Work Text:
Ace’s skin is burning. There are flames licking at the freckles on his arms. He pats at it, because that is what Sabo has told him and Luffy to do a million times before, but the panic in his throat claws through rational thoughts. His skin burns, but it doesn’t hurt.
His arms are bigger than they should be. The sky is clear, not a cloud in sight, and instead of ash on his tongue, there is a spray of saltwater against his cheek. His shoulders are a bright beacon under the relentless sun, lit up in orange and gold. His skin burns, but it doesn’t melt.
“Geez, captain, I know you don’t need sunscreen, but try not to burn off ours.” A man in a mask, a dollop of sunscreen on his cheeks yet to be smeared out, bats at the air in Ace’s general direction. “One of these days you’re going to light the ship on fire by accident and I am not going to be the one to explain it to Mihar.”
Mihar?
“Huh?” Ace smacks his lips and tilts his head at this strange man. A hat, the string of it around Ace’s neck, falls off. It isn’t on fire, but the soft brush of suede leather against his uncovered back is familiar.
(Is it? He’s never owned a hat before.)
“Ace? You good?” The man reaches out a hand and Ace jerks back.
There is a retort on his lips, along the lines of I’m good, or don’t bother. Except he opens his mouth, and instead of tasting salt water and fresh air, he nearly retches. Smelly feet and something sour invades his mouth. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he never reaches his lips. It hits something soft, fleshy, and decidedly rubber.
Ace blinks awake to the sound of a sleeping jungle outside, gunk gathered at the edge of his eyes, and Luffy’s left foot in his face.
(But… he’d been older, hadn’t he? Who was the guy in the mask? What the Hell is a Mihar? )
Ace shoves an elbow in Luffy’s ribs and turns to lie on his side. Sabo is snoring in his ear and his body feels entirely too warm in the hot, humid, summer night. Ace closes his eyes and thinks nothing more of the strange dream.
***
He doesn’t tell anyone about his dream. In fact, Ace is far too busy with dine and dashes to spare it another thought. Fishing Luffy out of various creatures’ mouths is a full time occupation anyway, and making sure that Sabo suffers crushing defeats in their training sessions keeps his mind off of it.
It works for a while.
Until it doesn’t.
Ace falls asleep in the middle of a bowl of bear stew. Winter has crept up on them, slow and steady like all the years before, when Ace’s eyelids start to droop and his breathing slows down. It has been happening more often. These weird, sudden moments when his body decides that staying awake is the stupidest thing on the planet, and Ace can feel a decent amount of soup invading his nostrils as he conks out.
Usually, his brothers will make sure he doesn’t get himself killed. Usually, he’ll wake an hour later with a blank space in his head and go right back to yelling at Luffy for stealing his food, or wrestle off Sabo before he can finish playing connect-the-freckles on his cheeks with a permanent marker.
Strangely enough, this time, Ace closes his eyes and when he blinks them open again, it is no longer winter. He isn’t in a jungle, sitting by a campfire surrounded by his brothers. It is night, even though he knows the sun was still making its way across the horizon when he nodded off.
“You awake?”
A man nudges at Ace’s shoulder and he jerks away. His hands are big again. There is a familiar hat on his head, orange leather in his periphery. He is in a cave somewhere, and the man next to him has hair as red as blood.
A scar over his eye, three neat lines, and only one arm.
Shanks? It must be Shanks, based on the things Luffy has told him.
What a weird dream to have about a person he has never seen or met before.
***
He tells no one, but the dreams persist.
Unrelenting little things that attack his brain whenever he keels over in a bush and snores away for half an hour while Luffy dumps a handful of leaves down the front of his shirt. Sabo braids his hair, whenever Ace falls asleep like that, and while he yells and hisses at the sight of it when he inevitably wakes up, he never unravels them from his hair either.
Sabo pretends not to notice, but he does notice when Ace wakes up, jittery and gasping after another attack. “Ace?” He calls, one hand firmly grasping the back of Luffy’s tank top as the little idiot tries to catch a frog in a nearby stream.
