Chapter Text
Luffy falls mid-step.
It’s so sudden that Ace doesn’t notice right away. He runs a few more paces before he realizes the wheezing breaths by his shoulder are gone. And when he spins around, searching the mass of bodies packed in around him, squinting through smoke and grit and flashes of gunfire, he’s expecting to find his brother drawn into a skirmish or cut off by an opportunistic marine.
Ace finds him on the ground instead. Just lying there, like all the life blew clean out of him.
It’s the scariest thing he’s ever seen—scarier even than the moment Luffy appeared at the Marineford in the first place. Ace’s heart turns to solid stone. He's never been less graceful, the way he scrambles back, little tongues of flame licking off his skin as he goes.
“Hey, hey,” he says, getting his hands under Luffy’s shoulders and hauling him up. “This is no time for a nap, kid.”
His brother’s head lolls back, limp and unresisting. It’s literally like something out of a nightmare. Ace’s brain stops working, right there in the absolute chaos of an active warzone, and the clutch of his hands tightens. He can feel the air around him get super-heated as he starts to fully lose his mind.
“What the fuck,” Ace whispers, and snaps his head up when someone approaches at a run—that Ivankov person his brother showed up with, who looks horrified at Luffy’s prone sprawl but not at all surprised. Ace zeroes in on them as someone with information, and Ivankov’s step falters under Ace’s undivided, probably wild-eyed stare. “What the fuck happened to him?”
“Ace, you can’t just sit there,” someone else shouts. It sounds like Vista, daring to split his attention from his duel with Mihawk in order to scream sense in Ace’s general direction. “You have to go now.”
But what actually brings him out of what is shaping up to be a truly historic meltdown is the tiny flutter under his hand—a pulse. Luffy’s juggernaut heart is still beating, weak and unsteady but proof of life all the same. That’s all Ace needs.
He jerks into motion, lifting Luffy’s body up with him. It’s like muscle memory. How many times has he carried his little brother around on his back? From an angry mob, even? Easily hundreds. They’re old hat at this.
“Yeah,” Ace is saying, like a crazy person, “yeah, we gotta go, Lu. You just—you just hang tight, and I’ll bail you out again, like I always do. That’s my job, huh? Gotta pay you back for this mad-cap rescue of yours anyway.”
Luffy doesn’t answer, but the hot puffs of his breath against Ace’s neck are answer enough. Ivankov is still nearby, and looks torn between pity and a sense of grief that Ace cannot begin to deal with the implications of right now.
Behind him, Pops is holding what might as well be half of the entire Marine army at bay. The rest of Ace’s family is clearing the way for him as best they can, but there is still the odd sword to dodge, a sudden cluster of gunfire to roll away from. Adrenaline carries him forward. The wharf is within sight, so close he can taste the salt even through the acrid smoke clogging the air.
That bastard Akainu is shouting something, but Ace doesn’t catch it. His entire world has narrowed into two points of focus. His two treasures. Luffy and the sea. His brother and the open arms of absolute freedom.
The ships are not even two dozen feet away. Barely more than a handful of running steps. Ace has a moment to think, deliriously, We made it.
And then a blast of heat sears the air behind him. On all sides, nakama are knocked clean off their feet, and the sudden crush of falling bodies has Ace tumbling down, too. He loses Luffy in all the chaos and he shoves Izou and Marco off of him, searching wildly for that familiar straw hat, that bright yellow vest.
There—blinking muddy brown eyes, trying to push himself up on shaking arms—Luffy. It’s such a relief to see him awake that Ace loses a second of reaction time to sheer relief.
A group of opportunistic soldiers seize that moment, capitalizing on Luffy’s obvious disorientation and spilling towards him with their swords raised. Behind them, Akainu is approaching at a run.
“Motherfuckers!” Ace snarls, digging his hands into the stone beneath him, leaving scorched grooves behind.
And then, in a literal sense, he raises Hell.
Izou shouts and rolls away from him. He can see Marco’s blue flames out of the corner of his eye, protecting their nakama from the inferno.
Ace feels like a wild animal. He feels like one of the jungle creatures he grew up with on Mt Colubo. The big cats and bears and crocodiles had as much of a hand in raising him as the bandits did. They taught him how to tear survival out of the world with teeth and claws.
By the time he had the Spades, Ace knew how to survive the human way—with cleverness and charisma and no shortage of help from kind-hearted strangers. By the time he was folded into Pops’ family, he was practically tamed, even accounting for all his screaming attempts on the giant yonko’s life. A smile was just a different manner of baring your teeth.
So he knows, in the back of his mind, that his friends are probably taken-aback by him right now. He just doesn’t have the capacity to care.
He tears through every single body between him and his brother the way the harpy eagles back home would rip apart smaller birds for a meal, so angry that sparks fly off his skin with every move. And he runs his mouth the whole time.
