Heart of Darkness

TW: GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF CANNIBALISM AND GORE. Additionally, there are aspects of self-harm - only to the extent that we have seen in canon, but it is there. There is a build up to all this and you will mostly likely be able to guess when it happens and skip ahead, but please take care of yourselves while reading. You can also ask me for a more detailed warning either in the comments or dming me on tumblr. Thank you, and enjoy!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The forest seems lighter. The sky brighter. His smile sharper and happier.

He has brothers – he can’t seem to stop thinking it. Brothers!

Brothers who would be with him no matter what even though –

“My dad’s the Pirate King,” Ace tells Luffy as they rest by a tree, fire cooking a hunk of many-eyed meat before them. It’s a secret he’s told Sabo, and it feels almost like a curse slipping out now to Luffy.

Luffy cocks his head at him, slowly, confused, like a predator met with a too obvious trap, and goes, “No… I’m going to be Pirate King. Not your dad.”

Ace is going to tear his hair out. “No, my dad was the old pirate king. Gol D. Roger.”

Luffy blinks. “But you don’t like your dad.”

“Yeah.”

Even Luffy could tell that, with the way Ace cursed under his breath when the subject of dads was brought up.

“So why does it matter? I’m gonna be the Pirate King.” And with the matter apparently settled, Luffy goes back to poking sizzling hot meat and squealing when it singes his fur-not-fur.

Luffy… Luffy doesn’t care. He likes Ace for Ace, and doesn’t care if Ace’s dad is the man he’s going to overthrow one day.

Luffy… Luffy’s the best.

Ace doesn’t even know he’s smiling till Sabo elbows him in the side and shoves a hunk of meat down his throat.

He still doesn’t stop grining, sharp canines peeking out in blinding white, even when a giant snake erupts out of the dirt and eats their meal in a thousand bites from a thousand tiny heads.

“OI!”

“GIVE THAT BACK!”

“SNAKE BASTARD!”

Dadan starts changing the spells that she speaks like a lullaby over Luffy’s head at night. They’re still protective, sheltering the world from Luffy rather than the other way around, but now, now there’s a bit more compassion in her words, something a bit more grounding in family and home, rather than danger and hunger and theft.

Ace likes it, it makes him a bit less scared of his little brother when he curls into his side at night, with his mouth to close to Ace’s flesh and his shape not exactly four limbed anymore.

Luffy is Luffy. Hunger or no hunger.

Ace will protect him no matter what.

Okay.

So.

Vowing to protect his little brother wasn’t supposed to involve Ace getting this protective of a kid who could trade blows with the best of them, who made the beasts of the forest cower before him, and who had a shape even the Veil had to conceal.

But.

Well.

Ace doesn’t regret covering his hand in blood by punching a man half to death for kicking Luffy in the face and calling him a freak.

(Porchemy had called Luffy a freak. Porchemy had, while Luffy looked at Ace with half lucid eyes and clung to a boy who had tried his best to kill him for two months straight, called Luffy a monster.

Luffy listened, and he didn’t believe in lies, but Porchemy didn’t believe what he was saying was a lie.

And that meant Luffy didn’t either.

Damnit.)

Sabo may try to hold him back, but Ace knows that men three times their height don’t just trip on nothing.

Luffy is smiling in the end though. That means it’s all alright.

(He doesn’t think about how Luffy gets protective of Ace and Sabo in the woods sometimes, when the trees begin to tower and the monsters begin to prowl with venomous fangs and glowing eyes. Luffy gets big, fur-not-fur puffing up and mouth widening, and suddenly, it isn’t their little brother standing between them, but something hungry.

But- maybe that hunger is still Luffy, after all.

Maybe.)

“Hey, Lu,” Sabo asks one day, after a hundred rounds of sparring and a bath in the cleanest, least- bloody spring Goa’s mountains had. “Why do you like that hat so much?”

Luffy looks up from where he watching two beetles tear each other apart on the ground. “Oh! Hat! Shanks gave it to me! I have to return it when I’m a great pirate one day!” His grin is blinding. Ace is sure he has only seen Luffy smile this much when they became brothers and when Ace agreed to let Luffy hang out with him and Sabo that first time.

“Shanks?” Ace questions. He’s never heard the name.

Luffy grows sheepish, and if possible, his smile grows even more. “Mmh! He visited Fuusha for a year. He’s really cool! He’s a pirate and he has sailed all over the Grand Line! Even to the second half! And..” Luffy pulls down on the ends of his hat, so his eyes are covered and his horns peak out of the twin holes in the hat. “He saved my life when a bandit kidnapped me and dropped me in the sea. The Lord of the Coast was gonna get me and…”

Luffy grows quiet.

Ace has never seen Luffy grow quiet. He’s always loud, unapologetic, brazen and brash and bold. He isn’t quiet.

But he is now.

“And?” Sabo prompts, voice normal, casual, to drag Luffy back into their easy conversation.

“And he lost his arm for me.”

The words make the clearing go silent.

“I would be dead if it wasn’t for him.”

Ace’s heart stops.

Luffy? Dead?

Ace had thought about it before – he had to, when he was trying to kill Luffy for two months straight. (He was getting a bit guilty about that now…) But Luffy hadn’t died then, and hadn’t died to Porchemy’s spiked gloves or the treatment of the animals and Garp.

Ace had kind of been under the impression that Luffy was unkillable.

(The forest seemed to almost think so.)

Apparently not.

“So you wouldn’t be here if not for him?” Ace moves the conversation on, mind whirling.

“Yeah! Shanks is the best!” There is nothing but adoration in Luffy’s eyes. Ace thinks that maybe he should be jealous but…

He’s just thankful instead.

“Guess that means I have to thank him someday,” Ace muses, staring up at the trees that blot out the sky. Wind brushes his nose and flecks of soot go flying over the clearing.

It’s a good day.

Sabo gives him an incredulous look. “Do you even know how to thank people?”

Ace sits up. “YEAH! Of course I do! Who doesn’t!”

Sabo raises an eyebrow. Luffy just laughs, the traitor. “Show us then.”

Well, Ace said his dream was to never run from a fight, wasn’t it? He stands up, brushing sparks and embers off his clothes, and shaking soot from his hair, bows only a little. “Hey! Bastard! You saved my brother! Thanks!”

Sabo stares at him.

Luffy stares at him.

They burst into laughter, holding their stomachs and rolling on the floor. “Bwahahaha!” cries Sabo, tears in his eyes from his laughter, “That’s not how you thank people!”

“Yeah?” Ace challenges, because he can’t back down from anything. “You do it!”

Sabo stands up with a smirk, bows at the waist and says, “Mister Bastard, thank you for not being stupid and killing my brother!”

Ace stares at him.

Luffy stares at him

They burst into laughter this time, holding their stomachs and rolling on the floor. “Ha! You can’t thank people either! And you got trained for it!”

“Shishishi!”

“Well it’s better than whatever the fuck you did!” Sabo retorts, and Ace doesn’t get a chance to snipe back because Luffy is calling from beside both of them.

“Guys!” he shouts, and oh, nothing good can come from Luffy saying something like that. “This is how you thank people!”

Ace and Sabo turn to look at him, and promptly get two gum gum pistols to the face.

It’s the first time he’s ever managed to hit something with a gum gum attack in the first try. Too bad his celebration will be spent in yet another brawl with his brothers.

Dust rises in the clearing, boys swiping at boys with claws and fangs and burning hands, and slowly, the crocodile that had been edging its way up, with three heads and five mouths, edges back down in to the water.

It’s too late.

Luffy has already noticed, and with his cry of meat! Ace and Sabo have too.

Lunch time!

Goa’s beasts are the most dangerous ones in the East. Ace feels like he has forgotten this lately, with how bright his brothers make everything.

This is a good reminder.

Before him lays a slaughter. Trees are crashed to the ground, bones lie half decomposed rotting on the bloody jungle floor, the ground is torn from gouges and teeth marks with bodies rotting at the bottom of gashes and the stench of corpses in the air.

It’s a dying place. A dead place.

A place Ace doesn’t want to get any closer too.

“The Lords…” He mumbles, his brothers standing in shock beside him “They did this.”

The Lords… giant beasts that roamed the forest with frothing mouths and souls too big for their bodies, so bones cracked and deformed and slerched to form grotesque monsters. Demons that could tower above any man, with limbs to long and eyes to wide.

The Lord of the Coast is one. The Tiger Lord and Bear Lord and the Crocodile Lord. The beast in Grey Terminal probably used to be one too.

When they fight… nothing survives.

(Goa’s heartbeat had jumped last night, something unnatural and violent occurring in the air and the very ground itself. Dadan had placed a couple extra spells around the hut that night, shushing Ace when he tried to get up.

He supposes this was what she didn’t want him to see.)

“C’mon,” he says, edging away. “Let’s-“ He doesn’t get to finish his plea for them to leave because his eyes catch on something gleaming white and terrifying.

Across the battlefield torn apart before them stands the deer of bone, silent and staring directly at Ace.

It’s like being in the line of sight of a predator who has gone to long without a meal.

(It’s not like. It is.)

Its bones are glistening, its eyes dark voids and its canines growing sharper, sharper, sharper as it steps towards Ace, one raised hoof at a time. Clink, goes its bones, rubbing against each other like a broken marinnente, clink. It’s horns sway with its head, blotting out the stars as faint mist erupts from it’s face like a masquerade of breath. Thump, goes its hooves as they settle against the grow.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Faster, and faster, and faster.

“Run.” Ace can barely choke out, as the deer of bone charges after them, clinking over bones on the ground and blood in the mud, swerving and not swerving, loud and terrifying, his ears now full of static and screaming and oh god – they can’t out run the deer.

Fuck.

(His heart has never hammered so fast, his pulse never been so high, his skin never cracking like it is now, with every pounding step on the ground shuddering up his spine. Ash sprays off of him, light erupting from his fingers, and hell hell hell – it’s his fault.

Yet – still, still he cannot manage to make himself regret this decision to anger the deer.

He didn’t want this promise. The deer forced it on him.

He’s not going to kill his little brother. Ever.)

He’s going to die, before more than the people of Dawnn knows his name.

His brothers are going to die, and it’s all his fault.

Well, he vowed to never run, didn’t he? And maybe, if he doesn’t run, his brothers will live.

