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Everyone’s dressed in black.
Black tuxedos, ironed and pressed. Black loafers, polished and shined. Black blazers pulled over black dresses with black heels. Luffy pulls at the suit too tight around his body, the fabric itching his skin, and Gramps swats at his hand from where they stand near the podium.
Marco’s talking now. His suit is navy blue. It’s not bright, not lively or free, but it’s different and Luffy can appreciate that. The man speaks with a quivering voice and tears in his eyes. His hair was combed back, but it’s starting to come loose with how much he ruffles his own hair as he talks.
“He was a good guy,” Marco says and he laughs, a wet sound. “A lot of people don’t know it, but he was. He was a good, honest-to-god guy. I remember this—this one time, when our little high school crew was hanging out near the mall.
“We see this little guy, all gangly and skinny, getting tossed around by a couple thugs. And we were young then, maybe fourteen or fifteen, and every teenage boy’s immediate reaction is to run off, get out his phone and pretend he doesn’t see anything. Maybe everyone’s reaction, probably.
“But Ace wasn’t like that. He stopped all of us and calls out to those thugs to back off. Let the kid be. They turn on him and I swear, I haven’t ever seen someone get punched in the face and smile afterward. The guy even had rings on, left a couple nasty cuts on Ace’s face, and before any of us knew what was happening, all those thugs were down on the floor.
“It was amazing, honestly. The little kid they were beating up, he got to his feet, tried paying Ace with what was probably fifteen bucks worth of nickels. But Ace just pats his back and gives the kid his number in case ‘he needs more protecting.” Marco swallows, clearing his throat, but when he talks again his voice is more broken than before. “Sorry. Sorry, it’s just…that was five years ago now. I thought…”
“Thank you,” Gramps says gruffly and the man takes his cue, stepping away from the podium and going to sit down in the pews. He’s dressed in the same suit as Luffy so they can match. Give an appearance, apparently, upholding rep even as his adoptive grandson lays dead before everyone’s eyes. The old man turns to Luffy and the boy can feel his stomach drop. “Luffy, would you like to say some words?”
He can feel all eyes on him. They’re all curious, wanting to know what he’ll say. Wanting to know if he’ll tell them what happened, how Ace really died, even though the only other person allowed to know that was Gramps.
Luffy glanced at the crowd. Everyone’s there, from Gramps’ fellow marines to Ace’s old buddies to family friends to Luffy’s friends, and he catches the eye of Zoro. He’s wearing a suit, too, but it’s gray with a red tie.
Red. Ace had loved red. His beads were buried with him.
What he would do to feel those beads one more time.
“Luffy?” Gramps repeats and there’s careful pity to mask the impatient tone building behind his words.
“I don’t think I can.”
Everyone watching is silent. The friends there, the ones like Marco and Zoro and Nami and Usopp and Sanji and Thatch, don’t have the prying eyes, the curious faces, but all of those marines do. They want to know what happened to great Admiral Garp’s trouble grandson.
Luffy takes a deep breath and moves to the podium, seeing the approval in his grandfather’s eyes. It won’t be there for long.
He’ll give them what they want. He’ll give it to them because Ace deserves for his story to be told. He’ll give it to them because Garp doesn’t deserve to say what will be done with his older brother’s legacy. But most of all, he’ll give it to them so at least someone will know the feeling of blood seeping through his fingers.
Luffy adjusts the mic so it’s closer to his lips. “Ace—” But the feedback rings so horribly in his ears, he cringes, the audience making faces of distaste. He moves it a little farther away, but still close enough for his words to reverberate through the church they all stand in. “Ace was my big brother. He was a friend. He was—he was everything, to a lot of people, including me. It’s been five days since he died.
“It’s not fair. He was only twenty; most people don’t know it, just looking at him, because he’s always had such a tough face, even when we were young. He’s always been an adult and also, somehow, he’s always been a kid.
“The day that he died, though, he was a kid. When he looked me in the eyes and thanked me for—for loving him, he was a kid. And it’s not fair that he died a kid and it’s not fair that we’re here, standing over his body like some kind of artifact in a museum—”
“Luffy,” Gramps warns, beginning to move forward, but Luffy keeps talking.
“He wanted to be cremated. He wanted to be spread into the ocean, to be free. That’s what he told me when we were kids. A lot of you know that when he was younger, he…he spoke of death like a friend, almost. I’m sure a lot of you think that’s how he died, hanging himself or taking too many dumb pills, but that isn’t right.
“He died because he was destined to die.”
***
Luffy was in school doing a group project when his phone started ringing. It was a warbled sound—a result of dropping his phone in water one too many times—but works nonetheless.