It takes him a minute to just – breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
The sun is too bright and his heart thumps thumps thumps in his chest. He curls a fist against it, pounding and coughing. “Ace?” His brother calls again, and he wants to answer, but he can’t.
(He can’t remember the dream this time, but he knows he was older again.
Strength had been wired into his very core, a grin on his lips and something on his back that he could only catch a glimpse of in passing. A mark, maybe, or a tattoo. It had been warm at first, the dream, but then something had intruded on the very edges, growing bigger and bigger and bigger until it stole the air from his lungs and choked him where he stood.
There was darkness clinging to his throat.)
Whatever it is, is still there.
It sticks to his esophagus like gooey slime that he can’t hack up no matter the coughing fit that he is throwing. Sabo lets go of Luffy and their youngest brother tumbles down on his ass, eyes finally leaving the jumping, scared as shit frog.
They both look at Ace, and he wishes that they didn’t.
His brothers are going to watch him die, choking on something stupid he must have inhaled during his sleep.
“Ace!” Sabo leaps to his feet, crossing the clearing in two quick bounds and then he is next to Ace, crouched down and plastering his warm hand on his back.
(It’s not warm enough. It isn’t his flames, cradling him from the inside out. It’s wrong. It’s–)
He slaps him hard. A flat palm right on Ace’s back, again and again and again, until something comes loose inside of his suffocating chest. “Ack!” Nothing pops out of his mouth. There is nothing to see, nothing different about the second before this one, but Ace inhales a gulp of air and this time it goes down properly.
Tears dribble down his cheeks, eyes red and spit dripping from the edge of his lips.
“What happened?” Sabo keeps his hand on his back, rubbing circles on the skin.
He has no answer for his brother.
Because dreams can’t hurt someone, but it very much felt like this one tried its damn hardest to kill him off on its own. It is stupid, and it doesn’t make any sense, so Ace shakes his head and opens his mouth–
“Ah! Ace is crying! Crybaby Ace!” Luffy points at him, a wide grin on his stupid, rubbery face.
Ace promptly gets on his feet and charges at him. “No, I’m not!” He chases him for a good minute, before he does a running tackle and grabs his annoying little brother around the waist, dragging him down into the dirt for a wrestling match that he knows he will win.
At the edge of the clearing, sitting by the bush that carries an indent from Ace’s sleeping form, Sabo chews on his lip. That calculating, blue stare never leaves his two brothers, their clothes muddied through and through as they kick and punch each other in the muck. Sabo doesn’t ask Ace to explain, but even if he had, Ace wouldn’t have known how to.
***
Sabo doesn’t call him out on it when he steals a nightlight from High Town.
Luffy has never been afraid of the dark, even when they moved into their little tree house, but ever since that choking, pitch black dream, Ace finds himself jumping at shadows. So he steals a nightlight a week after his nap nearly killed him, and when he brings it back, he tells Sabo it is for their little brother.
“So he won’t bother us if he wakes up scared,” he says, and lights it, even when Luffy frowns and tries to poke a finger into the open flame. “It’d be nice to sleep through the night for once.”
He knows he has been made the second the words leave his mouth. Ace averts his eyes, taking in the well worn wooden flooring of their home. It is wet with moisture from the melting snow, and come next winter season, they will need to replace it all before it rots.
“Sure,” Sabo shrugs, and spends the next ten minutes lecturing both him and Luffy about the dangers of an open flame. It is nothing they haven’t heard before, but if it stops Sabo from asking–
Asking what, exactly? About why he can’t stand to be in the dark anymore? Why he always makes sure that Luffy and Sabo are close by? Why their pantry is always stocked with non-perishables? Or why the smell of burnt meat sometimes makes him want to retch?
Ace doesn’t have the answers, but he hopes that the dreams aren’t real.
Because if the darkness is real, he doesn’t want to ever meet it.
***
Sometimes, he dreams of Sabo – older, scarred, and still wearing the same top hat that has always been on his head. He looks through Ace and says, “Fire Fist,” like it is a name. A title.