(And really – secretly, truly, he could die happy if that’s all he can achieve.)

Ace digs his heels in, turning, ready to fling himself at certain doom and terror if only so his brothers have a for more moments of life when –

Luffy leaps and the shadows at his feet explode into a thousand parts of him, teeth and whirling power, his eyes blazing. His hands – his claws are outstretched and far more jagged than Ace has ever seen, his presence larger, the shifting of his body more unnatural. He’s crystal clear and he’s a blur, the Veil closing in like a trap, running itself over Ace’s eyes and shielding him from his brother. His little brother who isn’t quite like the rest of them and he’s charging like Ace should be charging like -

Sabo tugs on his shirt, refusing to turn around (Don’t look back) and refusing to let Ace stop his running. Sabo is fluttering every half step, wings batting against the fog and oppressing air, leaping, running, dragging Ace along with him and all Ace can think is Luffy – Luffy is facing off against the deer. He turns at Sabo’s frantic urging, but -

There’s a puff of hot air at Ace’s back as he turns away, and he’s too afraid to look to see if it is Luffy or the bone of deer.

(Both?)

Ace keeps running.

(His dream-)

Running, and running, and running. Sabo next to him all the way, a burning oath in the forest behind him. There’s something beside him, something following him, and he’s broken the rules of the forest before but he can’t this time, he can’t, he can’t look back –

And then he’s breaking out into the light, by the cliffside, by freedom, and it isn’t the deer of bone beside him but Luffy.

His brother is safe. Sabo tugs on his hand. His brothers are safe. They’re all safe and alive.

Thank fuck, Ace thinks before falling to the ground in an exhausted heap. Thank fuck.

(He doesn’t sleep well that night, or the night after. It seems only Luffy does, Sabo and Ace trading glances above his snoring head in the dark but – he clings to their shirts in his sleep.

He faced off against the deer alone.

He’s not okay either.)

There’s a woman drifting up the mountain. She’s beautiful, and soft, and the forest seems to part before her.

Not in the way it does for Luffy, in a way born of fear and hate, but rather, it seems as if it is parting out of reverence and respect.

Ace has never seen the forest respect anyone.

But this woman… she’s different. Her hair, gentle and green, floats around her face and Into the air, scales cascading over her cheeks and down her arms like a loving touch, and a smile, sharp and deadly, so kind when she looks to the world. Her limbs don’t quite connect right, out of place with the rest of her body, and her soft hands are sharped tip as her tufted tail swishes behind her, but Ace can’t help but get quiet at the sight of her.

She’s ….

She’s…

(Guardian, the words that Ace doesn’t know want to whisper, Sentinel, Protector, Island Spirit, Island Heart, go to her, all you who need comfort-)

“Makino,” Dadan says, opening the door. There’s a deference in her nod, and a smile twitching her lip like she’s seeing an old friend again, which, weird.

Ace would remember seeing this woman before.

But maybe she is, even with how Makino looks no older than her twenties. Time is weird at the dawn of the world, odd in a way that Ace will never fully understand.

Makino smiles, big and bright as she looks at Dadan. “Witch!”

“I’M NOT A WITCH!” Dadan rages, but it’s a resigned, happy, used to this whole mess tone that Ace never heard before even in his decade of life.

“Sesesese!” Makino laughs like the lights in the woods, all welcoming and inviting and cheery.

This time, however, Ace can’t help but trust it – can’t help but it’s not a trap.

He peeks out from Dadan’s side, staring up and up at the mysterious lady, but she barely has the time to notice him before Luffy is shoving at Ace’s side and launching himself at her.

“Mamakino!” He calls happily, wrapping himself around her with rubber limbs as she crouches down to meet him. “You’re here!”

“Sesese! Oh, Luffy, yes I’m here, I’m, here.” Her voice gets even softer as she falls into a clearly familiar pattern, hugging Luffy with all she is worth, unafraid of the teeth that get far to close to her neck and the way Luffy’s edges get blurry.

(But – her arms seem to settle in all the right places along Luffy’s, all the right spots, never blurring, and perhaps the Veil isn’t a problem to someone like Makino.)

“Oh, Luffy, I missed you! Have you been having fun in the jungle?”

Not Luffy, how have you stayed alive? Not Luffy, are you okay? Just… have you been having fun?

What does she know?

Luffy doesn’t seem to find it surprising. “Shishishi! Yeah! Makino! Mamakino! Guess what! Guess what!”

She laughs again, holding him at arm’s length as he jumps up and down excitedly. “What? What?”

“I have brothers now! They’re the best! Shishishi!” And the grin on his face is blinding and bright and shines more than the lava underneath Ace’s skin or the glowing spots over Sabo’s body. Ace can’t help but step out from behind Dadan then, Sabo in tow, ablush on both of their faces, just to put a face to that proud praise. He’s Luffy’s brother, isn’t he? He should act like it.

Makino looks up, and her eyes go kind and loving and warm. “Oh? And what are your names?” She asks, smiling as Luffy still vibrates beside her excitedly.

“Sabo,” Sabo says first when it’s obvious Ace is too tongue tied to speak. “Uh, ma’am.”

“Sesese! No need for formalities – just call me Makino, alright?”

Sabo blushes even more. “Okay, Miss Makino.”

“Sesese!” She laughs again, and it’s a beautiful sort of laugh. A kind sort of laugh. “And what’s your name?” She prompts, turning to Ace and inviting him to speak.

“Portgas D. Ace,” Ace mumbles, shyly, words just pressing past the charcoal in his mouth.

She doesn’t laugh then, only smiles, and it is a second before Ace realizes he has been drawn into a hug by this stranger-not-a-stranger woman.

His face is pressed to her shoulder, and he could be burning her, with how often his cheeks crack away to reveal scattering freckles, but the soot just seems to merge into her skin. She’s… soft, and her embrace is strong, and sturdy, her scales cool and comforting, and Ace has never felt safer than he has in this moment.

It’s like being cradled by the island itself. Big and secure and warm, like you have a place there and you don’t have to leave if you never want to. Like finding a harbor in a storm, and feeling the relief as a lighthouse guides you to the safest place you could possibly be. It’s – it’s like home.

Beside him, Sabo seems to fall limp into Makino’s embrace, enjoying it just as much and shoving his face into her shoulder. And Ace –

Ace reaches around Makino and holds on tight, never wanting to let go and let this wondrous feeling of belonging disappear. His fingers leave soot marks but no burns, and he wants to crack apart right here and now.

“Oh, boys,” She says, like says Oh, Luffy, and just holds on tighter. “I love you.”

I love you.

It should sound weird, coming from this stranger-not-a-stranger woman, but Ace has felt that he should have known this woman all his life, so all he does is bite back his tears and bury himself deeper into her embrace.

(I love you.)

(It’s not the first time someone has ever told him that. But oh. This time is the first time he feels like he deserves it.)

It’s over too fast, but Ace knows nothing good can say so he only marginally tightens his hold on Makino before letting go.

She’s still smiling.

Ace attempts to school his face into something more stern before Luffy can see the way he’s not crying, but…

By the way he laughs and bumps into his side, it’s a futile affair but he tried at least.

“Now, what brings you up here, Spirit?” Dadan puts some emphasis on the name, as if an attempt to get her back for calling Dadan what everyone knows Dadan is anyway. “I’m usually the one to go down to you.”

“Sesese! To see Luffy of course - And Ace and Sabo now! The Mayor came up too – he fell behind though, but I’m sure he’ll be fine. And oh! I brought presents!” She presents the baskets hidden behind her with a flourish, her face content and tail waving in the air. “Things that Garp may have forgotten, hmm?” She hums.

It’s a mischievous expression that adorns her face as she pulls out a bottle of the nicest sake Dadan has – the same brand Ace and his brothers used to make their bonds – and hands it to Dadan, who no longer looks grumpy but incredibly pleased.

“Alright!” She turns to her bandit familiars with a grin, drink held in hand. “Start the party!” The bandits respond with cheers, and soon, the sounds of celebration echo all throughout the hut, shaking away the darkness like an animal shakes off water.

Makino just laughs again, just like Luffy is always laughing cheerily, and takes another thing out of the box.

A shirt.

“I don’t think you boys get many options up here in the woods, huh?”

No one has ever brought clothes for Ace before. He’s always found them himself or Dadan chucked things at him when he was a little kid. Never new clothes, fitted just for him, ready to withstand burns and sharp edges, and the way a monster’s limbs bend at all the wrong angles.

He’s about to agree, when an old, craggy voice calls from up the path.

“Damn you bandits! I wasn’t meant to leave my village!” It’s an old man, with striped pants and hands like gnarled oak, eyes like knots in a tree and bristly hairs that seem to burn into smoky whiskers around his face. He looks old. He looks ancient. He looks like every step is uprooting him further and further away. “How dare you steal that brat!”

“Mayor!” Makino chides, as Luffy jumps beside her.

“Woopslap!”

And, well, as the old man starts lambasting Luffy up and down for being taken away by his grandfather to bandits, and still being a pirate, Ace finds himself feeling like there’s something steadying him.

Just a bit, as Makino holds up clothes to his chest the way a mother might, calls him handsome, and strong like any doting old lady, compliments him and Sabo as good big brothers, just like Luffy.

Ace feels like a kid again. Not a devil child, running recklessly through the woods, but a kid. Someone who is protected and cared for and doted on. It’s strange but - he likes it, he thinks.

By night fall, that night where almost all the moons are full and the night fills with light and stars rather than darkness, the bandits build a raging bonfire. At its center is bone and wood and ash, things that have eyes still glowing and things that Ace and Sabo and Luffy tossed in, just to see if it would burn or come to life. A few frogs did, now hopping around with embers for eyes, but the rest burned into ash, souls joining the smoke.

Its shaped in that of a rectangle, a square of seats wrapping around it, the bandits careful to interrupt any kind of reverie before a faerie circle can form. Drink and juice flow freely, and Makino and the mayor are still there, still watching.

“Don’t you have to go back before it gets dark?” Ace had asked Makino, earlier as the sun began to set, only to be met with a laugh.

“Sesese! The Dark won’t get me Ace. Don’t worry about it!”

(He hadn’t mentioned the Dark.)

