. “I think he’s already lost something else.”

“Other family-yoi?”

“I don’t know, Marco. Intuition. I just don’t know.”

When he brings out the second bowl and drops the candies in Ace’s lap, Ace doesn’t say a word. The tears are dry, his expression is closed, and he won’t even look Thatch in the eye. 

But he eats.

Sabo’s been on Dawn Island, and specifically in Foosha Village, for all of ten minutes when there’s a commotion outside Partys Bar. He and Makino, who’s barely had time to come to terms with who he is, much less explain the bare bones of what’s happened, head outside to see what’s going on. 

He can’t help wondering if the government’s back. If the marines decided letting this island stay on the map, after the horrors is supposedly birthed, was no longer permissible.

Squinting against the miserable rain that’s been chasing him for the last several hours of his journey, he looks out at the water and feels his jaw drop. Those sails—the size of the ship—the flag—and the ship next to it—

“Whitebeard?” he manages, voice a little strangled by shock. Makino claps her hands over her mouth.

“Shanks!”

She sounds oddly excited for someone watching two emperors of the sea approach her home, and in the time he takes to glance over at her and back, something’s launched itself off the Moby Dick’s white whale figurehead while it’s still a hundred yards away from shore. Sabo rushes through the crowd of locals, thinner than it should be even with the weather, and throws out apologies as he goes until he’s almost at the beach.

The blurry thing resolves itself into a person and that person into Ace by the time he’s finished his flip and landed ankle-deep in the ocean. Sabo ignores the splash that catches him at the knees; he’s already soaked.

“Ace?”

He looks…okay. Clean, fed. Damp. Maybe not exactly rested, but not likely to keel over under the weight of the rain. Worry and anger sharpen every line of his body, and they don’t fade when he looks at Sabo.

“Where is he?”

“Are you—is that sea stone?”

Ace glances down at his wrists, the chained manacles connecting them, and tsks like it’s as much of an inconvenience as the water lapping at his legs. 

“Step back,” he says, and Sabo does, well aware that the crowd has also given Ace a very wide berth. Makino is the closest of all of them.

Ace’s wrists go black with haki and then he’s slamming them together with enough force that Sabo has to grab his hat. One more impact, Ace baring his teeth, and the stone cracks. A third and both cuffs are shattering, dropping into the water, and it’s right about then Sabo remembers Ace’s worry about taking the cuffs off back at the base.

He steps back again. Ace stays in the ocean, eyes closed and breathing deep. Something pulses in his chest, something orange and red and yellow that swirls and grows in intensity—the light, the inner fire, blooming like a flower but far more deadly.

The water at his ankles is boiling, every bit of rain that hits him bursting into steam. A bead of sweat trickles around the corner of Sabo’s eye.

In the distance, the Moby Dick has dropped anchor, too big to get in any closer, but there are a couple smaller vessels and the Red Force continuing on. The old sea king that gave Sabo a little trouble when he docked is nowhere to be found, so maybe it’s got a little bit of intelligence floating in its brain.

Ace, eyes still closed tight in focus but probably sensing Sabo’s questioning gaze, shares the abbreviated story: Whitebeard tracking him down at Marineford, Shanks interfering, Ace having no choice but to travel with them back here. Apparently making good time with the effort, enough to catch up to Sabo’s one-man boat even though Sabo’d had a couple days on them. 

Ace snaps his eyes open and strides out of the water, gaze so intent that Sabo doesn’t think to move before Ace is pulling him into a painfully tight hug.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” he snarls into Sabo’s hair, and Sabo digs a hand into his side hard enough to hurt in retaliation. No punch, but it’s close enough.

“I was thinking my brother ran away from me. You lied to me, Ace, and you left! Right after you told me you were family!”

Ace winces and starts to pull back. “I didn’t—you deserve better than getting caught up in my mess.”

“What I get caught up in is my own stupid decision to make, for the record.” Sabo drags him right back into the hug. “Don’t make it for me again.”

Shuddering, Ace returns the hug until his heart isn’t racing anymore. “I won’t.” A few flames flare up from his skin, and Sabo reflects that he should’ve asked Ace to keep the sea stone on for what’s coming. 

Right now, though, he’s warm, and it’s pleasant to stay in his arms.

“As for what else I was thinking,” Sabo continues into Ace’s shoulder, “I wasn’t about to pick a fight with Whitebeard.” Whose people are currently tromping down the dock. None of them look inclined to attack, but they don’t look happy about Ace taking off, either. He catches Marco’s eye and looks away. “He let you come here, but why? I thought he wanted your head.”

“He does.” Ace pulls away but, uncaring of the pirates’ shouts, grabs Sabo’s hand and takes them at a jog out of Foosha, sparing a nod for Makino on the way that’s wholly insufficient, but of course, he’s here for Luffy and everything and everyone else can wait.

Sabo’s not that patient, though, and he knows he won’t get another chance. Once they’re in the forest and climbing uphill, he drags on Ace’s hold until they’re forced to stop and Ace glances back at him with a scowl, clearly not thrilled about letting the pirates following them gain ground. Sabo doesn’t flinch.

“Why did they let you come here?” He can’t imagine the emperors have any reason to want vengeance on the whole island, but he’s been unpleasantly surprised by pirates before. Ace gave the story, but he never quite explained why two emperors of the sea were fine with basically giving him a ride to East Blue.

Ace’s eyes flick toward the forest, toward the bandits’ hideout that Makino was telling Sabo about. Where he used to live.

He’s shelving all the notes about how familiar this whole place is for later consideration. Much later. 

“Ace,” he pushes, “taking thirty seconds now changes nothing.”

That’s just barely enough. Ace lets go of Sabo’s wrist, scrubs a hand through his hair, and that’s when Sabo notes his hat has disappeared. Probably lost at some point around Impel Down or Marineford, because yeah, if Whitebeard had sailed into Marine Headquarters for Ace, there probably isn’t a headquarters left to speak of.

“Whenever Luffy dies, I wake up in the past. I’ve done it…I don’t know how many times. I told them about it. That’s why they let me go.”

Sabo reels while standing still, staring at his brother like he’s grown a second head. Most of the absurdity of that statement is tempered by the self-evident reality that he got two emperors of the sea to believe it. 

He starts to ask a question a few times before he finally settles on just one: “How many times have we had this conversation?”

“Never. This is—” Ace’s voice catches and he stops for a second to gather himself before he can look Sabo in the eye. “This is the first time I ever found you.”

Sent reeling before, now Sabo feels like the ground is one more word from opening up under his feet. How many times—no, he can’t ask that, not with Ace looking at him the way he is. But he can’t help asking himself: how many times have I failed you?

He sets his jaw. “Ace?”

“What?”

“I need you to make me a promise.”

His tone prompts Ace to frown.

“If there’s a next time, you’ll find me.” He sees Ace furrowing his brow, that frown deepening, and hastens to continue. “It’s not an easy task, I don’t usually want to be found. I can’t give you the location of our headquarters, which is the best place to find me. Nor can I guarantee I’ll be in the same places next time.” He pauses for breath, still winded from the rapid climb up the mountain. “There’s a dead drop location we’ve been using for years because no one’s come close to uncovering it yet. You can leave a message there and it’ll get to me.”

Ace’s brow remains furrowed, but the frown is gone. “What’s the message need to say?” 

Good. That means he might actually do it. “Assuming you don’t want me going into that meeting expecting a fight,” he pauses, staring at the ground like it holds all the answers, “well, one step at a time. To get it to me, say it’s for the Chief of Staff and it concerns his island of origin. Put the rest in an inner envelope.”

“The rest being for your eyes only.”

“Exactly. Thinking about what could convince me…maybe…no, it can’t be anything anyone else could figure out by spying, or just by coincidentally knowing me before I lost my memory. It can’t be something someone could use against the Revolutionary Army if the drop is discovered.” His eyes lift to meet Ace’s. “You’ll need to describe my dreams.”

“The ones in the forest?”

He nods. “I’ll give you all the specific details. I’ve never told anyone about them. The only person you could ever hear them from is me. It’ll be up to you to pick a place to meet. Somewhere discreet, away from any World Government or marine strongholds.”

“I can do that.”

“I don’t doubt it. I’ll think it’s a trap, but luckily for both of us, you make an impression.” His expression hardens. “Promise me, Ace. Promise you’ll find me. If this time doesn’t work…I’m not failing either of you again.”

That fire in Ace’s chest does a weird triple-pulse and Ace twitches a little, but after a second, he nods. “I promise I’ll find you.”

Sabo takes comfort in that promise when they reach the bandit hideout and a short man with a wide face limps out of the broken doorway. Dogra, he learns from Ace’s panicked whisper.

And now Ace learns what Sabo had learned from Makino: that one week ago, CP0 kidnapped Luffy and killed anyone who tried to argue. Makino was only spared because Woop Slap took the blow for her. Dadan is dead too, and even if Sabo can’t remember her, the agony in Ace’s expression when he hears still punches deep and leaves his eyes watering despite all those lessons in maintaining his composure.

Dogra doesn’t finish his explanation before his strength gives out and Sabo, having caught him, carefully hands him off to the other bandits nervously watching from inside the base, all of them spooked, all of them still mourning.