His title.
(Like his brother doesn’t know how to say his name anymore, and part of Ace knows that he doesn’t. Something, someone, took his brother’s memory of him, and Ace doesn’t know how to give it back.)
Sometimes, he dreams of Luffy, holding him. His hair is sweaty, there is blood in the corner of his mouth, and Ace wants to tell him to wipe it off but his voice doesn’t work anymore. None of his organs really do, because there is a hole in his chest and breathing hurts. Everything hurts.
He always dies at the end of those dreams, and every time he wakes, he crawls next to Luffy; all of eight years old, limbs akimbo and a snot bubble coming out of his nose. Ace puts his flat palm on that tiny chest, watches it rise and fall until his eyes slip shut again, a familiar heartbeat thumping beneath his fingertips.
***
Nightmares, he tells himself most days, when he wakes in cold sweat. Stupid, nonsensical fantasies, on the days when he wakes up from unfamiliar people calling him by name; not with hate, but with a familiarity and kindness that someone with his blood doesn’t deserve.
Prophecies, he hopes for the first time, on the day when Dogra walks through the door and tells him that Sabo is gone. Dead. Shot by some piece of shit noble who couldn’t care less about a child yearning for freedom on the seas.
“Sabo is gone,” they tell him, over and over again.
(But that isn’t the truth, is it? Ace had seen him in a dream, once – older, with that same, stupid top hat on his curly hair, one side of it nestled over a gnarled, grim scar that spanned from above his eyebrow and down his jaw. That Sabo hadn’t been twelve. That Sabo had still been breathing, still alive.)
Liars, Ace never says, tied to a tree stump and trashing so hard that his skin chafes and the rope digs bloody grooves into his flesh. Maybe they are right, though. Maybe his brother died in the shallow waters of Goa Kingdom, in pursuit of his dreams. Maybe they will never see each other again, and Ace’s dreams are just dreams.
So he promises Luffy he won’t die, on their hill overlooking the sea. Because if his dreams aren’t real, and Sabo really is dead, then Ace’s death – the one he dreams of more often than not, these days – is just a figment of his imagination, too.
***
He waves goodbye to his little brother years later, the wind in the sail of his small boat and an orange hat on his head. His mind is full of people he has never met and adventures he has never undertaken.
(There was a giant of a man once, drinking from a barrel of sake while patting Ace’s head. “Son,” he had called him, and Ace had woken to tears dripping down his cheeks. He had dreamt of an island, where children didn’t have enough to eat, and a little girl with purple hair who had stuck to him like glue. There had been people who cared for him in these dreams, no matter his blood, and Ace remembers names that he has never heard said out loud before.
Pops. Marco. Deuce. Mihar. Yamato. Otama– )
Ace waves goodbye to Luffy, and sets sail for Paradise.
Sabo is dead, and his dreams are just dreams.
Until they aren’t.
Stranded on an island in the East Blue, Ace meets a masked face and introduces himself. “I’m Ace,” he says, and sticks out his hand for the other man to shake.
“You can call me Deuce,” the man says, grasping Ace’s hand in his.
A coincidence, he tells himself, as they scavenge the island for food and find a fruit. They split it in two and bite into it. It tastes like wet cloth, stale orange juice and something that has been rotting in the sun for weeks. Fighting back a gag, he scarves down the rest of it and pretends it isn’t the most vile thing he has ever had in his mouth.
The dreams aren’t real, he thinks to himself, when he and Deuce get the Hell off the island as Ace lights himself on fire like he has always known how to do it.
***
Then they meet Mihar. And Banshee. Cornelia–
Kotatsu.
“Why do we need a cat on our ship?” Saber asks, and Ace doesn’t have an answer for him. He can’t tell them that Kotatsu helps with his panic attacks, or that having narcolepsy attacks around the cat means he gets to wake up to a rumbling purr and soft fur in his hands instead of an aching back.
“Who doesn’t want a cat on their crew?” He laughs, and his
family
crew joins in.
