Chapter Text
You saved my life he says I owe you everything.
You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just get gone, but he’s
relentless,
keeps saying I owe you, says Your shoes are filling with your own damn blood,
you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours.
–
A cowboy walks up to a brothel. Grief sits heavy on his shoulders—something old, something new. The smouldering coals of his eyes, a hearth stoked by revenge.
His black coat looks like charred flesh, shadows clinging at the seams. Or—his black coat reminds you of the skeleton remains of offerings, fed into flames in hopes of better fortune. In hopes of grace. In hopes, if one is particularly desperate, of salvation.
You can’t help but smile. He walks up to you, an offering, prayer beads around his neck like a noose.
He meets you at the entrance, takes off his hat, takes out the blade of grass from his mouth.
“Welcome, stranger,” you greet, sweet and docile eyes. Push off the doorframe to lean into the smoke of him. Make his eyes wander over silk. “How can we be of service to you today?”
Casanova grin, crooked. “I've heard that there’s a woman here who has the answer to any question a man may have.”
You hum. “You came all the way to Alabasta for a fortune teller?”
Says, softly, “I need all the fortune I can get.”
The girls at the brothel say your officer in charge of this part of Paradise was caught by Crocodile. It’s your fault for pushing him further into Baroque Works territory, searching for a Devil girl. Your officers are, after all, your responsibility.
You have a soft spot for personel recovery missions. Which is to say, you have a soft spot for saving people. Sabo says it’s your selfless streak. You disagree.
Your life may not be your own, but you are greedy. No, it is not a selfless thing.
It’s Dragon’s least favourite thing about you. Though you are dutiful, a loyal dog, a life long given over to things bigger than yourself, your choice to save has never been an imposed thing. It’s always chosen. An internal, selfish thing you keep tight to yourself.
“I don’t talk to cursed boys,” you watch the Old Hag tell Fire Fist Ace from the balcony, fanning her wrinkled face as a form of rejection. Alabasta sun spills hot and golden into the brothel’s courtyard, turning the edges of Ace’s hair red, a halo of fire.
“Cursed?” Ace repeats, lopsided grin never faltering. “I just wanna know where—”
“You will choke on your own blood,” she interrupts, peering up at him. “On the darkness you harbour.”
There is a silence. Alabasta Desert, sand-skimming-sand silence. You watch his back straighten, his black coat pulling taught across his shoulders. The shadows clinging to the seams. “People have been tellin’ me I’m cursed since I was born, lady. You’re not special.”
Though her fan covers her mouth, her dark eyes pull into smiling crescents. “And still you hurtle towards your death.”
He guards his ground, jawline jutted, hands in pockets, ever the picture of boyish defiance.
The Old Hag hums low, glancing up. “Unless you’re here for one of my girls, I have nothing to offer you, Fire Fist.”
“That was harsh.”
“I’ve been in the business long enough to know a dead man when I see one,” The Old Hag says, rolling her eyes.
You trace thoughtful circles on the metal railing of the balcony, staring down at where Fire Fist had stood. Spilling blood, frantically squeezing it back into half-dead bodies—you know your fair share of dead men. Fire Fist Ace? Halo in his hair, flames licking at his calves? Carrying love around his neck, prayer beads?
“A stubborn idiot, maybe.”
“Ugh. You’re just like my girls,” the Old Hag says with a scowl.
You laugh lightly. “How so?”
It’s not the first time someone’s compared you to a whore. You give to take. Whisper what wants to be heard. A life a cause a body that isn’t yours.
“You like the doomed ones.”
No, it is not a selfless thing. Abiding by laws, by dogma, a long thought-out morality—perhaps. Choosing whose blood is worth saving, worth spilling, based on something knowing that whispers in your chest, that stirs the power in your fingertips. Of course not. Of course not.
He slams you into the wall with a smirk, hand resting on the cool pale stone behind you.
“They say,” he starts, slow and smooth and obnoxiously charming, “that the woman with any answer a man might need has eyes like the glintin’ blade of Yoru.”
“That Old Hag is one of the smartest women I know,” you say, counting the start-freckles on his face. Five-hundred-million bounty and you can count the stars on his sunburnt nose.
“I don’t doubt that,” he says. Tilts his head, appraises you through long lashes. “In fact, I think you know a lot of things, darlin’.”
“Like?” soft soft soft.
“Like,” he says, just as soft, “where is Teach?”
