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"I'm the world's worst brother, aren't I?"
The mans its on a rock, head tipped down, eyes either closed in shame or blankly staring at his laced fingers between his knees. His posture is tense and loose at the same time, as if his parted knees and his elbows resting on them is the greatest sign of defeat and self-loathing a person could ever convey to the rest of the world .
His trousers some sort of close-fitting black material is rumpled and slightly dusty, and his black boots are scuffed and have dried splotches of mud on them. His torso is on display, wired and toned and shadowed in his hunched form. His jacket and crisp white shirt are unbuttoned and provides the tantalising view of pale skin protecting hard plates of muscle underneath, darker tan scars appearing in random stripes along his chest and left side, near invisible white stretch marks showing that the scars are old and have grown with his body over the years. The jacket is a deep, electric ocean blue and the back of it is draped over the rock, the two split tails looking like a sparrow's tail. The man's jacket sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, where the white of his shirt is displayed, though slightly dust riddled.
The man runs a hand through his light blonde hair, curly and kept short, though still wild in the twists of the curls. His hands are more tanned than the rest and have calluses and grazes on them, with a bandage on his right palm and a raised lump on his left middle finger.
With his right hand he picks at a scab on the back of his left hand, and finally looks up, sighing deeply as he does.
"I am, aren't I?" he repeats, tone somber.
His eyes are the deepest of black and swallow Marco up in an abyss of turmoil.
The collar of his jacket is deliberately turned up in a show of fashionable coolness and the ripped cravat decorates his long neck so beautifully that Marco is having a difficult time assessing the situation.
And this is supposed to be Ace's brother, fuck.
He realises that this is usually when a normal person would strike up a counter-attack of heavy denial, but honest toGod Marco doesn't know anything about Ace's brother. Although he's a pirate, he's not going to lie to himself, and what if what he's saying is true? What then?
He takes a bet and recalls all that Ace had ever mentioned about his family, not including his heritage. It's not much, but worth a shot.
"I'm pretty sure that Ace wouldn't agree to that statement, yoi,"
The blonde man's head jolts up, as if his head was attached to a string and the puppeteer had decided to viciously yank on the cords. His eyes, an absolute darkness, unlike Ace's, where his eyes had been a deep charcoal colour, like sparking flint, are wide and outrage is written across his face.
Wrong decision, then.
"How? But, he," the blonde man works himself up into such a workout that he loses his words in a splutter of chopped words and repeats of his brothers' names. He doesn't move from his spot on the rock, though, and Marco isn't sure if he should be grateful for that or not.
"I've been dead for ten years!" he exclaims, loudly, with a possible hint of a whining splutter in his words and moisture in his eyes. He viciously runs his fingers through his short curly hair, fingers rubbing over his skull in a sign of agitation. He looks up at Marco, then, and his eyes droop.
"I'm but a memory by now, for sure. I'm nothing." he mourns, hands returning to his lap, where he resumes looking down at his hands.
Marco knows when a man needs privacy and when he doesn't, and walks over to the edge of the rocks, looking out to the sea.
After a couple of minutes, the man's voice drifts over to him, sullen and hope a tiny light in his tone.
"Did he speak about me? Does he still-" he clears his throat loudly. Marco imagines the cravat around his neck, the way his Adams apple may move. "Did he remember?"
Marco thinks about the time Ace got drunk and cried. Thinks about the time when he could be loud and unhappy, how he yelled that his brother would have whooped all of their asses and had their mother's too, how Whitebeard had praised him and he's quietly confessed that his brothers would have been happy for him. Thinks about the times he overheard Ace on deck with Thatch and talking about how much of a pain in the ass his family was, but how they were fun all the same. Remembers the time Ace got drunk and rambunctiously recounted the time he and one of his brothers stole clothes from a certain big-busted woman and designed sails for their ship with them. Recounts the time that he and Ace were on the birdsnest alone and Ace looked at the sea and the quiet twilight and the lightly flapping sails all around them and said that he was never going to forget the power of family because they always had his back, just like Marco and the Whitebeard crew now have his back, and that withhout them he would have never gotten this far.