“He’s alive,” he offers Ace, who’s walked halfway down the path leading toward the tree line and stopped dead, back to the bandits, fire lashing around in his chest like an agitated animal, the core of it—the core of it—

It’s not yellow. It’s blue. And then Sabo realizes it’s not the rain filling the space between them; the air is twisting, turning hazy from the heat, and he’s scrambling back away from Ace with any thoughts of reaching out abandoned, and even as fast as he is he’s almost not fast enough when the blue explodes out, devours everything else, devours Ace.

Standing still, standing alone, Ace ignites.

Flesh and bone immolates and the ground isn’t spared. It looks like it’s burning at first, but no, it’s simply turning to flame, things that cannot be flame burning as such just the same. The air hurts to breathe, every bit of exposed skin seared by it, and Ace is a blue silhouette in a storm of red and orange and yellow and it’s agony to be this close.

Vaguely, as he’s stuck staring, pinned under the force of it, he’s aware that a few bandits were brave enough to drag him a little farther away before getting overwhelmed themselves.

If he uses those fire dragons, he thinks numbly, a few feet won’t matter at all.

Over the roar of the flames comes another sound: Ace, yelling his rage because there aren’t words that can contain it. The fire collapses in on him and then erupts upward as a stream of white-hot flames. Every single bit of water nearby turns to steam. The rain simply disappears. Black haki-induced lightning arcs around the beam and scatters amid the clouds, and if Sabo were still standing, he knows his legs would’ve collapsed under him.

It goes on for nearly ten seconds. Even shielding himself as best he can, Sabo feels bits of exposed skin turning red and raw.

High, high overhead, the fire loses its cohesion and explodes so violently that it cleaves through the clouds above, wiping all of them away like so much paint and hitting Sabo with a shockwave that slams him back into the dirt.

And it’s over, maybe, he hopes, and the world is oddly bright—because the clouds are just gone. That explosion, if it had happened on the ground, would’ve wiped Dawn Island off the map. Even so, the dirt path, what isn’t blackened, is shiny, glassed in places and outright missing in others that had turned to tongues of flame and consumed themselves.

In the center of it all is Ace.

The core in his chest is a shifting maelstrom of blue and white, his eyes are blue, more blue flickers in his hair, and his every breath is flecked with embers. His arteries are glowing under his skin like his blood is liquid flame and the sight is—despite everything Sabo knows about him, or maybe because of it—terrifying.

“Where?” Ace asks, that searing gaze landing on Sabo and the bandits cowering behind him, because Sabo’s the only one who’s been able to stand up so far, and he has to lean on the doorway to do it. 

Movement in the forest—Shanks and Marco emerging, the rest of the pirates probably knocked clean off their feet by Ace’s haki and these two not looking particularly pleased about the whole experience.

“What was that?” Marco asks.

“Where,” Ace repeats, and it’s not really a question but an order, and Sabo can’t help wondering if it’s really Ace doing the talking because there isn’t a single hint of gray in his eyes. Sabo licks his cracked lips, not entirely trusting his voice, but by some miracle he’s able to speak even though his whole throat feels like a wound.

“I don’t have confirmation yet, but it’s the only stronghold left. Marijois.”

Ace is gone in a blink, a will-o'-the-wisp left in his place that disappears a second later. The displaced air ruffles Sabo’s singed hair.

“Luffy was taken by CP0,” Sabo explains to the other two, already starting to move, ignoring all the parts of himself that would prefer he collapse instead. “We have to go.”

Shanks’s expression is dark. “They must be desperate if they’re pointing Ace straight at their own heart.”

The ground shakes, sending them all stumbling. 

“Pops,” Marco breathes. His arms turn to brilliant wings and he takes off into the disconcertingly clear sky in a blur of blue and gold. 

Another tremor rocks the ground. 

“I’m going ahead,” Shanks says. Before Sabo can get a word in edgewise, he leaps onto the side of a massive oak nearby and then launches himself toward the beach. A second shockwave buffets Sabo, and in its wake he hears a series of cracks that shift into a drawn-out groan. The tree, easily a dozen feet in diameter, topples over, its trunk split open where Shanks had leaped from. 

A third tremor—this one from the tree crashing down—and Sabo keeps his feet this time. He takes off at a sprint, wishing for wings of his own and knowing that even with them, he wouldn’t be fast enough to save his brother from himself. 

You don’t want to fight family. It’s not a matter of can’t.

But when Whitebeard stops you before you can get to Striker—tied to one of the docking craft and you don’t have the room in your head to think about what that might mean—and when the Red Hair pirates are also interfering and there is blood roaring in your ears and your heart, the thing that ate your heart, is pounding like a drum with a beat that demands action, don’t want to is swiftly changing to will and you are losing the fight to remember why you can’t burn these obstacles away. 

There’s a commotion behind you, a familiar voice cutting over the shouting: “Luffy’s been taken, let him go!”

You don’t care who the message comes from, don’t waste time or breath on a thanks for stepping aside when they should’ve done that already, just throw yourself into Striker and get away, splintering the arm of the little mast against the side of the Moby Dick, your flames threatening to melt through the paddles before you get them under control and concentrate the heat in your chest where it belongs, where you’ve been holding it for—for—

Mariejois. Luffy’s only ended up dying there twice. Should’ve gone there earlier. Before Impel Down or Marineford. Or right after. You would’ve, if not for…goddammit.

He’s not dead because you’re still here, but how long do you have?

You’re coming apart. Can feel bits of yourself breaking off into Striker’s engine, leaving yourself scattered all over the waves. 

Not that it matters. Past the rage that’s narrowed the world to the one singular line between you and where you need to be, you can’t find it in yourself to be afraid of the water; you’ve already drowned in it enough times. You know what it looks like when the ocean takes all of you. It doesn’t matter. Won’t.

Luffy matters. 

You don’t.

Chapter Text

They want to hurt Ace. That’s pretty easy for Luffy to pick up once they bother asking questions instead of just stuffing him into chains and tossing him into a gross and cold cell in the bottom of their stupid ship.

He doesn’t say anything for that whole trip to wherever they are now, not a word—other than yelling for food, which they give him exactly once a day no matter how much noise he makes.

Now, at their destination—Luffy never sees anything about it except this one room, blindfolded and stuffed into a sack for the entire journey here—they’ve lost interest in feeding him at all. If they do, it’s just because it’s more satisfying to hit him in the guts and watch him retch on a full stomach rather than shrug it off on an empty one.

They figured out he’s got a Devil Fruit back at Dawn, but they aren’t sure which one it is, and Luffy’s proud declarations of being a rubber man are shut firmly behind his locked lips even after they find sea stone manacles that can fit his narrow wrists. He’s not giving these guys in their creepy masks anything, not a single word, because for every question about Luffy there are three about Ace, and if there’s one thing these jerks don’t deserve to know it’s literally anything at all about his brother.

Silence is all he’s got, because he’s a bad liar and knows it, the one question he did try to answer by yelling that he doesn’t know Ace just confirming to them that he does, and from there all the questions and pain that comes with them get worse.

It’s easier, as the hours drag by, to be somewhere else in his head. Somewhere other than whatever bits of him are reporting back about what just broke, how hard it is to breathe, and that they’re asking more questions he’s never gonna answer.

He can’t keep his lips shut tight anymore. They’re split and puffy and bleeding everywhere, his nose too, but it’s the thought that counts.

A year ago, news of what Ace was doing reached Dawn Island. Makino had run all the way up to Dadan’s hideout with the paper and the both of them had waited for Luffy to come back from his daily training so they could tell him that Ace had painted a very, very large target on his own back.

They’d explained people might come looking around Dawn for ways to hurt Ace. That Luffy can’t let anyone know he knows anything about him, that it’s better if everyone thinks he doesn’t know Ace at all.

And Luffy had listened, kind of, tried to—not that it mattered when the weird masked guys seemed to already have all the information they needed to go for the bandits, to look at Luffy and mutter amongst themselves about a resemblance and grab him over Dadan’s shouts of protest and shoot—

He wants to be somewhere else in his own mind, somewhere that doesn’t know the expression on Dadan’s face when she realizes she’s been shot or the sound her body makes when it hits the ground or the screams of her whole tribe when they realize what happened or the screams from his own mouth when he realizes it too.

They hit him again, a rib they’ve hit before already cracked and now it’s broken, it’s poking into something that hurts so bad he couldn’t speak around the pain even if he wanted to.

He doesn’t want to. A day ago—or two? There aren’t windows. But earlier he was able to headbutt one of them hard enough to break off a piece of their stupid mask, and he holds onto that moment.

They’re still asking about Ace. He’s given them nothing this whole time and now all the punches and slaps and kicks and cuts are edged with desperation, like they know their time is running out, and it is.

He knows Ace is coming. Knows it beyond the pain, somewhere deep down they’ll never be able to touch. 

So even when his body is barely hanging on and the thing he thought was sleep is starting to feel like something a lot more permanent, he’s still hunting for some way to get out of his cuffs. Some way to get out, to find his brother, to prove that he’s as strong as he promised he’d be when Ace left, because Ace wouldn’t have gotten caught like this, wouldn’t have let them hurt him like this, because Ace is strong.

Worse than the blood are the dried tears. He cried. Couldn’t help it. And he can hear in his head the echoes of Ace’s lecturing about being a crybaby, and maybe that just makes him cry more despite how badly it hurts his chest because he wants to be somewhere else and he really, really wants to hear Ace lecture him one more time.

