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Ace doesn’t always remember to breathe.
Which is different from Michinaga, who sometimes stands in the sun and stops breathing and doesn’t notice at all. Keiwa pretends to ignore that because what good would it be to point out? Michinaga is good at accepting things.
But Ace just. Forgets. In slight moments, he seems to glow, his eyes blue and amber and not a warm brown Keiwa has watched lie without a hint of doubt (but then again, on those occasions, he was never truly lying).
And his breathing and his heartbeat still, and Keiwa panics the first time it happens, the silence of his head against Ace, before he looks up, and Ace looks at him in confusion.
“Tycoon?” He asks, and he still doesn’t breathe.
“I—” Keiwa says. “You aren’t breathing.”
“Oh,” Ace says. “Let me fix that.”
And just as suddenly, there is a heartbeat, a movement to his chest.
Keiwa lets out his own breath and looks at Ace carefully.
He doesn’t ask about it again.
“Does it bother you to have such an obvious weakness?” Michinaga asks. Ace rubs at his wrists, up his arms. Barbed wire chains, another idiot who thought Ace was something to be kept. Even at Michinaga’s worst, he’s never imagined Ace was something to be owned, only defeated.
He hadn’t known what he was up against. Ancient powers.
But the Ace then was human, almost. More human than Michinaga is now, undead and plant guts inside of him.
This Ace is an almighty god, who is useless when tied up.
Ace runs a hand through his hair and as his fingers move, the strands lengthen or shorten, switch from pure white curls to a straight black part. It’s almost obscene to watch. Or perhaps, it’s almost blasphemous.
“Maybe if I didn’t have you,” Ace says. “You always surprise me, so I’m never really in danger.”
Michinaga rolls his eyes to hide his blush, and probably doesn’t succeed. He never knows what to do when Ace is honest and warm.
“That’s a lot of trust for the man who killed you.”
“I got better.”
As though it’s normal. It is for them.
The truth, Michinaga thinks, is that he’s the one terrified. Of what Ace could become. Not because of one alternate future, no. Because Ukiyo Ace will tear himself apart and accept it for them, or grin at a twisted victory.
And he will win. He’s a god.
Somehow, it’s more terrifying than when they were enemies.
“You go too far, sometimes,” Neon says, and it means so many things at once, and Ace realizes immediately. Not because of any power he now holds but because he is smart and he knows her and he loves her, loves her like a precious jewel.
…no, that isn’t fair. Ace has always seen her as a person. Seen them as the same kind of person. Neon knows her eyes sometimes shine red in photographs, now. She doesn’t mind it.
She’s still herself.
“Far away?” Ace asks. “Or is it something else? I’m hardly the only god who’s rewritten the world.”
And he barely does it. Restraint is his everything, rules and rewritten rules. Sometimes she remembers it’s only their belief that keeps him free. She hates it. Hates the world, hates the DGP.
Never hates Ace. He found a way out.
“I just think you’re too big, sometimes,” Neon says. “This isn’t all of you. Like a fraction kept together.”
“Infinite power can’t be a person,” Ace says. “I’m still a person.”
“We see it, though,” Neon says.
“I know,” Ace replies.
Ace doesn’t let himself fear his own ascension.
Not when he stood, tied up in the pace his mother tortured. Not when Tsumuri had a gun to his head.
There’s a lot of things he hasn’t let himself doubt, and some of them were wrong. The DGP was wrong.
But ascension was never about him. It was about his mother, who had been tortured and blamed for it. It was about Tsumuri, who deserved a choice. It was about the world, that he always loved, even when the star player couldn’t show it.
It was about them, his Chosen Riders.
He never lets himself doubt them, either. No matter what they do, they’re his, and they’re perfect.
…sometimes, he still wonders if drifting away from them would have been better, when he moves and the world moves with him, and one of them notices how deeply he guides and is guided by the laws of reality itself.
To be a god is to be a force of nature, and to be a force of nature is to obey the laws place upon you.
But they look at him, and somehow, he never forgets that he’s Ace, too. He’s Ace, to them.