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WHITEBEARD PIRATES DIVISION COMMANDER FIRE FIST ACE CAPTURED BY—
Shakky sets the glass down right over Ace’s face on the front page, a perfect target-ring of whiskey and condensation bleeding into the paper. The picture’s still there—distorted. “Looks just like him,” Rayleigh says. He reaches for the drink and Shakky exhales smoke across the bar, already leaning forward to rest her elbows next to him—a quiet, steady rock the same way she’s been for the last twenty-something years. Mellowed by tragedy.
He wants to go on principle. Wants to stay behind for other principles, too. Both options feel futile—the kid’s in Navy hands, and the connection to Roger is just a hunch in his gut.
“His crew’s not going to take it easy,” Shakky murmurs. “Whether he was Roger’s or not, he’s Newgate’s now.”
Rayleigh drinks. Ace is still there, looking up with half of Roger’s face but not his smile—not his spirit. There’s something bone-deep to the disappointment Rayleigh feels and it’s not because Ace’s life isn’t worth saving but at the futility of what he’ll leave behind whether he lives or dies. Endless conversations with a dying man over shit wine about legacy and conquering the world too early—about a son who’d be there to finish the job and a father who wouldn’t. Except, well—the world’s still standing and by the look in Ace’s eyes, he won’t be the one to topple it, either.
That’s fine, though.
Rayleigh’s spent most of his life doubting Roger’s choices but not his convictions. Whether or not Ace is the son of the man now mostly-gone within the legend now left in his place, the legend itself will still live on—will still produce something great to carry on the dream. Still—in some ways it’s a comfort to know the human parts of Roger that Rayleigh loved and that the world will never remember were, for however long, loved by someone else too.
He rests his head against Shakky’s shoulder. She leans her own back, cheek pressed to his hairline. When he hums, “They’re all going to die, you know,” he feels her nod against him.
“Not without a fight,” she says, and it’s not malicious—just blunt in that way she’s always had. “And Roger stopped being your responsibility a long, long time ago.”
He knows she’s right. She’s always right. That’s half the reason he loves her, too. “Don’t think you ever get to stop being a first mate,” he says, “responsibility or not. No word from the others?”
Shakky exhales again, slow and smooth, and he likes the way it curls around them like a blanket. “None, and I doubt we will,” she says. “We’re the ones in the middle—they’re on opposite ends of the world.”
“They wouldn’t anyway, I suppose,” he replies. “Old bastards are old bastards ‘til the end.”
She laughs, dry and quick. “All of you.” Then she lifts her head and shrugs him off. Stands. Turns just enough so that he can’t see her face and waves one hand over her shoulder. “I’ll have stew ready when you come home,” she says, already walking toward the bar’s back kitchen, halfway out of sight. “Don’t bring a girl with you this time—I’m tired of feeding them.”
The kid with the straw hat is a miracle and Rayleigh doesn’t break his promise on a technicality—girls or not, he hadn’t actually answered.
It’s like watching the future unfold in threadbare linen and violence—and there’s a pride lodged somewhere in the liquor-soaked core of his ribcage. Roger’s son became Newgate’s boy but Shanks was their brat first, and this is the second lineage born purely from legacy. The irony of the kid’s name isn’t lost on Rayleigh but at the ripe old age of seventy-six, maybe he’s starting to believe in fate, even if there’s something fundamentally tragic about the whole thing.
Monkey D. Luffy doesn’t want to hear what’s waiting for him at the edge of the world and that seals the deal—Rayleigh will stay. There’s an entire family waiting in the wings to claw Ace back from Garp’s stupidity but this kid’s running headlong into the future half-cocked and cocky and—
Whether he knows it or not, it’s nearly cost him an entire life.
They split up and Rayleigh watches the swordsman go and knows he’ll be back mostly because the kid’s stupid as hell, partially because like recognizes like. There are bandages under his clothes, and Rayleigh would have done the same thing for his Captain, too.
There’s a green-glass bottle waiting on the bar when Roronoa Zoro returns, jingling the bell over Shakky’s door and glaring at it like the thing’s offended him personally, and (still seated) Rayleigh tosses it toward him while he isn’t looking. The face he makes is a teen-boy smear of surprise and annoyance, but he catches the thing even through his fumble. There’s real observation haki somewhere under all that bravado, then—untrained and built on brute force alone. Good.
“Roger used to get himself into all kinds of stupid shit, too,” Rayleigh says, gesturing broadly at all of Zoro with his half-filled glass, and Zoro blinks at him. “It’s half of what made him interesting enough to follow.” He shrugs. Takes another sip of his whiskey. Watches as Zoro squints down at the bottle in his hand and then back up at Rayleigh like he’s never trusted anyone in his life. And maybe he hasn’t—and that’s good, too. Means Monkey D. Luffy has earned it.
