Chapter Text
Lighthouses guide ships to safety. Ace has never seen one up close, but he's spotted plenty along shorelines at night, blinking like low-hanging planets in the darkness. Lighthouses are a welcome sight in the telescope’s lens. It means, the next day, Ace can wander around with his boots on solid earth. Eat plates of warm food. Drink a few beers and stretch out on a flat, wide mattress.
The beam from the lighthouse circles high overhead, leaving the rocky island path in relative darkness.
He doesn’t feel like he’s walking toward safety. He feels like he's been exiled.
Ace crosses his arms over his chest as he fights the driving wind along the path. His feet squish in his boots, wet from being dropped off only halfway up the rocky beach. The ferryman hadn't pulled in, and Ace couldn’t blame him. The rising tide and stiff eastbound gale nearly swept them into the jagged line of rocky stacks jutting out from the island. Ace is surprised he agreed to go at all, seeing how much the wind drives the waves into this edge of the bay.
Between gripping the sides of the ferry and getting dumped onto the beach like a washed up clump of seaweed, Ace didn’t have any time to reconsider his decision to come here. Now that the ferry had shoved off? He found himself eyeing up the distant, rocky cliffside, wondering if there was any chance he could swim over to it and ditch this whole adventure altogether.
Sabo had a way of putting things that Ace couldn’t argue against. It was the books he read and the school he’d gone to. He always sounded smarter than Ace, even when Ace knew he was talking out of his ass. The whole lighthouse thing sounded practical when Sabo suggested it. Take a few months off, get the marines off his ass, learn a few knots, and eat as much fresh seafood as they could haul in. What could be the harm in it? It’s a lot like being a sailor, anyway.
Bullshit. This is nothing like sailing.
In theory, they're similar. Limited space. At the whims of the open ocean. Constant maintenance and long hours to keep people from ending up at the bottom of the ocean. But it doesn't feel the same at all. The lighthouse looms high overhead. It’s as tall as a mast, but stocky and built in stone. The balcony is wrought in iron, the bars crossing over themselves like a jail cell. It’s not like a crow’s nest, which is spacious and wooden, same as the sturdy branches that he used to sit on with Sabo and Luffy, snacking on scavenged berries and overlooking the wide, open cliffside.
A gust of wind stings at his face and kicks up the long ends of his coat. It’s also cold here, and only expected to get colder. It’s already late October, when the warmth of summer gets buried under dry leaves (if there were any trees on this barren rock), and snow flurries happen unexpectedly, falling on still-green grass and melting off by mid-afternoon. Whitebeard’s company is sailing south by now, moving along to warmer waters like a flock of sea swallows. The cold air catches in Ace’s throat. He should be there instead. Maybe he could spread his arms wide, let the wind catch his coat sleeves and carry him back to them, to fall in formation with the rest.
It's Ace's fault, for his bounty more than doubling in the past six months. He doesn't mind the heat; the marines have had him on their shit list since he was born. What he does mind, is the number of ports they've skipped past for Ace's sake. The number of cannons that have threatened to sink the Moby Dick in his pursuit. The sleepless eyes of his crew members, stuck on long, nightly watches to make sure they're not getting ambushed by an outfit of marines or bounty hunters or both. Whitebeard told him not to worry about that, but everywhere Ace looked, there was someone making some kind of sacrifice on his account. And they got, what, for all their trouble? Some twenty-year old convict from the east blue taking up space in the barracks?
Ace said that to Whitebeard, and is pretty sure he almost got pummeled for it, judging by the teeth-breaking way the old man ground his jaw and the near-audible flex of his temples.
In the end, he’d let Ace go anyway, sending him off with the same father-son speech he’d heard a thousand times and a death threat if he didn’t make it back in time for his birthday. Ace’s stint was only two months. He’d be back in plenty of time. Even if this did turn out to be a huge mistake, at least it was short. He could manage two months.
Ace reaches the front door to the keeper house, takes a deep breath, and knocks.
His supervisor, Trafalgar, he’s been told, doesn’t come right away. Ace kicks at a stony ridge along the boulder beneath his feet. It’s a crisp, hard edge, only an inch or so high, but as wide as the wooden lighthouse door, if you ignore the sharp turn it takes at the center. It’s weird. A ridge like that should have a collection of small stones, sticks, pieces of shells, all caught and sheltered in its angled grip. This one is empty. Someone swept it.
Ace looks toward a collection of nearby boulders, up against the wall of the lighthouse, reaching up to the windows. A thick layer of algae blankets them, years of sediment and growth smoothing their edges and making them squishy.
The ridge at Ace’s foot is perfectly clean. Someone scrubbed it.
He tightens his grip on his bag, dread pooling in his stomach. What kind of person scrubs down a rock that isn’t even inside the building? An idiot, is who. Does the old man think it looks better that way? It's not going to stay like that. If that’s the kind of shit he’s expected to do here, it’s going to be a long two months. Ace isn’t afraid of hard work, but he’s not a fool. He'd rather die trying to swim back to the mainland than spend three months on his hands and knees scrubbing the fucking ground.