So he didn’t worry, and now Makino was here, firelight reflecting gently on her face and scales as she listened to the stories Woopslap was telling by the fire.

(The woods seemed brighter, the shadows clearer, and Ace felt at ease, here by the bonfire of bandits.)

“You see,” Woopslap says, tone dropping as roots seem to appear by the ground by his feet. “Oak always knows tales. Oak stays – even when the body is gone.”

“Like ghosts!?” Luffy cries curiously as he tumbles over to them.

Woopslap shakes his head. “Not quite… just… spirits. Your grandfather knows a few. Demons don’t die right, child. They tend to stick around.”

Ace snorts, though Woopslap doesn’t seem to notice by how he’s too engrossed in a story about how trees remember all, even the ocean’s sands that give away into the void. Ace doesn’t believe it but –

Spirits? Ha.

Gol D. Roger would have stayed a spirit if he could, just to annoy Ace, he bets. The thought itself sends shuddering sparks through his veins.

“Oak even knows the secrets of the Pirate King –“ Woopslap continues, and speak of the devil – if Ace doesn’t leave he’ll become the bonfire.

He gets up, quietly, like he’s hunting a Tiger Lord, and goes to sit behind the shack for a bit. It’s just for a brief reprieve and not because the anger in his chest scares him sometimes.

Behind him is the very wall he used to walk the first time, tiny handprints burned into the wall, eye level when Ace is sitting down. Simpler times, back when Ace was Ace and not the son of the devil, not the devil child running rampant, just –

“Ace,” A voice says to his left, just barely louder than the crack of a bonfire, and oh, its Makino. She’s crouching beside him, hand on the wall, staring at him with absurdly gentle eyes. Her hands are larger than the imprints left behind, cool where they are warm, and they don’t leave any matching marks.

Ace doesn’t respond, only scooches to the right to give Makino room to sit down next to him and rest her back against the wall.

(Little pieces of grass scorch and burn in his wake, little bits of him flaking off into the world, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It’s always been like that. Even in the presence of Makino, which is holding him together better than even his own skin can. )

Her hand starts to move, tracing the spots that he left behind as a child. Clawed tips resting in the tiny fingerprints of a child just learning to see the world, a hand that’s old as the island itself following the paths of a child’s history. They’re still so much larger than his so long ago – he doesn’t allow himself to wonder if she would have held his hands then, in the ways the bandits didn’t.

Her eyes seem sad.

Ace finds that he never wants her to feel sad. Never.

“I missed it.” Makino says, breaking the silence.

“What?” Ace questions, quietly and promptly at this confession that seems to break Makino.

“When Garp brought you here… I missed it.” Her hands find another burn, her eyes avoiding Ace’s as she looks at the scorched wood. “I shouldn’t have.”

“It’s-”

“Do you know who I am, Ace?” She asks him, interrupting, her green eyes finally meeting his.

They’re wet with tears.

“No,” he says, quietly. He can’t speak louder than a whisper.

“I am the Guardian of Dawn, it’s sentinel, it’s protector. It is my duty to welcome strangers to my shores and accept them or reject them but Ace – Ace I didn’t know you were alive. I couldn’t wrap you in my arms and welcome you home, I couldn’t protect you from the way the jungle creeps, the monsters of the Dark, anything – I failed you, Ace, because I wasn’t there.”

She’s crying, for a reason Ace doesn’t quite understand.

“I won’t again. You are mine, Ace, claimed by the people of Dawn, claimed by me, and even though this island is not your birthright it can be your temporary home, if you wish it, because Ace – Ace I love you.” Makino finally says, words like a promise, like a vow, and she’s not hugging him this time but he still feels just as safe as he did before, wrapped in her embrace.

She loves him. She’ll protect him, for however long he stays. No one has ever done this before.

“Okay,” He says, softly agreeing. “Okay.”

She smiles and its bright and good. Her hand leaves that wall covered in a child’s burning chance at freedom, and leans forward to cup his face in her soft hands. Her hair floats around her like a halo, like the angel that Garp isn’t, and Ace doesn’t want to let go of this sight and the warmth on his cheeks from where she cradles them.

“You have your mother’s freckles, you know,” She tells him.

He –

“She would always use to say she felt they were like stars.”

She –

“On you, they truly are, aren’t they Ace?” Makino smiles, tracing her thumbs over holes, the freckles in his skin that shine like miniature suns by the burning fire underneath.

“You knew my mother?” He questions, dumbly, at long last staring in shock at the woman who just turned his entire world upside down.

His freckles are like his mother’s.

He’s never seen his mother before.

“Sesese! Of course! Portgas D. Rouge was the Seashaker, Ace. Every island knew her.”

Seashaker.

His mother sounds amazing.

(Sounded. But he won’t think of that now.”

“Can… can you tell me more?” He asks, tentatively, as Makino’s hands leave his face and wrap around his shoulders.

Makino grins. “Of course! Rouge the Seashaker… Rouge the Seashaker was human, but she was not quite mortal. Not like you or anything other person on this planet. The sea bowed before her, wherever she went, and her touch was like a crown…”

Besides the wall, while the rest of the people are learning about Gold Roger, Ace sits and learns about the woman who could tame the East. The woman who loved him.

The woman whose name he is going to shout across the world.

Portgas D. Rouge, Seashaker, Tamer, Beloved, Void.

The voice of the eastern ocean’s depths.

(Ace loves her.)

Makino leaves in the middle of the night, walking down the mountain like a drifting spirit, tail swishing behind her as Woopslap follows carefully in her not-quite footsteps.

Ace, with his brothers leaning asleep on either side of him, cannot help but wave after her, tales of his mother ringing in his mind.

And with the force of her will, Rouge calmed the raging sea and sank a living island to its knees.

She smiled, and she was only human, but the king bowed to her anyway because there is nothing more powerful in a world of illusions than human truth.

Only the East knows her name – the rest of the world trembles before it. Names have power, Ace, your mother’s most of all. Its why you have her name, and not your fathers – she was far more terrifying, sesesese!

Portgas D. Rouge challenged dragons, challenged devils, challenged the sea and sky – and won.

Ace wants to be like his mother.

Portgas D. Rouge, the one who held the dark in her hands.

He has never been prouder to carry her name next to his, the D. resting between names like a warning, the Portgas like a prayer, and the Ace like a declaration.

Portgas D. Ace is going to become a pirate.

And the world will never forget his name

(The most important thing, however, that Makino leaves him is a secret held close to his chest like a treasure.

(His name is his treasure.)

Rouge loves you, Ace.

If Makino says it, he can’t help but believe it.)

“Hey,” Sabo says, in the middle of the day by the cliffside. “We should build a hideout.”

“What?” Ace looks at him curiously. Luffy cocks his head beside him, his own face stuffed full with meat just a bit too red, and attempts to repeat what Ace said.

Sabo shakes his head. “Swallow your food, idiot.” Luffy does, blood spilling out of his lips quickly licked up. “Anyway, a hideout! So if Dadan gets pissed we can run away there, and we can have a place to put all our stuff!”

“Yeah but – there’s a reason we stay at Dadan’s.” Ace tells him, obviously.

Sabo stares blankly at him.

“Y’know. The monsters in the woods? And the years of protective spells around the bandit hut that keep out those monsters?”

Really.

It’s not that hard.

If Ace though he could do it he would have moved out months ago, but the Dark is a real, horrible, horrible thing. He’s never taking chances again.

Sabo stares at him again, but this time it’s in the tone of you’re an idiot, rather than confusion. “We have Luffy.” He says, as if Ace cannot possible comprehend that their brother is seven and not a good defense for living alone in the demon woods in the heart of the east without any spell circle.

But Sabo’s not finished.

“Luffy, who the Lord’s run from?” He points, and Luffy just smiles, confusedly, and focuses back on his meal.

Huh.

Sabo’s right.

Most of the time, when they hunt, a Lord is a hard opponent but if you throw Luffy at it, and tell him to go wild, and let Luffy crack apart at the seams then –

Sometimes (almost all of the time), the Lord turns tail when faced with the fangs of a seven-year-old.

With Luffy, they could be safe from almost everything in the forest.

(Almost.

But if even the deer of bone was terrified of him, if even the deer of bone ran from him, and asked Ace to do what it couldn’t -)

“Maybe,” Ace says, lighting up, “Maybe… We could get a circle from Dadan…”

“And if we made it in the trees –“

“Then half the creatures wouldn’t be able to get us!”

“Shishishi! We could make it taller than the trees! So we could see the ocean like its our very own pirate ship!”

A pirate ship, sailing above waves of green so they could always watch that horizon even in the depths of the woods.

“Let’s do it,” Ace decides, all worry gone in the face of the childish delight of building a tree-house pirate ship – how cool is that?

Grey Terminal residents start getting their sleep disturbed at night by little boys hauling scraps of iron 9with wood and nails and the fabric of a black sail and other such necessary pirate things piled high above it) up the mountain. They’re loud about it, not giving a damn if the screechy residents come out of their hiding holes or yell at them for it. Most of them are too scared too at any rate – they’re the devil children. The brats who sneak into the city without offerings, who grin with bloody teeth and strike harder than even the monsters of the East can.

Who’s going to stop them?

They go at night so they can spend the playing and gathering only the best materials for their pirate-ship-tree house. Luffy’s there to ward off the Lords, so it doesn’t particularly matter how the shadows grow and the path curves away.

It doesn’t matter, until they pass the deer of bone, lying in the ground. It’s limbs are curved under it’s gouged, reddish rib cage, a nest of rot circling around it, and it’s eyes – like before – are voids, blotting out everything dear.

They didn’t mean to pass it.

(The last time was too fresh in their mind for that.)

But all it does is bow, to them, to Luffy, and it doesn’t move outside of that.

They start making sure their bringing all their stuff up during the day after that, no matter how fierce Luffy is.

Just in case.

Today, Ace and his brothers caught a five headed and snake tailed boar on the edges of the forest, taking a break from gathering materials for once.

Tonight, they feast in the warmth of Dadan’s hut, acting out their hunt in front of amused bandits and stuffing their faces with delicious and spiced meat for once, a gift from a visiting Makino.

It’s delicious. Even better than the food they have stolen from High Town.

Of course, as all parties turn to when you have three children that want to sail the seas, they start talking about their future pirate crew.

