Work Text:
Before the bandages came off there was some question as to whether the eye could be saved. Mostly he remembers not caring, because there was nothing else to remember. His body one whole wound. Still, the first time he looked in a mirror at the raw strangeness of his face, only one thought blurted into his head, pillowed in gauze and stuffed with cotton: That’s not fair, you’re gonna look so sick with an eyepatch. I know, he thought smugly, and then, I know that voice. Then the nagging spark exploded into a white-hot starburst of pain that ate away all else and knocked him out for another three days.
The eye, when it healed, healed completely.
The Revolutionary Army has its claws dug into every corner of the world. When Sabo finally gets to find this out for himself he feels almost cheated, having whittled away his early years not unlike an animal gnawing at the bars of its enclosure. The first time he’s allowed to tag along on a mission he watches the waves swallow up Baltigo’s implacable shoreline with a giddiness so violent he ends up throwing up over the side of the ship.
“You can’t be serious,” Koala says over his shoulder. “Seasickness? You?”
“It’s not that,” Sabo manages, or at least not just that; for all his talk, his body is remembering that he’s never actually been out to sea farther than the standard sailing lessons that were included in his tutelage alongside history and geography and lasting as long as humanly possible in a spar against Kuma-san without getting hit (14 hard-fought seconds, for the record, and he’s proud of every single one of them). There’s a world of difference between rowing a boat in a race against four other recruits to settle who’s on dish duty for the week and being set free on the open ocean, a fact some part of his body now feels fit to remind him with a vengeance. He hurls up more of his breakfast.
“Just nerves, then?”
There’s nothing just about it, as much as it grinds his teeth to admit. It isn’t the mission, some fairly straightforward reconnaissance so safe he would once have found himself patronized. But having watched soldiers return stone-faced and shattered and not at all, he can at least now begin to recognize the scope of the undertaking at hand. If duty is the beast to slaughter, then each severed neck sprouts two new heads to feed, and he’s no longer so young to have the excuse of assuming he can outlast that kind of hunger.
So no, it isn’t the work, or even his role within it. It doesn’t have anything to do with him at all. It’s only the vastness of what now lies before him that has plunged his senses into dizzying vertigo. His future has always been equally as faceless as his past, but here is that horizon now and all it’s offering. The blank slate filling itself in full nauseating colour, the world rising out of the water: it’s real, it isn’t something he dreamed up and then forgot. He’d laugh at himself now if he had the stomach for it, but as it stands, the only things still holding him up are his weak knees and his white-knuckled grip on the rail.
A handkerchief is thrust into his line of vision. Koala hasn’t kept her distance, unfazed by squeamishness or disgust, hovering squarely at his elbow. This should annoy him but he’s grateful instead for an anchor, the polite reminder of human dignity. He takes the handkerchief and wipes his mouth clean.
“Just hungry,” he says in answer.
Koala’s face pinches with exasperation. “What? We just ate. How does that even make sense?”
The ship sways back and forth, and back and forth again. Baltigo is long gone from their sightline. “C’mon, let’s go steal a snack from the galley,” Sabo says. He steps back from the rail expecting a squawk of outrage or else hurried footsteps keeping perfect pace and gets both.
The recon leads to more recon leads to a firefight with a Marine transport ship en route to a South Blue prison, thirty-eight revolutionaries freed from its smoking wreck. That mission leads to the next: a stakeout of a naval base on a winter island, surrounded by gorgeous floes of ice and frozen through with boredom, making snow angels between reports just for something to do with himself. A rescue mission trawling through swamps of stillwater and mud, letting mosquitoes drink the blood from the back of his neck so their drone muffles the incessant needling buzz of Koala’s voice through the den den mushi tucked inside the front pocket of his shirt. An assassination at a gala on the eve of a new year, poison slipped from the sleeve of his server’s uniform into a sparkling champagne glass, stealing a moment on the balcony to watch the fireworks as the partygoers below make a toast celebrating nothing. And still the next, and still the next, and he’s never even left with time to breathe, and he never even wants it.
