pay the devil (with hope and heart)

by ShadowSpires

Summary:

Everyone on the Grand Line knows what it means, to eat a Devil Fruit; to trade the hope of the Sea's Promised Gift, of the steady guide of your Soul Compass, for power.

It means you will be lost forever. You will never know what it means to find that perfect other half of yourself, to have the steady guide of your Compass all your life.

But Devils are greedy, and grasping, and they do not let go so easily.

Notes:

Devil to pay - Originally, this expression described one of the unpleasant tasks aboard a wooden ship. The devil was the ship’s longest seam in the hull. Caulking was done with pay or pitch (a kind of tar). The task of ‘paying the devil’ (caulking the longest seam) by squatting in the bilges was one of the worst and most difficult jobs onboard. The term has come to mean a difficult, seemingly impossible task.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My piece for the 2023 One Piece Big Bang!

Thank you to KasainoKage for being a wonderful and thorough beta. Any remaining mistakes are definitely my later meddling, lol.

Thank you to Distant for the lovely art!

Thanks to the mods for running a great event and keeping us all on track!

Chapter 1

The guards don’t even bother to strip Ace before they throw him in Impel Down’s ‘welcome bath.’

He refuses to make a sound, even as the pain screams through him; heat a now-unfamiliar enemy. The boiling water drowns out even the little strength he had gathered, past the thick links of seastone circling his wrists and ankles or the heavy chains that hang, inhibiting his every movement. 

When they drag him out, the guards alternate between shoving him around and skittering away from him every time he shifts.

Marine cowards. These might be the very worst of the lot: sadists and cowards, doorwardens to a man-made hell, with ‘Justice’ branded across its gates. 

“What?” Ace rasps, as he’s dragged through cold, dark halls towards the elevator, soaking wet, already starting to shiver. “No fancy outfit for me?”

His hat is somewhere on Banaro Island, probably; on a shattered battlefield that should have been Teach’s fucking grave. 

A measly Marine Captain had been all it had taken to keep him captive once he'd woken up in custody. The captain had taken his knife and his log pose, ripping the leather strap off his wrist with a particular sadism. 

Ace grins viciously at the memory of taking a few teeth in return, and it only widens as the guards holding him in place shiver and jerk the chains harder to hide their fear. That Captain is responsible for at least half the additional chains weighing him down. 

Ace should have broken more than a few teeth. Or killed him, for the insult; for daring.

The bare skin of his wrist pulses in his awareness, even half covered by a wide cuff. The discomfort of it is more real and present than even the torment of that fucking bath.  

The Captain had sneered down at him, his Log-Pose dangling from his fingers, eyes full of a familiar, disgusted disquiet as they lingered on the bare skin. 

And Ace hadn’t been able to help the flinch. 

He knows it is stupid, knows that the Captain didn’t have any idea, didn’t have any reason to suspect. Ace’s Devil Fruit is one of the best known on the seas. The Captain couldn’t have been expecting anything else, when he ripped away Ace’s ‘Pose. 

And yet. 

He’s kept that vulnerable patch of skin covered since he was old enough to reason, and know he was wrong. Having that protection stripped away had left him feeling off balance, more vulnerable than he could stand and furious for it. 

Voices from his childhood, never sufficiently silenced—

Should have been drowned—

Strangled in the cradle —

Would be glad to be rid of —

Worthless—

Poison—  

—echoing in cruel voices, even though he knew, he knew that they were wrong. That it wasn’t anything wrong with him.

Or, well… he had been told that. He had tried to force himself to believe the explanation that Luffy, of all people, had provided; straight from the mouth of what Ace now knows had been a New World Pirate. 

His Mystery Person must have eaten a devil fruit, just like Luffy’s had!

Logical. Neat. A reason for the defect that had haunted his entire life. Ace’s certainty that the lack of Compass was one more piece of proof that he never should have been born cracked wide open in an instant by an innocent voice, piping and carefree. 

Luffy, who had completely shamelessly shoved his own bare wrist in Ace’s face, and was so utterly uncaring of the blank wrongness where his Compass should be, of the looks, the wariness.

Ace hadn’t known what to say, what to think, continued not to even in the face of Luffy’s intractable insistence, over years. No matter the casual assurance of a carefree child, Ace had never been able to drown out the voices. 

The question. 

Did he deserve to live? 

Should he be alive? 

It had been a relief, when he realized what that horrid fruit on Sixis had been. When he had crossed Reverse Mountain and realized what it meant.

Partly because it had let him and Deuce escape, of course, but also because it gave a reason .

An excuse for the bare blank emptiness on his wrist. 

It may have been a Mystery in the East Blue, on sheltered and backwater Dawn, but on the Grand Line everyone knew that to eat a Devil Fruit was to give up the Sea's Gift. 

To sacrifice your Soul’s Compass and Guide for the sake of power. 

No Devil Fruit user retained their Compass. Anyone who’d earned even a measly Captain’s stripes knew that. Knew that was the reason for his blank wrist. 

It was the fire that made him now, from his skin down to his soul, and which had burned the Compass off him. 

It wasn't him. It wasn't—

Never should have been born!  

—it wasn't that there had been something wrong with him since birth , since he killed his mother coming into this world, a cursed, empty, lonely existence from the start. 

They couldn't know, they can't know. No matter his loyalty to the Marines, Gramps would never have told them, so they couldn’t possibly know — but he'd flinched, and the Captain had drawn up, gloating and smug, but also questioning the reaction and— 

Well. 

That prurient curiosity hadn’t lasted long before Ace responded to that reaction the same way he had since he was five years old and running feral in a forest and a trash heap: he’d made a damned fine effort towards ensuring the face in front of him would never be capable of making that expression again.

It hadn’t, sadly, gotten him free, but it had been satisfying while it lasted. 

The Vice-Warden, accompanying this shitty parade deeper into Hell, scoffs at his question, dragging him back into this moment, into the chilling, inevitable horror of it.

“A Uniform? For you? Why bother?”

It’s a grim sort of almost-humor that tightens Ace’s lips this time. They both know he won’t be here long enough to need a uniform. He’s known how this was going to play out since he woke up so weighed down by seastone he could barely breathe, deep in Paradise, far from any help, far from the Father he had disobeyed, the home he had fled. 

Possibly the Marines also want to make sure he is clearly recognizable when they cut off his head in front of the world. 

It’s probably both, honestly. 

There is a moment, just a brief one, as the elevator lets them out on Level 6, a level he’s only heard rumors of before, where he wonders: Did Roger walk these same steps? Did they bring him here first, or cart him straight to his execution?

He wonders now, suddenly, in a way he could never bring himself to ask about before, if his mother and Roger had been soulmates. If a Compass on the Devil’s wrist was how they knew where his mother was. Is that how they found her? Had they looked at the wrist of the Pirate King and headed South? Was Baterilla, all those women, all those babies, and his mother, the casualty of the Compass on the wrist of a monster? 

(Was the Son of a Monster so much more damned than the monster himself, that Ace had never deserved a Compass in the first place?)

Ace doesn’t know. He could never bring himself to ask, and Gramps had never volunteered the information. 

Had Roger had a Compass?

Had his mother? 

He doesn’t know what he wants, what he hopes is the truth.

He just knows he’s grateful, for the first time in his life, that there is no path on his skin, no promise of safe harbor on the seas — no path to the other half of himself, for the Marines to follow, to hunt and drive to ground and slaughter. 

~~~~

What Ace doesn’t know, because he’s never asked, never wanted to know, is that Roger and Rouge were, in fact, soulmates.

Two Compases, two paired Gifts, given from the Sea to her beloved children, dark and clear on the soft inner skin of their wrists, and a needle as black as a moonless night, pointing the way. It had taken time, and more than a few missed chances, but they’d found each other, and their Comapsses had burned, joy and pain and promise .

They’d met, but…Roger had already been sick. Had already been dying. They had met, and they had known that they would never have long enough together, but they had taken every day, the same way they had always taken everything in the world they had wanted: fiercely, joyfully, without holding back. 

Rouge, fierce and bright and cunning, and yet still… kind. Soft in the way that only the most powerful or wiley could afford to be. Roger, loud and larger than life, with dreams too big for the world.

They had lived, and lived, and lived, until they knew they couldn’t anymore. 

In the end, they had tried their best to hide Rouge, to keep her safe. They had known that even if Garp wouldn’t hunt Rouge for Roger’s crimes, that there was no way the World Government wouldn’t do their best to find her. They would use every tool at their disposal, including the very connection that had drawn them together. The Compass that should be as sacred as the sea’s guarded depths would be just another tool. It would be inaccurate at best, since they wouldn’t risk not killing him immediately, couldn’t exactly drag him around the seas hoping his Compass would lead them to her, but…

They hadn’t wanted to risk it. 

It wasn’t too hard, when the time came, for the Pirate King to find a Devil Fruit. 

The juice had been disgusting, as Rouge bit deep into sickly, rotten flesh, the fruit an alarming green, swirled and unnatural. The pain of watching their Compasses fade was horrific, and the new instincts that came with a Zoan fruit had been odd, but for Rouge nothing, nothing , could match the wrenching agony of knowing that her husband was dying. Knowing that he was hastening it to try to buy her time. Neither, though, could anything on the seas match the absolutely unshakable determination within her to do whatever it would take to protect her child. 

They both would.

So. She let a devil into her soul, let it destroy her compass. She courted the hatred of the Sea she loved nearly as much as she loved Roger, and she prayed that would be enough.

And it was, in the end. It was just the barest edge of enough, combined with her Will, and the extra resiliency of a Devil Fruit user. 

She only held her son once, held him and named him, but it was enough because he lived and that was worth absolutely everything, even dying with a wrist as bare as the world had felt since she watched the broadcast of her husband’s execution.

~~~~~

Gramps’ arrival into the cold dark of Impel Down is honestly a shock.

The lights come up in a way they only bother with at meal times, but it can’t have been more than an hour or two since the last load of slop.

Nearly the last person Ace expects to see stride in after the Warden is Garp.

He looks ancient. Tired. Sad.

Guilt twinges in Ace’s guts, to see Gramps looking like that, for him. 

The marine hero dismisses the Warden, and lowers himself to sit in front of where Ace is chained, strung, arms spread wide against the wall.

Helpless. 

Trapped. 

They regard each other in silence for a long minute. It’s the first time the two have seen each other since Ace was sixteen, scrappy and angry and trapped on an island that was growing smaller and smaller every day, yearning for the freedom of the seas. 

Garp is the one to finally break the silence.

“This isn’t what I wanted for you,” he says. He sounds frustrated, almost angry, and Ace can’t help a bitter smile.

The only tone of parental love he’d known his whole life.

No wonder Pops had to work so hard to convince him: he hadn’t been speaking a language Ace recognized.

Fuck.

I love you too, Gramps.

I’m sorry.

It was always going to be this way, wasn’t it?

“It was never going to go your way, Old Man,” he says instead of any of the rest of it.

“I wanted you and Luffy to become great Navy men!” Garp says, like he didn’t even hear Ace, thumping an angry fist into his knee. “Instead you became sallywags!”

Luffy!