The door squeaks, and Ace looks up from his rock. Standing there in the open doorway, is a problem.
Really, it’s Ace’s fault for imagining that all lighthouse keepers were gnarled-looking men in waders plucked from the pages of storybooks. There's nothing pristine about the way Trafalgar looks, by any means. Mud splotches up his pants, all the way to the knees. There’s grit packed into the cracked leather of his gloves. His hair sticks out at odd angles, and he shoves it back from his forehead when he answers the door. He’s dirty. And exhausted. But it doesn’t weigh on him like it does with other people. It draws attention to his features, darkening his jawline and pulling Ace into his slate-gray eyes, narrowed and looking Ace up and down sharply.
Ace expected someone older. Much older. This guy looks barely older than Ace is. Ace didn’t imagine that any lighthouse keeper could be described as hot.
But that’s what Trafalgar is. Hot.
Trafalgar’s fingers flex around the door handle as he holds it open. “Your shoe’s untied,” he says.
“Hello to you too,” Ace mutters, leaning down over his boot. So that’s how it’s going to be. Of course rock-scrubbing guy would be an ass about something as minor as an untied shoelace. And, honestly, it's simpler if this guy sucks. Ace is supposed to be laying low. Keeping his head down. He doesn’t need to get to know this guy, and this guy doesn’t need to know him. If he can avoid bringing up the whole ‘half-a-million bounty and biological son of an executed criminal’ thing, it’s for the best.
When he’s done tying his shoe, Trafalgar doesn’t introduce himself, so Ace doesn’t either. It’s not like they could be confused with anyone else.
Instead, Trafalgar moves back against the door to let Ace through the entry. He mutters a vague tour of the layout. Kitchen. Storage. Living room. It’s not a large space, Ace can nearly see every corner of it from where he stands. He could see more, if Trafalgar actually bothered to light all the lanterns.
The smell inside is strange, especially against the damp, salty breeze swirling around outside. It’s smoky, which makes sense. There’s a fireplace in the center of the room. But then there’s a sweetness behind it, an earthy one that comes on like a warm, spring afternoon. Ace can’t place it. None of the fruits or flowers he thinks of quite fit.
The interior of the lighthouse isn’t as obsessively neat as Ace expected. There’s a haphazard stack of books on a shelf. An empty mug abandoned on an uneven-looking side table. Unswept trails of sand lead in from the front door, so maybe Trafalgar isn't as ridiculous about cleanliness as–
“That goes upstairs,” Law directs, eyeing the travel bag Ace is pulling off his shoulder, snapping at him before he can set anything down.
Fuck, fine. Apparently Trafalgar is the only one allowed to leave stuff around the living area. He doesn’t lead Ace to the bedroom, but it’s the only room upstairs, so it’d be pretty useless anyway. Ace trudges upstairs and tosses his bag on the bed in the empty side of the room. Trafalgar’s bed is across from his. There’s a stack of books on his nightstand, along with a large, leather-bound journal. The journal is a shift log, it’s tabbed out with the months of the year. The books are lighthouse-related, the titles packed with technical terms to keep people like Ace from being able to skim through them easily.
Back downstairs, Trafalgar waits by the front door. “We can walk the grounds,” he says, “before it gets too dark.”
Sure. Whatever. Trafalgar didn’t give him the chance to take his coat off, or his boots, so why not? It’s not like Ace is cold and wet and has just spent two hours being pushed around by waves on the hard wooden seat of the ferry.
They step outside, and Trafalgar points out the well, the western shoreline with the crab pots, the foghouse. He even points out the whole lighthouse, in case Ace somehow managed to miss it on the way in.
The tour is short, but Trafalgar’s list of rules that follows is long. Ace isn’t allowed on the southern beach if swells are over ten feet. He’s not allowed on the rocky western shoreline without a rope if there’s ice, or rain, or snow. No digging for clams unless it’s within an hour of low tide. No going out on the balcony if it’s below freezing. The short, northern edge of the island is off-limits entirely, for some reason. He can wear wellies in the sand, but only regular shoes on the rocks–
“Home from the pub before midnight, got it.”
“What?” Trafalgar asks, a worried expression taking over his face. “You can’t leave the island unless–”
“I was joking,” Ace says, cutting him off. There’s something satisfying about the way Trafalgar scowls at him. If Trafalgar has to be an asshole, at least he seems fun to mess with.
They go inside after that.
Trafalgar makes dinner in silence, leaving Ace with a technical manual on lantern mechanics at the kitchen table, like he’s a toddler who’s been shoved off into the corner with some wooden blocks. Ace doesn’t read it, because the font is stupidly small and it sounds boring, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy flipping through the pictures, tracking the way the parts fit together and interact with each other. Maybe he isn’t so different from a toddler after all.
Trafalgar drops a bowl of chowder in front of Ace and continues talking. He’s moved on to explaining the lantern and foghorn maintenance, which are the most important parts of their work here. The ‘keep the ships from crashing into the rocks’ parts.
