Chapter Text
There is a great inexplicable and overwhelming fear that surges through Ace. His body quakes with unsettlement shivers from the passing arctic cold that shoots up his spine, and his mouth opens for a small gasp. He didn’t wake up from a nightmare. There was something else, something wrong. The Logia user stands up from his cot and exits his quarters in a mild panic, rushing towards somewhere he wasn’t really sure to. He walks through the ship’s halls, careful enough to find his footing but fast enough to not be too slugged with his movements. He makes his way to the rear deck but as he nears the exit at the end of the hall, he pauses, sensing something. He looks around, eyes blown wide, alert, alarmed, and unfocused; he tries to see through the bleary blur of his eyesight, the darkness of the Moby dick’s hall hindering him from his search in clarity. His mind only supplies him with a doable solution too late, for when he lights up his finger and uses it as a torchlight, the aftermath was the only thing that remained.
Body.
Knife.
Blood.
It’s the first thing Ace recognizes.
Thatch.
Stabbed.
Help.
Ace wastes no time, approaching the body. He shouts in hopes someone else on the ship would wake up and help.
Brother.
Killed.
Betrayed.
Ace tries to stop the bleeding, tries to hold everything in. His thoughts, emotions, the remains of his brother’s body, and everything pulling out of it. He doesn’t realize his clothes and body are stained with red, doesn’t realize that him pulling out the knife had made it worse. Ace is panicking. Ace is trying.
Ace is crying.
There are muffled noises, heavy and short footfalls that get louder, approaching the source of commotion—they heard Ace. But Ace doesn’t hear them, too focused on the lost warmth of the pale body that continued to bleed out on the deck, through his clothes, and on his hands. He doesn’t see them scrambling to get the nurses and medics nor is able to understand the movements of lips that whisper and shout in mixed and loud volumes. He only realizes what’s happening when they pull Thatch’s body away from him, the loss of contact somehow more morbid and horrid than when Ace had woken in fear and found his brother dead.
Ace moves forward to grasp the body back again, frantic and desperate. He wails as he had as a child, silent, broken, and fearful. His attempts are stopped by someone pulling and holding him back, but his mind right now could care less, too far gone into the scene of loss and murder, too worried to care about himself and others.
Except for Thatch.
Except for his dying brother.
Except for his dead brother.
Memories of a wild and raging fire burn through him, the smell of burnt flesh and crying children and elderly ring in his ears, and the sheer hopelessness he once told himself he’d never face again come back to hit him like a sea train.
Ace blacks out.
And he relives everything again.
In another lifetime, Thatch would have survived and Ace would be there with him, laughing along with the rest of his newfound family. In another life, they wouldn’t have known each other at all as they would have lived two separate lives that would have never intersected. In another time, they’d be enemies on the battlefield, pirate versus Marine. In an alternate reality, Ace would be the one who’d get stabbed and not Thatch.
But not in this one.
Ace finds great solace with his new friend, though he’d never admit it. The blonde boy who couldn’t have been any older than him, had teeth too white and clothes too fancy to be considered a regular habitant of the garbage dump Ace had frequented. The blonde had been too clear and polite with his words, his vowels rolled out too well out of his tongue, and Ace knew this boy was a noble hence his initial disdain for the boy. However, despite first impressions, the blonde noble boy had never given into Ace’s insistence of not being friends, he had not been scared off by Ace’s violent shoves and shouts of “Get away from me”. Maybe it was the annoying persistence or the tolerance that the boy had graced Ace with, but whichever one it was, it had been enough for Ace to relent.
The first time that Ace had even considered to call the boy his friend was when Ace had been sulking by the cliffside — the one where he had a perfect view of the sea and setting sun and all the vastness and comfort a passing breeze could offer him. The blue of the sea had shimmered in the reflection of the dying light and it had made Ace wonder if his infamous dead father had set out to capture the far end of the horizon, where the sea emulated tiny specks and sparks that looked like diamonds and treasure thanks to the sun. The thought makes his mind go down a rabbit hole of hypotheticals and speculations, conjuring instances and delusions as to how his life would have turned out if his father had been alive or if his father hadn’t been his father at all.