“Mmh!” Sabo groans as he tears a piece of meat off a no longer venomous fang. “When I’m a pirate, all my meals are going to be this good! I’ll get the best chef on the seas!”

Ace can’t resist a challenge, snatching a bit from the ribs on Sabo’s plate. “Yeah? Well I’m gonna become a pirate first, and get the best chef way before you!”

A tiny fist hits the side of his head, deceiving strength packed into the tiny blow. “Well I’m going to become King of the Pirates! So my chef will be better than all your chefs and I’ll have meat every day!” Luffy declares.

“You can’t have meat every day! Cooks won’t do that!”

“Says who!”

“Says me!”

“We’ll when I’m Pirate King, my chef will be awesome, and they’ll give me yummy meat all day!!”

Dadan spits out her beer all over Dogra, who doesn’t even notice as he joins Dadan in staring at Luffy and Ace with wide, open eyes.

Luffy and Ace stare back, Sabo looking between them.

What?

“A-hem.”

Fuck.

If Ace’s face was made of flesh instead of the crust of a volcano, the color would have drained from it. As it is, his fire dims and flickers in fright.

Beside him, Luffy does pale, the little flesh he has turning white as his eyes go wider than Dadan’s thanks to his rubber powers.

They know that grunt. That sound of disapproval. That warning sign.

“YOU BOYS STILL WANT TO BE PIRATES?!”

That’s the Shitty Old Man.

Ace turns, and comes face to face with Garp, all ten, heavenly, celestial, burning, thousand eyed and sharp tipped winged, feet of him. The fire that surrounds his head is blazing as he looks down at him, and oh, fuck is this what happens when not-quite-angels smite people? Is that a thing? Ace isn’t sure, but oh hell he talked about pirate shit in front of Gramps-

He doesn’t have more time to think about it than that because Garp is shouting Fist of Love! and all Ace knows is pain.

Fuck, his head hurts. How the fuck does Garp always manage to hit him so hard but never manages to crack his skull? How the fuck?

Oh hell it hurts, ow, his head, fuck.

Beside him, Luffy is on the floor holding his head as well which is even more of a shock because Garp managed to make a kid made out of rubber hurt?

(A kid like Luffy, who isn’t a demon quite like the rest of them. Who the Lords fear and the deer of bone trembles before. A kid like Luffy, who is not quite right.)

Only things with sharp claws and the darkness of the deep have managed to do that so far.

(Garp is never sharp with Ace. He’s not dark, though he could be. He’s light, bursting at the seams in fire and death, but he’s never been like the Dark.

Never.

Even if he is batshit insane.)

“You are going to be marines, you brats!”

Around him, he can hear Garp hitting Dadan, and Dadan smashing a bottle over his head and immediately apologizing, and Makino saying something to Sabo but he’s really just focused on the pain when –

“And You! Other Brat! I heard you talking about sailing as well!”

He tunes right back in then, at Garp’s words, looking up just slightly to sea Sabo’s terrified face. Right, he’s only heard stories, and his first interaction is Garp hurting Luffy but -

It’s fine.

If Sabo lies its-

“Hey!”

Damnit Luffy.

“He’s not a brat! He’s Sabo! We exchanged cups of sake to become brothers! We’re going be pirates together!”

Luffy and his goddamned toothy mouth.

“Ha!” Garp snarls, and maybe, if Ace had looked up, he would have seen a glimmer of relief in Garp’s eye, a glimmer of happiness, that Ace and Luffy were brothers, with another to their ranks, and they weren’t alone, no matter what.

But Ace doesn’t look up, still holding on to his head in pain, eyeing Sabo in the corner of his visions.

(He knows it anyway. Garp is readable, typical like that.)

“So the number of idiots that I need to make into outstanding marines is three, aye?”

Garp cracks his knuckles.

That has Ace looking up in fear.

Oh fuck. He recognizes that look.

That’s the training look. That’s the look that gets Ace thrown into ravines and down cliffs and into the mouths of hungry beasts.

Ace forgets about the pain in his head and starts running.

Luffy is just as fast, slinking into that odd state where even the Veil can’t cover all of him, and he gets faster than Garp’s hands, shooting out to catch him. The distraction gives Ace just enough time to get out the door, and Sabo enough time to get the idea that he has to fucking run, and jump out the window, already breaking into flight to follow after Ace and Luffy.

“YOU CAN’T RUN FROM ME!” Garp bellows behind them like a raging beast and oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, Ace is going to die –

Garp’s fist catches him right in the side, and Ace goes flying into a tree with eyes looking down from the tops, and knocks it over.

The eyes close.

So do Ace’s.

Ow, Pain, holy shit –

There are more sounds of crashing trees and smashing boulders as Garp has less luck grabbing for the monstrously fast Luffy and Sabo in flight, but eventually, Sabo is crying out Fucking monster! And Luffy is there groaning next to Ace, even in his rubber state.

Monkey D. Garp laughs at them, under the light of the holes his chase made in the murky sky with his felled trees, and says, “Ha! You boys better toughen up! You can’t expect such mercy from your enemies!”

Mercy?

This was mercy?

Ace can’t believe it, especially as Garp picks him up by the scruff of his t-shirt, and tosses him into the air for round two.

God-fucking-damnit.

There’s a new path to Foosha by the time Garp is finished with them. It’s been razed to the ground by Garp’s fists and beating wings, the trees they had uprooted to throw at the old man and the trees that had uprooted themselves to get out of the way. Ace and his brothers had passed Makino and the mayor along the way, the trees parting easily for Makino who only waved as they went by, the traitor.

(He still loves her.

It’s Gramps.

No one can stop Gramps.)

It’s still night however, a lucky day. Night. Whatever. Usually training lasts from dusk till dawn when Ace mentions pirates.

Guess with three kids, Garp was taking it easy?

Nah.

Garp never took it easy – not with training.

(Right?)

They find themselves on the cliffside, Ace’s cliffside, the cliffside that faces the rising sun and is so secluded from the rest of the woods, with protective hibiscuses dotting the area. He’s exhausted, bruised, and in pain but he’s alive.

And so, so, so sleepy. His eyes are drooping and he can barely prop himself up. His fire feels fafded and like the embers left over from a fire, and he wants to fall down and never wake up again.

His brothers, next to him, are in the same boat. Sabo’s wings are half collapsed behind him and his glimmering spots are dim with exhaustion. Luffy is leaning on Sabo’s shoulder, his hand wrapped around Ace’s wrist, and if not for the way he faintly tracked the waves crashing before them, Ace would think Luffy was asleep.

Ace wants to sleep but –

That’s a bad idea out in the woods of Goa at night.

Then, there’s a settling behind him. Someone heaving, sitting down in the grass and the rustle of flaming, eyed wings catching over tall stalks.

“C’mere, brats,” Gramps says, and pulls all three of them under his arms. “Sleep. You’ve earned it.” Ace’s head is pillowed on his grandfather’s side, and any other time he would protest but…

Gramps’ wings settles over him, soft and secure, like the warmest, safest blanket Ace has ever known. With Sabo resting at his back, and Luffy next to him, curled into his side and holding on to Gramps’ arms, that warm, feathery blanket laid over them all –

Ace falls fast asleep into oblivion, a smile on his face.

(A hand cards through his hair, picking out tangles, and a voice, soft and roughened by age, whispers Goodnight, brats.

It’s the nicest sleep he’s had in a long, long while.)

Ace wakes to a hand in his hair again, a heavy weight as his brothers resting against him. Luffy is curled so that his head is both resting next to Ace’s heart and lying on Garp’s thigh, and Sabo has shifted so that he’s curled on the other side of Garp, hand holding Luffy’s stretchy one.

When Ace looks out, its dawn, the sun just barely glimmering over the horizon but the sky beginning to blossom in hues of pink and gold.

He’s struck by the thought of the last time he was on this cliff with Garp.

He had asked Garp if it was good that he had been born. If it was good that he, the devil child, had been born. Garp hadn’t had an answer for him.

(He still doesn’t.)

Now, it is Garp who speaks first.

“Brat,” the man chides softly, voice tired but seemingly proud. Ace looks up at him from his position on Garp’s knee, eyes wide and curious.

“Old man,” he answers, and relaxes deeper into his Grandfather’s hold.

“You don’t crack apart as much as you used to,” Garp comments. “It’s good. I’m glad… I’m glad you have Luffy, now. And Sabo.” There’s something choking in his voice, something fragile in the light of the breaking dawn. “I’m so glad you’ll be here just a little longer.”

Ace has been cracking apart since birth. Garp won’t tell him why, but Ace knows Roger’s legacy, and his hellfire, and he knows he wasn’t meant to hold part of the soul of a man that great.

“Tch. They’re my brothers, Gramps. ‘Course I’m gonna stay… for them… I’m pr’mised…” Ace’s words are slurring as he falls back to sleep, realizing that Garp is just stating the obvious.

(Ace hadn’t noticed that he was cracking less than usual. That he wasn’t shattering apart, soot and embers falling off him at every turn, that his chest hasn’t been feeling like he is going to break a part as of late but…

It’s true.

With his brothers, Ace feels like he can breathe again.)

“Heh. Brat.” Garp says, again, and he must be in a really good mood because he doesn’t even hit Ace for implying that he’s stupid.

Instead, the hand on Ace’s head just brushes a bit of soot off, gentle and loving, and stills as the sun rises farther and farther above the horizon.

As the sky is bathed in pink and orange and the beginnings of a blue, crystal day, the ocean matching it’s hues despite its dark waters, grandfather and grandson watch the world drift by, as wind whispers freedom on their cheeks.

Family…

Ace has a family.

Garp leaves that day, hand waving over his shoulder, smile on his face as three bandaged boys sit and stare at the devastation he has left behind.

If Ace were not a part of that devastation, he might have called it incredible that one shitty old man could do so much.

Well.

It was Gramps.

Garp had always tended to go overboard on everything he did.

And as much as Ace enjoyed the quiet moments spent with Garp, when he acted more like a regular grandfather than a marine commander, he does not want to go through that horrible, horrible training again.

“Guys,” He groans, picking at his bandages that are covering the shallow cuts in what counts as his skin. “We need to move out. Faster.”