Ace aches for his little brother. Luffy never pays attention. He’ll be adventuring somewhere, free as the wind, and then Ace will be dead. It’s for the best, but it still aches, the thought that he’ll be breaking his promise, that Luffy will be all alone.

Something of it must show in his face, because Gramps sighs, slumps a little, resting his fists on the ground beside his crossed knees.

“Oh yes. I spoke to Luffy about his father. He was surprised to learn he had one.”

Ace glares at the thought of Luffy’s good-for-nothing father. Ace’s may have been the devil incarnate, but at least he’d had the decency to be dead. Dragon just couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about the son he’d fathered and then abandoned.

“Neither Luffy or I care about that,” Ace snapped. “In fact, we’d rather not talk about it. The fact that we both have world-class criminal blood flowing through our veins… there’s no way we could ever have been accepted into the Navy. But… I owe the name Portgas a great debt. I got it from my mother. I’d rather forget about my good-for-nothing father. I don’t owe him anything. I don’t even remember him.”

“That may be, but he has his own reasons for—”

“Give it up, Gramps. Whitebeard is my only father!” 

Garp is silent for several long minutes after that. What else is there to say? It’s true, and Ace will never deny it. Only one man on the seas has Ace’s love, his trust, his loyalty, the way Whitebeard does — the love of a son for his father. 

Ace thinks he’ll simply leave, after that, and he does stand to go, but… Gramps’ eyes linger, for a long moment, on his left wrist, mostly hidden as it is by the broad cuff of the shackle. There is something like relief in his eyes, and Ace knows what he’s thinking. After all, hadn’t he been thinking much the same?

He still doesn’t want to know, he thinks, the answer to his earlier thoughts, about his — his mother. But maybe he can get an answer for another question.  

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Ace asks, another question he’d never sought the answer for. If Shanks had been capable of relaying the information to Luffy, there was no way that Garp hadn’t known what Ace’s lack of Compass meant. (What it could mean. What he’d hoped it meant, since he’d heard it was possible; maybe he wasn’t broken, irredeemable. Maybe he’d simply lost his Compass to a devil, rather than being a devil himself, and unworthy, soulless.) The Hero of the Marines would know as well as anyone that those without Compasses had soulmates who had eaten a Devil Fruit, but he’d never said. Ace has never actually wanted to know why, but, well; it is literally his last chance to get an answer. “What it meant?”

Gramps sighs. “You never asked.”

The sound that cracks out of Ace might have been kin to a laugh, somehow. Wasn’t that just fucking typical. No, he hadn’t asked, had he? He’d learned his lesson about asking Gramps questions when he learned he was the son of a devil, that his mother was dead because of him, that as far as his Gramps was concerned the answer to ‘should I be alive’ was ‘maybe’ at best. 

“Go away, Gramps,” Ace says, tipping his head back to rest against the wall, refusing to look at him any longer. “I’m not your problem any longer.”

He refuses to respond to anything else Garp has to say, and the return of the darkness when he leaves is a relief against the stinging in his eyes. 

At least he's got a cell to himself, a moment of relative peace, before the end. 

Much to his surprise, it didn't stay that way, though. 

Jinbe at least gets led into the cell rather than dragged in while unconscious, but it is such a shock to see him, as he’s chained to the walls, that it takes Ace until the guards are retreating to gather his wits enough to question his presence here. 

"Jinbe," he rasps, throat dry from thirst and disuse. "What—"

"Ace," Jinbe says, voice deep and — that is pain, those bastards have hurt him. They— Why? Jinbe is a Warlord whatever else he is — "I have refused to go to war against the Good Old Man. And so..." 

Jinbe spreads his arms slightly, as far as he can, great chains rattling against each other with the movement. Ace tries to process that, poorly, because it simply does not make sense.

"The Marines are— War?” He asks, blankly uncomprehending. “They can't invade the New World, that's— that's stupid ." The Marines are a lot of things, but stupid on that level isn’t normally one of them. The New World tolerates a Marine presence, but they won’t tolerate invasion. Pops might even agree to be in the same hundred mile radius as Kaido and not try to kill him for Wano, if the Marines are stupid enough to charge into the Emperors’ waters in force, rather than continue on in the cautious balance of power they currently maintain. 

Jinbe looks at him, gentle and stern at once in the low light. 

"Ace," he says, even and steady. "They announced your public execution three days ago." 

That was fast, is Ace's first, nearly nonsensical thought. But that still doesn’t make what Jinbe has said make sense. How does that equal—

Ice crawls down his spine, deeper and more vicious than the chill of this hell. 

"No," he croaks out, voice breaking. "Jinbe—" 

The First Son of the Sea's voice is implacable, for all the sympathy in his eyes. 

"Whitebeard has called all of his allies together,” Jinbe says, his voice far too gentle for the news it bears. “They will go to war."

War. The word feels like it echoes in his brain.

Whitebeard will go to war. 

The motley, tumbling collection of brothers he has gained on the wildest sea will go to War. War for—

War for him.

"No," Ace shouts, fierce and desperate. "Jinbe, no, they can’t! ”

Jinbe's face actually cracks into something like a smile. 

"Ace," he says. "What wouldn't Whitebeard do for one of his children?" 

" NO! " Ace screams, and there should be fire, there should be something , some tangible reaction from the world at the sheer force of his denial but— but his fire is cold and dead in his chest and for all his anguish it is not true denial. He knows. He didn't— as soon as Jinbe said it he could see it. 

No matter what anyone might dare to say — though not more than once where a Whitebeard can hear them — Pops loves them. He loves them all, improbably knows every single one of the names of his children, the wide family he has collected across the seas. They are his Treasure. He knows their dreams and their wishes, learned it all with the dedication of every good pirate to the thing they treasure the most, of a father for his children, and he will brook no hand to harm them.

Everyone knows that. 

It's their greatest strength. 

It's about to become their greatest weakness, all because of Ace.

He should have known. He’d known they were going to kill him, he’d known that his stupid mistakes had put him here, but— he should have— he wasn’t just a loner anymore, wasn’t just one of a pair or a trio. He wasn’t even just a captain anymore. He wasn’t the place where the decisions stopped and the consequences rested. He had a captain of his own, but more importantly he had a father; he had someone who would take his burdens as his own, without question, without hesitation.

He’s had people who would die for him before. A few. But never— never so many. Never against such odds.

This isn’t one asshole pirate captain, or giant beasts, or the rabble in the Terminal. This isn’t a rival crew. This is the entire weight and might of the Marines, the strong and vicious military arm of the World Government. They would love absolutely nothing more than an excuse to take out Whitebeard, to rob his Pops of his freedom, to crush his siblings and destroy one of the four pillars of the New World. 

And Ace has given them one. He’s baited a trap he didn’t see coming. 

They are— Ace hadn’t understood, at first. They are Whitebeards, they are pirates, but they are also hope and protection. Stability. They are a force that protects, that gives the people on the islands they claim an option. Their flag says: you do not have to bow. You never have to bow.

It had taken Deuce, and a few very sharp words, before Ace had even begun to understand. That kind of thing was so far outside his usual experience, his knowledge of the world, that it was almost incomprehensible. You take care of your family, like Dadan does, and everyone outside it doesn’t matter. The same with your crew. They are where your responsibilities and cares end. Everyone is out for themselves and their people. Ace would face down the whole world for his crew, both old and new. But more than that…?

It hadn't been until he was watching Marco, honestly, that he had begun to understand. Wasn’t until he traced the first mate through each island, through check-ins with the locals, and problem solving when presented with issues. Ace had watched him as he worked tirelessly, when they were summoned by a plea for help after a disaster. The Whitebeards are a pirate crew, but they are also … more than that, to the people on their islands. To their people.

And it had been so… novel, the intricate play between the crew and the territories. Far less lawless than he was used to frankly, and occasionally stifling, but… but it was worth it — to always pay for his meals on Whitebeard island, to never cause more rowdiness than the locals expected, to help when asked — for the way that they looked at him.

Complete strangers smiled, when they saw his tattoo, and even if there was still wariness there was no fear , and it was…

He had liked it. 

He had known, for the first time in his life, the acceptance of strangers and the safety of people who were both stronger than him and wanted to use that strength to protect him. 

It had been so hard, at first, the realization that they were all stronger than him. He couldn’t beat a single one of the Commanders, let alone Whitebeard. His strength had meant nothing, his trials, his power and determination and will , not in the face of theirs. It had been terrifying, when it wasn’t infuriating. He was at their mercy, and mercy had always turned her face from him, every day of his miserable life. It had been harder still, the slow realization that all they wanted to do with that strength was to protect him, to accept that.

But he had, slowly, come to accept it, and he’d grown, and loved them, and then Teach—

His rage had known no end, an ocean of fire, and he’d thought he was stronger, now. Two years of training and fighting and improving. He didn’t need their protection, now. He could once again be that protection. So he’d left. He’d dashed after Teach with no thought and— 

And now his family would follow him, straight into War. 