He’d let Ace lecture him for hours, just to hear the sound of his voice again. Just to know he’s okay.

They hit his chest again and the not-sleep drags him under.

None of the defenses around Marijois can do much against someone who can fly and sense any attacks before they make contact. You’ve punched through them before, and back then, you weren’t half as powerful as you are now, with the fire boiling in your blood and threatening to take away your body and turn you into a mindless inferno if you let it.

You hold the reins with shaking hands and white knuckles, with gritted teeth and bare defiance, because you’re not here to destroy it, you’re here to save Luffy, and destruction can wait until you’re sure he’s okay.

So you’ve been here before but that doesn’t mean you know exactly where they took Luffy, and there are a few people that shout about you surrendering and how they’ll spare Luffy if you do and you burn them all before they finish because it’s a lie. The one time you listened to them, they lied, and you’re never giving them another chance.

Hard enough like this to focus on your haki, to try to feel Luffy. Harder still when they keep throwing armored soldiers at you, their armor turning them into little ovens while you stalk the streets, hunting for the brother you know is here somewhere.

The castle is too obvious. They wouldn’t risk the elders like that, though you kind of wish they would, wish you could take them all down during your hunt instead of knowing it’s out of your way.

The fire doesn’t like that. It wants destruction, it wants that castle and everything in it gone, and it doesn’t care that doing that would destroy you. 

Shaking hands, white knuckles, and now bloodied lips because the pain of biting them is all that’s keeping you centered right now. Luffy. You need to find Luffy. 

Maybe this would’ve been easier with help. More eyes. But no one can keep up with Striker when you don’t sleep and maybe, maybe, the threshold between you and the fire unmaking you is breaking down faster than you can patch it up and you are too far from sleep and food and water to survive what comes after.

Caught between your war against yourself and your hunt for Luffy, you lose awareness of the people trying to stop you. The soldiers in their armor cease to register; they don’t live long enough to matter. The cipher pol agents, the numbered ones, the ones in their masks—those almost pierce the fury that’s tinting your whole world in shades of blue, that’s leaving slagged stone wherever you step, that’s incinerating everything that gets within a few feet of you. Almost. 

They burn too. It’s just a matter of catching them, of watching the mask crack under your hand while that hand lights up blue from the flames building within it, of seeing the terror in their eyes when their haki fails and they realize you are more than one man is ever supposed to be.

A few Celestial Dragons, stupid and arrogant and fully believing they’re too important to be killed by the likes of you, stand in the streets in front of you and try to order you to leave. You walk past them. Right past. Within a few feet.

They’re running out of people to throw at you, as many fallen in your wake as running away. That’s the only reason you can imagine why the tide of opposition slows. The brief reprieve, ignoring the bullets pelting the ground around you and burning to nothing before they hit you, is enough to let you close your eyes and reach farther than ever before.

Luffy.

And he’s there, a knot in your chest undoing itself so fast it hurts, and now you’re running, not walking, because he’s here and he’s alive and you are going to save him.

An unassuming warehouse, a secret basement hidden within all the crates, guards who heard some of the chaos outside but never expected it to target them specifically because they don’t even know who they’re guarding. And the agents inside, the ones who took him, and they know, they know now, and you make sure they know for the rest of their short and miserable little lives that they should never have laid a hand on him, shouldn’t have looked at him, shouldn’t have ever heard his name.

And Luffy. The last body drops, what’s left of it, and it’s just you and him, the kid tied to a chair and beaten to a bloody pulp, his devil fruit caged by the sea stone around his wrists and wholly unable to spare him the pain. 

You melt through what’s safe to melt through and break through as much of the rest as you can, but you can’t force off the sea stone without breaking more of him, and he’s so small, so quiet, so light. He’s breathing, you can hear it catching in his chest and struggling to pass through the blood foaming over his lips.

“Hey, Lu,” you whisper as you gently ease him out of that chair, fire retreating by force of will so it’s safe because you’re not going to burn him, you’re not, you’re not.

You cradle him in your lap on the floor while you do your best to wipe away some of the blood. Should’ve brought water. Should’ve brought bandages. Should’ve—should’ve been there. “I finally found you.”

He stirs. Swollen and bloodshot eyes slit open to find yours.

“Hey,” you repeat, a grin as fragile and feeble as cracked glassware softening the word. You brush a few stray hairs out of his face.

He smiles, brilliant and beautiful and alive, and you bury your face in his neck and breathe him in, apologies falling from your lips like water, like the tears falling from your eyes.

“Crybaby,” he whispers, but it’s more of a wheeze, a rattle that makes your heart stop, because you know that sound, what it means.

You cannot save him.

This time, he dies in your arms.

Chapter Text

Something pokes your shoulder. Your eyes open. No matter how traumatic the end, it’s always slow, what follows: this body waking up, shaking off the effects of a nap, and that’s usually enough to douse the worst of the panic, keep you from setting fire to your own ship or your own crew. 

Feelings are in your mind but they’re also in your muscles and blood and brain, and these muscles and this blood and this brain haven’t been soaking in whatever miserable medley you brewed up holding your brother as he died, as you choked on the knowledge that if you’d gone straight to Marijois from Marineford, you could’ve saved him.

But, of course, you cannot save him.

How stupid of you to forget.

You blink until you can focus, until you can bring the world into your focus. When you do, there’s the slap of waves on the hull, the creaking of the rigging, the smell of salt, and the gentle warmth of the afternoon sun on your skin that’s almost enough to hide the chafe of damp cloth. You’ve felt all of this, exactly this, a hundred times.

Luffy died, so it’s a beautiful day.

You look down. Your hands are empty. Your fingers are red in a couple places from where the rigging must’ve dug into your skin during the storm, but it’s pain so mild you barely feel it. 

Luffy’s blood is gone. Luffy’s gone. Alive, but gone. Back at Dawn. Oblivious. Alive.

He’s alive.

“Captain?”

And there’s Masked Deuce, your second, his expression vaguely amused as he stares down at you, looking like he can’t decide whether to offer a hand up or wait for you to pass out again. The blue mask around his eyes doesn’t help the effect.

You blink a few times, fully process that Luffy’s body isn’t in your arms, and wipe the sleep from your eyes. You can get rid of the tears with this same motion, just like you’ve done a hundred times before.

By the time you’re reaching out to let him haul you up, you’ve almost got yourself under control. There are things building that you can’t help—the fire, for one, is growing again. It’ll be a little while before it whips itself back up into the frenzy it usually is.

Your last attempt was one of the shorter ones. It doesn’t take long for you to remember how this always starts. Right now, your crew is on Shanks’s trail, though they don’t know that. They’re under the impression you’re all just taking down anyone in the vicinity on your way to the top, on your way to take Whitebeard’s head. Shanks isn’t even in the picture for them. They’re nervous, but they’re still following you.

They’d follow you right to their deaths. You don’t think this; you know it. You never want to do that to them again.

“We need to change course.”

Deus lifts his eyebrows, sparing a hand to keep his bright blue hair out of his face when the wind changes direction for just long enough that the sails start to flap before filling back out. “Any particular reason? We’re not likely to see another storm like that for at least a day, and we should reach the next island tomorrow.”

“There’s someone I forgot I need to meet.”

“Okay, sure. Where are we headed?”

His easy acceptance of your lame excuse is just one more line in a script you’ve read a hundred times, but still, it’s reassuring. You rattle off the information Sabo gave you, and after a moment of staring down at the deck in thought while he maps it to his mental model of the Grand Line, Deus nods.

“Yeah, we can make it there. We’ll have to stop to refill supplies on the way, though. Who’re we meeting?”

“Depends what I say when we get there.”

After the new course is set, you go to your cabin with the excuse that you just need a minute more to rest after fighting the storm so long, and you should probably try to do that in an actual bed for once. 

If you were anyone else, it would be a perfectly reasonable excuse, but you’ve demonstrated to your crew that your stamina is a cut above and that you can fall asleep anywhere, and so you have to ignore the worried looks as you close the door behind you.

The storm tossed around all the things you didn’t remember to secure before the weather hit. Clothes and knickknacks you picked up in your travels are scattered across the floor. A few spare cords for your hat you’d been meaning to swap out for the one that’s getting frayed are halfway under the dresser bolted into the wall; the hat itself is upside-down in a corner by your pillow, beads drooping against their fastenings. Your dagger’s whetstone halfway out the whole maintenance kit’s bag, the draw-cord meant to keep it all in open. The chair for your bolted-down desk is tipped over, everything that had been on that desk—dagger kit included—sent sprawling. Maybe you’d been in the middle of honing the edge when the storm hit. Honestly, you don’t remember. Can’t. It was too long ago.

Spare clothes are spilling out of the backpack that is itself spilling out under the bed. You check on the dried rations you keep in your blue pouch, and they’re there, soaked through and tearing under their own weight. You set them aside. Probably not salvageable.

Water’s pooling under your boots, all of you as damp as the rations, not long enough spent in the sun to dry off more than your skin and sleep having caught you before you could do anything about it. You close your eyes and let habit bring your flames to the forefront. They surge faster than ever before, hungry, wanting to do more than you’re asking—but you’re not asking, you’re ordering, and they stay contained.

For now.