They call him peculiar, sometimes. The way he picks out people from a crowd and knows that they are meant to be part of his ship. It isn’t normal.
How he tells stories about Luffy and all the trouble he gets up to. How his little brother took down a Warlord and–
“Didn’t you say he is still in East Blue? How did he take down a Warlord?”
Shrugging, Ace bites his tongue.
With time, they come to accept that sometimes Ace has trouble telling left from right, and up from down. Sometimes, he calls out for people who have never been on their crew, and whom Ace has never met. Sometimes, Ace wakes up and thinks he should be dead.
Instead, he is alive and breathing, sailing on waters that Sabo never got a chance to see.
Dreams are just dreams, after all, no matter how perfectly they line up with reality.
***
Before they reach Wano, Ace has them stock up on food, water – anything and everything, to the point that it nearly tanks their entire treasury. It leaves Mihar in a hissy fit, and Deuce scratching his head when he enters the hull and sees dried fruit instead of gold.
“Uh, captain, I’m pretty sure we can do a grocery run on the next island.”
Mihar nods along to Deuce’s words, his square sunglasses falling down his nose.
Ace opens his mouth and says “No,” before he can think the better of it. His crew stare at him, brows furrowing. His first mate, always the one to bridge the gap between Ace’s discordant words and the rest of their crew, waves a hand for him to go on.
He takes a deep breath, turns his gaze skyward and tries to swallow through the expanding cotton that has taken up residence in his dry mouth. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and the course they plotted last night shouldn’t bring them in the path of any storm.
“Just–” Ace begins, and then stumbles when Kotatsu rubs against his legs. Threading his fingers in the coarse fur, he clears his throat. “Just a feeling, I guess. Sorry for not running it by you guys first.”
He is the captain, he knows, but he values his crew’s input and only rarely does he not consult them first. But this… This feels right and–
They shipwreck at Wano.
They drag themselves out of a broken Piece of Spadille, food storage still intact, and come across a small village. Ace has half a mind to just break out of the rope keeping him tied to a tree. Wants to tell them all to shove off and leave his crew alone, give them back their food– except he spots a tiny, round face with purple hair and sunken cheeks.
Otama.
He gives them their food, their drink, anything that survived their rough landing.
Just dreams, he tells himself, as the little girl bites into an apple for the first time and starts crying. Just dreams, he thinks, when they spend far too long in the little village and his heart yearns to steal away the kid. Just a dream, he insists, when he throws himself at Kaido’s base of operations and ends up making friends with his son.
“I’m Yamato,” the man says, swinging a club and fracturing two of Ace’s ribs. “Son of Kaidou.”
They drink through the night, and Ace tries to forget that he already knew his name.
***
Ace sits in a cave next to Red-Haired Shanks and thinks, not for the first time, that maybe his dreams aren’t just dreams. “Hey,” he nudges Shanks, three bottles of beer down and a flush on his cheeks. “Do you ever have these super vivid dreams? Like, of people you haven’t met, and you think they’re just dreams, but then you meet them in real life and… Well, suddenly they don’t feel like just dreams anymore, ya’ know?”
Shanks, ultimately, doesn’t seem to know because he raises one eyebrow and slaps Ace so hard on his back that he drops his beer bottle. “What kind of question is that?” The grin on his lips is wide, wide, wide and something in his eyes sends a shiver down Ace’s spine.
Ice settles in his veins.
“So it’s not normal?”
“Can’t say it is, kiddo. You been having them for long?” He sips from a mug, upper lip coming away from it covered in froth. Licking it off, the Emperor clicks his tongue. “It might have something to do with Haki. I’ve heard of a few people who can see into the future – anywhere from a few seconds to several hours. Who is to say that prophetic dreams aren’t a byproduct of that same Haki?”
“Huh.”
He isn’t sold on it. Shanks doesn’t seem like the smartest of the bunch, despite his bounty and title as an Emperor, and Ace spends the rest of the night mulling over the explanation. Does that mean every dream he has had has been true?
Is Sabo alive?
Is the darkness real?