Ace doesn’t notice Sabo plopping down next to him, with all tired bones and short of breath. He does only a second later, when the blonde boy pats his back too hard, almost making Ace fall forward to the sea.
Ace makes an indignant noise at the act and glares at the blonde but Sabo smiles back, his white teeth shown but this time with a gaping hole. Sabo later tells him that he lost his tooth in an alley fight, against a guy that Ace had previously beaten up but had been planning to get back at the raven-haired boy. Ace never thanked Sabo for it, but he mumbles to the noble “maybe you aren’t so bad after all.” and that would have been enough.
In another lifetime they had been brothers, in all the ways that mattered except in blood. In another universe, they would have been rivals, frenemies, and at most strangers, with no attachments or strings to tie them together. There are timelines where they might have met each other as noble and pirate, celestial dragon and slave, and even Marines! But those things exist elsewhere, not here, not now .
There is pain this time, one that is more visceral and charring to his insides. It takes a brief second for Ace to realize that there’s a fist, coated with molten rock and magma, that had gone through him, and another to understand that it’s been pulled back. It leaves him empty, a feeling he’s no stranger to but it’s somehow different this time. Unlike his usual musings and sessions of self-loathing and reflection, the emptiness leaves him quiet and tired — accepting of a reality he had been so determined to change and live through.
Ace tries to laugh at the irony. Nothing really comes out.
Instead, he falls forward and takes comfort in the arms of his younger brother, the one he’d grown up with and promised to have lived for. He doesn’t bother to listen in to the surrounding panic and conflict, his consciousness and sight had begun to falter, eagerly tugging him to give. With all the strength he can muster, he whispers words of breath and end. All of which were lasting, brief, but all well-meaning. Ace thinks he’s given his gratitude this time but doesn’t say why. He doesn’t say thank you for the love he’s been given or the regret he has for being unable to see his brother live out his dream. He doesn’t say any of those things because this time, there was no time.
In another life, he would have said everything.
In another timeline, he would have seen everything.
In another universe, he would have lived. Been given more time.
But in this present, he loses something. And in the next, he’d lose everything.
Time was a funny thing to Ace. It was kind but unforgiving, abrupt but predictable, at least to a certain extent; it had continued giving Ace a small amount of awareness to live through his life over and over, again and again, all in repetitive and circular motions that differed vastly with each rendition. The bouts of consciousness came in like sea waves, premonitions, and feelings of deja vu that make Ace believe that he’s done something like this has gone through this, and even warns him when something was going to happen. Time had been kind enough to Ace to let him act on those bouts, giving him an unexplainable sixth sense that existed outside the realm of Haki or devil fruits; it had been kind enough to Ace to let him live through his regrets, to see his dreams alive, and to find his answers much quicker than when he had previously during the first time he had died. Ace doesn’t believe in God but he believes in time and all that it has given him. It loops around him, spinning Ace further into himself and all the possible alternate worlds and realities that could have happened, that did happen, and that wouldn’t happen. He thinks that all things considered, the time had been pretty kind to have shown him all these things, to have given him so many chances to change and refute the past realities he’s lived through. But with each one being better than the next, there is an afterthought of dread, one that fears a reality much worse and less kind than any that he’s been through.
Ace hopes the loop ends before he goes through that. But just like anyone else, time ends for no one.
This time Ace wouldn’t have remembered.
This time Ace wouldn’t have lived but rather survived.
This time wouldn’t be kind to Ace.
This time isn’t for Ace.
It starts when his mother dies, just right after giving birth. It starts when he wails for the first time, the loss of his birth mother’s warmth too clear and too sudden. It starts when Gol D. Roger had been there through everything, despite his sickness, watching his beloved die and lose the light in her eyes as she had given birth to their child named Ace.
Ace is cradled by neither his dead mother nor his dying father and is instead picked up by the midwife who had helped his mother through labor. The two leave the room, the midwife giving privacy to the grieving man and opting to comfort the new life that had been born from a tragedy. From a criminal. From a dead woman.