You wonder if he knows how lovingly he hunts. How a selfish act can be done so selflessly.
In one fluid motion, you hook your ankle around his and yank hard.
The world shifts as Ace loses his balance, his eyes widening in shock as he crashes onto the ground. You move fast, straddling him before he can recover. One of your hands darts to his side, fingers closing around the hilt of the knife he keeps at his hip. With a sharp pull, the blade is free, and you spin it in your grasp with a practiced flick of your wrist.
Quickly, too quickly for a nobody-whore, his dagger rests under his chin.
“You’re certainly on the far end of Paradise, darlin’.” you tease. Slowly, every so slowly, a flush crawls up Ace’s neck.
“Ah,” he says, hoarse, his cocky smirk barely flickering.
Hair splayed out like a messy halo, all freckles and salt and heat, even with your knee dug into his ribs.
Eyes too-bright with pride and anger and something softer, all flames.
He tilts his head back, exposing more of his neck to the blade, in defiance. You wonder if defiance is his natural state of being, teeth bared to the knife, the noose, the red string tied around his neck.
You study him for a beat longer, your weight steady against him. There is little you know about Fire Fist Ace beyond the newspapers and fast-climbing bounty. His footprints littered across the Grand Line. A pretty little rumour about a murder. You lean back slightly, his knife dropping away from his neck to rest at your side.
Maybe you do like the doomed ones. You hope it's pity, but something tells you otherwise.
“He goes by Blackbeard, these days.”
Your words strike something in him, surges up from the ground like a live wire, quick enough to startle you, his forehead nearly colliding with yours. His hands, warm and coarse against silk, catch your hips instinctively, steadying.
“Where is he?” he asks, eyes blazing.
A hand pushes his chest to reclaim your space, reclaim the air between you. “You really might be running headfirst into death,” you breathe.
“Why, you don’t think I can win?” It is said seriously, but a boying competitiveness seeps through, peacocking.
The Old Hag had said she knows a dead man when she sees one. You look over his broad shoulders weighed down by grief—something old, something newer—the coiled anger in his posture, and the unrelenting fire that burns behind his big brown eyes.
Does he think he has the world's current against him? Does he really think he’s cursed?
Your hand is placed over his heart. The quiet stalk of a hunter. A desperation that gives him away.
“I know only one of you has killed a crewmate before,” you say. Not unkindly.
He scoffs, leaning in closer despite your hand still planted firmly against his chest. “You think I’ll let sentiment get to me? I’ve never been angrier in my life.”
“But Teach is apathetic,” you say. Because apathy is a ruthless killer. Because they’ve placed a knife in your hand and asked you to kill an agent (a friend?), and anger melts into fear melts into love, needs to be kept alight, and what does apathy need? Can an absence need anything? “You might be angry, but Teach is apathetic.”
You might melt under the weight of his hot-coal eyes. The heat of his hands on your hips. He lets out a thoughtful little hum. “You sure are a know-it-all, huh?”
“I’m not—” You frown, something akin to chagrin. If there’s one thing you can’t stand to be is incompetent. Sabo laughs at you from across the Grand Line. “I don’t know where he is,” you admit.
He smothers his disappointment well. Big brown eyes, the slight slump in his shoulders. It’s a pretty sight. Let him sit in it, just a bit.
“I do know someone who does, though,” you say eventually, slowly, tentatively. “My junior officer—ah. He got caught by Crocodile and—”
And can’t help it if your eyes go sharp. As if this wasn’t the plan all along. A whore can string people along, soft words and softer eyes. No, it’s not the first time someone’s compared you to a whore.
The first time you see Fire Fist use his devil fruit, he lights a fire. Fans it with his cowboy hat.
The Gods are not vengeful. They have gifted him his brother. Not biologically. You’ve spent enough time collecting bastard sons and false kings to know that. But a brother is a brother.
You start to understand where all his love—as heavy and demanding as it may be—comes from.
“Who is this?”
“This is—Ahh… My… friend?” (Ace)
“Your friend dresses like a common whore.” (Vivi)
“Your brother keeps interesting company, Luffy.” (Usopp)
“Amongst this crew we separate the dignity of individuals from an opposition to a commercial exploitative system.” (Sanji)
“You can’t say that while lookin’ at her boobs.” (Zoro)
“You can’t say that while looking at Fire Fist’s boobs.” (Nami)
Ace’s brother—Luffy—wants to be King of the Pirates.