***
The dreams aren’t truly real, not to him, until the last piece of the puzzle slides into place when he is covered in sweat, grime and dirt, four days sleep deprived and coming off of a marathon fight with a Warlord named Jimbei. He throws up a wall of flame between him and his crew while he urges them to get the fuck out of there, and looks Whitebeard in the eye.
Something angry sits in his chest (something warm, something familiar), and Ace declares, “I’ll take your head, old man,” for all of the Emperor’s crew to hear. It elicits laughter, a few scoffs, and mocking jeers.
Whitebeard does not laugh at him. “Cheeky brat,” he throws him a smile, pounding a giant naginata into the ground and putting out Ace’s fire without so much as a glance in its direction. “Become my son.”
The captain of the Spade Pirates doesn’t say yes.
He wants to, by the seas, he wants–
Ace aims for the man’s head and gets thrown to the ground.
His crew gets taken. His ship too, for that matter.
He hisses and spits all the way through his subsequent capture. Ignores the way his brain tells him half of the names of the Whitebeard crew before they introduce themselves to their new ‘brother.’ Ignores how his crew fit seamlessly with theirs, and how Whitebeard sees each of his assassination attempts coming. Ignores the way his feet know their way around the Moby Dick from day one.
Marco and Thatch attempt to lure him in with food, and Ace bites his tongue when the chef asks if there’s anything he wants to eat. Your sea king stew, he finds himself thinking, when he doesn’t even know whether the man is a good cook or not.
Every corner of the Moby Dick is familiar, and every face is one that Ace recognizes from his dreams.
Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence–
They are not coincidences.
Not when Whitebeard tells him one last time, “Become my son.”
And Portgas D. Ace says, “Yes.”
The world shifts half an inch to the right and something within the universe itself slots into place. The tattoo on his back is a promise and a visual representation of his home. In months, the title of Second Division Commander becomes as familiar as his given name.
He sits at the table for dinner, surrounded by his fellow commanders and Whitebeard. “Pops, can you pass me the salt.” A handful of his new brothers gasp, loud and audible, and it is the first time he calls Whitebeard his Pops. The salt shaker gets passed to him, and as Ace pours a hideous amount of salt into his stew just to make Thatch cry, he finally knows for sure.
The dreams are real.
And Ace doesn’t quite know what to do with that.
***
Living on the Moby Dick is a bit like never waking up from one of his dreams. He knows his way around the kitchen, knows where Thatch tends to hide desserts and snacks, and he knows how many blankets Marco, the First Division Commander likes to sleep in. Knows that the first two blankets will always end up on the outer edges of his nest on the deck, but that blanket three and four have to be extra fluffy, because they line the inside. (The Phoenix prefers blue, but he will take the occasional orange blanket if someone shoves it in his direction.)
Whitebeard cocks an eyebrow, alongside nearly all of the other Whitebeards, but it is Vista who first deigns to comment on his random knowledge about them.
“How do you know what brand of mustache gel I prefer?” The man asks, when Ace whips out a jar, still sealed with plastic, on the morning of the man’s birthday.
Picking at his earlobe, Ace cocks his head and leans out of the way of the ladle that Thatch hurls across the deck. It must hit its intended target, because someone squawks half a second later, and a chorus of Thatch! Thatch! Thatch! starts up from the corners of the partygoers.
“Don’t really know,” he shrugs, because it is as much part of the truth as might have been dreaming about the future for years. It also makes him sound slightly less insane, if only by an inch. “But did I guess right?”
Vista laughs. “You sure did, squirt!” It is loud and booming, so much like their Pops that Ace’s stomach twists itself into knots. Or maybe it is the twenty pancakes he had for breakfast. He hasn’t been a Whitebeard for long, has held the title of Second Division Commander for a terrifying two weeks and still isn’t used to the amount of paperwork it has brought him, but it feels right.
His dreams, no longer as vivid and hellbent on choking him to death in his sleep, have become sparse. On the rare nights when he does dream in color and sound and familiar faces that he has met already or has yet to meet, they are brighter. Because it is stupid, tiny, inconsequential things like Vista’s mustache gel, or Thatch’s pomade mix, or Izou’s silken kimono under his fingers, or Marco’s bird song around a roaring bonfire.