Maybe mercy had simply been waiting, to turn her face from him when it would hurt the worst. 

~~~~

After Gramps, and then Jinbe, the last thing Ace expects is another visitor; Impel Down isn’t exactly a hot tourist destination.

And yet. The lift doors creek open, and the ruckus tells Ace this isn’t just an unexpected visit from the guards, well before the party advancing through Level Six makes it into view. 

The Warden, guards, and a woman, a pirate , one Ace recognizes even without Jinbe’s exclamation. 

The Pirate Empress. 

Suspicion chills Ace’s spine. There is no good reason for her to be here. There is no connection between them, like Jinbe has, to give her a reason to resist orders. 

There is no possible reason she’s here for anything good. 

She’s in chains, but the guards aren’t shoving her, don’t even have a hold of her. 

She, too, speaks of war, and Ace refuses to give her the satisfaction of a reaction even as the knowledge that they’re calling in all the Warlords, arraying every power they have against his family—

And then she creates a diversion, leans in close to speak as Magellan erupts, and— 

Sometimes Ace hates being right. 

There’s a weird sort of sick relief, mixed into the stark terror of her news, as the Pirate Empress floats away.

Luffy is here. His stupid, reckless idiot of a brother somehow managed to smuggle himself into Impel Down, a place every sane person does their best to stay far away from. A place that was the next closest thing to impossible to escape from again.

But he is alive. At this moment, he is alive. Teach hasn’t followed through on his threat to hunt him down, Luffy hasn’t faced down the man Ace had so grossly underestimated, or that terrifying fruit. 

Luffy is alive. 

Ace is going to die, promise broken. 

He can only pray, to gods he doesn’t believe in, that he won’t take his little brother with him.

Chapter 2

Summary:

Luffy's Compass vanishes on a Tuesday.

Luffy's Compass vanishes on a Tuesday. 

 

Or. 

 

Well. 

 

He notices on a Tuesday: the bare, blank stretch of skin on the inside of his wrist, where forever before there had been a Compass, with lines as black as pitch, and a happy wiggling little needle. 

 

But every day is an adventure, and even in little Foosha there is so much to see . There are people to bother, and stories to tell, there are coastlines to travel and bugs to catch, and waves to kick and laugh, and then there is Shanks . There is so much! So it isn't really a surprise that it’s not until Makino is wrestling Luffy into a bath for the first time in a week that anyone notices. 

 

Makino goes still, absolutely motionless in shock, a hand flying up to cover her mouth. Luffy very nearly escapes her loosened hold before he realizes that something is wrong . He stills too, looking up at the one person in his life who has always been there for him, more than Gramps, more than anyone , even if she's so busy he still spends more hours alone than not. 

 

Makino looks... horrified . 

 

She's looking at his wrist, and he looks too, and— 

 

He maybe panics a little. 

 

There is nothing there, where always before there had been the Mystery Black Circle, the Compass, the needle and the promise that somewhere out there there would be someone just for him, and someday he would follow it and find them and he would never be alone again.  

 

And it's gone .

 

When the yelling and thrashing and loud messy tears have stopped, and he and Makino have mopped up all the water that spilled out of the bath when he tipped it over in his flailing panic, and she sighs and supposes that the drama has gotten him clean enough — when they gather themselves together, then they go ask questions. 

 

Well. Makino asks most of the questions, while Luffy follows around behind her.

 

No one in the village has ever heard of anything like it, not even Woop-Slap, the oldest and best traveled. It’s impossible. Unheard of. 

 

Compasses don't just vanish. 

 

They are a Gift, from the Sea, from the Mother Ocean, who connects all of them. Her waters touch every shore, just as they run in every vein, and pulse with every heartbeat. From the moment you are born, until the moment you die, the Compass Rose is with you. 

 

The needle... sometimes. It is there often enough, in this hard world, to make it just a little brighter, a little more bearable. Still, some people never get a needle, though they are few and far between. Some people's needle takes so long to appear that when it finally does they are old and gray. Those are known phenomena, if sad. 

 

If your soulmate dies, the villagers agree, voices quiet and grave as they discuss this sadly common occurrence, the needle will fade out, go gray and dim. It is a ghost of a missed chance, forever pointing to where your soulmate had been when they died, the faded remnant still set in the jet-black confines of the Compass Rose. Very, very rarely another needle might manifest, as a rare and precious second chance. 

 

But that's not this . 

 

That's not the same. 

 

That's not the entire Compass, every trace of the Sea's Promise, vanishing off a wrist, leaving not a single shadowed line behind. 

 

This is, in the experiences of the small town of Foosha, entirely unprecedented. 

 

Luffy, of course, doesn't hear most of this. 

 

He did try to listen. This is about His Mystery Person! 

 

But the adults are So Boring, and anyway, it doesn't matter. 

 

It's His Person. 

 

It doesn't matter if his Compass is gone or not, he'll find them anyway.

 

He gets his vindication later that month, when Shanks gets back. Luffy has nearly forgotten, by that point, about the Mystery. He is too caught up in the excitement of Shanks being back, of begging stories out of him, and once more putting together his arguments for why, exactly, he should be allowed to come with Shanks when he leaves. 

 

He’s nearly forgotten, but Makino hasn’t. 

 

Shanks goes quiet, when she asks, intense in a way that makes something in Luffy shiver, even though he hands over his wrist when asked.

Shanks looks … sad, Luffy thinks. He’s never seen Shanks’ face do that before, and the panic of it nearly swamps him again. Luffy is yelling before he can think of it, insisting to Shanks that it doesn’t matter! He doesn’t need some stupid Compass, he’ll find his Mystery Person no matter what it takes! 

 

Shanks smiles, then, something that starts quiet and grows to a boisterous bellow that Luffy can’t help but echo, giggling along even though he doesn’t know what the joke is. Shanks’ following explanation has far too many words in it, but Luffy gets the idea: somewhere out on the seas his Mystery Person ate a Mystery Fruit, and if (‘When!’ Luffy insists, which makes Shanks smile again) he meets them then he’ll get Mystery Powers too, which is so cool!

 

He spends a full hour running around, shouting out ideas for what Mystery Power his Mystery Person probably has, before he gets distracted by lunch, and Benn trying to teach him to swim once more — with a comment from the First Mate about getting his water time in before it’s too late, which Luffy thinks is silly: he’s going to have the ocean forever.  

 

Months later, when he eats his own Fruit, he wonders, briefly, what that means for his Mystery Person. Shanks can’t tell him for sure. Although the Captain looks exasperated and concerned, Luffy just shrugs, and works on figuring out how to make his punches like pistols.  

 

In the aftermath of it all, he’s glad he knows why his Mystery Circle disappeared, even though it’s confusing and doesn’t really matter, because he’s going to find them anyway. He’s glad, because it means he gets to tell Ace.  

 

Ace is angry, and he hates him, at first, but Luffy is nothing if not stubborn. He yells back, and follows him, and he also tells Ace again and again what his blank wrist means, because Ace is stupid, and thinks stupid things, and he needs to know in a way that Luffy doesn’t.

Ace doesn’t ever really believe him, but it’s okay. He’ll figure it out some day, when he meets his Mystery Person, and gets their cool Mystery Power, and until then Luffy will just have to make sure he knows that Luffy wants him here. 

 

Luffy is so sure when he sees him in Alabasta, that Ace has found his Mystery Person, but Ace says no; that he ate his own Fruit, and the power is his. Luffy pouts, but he guesses fire is pretty cool, even if it doesn’t come with Ace’s Person to finally prove Luffy right. 

 

It’s fine though, because while Ace is still angry, he also seems… happy. He talks about his captain, his father, and there is peace in his eyes for the first time Luffy can remember since—

 

Well. For a long time, anyway. 

 

So they part again, and continue on their adventures. Luffy takes off from Alabasta, missing Vivi, but with the best crew on the seas, and their adventures only get bigger, and better. They’re stronger, and they win, and win, and— 

 

And then they get to Thriller Bark.

 

Luffy doesn’t know what happened, exactly. No one will tell him, and he won’t order it. 

 

Then Sabaody. 

 

Kuma. 

 

Amazon Lily. 

 

Ace.

 

Ace, and the rush to Impel Down, because no matter what Ace will say about Luffy living his own adventure Ace is his brother and he won’t let him die. 

 

There is Buggy, and the Wax Guy, and Bon Clay and then— poison. 

 

He wins, gets past the Warden, down another level, but… 

 

Luffy doesn’t like this place. He punches another wolf, shivering with the cold and the nausea that’s been crawling through him since the first time he punched that poison asshole. 

His body is refusing to cooperate with him. It doesn’t do that anymore. Sure, when he was little, and he didn’t know how to control his fruit, he’d been all over the place. But not since he trained, and learned.

Now his body does what he tells it.

But not right now. Now things are numb.

Bon-Clay is yelling. The wolves are howling.

Luffy reaches deeper for strength. He won’t be stopped here. He can’t be. He has to rescue Ace. He will rescue Ace. 

 

There is snow under his knees.

Under his hands.

No, no, he has to keep moving. He needs to get up. He has to…

 

The poison man did something to him.

He just has to make it past this. 

 

He can do this. 

 

He has to.

He will.

 

His determination, desperation, sparks off something inside him, and for a moment he thinks— he thinks he can feel everything.

The world flickers blue— 

 

Then goes black in a snap, Luffy collapsing unconscious into the snow between one breath and the next. 

 

~~~~

 

Bon Clay saves his life, and a person with a huge head heals him from the poison, but he doesn’t make it in time. Ace is gone and Luffy has to fight his way back up out of the prison.

 

The big-head-person and their people help, and so does Jinbe, who was in the cell with Ace. 

 

Bon Clay saves all their lives, and Luffy hurts for them, but he can’t turn back, and Bon Clay made their choice, they all have. 

 

Onwards, to Marineford, and Ace. 

 

Luffy likes Jinbe. Once he’d given up on trying to make Luffy sit down he was good company. 

 

He doesn’t try to talk to Luffy, or make plans.

What do they need a plan for?

 

They will get there, and then Luffy will get to Ace, and they will get away.

Ace doesn’t like running away. 

 

Luffy doesn’t either, but Shanks had taught him when he was still tiny that some fights aren’t worth it.

Defending nakama is always worth it, but it is more important to keep them safe than to defeat an enemy. That’s why Shanks had focused on getting Luffy away from the Lord of the Coast, even above his own safety, above his arm .

So that’s what Luffy will do. 

 

He will get Ace, and then they will get away. 

 

Ace will be so mad at him for coming, for interfering in his adventure, but Luffy doesn’t care. Ace can yell at him as much as he likes, as long as he keeps his promise. 

 

