Chapter Text
In Ace’s defense, it started because he was just trying to be nice. Really. He enjoyed checking in with the former Spades; besides, it was his fault they were all here, after all, so it would be remiss for him to not look after them even if he wasn’t technically their captain anymore. They were his friends and his responsibility, and he’d promised himself long ago that he would always look after them. So of course he noticed when Deuce didn’t show up to dinner one day.
If it was anyone else, maybe he wouldn’t have been concerned, but Deuce liked his routines. The pattern seemed to be built into the very fabric of the universe: the spontaneous, chaotic captain and the organized, look-before-you-leap first mate. Ace knew better than anyone that his old first mate had a chaotic streak of his own and more than a little disorganized when he trusted Ace not to get himself killed without adult supervision (rude; Ace was an adult too, and not much younger than him), so him missing dinner wasn’t a certain indication of impending doom, but still. Ace was a good friend and he was going to check on him and either help or be annoying. Besides, in Ace’s humble, eternally correct opinion, it was good for Deuce to be annoyed sometimes.
That was how Ace found himself knocking at Deuce’s door one evening. He’d eaten quickly rather than skipping dinner; Thatch had just gotten back from a trip and that usually meant he’d go above and beyond for dinner prep, as if to remind them how much they’d missed him when he was away.
Deuce gave him a blank look when he answered the door, newspaper clutched in one hand.
“How are you?”
“Good?” Deuce had the same vaguely concerned look he always wore when he didn’t know what Ace was doing. “And you?”
“Good, good. Dinner started like an hour ago.”
“Oh! I forgot. I was reading.”
“The newspaper?” Ace didn’t read the news. He usually said it was because World Government-issued papers were sickeningly biased, but it was mostly because it was boring. Not much happened in global news that could rival the excitement of his life in Whitebeard’s crew. He’d glanced at a few headlines to see if Luffy had made his debut yet, but it seemed his little brother hadn’t gotten himself into a front-page-worthy mess yet. It was only a matter of time, Ace was sure, but until then, he didn’t care what the government saw fit to report. If it was really important, Marco would probably fill him in with an obligatory big-brother eyeroll and sigh. (Ace still wasn’t used to being the little brother, but he’d learned quickly that it was way more fun than being the oldest.)
Anyway. Ace couldn’t fathom how the newspaper could be interesting enough for Deuce to forget about dinner, even if he was a huge nerd.
But Deuce nodded. “Yeah, the newspaper. There’s this new anonymous column by someone traveling the New World solo, it’s fascinating.”
That was more interesting than Ace would’ve expected, but still— “There aren’t that many people who could pull something like that off. It can’t be that anonymous unless it’s fiction.”
“That’s the thing, it can’t all be fiction! They’ve been to some of the same places we have, there’s no way they’d know some details unless they’d really been there themself, but nothing they’ve said about themself sounds like anyone we know of. They claim to be a pirate but don’t line up with any known New World pirates. Iboushi could be anyone! But they’re a good writer for sure,” Deuce concluded, eyes sparkling.
Ace opened his mouth to respond, maybe call him a nerd and tell him to go to dinner already, but then his brain and ears caught up and— “What did you say their name was?”
“A. O. Iboushi.” Deuce held up the paper and pointed to the column. It was from the Blueberry Times, one of the few non-government-sponsored papers that spanned most of the Grand Line and then some. The heading “Lunch with Jungle Monsters on Faulkner Island” took front and center of the Travelogues section, and underneath it, in the same standard typeface as the rest: A. O. Iboushi.
……
“If we want to sneak into High Town, we’ll need a cover story,” Sabo said.
Luffy attempted to snatch Ace’s breakfast while saying, “Why? We have crocodile skin, what else do they need to know?”
“We’re three jungle kids, of course they’ll have questions,” Ace replied, defending his share of the meat and swiping extra from Luffy.
“Maybe we could sit on each other’s shoulders and wear a big coat so they think we’re an adult,” Sabo pondered. Luffy tried to steal his meat too, but he wasn’t deep enough in his brainstorming to forget to keep his food out of Luffy’s rubbery reach. “And we’ll need a name…”
Ace and Luffy were fighting over the last of the meat once again. Ace pulled Luffy’s hat down over his eyes, but Luffy tackled him before he could make a grab for it. Sabo claimed it while they were distracted wrestling.
“No fair,” Luffy whined.
Ace didn’t add anything to a similar effect purely because he wouldn’t be caught dead agreeing with his crybaby brother.
Without warning, Sabo broke into a wide, toothy grin. “How about A. O. Iboushi?”
“What?”
“It’s our secret fake name!”
Luffy shrugged.
Ace grinned. “Sure, why not?”
……
Ace didn’t realize he’d grabbed the newspaper until Deuce tried to pull it back. “Ace? Is something wrong?”
The hell was he supposed to say to that? Nah, nothing’s wrong, this anonymous writer just shares a pen name with my dead twin, no biggie. And wasn’t it a bitter victory to realize he’d been so good at forcing himself not to think about the terrible news he’d gotten so long ago that it hurt just as much to remember it now? He wasn’t even sure he’d ever mentioned it to Deuce—hell, to anyone at all. Probably not. Sabo’s name was as impossible for anyone to know as Iboushi’s.
And yet.
“Can I read it?”
“I—yeah, sure, but seriously, are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course.”
“You can’t just say you’re suddenly interested in random news columns and expect me to believe there’s nothing else going on here.”