The obstetrician cleans Ace from the remaining fluids of labor, the stains of the baby's blood wiped off by a fluffy towel that seemed to gently comfort the newborn, hushing him into a restful silence. When Ace is cleaned and clothed, the nurse-midwife brings him back to the room of his birth. Ace’s now dead mother had her face covered with a white cloth, the grieving man no longer crying but glaring instead, red puffy eyes now pointed towards the child in the nurse’s arms. Like every sensitive crying baby, Ace cries from the direct animosity, his sobs, and screeches much louder than when he had been born. The nurse tries to calm him, hushing him with all the ease and gentleness she could muster and give. It doesn’t help and the grieving man’s look is only intensified by the crying sounds Ace makes.
Ace is then grabbed by the man, cradling the baby in an almost restrained harshness. The babe stops his wailing a few moments later and looks briefly at the new person holding him. Tears trickle by the babe’s cheek, the small face an angry red, a sign of stress and fluster, and the remnants of Ace’s crying fit. The animosity and resentment seemed to be clearer in the man’s eyes and for all the baby’s sensitivity, Ace should cry seeing as how he was now in the arms of the source of his earlier outburst. However, despite the darkened glare and look from his father, Ace’s cries and sniffles stop and are replaced by a sleepy smile of content. The tension in the room bleeds through but the man’s frown only deepens.
Ace rests.
The man holding him does not.
The gears in the man’s mind twist and turn, running more than a mile a minute. It supplies him with imagery of another he had grown fond of and had loved, the face of a woman who had too many freckles to count, too much of a bright smile that hurt. The man thinks that the baby looks too much like his beloved, almost like he’d been the godsent replacement for his now-dead lover. But he also thinks that he’s a father now and that this child, though the cause of his beloved’s death, is proof of his love, a product between the man and the late woman he called his and in turn, that had called him hers. He thinks that forgiveness is bullshit but anger and hatred be more so because his wife had chosen to die for this, this frail entity he now cradles. He thinks about how easy it would be to crush this newborn to death, how simple it would be to stop it from breathing — from living, in hopes to make the pain of his loss any bit less. But then he thinks about what his love would say to him in death, and how killing this minimized doppelgänger would be like killing his wife.
The man may have been a murderer and renowned pirate, but he’d never kill his Nakama. He’d never kill anyone he considered his, like his wife and by extension, as well as his son. But grief is a funny thing and it makes even the most strong-willed weak.
It takes an excruciating amount of strength to reign in his anger, his remorse, and anything else he might have ought to lash out on this child he cradled and called his — theirs. He could never kill anything that had been theirs. That had been hers. And this baby, regardless of having been at fault to his lover’s death, was all of hers and his.
The man scolds himself for even considering killing his own child.
Though the thought would always be there.
When Ace turns one, there is no celebration. There are no festivities or signs of parties, be it a surprise or a planned one. There are no treats or presents, snacks or cake, but instead empty glass bottles of various sizes and colors, splayed across the house that were either empty or mostly drunk through. There were no visitors, no other participants in his birth celebration, only him and his father, in the four walls of old creaking wood, with a roof with small holes and floors too cold to sleep on — it was their home.
Ace doesn’t remember much about this time but he remembers this:
His father had been sprawled out on the floor with glass shards from the half-drunk bottle he had just thrown.
Ace was upset, almost crying at the sight; he had a feeling that something was wrong, that something was off, and that his dad had been at the center of it all. The small sound he lets out had been enough to shift his father’s focus onto him and Ace is scared. There is a surge of ‘bad’ that tries to claw its way out of his throat, to gouge out his eyes with tears and there is a small voice in the child’s brain — almost as if it was an instinctual knowledge, to not make any more sound and movement, or let his waterworks come through.
Ace doesn’t know what his father had said to him but the man’s face and expression had been enough.
Something was wrong.
And it was all Ace’s fault.
Somehow Ace gets away unscathed at least physically. His father had been ruthless with his anger and words but had been restrained enough to have never beaten him for it. In another life, Ace wouldn’t have to worry about his father’s bouts of anger or his unhealthy obsession with liquor. In another time they would have been happy together, with or without his mother. In another reality, his father wouldn’t have been his, and in another, Ace wouldn’t have been so lucky.