As long as he doesn’t leave Luffy all alone on the seas. As long as he doesn’t die.

~~~~

 

Luffy hates Marineford. He wants to punch Gramps’ stupid friend, as he talks into the snail, telling the whole battlefield things that don’t matter .

What does it matter, who Luffy’s father is? He didn’t even know he had one! Who cares who Ace’s father is! Ace is Ace!

But Ace hates his father so much that it makes him think stupid things about himself. 

Luffy has told him it doesn’t matter. Told him that of course it is better that Ace is alive. He is his brother! 

 

But Ace is stupid, sometimes. So, so stupid.

It doesn’t matter, though — even more than it usually doesn’t matter — because Ace has a cool new dad now. Luffy still thinks dads are kinda dumb, but Whitebeard is pretty awesome. Luffy is going to be King, though, not the old man.

There’s a sharp ringing in Luffy’s ears.

There is a lot going on he isn’t catching, and that… usually that doesn’t happen in battle. But it doesn’t matter, it can’t. Not now, not with Ace finally free, running at his side again, almost like old perfect memories brought to life, and Luffy is grinning, aiming for the shore.

They’re going to make it. Ace’s new family are clearing the way, and Ace is beside him, and—

And then he isn’t.

Then Luffy is turning. His body stops listening to him again.

He’s falling.

Danger, it’s dangerous. He tries to make his legs work, but he can’t, and—

 

The magma admiral is coming for him, and Luffy can’t move, and—

Ace.

Blood.

There is a hole through Luffy’s brother, in the shape of a fist and he’s screaming his name even as he reaches out to catch him, lower him into his lap and cradle him close.

There is blood on his hand. It’s hot and slick and—

“I’m sorry, Luffy,” Ace says, weak and wheezing but no, that’s not right, Ace is never weak and he never apologizes. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong, it’s impossible .

“Ace, your wounds need treating!” Luffy tells him, desperate, holding onto him with his own failing, faltering strength. 

Ace’s full weight is on him, an arm around his shoulder with desperate strength, his lips right by his ear, and he’s still talking but Luffy can’t, he can’t—

 

“Thank you for loving me,” his brother says, and then he’s limp, slipping out of Luffy’s hands, unmoving and smiling and Luffy screams. 

 

No, no, this isn’t right, this can’t be, Ace promised him!

He promised him he would never die! 

 

Something rips right down to Luffy’s soul and he’s reaching , like he could pull Ace back to him. 

 

The world goes blue for a fractured instant — and then black.

Chapter 3

As soon as they are safely submerged following the debacle at the auction house, Law kicks everyone out of the main operating theater and locks the door.

 

Including Bepo. 

 

Especially Bepo, truly. Thankfully, he can shoo his first mate off with the very real task of settling Jean Bart, their newest crew member. 

 

It gives him the space to have his crisis in private. 

 

This isn’t—

 

He hadn’t— 

 

Truly, he had never expected—

 

Law takes a deep breath. 

 

The air expands oddly in his lungs. He takes another deep, deliberate breath, despite the way panic tries to tighten his chest against it, and the way his ribs entirely fail to contain it as they should. 

 

Statistically, the chances of meeting your soulmate are… well. Small. 

 

To begin with, they have to be born in the same Sea as you. Even if you have the means to leave your island and search out the other end of your compass, once you hit one of the nigh-impassable barriers that are the Red Line or the Calm Belt… 

 

Unless you are a marine, or a pirate, or otherwise particularly adventurous, that is the end of it. Some people promise to smuggle desperate searchers across those barriers, but that is a quick way to find yourself collared and sold on the slave trade. The marines promise to let you travel far and wide: Recruit! Find your soulmate!  

 

Watch them get roped into a corrupt organization alongside you. 

 

Some pirates take up a Jolly Roger to sail the seas in search of their soulmate, but that had never been Law’s motivation. 

 

Hatred had driven him, first and foremost: a desire to see everything destroyed, to crush it all, to take out as much as he could before he died. 

 

And then there had been Doflamingo. 

 

And then there had been Cora-san.

And then…

 

Well, suffice to say that soulmates have never entered into the equation.

 

Even if they had, the chance for an average person finding theirs started at roughly one in six at best, depending on sea of birth, and dropped dramatically from there, dictated by both means and ability to travel said sea. 

 

And once one had consumed a devil fruit… 

 

Law stares at the pale skin of the underside of his wrist, marred solely by a scarred splotch of even paler skin.

It had been eleven years, but he can still picture the compass that had once shown there: a perfect circle, marked equidistantly with four delicately tapered, precise points, and bisected by a fine, dark needle. 

 

He had been an extremely-anxious nearly-seven before the needle appeared, fading into existence in his Compass before his fascinated eyes one cold, late-spring morning at the breakfast table, as hot cereal dripped from the forgotten spoon in his hand, and his little sister demanded to know what he was looking at. 

 

It had always steadily pointed off in the same direction, whenever he checked, his excitement dimming slightly as the months stretched into years of immobility. His father had tried to reassure him, he remembers, when even three years later it hadn’t done much more than vibrate faintly. 

 

Be patient, his father had said. Hold on to hope. His soulmate would still be very little, and wouldn’t have much reason to move around. The lack of movement didn’t have to mean they were at a great distance: they may still be in the same sea as him. 

 

And even if they weren’t, his mother had reassured him, he could become a famous, world-traveling doctor and go find them! Be patient, she’d repeated, smiling at his father. There is still time. 

 

Hah.

Then there had been no reassurance that could be offered, when the white crept onto Law’s skin, underlying even the Compass: the black of it even starker against the white than his natural tan.

 

And then…

 

Then it hadn’t mattered. The world had turned on his country, his family. It had abandoned them, condemned them, killed them. What was a distant needle on a marred compass in the face of that? In the face of the hatred, the rage, the pain?

He would never meet them, this other half of himself the Sea had promised him, and it didn’t matter.  

 

What good had that promise done anyone on Flevance? What good had it done little Lami?

 

None. 

 

So Law had worn his sleeves long, and his hatred of the world plain and brazen, and his only reply to any inquiry had been venom and viciousness, and a biting, frigid insistence that it did not matter. 

 

Not since the Amber Lead, not since Flevance had fallen; not since long before a day in the snow when foul juice had run down his throat and a devil had taken root in his soul. Not since long before the Sea had screamed her hatred at the new devil fruit user, unheard, and revoked her gift: his Soul Compass vanishing from his wrist as if it had simply never been. 

 

It had not mattered. Not in the wake of Cora-san’s sacrifice, nor Law’s escape and subsequent struggle to survive.

 

And then, even if he could have brought himself to care about the matter ever again? From a purely practical stance, it was hopeless. 

 

The chances of finding your soulmate once one of the pair has consumed a devil fruit are… infinitesimal. So rare it’s as much the realm of legend and myth as fact and study and statistics. 

 

Both compasses would have vanished in the same instant, according to the stories. One pair making a pact with a devil, and both would suffer for it, never to have that steady guide, the promise from the sea that somewhere was a stable port in this wild world, even if you could never reach it. 

 

Law had given up on that gift when he was just a child, scared and lonely and watching his family work for a cure they had to know was never coming.

Rejected it, when the world killed them and rage was all he had left. 

 

Abandoned it again, when the only chance of saving his own life was a devil fruit, and the certain knowledge that the compass he hadn’t looked at in nearly three years would vanish forever the moment the juice passed his lips. 

 

He had forsaken the promise of the Sea, and has never looked back. 

 

It is done. 

 

Gone. 

 

Impossible. 

 

And yet. 

 

And yet the evidence before his eyes is in turn irrefutable. 

 

He flexes his hands. 

 

He’s never been double jointed before. His thumb presses backwards to his wrist without so much as a twinge. 

 

And yet, there are the legends. 

 

Just a few. 

 

Of the devils. 

 

Of the grasping greed. 

 

Of a devil fruit user meeting their soulmate, unknowing. 

 

Of the devil in their soul reaching out for the matching soul that Mother Sea tried to deny them. 

 

Law wonders, as he pulls a finger and it stretches and stretches and then snaps back like rubber, what, precisely, his devil had been thinking. 

 

There is no way Monkey D. Luffy is his soulmate.

 

~~~~

 

Yet no matter his denials, the new power doesn’t go away. 

 

They linger in Saboady’s waters, floating among the endlessly deep roots of the mangroves, watching the sap bubble up towards the surface, and the comings and goings of ships. 

 

They may not, technically, need a bubble coating to get to Fishman Island, not on a submarine, but they do need to finish resupplying, and they need to wait until the abnormal amount of marine traffic on every part of the island dies down. There are Marine ships everywhere, even in the lawless zones, coming and going with frantic energy that seems disproportionate with the limited chaos they’d stirred up at the auction house.

It’s not their problem, though. Law does a lot of reading, spends a lot of time locked up in his room, or the main operating theater.

He doesn’t have any books on the soulmate phenomenon. Why should he?

Even before it had become a point so personally irrelevant as for his chances to primarily feature in legends, he had already known it didn’t matter. Either he will be dead, or he will never meet them.

But in light of his sudden new information… a few of his general medical texts have small entries on the subject. He dissects every word, looking for meanings, for possibilities, for some kind of explanation, because this has to be a mistake. 

 

He joins a clandestine resupply trip and promptly abandons his crew to the grunt work while he scours every bookshop and library on the island for texts on soulmates. He even skims the stories and books of songs and legends, though he only buys the copies of studies. He possibly also breaks into the small marine hospital on the island to raid their reference library, though the latter trip involves taking every book that he doesn’t already have, rather than just those on his current research topic.

 

Not even locking himself up with his new texts provides any satisfactory answers, however, just more questions.

When the studying becomes too frustrating he does a lot of very, very careful exercises confined alone in the largest operating room because, insane or not, mistake or not, absolute refusal to believe or not, his arms still stretch too far when he isn't paying attention. His lungs still expand without resistance when he breathes too deeply. 

 

The only good thing is that when he loses his temper and kicks the wall it doesn’t hurt — at least not until his foot rebounds off the wall and goes sailing uncontrollably towards the far one, dragging the rest of his leg with it as it unspools grotesquely, and flinging him into a completely undignified heap after it.

Bepo had broken into the room after that, in the wake of the crash and vicious swearing, and Law is pleased to note that his own devil fruit continues to work just fine. Proven when he promptly swaps his first mate with Sachi’s hat, and lets the thump of two bodies colliding and the indignant wailing and startled swearing from outside bleed off some of his temper.

So. 

 

…Rubber. 

 

Apparently. 

 

He sulks for at least another day, before Bepo interrupts again.

At least he knocks this time, but he also doesn’t stop knocking and go away, even when Law flares a Room, threateningly, blue dome passing through the metal wall of the ship without pause

“Captain,” Bepo says, and Law straightens up out of his despondent crunch at the serious concern in the Mink’s voice. “Captain, I think you need to see this!”

 

Bepo is right, as it turns out. This is very interesting. The Marines are going to execute a Whitebeard Commander.

Somehow they had caught a Whitebeard commander, and gotten him all the way to Impel Down, and now they are going to execute him. What is more, they are going to broadcast it live to the world, or at least to Sabaody.

“They’re declaring war on Whitebeard,” Law muses, as his crew flails and panics around him. “That’s… bold.”

There is only so much information available to them about Whitebeard, of course. Even most of what they do know is filtered through the Navy censors before it hits the papers. Law knows more than many — after all, his prey is in the New World and who knows what information could be important — but even Paradise is full of the rumors of the Strongest Man in the World. 

 

He is powerful. Ruthless. His crew is one of the largest in the world, and they rule nearly a third of the New World themselves. He’s been on the seas since even before Gold Roger, and has never suffered a defeat since the Pirate King was killed.

Law isn’t sure how much of that he believes, but he is broadly skeptical of the stories that claim the man truly loves the motley family he has collected about himself. Those stories are never in the paper, of course. That lack would make Law more inclined to believe them — anything the Marines tried to hide or contradict was instantly given more weight as far as Law was concerned — if it weren’t for the content. 

 

A power of the world, held together by familial love.

It’s completely ridiculous, of course; Law knows all about pirate crews that call themselves ‘family.’ He knows the priorities of the ones who lead them, and how little they will hesitate to strike down one of their own if they step outside the rules that govern the crew. 

 

But even Doflamingo would take badly to another power trapping one of his people, challenging his authority so openly. 

 

…that is actually an interesting idea, isn’t it?

Hmmm, a thought for a later time.

For now…

“Bepo!” He grins, only slightly maliciously. It broadens when his crew quails. “Let’s find a Navy ship to follow. We’re heading for Marineford.” 

 

The wails of “Captain?!” from all sides truly warm his blackened soul. 