Dry but your clothes still crusty with ocean salt, you unhook the buckle in your shorts, unwind the belt from its loops, and let the pouch thunk against the floor. Your other belt gets similar treatment. Then you toe off your boots, peel off your socks. Those all get kicked away. 

Your shirt, you peel off on your way to the dresser. Same with your shorts, your underwear. You open the latches that keep things from sliding open in rough water and rifle through the drawers until you find what you need.

Habit, all of this. Routine.

You’re mostly dressed now, but you pause in the middle of pulling your shirt on. A glance down at your left arm. ASCE. Only the S crossed out. 

The routine breaks. A wave of dizziness hits and you lean against the wall, squeeze your eyes shut until it passes. Can’t cross out the A again. Can’t lose yourself like that. Can’t abandon yourself like that. You had your chance at a not-life, and you still failed.

Luffy deserves better than that, anyway. Sabo too. That’s what you told Sabo, that’s how you justified leaving, that’s…that’s how Sabo ended up at Dawn, and how you knew to look for Luffy in Marijois instead of burning him like the rest. 

Another wave of dizziness, a harder lean against the wall, a flicker of nausea you swallow down. 

Can’t do anything about the crossed-out S, but fuck, maybe it’s fitting. You are who you are because you lost him. Because you failed him. 

Are you happy?

Won’t be the first time you ruin someone’s happiness. Won’t be the last. You made a promise, you need to keep it.

Maybe you’ll do as good a job as your other promise. Promises. You’re really fucking good at making them. Keeping them, that’s something else. How many times is this? You lost count, but it’s…at least a hundred. Not two hundred. You think. Maybe.

You’re on the floor. Not really sure when that happened, when your lean became a slide down onto your knees. The room rocks under you, but you know the storm’s gone—always gone—and whatever this is, it’s just you.

Just you. You, and Luffy, and…and Sabo.

You turn so your back’s to the wall and curl up, one hand around your legs, the other brought up to tangle in your hair because the sharp tug on your scalp is more grounding than anything else.

“Crybaby.”

You’re not. Weren’t. Aren’t. Even now the tears don’t want to come, that aftershock of desolation utterly spent on the effort of trying to get a relaxed body to grieve. That’s the awful part of this: the knowledge that, if you wanted, you could skim over the pain. Wake up, start over, write off the last attempt and the death that ended it. Save the grief, or maybe never grieve at all.

And you hate that. Hate it down to your bones. That was Luffy. Luffy died. He died. You failed him, he died, and you’ll be dead for the last time before you choose apathy. 

Instead of pulling away from it, you lean into the pain, the hurt, the grief, stepping off the edge and sinking up to your chin and then closing your eyes to sink just a little bit more until you’re breathing it and it’s filling your lungs with something that burns like saltwater without the mercy of death to follow.

Your forehead comes to rest against your kneecaps, your hand still digging through the strands of your hair into your skin, and the discomfort’s easy enough to enjoy as one more bit of misery to pour on the water pooling behind your eyes and building a lump in your throat and flooding the space between your every thought with grief so deep it has no bottom.

Luffy died, and Dadan died, and Woop Slap died, and so many people died and still you—idiot you, you still hoped that this time, that maybe, if you just—

And that’s the curse, really. Every time, you have to hope. You hope and you deal with the fact that hope has never done a single goddamn thing except aim the knives straight at your heart. You have to hope. Over and over again you hope, knowing it’s futile, knowing you have to believe it isn’t, and you watch that belief fray thread by thread every time you wake up on this beautiful fucking day.

It’s not fair, and that’s the most childish thought of all. You’ve done this too many times, and if you bothered to count how many years you’ve lived you’d probably be horrified, and still, however old you are, that’s what you keep coming back to: it’s not fair.

Ten-year-old you, watching Sabo get taken away, and later, too weak to fight Bluejam, and later still, hearing Sabo died and there was nothing you could do—it’s not fair. All the power you’ve gained since then and it’s still not fair.

It’s not fair, but it’s here, and there’s that other promise about no regrets that has you by the throat because it’s not fair is a swift slide into trying to balance the scales of should’ve done and did. 

A sob tries to escape but you bite your lips hard enough to lock it down until it dies. Another tries to follow and meets the same fate while you taste blood in your mouth.

Some fucking brother you are. 

Beyond the walls pressing down on you, something knocks against the ship. There’s a short-lived commotion—the crew, chasing away a sea king that every time only shows up when you decide to lose your shit for a minute.

Are you losing your shit? You might be losing your shit. You uncurl just enough to bury your head in both hands in time to muffle another sob.

How are you going to face Sabo like this?

How many times have we had this conversation, he’d asked, so earnest, and you only got the excuse of this is the first time just the one time, and now what? Now you have to look at him and say you failed, not just on your own, but that you failed with him too. Luffy and Sabo. One more knife between your ribs, and as you shudder, you think that you’ve gotta be running out of space by now. Only so many can fit in your chest—what’s left of your chest—but here’s proof there was still room.

You don’t want to find out if there’s even more.

You’ll lie to him, if he asks. No, you won’t. He’d see through you, probably—but he didn’t when you were planning to leave him behind. But lying to him felt—feels—god, if Sabo were the one trapped, and that’s a horrible thought but if he were, and you found out he’d been lying to you about that—

You won’t lie to him, if he asks. But only if he asks.

The sea king’s gone, the waves calm again, and your body aches from how long it’s been stuck tensed up like this. You can’t stay down here forever. Even if you want to. Even if, for as long as you’re right here, you’re not fucking things up and getting Luffy killed again.

Inaction kills him too. You know this. You have enough hate left over to hate how you know it.

A deep breath, pushing off the wall, pulling on the shirt the rest of the way but leaving it unbuttoned. Scooping up your hat, settling it on your head before you look in the mirror, ignoring for now the cream and razor you keep in a tin under it because you don’t trust your hands not to shake.

A younger face but still your face, and this one without the circles or gauntness that had haunted your last reflection. Maybe that’ll change, however long this attempt lasts. It’s just got splotches and reddened eyes from crying.

“Crybaby.”

Behind your eyes, a flash of blue. You open your mouth, peer down your own throat, wince when you catch the same light creeping up higher even as you watch. It’s barely bright enough to show through your chest, but it’ll get brighter. 

Blue. It was orange before, you’re pretty sure. You can’t remember when it changed, if it changed, if it’s always been like this and you’ve just been too distracted to notice.

The end of the last time is a blur except for the short minute after you found Luffy, and that’s…new. Probably not good. But a problem for later, like so many other things.

You could button your shirt, but that won’t matter at night, and really, what’s the point in hiding it? The whole crew’s already worried about you after you changed their course. They’ll take a buttoned shirt as a sign that there’s something genuinely wrong.

A laugh shakes your chest but doesn’t make it any higher. Oh, there’s something genuinely wrong, all right. 

Your fire’s eating you. It’s the only way you can think to describe it. The baseline it burns at, how much of you is fire at any moment, keeps getting higher. Feels like one day you might just wake up a blaze and that’ll be it for you.

Hellfire.

They had no idea how right they were.

“Want me to come too?” Skull offers, but Deuce shakes his head.

“I’ve got this handled. He probably just took a hailstone to the head and decided he didn’t need to tell me. Keep watching for sea kings; even if they don’t usually hunt in each other’s territory—”

“They’ll risk it for food,” the crew finished for him in unison and with the long-suffering tone of people who’d heard that particular lecture one too many times. Deuce nodded, pleased, and headed for Ace’s quarters.

He took his deep breath on the way there and tried not to think too hard about the empty look on Ace’s face when Deuce had woken him up from his nap. His eyes had been watering, too, and while Deuce would normally attribute that to the aftereffects of having saltwater spray crashing over them for hours with no reprieve, Ace wasn’t usually still suffering the effects after one of his naps.

That empty look, though. Like he hadn’t been looking at Deuce at all. A nightmare? He got them occasionally, but they’d been rare ever since they made the New World. He’d been napping peacefully, though. 

Deuce shakes his head a little, realizing he’s been dithering outside Ace’s door for several seconds now, his shadow darkening the threshold and probably letting Ace know he’s there if Ace hasn’t already noticed via haki. Deuce himself is good with observation haki, but Ace—when he puts his mind to it, which is almost never—is a distressingly quick study. 

That look on his face. He’s probably not putting his mind to observation haki right now.

Still. Better to knock before he makes this weird. Er. Weirder.

He knocks. “Ace?”

There’s a beat of silence that stretches out long enough he feels obligated to check with his own haki that Ace is still inside, and for an instant that’s all it is, just a quick check that Ace is there, and he is, but so is the fucking sun and Deuce is blinking spots out of his eyes and squinting through a sudden headache that’s gone as soon as he lets his haki go.

What was that? Whatever it was, it hadn’t felt like danger—not dangerous to the Spades or Ace, at least. But it hadn’t felt overly friendly, either.

Still blinking, he tries to figure out if Ace said or did anything while he was getting blinded.

“It’s not locked,” Ace calls, which is answer enough. Rubbing his eyes and resolving not to use his observation haki again until he’s sure he hasn’t irreparably burned some kind of mental passageway for it, he lets himself in.

Ace is on the bed, elbows on his knees and hands hanging down, eyes red and puffy, but Deuce barely registers any of that because Ace is glowing. Faint blue light bleeds out from his chest, tracing the shapes of his ribs and leaving shadows in their wake. 