“Why?” you ask him, tracing your feet through sun-scorched dunes.
Luffy smiles. It’s a bright thing. Sun and sun. “He’s the freest man in the world.”
You hum.
Do you think, Dragon had once asked you, deep in a snow trench, sharp smell of gunpowder, blood turning ice into red mush, freedom is a shackle within itself?
He asks things of you, expecting certain answers. Star student, Sabo would tease, but Dragon’s mind works in ways closed off to even your most prying attempts. You wonder if it’s part of why you stick to him.
The freedom of the world requires a heavy sacrifice, you answer, tentatively.
You wonder if Luffy is ready to make it. Something tells you he goes about freedom a different way to Dragon, even if it all is, ultimately, the sun setting at the end of the road. Half your life dedicated to the pursuit of freedom and—Do not doubt yourself, Dragon had added on. Revolution is not a means to an end. There is freedom found in it, here, too. Why do you think we fight so viciously?
“Do you know your parents, Luffy?” you ask. Your instincts prickle around him. Like there’s something you're not getting. Heritage is an important thing on the Grand Line, and the boy in front of you is, surely, as surely as the sun rises East, important.
He shrugs, shifting his backpack up his shoulder. “Nah. You?”
“No,” you say, and that’s that.
“I’ve heard it’s overrated,” Ace drawls. He keeps close to his brother when you’re around. You think it’s because he doesn’t trust you, despite his earnest appearance.
Eyes sharp like Yoru. It makes you laugh.
A whisper can bring down kingdoms. A hastily buttoned shirt, a rusted crown, the strange curl of one’s eyebrows—fragile things bring down, or make, the mighty. There are things more dangerous than a sword.
The first time Ace sees you use your devil fruit, blood sinks back into his wound. Watches as red curls into itself, back into the palm of his hand, called home by his heart.
“Do you stroke all menacing creatures you come across?” you ask quietly, mindful of Lu’s sleeping crew. He thinks, hopes, you’re amused.
“I didn’t think it would bite,” Ace says back in defence, grinning despite himself. And you laugh lightly, crinkled eyes telling on your smile.
He wonders what it must be like. To be a herald of life, rather than destruction.
When he had first seen you outside the brothel, he had thought you were a very smart whore. This is not a rarity. Knows the underbelly of the Grand Line—the cautionary tales told between pirates, the sea shanties about cunning women and sirens and whores who will rob you blind—well enough to know when to tread carefully.
He thinks, knows, he hasn’t treaded carefully enough.
A warm desert breeze plays with your thin silk scarf, blood-red, covering your lips. Only your eyes tell him anything, if anything. They take, more than they give. He can feel them reach deep inside of him, curling into his soul, scraping away into the dark of him. Robbing him blind.
Lu and his crew are a blessing—more than a blessing. A gift he doesn’t think he deserves. He wonders if this is a send-off. Wonders if everyone’s right about the grave he’s chasing. If the fates have been laughing at him since birth, are ready to snip off this long-running joke.
At least, at least—Well. At least he’ll die with the love for his brothers fresh and tender. When they carve him open to weigh his heart it’ll be the first thing they see.
His life has never been his own. At first it was his father’s, but he didn’t like that very much. Spitefully (lovingly), he then gave it to his brothers. His crew. Thatch.
Lu brings all this with him—or, it’s been with him all along, and Lu just lays it bare. Lu lays it bare? You lay it bare. Flay him open like a tender butcher. A sharp look between him and Lu and a knowing little smile, as if you’ve discovered everything about him, everything that’s made him, undone him, that he’s left behind.
He doesn’t trust you. Or—he does. Something about you is oddly earnest, despite your untrustworthy appearance.
Here’s a secret: Ace’s friendliness is not inherent. It is very, very intentional. Dimming his distrust, his anger, takes a lot of effort.
You let go of his hand with a final brush over his new scar, thin and already faded.
A devil fruit. An arson of secrets. Sharp eyes, cunning, spooling thick webs of blood and he’s pretty sure you’ve caught him.
“What drives you, stranger?”
Your eyes slide over to him. Slow and deliberate. You give nothing you don’t want to, Ace is starting to learn. He wants to—unspool you, get to the heart of you. Give him something he hasn’t earned.
