Chapter Text
The noise wasn't noise anymore.
There had been a moment, at the start, when Ace could still tell things apart. The cannon on one side. The orders on the other. The very particular crash ice made as it closed over a man. Then the layers had stacked one on top of the other until they made a single substance, thick, without hollows, something that pressed on the eardrums like a hand laid flat.
Sengoku's voice cut through everything. It came from everywhere at once, from the walls, the towers, the ground, carried by dozens of Den Den Mushi spread across the bay, and it was talking about his father. Ace had stopped listening to it long ago. He heard it anyway. That was the problem with that voice: it didn't need to be listened to.
Below, there were the men. Thousands. The sound a crowd makes when it has stopped being a crowd, when every mouth is shouting for itself and the shouts no longer answer each other. A man was screaming a name somewhere off to the left, over and over, and nobody answered him, and he kept going.
And then, under all of it, the tremor.
Every time the old man struck, the air split. It wasn't a sound, it was an absence of sound: a second where the eardrums emptied, where the world stepped back, before everything came back at once, louder than before. Ace had grown up with that noise. He had heard it from the Moby's deck hundreds of times, eating, sleeping, laughing. He knew it the way you know someone breathing in the next room.
He heard it twice more. Then he stopped counting.
The heat, though, was like nothing he knew.
Ace had spent his life in fire. He had slept in it. He had woken dozens of times with his sheets reduced to ash and Marco standing in the doorway, looking like a man seriously considering murder. Fire was home. He had never felt it, not really, not the way other people felt it.
Now he felt it.
The air itself burned. Not the skin, the air. You had to draw it into your lungs to live, and you had to draw it into your lungs to suffer, and those two things had become the same. Every breath went in like heated sand. Far ahead, where the magma had met the sea, a column of steam rose straight into the sky and twisted, and under that column the ground wasn't ground anymore. It ran.
Ace knew that smell now. Molten rock had a smell. Mineral, dry, almost sweet at the end, and he knew he would never forget it, which was funny, because he wasn't going to have the time.
The fist had gone in through the back.
It had come out under the sternum.
Ace had only realized afterward. That was the part nobody ever told: in the moment, there had been no pain. There had been an impact, an enormous pressure, the absurd sensation of having been shoved. And then a silence inside him. Something that had always been there and wasn't anymore.
The pain arrived two seconds later, and it arrived all in one piece.
His body tried to become fire.
It tried three times. It was reflex, immediate, as automatic as pulling your hand off a hot plate, the thing he had been doing for three years, the thing that had made him what he was, the only certainty he had ever had about himself. Become fire. Let it pass through.
Nothing happened.
He tried a fourth time, and it was that one that made him understand he was going to die.
The magma had cooled inside. He could feel it hardening, somewhere behind his ribs, a mass that wasn't his. The blood came out hot and went cold on his stomach in a matter of seconds. He had always believed blood stayed warm. There were a lot of things he had believed.
And there was the smell.
It took Ace a stupid moment, absurdly long, to understand that it was him. That the meat was him.
Then Luffy screamed, and everything else moved into the background.
His brother was against him. Ace wasn't quite sure how they had ended up in that position, there had been a moment when he was running, a moment when he had turned around, and between the two something had been lost. Luffy was holding him by the shoulders. Luffy was shouting something, and his voice had been gone for a long time, so it came out in pieces, a raw sound with nothing human left in it, and he was shouting anyway.
Stop, Ace thought. You're going to wreck yourself.
He wanted to tell him. His mouth was full.
So he did the only thing left to him, and it was the hardest work of his entire life.
He raised his arms.
They didn't obey him anymore. He had to think about each part separately, the shoulder first, then the elbow, then the fingers, as if his body were a machine whose manual he had been handed in a language he didn't speak. The right one came up. The left took longer. He closed them over Luffy's back, and he pulled, and his brother came against him all at once, lighter than he should have been.
He was small. That was what was wrong. He was seventeen, he had crossed half the world and an entire hell to get here, he had a crew and a bounty and a reputation, and he was still small, and Ace could hold all of him in his arms.