That’s…new.

He catches Ace bristling a little—just a slight narrowing of his eyes and lift of his shoulders—so he leans against the closed door, crosses his arms, and deflects with, “This place is a mess.”

To make his point, he nudges a small pile of discarded clothing with his foot. 

“Storm didn’t do it any favors,” he grants.

Ace says nothing. He’s stopped reacting to any perceived worry, but the expression he’s replaced it with isn’t one Deuce recognizes. 

“Something on my face?” Deuce prods, an old joke that for once fails to get even a whisper of a smile from his friend. Instead, Ace flinches, the conflict flashing behind his eyes resolving into something jagged and—

Blue?

A blink and his eyes are gray again, but the blue in his chest remains, and Deuce swears it’s brighter than it was when he first walked in. Does he know about it? Is he doing it on purpose?

The silence is getting unnerving, and despite how he knows his captain usually reacts, he can’t help his worry. “Ace?” 

Ace’s breath catches in his throat. He swallows down what probably would’ve been a cough and ducks his head. “There’s—there’s something you need to know.”

His tone is as unfamiliar as the expression on his face when he looks Deuce in the eye, and that, more than anything, brings the frown to Deuce’s lips. Whatever Ace is about to say, it isn’t going to be good. Did something happen during the storm? Did he lose something? The crew is fine, and it looks like Ace still has all his belongings, though nearly all of them are on the floor.

“You should sit down,” Ace says, and for all that the conversation has just started, he sounds tired.

There’s the tipped-over chair for the desk or Ace’s bed, and judging by everything about Ace, the choice is easy.

Ace’s mattress sinks below Deuce and Ace’s combined weight, and Ace swallows, shoulders hunching a little but not in a way that tells Deuce he chose wrong.

“It’s not going to sound real,” Ace begins, “but it’s the truth. Let me get through all of it. Then we save Luffy.”

Save Luffy? Deuce bites his tongue before he can voice the question, because Ace is already talking, already answering that question—and then dozens more besides.

It’s like he anticipates all of Deuce’s questions before he can ask them, detouring the story at odd points to address people, places, events he’s wondering about. Most damning of all is that he says all of it with the same flat, not quite bored but certainly weary tone, like he’s done this a dozen times already. Maybe he has. Maybe, no matter how Deuce responds to this, he’ll be doing something Ace has seen before.

Deuce has considered himself a storyteller. Aspiring, a lot of the time. Struggling, all of the time, and particularly when some of the crew had read his work and laughed at it. As he listens to Ace with growing disbelief, some part of his shocked mind spins off to examine the way Ace tells the story.

Meandering, jumbled, repetitive.

As long as he dedicates his thoughts to that, to empty critique, he doesn’t have to consider how utterly terrible the entire situation is. Hundreds of years. Dozens upon dozens of deaths. Failure after failure after failure.

And yet, he’s still here. Still trying. Still taking a minute to sit Deuce down and tell the tale he has, in fact, told before. 

By the end, Deuce is staring at the opposite wall in blank horror, so wrapped up in what he’s heard that it takes him a minute to realize Ace has stopped talking. He blinks and glances at his captain, who’s staring at the floor between his knees with his lips pressed tight together and bright blue flames dancing behind his eyes. 

His little brother. In his arms. Anyone else might remark on how calm he seems about it all, but it’s not equanimity, it’s despair. He’s raged a dozen times and it made no difference; why start now?

Deuce can’t ask about Luffy. He’s smart enough to realize that. “Is that,” he says into the quiet when you’re done, “is that why you’re glowing?”

Ace looks down at himself. His fire’s gotten brighter during the tale. Much brighter, so now it’s obvious even with the light coming through the porthole. He pokes at the shadows showing where his ribs are almost like he doesn’t expect them to hold firm. “Yeah.”

“Kinda disconcerting, seeing your ribs.”

He smiles just a little. “Definitely.”

Deus looks at his own intertwined hands, not really knowing when he did that, his elbows having come to rest on his knees as he found himself bowed under the weight of Ace’s history. He taps his thumbs against each other. “Did I ever finish my story, in any of them?”

“I…never made it that far.”

His head falls. “I see.”

“Do you—I could tell you what you—”

“No. No, I’d rather experience it myself.” He grins at Ace, at his willingness to trawl what have to be painful memories just for this. “Write what you know, after all, and I won’t know it until that happens.”

He reaches down and absently starts cleaning up Ace’s maintenance kit. Not the first time he’s done it, probably won’t be the last. The only thing Ace reliably takes care of on his own in his dagger; the things he uses to do so, not so much. “Still. Never would’ve guessed you had another brother.”

“You never asked.”

“Suppose that’s true. After how much you talk about Luffy…”

“I thought Sabo was dead.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Ace takes a deep, shuddering breath that completely undercuts what he’d just said. When he exhales, embers fleck the air for a split second, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “How long until we get there?”

“Two weeks, give or take weather, marines, and bounty hunters. We’ll stop for supplies in a few days—Skull says there’s a neutral port on the edge of Whitebeard’s territory we can hit without losing too much time.” He pauses a moment. “They’re happy to do what you ask, Ace, but a change like this—they’re going to wonder what put you off Whitebeard.”

“I’ll tell them. Just…give me a minute.”

Deuce pats him on the shoulder and gets up, ignoring how his knees protest after sitting for so long. “I’ll let you know when Aggie’s done prepping food.” Giving him, in so many words, the grace to wait until after the next meal.

“Thanks.”

Ace’s eyes stay on him until he leaves. He has to squint against the daylight on the door’s other side—the dirty porthole wasn’t letting in a ton of light—and when his vision adjusts he catches every member of the crew glancing at him from their posts.

Deuce shakes his head. Exchanging worried looks, they all go back to work.

The neutral ground you pick for the meeting is in Whitebeard’s territory. An uninhabited island, the top of a long-dead and submerged shield volcano: Peak Ode Island. It’s barren rock with walls around three-quarters of a flat arena-like space, what was once the volcano’s crater. No place to eavesdrop. No place to hide. Plus, uninhabited, so they won’t be overheard. 

You picked Whitebeard’s territory both so no one else will cause trouble and so Sabo knows you aren’t likely to cause trouble either. 

You’re pretty sure Whitebeard isn’t actively pursuing you yet. You were still months out from fighting Jinbe. Even if he is, he’ll probably be tracking the Piece of Spadille, and right now that ship—and your crew—are kicking back at the neutral port. It took quite a lot of convincing for them to let you take Striker and go off on your own, and you didn’t tell anyone else exactly where you were going.

You do one circuit of the island before you dock just to make sure it’s really uninhabited at the moment, that no one else is borrowing it for a clandestine communion. The rough waters that surround it don’t take kindly to Striker cutting through, but they can’t stop it, can’t stop you.

You ride a wave up to the height of Peak Ode’s forbidding cliffs and then rocket out of the ocean. Midair, you twist so you’re below Striker, and then your boots are slamming onto dirt and you’re skidding, you’re catching your ship, and you’re sliding to a stop a little ways inland. 

No matter where you go, you’ll be visible from the water. Deciding that you’re not in the mood to be constantly sprayed by crashing waves, you settle Striker in a spot she’s not likely to see damage and head to the middle of the crater to sit and wait.

Striker’s got enough supplies for a few days. It’s already been three weeks since you made the drop, so you figure word’s made it up to Sabo by now and he’s had a chance to make the trip out this way, if he plans to at all. You’ll give him the three days, and then…you’ll burn that bridge when you get to it.

This place isn’t exactly exciting save for a few oversized seabirds that decide you look delicious. Reminded of your initial encounter with Deus, you can’t help a flare of nostalgia as you catch the first one to dive, kill it, and set to preparing yourself some fresh roasted meat. Beats the hell out of your salted rations, and hey, this means you can probably hang around an extra day or two if you need to. Deuce taught you how to boil saltwater to make freshwater, and you’ve got the metal pans you need to do that stashed on Striker.

Yeah. You can wait here for a while. Much longer than three days, if you have to.

Day four and there’s a ship on the horizon. A small one—just a couple of sails, barely a smudge until it’s closer. No pirate flag flying, but the sails are red, the letters R and A emblazoned on it with some kind of dragon symbol between them.

You sit on the edge of the cliff with your legs dangling down and wait while they do a full circle of the island. As odd as it is to see your brother flying that kind of flag, it’s nice to see he found his way to the seas in the end.

Unlike you, when they’re done confirming the situation, the revolutionaries can’t just use the waves as a ramp up to the island. They find a point against the cliffs where a peculiar structure to the rock below the water creates a calm spot mostly shielded from the fury around it. You watch the many figures on deck scurry around, but there’s one figure in the crow’s nest doing no scurrying. He’s closer to you than anyone else, not eye level but near enough, and you stare at each other.

“Portgas D. Ace, I presume?” Sabo calls, pitching his voice to carry over the crashing waves. You nod. You don’t need to confirm it’s Sabo, and he doesn’t seem to expect you to. “You came here alone?”

“Like I said, Sabo,” you call back, “I just want to talk.”

Sabo smiles at that, and anyone else might find it polite and nothing else. You catch the edge of malice, though. He hadn’t expected you to recognize him immediately. “Quite a spot for a meeting.”