Ace should find it miserable. Any normal person would. Trafalgar has been going on for nearly half an hour. It’s already turned dark outside. Ace should be annoyed that Trafalgar hasn’t started any kind of normal conversation, hasn’t asked a single question to get to know him. Truthfully, though, Trafalgar’s explanations are given in an even-tempered cadence. He’s meticulously organized in his descriptions, but without the stuffy-sounding vocabulary that the manuals use. It’s easy enough to follow along, and all Ace has to do is occasionally ask a question to keep the “conversation” going.
Usually, when Ace meets someone, he has to answer a whole slew of questions about himself that he’d rather not answer. About where he grew up. His parents. Where he went to school. It’s a relief to skip all of that, and only be expected to sit here and not fall asleep.
Ace yawns. The ‘not falling asleep’ part is getting a bit difficult, though.
Trafalgar’s explanation of how the fresnel lens turns trails off. He stares at Ace, like he’s just realized he’s not alone at the table. “Are you tired?” he asks.
Ace almost laughs. The nearest city is twenty miles off the coast, and Ace had to wake up at dawn to take the public carriage to the ferry port, which moved slowly with the muddy, potholed roads and bumpy hillside. Then he waited out on the dock for the ferryman, who was late, and sour about having to go out in the wind. And now, Trafalgar’s been talking at him for a full hour, well past sunset. Ace can manage long hours, but he’s still human.
“Yeah,” Ace says. “A bit.”
“Oh,” Trafalgar responds, picking up their bowls and putting them near the sink. “You can sleep. I’ll take watch tonight.”
Ace doesn’t waste any time getting to his bed and crawling under the thick, woolen blanket. His back and neck ache from traveling. His head hurts from trying to figure out what he’s doing here. His eyelids sink as he stares out the window, watching the light flash across the sky. He’s facing south, in the direction of where his crew has sailed off to. Two months, is all. Two months, and then he can get off this cold, barren rock and back to his ship.
In the morning, Ace sweeps the entryway with Trafalgar watching closely from the couch. He’s acting like he’s not watching, but he hasn’t flipped a page in his book yet, and Ace is pretty sure Trafalgar is a faster reader than that. For the next few days, Ace can’t do anything without Trafalgar watching over his shoulder. He gets it. He’s new. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to pull seaweed from rocks or repaint a roofline.
Even worse, is Trafalgar teaching him. His voice is tired as he walks through the steps for replacing the quarter-inch pipe that feeds into the fog horn’s speaking valve. When Ace reaches to find the right part, Trafalgar can’t just let him be. “No,” he says, “that’s not it.”
And yeah, Ace knows that already, because the hard, metal shape beneath his fingertips wouldn’t fit a wrench around it, but before he has time to figure it out himself, Trafalgar is over his shoulder, reaching down his arm and guiding Ace’s hand gently to the right spot.
It's efficient. It’s professional.
It makes Ace want to strangle him.
In his months-long stints out at sea, Ace finds himself in similar situations. Not on the Moby Dick; Whitebeard would go on a rampage. But the subordinate ships, where supervision is lax and the standards slide off into the ocean. A crewmate standing just over his shoulder, nearly against his back. His bunkmate’s hand on his waist, tracing the sharp line of his hip bone, as they pass each other in the doorway. A superior’s fingers, clamping around Ace’s wrist when he talks back, thumb pressing on the inside, where you might check a pulse, dragging a forceful, quiet suggestion into his skin. He gets it. They’re miles from port. It makes people forget what they would or wouldn’t do back on solid ground. The needle of the compass is always shifting, waves rolling underfoot. It’s not so strange for people to try something with him, that they wouldn’t try on land.
Trafalgar goes back to his clipboard. He isn’t like that.
It shouldn’t piss off Ace. It does anyway.
Is it bad to complain about his supervisor not trying to get him into bed? Sure. But, also, why the fuck not? Ace can make sense of that. He has plenty of comebacks for that, hundreds of snappy ways to shut people down without pissing anyone off. Or, if he feels like it. He’s not immune to being bored. In any case, he knows what to do with… that. What he can’t deal with, is this pretentious asshole doing things like that—while also looking like he did, and smelling like earth and salt and that warm, mysterious sweet, and talking at a respectful distance from Ace’s ear, voice rough and kicked up from somewhere deep in his chest—and not even bothering to notice the way Ace’s breathing stalls out, and the way his ears burn underneath his hat. Ace can’t decide if he wants to pull him into bed or push him off the balcony.
It’s somehow worse when Ace does get something right.
Ace decides, after three days of listening to the lamp key scrape metal on metal, to yank out the thing and figure out what’s wrong with it. He’s not solid on repairs for the rest of the lamp, but he knows how to fix a key turning a gear. He’s ninety percent sure he can’t break anything catastrophic from this section, and Trafalgar is off heating up chowder, so he can’t watch over Ace’s shoulder and tell him he’s doing it wrong.
Getting the metal panel off is the hardest part. The bolts are rusted and stuck, the shape of them worn down and hard to get a grip on. Inside, the gear is misaligned, loosely set on its axel, so it gives a bit whenever it’s spun. And it’s filthy. It takes about two seconds to tighten it into place, and two minutes to wipe the years of grit from its teeth.