He squeezed.
It hurt. Everything hurt, but squeezing was worse: every contraction pulled at the hole, and the hole answered, and Ace felt things moving inside him that had no reason to be moving. He kept going. He set his chin on his brother's black hair, he smelled the sweat and the blood and the smoke, and he thought, with a clarity that surprised even him: I don't care. I don't care at all.
He wasn't stupid.
That was a thing people tended to forget, with him. He was loud, he fell asleep in his plate, he ran headfirst into walls, but he wasn't stupid, and he could see perfectly well how all this was going to end. He had seen it the second the fist went in.
Akainu wouldn't stop. He wasn't a man who stopped. He would finish what he had started, and then he would go after Luffy, because it was logical, because he was Dragon's son and that was why they had all come.
So Ace was doing the math, in what little head he had left.
Marco. Marco could hold him. Not beat him, hold him. Thirty seconds, maybe forty, and he would come out of it in a state nobody would want to see, and he would hold anyway, because he was Marco and nobody had ever taught him to do otherwise.
Jimbei. Jimbei could carry him. He was the only one solid enough to carry a kid in full crisis over that distance, and the only one calm enough not to turn around.
Izou would cover. Izou always covered. He fired while walking backward, with that faintly annoyed expression he kept even under fire, as if the whole thing were mainly keeping him from finishing his tea.
Vista. Jozu. Haruta. Namur. all of them. They would make a wall. They had done it before.
And Pops-
Ace closed his eyes for a second.
Pops wouldn't leave. That was the calculation he didn't want to make, the one he had been putting off the whole way down to the scaffold. The old man wouldn't leave as long as his sons were on this island, and his sons wouldn't leave as long as the old man was standing, and Ace was lying in the middle of all that with a hole in his chest, at the exact origin of that shit arithmetic.
Get him out, he thought, very hard, as if it could do any good. I don't care about the rest. Get him out of here.
He tightened his arms around his brother.
He was crying. He had realized it fairly late, and that, on the other hand, put him in a black rage.
He had spent twenty years being careful. Asking for nothing. Weighing on no one, owing nothing, arranging things so nobody ever had to worry about him for more than a few minutes at a stretch. He had built his whole life around that idea, brick by brick, and here was how he was ending it: in public, in front of thousands of people, his face soaked, hanging onto his little brother like a kid.
They were going to keep that image. That was what hurt most, more than the hole, more than the hardening magma. Marco was going to keep that image. The old man was going to keep that image. They were going to remember him as someone who had cried at the end.
I would have wanted to leave you better than that, Ace thought. I really would have.
He spoke anyway. He didn't remember exactly what he said, there were words, and they came out with difficulty, and they were more or less the ones he had kept to himself for two years without ever finding the right moment. About having been born. About having been wanted anyway. He heard his own voice from very far away, like someone else's, and he saw Luffy's face come apart, and he thought it was probably the most selfish thing he had ever done, saying all that out loud, here, now.
He did it anyway.
Then he looked for the others.
It took a long time. His head weighed tons, and the world was shaking at the edges, and he had to turn it by degrees, the way you turn a door swollen with damp.
Marco first.
He was there. Of course he was there. He was floating a few meters off the ground, the blue of his flames in tatters, one wing no longer holding its shape, blood down the whole left half of his body, and he was looking at Ace. He wasn't looking at anything else. He wasn't looking away, he wasn't fighting, he wasn't moving, and for a man who never stopped moving it was the most terrible thing Ace had ever seen.
Then Pops.
The old man was standing. He would be standing to the end, there was no doubt about that, but Ace knew him by heart and he saw right away what the others wouldn't see: the way his weight was badly distributed. The way he was breathing through his mouth. He was looking at Ace too, and his face expressed nothing at all, and Ace, who had taken two years to learn to read that face, read everything in it.
Sorry, Ace said.
He didn't know if the sound came out. He thought it with such force that it came to the same thing.
Sorry about Thatch. Sorry for leaving. Sorry for thinking I was settling something. Sorry for everyone who fell in this bay this morning believing there was someone to save at the end of it.