Inevitably there come the days more time is spent on a ship returning to Baltigo than on Baltigo itself. On his way out from a mission report one morning Sabo passes by a gaggle of children in the hall and realizes in the odd slip of a midstep that he hasn’t been one of them for a long while. At some point he crossed over into the wild territory of something else. Through the window, Baltigo’s rubble is bleached clean of any signs of living, but he still knows its bones by heart. There’s not a rock on this island that hasn’t been broken into more rocks by his hand. If he’s ever had a home, surely this has to be it. He doesn’t know what else you could call it. There are only so many places in this world that can make you.
But there are so very many places. Seas upon islands and islands upon seas, too many of them to gorge on. Sometimes he thinks he’s seen them all, and sometimes he’s thrown awake into a night black as the breathing belly of a whale. Pitch of the ship, the rise, the fall. Koala in the other bed, her alertness a quality to the air he can sense.
“Did you remember,” she says to him, having learned by now this is something he wants to be asked.
“I,” he says, wincing at the rasp of his voice. “I don’t think.”
“Pity.”
Koala is always so upfront about her own nightmares that Sabo wishes there was something he could scrape up to give her in return. It isn’t sincerity with which she recounts a striking hand or the rattle of a chain or a ship leaking rusted blood in the fishbowl of her palms so much as unflinchingness. He opens his eyes to the darkness and wills himself to look it in its face.
“Don’t you ever feel,” he tries, “that there’s not enough space in the world. That you’ve got to get out.”
The darkness, as ever, does not look back.
“But you are out,” Koala says.
It’s a summer island this time, caught in the death throes of spring and ready to be surrendered over to itself. They’ve been ordered to collect intel from one of their longtime contacts, a pub owner in a port town on the Grand Line; hardly a two-man mission, but the Army had claimed antsiness over reports of heavy Marine traffic in the area and so had sent their best. Sabo peers unimpressed through his spyglass at the harbour crowded with white sails like a nest of sleeping doves and says, “D’you think Dragon-san was just trying to get us to take a vacation?”
Koala doesn’t look up from her book (Verdel Island: A Comprehensive History) but she does respond seriously. “No, I don’t think the Commander’s familiar with the concept?”
Sabo sighs. “You’ve got a point there. Well, it’ll be over and done with quickly, at least.” He lowers the spyglass and checks his pocket watch. “An hour to the rendezvous. Shall we?”
By the time they’ve settled into a table at the bar Sabo has sweated clean through his undershirt and Koala has finished her book. “Did you know that Verdel is a port not because of its proximity to other islands but its unique climate,” she says to him now, because she likes to know the underlying architecture of the world, how things ended up where they are. Him, he’s just good with knowing they’re there.
“What, this heat?” he says, swiping through the dewy sweat on his wrist with a gloved fingertip.
“Not precisely. Apparently it only rains nine days a year. The rest of the year, the seas here are so calm and the harvests so plentiful that the port is flush with merchant and travelling ships eager to trade and settle.”
Their drinks arrive. Sabo drains his at once and regrets it at the burn of warm whiskey down his throat. Resurfacing, he asks the obvious: “How does anything survive on only nine days of rain?”
Koala sips at her own drink, a much more practical choice of mostly crushed ice in a glass. “Well, when I say it rains, I mean it rains. The streets and fields are flooded, the port’s rendered inaccessible through the storm, and both Verdel’s natural and artificial reservoirs are filled. Most of all, it doesn’t let up until the nine days are over.”
“And that’s enough rainwater to tide them over for the whole year?”
“Pretty cool, huh? There’s only one catch. The nine days of rain come at a different time every year and can’t be predicted with any measure of accuracy. The flash floods and thunderstorms can often be fatal to people who get caught out in the rain. But it seems everyone’s deemed it a small price to pay for living in paradise the rest of the year.”
“Huh.” Sabo taps his thumb against the rim of his cup, ponders her point. “Has it rained yet this year?”
Koala grins. “Nope!”
Sabo chances a look out the window. The night skies are clearer than some water he’s drunk in the past. “Sorry to spoil your fun, but I hardly think the odds of us just happening to catch an annual phenomenon are in our favour when we’re only stopping by for a couple of hours.”
The glint in Koala’s eye sharpens itself. “You know, they call it lightning season, for how rarely and relentlessly it strikes.”