When he tests it, it doesn’t scrape anymore.
The next evening, over a bowl of flat, flavorless porridge, Trafalgar asks. “Did you fix the key?”
“Yeah,” Ace says, spinning his spoon and dropping porridge into his bowl.
“It works well,” Trafalgar says.
Ace looks up from his bowl. Trafalgar’s eyes are flat gray, as flavorless as the porridge. There’s no reason for Ace to linger on them. No reason for him to find a softness there, a mild-tempered breeze on a cloudy day. There’s no reason for pride to flutter in Ace’s chest, because Trafalgar doesn’t hand out compliments easily, and no reason to force his mouth into a straight line and ignore the blush underneath his collar.
There’s no reason for any of that. Ace needs to get his shit together. It’s just a compliment. He gets plenty of those, in other company.
People like his freckles, which is fine. He inherited those from his mom. They also like his eyes, and his jet-black hair, which Ace would rather people shut up about. He’s spent enough time erasing the shadow of his father from his life. He doesn’t need to be reminded that, no matter what he does, his father is soaked into his features, painted over the anyone else he would rather be.
People say he has good manners. And they mean, for a sailor. For a twenty-year-old who grew up in the mountains. For someone whose possessions are more stolen than bought. For someone who can fight as well as Ace can. People say that too. That he fights well. As if he ever had the option to not. As if he could choose to be bad at fighting when he was looking out for Sabo and Luffy and taking on grown men who would happily beat the shit out of him if he lost.
Then there’s the compliments he gets, stripped down and wrapped up in other people’s blankets, while the room smells like sweat and his skin aches where it’s been grabbed hard or scratched red. The highest praise whispered in his ear. Stalwart resolutions spun in hot breath between lips.
Then they wake up. Think better of it. It’s not really a lie, if nobody believed it in the first place.
Trafalgar isn’t lying.
Trafalgar couldn’t fake a compliment if he tried. Even his actual compliments are stripped of excess flattery, because god forbid he ever sounds nice. He states them as plain facts, like they were the same as knowing that the sun rises in the east, or that there’s two turns in a lighterman’s hitch.
Ace stares, trying to find the scowl that usually haunts Trafalgar’s face, but it’s not there.
“Thanks,” is all Ace can think to say, tucking his foot underneath his chair and kicking his toe into the floorboards. He goes back to his porridge, picking up his spoon and shoving the lukewarm slop into his mouth. He doesn’t need anyone’s approval, especially not Trafalgar’s.
Except, there’s a hinge at the top of the staircase with a bent pin, making the hatch hard to push open. It squeaks loudly. It’d be easy to straighten it out. Wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. Ace could…
He pushes back from the table, picking up his bowl and abandoning the last few scoops of porridge, which are thickening and losing heat, anyway. Trafalgar is watching him. Ace never leaves food behind, but he’s starting today. He doesn’t need Trafalgar’s approval.
Ace scrapes his bowl, washes it in the sink, and walks out the front door and into the breezy evening. He sets out to check the crab traps. There’s seaweed built up on the rocks. A small amount, but Ace would rather not go back inside yet, so he meticulously clears it off. Then he goes to fetch water for the night. It’s past sunset already. Trafalgar will be on watch already. As he approaches the well, he’s greeted with a loud squawk. There’s a seagull that visits the well sometimes. It’s young. Adolescent and mouthy. Not small enough to be born within the year, but still covered in speckled feathers.
There’s something familiar in its personality. Ace is good at understanding animals. Before Sabo, he spent years running around the forest as a kid, complaining to the crows and asking the frogs for answers to questions that Dadan couldn’t answer for him. It wasn’t strange to him. It was just something he did. Who else was he supposed to talk to?
He never stopped as he got older. Sabo pokes fun at him, still, but he’s not mean. He gets it. He wasn’t talked to for years, only talked at. Spoken to, only to direct. To scold. To yell. He said he never had a conversation, before Ace, that didn’t have a right answer to it. Instead of talking to animals, Sabo wrote. Pages and pages of essays, monologues, and arguments, all of which he’d promptly fed to the fireplace in his bedroom.
Sabo had his journals, and Ace had his animals.
It feels natural to pick up the habit here, where he’s one of two souls for a four-mile radius, and the other would rather read or review emergency protocols than try to have a conversation with him. The seagull is as good of company as any, and much easier to read than Trafalgar. The seagull seems to like Ace better than Trafalgar does, too. It rouses its feathers, pacing along the edge of the well.
“What do you want?” Ace asks.
The seagull squawks back at him, beady eyes following him closely.
“Not right now,” Ace says. “This bucket is going inside.“ The seagull flaps up, crossing to the other side of the well as Ace walks past. “What do you want well water for anyway?”
Ca-squawk!
“Then why do you have sea in your name?” Ace reaches the firewood stack and pulls a few logs off the top. “You’re a seagull.“ he continues,“Sea-gull. You got a whole ocean out there.” Ace waves to the blue, flatline horizon.