“It’ll cost you,” you say, reading his mind. Your eyes dance in the fire light, a little teasing. He wonders if it’s part of your ruse. The way you manipulate his life force, his flesh, his suspicion.
“I’ll pay you back one day. The Grand Line’s a small place. I’m sure you know that more than anyone.” (Because he will make it through—will see you somewhere after, when his anger is buried and placated and the grief in his gut sits lighter. When he burns in a way that’s less smoke-thick and suffocating.)
“I don’t let people keep tabs,” you say, softly, smile gaining a teasing edge. “Tell me what happened—with Teach.”
“You already know that one.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
He watches you carefully. Wants something he hasn’t earned. Sighs and gives in to the tug of his blood—your doing, probably.
“Do you still think it’s stupid—going after him?” he asks, feels the weight of his tattoo press against the cool stone behind him.
Your knees are touching, silk soft and tender, and he can feel the hum of your voice in his chest. Warmth pools in his stomach.
You answer his question with a question: “Do you think you’re being selfish?”
When Ace had called your devil fruit neat, he meant it in a handy sort of medical way.
And then he sees you bite your finger, draw a single drop, and flick it into some poor sucker’s skull with deadly precision. A bullet of blood.
Herald of life, he had said. Harbinger of death.
Sends a quick prayer for his own life, nevermind the heat that stirs.
Your informant is a boy, a little younger than Lu. Ace watches your hand grip the back of the boy’s neck as you put your heads together, whispering low. The boy leans into your touch.
And Ace can’t help but think back to his own brothers, back to his division and to crowded mess halls filled with laughter and noise, the clang of plates and the constant bickering that felt a little like his old home but something new.
He thinks about what it’s like to lose a brother, and the rage that thrums in his veins.
He thinks he might be so terribly angry because a brother is a precious thing. And to willingly ruin that? To willingly, purposefully, apathetically take this beloved thing? Are we not each other’s keepers?
A grief that clings to his shoulders—something older, something new.
Ace doesn’t watch the boy as he leaves, as he slips into the Alabastian streets like smoke. Watches you, instead. A heaviness Ace is intimate with. A guilt a grief a greed a gut heavy.
It is here that sand begins to twist around your feet.
You carry a bleeding Ace across the desert. He mumbles into your neck, sorry, and you can only say don’t be silly. How to tell him that you are more acquainted with blood than the flesh it makes up.
Red spills out of a gaping hole in his shoulder that should’ve been your heart.
Ace dreams of Sabo. Hears his voice, older now but still threaded with its sarcastic teasing, its voice of authority that separated a feral Ace from an even more feral Lu. He feels a blanket being draped over his feverish body and he shivers into it.
The desert is an indifferent witness to your burdens. Sand shifts beneath your knees as you lean over Ace, your hands steady. You’ve always been good with blood. Yours, theirs, his. It always obeys you when you’re unsure about everything else.
His skin is fever-warm against your palms as you weave blood-threads through his wound, knitting muscle and flesh together, willing blood to clot and scar. A shady cave of large rocks stacked together provides some relief from the sun, if anything.
You wonder if he’s aware, how pretty he looks when he’s burning. How the fire curls round his hair like a halo. A gift to humanity, and the Gods are not vengeful.
His shoulder mends itself slowly. It’s not your best work, you think with a small frown, but it’ll do. You’ve seen worse. You’ve been worse.
“Don’t pout,” you hear, hoarse with sleep.
Your eyes move from his shoulder to his face, slightly hazy eyes and a smile so lopsided it’s almost charming. “You’ve made a mess of your shoulder,” you say, softer than intended.
“And you’ve fixed me up all nice and pretty.” He sits up slightly, his brow furrowing as he tests the edges of his pain. “Thanks,” he says after a pause, his voice rough but sincere. Always sincere.
The silence stretches between you, heavy but not uncomfortable. You feel his eyes, studying, questioning. You wonder if he’s asking the right questions. You wonder if you can give him the answers he needs.
Ace sleeps wondering whether you’ll be there when he wakes. Whether you’ll have packed up and moved on to your next endeavour, your next informant to meet or save, Warlord to stab with your own blood, poor vulnerable pirate who’ll be fooled by a smile and will spill his heart out, only for you to pick it up, blood and all, and tuck it into your pocket before you leave again.
Through feverish dreams, he sees you reach out, brushing sweaty strands of dark hair from his feverish-forehead.
He rolls over and assumes you’ll be gone by morning.
