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Sabo realizes something’s wrong immediately, of course. The fire is too eager. Too hot. Too hungry. It doesn’t leap at his command so much as it tries to anticipate that command. Or, even, interpret it however it pleases.
It’s simple enough to chalk the errant flames up to inexperience, at first. It’s a new skill, this Devil Fruit, and he has to hone it the same way he did the strength in his hands to avoid shattering every cup he ever picked up. In his spare moments, he practices. The flames listen. They cooperate. A dozen candles, lit in a blink, and extinguished with the next. A target on the prow of the ship, hit from the crow’s nest and not even smoking by the time he jumps down to inspect it. Nothing at all to indicate any issues.
In combat, though, that bloodthirstiness rears its head, and the fire strains against his control. Breaks right out of it. Brushes so near to Koala that it singes her hair and leaves the marines in front of her so much ash.
Sabo stands in the wake of it, fist still extended, eyes wide with horror as he takes in the burning street, the screams of people who hadn’t yet fled the fight. His hand shakes.
He doesn’t remember the aftermath and, hours later, is only barely aware of Koala leading him to an out-of-the-way shack on the edge of town. She leaves him there with a couple other revolutionaries to keep an eye on him and goes to finish the mission without him.
The guards are, on the surface, meant to make sure their little hideaway isn’t discovered. Their real purpose is to sound the alarm if Sabo loses it.
He isn’t going to lose it. Maybe. Probably. No—he won’t. He refuses.
For a while, he paces back and forth, his boots loud on the worn wooden floor. All that does is waste energy, though, and as the sun sinks down and the light from outside wanes, he sinks down onto the bed and rests his elbows on his knees.
What was the training for, then, if this is how he handles himself in a real fight? How is he supposed to look Koala in the eye when she comes back?
Shivering, he hunches in on himself and closes his eyes. He has to understand how he’s failing. He has to do better. Be better. He can’t be a liability to his own people.
Luffy’s ecstatic grin from Dressrosa flashes in his mind. He’d be ashamed if he knew how Sabo is wasting this gift, tarnishing Ace’s legacy.
Ace always protected what he cared about. Always.
Warmth bleeds out from under his skin and wraps him in a careful embrace. Orange light blooms beyond his eyelids. It can’t be sunrise; the night’s barely begun.
He opens his eyes and realizes the shack’s dilapidated interior is bathed in a flickering firelight glow. Fire is wrapped around him, under one arm and over the other shoulder, more resting against his head, the rest trailing off to nothing before it can set the bedsheets alight.
He brings up a trembling hand to hover above the clasped ones on his collar.
“Ace?” he whispers. The blurry impression of a face in the corner of his eye breaks into a smile. His heart stutters in his chest and he tries to take his brother’s hands in his own, but his fingers only sink into the flames. “Is that you?”
Or is it just this Devil Fruit trying to shape itself into what Sabo needs? One Fire Fist the same as all the rest.
The smile dims, the fire itself dimming in turn, as the ghost of the man he never met releases him.
Darkness claims the shack’s interior once more and Sabo buries his face in his hands.
Solo operations are nothing new to him. For a while, they’re all he does, until the flames calm down and he trusts himself to keep his comrades safe rather than be what brings them harm.
He still sails alone sometimes, as he did for this mission. A winter island so hostile to life that it’s one never-ending blizzard, and though there’s speculation it’s not an island at all but a frozen glacier perpetually maintained, no one’s developed equipment that can weather its climate for long enough to confirm the matter one way or another.
Put simply, Sabo’s one of the few people alive who can stay that way in this place. He docks his ship and hops ashore, goggles over his eyes and hat left behind so the wind wouldn’t take it. Somewhere here is, allegedly, an abandoned weapon from the Void Century. The information comes from the rumor of a whisper of a legend, but Sabo was already in the area, so it doesn’t hurt to look.
Looking around nets him a landscape of undulating white for the ten feet he can see before the blizzard becomes a wall. Two steps off his boat and he’s sinking up to his hips in snow that hisses and steams on contact with him.
He sighs. It’s going to be a very long, very annoying search.
Several hours later, he finds a shallow cave offering shelter amid the blizzard’s fury and crawls inside to eat a simple lunch.
The temperature isn’t going to kill him, but it’s annoying; his body remembers cold, still, and reacts to it with a runny nose and dry eyes even though the cold can’t pierce the fire he now is. The deep snow makes travel next to impossible. Lacking snowshoes, his only choice is to melt his way through, and it’s deep enough that he can’t see where he’s going when he does that.
Rumor once said that, wherever Fire Fist Ace went, the snow fled. Sabo wishes he had that talent. Though his grasp of the fruit grows by the day, and though he hasn’t had another dangerous flare-up in weeks, the heights of its strength are yet beyond him.