“You put your filthy fucking hands anywhere near him and I’ll rip them off and feed them to you, you puke-faced piece of shit! You want to try me, asshole? I was putting bitches like you in the hospital when I was eight!”
It’s like he’s back in Gray Terminal. It’s like he’s ten years old again and the world is on fire. Only it’s not Bluejam holding Luffy’s life on the line, it’s Akainu, standing over his little brother with a magma fist at the ready, sparing a moment for some self-righteous monologue about good versus evil or whatever bullshit, and Ace feels what’s left of his rationality burn and burn and burn away.
He’s not close enough. He’s not going to make it. Even if he managed to shake off the soldiers in front of him and just threw his whole body at full-speed between Luffy and Akainu to take the blow, he wouldn’t get there fast enough. He doesn’t have enough time. He’s going to lose another brother, only this time it’s going to happen right in front of his eyes, from seven—five—three feet away.
He’s ten years old again and learning what grief is. He’s ten years old and all that’s left of Sabo is the letter in his hand and a shared dream and the promise that Ace will look after their silly baby brother while he’s gone.
“DON’T TOUCH HIM!” Ace screams. It’s pure desperation. It’s the last human thing he’ll ever say if Luffy dies here.
He’s not prepared for it to somehow work. The soldiers around him fold like paper, dropping to the ground. Even Akainu stumbles. It’s not much—it’s barely anything—but it’s enough. Akainu’s killing blow doesn’t land fully, only drags across Luffy’s chest instead of punching through it. It burns away all the skin there and Luffy cries out. In the next second, Jimbei has scooped Luffy off the ground and one of the Shichibukai is up in Akainu’s face, her fair features twisted with rage. Ace’s nakama have peeled away to the wharf. It’s enough.
With one last mighty heave of his naginata, Pops gives them the opening they need. And then, because today is a day of unexpected arrivals, Shanks appears next to him as if plucked out of thin air.
The Red-Hair pirates’ entrance puts the Marines on the back foot. It gives Ace’s family a real chance to get the hell out of here alive.
The ships are readied to sail. Jimbei bundles Luffy gently into Ace’s arms. Ace holds him, trying to remember how to be a person, and has a terrible moment of indecision.
His nakama pile onto the Moby and he doesn’t follow. He’s frozen. He knows they’ll be pursued, probably to the ends of the earth. With the sheer amount of resources already expended and the entire world watching, the World Government has too much to lose. They won’t just let him go. Ivankov said Luffy needed treatment, but he won’t be able to get it if they’re running for their lives. He won’t be safe.
I don’t know what to do, he thinks, his heart racing double-time, adrenaline bitter in the back of his throat, his brother heavy in his arms. The armada is beginning to set sail, ships pulling away one by one. He’s bringing almost certain doom down on whichever vessel he boards. His friends are waiting. Luffy needs help. I don’t know what to do.
Through the smoke, he sees a glimmer of color in the ocean. He turns his head in time to watch a submarine surface.
The sea spills off the smooth sides in a thundering rush and then a water-tight hatch swings open. A young man steps onto the small deck, crossing all the way to the rail in quick strides. He has dark eyes and tattoos and kind of an air of walking tragedy. The Jolly Roger painted on the sub is vaguely familiar, but Ace has no idea who the fuck this guy is or what he’s doing here, the very last place a pirate with no stake in the war ought to be.
It’s a moment of pure absurdity. Ace is beginning to think he might have snapped in Impel Down.
Then the strange pirate calls out, “Bring Strawhatter to me—I’m a doctor!”
Ace is running across the wharf without another thought. A hand catches his arm before he can leap off the edge onto the submarine, and he turns with his teeth bared, but it’s Marco. Exhausted, bloodied Marco, who looks both tired of Ace’s shit and unrelentingly fond of him at the same time, who just fought in a war for him and threw his whole body into protecting Ace’s brother when he couldn’t protect himself.
He reaches around Luffy and puts something in Ace’s pocket. When it squirms disconcertingly for a minute, Ace realizes it must be a baby snail phone. Then he squeezes Ace’s arm and steps away.
“Okay, crazy,” Marco says, every bit as though nothing between them has changed, “now you can go.”
Behind Marco, Whitebeard is still alive. Shanks is holding the outcome of the war in his bare hands. Luffy makes a quiet sound of pain against Ace’s throat, barely even lucid anymore, and the pirate on the submarine shouts, “Come on!”
Ace has known from a young age that survival is a stolen good. He’s never known it to be given freely, every single person around him trying to push into his hands, willing him to grasp it.
He’s always clutched at life stubbornly, selfishly, outright refusing to die because he made two seperate promises to two separate brothers and they’re more important than his spite or pride. He’s a child again, running back into the wilderness that raised him, plunging headlong into the unknown because fear is for people who can afford it.
“See you later,” he tells Marco. He doesn’t have time to say everything he needs to say.
He holds Luffy tighter and takes the leap.