When he wakes up hard and hot from dreams of silk and denim and salty skin, you’re fast asleep.
“We’ll be good to go tomorrow,” you say, fingers running over his shoulder. Your devil fruit powers spread like the skittering heat of sunlight, across his shoulders, down to his fingertips, curls into his ribs, his gut.
He watches you lean over him—pupils wide and dark, bright with interest. When you tilt your head up to look at him, your noses almost touch. He wonders if you can feel his pulse stumbling over itself.
He’s been drinking liquor—it’s the only thing in the flask, anise and dates and hot fire down his throat, and it helps with the dull ache in his shoulder. It doesn’t, however, help with the heat curling into his ribs.
“I’ll be sad to go,” he says quietly. You arch a brow at him. “I like gettin’ special treatment.”
He thinks you know he’s trying to be a bit playful, a bit flirty, a bit incorrigible. Both of you know he’s bound elsewhere, a cowboy hunter with his prey just over the horizon, ready to spill blood. Still, he wonders if you’ll play his game, just for tonight.
And you do. You tilt your head, play his game (—will probably win it), say, “You should be grateful. Only the pretty ones get special treatment.”
“For free?” he says, low, looking at you through dark lashes.
Your smile brightens. “Of course not,” you say, plucking his cowboy hat from his head and placing it on yours. “How will you repay me, Portgas? You know I don’t keep tabs.”
You might have only been playing at being a whore, but you sure do sweet talk like one.
There is a trust between you slowly mounting, the hearth of a larger flame, that allows him this.
Tell me a song, you ask him later that evening. Breathy whisper that tickles his ear. Smells like anise and sweet, sweet dates.
When Ace gets a fucking fire devil fruit, it feels a bit like a cosmic joke. Ace, still young, still burning with life and brimming with insecurity and rage. Did I deserve to did I deserve to did I did I did I?
And the first thing he does is accidentally burn down their first ship. His first ship.
The second thing he does is throw up.
The others don’t mind that their ship is gone. Or, they don't seem to. They cheer and whoop, they congratulate him. The fire-fire fruit. How lucky, captain. This is how we get to the One Piece.
It consoles him that they’re not upset, in some ways. They should be, but they’re not. They’re young and impressionable and care little else but for power and victory.
But they can't help him stop feeling like a lit match in a world made of paper. Can't teach him how to trust himself with this gift that feels more like a curse, another thing to keep the fates laughing and amused.
Some nights, when the moon hangs low and heavy, he sits at the bow (of their second ship) and creates tiny flames. Watches them flicker between his fingers like dying stars. He learns to laugh it off during the day. Learns to wear his fire like armor, like it's something he chose. Something he deserves to boast about. But in moments when the night presses close, he remembers the acrid taste of fear in his throat, the way his stomach turned to lead as he watched his own flames devour his home.
Will of D. Enemy of the Gods. The Ace of Spades means death, one of his crewmates says jokingly over a game of cards. He closes his eyes and traces the constellations behind his eyelids. Laugh at him. Plot the world against him. Who? Who is up there? The fates? The Gods? His father?
He wonders if, when he’s in Hell for the crimes he’s committed and mostly for the ones he hasn’t, they’ll let him keep his devil fruit. Probably not.
Did I?
The universe answers back, negative.
“Where is your sea, then, O wise Oracle?” he asks you.
He has a bad habit of looking at you through his lashes, all doe-eyed and heavy. Lopsided grin.
“Guess,” you say.
“Easy,” he says, peacocking. “Grand Line.”
You smile. “Paradise?”
“No way. A girl like you? Straight from hell. New World.”
You tilt your head in acquiescence.
“And?” He straightens. “Don’t you wanna know mine?”
“Your sea?” you say. “Is the Eastern-drawl just a part of the cowboy look?”
“Ah, but you're wrong. I was born South,” he smirks. Laughs at your expression. “You’re not wrong often, are you?” Voice dips into something conspiratorial.
“You’re getting cocky, Portgas,” you warn, smiling despite yourself.
“Sorry, sorry. No, you’re right. I grew up East,” he says. And then, softer, “My ‘ma was from the South.”
“It’s your turn, stranger,” he says. Your eyes are bright below him, bright and glinting. “Tell me a song. About your sea.”
“Only because you asked so nicely,” you coo.
You're from a trading port. He’s probably thinking of spices, exotic fruit, weapons, the usual commerce of sea-bound places.