Sabo shudders next to him as he helps Luffy readjust the bandages around his waist. “Yeah… I.. don’t think I can survive another training session with that bastard.”

“Grey Terminal?” Ace suggests, but Luffy groans, loud and pained.

“I don’t wanna moooooveeeeeeee,” He moans out, flopping limp as Sabo squawks at him to get up so he can finish his job. “Can’t we go tomorrow?”

Ace…

Ace doesn’t want to move either.

Everything hurts.

And the trek down to Grey Terminal is a long one, one that takes them by places they may have to fight.

“Fine.” He says, and flops back down in the clearing at Dadan’s house. “Tomorrow. We gotta snatch food from Dadan’s stash though. I don’t feel like hunting either.”

“Fine by me,” Sabo agrees, finishing the bandages on Luffy’s side before flopping down next to Ace. “I just… wanna sleep…”

He doesn’t get the chance to, no matter how his eyes droop, because Luffy takes the opportunity to flop right over Sabo instead of the perfectly good ground next to him.

“Bastard!” Sabo cries after the sharp stab of pain that clearly happens after Luffy digs his edged elbow into the giant bruise in Sabo’s side. “Get off!” He shoves Luffy to the ground, then tackles him into a flurry of dust and flying limbs.

Ace smiles, finds he’s not too weary for a fight, and joins in on the brawl.

He’s never too tired for sparring.

(Even if sparring in this case is just tired cheek slapping, bandaging pulling and arm pinching. It’s deadly enough, when they have claws on their hands and his skin can burn.)

The tree house gets built, slowly, but surely.

Piece by piece.

Plank by plank.

Nail by nail, and large fang substituted for nail, by large fang.

They build the treehouse just off the beaten path, where no one but three devil children (and perhaps a mountain bandit and her familiars) dare tread, in a tree that’s as wide as a house and taller than any other tree they can find. Its stable, sturdy, and with thick branches with little eyes for easy gripping. Eyes do not glimmer from its branches, and it seems safe and adventurous in the way other trees do not.

It’s the type of tree any child dreams of climbing.

And Ace and his brothers are going to build a treehouse in it!

He’s never been so excited to work.

(Around the treehouse he and Sabo carves circles into the ground, deep, deep, deep and protective. The tree is far from the deer of bone, but never far enough, not in the forest of Goa, where time slips through fingers like sand and distance is rather a question than a fact.

This will be the first place he lives far outside of Dadan’s protection. He won’t let it backfire.)

The treehouse is in the topmost branches, still sturdy and steady, where Ace can see the ocean from the windows they have made along the side. Torches for hellfire lights stand by the windows, warding off the unsightly beasts of the night, and traps are placed every edge of the way down, just in case something gets by the protective circle laid out in the ground.

There are mats for three boys, piles of blankets and clothes in the corner, and pipes and sake cups hanging against the wall.

But best of all – best of all is the crow’s nest.

It has a steering wheel pulled from the wreckage of an old fishing boat, a three hundred sixty-degree view of the world around them, stretching from the ocean to the tops of Goa’s dark peaks, high up and towering, and –

On a pole, flying high and proud and brazen, is a flag.

Their flag – their very own jolly roger, with crossbones behind each of their initials, written in color with as much care as three devil children can have.

Its like a dream come true. Happiness, made into being, joyful and prideful and a hundred different emotions Ace doesn’t quite have the name of.

A.S.L.

Ace, Sabo, Luffy.

Pirates.

He’s never felt more free.

They play up there, three demon children, pretending that they’re pirates already, strong and unbeatable and able to fight any foe that lands in their path.

Their imaginary swords slash, and enemies featuring familiar fangs fall off their sailing boat in the clouds. Adventure awaits them, and without fear, he and his brothers charge and fly around their own ship, reckless and wild and having fun.

Wanted Posters, Ace imagines, that capture every detail of them, from the shimmering deadliness of Sabo’s wings and the molten fire beneath Ace’s skin, to the glint of fangs in Luffy’s smile.

Bounties, higher than even the Pirate Kings, with adventures stretching forever before them – he and his brothers are going to be great.

They move out on a rainy night, ready to face the storm with everything they got.

A note, left behind beneath a half empty bottle of sake, is all Dadan gets as to where they go.

They run out, sprinting free and wild into the woods, hollering and shouting to be heard over the cracks of thunder and growling of the beasts. The mud, slick and bloody beneath his feet, splatters up Ace’s leg as dark water pours down on his head. He can hardly see against the howling of the wind and rain before his eyes, and it’s only the flash of lightning and the glow of his own skin that illuminates the path before him.

But he knows where to go.

He’ll never forget this path.

The treehouse looms large before him as they start climbing upward, clawed fingers digging into slippery, hard block. Luffy falls, twice, dragging Ace with him, then Sabo, but eventually his claws start slipping out and he can finally have a good grip against the wind.

They reach their trapdoor, open it and climb up into the warmth and dryness of their own hideout in a tumble of excitement.

“Look!” Luffy gasps, rushing to the open window, where the world sprawls out before them. “You can see the ocean!”

Ace and Sabo run after him, till all three of them are leaning out the window into the storm. The ocean is surging in the distance before them, waves flowing upward and slipping off scaled monsters rising above the crests. Creatures, larger than islands, walking across the sea before them, just barely visible in the dark, feet splattering against waves. They’re hulking, massive beasts and even in the shroud of the storm Ace can see the ships that were unlucky enough to remain out in the storm being pulled down by the maws of beasts.

Lightning flashes, and scales and fangs become visible in frightening detail in the dark.

Ace’s mouth opens in an O, awe in every line of his face as he stands out into the world.

It’s like staring off the bow of the ship, and despite the eyes in the sky and the prowling monsters below, Ace doesn’t feel afraid.

He can’t be.

Not with his brothers by his side.

(And Dogra and Magra, watching from the ground and edging their protective circle with their own shovels to make it withstand the force of the storm. Anyone would be unafraid with the only true Witch in the East at their back.)

The first night in the treehouse after the storm is rough. Ace can’t help but twitch at every noise, worried for the monsters that creep in in the night, worrying that every creak is a deer, beating at the wood or a bear crawling its way up a tree.

(He worries that every noise will turn into a siren song instead of murmuring voices and that he’ll lose his brothers to the thing he cried at as a babe. )

But – Sabo glows gently, making the treehouse warm and inviting, warding out the Dark that calls to Ace in gentle voices. Blue cascades over his cheeks, drifting by the door, glimmering in the dark and illuminating the shadows. Light – always there, since that night holed up together.

(And maybe Ace sleeps better knowing that Luffy is by the door, biting and snarling at anything that comes up.

And maybe Ace sleeps better, knowing that however much the deer watches from their window, it can’t get in.

Not with Luffy curled up by Ace’s side.)

Then – after the first night – there’s freedom and sparring and reckless, unrestrained joy. Little boys adventuring in woods too big for them, wandering and happy. Free, wild, half feral joy, the kind only childhood can have.

“Luffy! Dodge!”

“Wha-OOF!”

“HA! That’s fifty rounds, Luffy! I win!”

“No! Stupid! I wanna go again!”

“No way- Ack! Watch it! Your horns are sharp!”

“Okay – here’s the plan. We go down to the ravine, kill a wolf, and then Luffy rockets us out of there.”

“Ace, I think that needs a bit more detail.”

“Anymore detail and Luffy’s gonna mess it up.”

“Shishishi!”

“Oh fine – wait, shit, Ace don’t move.”

“What –“

THWACK!

“WHY THE FUCK DID YOU HIT ME WITH YOUR PIPE!”

“There was a spider on you! The bloody kind!”

“Give me that –“

“Hey You don’ need to hit me back!”

“Shishishi!”

“Luffy! Shut up!”

THWACK!

“Ace.”

There’s someone shaking him awake.

“Ace.”

Ace really wants to go back to sleep.

“Ace Ace Ace Ace-“

“Alright I’m up – the fuck is going on Lu?” Ace yawns, tired, raising his gaze to meet the eyes of his little brother, bright in the dim light of Sabo’s glow.

“There’s someone outside.”

That wakes Ace up.

He moves his blanket aside and reaches for his pipe, crawling over the trap door to peer through the small eye hole with Luffy.

There’s someone below, glamour wrapped around them like a cloak, and holy shit who is powerful enough to use the Veil like that –

The figure trips and falls on a branch, nearly going all the way to the ground. They let out a loud curse in a familiar voice and ah.

It’s just Dadan.

Ace should have known.

“C’mon. Let’s go back to sleep,” He tells Luffy, head already falling to the floor, too lazy to shift all the way back to his futon. Luffy laughs, and falls right on top of him, but Ace can’t be bothered to shove him off. Sabo rolls across the floor to lay by Ace’s back, and now, warm and secure, Ace falls back to sleep.

(It doesn’t stop him from stirring to awareness when Dadan finally makes it past all their traps to mutter spells over their heads of protection, no hunger, and light.

It’s a familiar comfort, out here in the woods.

Ace is a devil child, but sometimes he can pretend he is the Witch’s child on nights like these.)

It’s getting colder.

This happens sometime, even in Goa’s supposedly jungle climate. The east isn’t predictable, not like any other Blue.

(According to the tales, no one can predict the weather in the Grand Line either. When Ace sets out to be a pirate, at least he’ll be used to that aspect of the dangerous life at sea.)

Ace can tell by the way Sabo and Luffy curl up to him and his warmth at night, blankets following them, and the way his own skin is a bit more brittle and unstable in the cold. It flakes off when they spar, bursts of ash clouding the air.

The cold is early.

That’s what Dadan says at least.

Ace is inclined to believe her.

“Do you think we need to move back to Dadan’s?” He asks Sabo, once they are done sealing up the treehouse for the day, trying to trap in a little more heat as Luffy plays with two flesh-hungry beetles in the corner.

Sabo hums, contemplating, then makes a face. “Not till we have to. We’ll be fine now, don’t you think?”

“Mmm… But foods going to get scarce. The jungle’s going to start hiding.” Ace has been through this before. All the winters where a jungle island goes into an unnatural, almost cursed slumber… the winter’s where all he adult’s faces grow a little tighter and meals are a little less nice.

Sabo pauses for a moment. “… Grey Terminal too. People are going to start burrowing up and trying to keep warm with the scraps of food they have.”