You glance behind you and shrug. Sure, this is where you had your hundredth—and final—battle against Whitebeard. It’s a perfect combat arena when your opponent can cause seaquakes with a flick of his fingers. That’s not why you chose it for this.

Since you’re not moving, Sabo seems to take that as sufficient sign that he’ll have to come to you if you don’t want to have your whole conversation via shouting. There’s a bit of a scramble up the cliff face, and while they’re climbing, Sabo and a few of his friends, you relocate back to the crater. You don’t go all the way to the center, just find a convenient rock and sit on it until Sabo finally strolls over.

“Your friends coming?” you ask, tilting your head toward the three people standing by the cliff. 

Sabo remains standing with his arms crossed. “You didn’t say you wanted an audience.”

“Guess I didn’t.” You spare a second to look over your brother. He looks much the same as he did the last time you saw him. The scar on his face still makes your stomach twist with guilt. If you’d known…

Sabo frowns and tilts his head so his hair falls over that eye. “I can’t say I was expecting an up-and-coming pirate to know about that drop location. You also knew a lot about me for someone whose name I’ve only ever seen on bounty posters.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you told me what to say and where to say it.”

“I did, did I?”

You lean forward, elbows on your knees. “You were born Sabo a noble in Goa Kingdom, but your blood family were bastards who didn’t deserve you. You ditched them and found me. We spent five years together, swore brotherhood, before your piece of shit father realized you were still alive and I wasn’t strong enough to stop him from taking you. One thing led to another, and it was my turn to think you were dead.”

“Uh…huh…” Sabo says slowly, having sunk down onto a rock of his own while he stares at you like you’re a puzzle to solve.

“Then I died a few times,” you continue, because you’re less of a puzzle and more of a bear trap, “and a few more, and in the last run I had of things, I ran into you. You told me what to say and where to say it in case things started over again.”

A particularly large wave crashes into the cliffside and its spray momentarily dims the sun before it falls over them in a light, stinging rain. Sabo casually removes his hat, flicks off some of the moisture, and settles it on his head again.

“You realize how absurd that sounds, don’t you?”

You smile at him. It’s not a kind expression. “I don’t care how it sounds.”

All you care about is whether he believes you. That question, you know, was his way of buying time, of making himself the room to process.

He looks at you, at his friends over by the cliff, at the island and the ocean and the sky. He looks, finally, at you. “If I believe you, what then? Finding me, bringing me here, why was it important?”

“Here doesn’t matter. I just know Whitebeard doesn’t come here often and it’s uninhabited. Good place to talk.” Another wave slams into shore; faint exclamations from the revolutionaries there reach them on the wind with the spray, but it dies down after a second. No damage to their ship, apparently.

You lick your lips, dry from salt, or maybe you haven’t been drinking enough water again. “Why you? You’re what’s different. I have to believe that. I have to.”

“How many times, exactly, have you…started over?”

You take a deep breath, drawing in air until your ribs ache, and then let it out so slowly your lungs shudder. Hard to say if it’s actually your lungs or if your mind’s just trying to tell you there are still lungs there, that it’s not all just fire, that the thing beating inside you is still a heart.

“I don’t know. More than a hundred.” You let out a broken little laugh, because saying it out loud drives deep the jagged edge of your own failure. A hundred times you’ve let Luffy die. 

The fire inside you snaps like the jaws of a beast, one big muscle spasm of a thing that’s not a muscle, and you tense until it passes. It does pass. Slowly. And when the spots clear from your eyes you see Sabo staring at you in alarm, and you look down at yourself and realize your whole body is glowing on the verge of turning to flame completely.

More deep breaths, in and out, willing your lungs to be real, your heart to be real, all of it, piece by little piece until the glow is mostly contained in your chest again.

Mostly. It’s bigger now. Brighter. And still blue.

Worse. It’s worse.

“I don’t know how long I have left, ‘Bo.” He stiffens at the nickname. “Every time it starts over, I’m a little—this”—you gesture at your chest—“this is a little more, and I’m less, and it keeps getting worse. I’m gonna wake up and I’m, I don’t know what I’ll be. A monster. A real one. More than he ever was.”

Sabo searches your face, his eyes flicking between your own. Putting together the pieces. “That scares you,” he says softly, and all you can do is nod. 

So long spent furious, so long spent desperate, and under it all—not just the terror of failing Luffy again, but the terror of losing the ability to even try to save him. The terror of becoming the thing that kills him.

“Is that why, you think?”

“What?”

“There has to be some kind of reason for you to be sent back. I won’t deny it causes you pain; that’s obvious. But I have to question if that is the only reason.”

You scowl, skin prickling as more spray hits it and evaporates. “What else is there? The Grand Line has shit happen without a reason all the time. If it’s doing anything, it’s laughing at me.”

Sabo shakes his head. “A skilled navigator can puzzle out the weather, sail the unpredictable currents. Every devil fruit has its own logic, even if it doesn’t appear logical to anyone observing it. The islands themselves follow their own rules. Your death resets the loop, right?”

“Not just mine.”

“Who else?”

“Luffy.” You know it’s coming, but even so, the way Sabo tilts his head and furrows his brow hurts.

“Who?”

“Our other brother. Younger. He hasn’t set out to sea yet, but he’ll be a pirate too.” You hold a hand to your chest to be sure the flesh is still firm under your touch and, as briefly as you can, a stone skipping over the water without sinking, you explain how Luffy dies. How he always dies.

Sabo digests another brother for a moment, then nods and moves past it as though that isn’t twisting the knife. “If Luffy dies first, you don’t stay?”

“No.”

He folds his hands together and presses his thumbs into his chin. “Either of you dies, the world resets, and your fire gets stronger. If the world wanted you to fail—that’s what you mean by laughing, yes? If it wanted you to fail, why make you stronger?”

You blink. “To let me get farther?”

“Maybe. I doubt it. It’s a big world; you have any number of ways you can fail with just the strength that got you to the New World.” So Sabo probably would’ve gotten way more creative with things way earlier than you did. Good knowing that. Feels great. Seeing the look on your face, he shrugs. “What I’m asking is this: are you sure? Are you sure this is the world torturing you, and not something else?”

You cannot save him.

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t lived it. But by the sound of it, you’re just the best way it has to try to save Luffy.”

You cannot save him.

“That’s a fucking lie,” you snarl, standing because suddenly your body’s buzzing too much to stay still. You pace. “Every time I think I’ve saved him, it rips him away from me and everything falls apart. Every single time. Once, it took ten years for it to end, but it did. The entire island he was on, erased like it was never there. I was sailing toward him, wanted to surprise him for his birthday, and he was just gone.”

Sabo’s unfazed, tracking you with his eyes while the rest of him stays still. “The world resets if either of you dies, but only you remember. As for the answer of why you,” he talks over you when you try to interrupt, and you stop when you realize the question you were asking is the one he’s answering, “that’s easy. You care the most.”

“But you—”

“I don’t remember him,” he says it gently, and that makes it hurt more, enough that you stop in your tracks. “You know him, you’d give your life for him—you have given it. And you’re strong. That’s why you get sent back right away. That’s why things reset when Luffy or you dies. He’s important, but so are you, Ace.”

“I’m not,” you protest, but you can’t deny the rest, that the world seems to need you alive as badly as it needs Luffy. You bow your head, biting your lip hard enough to hurt. “What’s it matter? I still fail.”

“And you try again.” Sabo stares at you over his clasped hands. “How many times have we had this conversation?”

You drag in a deep, shuddering breath. “First time.”

“Really?”

“I never found you, until—until last time.” Until you burned the world to ashes, and nearly burned him, too. Your most successful attempt so far, from one kind of perspective, and all you had to do was be the monster the world always believed you were. It leaves you sick.

“Then you’re still finding new ways to approach the problem,” Sabo says appreciatively. “I think we can work something out.”

You almost laugh but stop yourself. After what you’ve done, there isn’t going to be a way to work something out. You don’t deserve a happy reunion. You don’t deserve to be Luffy’s savior. You know the kid sees you as a hero, he even said as much one of these times, and maybe he could believe it before but not anymore. Not if he ever knew the truth of what you’ve done and failed to do.

“I need you to get Luffy,” you say, hearing yourself speak from a distance as you raise your head and look Sabo in the eye. “Take him somewhere safe. I can’t erase the trail that leads back to East Blue; he’s going to be in danger.”

Sabo’s eyes glitter; he doesn’t like being given orders, but he’s willing to humor you for the moment. “And what are you going to be doing to put him in danger, exactly?”

You look back down at your hands. While you were distracted, the fire in your chest has spread all the way down your arms, and the veins up to your fingertips glow with intermittent heat in time to your heartbeat. You clench them into fists. You’re not thinking about it. “Trying a new way to approach the problem.”

You go alone. You don’t want to, and maybe this isn’t so much a new way to approach the problem as the most direct possible way you’ve thought about but simply haven’t tried before. But the fire inside you is furious and hot and would burn anyone you tried to take with you.

Besides, you’re not going to let anyone sacrifice themselves for you again. You know they all would, so you won’t give them the chance.

You dream of your old crew begging you to reconsider all the way to Marijois, and from there, the fighting is loud enough to drown out the memory of the real thing.