Yes I can. “Is it a crime for me to take interest in your hobbies? Come on, have there been other articles? I want to know more about this Boshi guy.”
Deuce once again looked baffled but welcomed him inside nevertheless with only token hesitance.
As it turned out, this was Iboushi’s fifth article. Deuce had two saved before this one but was missing the other two. Each was about a different adventure on a different island. They were all labeled as fiction but, as Deuce had told him, contained such specific and verifiable details that Ace was convinced the author had truly visited the places he wrote about. Iboushi mentioned coworkers and a headquarters to return to, but always maintained that he traveled alone and his adventures were solo escapades.
It wasn’t until Ace got hungry again that he remembered why he’d shown up at Deuce’s room in the first place.
“Shit, you still haven’t gotten dinner, have you?”
Deuce blinked at him for a moment. Then he pushed him out of his chair. “And you were judging me for forgetting earlier!”
“Yeah, it’s food!”
“You forgot too!”
“I ate earlier—hang on, what time is it?” Ace looked around for a clock (a difficult task from the floor) but shrugged it off. “Whatever, we can raid the kitchen together.”
Deuce reclaimed his budding collection of articles and stacked them in order, as if to make it absolutely clear that he could and would ignore Ace. “No thank you, I don’t want Thatch to kill me.”
“C’mon, the moment you tell him you missed dinner he’ll be giving you all the food he can find.”
“Ace. Captain. Buddy. Every time you get caught raiding the kitchen, you end up overboard. I don’t want to go swimming.”
Ace handwaved that and slung an arm over Deuce’s shoulder, effectively forcing him to follow him to the kitchen. “Don’t worry about it, it’ll be fun! It’s been too long since we’ve gotten into trouble together anyway.”
“I was enjoying that staying-out-of-trouble streak.”
They continued going back and forth all the way to the kitchen. Ace could almost forget about Iboushi, could almost push that damn name to the back of his mind where the rest of Sabo had been laid to rest long ago. Nothing had really sank in yet, no ideas or emotions or any of it, but he knew it would eventually. He felt like he was pressing against a door to keep it shut, but the dam would break and then where would he be? But that was a Future Ace problem. Now Ace could think about stealing food and making fun of his friend. No problems for Now Ace, no sirree, nothing’s wrong, and Deuce could stop giving him concerned side-eyes, thank you very much.
Ace was so caught up with how completely and totally A-Okay everything was that he didn’t sense danger until they opened the door to the kitchen. Even then, he was distracted, so busy being Definitely Fine that it didn’t register for a moment longer.
Then he looked up and saw not Thatch at the stove, but a shadowy figure looming behind him, a devil fruit in one hand and a raised knife in the other.
And then Deuce whacked the shadowy figure over the head with a cast-iron skillet.
Ace ran forward. Thatch turned around. Deuce fumbled the skillet and dropped it onto—
“Is that Teach?”
……
Marco got to the kitchen first after Thatch called an emergency meeting, looking not much more tired than usual. Ace had joked before that Marco didn’t sleep, but he was starting to consider it a valid theory. Thatch had started stress baking in the meantime and had handed at least five plates to Deuce by the time the other commanders arrived; Ace helped him eat them. Deuce, for his part, looked like he wished he was literally anywhere else.
The explanations were predictably awkward. Teach was a traitor and Ace had missed dinner to read the newspaper—the world was upside-down and on fire.
“They’re very good articles,” Izou pointed out in defense of Ace’s uncharacteristic alibi.
“Frustrating is more like it,” Haruta grumbled, still rubbing their eyes like they were convinced they’d wake up any moment and things would finally make sense. “They can’t be fiction, they can’t be real. Not one of my sources has any leads on the author. Not one! Even the publisher doesn’t know—”
“I don’t think that’s the most pressing issue,” Marco cut them off. “Ace, Deuce, Thatch—can you think of any explanation for what you saw Teach doing besides…”
“I didn’t see anything.” Thatch’s voice was quieter than usual, nothing like the laughter Ace always heard filling the kitchen. “I didn’t even know he was there until…”
Ace and Deuce exchanged a long look. “I don’t think there’s any other explanation,” Ace said. He wanted to give his crewmate the benefit of the doubt, he really did, but— “He was trying to kill Thatch for the devil fruit.”
The Moby had never been so quiet.
“Lock him up,” Marco finally said. “I’ll tell Pops. And… let’s keep this quiet until we know more.”
They filed out.
Ace wasn’t hungry anymore.
He’d already lost one brother. The thought that he could’ve lost another… he couldn’t even think about it, even as he couldn’t think of anything else. Thatch, Sabo. Teach, Gray Terminal. People obsessing over power in the stupid world they were stuck in, and the people who got in the way. Ace had never been any good at pretending he didn’t care.
Sabo wasn’t staying out of his head anymore. Damn that Iboushi. But at the same time, he had to know something, right? Could it really be a coincidence that someone had both Sabo’s pen name and Sabo’s dream of writing about adventures across the seas? There was no way, though; if anyone else knew, Ace would know them. But maybe Sabo had been inspired by someone. Wasn’t that a possibility worth looking into?
Ace didn’t want to lose anyone. He stayed with Thatch in the kitchen until the cook went to bed. He checked on Deuce again before turning in himself. He stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep, the familiar restlessness inside him kicking up silt that had never truly settled.
Even if it was too late to make a difference, if there was something more of Sabo out there for him to find, how could he not try?