Chapter Text
The war had raged on for too long. Long enough for the sounds of screaming and the clash of swords becoming as common as sleep. Long enough for the dead to outnumber the living. Long enough that the people that remained started to doubt which side was right — or rather, whether the side they fought for was worth it.
A woman clutched a bundle of cloth swaddling a corpse, and screamed at the god. Her hands trembled as she held the small body wrapped within it, but her tears had long since dried. There was nothing left to cry for.
Strife had pushed her heart over the edge, leaving behind nothing but anger and despair. She no longer cared about her own survival. She no longer cared about the consequences of raising her voice against something greater than herself. Perhaps she had already lost everything worth protecting. “We prayed for happiness, for laughter, for freedom. And what have you brought us? Plague! What have you given us? Death!”
The god couldn’t find it in himself to respond, let alone disagree. Because what could he possibly say? That he had tried? That he had fought? That he had wanted to save them? Those words meant nothing to the people who had lost everything. After all, she was correct, wasn’t she? It was his fault — his own hubris — that allowed the conflict to stretch out this far.
“I’m…” The words caught in his throat. For once, the being worshipped by thousands of people found himself unable to bear their gaze.
“I’m sorry.” He eventually managed to choke out, the sound impossibly human. “It’s all my fault.”
Centuries later, the world had forgotten. Forgotten the god who apologized, forgotten the child consumed by disease who was saved by his god, forgotten the soldier who died for his god, forgotten the ghost who trailed after his god, and forgotten the man who would find his god again.
***
The first thing people learned about Monkey D. Luffy was that he was impossible. The kind of impossible that made adults wish to tear their hair out, the kind of impossible that made Ace abandon him in the woods more than once, convinced that the brat would realize he was better off alone, the kind of impossible that made Luffy trail after a boy three years his senior, scrambling back to his feet when he inevitably tripped on an overgrown root, shouting, Ace! Ace! Wait for me!
There was a day, early on, that Ace liked to pretend he didn't remember.
He'd left Luffy behind on purpose that time — walked fast, took sharp turns through the thickest part of the forest, the kind of route a seven-year-old had no business following without getting lost. He told himself it was for Luffy's own good. He told himself the brat would cry for an hour, give up, and go home to Dadan's, and maybe then he'd finally stop trailing after someone who'd never asked for a little brother in the first place.
Three hours later, Ace found him instead — scraped up, bruised, half-eaten by mosquitoes, sitting in the dirt at the exact fork in the path where Ace had lost him, waiting.
"Why didn't you just go home?" Ace had demanded, furious in the specific way that was mostly fear wearing anger's clothes.
Luffy had looked up at him, filthy and swollen-eyed and entirely unbothered, and said, with the same total conviction he brought to everything: “Because I wanna be your friend. I wasn't gonna just leave."
Ace hadn't had an answer for that. He still didn't, years later, except that it was somewhere around that fork in the path, in the mosquito-bitten silence of a forest at dusk, that he'd stopped trying to make Luffy leave.
The second thing people learned about Monkey D. Luffy is that his dream was to become the king of the pirates, no matter how many fists of love Garp threw his way. After all, the king of the pirates would be the freest person in the world.
It was that dream — that wish for freedom — Ace later discovered, that had drawn him closer to the little brother that barged into his life. Later, Sabo would come to the same realization.
It was why Sabo stayed; why Ace stayed.
Sabo had grown up inside walls that told him exactly what he was allowed to want, exactly which dreams were appropriate for a boy of his birth and which were an embarrassment to be corrected out of him. Freedom, to Sabo, wasn't an abstract virtue. It was the one thing he'd never been permitted to have. So when a small, loud, utterly shameless boy looked him dead in the eye within a week of meeting him and declared that he was going to sail the entire sea and be free doing it, something in Sabo's chest had cracked open in a way he didn't yet have the words for.
It wasn't because of the sake, shared under an orange sky with cups too large for hands too small. It wasn't happenstance, or convenience, or simply being the only children for miles who understood each other. It was because Luffy had stumbled across two broken, guarded, aching boys and decided — without a sliver of doubt, without needing a single reason beyond wanting it to be true — that they were his.
And Luffy had always been impossible.