"He was secretive, you have to understand that, yoi. " Maro turns to the man, whose face looks crushed. Christ, he thinks, he wears his emotions on his sleeve just like Ace.
"But he did talk about you, for sure. Here and there. Didn't want to cause too much of a fuss unless he was drunk . "
The man chuckles, and the motion is boyish and so young that it reminds him of Luffy. The freckles dottig his nose and face remind him an awful lot of Ace when his grins.
""Is it true that you used some hag's bras as sails?"
The man erupts in laughter at that, and Marco's brain has absolutely no problem imagining the man as younger, more small, with two laughing brothers draped over each shoulder, also hysterically laughing at the memory of tomfoolery and theft. Fuck.
His torso is exposed and with the movement of one arm his jacket shifts and reveals and entire artillery of scars running u his side, the edges slightly tan, working it's way deeper and darker until the center of the scar is a hideous light red. They're old scars, nothing like the scratches and bumps working up his hands and fingers.
Ace had never said how his brother had died, but fuck it must have been hideous.
Did he get cut in half by a Marine vessel or something?
He sees Marco looking and subtly shifts his arms so that his jacket hides his torso from view, but not before he sees faint dots along the outside of his scars, as if he were --fuck.
"We did steal her bras," he says, more quiet than before, and turns his neck to look out at the shining sea and glittering waves from the sunlight.
Along his collarbone is a thin tattoo, black roman numbers IV adorned with a tiny crown on top of them. Maybe it was the date he died. Either way, Marco wasn't going to ask, maybe just too scared to know the answer.
"Can I see your ship?"
The question is so utterly random that Marco has to do a double take and look back at him from where he'd averted his eyes.
"Pardon?"
The blonde laughs loudly, clamouring at his politeness as a pirate, though not meanly, and repeats his question somewhat shyly. Marco realises that Ace's abnormal politeness had rubbed off on his at some stage during his many years aboard the Moby Dick, but kept the thought to himself, snapping his jaw shut.
"Can I see your ship, please?" he adds, with a bit of a smile. Marco is already falling hard for him.
"Oh, sure, yoi."
The man stands up in a sweeping gesture, flicking his coattails out from behind him and patting the fabric where dust and dirt had collected.
He looks up and gives Marco a small smile, and right there, that's when Marco sees Ace, Luffy and all shining in those eyes, those eyes that are so like Ace's, just darker and deeper and just that lukewarm temperature, not irrational and boisterous like Luffy's but just more.
Those eyes seem so like Marco's, he realises with a start. That's whose eyes they remind him of his own. Just that bit distant, just that bit indifferent and uncaring, just that bit heartbroken and just that bit spirit and soul and charisma.
Before he knows it Marco has taken six deft steps and grinded to an abrupt and unsure halt in front of him, him, for fuck's sake and is stuck staring wildly in to those eyes.
It's the other that makes the first tentative move, hands slowly reaching up to rest against Marco's bicep. The touch is warm and slightly clammy, slightly slick but totally human. It sends tingles up and down Marco's arm.
Marco grabs him, holding him tight in his arms, chin tucked into his shoulder, squeezing for all he's worth. The blonde weakly responds, tugging at his jacket.
"Fuck. You're real." he says, squeezing him tighter. The realisation that he's holding Ace's dead brother hits him hard.
"You're real."
"Yep," he responds, patting Marco's back. "I'm real."
Marco can't do anything but hold him tightly for a while.
"I'm real. I stole the sea and she spat me out. Notorious pick-pocket and travelling journalist pirate brat."
"Sabo."
"I stole the sea." Sabo finally says after a few minutes of pregnant pause, voice quivering.
"and we stole the sea, dreaming of the day we would become pirates and claim the world, but I guess that it was all for naught for me."