Still, Zoro doesn’t cross the room—just stays there, just inside the doorway—and doesn’t thank him, either. “Captains,” he says, and it’s a whole sentence.
And Rayleigh laughs. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” He raises his glass in mock salute and if Zoro looked irritated before he’s pissed now. Truly pissed.
Also good.
“Clearly,” Zoro spits, “you can.” He jerks his chin, sharp and quick, in no particular direction—at the empty bar all around them. At the life he’s built with Shakky, comfortable and soft and so, so lucky in ways few pirates from their generation lived to see.
“Not sure that’s entirely a bad thing,” Rayleigh says, easy, as if this kid could hurt him in ways he hasn’t already hurt himself. “It’s possible to live for two things at once, you know.” He drinks again. Watches Zoro grind his teeth and think about leaving. “You want to be the World’s Greatest Swordsman, right?”
“I will be.” The reply is instant, barely a thought. Good, good, good. He’s a fucking idiot, but maybe he’ll survive the heartbreak.
So Rayleigh nods. “You can’t always pull him out of the ocean,” he says, and the kid scowls back, defensive. There’s the curled-in jaw snap of a burden too heavy on the shoulders of a boy who’s given up so much already. All the hurt he’s hiding under his clothes won’t be the kid’s last scars, Rayleigh thinks, earned bleeding out for someone worth dying for—and Rayleigh knows by his own that they aren’t the first, either.
“Bullshi—”
“You can try,” Rayleigh says, because fuck—he tried. “But someday you’re not going to be able to. You need to be okay with that.”
Zoro has the balls to take a step forward, so Rayleigh gives him that, too—he has the audacity to defend his own pride as much as his captain, even in such a fucking state. Even better. “I’ll—”
“The important thing—” Rayleigh doesn’t let him finish, just cuts Zoro off calm and clean and firm. “—is that you try anyway.” The ice in his glass shifts just enough to catch his attention and it stays there, even as Zoro seethes at him. “That’s what makes a good first mate.” Rayleigh nods to himself like it’s the truth and wonders, somewhere in the fuzzy distance, if he’s just learned to lie well over the last two decades so the ache hurts less. “Even if you can’t save him in the end, you dive in after him anyway. Every time. And then you live, so someone remembers him when he’s gone.”
And Zoro scoffs, not a cornered animal yet (but will be (too) soon), and snaps, “Speak for yourself, you old bastard,” before he turns—yanks open the door—and stalks out into the sunlight, bottle still in hand.
Even though he’s gone, Rayleigh laughs again anyway. “I am.”
It all goes to shit because the crew’s only strong enough to have gotten this far on grit-toothed optimism and blood, and the world’s an unforgiving place run by unforgiving people and—in the end—Roger’s son has the one thing Roger himself hadn’t: the ability to love someone or something as much as his own dreams.
Monkey D. Luffy survives and it’s as much an inevitability as it is a tragedy in its own right. He’s going to be King of the Pirates, after all—and he can’t do that if he’s dead. Still, though, there’s a stark difference between surviving and being alive, and—watching him force down food at Jinbei’s behest—Rayleigh knows he won’t be either for much longer if he runs ass-first into the New World. And there’s an even steeper divide between deciding to live and doing it—
So Rayleigh stays, and stays, and stays.
It’s strange—as the days turn into nights turn into weeks turn into months—how much Monkey D. Luffy is Roger but how much he is not. The joy is there—the conviction and the selfishness and the lust for adventure—but there’s a softness, too. The thing that drove him to save his brother, that drives him now to live for his crew. What Roger lacked: the need not just to be loved but to love in return, all the same.
Watching Luffy grow is like a balm but like heartbreak, too, and Shakky had been right—Roger stopped being his responsibility long ago—but Rayleigh had been just as right in his own way. Once a First Mate, always one.
He can only hope the other kid fell into responsible hands or at the very least hasn't died, mostly for Luffy's sake but for his own sake too. Rayleigh knows, though, if he loves his Captain even half as much as Rayleigh loved his, Roronoa Zoro will find a way back and figure out how to follow orders on the trip. Will survive and crawl his way back if he needs to, because that’s what Rayleigh would’ve done at his age—on something lower than hands and knees just to see some scrap of the Pirate King’s smile, the echo of his laugh.
Rayleigh knows he’s only here as a placeholder and is content with that, because his time’s passed. He’s got his own home to return to now, so he’ll keep this one safe for the next generation as long as he can.