They both glance at Luffy then, and his sharp teeth and hungry eyes. Luffy doesn’t like to be hungry.

(Ace has never seen him hungry.)

“A month,” He declares with finality. “We’ll wait a month, and then we’ll go to Dadan’s. We’ll have to seal up the treehouse though. And take the sake cups.”

“We’ll figure it out then.” Sabo shrugs, and nudges a scurrying beetle back to Luffy. “Winter’s not here yet.”

“Yeah…” Ace trails off, watching the dark air outside become brisk and his breath fog.

Not yet.

Grey Terminal is quiet the next time they visit. The loudest noise seems to be the reddish frost settling underfoot, crunched by clawed feet.

It’s uneasy. Ace doesn’t like it. Quiet things mean hunting, mean fear, and never anything good.

Ace and Sabo meld to it, shutting their mouths and becoming just as quiet as the rest of the crowd. They try to copy the silence, become it, as if hoping if they did it wouldn’t notice them.

Luffy doesn’t.

Luffy is loud, breaking the silence like a shattering vase, sudden and jarring, shocking Ace and Sabo back into their normal beat of devil children on the run.

Laughter born again, as they begin to run throughout the Terminal. Glares are cast their way, but Ace can only focus on how alive the Terminal feels again, instead of the deadness that had been there when they first arrived. Luffy makes everything better, just by being unashamedly true to himself – or the self Ace knows at least.

They bring back planks of wood to patch their treehouse, thick blankets that have been freshly abandoned by the dead, but even amongst the people there is no food to be seen.

Winter has only just begun, or at least what feels like winter to Ace, and yet everything is already like this?

It feels like a bad omen. A warning. A threat.

(Luffy frowns as they tell him no snacks today, not in Grey Terminal, and there’s something worrying in the way his eyes trail after the few people wandering the streets, but…

He’ll be fine.

Fine.)

The deer of bone is sitting under their tree house when Ace wakes up.

Luffy chucks a rock at it as Ace and Sabo prep their pipes, and they all hope it goes away. It seems odd that it’s their only option but what can they do? I’s the deer of bone, and the area beneath their tree seems to grow thick with the smell of rot, the air and vision blotting out with darkness.

The deer seems to cock its head, antlers shredding through the veil and leaving wavering gashes in the air, then it…. it simply gets up and walks slowly, slowly away.

Where it had been laying, is now rotted and dying, corpses of animals strewn around, filled with maggots and diseases.

It’s a mockery of their situation. A joke. Ace and his brothers need to eat, and they can’t eat something that’s slowly being swallowed up by white.

They side step the gifts of the deer, recurve their protective circle, adding bits of bone to reinforce it, and start hunting again.

His stomach growls before they’re even a mile away from home.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

It’s not fine.

The snow is falling and it’s not fine.

Ace is cold, and he can’t imagine how his brothers must feel, without the warmth of an inner fire so hot it burns pushing at their skin. They all curl up under a pile of blankets every night, pressed into each other, trying to keep every bit of warmth they can until the sun rises and the cold eases, just a little.

Sometimes, Luffy gets up in the night, and Ace finds bite marks along rubbery skin the next morning. They’re bloody and deep, matching perfectly with the blood on Luffy’s teeth. He bandages them with concern, gives Luffy an raised eyebrow but not voicing anything yet, and settles back down.

He’s been getting quieter.

It’s not fine.

All the animals have burrowed deep into the woods now, hiding under frozen earth and trees with eyes and limbs and blood dripping like sap from their branches. Only the animals with no meat and only raging, snarling faces made of bone and terror walk about. The beasts of the cold, with maggots in their chest and frost winds in their breath are no meal, not even for Luffy. They can barely hunt anything. They can barely eat anything.

It’s too cold to move.

“Morning…” Ace slurs from where he’s pressed into Sabo’s shoulder with Luffy in a death grip around his waist. “Let’s go b’ck… to Dadan’s tomorrow.”

Sano nods, point chin hitting Ace’s head, and he doesn’t even need to feel Luffy’s nose shake against his back to know that Luffy agrees as well. It’s a plan.

Ace falls back to sleep, the plan a hopeful place in his heart.

(It will be fine. It has to be fine. It has too.)

They wake up sluggishly, slugging on every piece of winter clothing and warm blankets that they weren’t already wearing, and head out into the cold. The path is slippery, and they barely manage to run when a bear, gaunt and starving and rabid crosses their paths. It collapses behind them when Luffy snarls, and it’s only the smell of disease in the air that keeps them from eating it.

Ace and his brothers make it to Dadan’s house with ruddy cheeks and unfeeling fingers, terror in their eyes as they crash down the door.

For once, Dadan doesn’t say anything. Just throws them at the bath, already warmed up, and tells them to get warm.

The cursing and low murmurs of the bandit hut are a soothing lullaby as all three of them climb in, Ace and Sabo holding Luffy and all his gangly limbs above water. His head lolls on their shoulders, his eyes distant (due to the water?) and it is the most peace and safety Ace has found yet.

The water’s warm.

It would be better if they didn’t come out of it to Dadan’s scolding.

“Why the hell did you stay out in that damn tree house so long, you fucking devil brats!”

Ace gives her a half smile, fangs pulling at his lips but still yawning, still cold, cracks in his skin barely glimmering in the frosty air as he buries himself further into his blanket.

“Dunno.” He says, and Sabo echoes it beside him. “We were having fun.”

And really, that’s all the answer Ace can give as tired as he. They were having fun and they were independent and they were free. It was worth a little (a lot) of cold.

Dadan walks away, and its only in the briefest, last moments of consciousness that Ace notes that Luffy hadn’t laughed or spoken at all since they arrived.

Dadan’s hut in winter is like Dadan’s hut on moonless nights. Boarded up, warm and toasty, with liquor flowing freely to warm the bodies of hunters coming in from the outside.

They never bring in much, but it’s enough to get by, even with the appetites of three devil children.

But it’s hard not to get a little stir crazy. They spar, jumping from the rafters and over sleeping bandits like they would if they were at Grey Terminal, and they fool around, laughing and playing pirates, like they would do any other day of the year, but being stuck inside…

Ace is used to the wild now, to waking up and seeing the ocean stretch before him in miles of uncharted waters. He’s used to the sound of birds that sound like screams and the way the treehouse sways on windy days. He’s used to being bare to the elements with his pipe and his brothers to defend him.

He doesn’t like the hut. It’s…. confining.

“Ace,” Luffy whispers from beside him one day, as they sit outside of Dadan’s hut for just an hour, just enough for a breath of fresh air. She had given them an hour, as much as they could stand before the cold bit in, knowing full well how antsy they were getting. “When can we go hunting again?”

“Stupid – there’s nothing to hunt. We can do all that when winter’s over.”

“When’s that?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Mm.”

Luffy’s eyes are sealed on the ground, his claws digging gouges in the dirt that seem so small, smaller than usual, a force contained in a small, small body. Ace and Sabo have been bouncing around, but Luffy – he’s just sat there. He’s not antsy like the rest of them, not stir crazy, just… quiet.

He doesn’t wonder why Luffy is like that now of all times, understanding it off as lack of food and the winter taking its toll on him.

(Right? That has to be the reason, right?)

“C’mon,” Ace says, standing up and brushing snow off the lid of Luffy’s hat and off his own horns. Sabo looks up from where he’s drawing with a stick in the snow. “Let’s go see if Dadan has anything else to eat.”

“I thought we couldn’t hunt?”

“Dadan has storage meat, dumbass. That’s what we’ve been eating all this time.”

“Oh. Meat!”

It’s the first time Luffy has been excited all day, and it’s worth it, even if Ace has to give up a smidgen of his portion that night.

Dadan says this is the worst winter Goa has ever faced, and couples her whispered words of worry with glances at Luffy, sitting in the corner and poking beetles again.

She does that a lot.

Glancing at Luffy.

But – Luffy is Luffy, wrapped in the Veil and mystery, and Dadan is a bandit witch so maybe she just sees what no one else can see right then. It’d make sense.

Ace ignores it, for the most part, and tackles Sabo into another brawl of make-believe pirate fights atop of the rafters mimicking the swaying tops of sails. Pipes become swords and even Dadan doesn’t have the heart to tell them to knock it off when the lack of food will have them napping in the hour.

(Luffy watches from his corner, his eyes a bit too wide, and smile a bit too tight, too small, and Ace doesn’t focus on it.

Maybe he should have.)

“Your grandfather is visiting brats. First time he’s called ahead too, damn him.” Dadan tells them one day, as if it isn’t a cause for worry and panic and oh fuck this is exactly why they left for the tree house in the first place. And they can’t go back because it’s winter and everything’s awful and oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck – they’re going to get destroyed -

Or-

“BRATS! Relax! He’s bringing food, you dumb idiots. Don’t run away or you aren’t getting any.” Dadan scolds them, bottle in hand.

“What kind of food?” Sabo asks, always curious, fluttering up a bit.

“Sea king brat. The kind from the Grand Line.”

Stars form in Ace’s eyes as Sabo rambles on about how far it must have come, facts spilling from his mouth, and how good sea king is, he’s had it only once, but it’s better than sea monster flesh from the East and it’s so, so good.

(Luffy doesn’t speak. Only stands next to Ace, holding on tight to his shorts and looking to the ground. Dogra places a hand on his shoulder, and Luffy shudders.)

“Do you think he’ll try to murder us?” Sabo asks him, once the allure of food, meat, the good kind, the fresh kind, has faded from his eyes.

“Gramps?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah. Not in the winter.” Ace tries to rationalize despite his earlier panic. Right? It’ll be okay if he’s bringing food, right?

“Mmkay. Hey, wanna go see if we can steal Dadan’s beads off her neck?”

The beads gleam in red and shining colors from across the room, from where’s she’s gone to yell at some random familiar to prep for an angel coming to stay the night. It’s like a treasure, like cookies on the top shelf, like a challenge.

Ace’s eyes narrow. “Bet I can do it faster.”

“You’re on!”

(Luffy sits in the corner, again, quiet, gnawing on a bone with teeth sharper than usual. Without Dogra holding steady to his shoulder, his hands have started scratching at his arms, hungry, hungry, and hungrier. Red drips to the floor, teeth marks joining the scratches, but Magra bandages them up, not Ace this time. )

Ace wakes up in the middle of the night too Luffy getting up and moving from beside him.