And they call Koala the sensible partner of the pair. It’s true in all the ways that matter, but she’s always had a soft spot for mythology, those far-flung theories of fate too abstract to ever be put to test and proven. After all, nobody survives this long in this occupation without the requisite foolishness to believe in a dream that will outlive them. Next to the same big hope they’re all clinging to, this slice of wonder feels easy to swallow, even indulgent.
“Well, then,” Sabo says. “We might just get to take that vacation after all.”
“We should be so lucky,” Koala says blithely. She finishes her drink with a smack of her lips, folds her hands together on the table, and returns to business. “So anyway, what’s the count?”
“Four civilians.”
“Ten off-duty Marines,” she returns.
“And six pirates,” Sabo says, because he’d recognize them anywhere. They don’t always parade around in uniform like the Marines but they’re just as eager to announce their place in the world. He made a game out of it when he was younger, studying the way they revealed themselves in a crowd, their crude swagger and carelessness. How is that a game, Koala would ask, games are meant to be won. No, said Sabo, games are meant to be fun. And how is this fun? He couldn’t tell her then and he doesn’t know now but there’s still something electric in the way his eye is drawn. The observance of moths converging upon a flame; a morbid fascination. If he didn’t know better—and he doesn’t know better—he’d mistake the feeling for closeness.
“Well, aren’t we in quite the line of crossfire.” Koala sighs. “How long do you think before those soldiers finally spot the Whitebeard tattoos dancing right under their noses?”
From the other side of the pub erupts a raucous round of drunken cheers. Another twenty minutes and those soldiers won’t even be able to remember their own names. Sabo smiles, leans back in his chair. “Hey, you ever heard that joke? A Marine, a Revolutionary, and a pirate walk into a bar...”
“What’s the punchline?”
He winks. “Ask me again when I find out.”
Koala rolls her eyes. “We should be out of here before that happens.” She straightens the cuff of her sleeve, a habit started in attempt to iron out her nervous tell of adjusting her gloves that only became a new nervous tell instead.
Sabo gives her a cheerful mock salute and gets to his feet. The tavern’s full this time of night, air dense with cigarette smoke and intention. He sidesteps spills of beer as he weaves his way through the tables, cutting past the Marines and the pirates and the handful of poor clueless common folk to get to the bar.
“The tab, please,” Sabo says to the stranger behind the bar, placing a neat stack of beli on the counter. “Lovely establishment you’ve got here, by the way. Say, it might be a long shot, but do you remember—seven years ago, I passed by here one night with my brother? He looks just like me, but older.”
“Sorry,” the stranger says. “Seven years was a long time ago.”
“But it feels like only yesterday,” Sabo returns, and the stranger nods and passes him his change, and he palms both the coins and the code-engraved tokens, and a hand slams down onto the bar beside him.
Heads turn across the room. The message tucks itself into his sleeve, out of sight. The Marines, his mind is working, they’ve walked into a setup, but his body senses salt and smoke and already knows it’s only a pirate. Still, he feels an executioner’s knife at his neck as he coolly raises his head, meets the furious, dark-eyed gaze boring into his own.
“You,” the pirate says.
Sabo’s smile is pleasant. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”
It’s his typical brand of perfunctorily harmless bullshit but it seems to land like a blow. The pirate stops short, face twisting in the astonishment of some animal that’s hurt itself in its own confusion.
“Have we met,” the pirate repeats.
It’s infuriating that Sabo doesn’t know who this is. Know your enemy, he can hear Dragon telling him without a single grave trace of irony, and Ivankov piping up beside him: but also know who the real enemy is. Pirates can range from a spectrum of reluctant allies to despicable scum, most of them landing somewhere in the vicinity of ineffectual nuisance. The one thing they all have in common is trouble. Sabo usually keeps track of the latest bounty posters, but he just came out of a four-month undercover stint in North Blue and he’s still finding his bearings. The seas in the Grand Line shift when you’re not looking, power changed hands and empires toppled overnight. There had been a brief, but it didn’t include some hotshot flaunting Whitebeard’s emblem on his back like a poisonous insect flexing its wings in warning. Well, warning taken.
“Sorry. I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” Sabo says, unwavering in his good-natured smile.