He dreams of only good things, and the dark hasn’t touched him in a long time.
***
Sabo, the fucker, is alive.
Ace is on a mission with Marco in tow, at one of their small islands after a report of some infighting between the locals. It is after he has been promoted as Second Division Commander of the Whitebeard pirates, a year into his new job. The Jolly Roger on his back is a vivid purple – almost as purple as Ace’s face while he attempts to stomp down an irrational wave of anger.
“Fire Fist,” the blond says, standing over a Vice-Admiral with a pipe in one hand. The scar on his face is large, covering one side entirely, and it is exactly as the face in Ace’s dream had been. A top hat perches on his head, and his eyes hold no recognition whatsoever.
“Sabo! You motherfu–” Ace jumps, frothing at the mouth and promptly scaring Marco into going full phoenix as the Second Division Commander bowls over the Revolutionary Army’s Chief of Staff. He doesn’t have time to explain to his fellow Whitebeards, jabbing one spit-slicked finger into the blond’s ear and wiggling it around in the most vicious wet willy he has ever forced upon his brother.
“Ew!” A pipe swings for him and Ace ducks, letting go of the struggling man.
“Do you have any idea who I am?!” Ace’s chest is pounding, his skin is too tight, and Kotatsu isn’t here to help him calm down. It doesn’t matter, though, because Sabo is sitting on the ground, eyes crossed as he stares at the half-naked, feral pirate who has just bowled him over and called him by his first name.
The blond clears his throat, one hand still clutching his pipe. “You’re Portgas D. Ace of the Whitebeard pirates. The… Second Division Commander?” It comes out low. Unsure and stilted. Wrong wrong wrong–
Ace lets out another scream, words devolving into growled, indecipherable syllables, and he drags Sabo into a noogie that is sure to leave him with a bald patch. “I’m your brother, you piece of shit!”
***
Marco gives him two weeks of shore leave.
“Stay with your brother,” he says, punting the last corrupt Marine of the island into the ocean with a well placed kick right in the solar plexus. The man groans, wheezes, his white coat already waterlogged and dragging him down into the depths of the sea. One hand reaches above the waves, clutching to the tiny dinghy where the rest of the corrupt Marine officers have been trying to make a hasty escape.
Marco’s nods at the Second Division Commander, his clothes giving way to blue flames and with a beat of his wings, Ace is left behind on a small island with the twin he thought had been dead for years. He had never dared to truly hope and now–
(Because hoping meant that Sabo might be alive, but also that the darkness is out there, waiting and waiting and waiting to claim him.)
“So, uh,” Sabo picks at the brim of the top hat in his hands. “You’re my brother?”
Why does it sound like a question?
The eyebrow he cocks at the revolutionary must convey his confusion, because Sabo plops the hat back onto his head and scratches at the border of his scar where the flesh turns pale. “You see, I’ve suffered from amnesia for quite a long time. So it’s a bit strange to have a Whitebeard Commander call me his brother. I don’t think I’ve ever sailed with an Emperor, but, well, maybe you can clear that up for me.”
The smile he gives is painted on. A quirk of his lips, a soft edge to his eyebrows.
His brother is a stranger, and Ace hates it. Hates every part of the man that stands before him, nearly an inch taller than him and still wearing the same noble clothes he once yearned to burn under an open sky.
Sabo pokes him in the cheek. Probably for the better, since Ace’s hair must have begun smoking, and the grip on his metal pipe hasn’t lessened one bit. “So, how exactly are we brothers”
Ace isn’t the right one to ask for this. On a good day, he can tell what memories are his. On bad days, he talks about things that haven’t happened and likely never will. (A burning flag at Enies Lobby, a bullet in Pops’ head, his little brother bouncing in the sky
laughing and laughing and laughing–
)
Ace doesn’t have all the answers to Sabo’s questions, but some of them are easy.