Around the fourth ring, Nami smacked his arm, snapping his attention away from drawing little smiley faces on their diagram about the economic decline in the years leading up to the Great Depression. “Are you just going to leave that ringing for the rest of class?” she demanded and he realized then that Sanji and Robin, their two other group members, were staring as well.
Luffy blinked, then snorted. “My bad. Sorry.” He fished around in the pockets of his jacket; he hates wearing coats, but it’s snowing outside and there’s no way any of his friends or family would let him run outside with shorts and a T-shirt.
Ace’s profile picture, fast asleep with a puddle of drool beginning to form on the desk he’s laying on and Sharpie scribbled on his face—courtesy of Luffy’s artistic streak—popped up. Luffy declines, turning back to his school work just as Nami sees the smiley faces and starts yelling, when the phone starts ringing again.
He hangs up. Ring. Hang up again. Ring.
Eventually, he rose to his feet with a sigh, heading out of the library and accepting the call. “Ace, I’m really really sorry I ate your leftovers for breakfast, but Gramps hasn’t gone shopping yet so it’s not my fault there was nothing to eat—”
“Lu,” the voice was ragged, either pained or winded or maybe both. “I need you.” There was the sound of glass shattering and the line went dead.
Luffy skipped class before. Once, he walked out while the principal was passing by, and he didn’t bat an eye. In a matter of seconds, Luffy’s off campus, rushing to the beat-up mustard yellow Mustang that Gramps gave to him for his sixteenth birthday, racing down to the parking lot of the community center nearby.
When he got there, he didn’t see them at first, but when he did, it’s impossible to forget.
There’s blood on the asphalt. A car—Ace’s car, a red Mazda with broken headlights—has its window bashed in, glass shards all over the seats, and that’s when Luffy slows the Mustang down, clamoring to get out of the door.
That’s when he heard it.
The laughter.
“What’re you gonna do, eh?” a man, tall and broad, smirked. He wore oil-splattered jeans and an American flag shirt. He spat on the ground and that’s when Luffy saw him.
Ace, bloody and beaten, laying on the floor. One of his eyes was swollen shut and he was trembling, perhaps a product of fear with the circle of towering men above him or of cold, his shirt torn and bloody just like everything else about him.
“I’m—I don’t mean any harm,” Ace said, voice level enough. “I was just trying to get directions. My little brother, he goes to high school nearby, I need to drop off his lunch—” His words are cut off as one of the men kicks him in the ribs. The groan that follows is guttural and agonized.
“Trash. That’s what you fucking are, you know that?” He spat on the ground, just barely missing Ace’s face. “We were all firefighters in New York, back when your fucking father decided to blow up the Empire State Building and everything within a half mile radius. Do you know how many people were killed? Your father ran back then, with his wife. She was pregnant, almost given birth. We chased ‘em down, shot them dead, but not before we lost track of that baby.” His scowl twisted into a grin and somehow that was worse. “Not until word spread that Gol D. Roger’s scum was roaming around town.”
“I don’t take account of my father,” Ace said through gritted teeth. Another kick and Luffy was rushing toward them, a shout on his lips that died as he saw his brother still talking even through the most brutal beating of his life. “He—he was a bad man. A horrible man. But I’m not him.”
“You have his blood. That’s enough,” another man said and he was dragging Ace up by the tatters of his shirt, dropping him face down against the curb, a second man adjusting the twenty-year-old’s jaw around the cement. He was going to curb stomp him.
“Leave him alone!” Luffy cried out. The circle of men looked at him with scowls on their faces.
“A kid,” one of the men noted with amusement on his face. “Piss off. This isn’t a playground.”
“That’s my older brother,” Luffy scowled, pushing the man trying to balance his boot over Ace’s head. The man stumbled away, but suddenly Luffy was the center of their attention, glints in their eyes. Ace was rising to his feet, but he was too slow from his injuries.
It was fine. Luffy had gotten into school fights before, back from people like Arlong, a senior trying to bully Nami around back when they were in freshman year, to Big Mom, a concerningly overweight substitute teacher who had picked on Sanji.
Still, sizing up the men, he knew this was going to be worse.
“His brother. Are you Roger blood too?” one of them sneered.
“Our job was to get rid of the vermin on the streets.” The man wearing the American flag shirt drew forward until Luffy could smell his breath, sour and warm. “I guess we found two right here, ready to be exterminated.”
He reached into his jacket.
“Akainu,” one of the men started, some kind of warning.
Luffy didn’t process the click of the gun before it was too late.
He didn’t see the man lifting the weapon , raising it in the air.