He can feel the pirate’s gaze drag itself from the metal pipe strapped to his back to his blue goggles and black hat; from the cravat laced at his throat to the scar tissue branching over the left side of his face. His skin itches. He forces himself not to blink.
“You’re still,” the pirate says. Half to himself: “It has to be.” And then: “Aren’t you sweating bullets in that ridiculous getup?”
“I’m used to it.” Tone harder, now; he can’t help it. The pirate’s drawing the attention of the Marines, still halfway to wasted but sobering fast, while his own crewmates are watching them both with mutters of confusion. If there’s a grudge, at least it seems personal, unaffiliated with Whitebeard himself even if the gaudy back tattoo signals otherwise. The pub owner has made himself scarce—good for him. At the table Koala is probably quietly losing her shit.
The pirate doesn’t notice any of this, or more likely, he doesn’t care. Pirates never do. He’s still staring at Sabo like the whole world’s narrowed down to the single spark of tension fizzing over between them. He tilts his head, the brim of his obnoxious orange hat lifting slightly, dark hair falling limp over the eyes that still have yet to once look away.
“Hey,” the pirate says, and there’s something coaxing to it now, gentle in the way you would call after a small child or a tamed creature: playtime’s over, come back inside for dinner. “Humour me. What’s your name?”
“Who, me?” Sabo says. “I’m nobody.”
He watches it tear through his face like a shotgun blast.
“Oh, you fucking asshole,” the pirate says decisively, and swings his fist.
A few things happen after that.
What happens is that the Marines and the pirates jump to their feet at the exact same time. To their credit, only two of the Marines double over and collapse on the floor; the rest have their firearms cocked and pointing at the bar, swaying slightly on their feet. The pirates, of course, immediately take offense, swords drawn and hackles raised. Half the military rifles change target in response. The other half stay put.
What happens is that Koala follows protocol: vanishes from the table like she was never there save for the tavern door swinging shut. She’ll ready their boat for departure and wait for him no longer than the pre-established time of fifteen minutes, at which point she’s to consider him missing in action and return alone to headquarters, where they’ll initiate the standard procedures for retrieval and rescue.
What happens is that Sabo does not. Instead of taking the hit like a good innocent civilian, letting the Marines and the pirates do their jobs and duke it out, and making a swift exit in the midst of all the ensuing commotion, he ducks. Instead of getting punched in the face, his hat is knocked clean off his head, and instead of hightailing it out of there, he grabs for it in the air, a stab of urgency lurching in his gut. And instead of being halfway to the harbour by now, he’s got himself pinned to the sticky tavern floor by a raging pirate with sour breath and a death wish.
“You’re gonna look at me like that,” the pirate’s saying now, fists clenched in the lapels of Sabo’s jacket, wild-eyed and inane in his furor. “Do you have any idea what we went through—what we’ve been going through—and you’re gonna look at me like—”
What it is Sabo’s looking at him like nobody gets to find out, because he’s cut off when Sabo’s gloved fist lands squarely in his jaw. The death grip on Sabo’s collar lessens somewhat. It’s all the give he needs to throw the pirate off him and roll forward onto his feet, shoving his hat back over his head. A quick scan of the scene shows it’s a lost cause: the air’s afire with noise and pandemonium, the logical conclusion to pirates and Marines being set loose in the same room. He hopes the civilians cleared out in time. Thirteen minutes and forty-eight seconds until Koala does the same.
Sabo’s out the door and making short work of scaling the back alley wall to the rooftop when he hears the voice behind him.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” the pirate says, and Sabo bites the inside of his cheek, half annoyed, half impressed. He doesn’t deign to respond or look back, but he can hear the pirate shadowing him across the rooftops in dogged pursuit, boots clattering against the tiles in deliberately loud echo of Sabo’s own silent footfalls. Do you mind, Sabo has half a mind to snap, surely you’ve heard of the concept of being discreet, but there isn’t even anybody around to hear the ruckus they’re causing; the streets below have emptied out. Odd—it isn’t that late, and the barfight’s quieted to a faint rumour of shouting in the distance, now that they’re several blocks down. He looks up instead.
We should be so lucky, Koala’s voice rings in his ears.
“Well, hell,” Sabo says.
“Gotcha.”