Rayleigh hears Luffy weep in his sleep and says nothing and knows Roger never cried for them the same way Rayleigh cried for him, a bastard selfish enough to die without the mercy of letting them watch. He wonders if Luffy will do the same when the time comes but knows, somehow, that he won’t out of the same self-serving kindness that got them all here in the first place. If Luffy were to die like Roger, he’d have to be alone, and—
“I miss them,” Luffy rasps, fingers curled around the edge of his bandages, prying gently at the corners of his heart. “I miss them.” The rage is gone, left on Amazon Lily with that directionless despair—the one now replaced twelvefold with a flood of loneliness spilling endlessly into the void. “I miss them.”
Rayleigh can feel the campfire between them, roasting meat and skin too-hot against the cooling humidity, and thinks of Gaban and Crocus; of laughter that could shake the world and of the privilege of joy at the feet of a King; of this, here—now. The other side of his own spit-out love.
And Rayleigh inhales through his teeth like a smoker long-since quit, soft and sharp and mostly out of old, aching habit. “They feel the same,” he says. It’s meant to be something like reassurance, but it lands like a dead bird in the sand. “What’s a crew without a Captain, after all.”
Just people, he thinks. Left behind.
Just people.
“I miss them,” Roger’s ghost repeats, and Rayleigh can pretend for a moment he hears him and replies—
“So tell me about that idiot with the swords—”
And it’s the right thing to say, because Luffy looks at him with wide, surprised, delighted eyes. Grins with all his teeth. Says, “Oh, Zoro? He is an idiot, isn’t he!” and laughs.
“—so I grabbed all three and he said they were all his—and you saw him! He holds the third sword in his mouth, so of course he’s going to be the greatest in the world–because there’s nobody like Zoro, because if there were then he wouldn’t be Zoro, and isn’t that amazing?” and it’s like something’s come alive, this hollowed-out boy clawing his way back not for the adventure alone but for the people he’s with, and (like Rayleigh’s not giving the right enthusiasm, the response Zoro deserves) Luffy digs. “You saw him! Isn’t he amazing? Isn’t he—”
And Rayleigh feels the catch in his throat—wonders from a distance of two decades if another voice said the same thing about another man with the same light in his eyes. Wonders if knowing would be easier or just make things worse in the end, and decides—ultimately—that it doesn’t matter.
Luffy loves Zoro with his whole body animated, like the wounds from today and that day aren’t anything, recounting the whole of their lives together in a disjointed timeline—Skypiea to Thriller Bark, Enies Lobby to Arlong Park, and the place before it all: Shells Town, a stone’s throw from home.
“He sure is,” Rayleigh grunts, eyes half-lidded toward the rising sun. Drinks the shitty liquor Hancock brought on her last less-than-secret supply run, more than likely a bribe in the mix from Gloriosa herself. “Amazing.”
“Right?” he giggles—then Luffy stops—doesn’t still but something close—and there’s a flicker and Rayleigh can’t tell if he’s staring at the firelight or something further. “My friend who got left behind in Impel Down,” Luffy says, and Rayleigh thinks Oh. “He had a devil fruit that let him turn into anyone, and when we first met he touched a couple of us, and it was really funny,” and Rayleigh thinks (again) oh. Between them, a log splits. Hisses. Spits. “And when I saw him in the prison, before I knew who he was, he looked like Zoro.”
There is a break in the kid’s voice—a hurt—and if Rayleigh were younger and softer and maybe someone else entirely, he would gather Luffy into something like careful love. The kind of love he can admit (now, after time and distance and the realization that he’s never stopped grieving) he would have given Roger’s son if he’d known—the kind of love owed like a debt unpaid.
The part of himself that nearly drowned at sea after Roger’s death—the part Hacchi saved and Shakky nursed—aches and he says, “Though I doubt he meant it, there's a closeness between Captains and First Mates that shouldn’t be tested.” Luffy nods into the night and Rayleigh hopes for all of them he understands.
“I miss him,” Luffy says, and it’s not small but it’s solid. A truth buried in the bones and sinew of new wounds and a body burdened with its own heart. Not for Ace’s sake, now, but scars for the sake of protecting what’s left. “Zoro. I miss Zoro.” He doesn’t say the most, and Rayleigh knows it’s because he’d never choose between them like that—doesn’t have it in his nature—but there’s something there, all the same.
“I know, kid,” Rayleigh replies. “I know.”
When the bell over Shakky’s door clangs into the empty bar, no part of Rayleigh expects to see his own legend’s blurred edges around the grown-into limbs of some new creature, tall and broad and two years stronger than before. There’s a confidence there—in the shoulders—as sure as the slicked-back grease of his hair, and before the brat finishes grinning into his insult Rayleigh’s already reaching around the swell of pride to grab a bottle from behind the counter. (Another, really, since he’s been here all day waiting, not waiting, waiting to see who emerges from the jungle). Of course he’s first; Rayleigh himself would never be less, so Zoro can’t be either—can never be if he wants to stand beside the summit of the world.