He chews a tough piece of jerky and stares out at the snow driven nearly sideways by the howling wind. The storm turns the midday sun into a gray haze. In his hours of searching, the light hasn’t changed. He won’t know the day is ending until the gray turns to black.
Swallowing, he considers his options. His greatest discovery so far is evidence of a very old village buried deep under the snow. Of the places a grand weapon of old could be, that seems the most likely. He has a suspicion about it, too. A village like that would never survive this weather. This permanent blizzard—a greater deterrent, he hasn’t seen. There’s every chance that the fabled weapon is the source of the weather, and that it did its duty and ceased to be.
He’ll have to search the village again. Maybe he can find clues interred in the snow and ice built up over the centuries.
When he polishes off the last of his lunch rations, he has to resist the urge to blow on his hands and rub them together. He’s not cold, much as habit would try to say otherwise.
Soft orange light wraps around his hands in a gentle embrace that guides them together. Hands, cradling his own. Twin lines of flame that form into arms, a familiar ghostly weight at his back, a chin on his shoulder.
“I’m not cold,” Sabo whispers.
The ghost’s smile is smaller this time, more of a wry smirk. Steam rises off Sabo in gentle wisps, and he realizes with a start that he had been cold, Devil Fruit reflexes faltering in the face of lived experience, the same as his first several fights spent flinching when a bullet passed clean through him. Only now, it’s snow soaking his clothes and weighing him down.
He bows his head. “Thanks, Ace.”
Flames ruffle his hair and fade away.
“Overconfidence,” Koala had once lectured him, “is going to get you killed. Always assume your opponent’s got one more trick up their sleeve. I always do.”
He’d challenged her on that and gotten pepper sprayed for his initiative, the bottle hidden under her hat where he hadn’t thought to look when they were practicing hostage scenarios.
Now, she’s giving him the same lecture, just tinged with fear as she and their doctor work to patch up the holes in his leg. Shrapnel, a cannonball slamming into the street in front of him and he’d handled most of it with a wall of flame, but reflexes were only so fast and some got through, and it was him or the family they’d been escorting to freedom, and no choice at all to take the hit in their place.
“No one,” he grunts as the nurse cranks the tourniquet tighter, “thought the old ship’s cannons still worked.”
The tourniquet buys them time to clean, disinfect, and bandage. He should’ve bled out already, the nurse had said, if not for Koala’s swift intervention and Hak securing the fastest route back to the ship and its doctor.
Koala’s too busy to whack him for the comment, but she sends him a withering glare. The pain spikes as they get to disinfecting and his head falls back onto the pillow. Sweat beads on his brow and on the back of his neck, dripping down his face and soaking into the pillow. He traps groans of pain behind his teeth but can’t help the whimper when they finally loosen the tourniquet and fire of an unwelcome sort burns through his whole leg.
Tears leak from his good eye. Koala, having stepped away for a moment to wash her hands, dabs them away and then rests her hand on his forehead. Her own is creased with worry.
“Next time,” he promises her. “I’ll remember next time.”
She purses her lips, blinking rapidly. “You’d better.”
With that, she leaves to continue the rescue efforts. The doctor pats him on the head, tells him to holler if he needs anything, and then goes to the many other patients that have come in. There are so many of them, so many refugees, so many islands brought to ruin for crimes no one saw and fewer believe actually happened.
Sabo gets a curtain for privacy, and he can’t muster the energy to be surprised when he wakes from an unplanned nap to see a fiery specter sitting directly on his legs, its own legs crossed, whole torso canted to one side so it can prop its elbow on its knee and its chin on its hand. It weighs nothing, of course. His skin still prickles.
This is the first time Sabo’s gotten a good look at its face. Details are hard to pick out in the shifting flames, but that’s definitely a frown. And the eyes, though they lack discernible irises and pupils, are narrowed.
“I’ve already gotten a lecture from Koala,” Sabo rasps. “You too?”
Those eyes narrow further. The lips part. No sound emerges. The specter straightens up, its expressions impossible to parse as it moves, but then it stills and seems to enunciate something as clearly as it can. Once, twice, three times it repeats the same words. Sabo shakes his head slightly. It doesn’t really have lips to read; there’s too much uncertainty.
What’s certain is that the specter is scowling now. It crosses its arms a moment, head tipped down, and then arcs one hand through the air. A burning line of text flickers in its wake.
“‘Take better care of yourself’,” Sabo reads, bemused. He looks harder at the specter, this ghost that’s never given a straight answer for its own existence. Could it…Could it really be…?
The doctor sweeps the curtain aside to check on him and the flames dissipate as though they never held any shape at all.
