Work Text:
Sunlight filters through the blinds of the RA medical ward, illuminating the interior in long bands of gold.
You raise a hand into the air and watch the light catch the dust around it. Watch the hand, too, with the appraising eye you've spent your whole life training, like it has the answers to all the questions you don't want to ask. Like it's a stranger's hand, one you've never seen before, not the same one that's been on the end of your arm since you first formed in your mother's womb.
To yourself alone, you ask: Who am I?
You keep looking at yourself and being startled by your own adult body, as if the recovery of your memories should have returned you to the form of that long lost child, blown to nothing a decade ago.
As if knowing what you've lost should bring it back.
No one else is in the room, nor is it likely anyone will enter for hours to come, so you indulge in the desire to roll into a sitting position, back yourself into the corner, and curl into the tightest ball your long limbs will permit.
Your eyes are dry. It would be healthier to cry. You could use the release.
But you can't summon it. You feel like a hollow thing, a wrung out rag, whatever metaphor strikes hardest for a person who should be overwrought but only ended out empty.
Ace is dead.
Do you care about that. You shouldn't, should you, after ten years of not giving a damn.
For all intents and purposes, he was a stranger you happened to know for a few years when you were young. He's had no impact on your life from the moment he left it. Who you are today is something he had no influence over. He left no mark on you.
That's a truth fit to kill you all over again.
He should have mattered. He should have. You should have carried him with you every day you were away, should have kept in your heart a place for the first person in the world who ever loved you.
But you didn't.
And now he's gone.
Can you even claim to be the same person who loved him? The same person he loved? After ten years and a whole life in between, can you truly identify yourself as the boy who used to chase his brothers through the jungle with teases on his tongue and laughter in his heart?
Your memories do not sit easy in your skin. They look out through your eyes with the perspective of a ghost before that of a recollection.
Many times, you have felt like an interloper in your own body. Akin to a possessing spirit, moved in when the original host vacated the premises.
The Sabo of now and the Sabo of then have never been the same entity in your appraisal.
What, then, do you call this.
A melding, maybe. Those two disparate selves, reunited at long last. Slotted together like puzzle pieces, ones that didn't actually fit in the same picture. Two full and disparate people melted into some shambling abomination, a creature that should never have existed at all.
This skin doesn't fit you right. You aren't so deluded as to think your old body would feel any less foreign to what you are now.
You don't know who you are anymore.
It aches.