Ace doesn’t speak – not when Luffy’s stomach is growling.

(Or maybe it’s his little brother himself, the sound coming from his chest not his stomach.)

Luffy creeps over Ace like a predator, tip toes around sleeping bandit familiars until, in the dim, shadowy light, Ace can see him shake Dadan’s shoulder.

“Dadan...?” Luffy asks, voice barely above a whisper. “’M hungry.”

When Luffy says it like that, Ace doesn’t think hungry means what it should.

Dadan is up in an instant, throwing a single beaded necklace around Luffy’s neck. It hangs heavy, slipping off, but Luffy readjusts it with a moment to quickly to see and nods.

“Go back to sleep, brat,” Dadan admonishes, but her eyes don’t slip close till she watches Luffy’s breathing even out into a deep sleep from where he’s curled beside her… far, far away from Ace and Sabo.

Ace tries not to get too hurt by it.

He can’t stave off the hunger anyway. Not like Dadan can attempt to.

Luffy doesn’t need him.

(Yes he does, yes he does, yes he does - )

Not when he’s hungry.

(In the morning, there are burn marks around Luffy’s neck.)

Garp shows up three days late, citing ice in the way and a weird sea serpent hanging out by the calm belt.

Ace isn’t really paying attention.

There’s food, glorious food, that fills his mouth with juicy sweetness and something that isn’t dried, over salted jerky, and hell – Ace is the closest a demon can get to heaven. It’s so good.

(Luffy eats half of it, Garp’s hand on his shoulder, weighted down with something that Ace can’t see. It’s been hard to focus on Luffy these days. His eyes just… keep slipping over him, around his blurry edges, like a leopard in the jungle. Impossible to see until the fangs slip into the neck.

Ace doesn’t notice that Luffy’s still hungry after the most fulfilling meal they have had all week.)

There’s a bandit standing outside the hut. It isn’t one of Dadan’s familiars – no, this man has no magic running through his veins, no secret talismans weighting him down at his core. He’s just a bandit, as normal one can get on Goa.

He’s asking for food, cart behind him, hands on his knees, begging Dadan, Witch of the Mountain, Witch of the East, for food for his clan.

It’s something new, so the rest are outside, watching. Dadan pointing to the three of them, explaining that there’s no food to spare, gaze lingering on Luffy –

Luffy, who is still. Stiller than he has been in days. Was he shaking before?

Ace can’t remember.

(Ace should have noticed.)

His little brother is staring at the ground.

His little brother raises his head.

That is not his little brother. Not the one Ace knows.

This little brother – this little brother has a face splitting along the seams of scars and smiles, teeth sharpening into white, blood tipped fangs, eyes glowing and red light bursting forth turning his pupils wild like pinpricks. His hat seems to slip off him, the flames around his head spiraling higher, higher, higher, curling around his small horns and –

Luffy takes a step forward.

It’s the only one Ace can see.

Garp flinches out of the corner of his eye, lunging in slow motion to where Luffy used to be, a word on his tongue not yet formed but eyes worried and bright and fearful.

It’s a moment, and Garp’s arms close too slowly around the place where Luffy – he’s not there anymore.

He’s in front of the bandit, mouth opening wide and body twisting and everything blurring and –

A sickening crunch fills the air.

Blood splatters against the dusting of snow on the ground.

The bandit doesn’t even scream before Ace’s little brother bites him in half with the force of a tyrant, and it is not another breath before the rest of him is gone, devoured by Luffy in quick, hungry motions, sickening crunches of destroyed bone and the slerch of organs filling the air.

Fuck.

There’s so much blood – red running down Luffy’s chest and mouth and face, dripping from his hands. An explosion of crimson before him, where a man was just kneeling for sanctuary.

Luffy’s eyes are a bit less crazed. A bit less wild.

They’re still bloody.

(Everything is bloody.)

Ace can’t breathe.

Luffy takes a hand and licks the blood off his fingers, like Ace would lick off sauce or other treats. Like Luffy is a tiny child who made a mess of his food on his hands, and not someone who just –

Who just –

(Ace remembers the first time he and Sabo gave the beast of the gate an offering. The way Old Man Gram had screamed, the dawning horror in his face, the way. Ace’s fingers had interlocked with Sabo’s out of sheer terror… Ace remembers.

This is nothing like that.

This is worse.)

Luffy just ate a man before Ace’s eyes, killed him in one bite, for no reason –

Other than that he was hungry.

(Luffy didn’t start saying he was hungry till their Grey Terminal visits started dropping in numbers due to the few amounts of people that were there to rob.)

Hungry has a new meaning now.

Ace feels like he’s going to be sick. Sabo’s the same in the corner of his eye

Before him, Luffy suddenly pauses in where a long tongue is licking a strip of blood off of his wrist like a contented cat. His eyes seem to lose just a little of their glassy look as he gazes around the clearing with wide, wide eyes.

“Luffy,” Garp says, low and soft in the silence. It rings like shattering glass.

Luffy’s head twitches like lightning to where Garp is standing. Reflexively, Ace’s grip tightens on his pipe as Sabo steadies into a fighting stance behind him.

He doesn’t like that he does it. That’s his brother. But he doesn’t have a choice. He’s – he’s terrified.

His brother just ate a man before Ace’s eyes, has been complaining about being hungry for weeks, and is now licking blood off of his skin with a tongue barbed and red.

The gaze that Luffy pierces him with – its…

Haunting.

Luffy cocks his head, unseeing gaze unsettling with the red coating his face. It’s smeared on his blurry face, between his eyes, across his nose, curling across his cheek bones and still dripping from the sheer amount of it.

“Luffy,” Garp tries again, more forcefully, and suddenly Ace and Sabo are being shoved behind Dadan’s body as she steps in front of them.

This time, Luffy does more than cock his head. He blinks, eyes wide, focusing again.

He stops in his actions, stilling once more.

Ace’s heart stops.

But this isn’t the stilling of a predator. This is the stilling of a child who realizes he’s in trouble, a child who is terrified of something in himself, a child who is-

Who is hungry.

Luffy’s hand pulls away from his lips, and it’s so hard to see his face, so hard to see with the way the Veil is concentrating on it. Like fuzzy nothingness, if not for the teeth and blood.

“Gramps?” Luffy whispers, even if Ace can’t see his lips move. “Dadan?” He’s shaking now, no longer still.

His face turns to Ace and Sabo, where they peek out from behind Dadan fearfully. Ace thinks that if he could see Luffy’s mouth, it would be framing the sounds of his brothers’ names.

But he can’t, and Luffy just stares at him, both of them, and it’s the scariest thing Ace as ever known.

Dadan moves.

She sidesteps the blood on the ground, sweeps over bits of gore, and soon, Luffy is captured, cradled in her arms. His own arms are pinned, his look dazed with the quick motion, and Dadan is muttering, lightly, smoking flowing from her lips as she mouths words in a language no human, no demon should know.

Ace watches as blood drips down Dadan’s front, watches as she carries Luffy away, watches as they disappear into the bath hut behind the house, watches, watches, watches –

And does nothing.

Luffy –

Besides him, Sabo starts shaking.

(Ace’s hand snakes out to hold Sabo’s, just like that first time they saw a man get eaten alive. Sabo’s hand is still just as warm, and still shakes just as much. Familiar comforts, on days like these.)

The silence in the clearing is unbearable. Ace feels like he’s going to shatter apart beneath it.

Luffy just –

“C’mon,” Gramps grouses, voice rough and low as his wings span outward, covering the bloody ground behind him. “Get back inside. “ His eyes motion towards Dogra and Magra, and suddenly there are large hands on Ace’s shoulders, guiding him inside and away from the stench of death in the air.

It doesn’t stop Ace from seeing the way the ground glistens in the dim light, the way a spare limb, unrecognizable but bloody, is left over, the tension in the air when Garp shifts, just so, before Ace disappears inside.

Luffy just killed someone.

Ate someone.

Someone who was begging on his hands and knees for life and food.

It’s a haunting irony, a curse, a threat, and that was his brother-

Ace grips Sabo’s hand tighter, and doesn’t let go.

Luffy comes back, his face clean and teeth sharp, with a new set of clothes on him. His shirt is white, his shorts blue, and his feet barefoot and stepping far too heavy where ever he goes.

(There’s not a speck of blood on him.)

Dadan’s beads wrap around his neck like chains, holding tight, the faint smell of burns in the air. Luffy’s hands hold on to the constricting beads and onto Dadan’s, his hands tiny now, clawed now, no longer blurred by the Veil. Luffy is clear, in the way he hasn’t been in a long while.

Not since before winter began.

(Not since, a voice supplies Ace, you stopped being with people you couldn’t care less about.)

Luffy looks small. He looks like the seven-year-old he really is, and not just the monster the water of the East makes him into, what he makes himself into.

He looks like Ace’s little brother. The one he swore an oath too, the one he bound himself too with dark ceremonial sake and binding words of demons.

(His little brother is a monster.)

Ace wants to reach out to him – tell him it’s okay, and you’re my brother, but –

Ace is a devil child but Ace is only eleven.

Ace is terrified.

He doesn’t reach out, and neither does Sabo, so Dadan brings Luffy over to Garp and Luffy sleeps between protective feathery wings that night, with faint tear tracks down his face.

Protective wings – and by the way Garp looks around the room that night, always vigilant, Ace can’t tell who he is really protecting.

It… It takes a while for Ace to relax again, around Luffy.

The week that follows, Gramps is there, always, a silent buffer for Luffy to retreat to and Ace and Sabo to hide behind, a little bit of comfort for little boys at the realization of the obvious.

Sabo and Ace mutter in soft voices about it.

The hunger.

The raids Dadan brought Luffy on.

The way the beast at the gate and of the forests bowed to him.

(The way the deer of bone wants Luffy dead, and gone and destroyed, ended and smited off this earth. Luffy isn’t like the rest of them. He’s dangerous.)

The way Luffy said he never wanted to be alone, that being alone hurt, and Ace and Sabo wonder what hides within his chest. Something dark and consuming, something Luffy is barely fighting against.

The way that when they rescued him from Porchemy, it was a bloodbath.