The seagull makes a series of incensed chipping noises. Ace sticks his tongue out at it. See? Ace doesn’t need the seagull’s approval either. The bird flaps its wings and flutters off. Ace blocks out the sunset with his hand, watching the bird disappear behind the lighthouse, angled upward toward the balcony.
A gust of wind catches Ace’s hat, and it flies in the air, chasing after the bird. Trafalgar would scold him for forgetting to use the strap. Ace trots after it, as it drops lower, the wind still dragging it along the wall of the house.
Ace ends up behind the keeper house, along the northern shore. Trafalgar said not to go back here, and Ace can see that the cliffs are higher back here, the rocks sharp like black, jagged teeth. His hat isn’t even to the rocks, though, and the thin dirt path is easy enough to follow without being in danger. It’s stupid that this is off-limits, when Trafalgar has got Ace crawling over rocks to dig up clams and check the crab traps. It’s less maintained than the front, and Ace has to fight past a few thorny brushes, their roots clawed into sandy soil and barely hanging on with the wind and sea. He pushes aside a stiff branch, spots his hat, the string twisted up in the dying stems of a—
It’s that smell. The faint sweetness he keeps picking up on. The burnt odor that lingers on Trafalgar’s clothes, his hair. It’s this, it’s…
Ace unfurls a drying leaf.
He snaps back his hand, rescues his hat by snatching it off, breaking a stem in the process.
Is that… nightshade?
Ace crouches down to inspect the broken stem. He knows nightshade. Better than most, because he's had to tell Luffy what it looks like a hundred times to keep the idiot from poisoning himself. Ace spots a few wrinkled berries still left on the plant, but most are gone. Picked off by birds or… some of the leaves are missing, too. The birds aren’t interested in those, and the fish sure as hell aren't up here nibbling on nightshade, so it must be…
Metal creaks overhead.
Ace snaps his head to look up at the lighthouse. The shadows shift. Trafalgar must be up there. Why would he be picking nightshade? And why’s he… there’s no reason for it to be here, either. Someone planted it here. Or, even if it somehow managed to leap an ocean, someone decided to keep it here.
Ace shoves his hat on his head, nearly running to the front of the lighthouse. Trafalgar’s going to kill him. Especially now, since Trafalgar’s probably caught Ace poking around his secret poison stash. It’s just Ace’s luck to end up here with a goddamn murderer. There were rumors in town about Trafalgar. That he’s creepy. That he’s living under a false name. That he only became a lighthouse keeper because the government wants to lock him up. Ace doesn’t listen to rumors much, but maybe he should start. Maybe he would have avoided sleeping next to a cold-blooded killer. He should’ve trusted his gut when he got here. Tried his luck swimming back to shore.
He didn’t, though, so now he has to figure out what the hell to do about it.
Ace flies through the rest of his evening tasks, turning every few seconds to check that Trafalgar isn’t lurking in the room somewhere, or watching him from the salt-streaked windows. He doesn’t know what else to do. He retreats to the bedroom, which hardly makes Ace feel any better, but at least he can close the door and shutter the window. He sits down heavily on the edge of his bed.
Okay. Ace? Calm the fuck down. He puts his head in his hands and squeezes his temples. It hasn’t even been a full week, and already he’s convinced Trafalgar is out to murder him. Or at least, could murder him. Even if Trafalgar is a murderer, has Ace done anything bad enough to warrant an attempted murder? No. Probably not. Ace is pretty sure Trafalgar thinks Ace is kind of useless, but as long as Trafalgar doesn’t hate him, he might be alright. All he has to do is stay on Trafalgar’s good side. And, avoid drinking anything Trafalgar offers him.
He has a plan, then. Which isn’t much of a plan, but it’ll have to work for now. Ace forces himself to lay down, but he doesn’t get any sleep. He stares at the ceiling, checking every few minutes that the door hasn’t creaked open, or the handle hasn’t twisted. When Trafalgar comes in to swap shifts, Ace startles into a sitting position and grips the edge of the mattress.
Trafalgar frowns and shrugs off his jacket. “Did you sleep with the candle lit?”
Fuck. Goddamn it. Ace is fucking this up already. “I just lit it,” he lies.
Trafalgar tilts his head. “It looks low,” he comments.
Of course. Trafalgar would be the type of person to notice that. Ace pushes off the bed and grabs his own jacket off the foot of it. “I was up late, is all.”
“Doing what?”
“Um.” Ace twists his hand around a sleeve. “Reading.”
Trafalgar raises his eyebrows. Looks at the nightstand, where the only books are his own, sitting in a neat stack, same as he left them. He looks back at Ace, wrinkling his forehead in confusion. “You should try to sleep longer.”
“Fine,” Ace says, shoving his arms in his jacket and stalking to the door. He needs to get out of here before he makes this any worse. The plan was to act normal and stay on Trafalgar’s good side, and he’s doing the exact opposite. He’s going to get himself killed.
Ace is dead tired the next morning at breakfast. He might fall asleep in his porridge. He can’t look at Trafalgar. He can’t not look at Trafalgar, his own self-preservation forcing him to clock his every movement. How is he supposed to act normal? Trafalgar scrapes his chair against the wooden floor when he gets up, and Ace jumps in his seat.