“How did we meet? When did we become brothers? So, you’re telling me that I didn’t sail with Whitebeard?”
Some of them… less so.
“How did you recognize me? Do you think I’ll get my memory back? Why isn’t Luffy and your last name the same?”
That last one is a bit like swallowing coal before he got his devil fruit. Highly unpleasant and extremely traumatic for both of them. Sabo’s world is turned on its head in the span of two weeks, while Ace hunkers down on the island and tries to sort through all of the information rattling around his skull.
He swallows down the stories and memories that he isn’t entirely sure of, but helps Sabo learn as much about their family as he can. It isn’t easy, and more than once they either break down crying or send their fists flying, just because they can.
Because Sabo is flesh and blood and breathing and alive.
It is all Ace could have ever hoped for.
How many dreams of his have come true already? Deuce, Yamato, Otama, Shanks, Pops, Sabo… The more faces he meets, the larger the shadows appear to become. Just how long does he have left until they swallow him whole?
***
The darkness wakes him.
Not the cloying, desperate slime that used to permeate his dreams nightly, but the nightlight in his commander’s cabin snuffing itself out. Groaning, turning towards the tiny lantern, he flicks out a finger and shoots a spark from the tip of it.
The wick lights again for a moment, sizzling. Wavering.
It goes out.
He sends another spark.
It doesn’t light.
“Oh for the love of…” He gets up, barefoot on the cold, wooden floor and fights off the shiver that rolls down his spine and into his limbs. His dreams had been quiet, for once. Just a bleak, empty space and no feelings. No faces crying out, no blood, no Luffy escapades that he hadn’t already had the pleasure of reading about in the papers.
He puts two fingers to the wick and lights his hand on fire for good measure. It hisses back to life, throwing his shadow into every corner of the cabin and Ace stamps down a wave of fear.
It is his own shadow staring back at him, nothing else.
The dark the dark the dark–
His stomach drops out from under him and a brilliant, sharp pain rings through his skull. He pants through the panic, the air in his room non-existent and even when he throws open the tiny scuttle, it doesn’t help.
From his bed, Kotatsu lifts his head, chest rumbling and eyes blinking in long, slow strokes. The cat gets up, slides his fur into Ace’s hand and guides him out the door. Up is down and left is right and Ace trusts Kotatsu blindly as they stumble through the dark hallway and out into the fresh night air on the top deck.
The deck where Marshall D. Teach stands over Thatch, knife in hand and a manic grin on his face.
“No!” A wave of flames leaves his hands, eating away at the Adam’s wood deck. Beside him, Kotatsu gives a piercing yowl, shrieking and spitting and hissing – sounds Ace has never heard the cat make before, and hopes to never hear again.
A door to the deck below swings open and Izou stands there in a night robe, Marco peering over his shoulder, and a sleeping mask still strapped to his forehead.
Whatever luck Ace has gathered throughout his lifetime is used in this one moment.
It takes them half a second to take in the scene – Teach rolling on the deck as flames melt away his skin and licks down to the bone. Thatch’s devil fruit, still whole and uneaten, clutched in one of the screaming man’s hands. In the other, a melted handle and a lump of steel fuses to his fingers as flames eat away at him. Thatch, on the deck, curled in fetal position and nursing a bleeding knife wound between two ribs.
Marco springs into action, human form giving way to burning blue in the shape of a phoenix. Shrieking, the bird puts out Ace’s flames, absorbs them into his own skin, and digs his claws deep, deep, deep into Teach’s neck. (No reprieve for traitors. No trial, when the first mate himself catches you red handed. No reason to wait for the inevitable execution.)
Izou slides in Thatch’s pooling blood, twisting his ankle as he flops down to apply pressure on the wound.
Sinking to his knees, Ace buries his face in Kotatsu’s fur and breathes through the darkness cloying at him from beyond his dreams and into his waking life.
***
Thatch lives.
He lives, and Marshall D. Teach dies the very same night he tried to murder part of their family. Pops pulls Ace aside the day after, one large, warm hand on his shoulder and steers him into the captain’s cabin.