Sorry for only understanding it here.
Because that was the real joke. That was what it had taken. A war. An entire island on fire, a fleet, three admirals, thousands of men, his brothers, his father, that was what had to be deployed for him to finally agree to believe a thing those people had been patiently repeating to him for two years around a table.
He would have given anything to start over.
That was the last clear thought he had, and it came with a violence that caught him off guard, stronger than the pain, stronger than the fear. Not I don't want to die. He had made his peace with that around noon. No: I would like to take it all back from the beginning.
Go back aboard. Sit down at that table again. Eat what he was given without spending three hours calculating how he was going to pay it back. Answer when the old man called him son, instead of pretending not to have heard. Let Marco put a hand on his shoulder without stiffening like a cat being picked up. Say once, just once, it would have been enough, that he loved them too.
They would never know. It was his fault and it couldn't be repaired anymore, and that thought was by far the most painful of the day.
The noise began to move away.
It happened gently, from the edges. The shouts first, then the cannon, then Sengoku's voice. Luffy was still screaming against his shoulder but the sound was arriving now through something, water, cotton. Ace tried one last time to tighten his arms and didn't know if he managed it.
He looked at Marco. He looked at Pops.
He closed his eyes.
After that, it was blurry.
There was no more up or down. There was no more body either, which was strangely comfortable, Ace noticed the absence of the pain before noticing the absence of the rest, and he stayed in there a long while without thinking of anything, as if in a bath.
Then there was a voice.
It was singing.
It was a woman. She was singing something very simple, wordless, one of those melodies you hum while doing something else and that have neither beginning nor end. Her voice wasn't beautiful. It was tired, a little veiled, and it cracked slightly on the high notes, and it was the sweetest thing Ace had ever heard.
He didn't know it. He was certain of that. He would have sworn he had never heard it in his life.
And yet something in him, somewhere under the ribs, recognized it immediately and began to hurt.
The song stopped.
"Oh, Ace," she said.
She said his name as if she had already said it thousands of times. Like someone repeating a word for so long that it no longer weighs anything in their mouth.
"You are so loved."
A pause.
"I'm sorry."
Ace wanted to answer. He wanted to ask sorry for what, and who she was, and why he felt like crying when he no longer had eyes for it.
The dark closed back over.
He stayed there a long time. Or no time at all. The question didn't seem to mean much here.
Then there was a sound.
A crackling. Light, irregular, very close, like paper being crumpled slowly, or a small ember working in a stove. It lasted, stopped, started again.
And with the sound came a smell.
Sugar. Something warm and sweet, on the edge of caramel, the smell a kitchen has an hour after someone did something good in it.
And with the smell came the light. It was faint, and blue. It was there to warm, and it didn't warm the skin: it warmed something much deeper, a place in the chest whose existence Ace hadn't known about before someone started heating it.
Marco.
Ace didn't need to think about it. He would have recognized that anywhere.
It didn't resemble the first time at all, though. The first time, on the deck, Marco had healed him by force after a particularly stupid attempt, and his flames had been cold. Not unpleasant, neutral. Clinical. They had done their job without looking at him.
That had changed. Ace didn't remember a precise day when it had changed, which was the most troubling part: it had happened by degrees, over months, so slowly that he hadn't seen it coming. One morning he had woken up in the infirmary with his arm in a sling and had thought, half asleep, that it smelled good.
He had ended up asking. Marco had shrugged with that look he got when he was about to say something enormous in the tone of a weather report.
"The phoenix adapts, yoi."
"What's that supposed to mean."
"It means the better it knows someone, the more it heals in their way." He made a vague gesture with his hand, annoyed in advance by his own inability to explain. "It's not me deciding. It's like a parent with their kid. You adjust without thinking about it."
Ace hadn't answered that. He had looked at the ceiling for a very long time.
There was another memory hooked onto that one, and it came along with it, the way memories always do.