Trafalgar pauses on the way to the sink, empty bowl in hand. “Were you outside last night?”
Ace drills his gaze into the bottom of his porridge bowl. Maybe Trafalgar didn’t see him by the nightshade, after all. Or maybe this is a test, to see if Ace will come clean on his own. “When?” Ace asks, trying to stall.
“Twenty-five minutes into my watch,” he says. “Around then.”
So Trafalgar saw him, but still, he doesn’t sound sure. At this point, Ace will take any opportunity to make himself look less suspicious. “No,” he answers. “I was upstairs by then.”
Trafalgar sets his jaw into a frown, and runs a hand through his hair, sighing heavily.
Shit. That must’ve been the wrong answer. Trafalgar is pissed. He knows Ace was outside. Ace is climbing up the “getting murdered” ladder at a frightening speed. He has to get better at this. If he could get through a single conversation without eating his foot, it’d do wonders for his sense of self-preservation.
It doesn’t get any better as the day wears on. He considers just accusing Trafalgar outright, because trying to act normal is turning out to be impossible. Would that even help, though? Trafalgar would deny it. Call him crazy for accusing him. Ace can’t go after Trafalgar without any real proof. They’re the only two out here. Ace’s word against Trafalgar’s, and Trafalgar argues in the same put-together way that Sabo argues, the organized logic and confident air that Ace is defenseless against. By the evening, Ace is exhausted, nerves frayed to blackened, burnt out stubs, and all he wants to do is shut himself in the bedroom and try to sleep.
Trafalgar has other ideas.
After dinner, Ace washes the dishes, and turns around to find Trafalgar still sitting at the table, two tin cups in front of him. Ace didn’t see him pour them. “Here,” Trafalgar says, pushing a cup toward Ace. “For your first week.
A chill shoots down Ace’s spine. This is it. He expected this, but not so soon. It must be Ace’s punishment, for catching onto the nightshade and then lying about it. He broke the rules. Figured out Trafalgar’s whole deal, and now he’s paying for it.
Idiot, why didn’t he come up with a plan for this part? A weapon would be helpful. Why didn’t that occur to him until now? He gingerly takes the cup and swirls it, watching the sediment spin at the bottom. It leaps and dances along with his heartbeat, and the stuttering waves of his breath.
Trafalgar is trying to kill him. Ace is sure of it.
They make eye contact when Ace looks up from the cup. Trafalgar’s pupils are wide and dark. Predatory, like a shark’s. There’s a long, unbroken silence, when the wind outside seems to die at the windows, leaving a still, stuffy air hanging over the kitchen.
Ace knows what he has to do.
Ace smacks the mug to the side, where it clangs against the cabinet and onto the floor. In the same motion, he swipes the heavy metal candlestick from the table, plunging them into darkness, interrupted only by moonlight streaming in from the windows. “Do you think I’m stupid?” he yells.
Trafalgar startles, and looks between the candlestick and the dark liquid running along the wood. “No?” he says, scrunching his forehead at Ace.
Sure. Play the fucking fool. Ace isn’t falling for that. He has the upper hand now, feet spread in a fighting stance and candlestick held out in Trafalgar’s direction. “You can’t kill me that easily, motherfucker, I’ll kill you first.”
Trafalgar tilts his head slightly. He blinks, eyes dulled in the soft silhouette of the moonlight. His right hand stills on his mug. The left is hidden somewhere underneath the table. He looks calm.
Too calm.
He has a backup plan. Of course he has a fucking backup plan. This is Trafalgar. Rock-scrubbing, manual-reading, inventory-obsessed Trafalgar. Poison is easy. Neat and tidy if Ace is as dumb as he thinks, but, if that doesn't work, why not have another option? Knife is unlikely, he probably knows Ace can take him in an even fight. A gun, then. Ace is about to get shot.
It’s not the first time Ace has been in this situation. Whenever you bring a knife (or a candlestick, in this case) to a gunfight, the worst thing you can do is back off. If Trafalgar wants Ace to cower, or try to flee, he’s out of luck. Ace kicks the table into Trafalgar’s chest, who grunts into the impact. Then he lunges diagonally, toward Trafalgar’s left arm, aiming to get behind him.
He does. Easily. Trafalgar’s reaction is slow. That’s what he gets for fucking poisoning people. Can’t keep up with someone who’s reaction time is still razor sharp, even woken up from a dead sleep or three sheets to the wind. Honed by years of having to be constantly on alert. Even as tired as he is, Ace can manage to stay on his toes. He’s not about to get murdered by some creep who’s too cowardly to take him in a fair fight.
Ace wraps his right arm around Trafalgar’s neck, kicks out his chair, and clamps his other hand around Trafalgar’s wrist, squeezing hard as they half-fall to the floor. Ace's back lands against the wall. Trafalgar makes a pained noise and grabs at the air with his fingers, dropping the–
Wait, where’s the gun?