You’re a fighter still, have been your whole life, your every life, so you fight. You fight your way to the castle, you fight your way into the castle, and you fight your way through the castle. All the way to the throne room, and there, for a moment, the fighting stops as the sound of the last knight falling to the floor echoes around a cavernous space and bounces off the weapons stuck in the floor.

The room isn’t empty. There are monsters here, old ones. Monsters that look like men until they see your fire and your hatred and realize you’re as monstrous as they are, and so they stop pretending otherwise.

You’d thought there were only five, but now you learn there are six. The sixth sits on the throne, and you’ve never intentionally paid attention to anything about that throne but you know that this—someone, anyone claiming it—is wrong. You meet its gaze and something shakes you down to your bones. Your fire shivers.

It clicks, then. The truth. The real reason. 

It was never: you cannot save him. 

It was always: please, please save him. 

There is a sword through the heart of the world and their hands are on the hilt. You’re in the room, a blade yourself.

And you will make. 

This. 

Right. 

Chapter Text

You’ve slayed the monsters. Now, you’re the only one left. 

The fire’s exhausted and so are you. Splayed out on your back, wrung out like a rag, staring up at the stars where the roof used to be, you wonder if you’ll ever burn like that again. 

Your resting place is a surviving scrap of carpet, the most comfortable spot to collapse amid the ruins that used to be Pangaea Castle. A miracle it survived in any recognizable form after thirteen days of bitter violence.

Thirteen days, up into the middle of the thirteenth night, and it would’ve been longer if you hadn’t realized that one of them, the sixth of the should’ve-been-five, was granting immortality to the others.

In the silence that fell after the last of them burned to ash, it was all you could do to fold down onto your back rather than collapse outright. Now, even breathing is close to asking too much. Your body’s not really listening to you. It isn’t saying much, either.

Breathe in, breathe out. Try to twitch your fingers and wonder if you succeed. Keep staring at the stars because it’s easier to look at them than think about what all this means.

You’re not angry anymore. You’re just tired. They muddy your thinking the same.

“Hey, see that?”

Sabo’s voice to your left—young, too young, not the one you charged with protecting—

“It looks like meat!” Luffy, also too young, from your right, his words drawing a chuckle from the ghost of the brother who isn’t dead.

“You always say that, you goofball. Not everything’s meat. That’s the Emperor of the Sea.”

“Fish are meat.”

Even with all the years separating you from that moment, you can hear Luffy’s pout. Sabo laughs and keeps going, pointing out each constellation as you let your eyes wander the sky. He knows them all—or he’s lying, which you’re pretty sure you accused him of doing at one point, but you were never able to get your hands on a map of the night sky before he…

Seeing light out of the corner of your eye, you manage to look over at your hand. It’s fire. Fire that’s dripping up toward the stars, rejoining them, moving like molten metal pouring in reverse.

You blink, and it takes effort to open your eyes again. You try to to turn your hand back to flesh and fail.

Borrowed strength or borrowed time? Not that it matters. Even if you could walk out of this, what then? There are reinforcements coming. You dealt with everyone who tried to interfere with the fight, but now that fight’s over, the flames are gone, and the ones who stayed back when they saw what happened to anyone who neared the flames are going to find their courage. Find you.

What’s left of you. There might be nothing; you feel yourself breaking apart like a campfire. Sparks going up, up, up into the heavens. Nothing coming down. 

Maybe you’ll be able to watch Luffy from there. You hope Sabo took care of him. You hope they’ll both forgive you. Or if they don’t, that they can at least find happiness without you. They deserve that much.

Pieces of you drift away and you watch them go, but then there’s movement past them: a shooting star, and another, and another. A meteor shower.

You’ve seen a lot of those from the decks of pirate ships, and it’s breathtaking enough on the open ocean, but here you’re so much closer to the sky. It feels like you can reach out and touch them. Scoop them into your hands and hold them close, keep them safe, promise they’ll never have to fall again.

You watch for several minutes, your body becoming less and less with each second flickering by. You can’t feel your hands or feet anymore. Can’t flex your fingers or wiggle your toes. There’s a left shoulder that listens when you tell it to bend but no answer from the right, not anything of that arm left to listen.

Your eyes close of their own volition—you’re tired—but something goes plink off the ruins nearby. Despite your desire to just let it go, your eyes open, lids scraping like they’re lined with sand. You can’t turn your head, but more sharp plinks break through the silence, a rain of them, and through blurry vision you watch the streaks in the sky start falling toward you.

There isn’t even energy enough to panic. All you can do is bear witness through eyes slowly losing their ability to see anything at all.

One of the fallen things rolls across the floor with a sound like a rough-cut gem and bumps into you. There’s a shudder through your whole body, a flush of heat, and suddenly your right shoulder is back and bending.

The world’s returning the pieces of you that it took.

You start tearing up. Can’t help it. Haven’t I done enough, you want to scream, even though you don’t have air in your lungs, or lungs at all. I don’t have anything else.

More pieces reach you. Sensation you hadn’t noticed losing comes back, your exhaustion sharpening into something real when there are muscles to feel it. 

Your chest heaves and you drag in a sharp gasp, don’t even know when you stopped breathing, just know starting it up again is bringing tears to your eyes.

Even when your body is whole, pieces keep falling. You sit up, wipe your eyes, and watch them, gleaming fragments of stars that bounce off the wreckage like musical notes and—however improbably—reach you. Each one drains your exhaustion, heals your wounds, restores your strength.

And then it’s over, the last of them spent, silence reigning in the former throne room at the top of the world.

You bring a hand to your chest. Your heart beats a steady rhythm. You pull your fingers away and there’s no splash of orange or blue over your skin. No light bleeding out from between your ribs or tracing your veins.

And you realize: this isn’t a demand. It’s a thank you, and it’s an apology.

It takes two days for Luffy to shatter the barrier in Sabo’s brain that holds back his memories. Another three days for Sabo to recover from that shattering. And a further two weeks for the news to reach their little hideaway that some kind of superweapon attacked Marijois and murdered the Five Elders, leaving nothing of the Holy Land but ashes and ruins, any bodies utterly unrecognizable and no witness left alive who could explain—

“What happened?” Luffy asks, bouncing around behind him. Sabo, struck dumb, can’t find the presence of mind to mince words.

“Ace killed the World Government.”

He reads the paper three times while Luffy yells WHAT loud enough to startle every poor creature in their little patch of desert and then pelts Sabo with questions he doesn’t answer, too distracted with reading between the lines.

What the papers, in their speculation about the superweapon, don’t say: Fire Fist Ace is dead. Which means he’s still alive, and free. Because if they had him, they would’ve killed him, and they would’ve made a macabre little show about whatever they could dress up as justice.

For three days, Sabo waits for word. He’d given Ace a way to contact his snail. All he has to do is call, and Sabo will tell him where they are, or Ace will tell him where he is and Sabo and Luffy will find him.

Ace doesn’t call. 

He probably thinks Sabo’s going to let him go. But Sabo’s not the same idiot who was only mildly uncomfortable with the idea of sending Fire Fist Ace off to take on the World Government alone for the low price of a little babysitting. Now he’s an idiot who let that happen and who knows Ace and can guess with new insight his brother’s state of mind.

However many attempts, however many failures, however many horrors he had to face to get here—what matters is that he’s here, and Sabo’s here, and Luffy’s here, and the whole world be damned if Sabo’s losing any of his brothers ever again.

He stands, eyes burning from staring at the snail for so long, knees and back and shoulders protesting being disturbed from the positions they’ve been locked in for nearly a full day, stomach rumbling like it’s going to start devouring anything next to it soon, and he goes to find Luffy. 

It becomes apparent that Ace really didn’t think they’d be able to track him down. Well, shame on him for doubting Sabo’s abilities. 

This little tropical island in Paradise is uninhabited, largely thanks to its small size and location that keeps it out of the way of any path heading to Sabaody or Marijois. In the list of islands Sabo deemed likely for Ace to be at—assuming Ace wasn’t just drifting at sea—it ranked twelfth. 

Suffice to say that Sabo’s patience dried up after island four. Luffy lacks his anger but he’s plenty annoyed at Ace for hiding from them. Luffy wants to go back to Dawn Island, wants to keep training. He’s about to set out to sea, after all.

He has no idea how different of a sea he’s about to sail.

Sabo doesn’t say a word as he marches up the beach and steps onto the jungle trail, and Luffy doesn’t either, sensing the tension that’s thickened the air into something hostile. 

Observation haki pings off Ace’s presence and Sabo tracks him like a predator hunting prey, so by the time he finds the clearing with the old rosewood where Ace is mending the cord of his hat, every wild animal that had considered him for food is cowering on the far end of the island.

For his part, Ace sees them clear the trees immediately. He tenses more and more with each step Sabo takes and properly flinches when Sabo strikes the tree right next to him with force and haki enough that most of the trunk at the point of impact explodes and what’s left that isn’t rooted into the ground topples over with a thunderous crash that takes down a dozen other trees.

Luffy and Ace are both staring, stunned and speechless, while leaves rain down. Sabo brushes splinters off his glove and then drops into a cross-legged position next to the newly made table. He reaches into his coat, produces a bottle of sake, and slams that bottle down on the wood hard enough to make a point but not so hard it breaks. 

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t trust what would come out.