Ace is two when he is given away to a Marine named Monkey D. Garp. He’s still too young to understand such complicated words, but he understands it when his father says “leaving” and the other replies “goodbye”. Ace scrambles his little limbs to chase the retreating figure, calling out the black-haired man with words such as “Dada” and fumbled babbles that attempt to say “don’t leave”. It ought to be a heartbreaking scene, but the world could care less for a child born from a devil, who was now shackled in chains and be sent off to the chopping block. His father, albeit infamously strong, had not resisted the insistent tugs from the men in white; he had not fought off the steel chains that gripped his limbs in a tightness that Ace could only assume that had hurt. His father hadn’t looked at him from the moment these strangers came into their abode and the fact grips Ace’s heart like he had been chained too. The boy tries to cry in hopes of grabbing his father’s attention, in hopes that this was all just a bad dream and he’d wake up to his father telling him to shut up.
The boy’s small sounds fell onto deaf ears.
His father doesn’t look back, he leaves the front of their house towards the other end of the horizon that Ace had been warned to never go to. Ace tries to reach out further, small pale limbs desperate to grasp and touch the retreating man in chains but the larger man who his daddy had been talking to earlier stops him, and carries him far away, towards the other end of the small island they had called home. Ace’s heart bleeds in protest, tears rampant and limbs flailing in an attempt to escape the man’s grasp. He’s too focused on the father that leaves than the man that takes, too focused on the abrupt loss to realize where he was being taken, to hear and understand the man taking him and all his whispers of small apologies and empty comforts.
Just like his first birthday, Ace knows something is wrong.
“Dada!”
It’s probably his fault.
“I’m sorry!”
The man he chases after stops briefly, the other Marines accompanying him staggering at the abrupt pause. His father still doesn’t look back at him but Ace takes this chance and cries out desperately.
“I promise I’ll be good! I promise I’ll be good this time!”
Ace thinks it’s enough. He thinks that his promise will make his father stay.
“So please don’t leave me!”
But his father leaves anyway, not even looking back, not even bothering to fight the men that drag him farther away. The little boy understands this was bad. And bad things only happened because of Ace.
“Dada!”
Ace screeches louder.
“Dada!”
He just wants his father.
“I’m sorry!”
The apology leaves the little boy broken, cracked, in a way that no two-year-old should have been. It leaves the boy raw, his throat parched and lungs burning from overuse; his face is flushed in the same red he had been born with but instead of his mother’s blood it had been his — his own blood that blushed his face in red tones. Ace’s grey eyes cast themselves to silver, the tears or maybe the reflection of the sun had been its cause, but whatever it was his eyes had been blown wide in panic, in fear. The larger and older man that holds him, grimaces at the struggling boy’s antics, the expression painted on Ace’s face would have been enough to warrant pity from him. But the old Marine does not give away his face and continues to let it remain steeled and cold. Speculators and others present don’t notice the sadness nor the unfairness of the scene or at the very least they don’t bother. They jeer at the chained man instead, gossip about the desperate child demon that sought its sperm donor; their eyes had been too privy to the forced parting between father and child yet not one actually considers them to be a father or son. Despite the attempts of the other Marines to keep bystanders at bay, a crowd continues to gather and no one offers the father or son any pity. There is no sympathy given for criminals and pirates or their children; there is no pity for the devil who reigned the seas and his child who was tainted with bad blood, for a child born from a tragedy of crime and death. There is no love to give to a child who’d never been loved — not really.
There is no love in Ace’s life.
Not this time.
If given a bit more time, maybe Roger would have loved his son. If given more time, maybe he wouldn’t have blamed Ace for Rouge’s death. If time had been kinder, maybe it would have allowed Roger to learn how to love Ace before post-mortem, before his head had lolled itself onto the execution platform and rolled its way down to the plaza. Maybe he would have learned to love Ace then when he first cradled the baby in his arms but that was the thing, he hadn’t; time had already been kind enough to let him live a little longer but not generous enough to give him do-overs.