It’s not in his hand. Not on the floor. Under the table. Behind the chairs–
“Augh–” Trafalgar chokes, pulling at Ace’s sleeve and kicking his feet.
Did he. Not.
…
Did he not have a gun?
Ace drops Trafalgar to the floor and backs away from him. Still half-crouched.
Trafalgar crumples forward, coughing hard and bracing a hand on the floor. He’s wheezing, and his eyes are forced shut, a pained expression taking over his features. He can’t seem to catch his breath.
Ace didn’t– he only choked him out for like ten seconds, he shouldn’t be– “Well don’t die, asshole.”
Trafalgar shoots a glare between coughs. He points to the sink.
Yeah. Okay. Water. Ace wil get it, but not because Trafalgar is making him. He’s only getting it because he wants answers. He still has the upper hand. Ace fills a cup, setting it down in front of Trafalgar from a safe distance. He doesn’t reach for it immediately, still caught up by a torrent of coughs.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ace asks, on edge. Trafalgar’s smart enough to pull something like this. Make Ace let his guard down while he fakes a coughing fit on the floor.
Trafalgar ignores his question, but he does manage to take a sip of water, and slides back against the wall. He breathes heavily, tilting his head back. He’s still coughing, but there’s space between them, and he’s not wheezing so much. His limbs lay heavily on the ground, like the burlap sacks of rice they throw in the storage room.
“Answer me.” Ace demands, tightening his hands around his weapon.
Trafalgar scowls at him from the floor. “What’s– what’s my problem?” Law’s voice is hoarse and interrupted by small, dry coughs. “You tried to– strangle me,” he points out.
“You tried to poison me.” Ace argues back.
“What?” Law asks, incredulous. “You mean the brandy?”
“It’s not–” Ace starts, twisting his hands on the candlestick. “I know what nightshade looks like,” he says defensively. “And that patch back there is picked clean. So fine, I did go outside, and I’m not dumb enough to–”
“I didn’t–” Trafalgar shakes his head, lips stretching sideways in a grimace, and it takes Ace a second to realize he’s laughing through a fresh torrent of coughs. “I didn’t,” he chokes out.
“It’s not funny, Trafalgar,” Ace snaps. He should stay alert, but Trafalgar’s smile– even pained, even huffing out air– is disarmingly soft, and Ace is distracted by the even whiteness of his teeth, the maroon that’s washed over his cheeks, dull and hazy in the moonlight.
“It’s a little funny,” Trafalgar says, dropping his head against the wall and kicking his feet out straight. “You know–” another laugh catches in his throat, and he coughs. “Before this, I really thought… I was thinking this was the easiest I ever trained anyone.” Trafalgar laughs again, so hard that it sounds like he’s choking again.
Ace feels a blush sink into his cheeks. What does he mean the easiest? Ace hardly knew what the lantern looked like before he came here, there’s no way that’s true. In any case, he’s not going to get distracted by that. “If you’re not trying to kill me, why are you growing nightshade?”
“The nightshade is for me,” Trafalgar says, managing a breath and getting up off the floor. He walks to the side table in the living room, fetching a black leather bag from underneath it.
“You’re poisoning yourself?“
“No,” Trafalgar takes something out of the bag and flops on the couch. He kicks the bag in Ace’s direction. “My lungs are screwed up from when I was a kid. Nightshade is an antitussive in small doses. Very small doses. Otherwise it wreaks havoc on your system.” Trafalgar sticks a small, hand-rolled cigarette into his mouth and lights it with a match. “To be honest,” he says, breathing out slowly, “when you grabbed the candlestick I was dead sure I was hallucinating off it.”
Ace looks down at the candlestick and places it back on the table. He picks up the bag from the floor and immediately recognizes the familiar earthy sweetness. There’s a bitterness there too, now that it’s stronger, a medicinal bite underneath its alluring scent. The bag contains a glass jar of dried plant material and a plain paper box of cigarettes, along with a roller and a small apothecary scale.
“Why can’t you just take laudanum like a normal person?” Ace asks, annoyed.
“Ever met a laudanum addict?” Trafalgar asks, sinking back into the couch. The smoke trails up toward the ceiling, swirling mildly with the draft. His voice is still a bit hoarse, but he’s already stopped coughing. “I always have a cough. If I took enough laudanum for it, I’d be dead by thirty.”
“I guess,” Ace says noncommittally, but he knows what Trafalgar is talking about. Ace has seen plenty of laudanum addicts. He’s fought a few who ended up in Gray Terminal, trying to catch Ace and Sabo on their way out the gates to Goa, hoping to pick off their hard-earned coin from the city. They were never hard to avoid, being weak from withdrawals and practically yawning from fatigue. Ace could tell they were on something from their eyes. Pupils wide, eyes glassy, squinting even in the fading daylight.
Now that he thinks of it, Trafalgar’s eyes are kind of like that. He squints in the daylight, even when it’s obscured by a layer of clouds. The black of his pupils swallows up the softer gray surrounding them. The difference, is the steadiness to Trafalgar’s. He doesn’t look so desperate, or like he’s crumbling.