 

~~~~

 

The adage ‘expect the unexpected’ is inane and reductive. Law prefers ‘know your enemy’ and to have six plans where anyone else might be content with two. That said, he has become resigned to a certain amount of unpredictability here on the Grand Line. 

 

And. Yet. 

 

The absolute last thing that Law expects, bobbing just-surfaced a relatively safe distance from Marineford, is for the tsunami that nearly tossed them ashore, and the ice that nearly trapped them, to both be outshone by the spectacle that is Monkey D. Luffy, fellow supernova and the current absolute bane of Law’s very sanity, falling out of the sky in a ship apparently crewed primarily by inmates, cross dressers, and a Warlord. 

 

Law’s heart very nearly stops, before it picks up double time.

The little denden squeaks a protest when Law’s grip on it tightens, and waves its little antenna in alarm, blurring the projected picture showing on one wall of the command room. Law drops it on the counter, shoving his one hand in his pocket, the other clenching tighter around Kikoku’s sheath. The hijacked signal, the same that’s being shown at Sabaody, steadies. 

 

Law still hates it.

“Captain?” Bepo inquires, a soft rumble beside him.

“Take us closer,” Law orders instead of responding to the unasked part of that question, which is ‘are you okay?’ 

 

The answer to that is obviously no, so it doesn’t warrant an answer, even if Bepo has no reason to know that.

“Captain?” Satchi repeats the one-word question, this time alarmed more than concerned.

“Take. Us. Closer,” Law repeats, but concedes: “Carefully.”

Projected on their wall, Strawhat is confronting Whitebeard, an Emperor. Law can’t even bring himself to be incredulous. 

 

His first meeting with this man had involved punching a Celestial Dragon. Of course he’d follow that up with… apparently somehow ending up in Impel Down, breaking out of Impel Down, traveling to Marineford on a stolen ship, and confronting an Emperor of the Sea.

For the love of the seas, sharp scalpels, and Law’s sanity. This is the man Mother Sea thought was destined for him? 

 

Even the condemned prisoner is telling him to go away. 

 

Why is he even here?

“You’re my Brother, Ace!”

 

…ahh.

He clenches his hand around his opposite wrist. Skin and then bone flex like, well, like rubber, unsatisfying under his grip, the pressure distributed painlessly. The expected grounding ache of the tight grip doesn’t come.

…Fuck. 

 

Law watches as Strawhat struggles forward, again and again, no matter what gets in his way. 

 

Sees the allies he’d gathered in less than a week come together to his aid when he is outmatched. 

 

Sees just how outmatched he is, this man who had fought side by side with Law in the aftermath of the Auction House.

Law had seen him and Kidd fight, and been pleased that he easily stood alongside the two other supernovas.

He’d thought the Hearts were ready for the New World. 

 

An ally steps behind Whitebeard. Law watches the blood spray and knows that Whitebeard will not be leaving this battlefield alive. 

 

The projection shuts off as the Marines decide they don’t want the world to see what comes next. 

 

Law steps up to the scope, looks to the distant shore of Marineford, just able to make out the huge form of Whitebeard kneeling down to embrace his killer. 

 

Maybe there is something to those rumors of love, after all.

“Submerge,” he orders evenly. His crew sighs in relief. 

 

Law can’t help the sadistic smirk that crosses his lips.

“Take us closer.”

“Captain!”

 

~~~~

 

Law doesn't have them resurface again. Not this close. This is going to be so, so risky, and he's already risking his crew’s lives enough, with this whim . He peers through the periscope, nails digging into the panel, everyone poised to dive the second he gives the word. 

 

Closer, closer, they have to get closer, hugging the edges of the bay and avoiding the shattered carcass of the grand Moby Dick as she finishes sinking below the waves. 

 

Law’s reach is so much larger than it was when he was a child, but it's still not large enough, not for this, not when the battlefield is moving in waves, and some of the most powerful people on all six seas are somewhere above them, embroiled in a war. 

 

He can't believe he's doing this. This is insane.

 

The Marines will know. 

 

Doflamingo will know. 

 

His Room isn’t the flashiest manifestation of his devil fruit, but it’s surely not subtle enough to fool an entire battlefield of the world's best. 

 

His hands are cold where they grip the periscope, the scope just raised above the edge of the lapping waters. 

 

He forbids his hands to shake: he is a surgeon .

 

They want to, anyway. 

 

He'd thought the Hearts were ready for the New World. 

 

Ha . 

 

They are nowhere close.

 

The North Blue was a hard sea, and Paradise had been… insane, crazy, exhilarating; challenging in a way that made his blood surge and his heart pound. Every day took him closer and closer to the New World, to Dresrossa, to Doflamingo and his revenge. 

 

When they had reached Sabaody without a challenge more serious than they could handle, without losing a single crew mate despite the horror stories of the Grand Line, he had thought them ready to face the New World. 

 

The last week has been nothing if not a second-hand crash course in why that is patently, blatantly untrue. 

 

The New World is full of monsters. 

 

And here he is, ready to taunt the best of them. And for what? A connection he hasn’t believed in since before his city fell?

 

He bites back the urge to order Bepo to turn them around. 

 

There, on the battlefield, a flare of fire, finally. Firefist is free. 

 

A turn, a surge, a shift in the battlefield. He watches it, assessing.

The Whitebeards are retreating, Portgas and Strawhat both running towards the allied ships, towards the shore, closer, closer, almost close enough, nearly there… 

 

Maybe he will not have to interfere, after all. Strawhat and his brother both look battered, but surely Whitebeard has good doctors of his own. 

Maybe, just maybe, Strawhat will make it through this debacle without any interference from Law.

Maybe Law will get to simply slip away quietly; lay low in Paradise until the waves of this fight die down. 

 

Make plans for how, exactly, he’s going to prepare his crew for the monsters of the New World. 

 

He cannot help the sting of admiration, even as he watches Strawhat run with a doctor’s eye. None of his crew would last more than a minute or two on this battlefield, yet Strawhat has blazed his way into the eye of the world with this, and survived. 

 

Only— 

 

Law’s hand clenches on the scope, every muscle going rigid as Strawhat stops, turns. His brother has planted his feet when he should be fleeing. He is squaring up to fight, and Luffy is turning back to him— 

 

Damn Portgas, Gol, whatever his name is, damn him, why has he stopped, he is still too far away— 

 

Law sees it happening.

 

"ROOM!" He shouts, face still pressed to the periscope, launching his will out, feeling the drain, but— too far, they are still too far, and he sees it happen. Sees Strawhat trip, sees him fall. Sees Akainu, the Mad Dog of the Navy, fists aglow with burning magma, focus his malevolent gaze on the fallen man, sees him charge— 

 

Law is going to watch his soulmate die.

 

Just. 

 

Like.

 

Everyone. 

 

Else.

 

Except. He sees Portgas. Sees him move. Sees a fist that should have passed through fire punch through flesh instead, wonders if he imagines the flickers of black holding the flames at bay, slowing that fist with solid muscle and bone and flesh before it kills the boy pulling himself frantically up on his knees — Strawhat catching the body as it falls, face a mask of shock and bewilderment and dawning horror.

A fist grips Law’s throat. 

 

Snow and the smell of blood and the thud of a body against a wooden chest. 

 

The battlefield erupts. Law sees the horror and the tears. The screaming. 

 

Law can't hear it, all of this playing out before him in horrible silence, but he can see it. 

 

Can see when Akainu gathers himself to attack again, Law’s— Strawhat, helpless and unresponsive, cradling his brother’s body, vulnerable. 

 

No.

 

“ROOM!” Law reaches, in and then out, pushing with all of himself, desperate, reaching further than he has ever managed before. It’s not going to work. It’s too far, he can’t— something changes, shifts, there’s no time to guess what, he can feel them, a last exhale, a heart’s last beats— "SHAMBLES!"

 

The floor lurches beneath his feet, and his vision goes blinding blue and gold for a long second where he’s still pressed up against the periscope, before gray overtakes him. 

 

It can’t be for more than a second. Sachi is holding him steady where he clings to the scope, even as Bepo shouts orders. 

 

They dive straight down and away, breathless with fear that any moment something will catch them, but Law only has eyes for his— his patient, empty eyed and shocked, cradling the body of his brother as it bleeds the last of its blood out over the floor of Law's command room. 

 

Defeat is bitter on his tongue, but he doesn’t have time for it. 

 

He orders Ikakku to get Strawhat to the medbay, test his blood type. He's not bleeding anywhere obvious but he looks three steps from dead anyway, and Law will be damned if he's done all this just to lose him. 

 

She complies, touching Strawhat’s arm cautiously, then pulling him away and lifting him up when he doesn’t react. 

 

Portgas' head thumps limply to the submarine's grating as Strawhat is moved, and everyone not focused on operating the sub winces as Ikakku caries Strawhat away. 

 

Law looks at Portgas, at the hole punched clean through him. The charred scent of meat and spilled blood will linger until they can surface. He thinks about it, but… no, it’s too late. Not even his powers can do anything in the face of this level of devastation to a body. 

 

"Captain?" Bepo asks quietly. Law shakes his head. 

 

"Put him in the morgue," he orders. "I will ask Strawhat what he wants done, once he wakes." 

 

They had best be surfaced by then, Law considers coolly. Given the kind of havoc he knows Strawhat is capable of. 

 

Bepo nods, and turns back to navigating them deeper, away from Marineford and the deeply suspicious lack of pursuit. Could they really have gotten away with it? 

 

It feels impossible, but Strawhat is in his infirmary, and alive, at least for now.

Law needs to go, make sure that state continues. 

 

But still he does not leave. Lingers, looking down at the body of a flashfire legend, there and now gone in barely more than a few years. 

 

Just like his blood-father.

From the little Law saw, Portgas would have hated that comparison. 

 

He sighs, takes a few steps closer, and crouches down, brow pinched as he contemplates the small smile gracing Portgas’ lips.

 

"I will …” Law pauses. He knows better than to make promises to the dead. The one he already holds is more than weighty enough, but this, at least, he can promise: "He is safe here."

 

With that he stands. 

 

Turns. 

 

He has a patient to see to. He can waste no more time on someone else's dead.

Chapter 4

Marco likes traveling underwater. 

 

No one ever expects it of him, though, which Marco honestly thinks is a little funny. He’s a creature of fire and the sky, it’s true, but he’s made his life on the ocean, and the Sea has been his constant companion, even if she has hated him for as long as he can remember. 

 

Being below the waves is the closest he can get to her embrace, and it’s a quiet sort of peace he enjoys at every opportunity. 

 

It’s a reminder, in many ways: he’s still just a human, no matter his power, when surrounded by the endless expanse of the ocean. It’s the same for everyone, no matter who they are, what they have done. It doesn’t matter here, a mile below the ocean, that he’s a Fruit user, or that the ocean hates him, specifically. A single mistake, a bad coating, and that’s it. Crushed. Everyone will all die the same. 

It’s morbid, maybe. But it makes it peaceful. He likes to lay up in the crow’s nest and watch the ripple of the bubble coating, watch the deep-sea life swim by. When they’re edging closer to the surface, or nearing Fishman Island, he likes to watch the way the light slowly filters down, everything brightening as they surface, the light changing as they go, colors shifting and reemerging.

They only lose the blue tones when they lose all light, but the blue also returns first, as they emerge from the black. They get the green back next, then the yellows and oranges. Red returns last, always. 

It’s the first they lose on the descent, the last they gain on the way back up. The warmer colors stay absent, on this trip, as they stay submerged, keep to the depths as they ride the currents up the ‘Line. 

 

It feels cold, no matter how many layers they put on. 

 

Marco, bundled in the crow’s nest, misses the warmth. 

 

He misses Ace. 

Ace had been the most recent, in a long history of people, to tell Marco he thought he, more than anyone, would hate being under water this way. 

 

That he was meant to fly, and didn’t this feel like being trapped? 

Ace has never relaxed into it the way Marco has. 

He’s only come down to Fishman Island with them twice. 

 

Marco hopes they’ll get to bring him a third time. A fourth. However many times it takes for him to relax into it. 

Marco doesn’t know how Ace got across the Red Line to hunt Teach down in Paradise. He didn’t take the Striker through the deep sea currents on her own, did he? She is a valiant little ship, it’s true, but she isn’t built for a trip like that. 