But he did see the way Ace lunged forward, taking the bullet before it could reach Luffy.
From there on, it was a blur. The man shot again. Again and again and Luffy was crying out as his older brother slumped to the ground.
The door of the community center was opening; someone was coming out, having heard the gunshots, and just like that, those men were gone, hurrying into their truck and speeding away.
He didn’t know what was going on. Ace was in his arms, eyes blown too wide, and his breathing was coming out too hard, too fast, the blood spreading through his shirt. He had been shot three times: once in the thigh, once in the stomach, and once in the chest
“Luffy,” Ace wheezed. He was crying.
His older brother. Crying.
“No,” the seventeen-year-old whispered. “No, no—Ace, what are you doing? You have to get up, we have to go find them and beat their asses. Don’t you know anything? We…we have to go, right now, before they get away—”
Ace clasped his hand. It was enough to silence him. Sirens were blaring; someone had called 911, but they were too far away. “Luffy.”
“We have to go. We have to, c’mon.” Please, Luffy had thought, please get up. Please stop crying.
”I’m—I’m sorry,” Ace managed. “For when we were younger. I didn’t say it back then and I haven’t said it as much as I should now, but thank you.”
“What?” the younger asked and his voice was shaking.
“Thank you,” Ace whispered, a trembling grin on his face. “Thank you for loving me.”
His eyes closed.
And that was the day Portgas D. Ace died.
***
Silence.
The entire church, all the people on the pews with their black suits and ties and dresses, silent. Luffy swallows, realizing then that there’s tears on his cheeks, and he wipes them away. His tongue is heavy in his mouth and his throat is dry. “The paramedics didn’t even try CPR. Did you know that? They just…took him away.”
And then everything’s going on at once.
The marines at the audience are on their feet, spewing demands and questions. Ace, Garp’s grandson, couldn’t be the son of Gol D. Roger. It didn’t make sense, not to them, and Luffy could see the way their faces had morphed from sympathy to something new, something angry, accusatory, like somehow, just because they now knew the truth of Ace’s lineage, it changed who he had been. Gramps pulled Luffy away from the podium, but that was okay, because he was already stepping away, racing out of that goddamned church as quickly as he could.
The fresh air was cold, but he was shedding the black blazer to expose the white button up underneath, desperately loosening the cursed tie making it hard to breathe. But even as the tie was gone and the jacket thrown to the floor, he was still choking, still drowning, the tears coming hot and quick and splattering onto the ground below.
Drip.
Blood. It was all over his hands, on the floor, and he couldn’t breathe, eyes squeezed shut, except when he opened them, it was tears on his hands, rain on the cement, the clouds overhead thick with precipitation. It rained and rained and rained and Luffy sat there outside the church, not caring about how the mud got on his suit or how the rain got in his hair, just sitting there and sobbing until he couldn’t anymore.
The door creaked open behind him. He didn’t try getting to his feet or rubbing his swollen eyes.
It wasn’t a marine demanding more information. It wasn’t Gramps trying to scold him. It wasn’t Marco choking on his sobs after the story of how his best friend truly died.
Instead, it was his friends.
Zoro, Nami, Sanji, Usopp, the four of them seeing him sitting there on the ground. Instead of making him get up, go back in there and pay his respects like he should have, they sat with him. Black shoes, black dress, black suits, all piled up there together in the rain, shivering yet not complaining.
Others came, too. Robin, who had canceled on her college course math exam to be there at the funeral. Brooke, who had agreed to be part of the church choir singing their mourning songs. Franky, who had spent time doing repairs for the church so it would be in good condition by the time the memorial came.
It was Zoro who spoke first. Surprising and yet not all the same, because he had always been so caring, even with his rough exterior. Like Ace. “He was a good guy.”
Luffy exhaled in what could have been a laugh or a sniffle. “Yeah. Yeah, he was.”
Nami shifted so she was facing him, fishing something out of her jacket. “Your grandpa gave this to us when he saw we were walking out here. He…he said he wanted to give it to you himself after all of this, but—couldn’t. Not now.”
Brown leather.
A wallet.
Luffy frowned, accepting it. Nami, seeing his confusion, swallowed as she opened it for him.
One credit card. Way too many gift cards for random fast food restaurants. Ten dollars in cash and two more in coins. And there, instead of a driver’s license or I.D card, was a weathered picture of three little boys gathered together.
The one on the left with blond hair and a reserved smile.
The one in the center with wild eyes and an even wilder grin.
And the one to the right with a nasty scowl and a red bead necklace.
Luffy sobbed as his friends sat around, sad looks on their faces.