Roger had been given time; it just wasn’t enough.
Halfway through Ace’s sixth year of being born, he had come to the startling realization of his placement in the world. The realization comes to him like a finished puzzle piece, the parts of the bigger picture has been there all along and only having been needed to be fit together. It comes to him in the form of an overheard conversation.
“Boss, how long are we going to raise this kid?”
“We can’t be under Garp’s whims forever!”
“What are you saying, twerp?! We’re following his orders so we can survive!”
The curly red-haired woman bursts out angrily, her face flushed and fuming with anger. She tightens her fists till they pale and knocks the two bandits on their heads. Before the two could protest, the woman speaks up again.
“Of course we don’t want the brat! Of course we don’t want to raise him! But we need to if we don’t want Garp killing us.”
There is a short silence in the house and somehow it fills Ace with another feeling of ache, this time different from the dread he had once felt before. Unlike then this hadn’t been overwhelming, this hadn’t been as scary.
“He’ll die anyway. Either through his life in the forest or when he’s old enough.”
Ace feels his stomach drop.
“They’ll take him away eventually. Garp will — he has to. And when he does, it’ll be another Roger again, an execution.”
It may not have been the same feeling as before but it just might be a bit worse, because unlike his foggy memory of his father leaving him, this one conversation would be burned forever in his mind.
“We just have to wait for him to die and then we’ll be free.”
Ace feels his heartbreak.
He doesn’t return to the bandit hideout that night and instead seeks refuge out in one of the forests’ clearings. Unluckily for the bandits, none of the animals had been brave enough to attack Ace, too spooked by the muffled wails and cries of a small boy and his rumbling empty stomach. It takes all of Ace’s effort to stop his tears, to numb his tummy’s pain of protest to the lack of food. It takes Ace too much effort to have fed himself or stay on guard throughout that night. The night takes Ace to an unwarranted introspection that makes the young boy question his purpose and existence; it takes him the next day to settle for the unanswered question and to accept the small comfort of having survived, of having been needed.
According to Dadan, he may not have been wanted but he was needed.
Even if that meant his loss. Even if that meant his death. Ace just had to make sure that he’d survive long enough and then they’ll be free.
Ace wonders if he’ll be free too.
Ace and Garp talk about Roger. It goes as well as Garp expects.
Ace doesn’t like his father, seemingly repulsed at the idea that the late Pirate King had been his sperm donor. Insults him in a way that Garp had heard his Marine whelps had when he’d pass by the academy. Garp tries to lighten the mood of the kid, telling Ace that despite his father’s criminality he had his moments but then Ace questions why he had chosen to get captured, why his father hadn’t chosen to fight the Marines when they found them, and why his father had chosen death over him.
Garp doesn’t really know what to say but neither does Ace. The silence between them is suffocating but it stretches to minutes and maybe even hours. Time had seemed passive in this instance, an utter contrast to the raging waves of flurry emotion, hurt, and pain that Ace had been rocked into. Ace tries to recall the distant and few memories that he had of his father and though vague and fragmented, they had seemed to fit the picture of one the worst criminals the world had been faced with.
Empty bottles sprawled across the floor (A drunkard).
A dark and angry expression, glaring right at him, piercing and somehow loathing (Temperamental).
Back-turned parting, apathetic and silent towards the struggle of a child and their anguish to see their parent (Uncaring and heartless). Somehow the imagery makes Ace feel dry and itchy but he scoffs off the feeling instead, promptly ignoring the prickling tears that threaten to roll down his cheeks.
His heart doesn’t ache but burns. It burns within him like a kindled flame, one whose embers have only begun to take off, small but fast enough to spread throughout his entire being, lighting up some internal switch. The flame grows, fanned by other vague and passing memories and at this point, Ace couldn’t really differentiate memory from imagination. His father had been a pirate — the Pirate King. Somehow the title ignites the flames within to a hotter pace and treads on his emotions harshly. It rages, rages within him like a storm and whirlpool, spiraling him to accept a truth he may or may not have thought about. It pulls him with a taunt, with a light, that somehow made everything bright and dark all at once. It was not even a realization but more of a startling and hard-boiled form of acceptance.