“From what I’ve heard,” Rayleigh says, and he tosses the rum to Zoro’s blind side just to be sure, “it’s a miracle you even found your way back.” Of course Zoro catches it—flawlessly this time—and there’s a light in his eye too. Not the shutter of poorly-worn ego at the insult but something else, something brighter and infinitely more assured, and he says—
“Of course he fucking talked about me,” with scoff that Rayleigh can feel along the forever-raw edges of his heart. “Bet you couldn’t get him to shut up.” And Rayleigh grins, too. Good.
Instead of answering, Rayleigh kicks out the bottom rung of the stool next to him and gestures with his own bottle, reaching for a second glass with his free hand, then he fills it to the brim.
Zoro takes the cue for what it is and strides in, crossing streaks of sunset that cut through the slits of Shakky’s half-opened blinds, changed.
Rayleigh raises his own glass and when they toast, it’s to death and life and futility. A goodbye to the past and a hello to the future and a hope that maybe, maybe, maybe the right hands of Kings won’t always have to die wondering. An acknowledgment of the one-eyed idiot whose bandages are gone now—of the man who’s finally learned some manners, because he raises his own back.
“Hawk-Eyes Mihawk, eh?” Rayleigh grins, watching Zoro down the liquor without hesitation. “Hope that brat taught you something worth the time.”
“He taught me just how fun it’ll be to kill him,” Zoro says, rolling the only eye he has left, but there’s a fondness to it, too, with layers underneath. The understanding that it’s not just a title to grab but a man to be on the other side. “The old bat bastard.”
“I imagine so,” Rayleigh says, and he can’t help the way his smile stays even through the last of his drink. “Let’s just hope you learned enough new tricks to follow through.”
As he sets the drained glass on the bar, Zoro grins. “I’m strong enough,” he says—not cocky now but confident in a way that’s been earned by the years and labor and the sharp-honed edge of something else, something deeper, “to pull him out of the ocean every time.” Then he reaches for the bottle to refill his and Rayleigh’s too, not empty but close enough. “Because whatever you taught him, it won’t be enough to keep him from falling in anyway—”
And Rayleigh laughs just like he did two years ago and somehow, still, completely different too. “Oh, absolutely not,” he says. “If anything, it’ll make him that much more likely to jump in of his own accord.”
Zoro shakes his head. Clinks their glasses. Says, “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” with his whole chest and Rayleigh hears, at last, that the sound of his own voice within has faded. In its place is something new—the future, as it should be.
Shakky makes Zoro stay for dinner and in their spare bedroom, too, and Rayleigh knows, against all odds, it will be an easy goodbye.
As the world rings in the King’s return with bombs and guns, fire and flood—an army of cyborgs, a legion of insects, a wave of crying fans, a crush of Marines, and a plague of ghosts—Rayleigh sees it: the grin, wide and bright and real, stretched to impossible limits under eyes brighter than anything he’s seen in two decades. Watches as arms and hands and heart reach out for Roronoa Zoro, who reaches back—pissed off and yelling and so full of a molten-gold joy that Rayleigh can feel in his own chest because it’s the same. It’s the same.
Then—amidst the chaos—Luffy skids to a halt. Rayleigh watches both of his idiots (first mate and the cook whose name he never bothered to learn) shout in frustration and he wants to laugh, because who among them has ever been able to tell a D anything they’d listen to—
And when Luffy turns—“Rayleigh!”—it’s with a voice reaching for him across some impossible distance. “I’m gonna do it—I’m gonna be King of the Pirates!” They’re the same words he’s heard a hundred times from the kid’s mouth over the last two years but now they’re said with an entire soul to back them up—the leftover pieces of his heart, collected at last; the other half of the dream worth living for.
Here, now, it is a gift Rayleigh never thought he’d hear again—not just a shout but a promise, guaranteed.
It’s like watching the past and present superimpose—the way Roger would burst through doors without hesitation, never bothering to knock. Silence one moment, Monkey D. fucking Luffy the next—a man now, fully grown and ready to crush the future between both bare hands, head raised, straw hat backlit against the frame of dawn.
Zoro’s eye is missing. Luffy has a half-healed hole in his chest. They’ve both given pieces of themselves, carved out and healed over, for the people they love. They’ve both learned to live for their other dreams, too—Monkey D. Luffy for the crew that made him, and Roronoa Zoro for the title he’ll win at the end of the world. They’ve both become whole and wholly equal—and they’ve both become men who history will forget in the face of their legends, but who the people they leave behind will remember.
Roger stopped being Rayleigh’s responsibility a long, long time ago and now, finally, the legacy isn’t his to carry, either. Ace is gone and Rayleigh’s memory is part of all that’s left. He returns home and leaves the ghost behind, satisfied.