 

He doesn’t know. He hates that fact. 

 

They hadn’t had time on this trip, racing the clock, to stop in Fishman Island to seek that kind of information. They’d only skirted the city as they passed through the passage under the Red Line that it guarded. 

 

It had taken time, to gather their allies, to coat the ships. It is taking too much time to slink through this end of Paradise, even with an Eternal ‘Pose to Marineford to guide them true. 

 

But there is nothing left for Marco to do. He has prepared all he can. He has planned, and prepped, and discussed. There have been meetings and discussions and orders given. There is nothing left until they arrive, and so he… waits. He lays on the floor of the highest crow’s nest, and watches the shimmer of the bubble, and does not ache for the sky. 

This is a little like flying anyway, the clean slice of the Moby through the deep waters, the endless blue around him. 

 

A little. 

 

Nothing can really match the feeling of wind in his feathers, and the endless stretch of the sky surrounding him. 

 

He loves his fruit.

Not only are the benefits obvious, his healing rate truly beyond compare, but he wouldn’t give up flying for anything in the world. 

Not even… Well. He holds his hand up, staring at the blank skin of his inner wrist, backlit by the gentle filter of cool light down through the water. 

 

He doesn’t think he’d give it up even for the return of his Compass. Once, maybe, but…

 

He’d never known anything else, after all. He’d eaten his fruit when he was too young to remember anything before it. He has simply always had it; the fire, and the healing, and while it had taken a while, and a few moments that were both funnier and more heart-stopping in hindsight, to figure out the flying, he’d always had the form; the Phoenix resting up against his own soul.

 
It was the only thing that had enabled him to survive, truthfully, growing up alone on an island in the New World. He had learned early to hide it, earlier still that no one would come to help him if he failed. 

The bare wrist had been just one more strange thing about him, in a countless host of other things. He had never known to miss it, not until he was old enough to start asking questions of the few people on his island who weren’t too scared or hostile to talk to him. His life hadn’t been defined by its lack, and he hadn’t known it was something he should be mourning. And then…

 

Then he’d learned that it was, in fact, possible to mourn something you had never had. Something you could never have. Something you’d had no choice in, and didn’t care about, up until the moment you did.  

 

He doesn’t remember eating his fruit.

“Do you regret it?” Ace had asked him, once, standing side-by-side at the railing, looking out over the sea. He hadn’t clarified, hadn’t led into the conversation, hadn’t given any indication of what he was talking about, but his right hand was tight on the leather band that encased his left wrist, and Marco hadn’t had to ask what he meant. Ace had never taken his log pose, or wrist band, or wide bracelet, off in Marco’s presence, but he knew as well as anyone what he would find if the younger man had.

Blank bare skin, no hint of a compass ever having been there; consequence of the fire that made Ace now, from skin to soul. 

Marco had been silent a long minute, long enough that Ace had started to backpedal away from the question, before he had sighed, leaning sideways into the railing, and bracing his chin with the heel of his hand, his own bare wrist on clear display, nothing in place to hide it. 

“No,” had been Marco’s slow, deliberate answer. It wasn’t the first time he had been asked, but he took the time to think deeply about it every time, to make sure his answer remained the same. “I don’t think I can. If I didn’t have this fruit I would probably be dead. And having it has saved countless of my family’s lives. It has saved Pop’s life, even. I don’t think I can regret that. I’m happy with where my life has taken me.”

And it was true, even. Ace had nodded, slowly, and silence had settled as they watched the waves off the prow. Marco had thought, then, about asking the same question: did Ace regret his fruit? He’d had years without a fruit, chances Marco never had, to find his other half. Had he looked? Had he found and lost them? Did he know, when he ate his fruit, what it would mean? 

 

Marco had held his silence, though, and his questions. He had been content to wait for Ace to come to him, if he wanted.  

 

He regrets that now, too. 

From the way Ace had looked at him a few times, later, uncertainly, Marco thought he might have gotten the story from some of the older crew mates, about how a very young Marco had been obsessed with soulmates: with the idea, and the stories, and the possibilities legend suggested to him, even without a Compass. How he had read every scrap he could find about Soulmates and Compasses. How he had traveled and tried to meet every person on every island he stopped on, hoping that one of them, somewhere, was also lacking a Compass. Hoping that blue fire would spark in them, that they would know , when Marco’s Phoenix reached out across the bridge of their souls, sunk claws in and never let go. 

But it never happened. It never happened, and slowly Marco grew to accept that it never would. He had been a pirate on these seas for decades. He bounty and his fruit had been spread far and wide for most of that time. If he had ever met the other part of his soul, the Sea’s Promised, and his power had ever rooted in their soul, burst into flaming life with a Phoenix's song, then they had decided to keep a low profile, and not to seek him out. Most days he couldn’t blame them, this hypothetical Soulmate of his. Life on the seas was hard and brutal as often as it was fierce and joyful. 

 

So no, it hadn’t been a lie, what he told Ace. He didn’t regret it. Not even a little bit. It wasn’t a lonely life he lived, even without a soulmate. It hadn’t been since he met a man larger than life, with a laugh that could shake the foundations of the world, even before you added his own Fruit into the matter. He had a father, and more siblings than anyone sane could claim, but they were Whitebeards and it was all worth it. Occasionally, the thought reappeared, the wistfulness. On the rare times now they encounter new islands and with them new people, Marco can’t help it, sometimes, but to wonder if maybe this time… But it is a quiet thought, and not one he feels qualifies as a regret. Marco has dedicated himself to his family, instead: to running the first division, and managing Pops, and teasing adorable new little brothers gently until their ears light on fire. 

 

Ace is too easy to tease. Once he calmed down, once he accepted that they truly wanted him there, that the Moby was a place he could find a home, that it was safe and they wanted him, and they cared for him — then he’d relaxed so dramatically that at first he had very nearly seemed like a different person. 

He’d smiled, and laughed, and teased his crewmates both old and new alike. He was the first to start a party and the last to end it — unexpected naps notwithstanding. 

It had taken nearly a year after that for any Whitebeard who hadn’t been a Spade to see the quieter moments — both for good and for ill. The soft smiles as he trained with his little firefly technique for the sheer beauty of it, and his tender joy in the sunrise after a long watch, the vulnerabilities of his affection. So too did they begin to see the times when Ace was angry in a way so coldly furious even his flame seemed to freeze, the feral biting vicious edge to him that took no quarter with anyone, least of all himself. It took time to earn those moments, and every one of them, when he pulled back one more layer of the armor he had put up around himself, between himself and the world, was a gift carefully handed over and never squandered. 

It had been that cold fury in Ace’s eyes, under the bluster, that had made Pops let him go after Teach. He could have stopped him, of course, could have made him stay when even his words did not halt him, but doing so would be like throwing a priceless gift at a wall and watching it shatter. 

Marco cannot regret letting him go. Cannot regret Pops not stopping him. 

But oh, he can regret not going with him. 

 

There had been good reasons. A host of them. 

 

Ace was determined to go and no matter what anyone else imagined, the vicious rumors spread about them, no Whitebeard was on their ship against their will; if Ace was determined to leave, none of them would cage him. 

 

The Striker was his best bet to do it quickly and she was only built realistically for one.

 

While the Marines might, just maybe, overlook one of Whitebeard’s Commanders wandering around Paradise, two would send them into an absolute tizzy. 

 

They should have risked it. Marco should have risked it. He could have kept up, stayed with Ace. Who cared what the Marines thought: it didn’t matter in the face of a man who apparently had no compunctions about killing one crew mate and turning the other in for the sake of power. They should never, ever have let Ace go alone. That’s what it meant, for their crew of outcasts and cast-aways: to be a Whitebeard meant you would never be alone again. 

Marco feels his flame simmering inside him and presses a hand to his chest, easing it. 

They’d never established if his flames eat oxygen the way normal ones do, but it is better safe than sorry when they are in a bubble with limited oxygen: the same reasons their meals have been cold since they submerged. They have to travel too far to risk using their limited air on cooking fires. 

 

No flames. No warmth. Not until they have Ace back. 

Marco sighs and closes his eyes, watching the wash of light through his eyelids. It doesn’t matter. They will go to Marineford. They will rescue Ace. Then they will find ‘Blackbeard’ and show him why, exactly, betraying them had been a mistake. 

And yet, Marco worries. Ace is strong, and determined; experienced with his fruit. He’d still been a raw beginner compared to the Whitebeards when he joined two years ago, but he’d improved astronomically since then, learning and growing, sparring with the other Commanders, and leading missions across their territories. 

 

Marco would have bet on Ace winning over Teach any day for almost a year. 

There is no way Teach should have been able to defeat him. So what changed? 

 

Marco doesn’t know the answers, but he has a sinking feeling it’s important in a way they won’t understand until it’s already biting them in the ass. 