Sabo flinches—it’s like a match struck in his ear. He lets himself be dragged back by the scruff of his jacket, stumbling in a way that could be mistaken for clumsy, leveraging his weight. The pirate’s face looms into view, unamused.
“Hey,” Sabo says. “You ever heard of lightning season?”
The pirate pauses. His gaze flicks upward at the storm clouds that have snuck up on the skies.
“Huh.” Of all things, the pirate’s face splits into a smirk. “Nice try.”
Eight minutes and twenty seconds. “I just think,” Sabo says, palms held up diplomatically, “that it would be in everyone’s best interest—”
“Shut up. You think I’m letting you get away? Think I’m just gonna let you fuck off without so much as an explanation? Again?”
“With all due respect,” Sabo tries one last time. “I really do think you’ve got the wrong guy.”
The pirate’s grip on his collar tightens enough to cut off his airway. “What do you take me for? An idiot?”
No point trying to reason with a pirate. Sabo rolls his eyes, abandons tactics, and sweeps his leg up in a direct kick to the pirate’s chest.
The impact never arrives. He stares at the hole in the pirate’s body through which his boot has entered, ringed by red-hot fire.
The pirate grins, baring teeth. “That the best you can do?”
Seven minutes and forty-six seconds. It’s another five minutes to the docks, and his opponent’s turned out to be a devil fruit user. No sweat; he’s fought through worse scrapes before and lived to tell the tale. Still, he’d better start putting his money where his mouth is. Best not to keep Koala waiting too long.
Sabo worms his way out of the pirate’s grasp, throws a punch meant to misdirect and is surprised when it lands. The pirate doesn’t dodge it, nor the next, but he returns the blows in kind, the fistfight devolving quickly into the viciousness of a back-alley brawl. For some reason he isn’t using his devil fruit ability offensively, but he’s fighting dirtier than anyone Sabo’s ever gone up against before, as though intent on dragging him down to his level.
That’s fine with Sabo: he speaks the same language, after all. He goes for the eyes. But the pirate’s quick, leaping back and grabbing hold of Sabo’s arms, so Sabo rears up to headbutt his chin. Pain cracks across the crown of his head but it’s worth it for the pirate’s bitten-off curse, the relenting of his viselike grip around Sabo’s wrists. Automatically Sabo starts digging his nails into any soft unguarded place he can reach.
“OW, fuck—you asshole, what is wrong with you—” The pirate gives up on trying to pin down Sabo’s arms and punches him in the gut instead. Sabo gears up to return the gesture but is knocked off-kilter when the pirate’s shoulder slams bodily into his ribs, flattening all the breath from his lungs. He takes a flurry of hits in his winded confusion before retaliating with an uppercut jab to the nose. It crunches satisfyingly under the heel of his hand. The pirate’s flailing fist clips Sabo in the temple, and he staggers back. Reaches behind him, slips his metal pipe from its strap and raises it, and the pirate draws up short.
“You gonna hit me with that?”
Voice edged with livid disbelief, the sting of laughter. Again, it suits Sabo fine; being underestimated always grants an advantage. But it isn’t arrogance darkening his eyes, exactly. Something closer to vindication.
“You ungrateful shitty bastard, I can’t believe it.”
Blood is dripping steadily from the pirate’s nose but this is what’s brought him to his knees, a blow that hasn’t even struck him yet. Sabo licks his lips, tastes copper, rust of rain in the air thick enough to bite down on. His head hurts something awful.
“You gonna hit me with that, yeah? Who do you think’s the dumb fuck who taught you how to use it?”
“What,” Sabo says thickly. His eye is killing him, or not his eye but whatever’s beneath it, some shrapnel they forgot to excavate years ago and left buried in his skull. Four minutes and fifteen seconds. Sorry, Koala, for the paperwork, and for all the rest besides.
“Look at me.” The pirate lunges forward, catches Sabo in his flicker of distraction and socks him straight in his left eye. The delicate machinery of what’s left of Sabo’s nerve endings there goes haywire. He recoils from the kaleidoscope of pain that fractures across his vision, but the pirate’s still got him in his grip and won’t let go, nails digging into his cheek, prying open his eye. Tracing soft along the lines of his scars, and something claws up inside Sabo then, biting and kicking and screaming, the frantic thrash of a creature he could never keep penned up in tailored leather and refinery.