Releasing the neck of the bottle, he levels a challenging glare at Ace. Luffy, galvanized by the sight of the bottle, produces three saucers from his pockets and lays them out, then drops down just like Sabo.

Ace opens and closes his mouth a few times, but each time, his eyes meet Sabo’s and he falters. Finally, he scoots over to the trunk and reaches for the bottle. Three even servings of sake are poured into three saucers, his one hand steadier now than it had been all those years ago when he’d needed two just to properly hold Dadan’s pilfered prize.

He sets the remaining sake off to one side. With that signal, he, Sabo, and Luffy all reach for their saucers. They hold them, waiting.

Sabo looks at Luffy, then at Ace, then extends his saucer for them to clink their own against. Then they all drink. It burns on the way down, but he and Ace handle it just fine. Luffy splutters a little but manages far better than he had as a kid. 

The saucers go back on the trunk. Sabo takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and breaks the silence. “Brothers. Then, now, wherever and forever. Nothing’s going to change that.” He meets Ace’s gaze again. “Nothing.”

He wants to protest just like he did before, Sabo can see as much, but the burn of the sake he didn’t actually handle as well as Sabo causes him to cough instead. Sabo can’t help his grin, and Luffy’s laughing too, making fun of Ace for succumbing just like he did.

Ace goes to shove Luffy, or at least that’s what it looks like at first, but he actually yanks the kid into a hug so tight that Sabo can see Luffy’s rubber body deforming from the pressure. Luffy lets out a wheeze, his face bugging out and looking comical for a second before Ace eases up just enough that a normal person’s ribs would just be squeezed and not broken.

Luffy returns the hug with one arm and snags Sabo with the other. Sabo offers no resistance as he’s dragged into the embrace.

“I’m sorry,” Ace whispers in a voice so ragged it threatens to break on every word. “I’m sorry it took so long. I’m sorry you—all the times I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

There are lifetimes of grief making his whole body tremble, and since Luffy’s busy trying to breathe, Sabo takes on Ace’s weight and holds him up until he’s almost steady.

“Nothing to apologize for,” Sabo murmurs. “I know you did everything you could.”

“But—”

“But nothing. I forgive you.” He raises his head, tugs on Ace’s hair a little so the other man lifts his puffy-eyed, tear-stained, red-splotched face from Luffy’s chest. Sabo presses their foreheads together and wills Ace to take the words to heart. “I forgive you, Ace.”

Below, Luffy looks between them both, eyes wide and expression deceptively blank. Then he redoubles his embrace, circling all of them three times with arms that drag them in close. 

“Me too,” he declares.

Ace’s patched composure cracks and then shatters, his expression melting into a sob that wracks his whole body. More apologies spill from his lips as he clutches Luffy like the kid’s gonna disappear from under his fingers, but neither Sabo nor Luffy pay them any mind.

They’ve agreed: he has nothing to apologize for.

Later, an embarrassed Ace blames the tears on the alcohol. Luffy and Sabo grant him the dignity of letting the lie go unchallenged—once Sabo slaps a hand over Luffy’s mouth, anyway.

He then convinces Ace to travel with him and Luffy back to Dawn Island, where the Spade Pirates are waiting. 

Convinces; not really. It doesn’t take much convincing at all, though long enough that they haven’t even left shore before Luffy’s asleep out of boredom.

“Why are they at Dawn?” Ace asks of his crew.

“Tracking them down took some doing,” Sabo admits. “Convincing them it wasn’t a trap took more. They’re quite eager to talk to you and I figured, with Luffy involved, that was as good a meeting point as any.”

Ace winces, something he seems to do every third sentence, and Sabo wishes he knew better how to traverse the dangerous currents of his brother’s mind to spare him that pain. 

“I wasn’t trying to…”

“I know. They know, too.” He lightly punches Ace’s shoulder, a little above the crossed-out S. “They’re just worried, and worry makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do.”

“Guess so.” Ace still looks troubled even as he focuses on the sight of Luffy taking a nap in a pile of spare rope by the main mast.

“What are you thinking about?”

He swallows, shifts on his feet. Fidgets, Sabo realizes, like he used to when they were kids. “Just…realizing all the things I can do, if…if it really worked this time. There’s someone at Sabaody I wanna talk to, and I still gotta thank Shanks in this timeline—and I owe him, not just for Luffy, but for—and Pops, Whitebeard.” His flicker of excitement dies and its dead shadow lies dark on his face. Sabo’s heart skips a beat when he catches a flicker of blue in his eyes. “There’s someone who doesn’t belong on his crew.”

“Slow down just a second, Ace. You can’t go in and murder someone on Whitebeard’s crew.”

“Yeah, I can.”

Definitely blue. Sabo punches him in the arm again, harder this time, enough that Ace rocks with the force and glances down, a little surprised. “Idiot. What about us, huh? Your family? And the Spades? Whitebeard would go after everyone if you did that. You called him Pops—you know he would.”

Another wince, but Sabo is expecting it this time, and he pushes harder on what he’s sure is a raw wound still weeping. Maybe Ace is still tired. Maybe he’s still reeling from whatever happened in Marijois. Maybe he’s not quite caught up to the fact that he’s here, and they’re all here, and no one’s going anywhere. Maybe he’s lost them all a hundred times but that doesn’t mean he has to lose them this time.

“I’ll stick with you for that, if you want. You and the Spades. You want to keep your family safe and so do I. If there’s someone there they shouldn’t trust, let me help you find a way to explain that to them. I’m good at negotiating.” He offers a toothy grin. “Worst case, we beat up the nearest guys with our pipes and make our escape.”

It’s ridiculous and they both know it, neither one believing for a second that it’s a viable plan against an emperor of the sea and his crew, but it does earn a smile from Ace so that’s mission accomplished.

“I’d like that,” Ace says quietly. He refocuses on Luffy. “I don’t want to leave him behind.”

“You don’t want to suffocate him, either.”

“It never mattered. Whether I was there or not, I mean. He still died. I just…as long as I was close, I had warning. It wasn’t—the time wasn’t just gone.”

“He’s still got time before he’s meant to leave Dawn. Yeah, he told me all about your promise. While you were off destroying the seat of the World Government, I was off erasing the trail back to Dawn. I’ve got a couple associates keeping an eye on East Blue now, too. They can step in if anyone decides to take what you did and go after Luffy instead—though, according to the news, there weren’t any witnesses.”

Ace bites his lip, a flicker of—not quite guilt, but not satisfaction either—in his eye.

“All they know is fire was involved. They’re all postulating about some ancient superweapon, not a single pirate with a devil fruit. You’re in the clear, Ace. I doubt anyone would believe you even if you tried to take credit. Not even Whitebeard in his prime could match the damage you did if he had to attack Marijois all on his own.”

He looks like he badly wants to believe but can’t bring himself to commit to it. Sabo gives one last push.

“You and I and your crew, we can meet with your friend at Sabaody and Shanks and Whitebeard and still make it back before he sets sail. Then you can decide what you wanna do. How’s that?”

Ace takes a deep breath in and lets his shoulders drop. “Okay. Yeah, okay. Let’s do that.”

“Great.” Grinning, Sabo ruffles his hair and ducks away from his automatic retaliatory swipe, laughing at his indignant squawk of protest.

When the three of them sail together in Sabo’s borrowed boat, it’s not what they pictured as kids. Luffy hasn’t officially set out to sea yet, Sabo’s not a pirate, and Ace has died over and over again trying to reach this moment. But at least this way, there aren’t arguments over captaincy. Sabo volunteers as navigator. Ace calls himself the lookout. Luffy doesn’t bother with labels since he’s not seventeen yet and spends most of his time—when he’s not in the kitchen or asleep—out on the figurehead of their craft, a simple little crow’s head left over from this vessel’s time in someone else’s employ before it found its way to the revolutionaries. 

Only now, unlike the journey to find Ace, Luffy isn’t alone up there. Ace joins him, usually stopping to chat with Sabo on the way. But he spends the most time with Luffy, always leaning in close, always finding excuses to bump shoulders or ruffle hair or touch in some way.

Unlike the tears, Sabo thinks, Luffy notices this for what it is. He doesn’t have the full story—it’s Ace’s to tell, not Sabo’s—but he lets the touches go unremarked. He seems to like them, even, leaning in close to give Ace as many excuses as he wants.

In the day, Ace puts up a good front. The need for contact and eyes on Luffy is something he can disguise as brotherly affection, as happiness at a reunion. But at night, when Sabo’s on watch and hears a choked-off cry, or when Ace takes watch all night to try to spare them the nightmares, it’s harder to hide. 

Luffy tries to chase the nightmares away, and sometimes succeeds. Sabo offers his ear, and sometimes Ace takes him up on it. The nights pass, and in the morning, things are better. They eat, they talk, they spar. The days, too, pass.

Right now, this day, Ace and Luffy are on the figurehead, the both of them lying on their backs with their eyes closed. Ace’s arm lies across Luffy’s chest to keep him from rolling overboard. Luffy’s got his own arm over that arm. The breeze plays with their hair and a couple of seagulls keep pace with their path through Paradise. 

Sabo keeps an eye on his brothers from behind the wheel to make sure neither takes an unplanned swim, but that’s not likely.

The waves are gentle against the prow, the wind is steady as it fills the sails, and the sun is shining around scattered and fluffy white clouds. 

It’s a beautiful day.