Ace didn’t have a father. Not one he could call his.
Roger didn’t have a son. Not one that he wanted.
There is only so much a little boy can take. Be it beatings, berations, or just the overwhelming insecurities surrounding their existence and self-worth, all of it just seemed to add up, boiling itself towards an eruption. For Ace, his tipping point had been weeks after his conversation with Garp, days after the old Marine had left the quaint port in the East Blue, and hours after Ace could partially hold himself together. The feeling doesn’t settle in the boy but it rages more rampantly, taunting, and almost daring him to do something.
And so Ace does, in the most rageful and irrational manner he could.
Ace begins to fight and hunt like there’s no tomorrow, he hunts to survive and earn his place in the hideout he calls ‘home’, fights the lowlife drunkards and wannabes in the skirt of Edge Town; he bashes things, prey, and people too, till they’re broken and bloodied and had bled enough red to be considered almost dead. He throws things like junk, scraps, and fists, till there’s nothing left to throw and until Ace is left with a numbing emptiness that pushes him between the borders of disassociation and dissatisfaction. There is a storm within Ace that does not settle or slow, a fire that rages and rages , taking, consuming, and burning everything in Ace and all that is before him.
Time passes as Ace burns.
The fire never dulls, it exists and burns through Ace like a constant heartbeat. The rage that it once incited comes by through waves and trials because apparently, too much rage could burn one out. Ace had been at the tipping point, where the rage hadn’t been enough to hold off his exhaustion or fear. Where the anger was not enough to let Ace get through the day to hunt or protect himself. Where the rage wasn’t in sync with the fire within and had instead been overwhelmed by a feeling Ace thought he had pushed out a long time ago.
Sadness.
Coincidentally, the rage quells itself on the night before his birth, where everyone else had been partying and singing merrily. Where the mountain bandits had been less harsh and more forgiving. Where the people of Gray Terminal and Edge Town alike, refused to fight a brat just because it was “New Year’s Eve”. Where the night sky bloomed with flowers of light and fire, illuminating the darkness more festively than the stars would have. The night before he turned ten. The night before his birthday. Somehow the celebrations made Ace feel worse, makes his bones weary and heart heavy in a way he didn’t think it could. He doesn’t seek refuge in the bandit hideout that night nor does he try to bother anyone else in Gray Terminal or Edge Town. He takes his place at a treetop within the forest, where he is alone and the only company that existed were the critters below the treetops and the sky that glowed and boomed in celebration. Ace stares out at the sky and the distant horizon of the sea. The view does not compare to that of the cliffside but he thinks it’s okay. At least here, Ace can strain his ears to listen to the festivities; at least here, he can hear the sounds of the distant city, the rowdy bashings at the other side of the forest that hid the bandit hideout. At least here, Ace would hear the sounds he wished he could have merrily voiced out before, that he used to dream about when imagining a happier place, a happier time.
At least here, Ace wouldn’t feel so alone.
By the stroke of midnight, Ace can hear shouts of greetings of ‘happy new year’. He can hear people welcome the new time, the new beginning, and somehow that makes his heartache because unlike the New Year, Ace’s life has never been welcomed before. Before Ace knew it, he was crying and tightly clutching his chest from the ache. The pain burns through him and the rage comes back but it mixes and intensifies the hurt, making Ace cry out a silent sob. At that moment, Ace wishes he had never been born. Wished he had never been able to go through this, to feel like this. He wishes for someone, anyone, to come by and get rid of this terrible feeling that’s making his heart feel too heavy, his body too painful and sluggish. He wishes for something, anything, to rip him out of his misery and somehow make it all better. Ace wishes for hope.
But hope doesn’t come at that moment, at least not at that time. It comes a bit later, in the form of a blonde boy who wore a top hat and whose teeth had a big gap in between. That hope comes in much later in the form of another boy, who was made out of rubber and too stubborn to falter. But those hopes come in later, not now, not at this time period. But they will come, in due time.