“—fucking look at me, if you would just—”
His vision’s shot, the world one big watery blur. Because why else—
“—look at me, I know you’re in there—”
Why’s the pirate crying?
“—look at me, you fuck, I know it’s you, and you know it’s me,” and Sabo looks, but it isn’t that—it’s the hand still clutching at his face, palm laid flat against his scars, the searing burn of it so hot he feels it through dead skin and bone and all the years of empty wild nothing—
The first flash of lightning whites out the world. For a moment the stillness before the thunder seems like it'll last forever. But it can’t. Something’s got to give.
It gives.
“Oi, Luffy, you dumbass, it’s all your fault we got caught in this storm!”
“Whaaat? That’s not fair, if you had just helped me fight against that tiger we coulda been out of the woods ages ago!”
“Why should I help you? Aren’t you always bragging about how strong you are? You telling me the future Pirate King’s some baby who needs help taking down a measly little tiger?”
“Hey!! I’m not a baby!!”
“Tch. Sounds like something a baby would say.”
“I’m not!! And I am gonna become the Pirate King, so what!! And this is all your fault!! Right, Sabo? It’s his fault, right?”
He was drenched to the bone. Cold, hungry, tired, sore, a stone in his shoe, hair bedraggled, the knot of his necktie ruined, his beloved hat sodden wet—the list of grievances seemed like it would never end. There wasn’t an inch of him that wasn’t soaked through with rainwater and mud and bursting joy. He looked his stupid brothers in their stupid expectant faces, both of them waiting for him to do the only sensible thing and take their side, and chose violence instead.
“It’s both your faults.”
“WHAAAT!! Sabo, that’s not fair!!”
“Hah? Are you kidding me, Sabo, I didn’t see your dumb ass being much help either—”
“Oi, watch who you’re calling dumb—”
In the muddle of the moment it was unclear who threw the first punch, only the understanding that they were fighting, now, so fighting it was, no hesitation or holding back. Throwing themselves at each other through the rain and slinging fistfuls of muck, sinking deeper and deeper into the marsh of flooded grass. Dragging each other down because whoever gave in and let go first was whoever lost, and so what if they caught cold or fever or worse; there was nothing that could kill them. They would never die.
Eventually their momentum was spent. They lay panting in puddles of wet earth, beat-up and half-drowned and shivering.
“Aw, man, I’m hungry.”
“Shut up, Luffy, this is all your fault.”
“Whaaat!! You started it!”
And they had stopped but the storm had not, and they still had to pick themselves up from the mud and go home, and they did.
There’s rain in his mouth. His eyes. Something burning down the tender ruined skin of his face.
“Fuck, Sabo. What’d they do to you?”
The neat metal click of a gun being cocked.
“Let go of him.”
Low laughter.
“Lady, there’s no way in hell I’m doing that. Not again.”
“You have five seconds.”
“What’re you gonna do? Shoot me?”
“Four. Three.”
“You sure you’re not gonna miss your shot, in this rain?”
“You sure your body can hold its flame around the bullet, in this rain?”
“Well, it’ll be a hell of a way to find out.”
“One.”
“Stand down,” Sabo croaks.
The arms cradling his head freeze stiff beneath him.
There’s no gunshot. Only the steady drum of rain.
“Chief. Status report.”
“Koala. What are you doing here—”
“It’s been nineteen minutes and forty-four seconds, Chief.”
So he’s not the only one breaking protocol tonight. He laughs, then chokes on a mouthful of rainwater, and then he just breathes for a little while.
“Sorry I’m late, Officer,” he says, when he can manage it. He jerks his head in a vaguely upward direction. “It’s all his fault, I swear.”
Fists clench in his hair.
“Sabo.”
Everything’s got that iridescent sheen to it when he opens his eyes, oil on water. The skyline, the hair-trigger tremble of Koala’s pistol. His stupid brother hovering over him with his stupid expectant face.
“What? You gonna fight me on it, Ace?”
He’s so close Sabo can hear it, the laugh that shakes out of him like a gasp.
“You bastard,” Ace says. Water dripping from his eyelashes. Hair plastered to his wet freckled face. Pale red blood running down his nose and mouth, thinned by the rain. “You dumbass. You took your sweet time, huh?”