Your island didn’t really use money. Beri or otherwise. Instead, because nothing is free, information flowed through the streets like water, collecting in deep pools where the powerful gathered to drink. Cipher Pol and monarchs’ envoys and revolutionaries and the fate of empires, all pooled in one place. The entire underworld had its claws, sharp and menacing, deep in the flesh of your island.
You remember it in fragments: dry summers, cicadas, olive trees centuries old bending their silver leaves. Stretches of blue—sky meeting sea meeting temple walls. An old quarry where you bathed with the other orphans.
An orphanage? Run by priests—though that's not quite the right word. Translation error.
There’s this aspect of our religion. You’ll like it, you say.
For you, fire was the Gods’ greatest gift. And, in return, great fires of sacrifice—food, possessions, secrets, everything you owned. The more valuable, the better. Give, give, as much as you can.
Question: In a world without money, what binds people together? What creates honour, obligation, and trust?
Leave yourself raw, laid bare before gods and men alike. There’s no greater honesty than that.
We’re very loyal people, especially to each other, you say. It’s important, when what we keep breeds disloyalty, feeds it like dry wood to a fire.
It was common, you continue, to sell children to the marines. To Cipher Pol, sometimes. All the orphans knew. It was an honour, actually.
You worked hard. How proud you were, when they chose you.
You quite enjoyed Cipher Pol, actually. A quiet admission. They were good to you. You were good to them. They never had to be cruel—their kindness was a far more effective chain.
“—Do you see now? I’ve been a dog my whole life. Since the moment I was born. What drives me? I don’t know, really. It’s taken me a long time to pick through and negotiate what I believe in and what’s imposed. I can’t judge you for any blood spilt. What right do I have to arbit life? I mean, all I have is whether I think you deserve it or not—and how selfish is that? It’s just the bits and pieces of morality from people I believe to be good. My life might not be my own but I enjoy giving it away to bigger things—I don’t know, maybe it’s all I’ve been taught. I grew up believing in divine judgement, but even then, even after—my whole life I’ve been told to kill for a greater thing, save for a greater thing. Sometimes I like being able to decide that on my own. Make something personal out of it. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who believe everyone deserves to be saved, but I don’t. I don’t. I believe in sacrifice. It’s not reciprocity, necessarily. It's just giving, giving; giving yourself away, as much as you can, pieces of yourself. It’s what I was made to do, from the moment I was born. I don’t know who told you I have an answer for every question. What drives me? Do I think it’s stupid to go after Teach? I don’t have any answers worth anything.”
“Do you honestly believe that you’re doomed? Cursed?” you say, small smile, sharp eyes.
“Do you?” he asks, quiet. Draws soft circles into your hip, thinks it might be a form of pleading.
You consider him. It’ll never stop feeling like he’s being cut open. “I think you’re charging headfirst into death,” you say, slowly, “but I also have a needling suspicion that there are a lot of people willing to pull you out of hell.”
“Including you?” he says, spills out of his mouth, and it comes out a bit heavier (a bit desperate) than he expects it to. Wonders if the alcohol is making him loopy, messing up all the suave charm he can usually pull off.
You breathe out a laugh. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
He pouts dramatically. “Something tells me being saved by you isn’t special.”
And he’s being selfish, now, putting his life in your hands. He’s been selfish his whole life. Hunting his death, knowing it, doing it anyway. What’s one more thing? It’s not like the Gods will give it to him, either way.
(And what if he wins? What if? Then he’ll prove it, prove it to all the world, that he deserves it.)
“I told you already,” you say, soft. “You’re too pretty not to save.”
(I owe you, is what you don’t say, tucked into the breath spent on your words.)
(And even if I didn’t, even if I didn’t owe you, I would give you salvation anyway. What can I say? I’m selfish like that.)
The morning after they make their way through the desert back to the sea. Ace watches your figure against the sun, curves that ebb and flow with long silk fabric billowing in the wind.
You're going after him like you’ve got nothing to lose. But you do. You do, and I’d bet my life that he’s counting on that, Marco had said, foreheads pressed together, desperately clutching onto the back of his neck as if it’ll keep the fates from dragging him into hell. Jumping into hell? Ahh, whatever.
He puts his hand up to the setting sun, peering between the gaps of his fingers at the light.
You came to Alabasta for a cursed girl. They say to make the Gods laugh, you tell them your plans.