But – they also murmur about the way Luffy gnawed at himself before anyone else, and never, ever tried to bite Ace and Sabo. How he looked at them with fear and terror but never hunger, how he kept quiet and didn’t worry about it, how he made the same vow as them and -

Ace reaches out, brings Luffy into a hug with Sabo by his side, and knows that Luffy is his little brother.

That will never change. Never. Their bond is unbreakable, isn’t it?

(Garp leaves after that, once he knows his second grandson will not be alone. Still – Ace sleeps with his pipe in reach at night, and it’s always Sabo and Ace with Luffy, not just one of them with their little brother.

A sight like a man kneeling, being killed by something darker than the heart of Goa, isn’t easily forgotten.)

Night is quiet.

“Ace? Do you think I’m a monster?”

“Luffy we’re in the East. Go back to sleep.”

“Do you?”

“Go to sleep.”

But not always.

(He can’t speak the truth, even then.

He wonders if this is how Garp felt like on that cliffside, when Ace asked him another, horrible question that no child should ask.)

“Hey! Get back here brats!” A voice, slurring like a snake calls behind him. Ace can only laugh.

“Ha!” He shouts. “Only if you can catch us!” He turns, flowers burning under foot in the fresh breath of spring,

There’s a howling and a smashing as Sabo takes the guys knees out, and soon, his brothers are running alongside him, just as they used to, fangs bared and smiles deadly.

With spring came people, crawling out of their homes to find food and not the cold.

With people came less hunger, less wariness around their littlest brother.

With spring came their treehouse and freedom, with spring came trips to Grey Terminal and the city, with spring came monsters in the woods that were not hungry, just deadly, and with spring came happiness.

(The worst winter Goa had ever faced, Dadan called it again afterwards, as she looks at her nearly diminished storage. Any longer and – she cut off when she saw Ace listeninng, but Ace didn’t miss how her eyes trailed towards Luffy and Luffy alone.

He didn’t want to know what would happen to Luffy if Luffy couldn’t eat.

Besides – the winter hadn’t been all bad. Ace celebrated the new year with cups of sake shared with his brothers, under the light of three whole moons and a red sky at night. The slept in comforting piles in the corners, once they learned that Luffy’s teeth posed no threat to them (yet), played pranks on bandits, had pretend pirate fights on icy roofs, felt the frost melting beneath Ace’s feet – it hadn’t been all bad.

Just… the beginning.

The beginning was the worst.)

“ACE!” Sabo calls, and it is reflex that has Ace catching the string of jewels that Sabo tosses at him, “Watch this!”

And Sabo swoops up, wings flaring outward, before ducking into a tight dive, pipe stretched before him, until he nails their pursuer in one of his three heads, sending him crashing to the ground.

Ace laughs, echoing Luffy’s Shishishi! beside him, and soon Sabo is flashing forward to join his brother’s again.

Burns underfoot, blood behind him and brothers’ beside him, Ace howls with the joy of wild children running free.

With spring comes fun.

With spring comes storms.

Howling ones, raging ones, the kind that has the sky peeling apart before them and eyes of a thousand stars staring down at them with fatal gazes. Lightning flashes and the prowling forms of sea monsters are visible off the coast, the red, flashing claws of beasts below them, and thunder cracks louder than Ace and his brother’s calls.

The worst one yet, and it’s all Ace can do but hold on to Sabo as he holds on to Luffy, who holds on to their flag.

A pirate’s flag is his pride, is what his crew stands for.

They can’t lose their flag!

Come morning, it’s a miracle they don’t. They have lost a wall of the tree house, half of their crow’s nest, and all of their blankets are soaked in rainwater turned bloody.

But the flag is safe.

(His brothers are safe.)

And really, that’s all that matters in the end. However –

“We need to fix this shit up,” Ace declares to his brothers, hands on his hips as he stares at their collapsing treehouse. Even the circle in the ground is muddy and ruined, needing to be redug.

“Yeah,” Sabo nods, picking up another scattered board and dodging the teeth of particularly nasty tree. “Grey Terminal?”

“Grey Terminal,” Ace agrees, and then gets side tracked by a beetle crawling along the ground.

Its midday by the time they finally make their way down the mountain, but that’s fine. They have Luffy, they can sleep out in the open for one night if they don’t finish rebuilding in time. The storm washed most of the threats away, as long as they can redig their circle.

(They don’t notice the sky that that morning.

Red and bloody, with streaks of crimson covering the sky.

Sailors take warning, every person knows, but Ace doesn’t listen to the superstitions of anybody else, not since his brothers joined him.

Perhaps he should have.)

In Grey Terminal, Ace turns his head for a second, and then there are screams behind him.

Sabo’s screams.

He turns his head, and there is Sabo, raging and angry, held in the arms of what Ace can only describe as a man made of living slime.

Bluejam, Ace knows from the rumors, the man who no bullets can take out because his skin s like acid and melts them, the pirate of the Terminal.

And he has Sabo. Sabo, Ace’s brother.

The guards of the circling kingdom surround them, clothed in masks that hide their faery features and holding guns and swords and weapons that Ace doesn’t even begin to recognize.

Ace doesn’t care about the strange weapons.

Bluejam has Sabo, who is dangling off of the ground, and fucking damnit that’s Ace’s brother.

“GIVE SABO BACK BLUEJAM!” Luffy screams, his voice like the rolling thunder of the storm that just passed, commanding and threatening and not-human – but all Bluejam does is laugh.

The guy that Ace only dimly recognizes as Sabo’s piece of shit father starts blathering on – something about how dare they suggest that Sabo belong to them, children belong to their parents, faeries belong to the city, Sabo needs to come back home and oh –

Ace has always hated dads.

Rage boils in him, threatening to crest and fall in the shattering of skins, and the trash starts burning around him in a lack of control that hasn’t happened since he was a toddler.

He lunges upward, ready to fight, ashy hands burning with embers when –

THWACK!

He eats dirt in the ground, at the hands of a bullheaded pirate.

The liquid fire that counts as his blood goes flying from his head, but at least he can say it hit and burned Sabo’s bastard dad in the face.

The bastard is talking again, but Ace is just trying to look up from the foot placed on his back.

He manages, just barely, in time to see Sabo’s face as he shouts out.

“STOP IT! NOBODY MADE ME DO ANYTHING! I LEFT ON MY OWN!”

“QUIET YOU SUMMONED CHILD!” Fuck, Ace hates Sabo’s dad. “Take care of the devil children, pirate. I want them out of my sight.”

Shit – Wait they have Luffy, Luffy could –

Sabo’s already speaking. “WAIT! STOP! BLUEJAM! FATHER! I GET IT NOW!”

No- NO!

“DON’T DO IT SABO!” Ace shouts, wild and desperate. Luffy is watching in shock beside him, weak and terrified, strange metal weapon pressed to his head by the pirate that must have taken him down. His limbs lift weakly but it does nothing.

Ace! Luffy! We have to make it out to sea one day! We have to leave this country behind and be free!

Sabo’s face is shadowed as he gives in. “I’ll do whatever you want! I’ll live my life the way you want me too! I’ll go back to the circle! Just –“

I didn’t belong with them… I was always… Alone-

“PLEASE DON’T HURT THEM! PLEASE!” Sabo cries as he begs.

When we become pirates, we might not end up on the same crew, but the three of us will always be brothers! No matter where we are, or what we do, our bond will never break!

“THEY MEAN MORE TO ME THAN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD! PLEASE! THEY ARE MY PRECIOUS BROTHERS!”

Sabo…

(“I don’t.”

“Huh?”

“Hate you, I mean. I don’t hate you.”)

The bastard smirks, almost as slimy as the pirate standing next to him, and he makes a motion with his hands. The guards start moving, Sabo dragged between their arms and –

The bastard disappears in a puff of smoke, stone left behind, and hell – he couldn’t even leave the dance of the faery circle to get back his son.

Ace hates dads.

But – Sabo’s still here. Still dimly glowing. Still wobbly.

“HEY!” Ace cries, desperate as he scrambles to his feet, or tries to at any rate with the pain in his head from where the pirate hit him. His feet kick up ash and his entire body threatens to fall apart. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?! GET AWAY FROM THOSE GUYS! WE’LL BE FINE!”

Sabo keeps walking, tears falling from his face, and Ace feels desperate, feels small, feels tears of lava edging at his eyes.

“SABO!!”

We have to get stronger, and become pirates! Free !

“WE’RE GOING TO BE FREE TOGETHER, AREN’T WE? PIRATES!”

I’m going to publish it, my own captains log, and change the world so that things like Goa don’t have to exist anymore!

“ARE YOU JUST GIVING UP!?! SABO!?!” Ace screeches, one last desperate time, claws digging into the ground, sinking deep as he scrambles forward. Luffy sobs beside him. “SABO!!”

TO BROTHERS!!

The last thing Ace ever sees of his brother is his crying face, as he’s thrown over the gates and trapped back in his own, personal hell that he ran from so many years ago.

“SABO!!!”

TO BROTHERS!!!

Notes:

will i ever not end this on a cliffhanger?? probably not. u all know whats coming next tho lol so until we get to the spades it's not going to hurt,,,, much,,,,,
do u guys think i should up the rating for this?? im hesitant to mark it as explicit as typically i mark all works as teen (because u know. thats what i am lmao) but it is more graphic than my previous works. What do you think?
Aside from that!!! Apologies for the wait, but u will be getting another chapter next week as well, then hopefully one more as i finish editing. After that it'll probably be another wait, as i have other projects to work on (crown the king, till the sea, dearest brother, as well as some well overdue prompts from pride and before) but!! we'll see!!! as for zines - one piece supernova zine that im in has already finished it's availability but the ASL zine unbreakable bonds is coming up and im in that as well!!!! so go check them out <3
WE ALSO HAVE SOME AMAZING ART FOR ESOM!!! This is for Law Chap of esom, by guardian-hyren (who if you recall has drawn some jaw dropping art in the past!!! check it out here!
ANYWAY. FRNED. LOVE MY DEER. LOVE MY DEER SO MUCH ITS THE WORST THING I LOVE IT SO MUCH <3 it featured a lot in this chapter, and itll probs be the most he features in a bit, but, yeah :DDDD
Hope you enjoyed and thank you for reading! <3
- whirly

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