Thatch had gone over the side one day in November, in the middle of a storm, trying to catch a crate of wine, a crate of wine, he was still talking about it six months later as if the wine had been the problem. Marco had spent the rest of the day circling him with blankets, herbal teas and death threats.
And Thatch, half blue, coughing up the whole New World onto the deck, between two fits, had said:
"Mother hen."
Marco had smacked him behind the head. Thatch had nearly coughed out a lung. Then he had lifted his head, eyes full of tears from coughing, and said it again:
"Mother. Hen."
He called him that all day. All day long, never missing an opportunity, even when he could barely speak, even when Marco had threatened to put him back in the water. By the end of the evening half the crew had taken it up, and Marco had ended up eating his dinner standing in a corner of the kitchen, staring at the wall with the dignity of a man seriously considering resignation.
Ace smiled.
He had no face, but he smiled anyway, somewhere, and it felt good. Thatch. He hoped to see him again soon. He didn't know how these things worked, whether there was a place or just the dark, but if by chance there was something then Thatch had been there a year already and must be deeply bored for lack of an audience.
Ace let his thoughts drift. It was pleasant. The crackling went on somewhere and he settled into it as into the warmth of a kitchen.
He thought about Sabo.
That one was more complicated. Was he going to see him again? After all this time? And in what form, would he still be a ten-year-old kid with his missing tooth and his lead pipe, or would he have grown up on his side, somewhere, while Ace grew up on his?
Ace hoped for the kid. He wasn't very proud of it, but he hoped for it frankly, for a perfectly petty reason: because at ten Sabo was smaller than him, and because Ace was twenty now, two meters of tattoos and a commander's career behind him, and he fully intended to point it out to him for at least a century.
And then, also. Maybe deep down he missed it. Running after two idiots in a forest. Counting heads before sleeping. Yelling at someone for eating raw something that shouldn't have been.
He missed it a lot, actually.
The memory of Luffy made him frown.
All the softness withdrew at once.
He had left him back there. That was the raw fact, and there was no way of turning it that made it bearable: he had left his seventeen-year-old little brother alone, in the middle of a war, on his knees, voiceless, with three admirals in the scenery.
He did what he could do, which was to redo his math.
Jimbei would carry him. Marco would hold. Izou would cover. Pops-
Pops would do what was needed. He always had.
And Ace, who had been incapable of trusting anyone for the first twenty years of his existence, noticed with a kind of stupor that he trusted them. Completely. Without reservation. He could do nothing more for Luffy, he was dead, and despite that he wasn't afraid, because sixteen people were standing between his brother and the sea and he knew every one of them by name.
It was probably the most peaceful thing he had felt in his whole life.
But don't come here, he thought anyway, and the calm cracked a little. Neither of you. Not now. If either of you shows up in the next five minutes I swear I'll-
The crackling grew louder.
It had become insistent, very close, annoying even, and there was a pressure somewhere now, a sensation of weight, the vague unpleasant impression of having a body again.
Then someone flicked him on the forehead.
It hurt. Not much, exactly as much as a flick. A ridiculous pain, tiny, perfectly banal, the kind of pain you absolutely should not feel when you have just died of a thirty-centimeter hole in the chest.
Ace opened his eyes.
The light hit him like a slap. White, white everywhere, unbearable, and he had time to make out only one thing before closing his lids again: a mass of blond hair leaning over him.
"Sabo?" Ace croaked.
There was a silence.
"I know you hate us," a voice said, "but could you at least remember my name, please?"
Ace's eyes flew open.
That voice. He would have known it among a thousand. He had known it while falling into the bay, he would have known it at the bottom of a typhoon.
"Marco?"
Marco tilted his head to the side.
It was a gesture he made without realizing, a bird's gesture, the one he had when something didn't add up and he hadn't yet decided whether it was worth being interested in.
"You're not dead?"
Marco frowned.
He didn't answer. He took a small metal instrument out of his breast pocket, leaned in, and pointed it at Ace's eyes.
"Follow the light."
And Ace followed it.
He followed it mechanically, because his body knew how to do that, because he had done it thousands of times in two years, after fights, after burns, after every time he had fallen asleep with his head in his plate and someone had panicked. His eyes slid left, then right, with the perfect empty obedience of a man who isn't really there anymore.