 

~~~~

 

It’s been a long time since Marco has been on something he would classify as a true battlefield. The pirate life is more prone to skirmishes, not the War that the Marines were setting up. They had known that, going in, and had done their best to prepare, none of them willing to back down from the challenge the Marines had thrown in their faces. 

 

It turns out, in the end, that it’s not really that different. The scale doesn’t matter when it all still comes down to moments: instants you can’t predict. Betrayal. Bad luck. 

 

Marco’s speciality has never been Observation Haki. He’s fought Katakuri enough to know just how fucking annoying it can be when it is that finely tuned, but he’s always been far more of a brute force fighter. He focused on Armament to take advantage of the increased strength his Phoenix gives him, of the way his healing lets him tank the hits that make it through anyway. 

But he doesn’t need Katakuri’s future sight to know, deep in his gut, that he’s made a huge mistake when the seastone cuff circles his wrist and he’s slammed into the ground, flame smothered in an instant, grounded, cut off from the sky. 

He’s far from helpless, rips away from the marine with a burst of pure speed and determination, but— 

 

He forces himself not to panic, to ignore the freezing dread in his chest, write it off as a symptom of the lack of his fire and nothing else. He dodges or blocks another series of strikes aimed at him, Haki still active, seeking around for someone who can get these fucking cuffs off him so he can properly get back in the battle, even while he fights his grounded way towards where he can see Ace running. 

 

It’s close, it’s so close. 

Their Father is standing strong behind them, even while he’s dying, and Marco wants to turn back so badly, wants to return to Pop’s side, but— 

 

He has his orders, the last order he will ever receive from his Captain, from his Father, and it’s to leave him behind, but — 

 

Marco is also a doctor. He knows that Pops is unlikely to survive this, even if they could get him off the battlefield again. Rage flares but fails to catch as he runs and fights, kicks out with armament coating his feet, still devastating even without claws. Pops had forgiven Squard, hugged him to him and called him Son again, and Marco… Marco’s not as good of a person as Pops is, or maybe just not as blinded by love, but he will also not disobey even his Captain’s unspoken orders. 

He’ll get Ace off this battlefield, and their firecracker’s amazingly troublesome little brother with him, and the rest of their remaining siblings, and then— and then they’ll have to figure out what they will do from here, how they will survive without Pops, but that’s a problem for later, after— 

Marco blocks a blow and his return kick caves in the skull of a marine captain, but it shifts his focus for just a second. 

 

It’s just a second too long.

“ ACE! ” 

 

It’s ripped out of him, horror and denial. 

 

Akainu pulls his fist out of Ace’s back, and Marco’s friend, his fellow Commander, the warmth and light of passion they’d been fighting so hard for, sinks down onto his knees, and then falls forward into his little brother’s arms.

 

The battlefield freezes. Marco barely registers help arriving, a presence he knows yanking away the hand that’s digging bloody furrows into his wrist as he struggles to get the cuff off, digging in the mechanism with lockpicks while another watches both of their backs, both of them swearing through the tears as he tries to free Marco. 

Marco feels the cuff click open, feels the Phoenix rush back, but he knows it’s too late even as he takes flight in a rush of blue fire. 

 

Ace goes limp in the arms of his beloved little brother, and Luffy screams , a bare second before Marco slams straight into Akainu in a conflagration of furious flame that washes an entire section of the battlefield in blue and gold, streamers of blue fire whipping out around him in all directions as the Admiral takes aim at Luffy next. They collide, and more flame explodes in an arching wave around them, obscuring the two bodies on the ground as Marco flares his wings and the Phoenix screams inside him. Too late, too fucking late, but he won’t let the Mad Dog past him for another strike, this time aimed straight and true for Ace’s little brother. Fire boils from his skin as he meets lava in a series of furious rapid strikes, armament against magma, blue fire sweeping in to instantly heal any places where the Admiral gets past his guard, nearly before the pain can register. He forces Akainu back, and back, and Marco is breathless, his lungs refusing to fill, choking on the scream that is building and building in his chest. 

 

Akainu will not succeed in killing Ace’s little brother like he has— 

 

Like he has Ace. 

 

Marco snarls a curse as a lucky strike gets past him, sears down to the bone of his thigh and, more importantly, sends him flying back before he can counter, stabilize. His wings flare, he catches himself, and dives back forward as blue fire flares bright, reveals unblemished skin in barely a blink, determined to keep Akainu away from— 

 

Ace. 

Except when he pulls up sharply, staring at the spot Ace had died while Marco was trapped and useless in a seastone cuff— Ace’s blood is soaking into the ground of Marineford, and a scatter of red beads glitter, gleaming with still-wet blood, and that is all that remains to say Ace or his brother were ever there. 

 

Where are they?

 

Marco reaches out, but Haki is a mad scramble. There is too much information, too many presences, too much pain and distraction, and he doesn’t know Ace’s brother’s presence well enough to feel for it in all this chaos. 

Marco’s only consolation, as he dives at Akainu with a furious shriek finally breaking past his lips, is that the Marine looks just as furiously confused as Marco feels. 

 

The air shatters, the earth rumbles. Marco takes ruthless advantage of Akainu’s stumble to claw across his face with Armament coated claws, shrieks his victory when the hot liquid on his claws is blood, not lava. 

“Where. Is. My. SON?!” Whitebeard’s voice shakes the very air, the Haki of the man who is still, now, the Strongest, splintering across the nerves of those still standing. 

 

Marco feels it like a wind in his feathers, pushing him forward, upwards, into his dreams. 

 

From the way the remaining marines around him pale and stumble, he knows it’s very different for them, and Marco can’t help the nasty grin at their fear. 

Good, let them fear. Let them remember that fear, no matter today’s outcome. Let them remember when they taunted the strongest crew in the world, and felt their wrath. 

Chapter 5

 

Law can waste no more time on someone else's dead.

 

But as usual, it seems that the dead are never truly done with him.

 

He doesn't even make it all the way to the door of the control room before he feels something — it’s indefinable, a sense of knowing that comes from nowhere, but he’s already whirling around again before he can try to make sense of it, before he even sees the flicker of light — whirls, hand coming up, a Room forming nearly before thought— 

 

Portgas is on fire. 

 

Panic seizes Law for an instant. The impossibility of flame, of spontaneous combustion, from a body dead, and a spirit fled, even one that had once been made of fire, is far less important in this moment than the urgency of action. There is nothing more deadly on a submarine than fire. Uncontrolled, it could chew through their air supply, destroy their controls, and consign them all to the depths. Can he get it contained? Or simply switch the body with something outside, drown that flame in the ocean depths and just never tell Strawhat about it?!

 

Except… Law pauses, heartbeat throbbing in his throat as he watches the fire for a long, wary moment. It fails entirely to spread, to consume, to give off heat. Instead, it pools, thick and viscous, blue and gold and nothing at all like the Fire Fist's explosive bursts of red and orange. It oozes like syrup, thick and slow and liquid into the gaping hole that had been punched through the Commander's body, obscuring the once-clear view of the decking below, swirling and flickering and— Law steps closer despite himself, fascinated. 

 

There, through the fire that gives off no heat, he is watching a spine regrow itself from nothing. 

 

The bones come first, stacking themselves one after the other, slow and eerily noiseless in the breathless, awed silence of the control room, until they meet in the middle. His ribs grow like the branches of a tree in agonized speed, to cradle quickly filling emptiness. Next, the crawl of nerves, the spinal column. Law watches most of Portgas' lungs regrow through the cage of white bone, and then part of his liver. A swath of his upper intestines slithers into existence, his stomach regrows itself from charred shreds. Muscle fibers and veins slither out to cover all of it, slick and red. Tendons and ligaments bind bones and muscle, holding it all in place, stark and bare for one instant like an anatomical diagram. Last, skin follows in a wave, unblemished and whole. 

 

The blue flames flicker out slowly, like a dying campfire. 

 

In the silence of a whole room holding their own breath, Portgas inhales. 

 

Into the stunned, silent aftermath of an unlooked for miracle — as everyone stares at the corpse who is, by the grace of a rising and falling chest, a man once again — the alarms sound, a blaring, howling warning. 

 

“Check him!” Law orders, and then he is bolting towards the infirmary. A very large part of him wants to go to Portgas, to examine him. He had been extremely, demonstratively dead. The kind of brutal injuries that Law didn’t think even his powers could bring someone back from, even if he got to them the very instant it happened. However strong his intrigue, though, those are the medical alarms, warning of a patient going critical. 

 

There is only one other patient on his ship, and it’s one who he doesn’t think is going to experience a miraculous rebirth by fire if he dies. 

 

He slams into the infirmary to find Ikakku, pleasingly, panicking only a little bit. 

“Captain! I hooked him to the machines and they immediately started— well,” she gestures at the screaming machines, pride of the North Blue’s medical advancements, all wailing electronic protest to Strawhat’s… Law’s brow ticks up as he surveys them, shedding his coat and hat and scrubbing up quick but thorough as he looks at them. The machines are wailing about Strawhat’s everything , it seems.

Heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, you name it; if they had a machine for it, it was mid-meltdown over the state of their patient. 

“Get me a—”

“Blood test is running, Captain,” she says. “I told it to do… pretty much every test we can.”

 

Law nods approvingly. He’ll do a Scan, of course, but his devil fruit relies mostly on his own knowledge. The blood tests can identify things against their own databases that he would only know as ‘foreign’ to a healthy body. From the looks of his — of Strawhat, Law’s going to need all the help with this he can get, especially with the way he can feel his strength already flagging. Stamina is his greatest weakness, as much as the admittance burns. His fruit is a drain, and he is tired from the way he slammed past his own limits to bring Strawhat to him. Not that he intends to let that stop him. 

He steps close. 

“Room,” he intones, pressing a small Room out, only big enough to encompass the table Strawhat is on. “Scan.” 

Both his brows tick up, as he’s inundated with feedback from the body before him. 

Something like frustrated respect crawls through him, even as he snaps out orders to bring him as much universal blood as they have, stat, and more of whatever type Strawhat is when they get the results back.

 

Then he settles in, and gets to work for what proves quickly to be the most frustrating, interesting, and intense surgery of his life. 

Only the fact that Strawhat’s heart is as rubber as the rest of him keeps him from dying more than once on the table as it thunders erratically against the steady beat Law is imposing on it. He holds the organ gripped in one hand, forcing it into rhythm with will and power and a low current as Law painstakingly filters out the truly insane amounts of both lingering poison and what must be artificially introduced adrenaline as well as a miasmic swimming host of hormones overloading his system. It’s draining, taxing, exacting work, manipulating compounds in the blood. 

 

It’s also complicated immensely by the fact that whatever Strawhat is, it’s too far from truly unconscious for Law’s workplace comfort. He pulses . Law doesn’t know what he’s doing, how he’s doing it, but the first time Law barely manages to keep his feet as something rips from Strawhat, heavy and powerful. There had been a bare sliver of awareness in his eyes for a moment that shouldn’t be there, before it slipped away again. Law had ordered Strawhat restrained.

He can’t afford to introduce anything else into his system, not even to keep him knocked out, not unless he has no choice. Thankfully it never comes to that, as Law filters and bandages and splints, and idly contemplates what force could possibly fracture bones made of rubber. The pulses continued, but they did not ever return Strawhat to enough wakefulness to interfere, so Law simply withstands them, and continues.

 

It is several hours, in the end, before Law can return Strawhat’s heart to him, and trust that it will continue to beat. He presses it into a bandaged chest, relinquishes it, and ignores the way his fingers tingle for lack of the warm flesh against them. 

 

He sinks into a chair on the edge of the room with a slow exhale, and watches Strawhat breathe for several long moments, machines finally returned to docile beeping rather than mechanical hysteria. It’s done. Most of it had been keeping the idiot’s heart constrained to a rhythm that wasn’t bouncing all over the place, while he carefully extracted the variety of toxins and replaced them with clean blood from their stores. The rest would heal with time and a bit of care. 

 

Truly a miraculous outcome from the fight he’d been in, frankly. 

 

He looks up at a clatter at the door, and sees Shachi and Penguin carrying a litter that holds the unconscious — and still miraculously breathing — form of Portgas D. Ace, Whitebeard Commander and son of the Pirate King, and, most pertinent to Law’s bewildering relief, brother of his soulmate. 

 

“We thought it might be best to have both patients in the same room now that it’s calmed down in here,” Penguin tells him, as they set Ace down and move to set up another patient bed in the far side of the room. 

Law pulls himself up, ignoring both the way the world grays a little, and the concerned looks his crewmates shoot him, to make his way over to the other man as they lift him up into the bed, working seamlessly together. 

“He’s still stable?” He asks as he leans over him, fascinated. 

 

“Yes Captain,” Shachi confirms, sounding spooked even as he efficiently sets Portgas up with his own far less elaborate monitoring system. “Breathing and heart rate are normal, and he’s got all the right unconscious responses. There doesn’t seem to be a single scratch on him.” 

 

It’s understandable Shachi is uneasy; even on the Grand Line people do not return from the dead. 

Law is tempted, so tempted, to open another Room. To Scan the man, and find out what exactly had happened; how a man with injuries that catastrophic, a man who had been demonstratively dead on the floor of his command room, had come to be here, in his infirmary. How he managed to be breathing and seemingly entirely uninjured by either the blow that had killed him or the fight it must have taken to catch him, or the weeks of doubtless ill treatment in notorious prison of Impel Down which had preceded the killing blow. 

Though, actually, in light of Law’s own recent events, he might have a decent idea of the how . 

He, unlike some, paid clear and careful attention, as much as was possible in Paradise, to the politics and power dynamics of the New World. He would be an idiot indeed not to recognize the blue flames that had pooled in Fire Fist’s wounds, the glittering gold edge to them. 

Not when he had just seen those same flames engaged in desperate combat. 

 

“I wonder how they managed to keep that a secret?” He muses, tamping down the curious urge to call a scalpel to him, to nick the skin just a little, carefully, to see if that blue fire would come again. Is it called to any wound, or just to mortal ones? How quick is the usual response? Can it be consciously called, or is it always an automatic and instant response. If it can be called, can it be delayed? So many questions, and really only this one chance to answer them. It’s unlikely Marco the Phoenix will ever consent to any curious experimentation, after all…

 

“Captain?” Penguin asks, confused. “That he was… well…” 

Well indeed, though that isn’t what Law had meant. 

Son of the Pirate King. That is a pedigree indeed, and quite a secret. 

He’d heard about Baterilla. It had been when he was quite small, of course, and far more interested in things like convincing his parents that he needed the medical textbooks from the shelves above his reach and playing doctor than in world politics, but.... The rumors had reached even Flevance, eventually. While he hadn’t known about it while it happened the adults hadn’t shied away from topics like that, in those last horrible weeks; steeping in bitterness and hate, and all of them rethinking things that they had been told their whole lives. 

 

Islands wiped off maps, populations slaughtered. 

Ohara. 

Batarilla. 

Just a few names that Law had heard in dark and furious whispers. 

 

And soon, Flevance had been added to that count. 

 

He’d come by his hatred for the world quite honestly, after all. Doflamingo had only fed it, not birthed it. 

 

Then later, free on the seas and preparing for his campaign against Doflamingo, Law had done more research, seeking rumors. What little information there was to find, on the other islands, other instances, which had been wiped from the history of the world government as anything other than dark whispers and hints in the wind, Law had found it. 

“That too,” Law says, amused at the way Penguin doesn’t want to say the words that have just been revealed to the entire world. “But I was referring to the fact that they also managed to hide the fact that Fire Fist and Phoenix Marco are soulmates.”

Penguin coughs on a startled inhale, swinging around to look at Fire Fist on the bed, wide eyed. 

“Soulmates?” He squeaks. “But— oh.” He frowns, trades a wide-eyed look with Shachi. “I thought—” 

Looks pleadingly at Shachi, who sighs and shoves him with his shoulder, but turns to Law anyway, a ‘I’m going to say something stupid, but please don’t dismember me and replace my elbows with my knees, aren’t I too cute for that’ look on his face. 

“We thought that Devil Fruit users… couldn’t find their soulmates, Captain?” 

 

Law looks at them blankly, watching them start to fidget, start to sweat. 

“It’s very rare,” he says, just before they are about to break into babbling apologies. “But when it happens, it manifests like that: in the sharing of devil fruit powers. What did you think we just witnessed?”

 

“Phoenix fire,” Shachi whispers, a realization, looking back at the dead-man now breathing easy and slow on one of their medical beds. 

 

Law shouldn’t do it. He really shouldn’t. This isn’t a thing he’s ready to accept yet. Possibly ever, no matter that he’s already done at least three reckless things with the information. 

But the set-up is too good, and everything else aside, he trusts these two more than everyone except Bepo. 

“Well,” he says, and two pairs of eyes snap to him in trepidation over the malicious glee in his voice. “That’s one of them.”

Then he raises his hands, grips long fingers, tattooed and surgeon-steady — and pulls on them until they start to stretch. And stretch. And stretch.

It’s still the absolutely most ridiculous and humiliating fruit he could possibly imagine. 

 

…but the looks of absolutely astonished horror on Penguin and Shachi’s faces in the long second before they start screaming and yelling are, in fact, worth it.  

 

