Chapter Text
The first sensation was pressure—a dense, uniform weight pressing in on him from all sides. Then came the smell, earthy and damp, flooding a nose that, last he knew, had been filled with the acrid stench of his own burning flesh.
I died.
The memory hit him with the force of a Quake fist. Akainu’s molten fist erupting through his chest. The searing, incomprehensible agony that vaporised thought, followed by a terrifying cold that had nothing to do with temperature. He’d cursed the admiral, cursed the Marines, used his last breath to spit defiance rather than scream.
But his final thought… that had been soft.
A face, streaked with tears and snot.
Luffy.
Ace’s consciousness, adrift in the dark, clenched with a regret sharper than any magma. He’d promised. He’d promised his little brother he wouldn’t die. And he’d broken that vow, leaving Luffy alone in that hellscape of a war. No regrets about his own life, but damn… damn him for breaking that promise.
So why was he thinking? Why did he feel this rough wood against his back? Why was there air, however stale, in his lungs?
The darkness behind his eyelids was no longer the infinite kind. It was the dark of a confined space. He died. But he was waking up.
Ace’s first coherent thought was of touch. He lay on something impossibly soft, a plush, silken cushion that cradled his form. When his fingers twitched, they brushed against a padded, velvet-like lining that covered every surface he could reach. This wasn’t a crate or a sailor’s trunk. The air, though stale, held a faint, lingering hint of perfume and cedar.
He tried to stretch, to push himself up, and his hands met resistance far too quickly. The luxurious lining was everywhere—above, below, to the sides—hemming him in a snug, padded box. A deeply unsettling idea took root.
This was a coffin.
Buried.
The panic was a cold dart.
Ace was buried. The space felt closer than it should because his body was wrong. The fine tunic he wore, smooth against his skin, felt baggy in the chest, but taut across shoulders that were too narrow. When he tried to brace his feet to kick, they didn’t come close to the end of the box. A child’s coffin. A child’s body.
His breath hitched, the perfumed air turning sour with fear. He was trapped in a rich kid’s grave, deep under the earth, in a form that wasn’t his. He slammed a fist against the lid, a weak, muffled thud that promised only more earth above.
As the terror crested, an answering heat bloomed in his core—a familiar, defiant presence. A single, perfect blue flame winked into existence above his palm, illuminating the lush, dark blue velvet an inch from his nose. Ace stared. His fire. It had followed him even here. The panic didn’t vanish, but it was instantly outmatched by a surge of savage will. His lips split into a fierce, familiar smirk.
Nice lining. Let’s see how it handles a barbecue.
He focused on a technique and pure expansion.
Heat and force, radiating outward from his core.
The blue flame surged. The coffin didn’t so much explode as disintegrate from the inside out. The lid vanished into splinters, and the earth above it, deprived of its support, collapsed downward—only to be met by a sustained upward jet of searing flames.
Ace rode the geyser of fire and dirt like a vengeful spirit, erupting into the cool night air. The fine clothes he wore—a linen shirt, wool shorts, a little vest—were strangely brittle, the fibres weakened from years in the dark. They carried the faint, permanent scent of turned earth and cedar. He landed on fresh-turned soil, knees bent, flames licking harmlessly around his small form before he snuffed them, leaving only a curl of smoke from his fingertips.
Silence, deep and absolute, pressed in.
He was in a necropolis. Elaborate family crypts loomed like small houses in the darkness, their facades pale and solemn. A small, steady flame obediently sparked to life above his head, a will-o’-wisp to guide him. It glinted off polished granite right beside the raw hole. The stone was huge, expensive. The carved letters were deep and gilded.
IN MEMORY OF OUR DEAR ACE
2001- 2005
“Gone From Our Arms, But Not Our Hearts”
Ace’s breath froze.
Our dear Ace.
He counted them on his small, soot-smudged fingers.
Four. He had died at twenty. This boy in the rich grave had died at four.
He stared at the dates, then down at his own tiny, unfamiliar hands, back at the stone. A cold understanding, deeper than any grave, settled over him. This wasn’t just weird. This was wrong. A different kind of wrong.
“What the hell is this?” he asked the empty, opulent graveyard.
No one answered.