The little point of light passed. Passed back. Went out.
And Ace's brain started up again.
He sat up all at once. Or he tried, a hand came down on his sternum and put him flat again without any particular effort, which should have alerted him immediately, because you don't lay a hand on a sternum that no longer exists.
"Where is-"
His voice went up into the high notes. He started again.
"Did I-"
Nothing came out in order. The questions were all jostling at once in his throat and none of them wanted to go first. Did I survive. Was it me who got through and not them. How many did we lose. Did the old man-
"Luffy," he said finally, and it was the only word that came out whole. "Luffy. Where is Luffy."
Marco looked at him for a long moment.
Then he sighed, put his light away, and said, in the exact tone you use to point out that it's raining:
"Relax, yoi. You fell in the drink trying to kill Pops. Again."
Ace froze.
The word took an unbelievable amount of time to get through. Kill Pops.
He hadn't done that in two years.
Two years. It had even become a joke on board, one of those worn old jokes you bring out for the new ones, the board was still hanging in the port-side passageway, with Haruta's odds and the columns of names, nobody had ever wanted to take it down. 99 attempts. 99 failures. Two months of his life he had spent throwing himself at a six-meter old man with the constancy of an insect against a window.
He hadn't touched it since. He wore his mark on his back.
Ace looked down at his chest.
There was nothing.
No hole. No bandage, no blood, no burn, none of that hard cold mass he had felt setting behind his ribs while he held his brother. Nothing but skin stretched over muscle, a little dried salt, and the total, obscene absence of pain.
He lifted his head toward Marco. Too fast. The world lurched.
And he looked at him properly, this time.
It wasn't the Marco of Marineford. There was no reason it should be, obviously, in a memory you don't take people on their worst day, but still. No blood on the left side. No burns. Not that thing in the eyes, that appalling stillness of someone who has decided to watch it through to the end.
Just Marco. Tired as usual, his hair in a deplorable state, a towel on his shoulder and seawater up to his elbows.
And the scar on his brow.
Ace stared at it. It was his, his scar, the one he had put there himself, on the thirty-first attempt, with a hit he should never have managed to land and had never managed to land again since. It had never healed. Marco had explained it once, at length, with words like complementary and cancellation and a lot of hand gestures, and Ace had checked out after forty seconds.
He had retained two things from it, because those two were useful. One: the phoenix wasn't immune to his fire. Two: Marco's flames worked much better on him when his own fire was out, which, in practice, meant sea-prism stone, which, in practice, meant he had spent a good part of those two years handcuffed to an infirmary bed listening to Marco explain why.
The scar was there. Thin, pale, across the eyebrow.
It looked young.
Something stirred at the very back of Ace's skull, a small cold thing trying to get his attention, and it didn't manage it, and it lay back down.
Because he had just understood.
Sabo had told him, one day, in the forest, with the authority of a ten-year-old who has read a book. That when you died, it lasted seven minutes. That the brain kept going a little on its own, in the dark, and that it replayed the best moments. Ace didn't even remember the day he had heard that, there was surely a campfire, surely Luffy eating something dangerous, but the sentence had stayed stuck somewhere.
Seven minutes.
It held up. It held up perfectly, even. Because outside of Dawn, outside of the forest and the two idiots that went with it, there was only one place in the world where Ace had been happy, and he was lying in it.
He looked around him. The Moby's infirmary. The pale wood, the sweating partitions, the smell of alcohol and herbal tea and sea. The empty hammock across from him. The light moving on the ceiling with the rhythm of the swell. Someone was yelling on deck, two decks up, something about a net or a line, and someone else was answering him, laughing.
Seven minutes.
It was short. It was enormous.
He lay back down slowly. Marco was still looking at him, vaguely wary, the towel on his shoulder, visibly waiting for him to say something coherent.
"You're somewhere else, yoi."
"Yeah," Ace said.
He had seven minutes with them before the dark came back for good. He wasn't going to waste a single one.