Capture is a constant, looming consequence of every mission into enemy territory. They compartmentalize as much information as they can, minimize the risk of any one revolutionary cracking under interrogation, but there’s only so much compartmentalizing they can do when the number two is off running reconnaissance missions.
Sabo wakes to a bucket of water—seawater, by the stinging in his eyes—tossed over his head. He coughs and sputters, tests the manacles holding his wrists behind the back of his chair. His ankles are likewise shackled to the chair’s legs, and simple rope keeps his torso in place.
By the feel of it, only his wrist shackles are sea stone.
They’ve also stripped him of all his clothes save for his pants. The water is cold and he’s left shivering and enjoying the knowledge that the saltwater, when it dries, is going to chafe like mad.
It’s a classic interrogation, questions followed by punishment followed by—depending on how much they dislike his sardonic and unhelpful responses—questions or more punishment. Pain is nothing new, and he weathers the treatment as best his body lets him while he uses every particularly rough move as cover for adjusting his wrists into a position with better leverage.
The thing about sea stone, compared to metal restraints: sea stone is brittle. Apply enough force, and it’ll shatter.
Sabo’s hands can, as a matter of fact, apply quite a lot of force. And, true to form, the cuffs around his wrists shatter into tiny little pieces.
Flames devour the rope around his chest and he simply steps out of the bands around his ankles, his legs turning briefly to flame. His interrogators are quick to bring out more restraints, more sea stone. He readies himself to relieve them of any ideas of recovery from this, but his fire has other ideas. It, unlike his body, suffered not at all under the many beatings. It merely bided its time until it could be set free.
It erupts out of him in a silent explosion, the effects of which are anything but. Every captor is hurled into the walls hard enough to crack the stone. The little room’s scant furniture follows, the low table full of torturing tools catching one of them in the head and ensuring he’ll never get up.
In the fire’s wake, the room is eerily silent save for the crackling and popping of the burning chair that had once held him down. After a beat, gravity pulls the men loose from the wall and they all fall to the ground. None stir, though he can see a couple are still breathing through their burns.
A flash of orange lights up behind Sabo and he turns to see the specter stalking back and forth, back and forth. It whirls on the closest captor and stalks toward him, one fiery fist coming up—
“No,” Sabo says, catching it by the wrist, the act more a flex of his aptitude with his Devil Fruit than a physical restraint. The specter silently snarls at him and yanks its arm free. The message is clear. “I need information from them. I can’t get it if they’re all dead.”
The specter looks at him, shakes its head, and goes to attack again anyway.
Sabo takes a risk. He steps in front of the specter and looks into its eyes, into the swirling twin maelstroms where the eyes should be, and brings one hand up to the back of the specter’s head. A gentle pull brings their foreheads together. Sabo closes his eyes.
Time and practice have made it clear: he is fire, now, but not all the fire in him is his own.
“Ace,” he murmurs. “I’m okay.”
Fingertips of flame trace all the new cuts and bruises on his skin. Sabo huffs out a laugh and winces for the strain on his tenderized ribs.
“Point.” He takes a careful breath. “I’m close enough to okay. I have to make sure they didn’t get the information about my location because of a leak or other compromise in our network. Other people could be in danger. After that, I don’t have a use for them anymore.” He opens his eyes and sees Ace—this ghost of him, this fragment of his burning need to defend what he loves—staring back at him, those unseeing eyes of his narrowed in thought.
Sabo manages a grin and offers one last incentive.
“You can help with the interrogation.”
Sabo stops doing solo ops. Not because he always travels with Koala or another revolutionary, but because the definition doesn’t fit anymore. Even when his are the only hands steering the ship, he’s not alone.
Ace isn’t…This face in the fire isn’t Ace, not him in his entirety, but it’s the heart of him. It’s all the pieces the Devil Fruit let him be to their absolute fullest, the pieces Sabo had seen in their infancy when they were children, now forever locked into this final form.
They can talk, in a way. He can hear Sabo and Sabo can read what he writes in the air, but mostly, they simply exist around one another. Mischief on missions goes without saying, but when they’re traveling, when they’re sailing the seas together like they once promised, two lifetimes and an ocean past, they fall into simpler patterns. Sabo at the wheel and Ace somewhere nearby, the wind streaming through the tongues of flame that form his hair, his face tipped toward the sun, a smile playing on his lips.
He never answers when Sabo asks what he is. How much of his brother he really is. What he thinks of the odd life he’s living. If the grave for him is empty of the spirit it’s meant to honor, just like the one he and Luffy left at Dawn.
The questions haunting Sabo don’t seem to bother him at all.
When they have these quiet moments, when Ace is out on the deck and it’s him and the wind and the sea, Sabo can see why the answer doesn’t much matter.