“Son,” he says, those warm, cheerful eyes looking far too dull. The skin under his eyes has blackened in the last couple of hours, and the betrayal sits deep in the both of them. It stings every breath that Ace forces into his own body, and his exhales are sparks waiting to light the world on fire. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“How did you know to go to the deck when you did? Did you feel Teach’s Haki? Thatch’s?” Pops sighs, bone weary and Ace hates this.
Hates that the trust in their family has been splintered, even though his mind knows that Pop’s words aren’t an accusation. Ace’s tongue sits heavy in his mouth and for a moment he wonders what he can even say to that.
“I was having a panic attack and Kotatsu brought me outside…”
But it isn’t the entire truth and Ace is so, so tired. He slumps onto Pop’s bed and fists his hands into the sheets until his knuckles turn white. Then he talks.
He talks, and talks, and talks, and cries until he can barely get words out of his mouth.
From that very first dream, standing on a boat under the sun with a hat on his head and a crew he didn’t yet know. The fractured pieces in between, interwoven with a darkness that has tried to choke him again and again but never quite succeeded. When he dreamt of a scarred Sabo, only to find him later, alive and breathing.
How he knew about Pops before Pops knew about him.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” He hiccups, limbs trembling as his father sits besides him, stroking his hair.
“I suppose it doesn’t,” says Pops. “But whatever trouble those dreams have brought you, I am infinitely glad that they brought you to me. Without them, I might not have met you, and Thatch might have died last night. I owe them my thanks. I owe you my thanks.”
Ace sobs for another half an hour and Pops lets him.
He doesn’t have an answer as to why he has dreamt what he has dreamt, but maybe it is okay to not know. They brought him to his family, brought him to his friends, and reunited him with the brother he once thought dead.
Maybe that is all they were ever meant for.
***
Once Ace gets wind of Luffy having made it to the Grand Line, he gets permission from Pops for a brief vacation. He picks up Sabo from a backwater island with a corrupt monarchy, and together they sail for Alabasta.
“How do you know he’s in Alabasta?” his brother asks, raising an eyebrow.
Ace smiles and shrugs. The sun burns his skin, flames licking at his feet, his hair, his hat. Striker isn’t made for two people, but they make it work.
Under the night sky, and during every meal break, Sabo asks for clarification of memories and thoughts and stories that are missing pieces.
Tiny tidbits that have been coming back to him, or that he once deemed insignificant. Now they have begun making sense, because Ace can tell him that the reason he keeps picking up telescopes is because Luffy had asked them for one, once. That the pipe in his hands will always be his first choice for a weapon, because it is what they all three used when they were kids. Can answer why he looks at the beads around Ace’s neck and hat, but recalls ginger curls and the scent of smoke instead.
In return, Sabo shares what he can.
He doesn’t remember everything, but he remembers enough. (Ace couldn’t care less. He has his brother back, and it is not like his own head has ever truly made sense either.)
And once they stand on the deck of a small caravel, a smiling sheep as their figurehead and flying a jolly roger with a straw hat, Ace wouldn’t have it any other way. Luffy – their amazing, stupid, brilliant little brother – takes a moment to get with the program, but when he does, his face is a mess of snot, tears and joyful laughs.
Ace and Sabo give twin bows to the crew of the ship. “Thanks for looking after our little brother,” they say. “He can be quite a handful, so we appreciate it.”
They spend days running from the marines, pulling pranks on Smoker and dismantling a Warlord’s crime syndicate piece by piece. Every night, the three of them camp on the deck and look up at a swath of stars, making up constellations and sleeping in one big pile of limbs.
Keeping one hand around Luffy’s wrist and his forearm slung over Sabo’s chest, Ace slips into a dream without darkness for the first time in years. Within the week, the papers will write a story of a fallen Sir Crocodile and a freed island. He knows, as his eyes slip shut, that in a few years, the papers will tell the story of the fall of Mariejois, at the hands of the Revolutionaries. Within the next five, they will declare the new Pirate King to be Monkey D. Luffy.