“Ace,” Sabo says again, breathless, because he can, because he has, the name he’s called over and over in the past has returned to him now, it casts an echo, it makes a sound—“Ace, Ace, I forgot. All this time—you, Luffy, I forgot—”
“Shut up, you’re pissing me off. You telling me you don’t remember Luffy? You don’t remember me? You’re gonna show up wearing the exact same stupid shit you did as a kid, practically waving a flag in my face, and say you didn’t want anything more than to be found? You’re nobody?”
Footsteps approach from the side.
“Sabo,” Koala says. Voice hushed in the rain. “Did you remember?”
He can’t stop grinning, ear to ear, blood in his teeth, salt on his lips. The tears welling fat in his eyes. “Ace—hey, Ace, this is Koala. Koala, this is Ace. My brother.”
“Oh, good,” Koala says faintly. “Because if the second division commander of the Whitebeard Pirates has tried to kill the chief of staff of the Revolutionary Army tonight, we’ll have a war on our hands.”
“Revolutionary Army? Thank fuck, I thought that old bastard Garp had finally gotten his wish and you’d gone turncoat and joined the Navy, I was gonna have to kick your ass for it—”
“No way, not a chance in hell,” Sabo says, “and you already did that anyway, didn’t you?”
He’s still laughing, garbled sputters that sound like he’s dying, and maybe he is because he can’t stop crying, either, and when he finally gets air back into his lungs Ace says, “You fuck, I think you broke my nose,” which sets him off all over again.
“Hey, don’t think you’ve gotten off easy, Sabo, I still gotta kill you for dying on us.”
“Oh, this is going to be a good story,” Koala says at once. She likes those, Sabo knows. He cracks open his eyes again to peer in her direction. She’s lowered her gun and picked up Sabo’s fallen hat and now hovers to the side in open curiosity as if the onslaught of rain upon them is nothing more than water off a duck’s back. He belatedly becomes aware of his own indignified sprawl, flat against the rooftop tiles, head still clasped in Ace’s hands.
“Hey,” Sabo says, attempting to shake rainwater from his hair and instead setting off a firecracker inside his skull; Ace catches his wince and holds his head firm. “D’you think we can get off this rooftop already?”
“Come with me,” Ace says, “my crewmates and I are staying at a secure place in town.”
“Marines won’t find us there?” Koala says.
“Marines can’t find their own shadow on a sunny day.”
“Looks like we get that vacation after all,” Sabo says, and watches Koala’s face light up, childlike. It isn’t a look she wears often. He thinks, not without humour, that must be the same dumb look he’s wearing too.
The hands slowly peel themselves from Sabo’s face. One is held out before him in offering. Sabo takes it, drags himself up, and falls startled against Ace in an untidy collision of gangly limbs. How many times can he lose his breath in a single hour, he’s finding out. Ace’s arms lock tight around him, his fist knuckling sharp against the small of Sabo’s back, and Sabo’s chin knocks against his rain-slick shoulder, teeth clacking in his jaw, biting his tongue. He tastes blood, it hurts; what’s a little more blood, a little more hurt. He holds his brother back and laughs the hoarse creaking rattle of a rusted chain pulling taut, anchor finally striking the bottom of the sea.
When Ace eventually draws back it’s to look Sabo over with an appraising gaze, lingering on his face, his left eye. He hesitates. But all he says is: “You look so sick with that scar.”
Sabo’s laugh is shocked out of him. “Believe me,” he says. “Believe me, I know.”
Even when they break apart they don’t break their hold, throwing their arms over each other’s shoulders instead, and side-by-side Sabo can tell for sure, exclaims with delight, “Ace, hey, guess what, Ace—I really am taller than you now!”
“Fuck off,” Ace says, but he doesn’t let go of his arm around Sabo’s shoulder, so Sabo doesn’t let go of his arm around Ace’s shoulder either, because whoever lets go first is whoever loses; it’s the only rule to the game they used to play, the promise they made as brothers, the one they’re still keeping now. So they stumble on like that, holding each other up, holding each other; and the shadow they cast is that of some three-legged monster at the mercy of the storm, returning at last through the deluge to where it belongs.