Ace picks up his chair, and slides it over to the fireplace. “Um,” Ace says, sitting down, “Sorry about…”
“Accusing me of attempted murder and then threatening to beat me to death with a candlestick?”
Ace glares, but that is what happened, so. “Yeah,” he says.
Trafalgar shrugs. “It’s fine,” he says, puffing out a cloud of smoke. “If it happens again I’ll just poison you.”
Ace shoots him a look, half because Trafalgar is an asshole and half because he hates that he’s actually kind of funny. “Shut up,” Ace says back.
Trafalgar nods toward the kitchen. “The brandy’s still out if you want any,” he offers. “Blackberry. I promise.”
“No,” Ace says, shaking his head and eyeing the stain trailing down the cabinet. “I’m… pretty exhausted, actually–”
“You didn’t sleep at all last night,” Trafalgar states, confirming it with his eyes steadily locked on Ace’s. “I thought the candle looked low.”
“You know,” Ace says, “It’s comments like that that make you sound like a murderer. It’s like you’re watching me all the time. Tracking everything I do.”
“I don’t–” For some reason, Trafalgar distracts himself by rolling the cigarette between his fingers staring down at it. “You’re new at this, I’m making sure you can manage everything.”
“Like sweeping the floors?” Ace asks, “Think I can manage that one without you staring at me.”
Trafalgar throws an annoyed glance in Ace’s direction, before shifting his eyes back to his hands. Ace knows he’s being a bit childish, but there’s something… Trafalgar is annoyed, but he’s also…
Wait, is he embarrassed? When Ace is embarrassed, his cheeks and his ears give him away like bright, glaring emergency lights. But Trafalgar’s not so easy to read. He’s not blushing, but he’s hiding beneath the collar of his jacket, chin tucked toward his chest.
“I have to—” Ace says, standing up suddenly. “I’ll clean up the kitchen,” he decides, dragging his chair back to the table. He picks up the cups, wipes the brandy off the cabinet. Now that he’s taking a second, he can tell it smells distinctly of blackberry. Maybe he’s imagining it, but he can practically feel Trafalgar’s eyes on him. Ace thinks through the week as he leans over the sink. He assumed Trafalgar was waiting for him to fuck up something, make a mistake. But then… he did say Ace was easy to train. That Ace was doing well. Which means… he wasn’t watching Ace to correct him. Or check that he was doing everything right. He was…
Ace turns from the sink and finds Trafalgar staring into the fireplace. “I’m going up,” he announces, crossing the living room in front of the couch.
Trafalgar nods, finishing his cigarette. Ace figures that’s the end of it, but Trafalgar says something when Ace reaches the stairs.
“What?” Ace asks.
“Law.”
Ace furrows his brow, not getting what Trafalgar is trying to tell him.
“My name,” he explains. “Trafalgar is too formal for a place like this. Just call me Law.”
“Sure,” Ace agrees. And then he goes upstairs.
For the second night in a row, Ace doesn’t sleep. For the second night in a row, it’s because Trafalgar– Law, now– is screwing with his head. He stares at the familiar wood grain of the ceiling, though, this time, it’s much darker, because he’s remembered to put the candle out. He stares over at Law’s side of the room. His stack of books. His blanket, neatly tucked in at the corners. The shift log, slid against the bedside table.
Curious, Ace reaches for it, turning over to his stomach and flipping it open on his pillow. Trafalgar’s handwriting is neat, scrawled across the pages in thin even lines. Ace Ace flips open October and spots his name on the page, looking better than Ace has ever written it. Ace squints to read the entries in the moonlight. They mark his role, and the day and time of his arrival. And then, a few days later, there’s a longer entry:
Regarding keeper Ace. D. Portgas. Progress note. High aptitude for mechanical work, re. lantern, foghorn. Recommended advance in training and upgrade to pay status: maintenance/keeper.
Ace shuts the journal, feeling heat wash over his whole body. He shoves the shift log back in place and buries his head in his pillow. Law mentioned he was easy to train, but, he didn’t think… in the few stints that Ace actually went to school, his teachers only ever wrote how behind he was. Noting the fact that he read slower than all the other kids, which wasn’t news to him, or Dadan, or Garp. He got notes about bad behavior. Fighting with peers, talking back. He never figured out how to do math like he was supposed to. He said history class was stupid (Sabo’s fault, for going off on his tangents about how it was taught in schools).
He understands now, why the smart kids in class liked going to school so much. It’s only a few words, scrawled out in a notebook that hardly anyone would care to read. But there’s a permanence to them. Spoken words disappear into the air as soon as they leave a person’s mouth, blown away, easy as smoke. This, though, is set in ink. There’s no denying it. No misremembering. No forgetting.
Ace flips over to face the wall. Maybe it’s his lack of sleep, or his whiplash from thinking Law wanted to murder him only a few hours ago, but he blinks into the darkness as his eyes go glassy. He wipes at his face with his sleeves, laughing mildly at himself. It’s only been a week and he’s already a trainwreck here. But, for the first time, he feels like two months won’t be so long after all.
For the first time, he thinks, maybe it’s not long enough.