~~~~

 

Thankfully it only takes a few extremely sharp words to force Shachi and Penguin to regather themselves. He swears them to (bewildered) secrecy, yes not even Bepo, on pain of having their feet swapped with their hands, and they hook Fire Fist up to monitors just in case. He seems to be in perfect health, not even a scratch, and all his tests are clean, but, and Law cannot emphasize this enough, he was dead, and he still hasn’t woken, so it’s better safe than sorry at this point. 

There isn’t much Law could have done about a whole section of him being missing, but he can probably manage cardiac arrest or something, with some warning. No he’s not too tired, no he’s not going to either go lay down or explain, yes he’s absolutely sure he hasn’t always been made of rubber, no he doesn’t know how this happened, yes he still has his fruit: would Penguin and Shachi like a demonstration?

The way they flee, scurrying, is deeply satisfying. All in all, it’s less than ten minutes later that Law finds himself once again alone in the room, listening to the now mostly-steady beeping of two heart rate monitors, and thinking, as he has spent far too much of the last week, about soulmates. 

 

Statistically, this shouldn’t be possible. Historically, this shouldn’t be possible. 

 

None of the resources Law had seen, or had been able to find on Saboady, had mentioned a single instance of two devil fruit users finding their soulmates in each other. That number isn’t enormous, as, again, he’d believed soulmates to be a mostly-irrelevant complication to his life he would never actually be bothered with, but it isn’t entirely nothing either. 

 

A Devil Fruit user finding their other half is rare, exceedingly. Part of that is the fact that Devil Fruits are themselves rare, despite the way it seems that they can’t go a week without tripping over someone with one. Life on the Grand Line is an anomaly, with the way Fruit users congregate on these waters. Elsewhere, a normal civilian might go their entire life without ever meeting someone with a Devil Fruit. As a result, most cases involving a Fruit user finding their soulmate were on the ‘Line, be they pirates or marines. They were usually one or the other. Fruit users didn’t often end up living a peaceful life: they were recruited into the Marines, they were persecuted or otherwise drawn into piracy, or they were killed and their Fruit either stolen or sold to the highest bidder. That helped weight the occurrence of Fruit Users on the ‘Line as well, as most Marines with a Fruit were stationed there. 

 

There are more recorded cases of Marine Fruit users finding their other halves, than pirates. Law is inclined to attribute this to statistical bias, however, on a variety of factors: Marines are more likely to actually record such things, for one. Pirates know better than to flaunt their weaknesses. For another, if someone meets a Marine and starts displaying their powers they are easier and, presumably, less dangerous to track down. Additionally, showing the power of a known Marine is less likely to get you arrested and executed than showing that of a pirate. 

 

So. There are few hard records of pirates finding their soulmates that Law knows of, but there are several more songs and stories to that effect. And all of them, every one, speaks to a single Fruit User meeting their match, and the devil in them seizing the connection the Sea tried to close, sharing the power, but also the weakness, and the sea’s hatred. 

 

None of them speak of two devils, and what happens when they meet. It is impossible. It is at the very least improbable.  

 

And yet. 

 

Here they are. 

 

This situation was bad enough when it was just him and Strawhat, a match as inexplicable as it is improbable. To have one half of another set of impossibilities on his ship… 

 

Law now has proof of two pairs of fruit users who have found their soulmates in each other, and three of the relevant people are in his operating theater right now.

 

Either this was simply more of the insanity that Law can already tell follows Strawhat around, or… 

 

Buzzing, furious, terrified ice continues to crawl up and down his spine, unceasing since the frantic pace of his surgery had slowed enough for him to think through the implications. 

If it isn’t simply impossible, then the fact that there are no records means that the Phoenix and Fire Fist had been extremely wise to keep their soulmate status so very secret. Silent enough that not even a whisper of it had ever reached his ears, not even about two famous pirates from a famous crew. 

 

The only other things that there is no whisper of, only a lack of information to give the bare outlines, are things that the government has ordered out of existence and has killed indiscriminately to keep that way. 

The true reason for Ohara’s fall. 

 

The truth about White Lead. 

 

What really happened in the Void Century. 

 

Law steeples his fingers in front of his mouth and breathes. 

Okay. So. 

 

Where are they going to go from here? 

 

~~~~

 

The question ends up needing a far more literal and practical answer than Law had intended, when Bepo knocks on the door only a couple minutes into Law’s planning session. He’s giving him the deeply skeptical look that means he’d noticed Shachi and Penguin’s dazed horror, but they haven’t spilled the beans yet. That look means ‘I know you’re hiding something from me. I’ll get it out of you eventually, so wouldn’t it be easier for all of you if you just told me?’ 

Law studiously ignores that look. 

 

“Captain, we need a destination,” Bepo says, instead of pushing. “We’re out of the Calm Belt again, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of pursuit yet —” Which is a series of small miracles of its own, and Law doesn’t know whether to be thankful or deeply suspicious. “— but I don’t think it’s a good idea to go back to Sabaody.” 

Law snorts. 

“No,” he says dryly. “That would probably be unwise.” 

Taking the two, injured — or at least still unconscious, in the case of Fire Fist — centerpieces of a war between pirates and the marines straight to one of the most heavily marine-patrolled islands in Paradise is not on Law’s agenda today. 

 

Whatever ends up happening from here, that would be the equivalent of turning them all over to the Marines with bows and pre-fitted seastone shackles.

He has no interest in seeing the inside of Impel Down in this lifetime. Or any other. 

Bepo nods. 

“The Log Pose is still set for Fishman Island,” he suggests tentatively, but he is pushing his paws together nervously, and Law can’t help the way he leans over and presses his own much smaller hand over the Mink’s paws, holding eye contact until Bepo takes a deep breath and relaxes a hair, looks straight at him rather than off to the side. 

“No,” Law says, and doesn’t elaborate. Bepo had seen the same things he has; the monsters of the New World gathered together and fighting. 

 

He hasn’t figured out, yet, how exactly he will reassure his crew, prepare them, but … no. They will not be heading for Fishman Island and the New World. Not right now. Not after that. 

 

What they need is a bolt-hole, at least temporarily. No matter the exact details of the rest of the war they had just escaped from, the seas are about to explode. Law can almost feel it, a shiver in the currents that caress the Tang’s hull. 

 

They can not go towards Fishman Island, and there is no convenient stream of marine vessels to follow unobtrusively from below as there was on the way towards Marineford, hugging close to their hulls to keep the sea kings away. The fact that they had made it back out of the Calm Belt at all is probably at least the third inexplicable but appreciated miracle today. 

 

Navigating back up the ‘Line towards Reverse Mountain is a pain, under normal circumstances. 

 

Log poses in Paradise follow the flow of the magnetic lines in only one direction: from Reverse Mountain towards the Red Line. But Law is as paranoid as a summer day is long, generally considers overpreparation to be slacking, and has absolutely no compunctions about theft. 

And as a result, Bepo is likely one of the most spoiled navigators outside the Marines, and the Polar Tang possesses an Eternal Pose library that likely rivales most regional marine bases. 

The problem, of course, being that generally Eternal Poses are only made for populous islands and trade centers, and those are exactly the kinds of places Law wants to avoid for the time being. 

He squints against his headache for a moment, thinking about it. There had been that one island, only a few before Sabaody, with the carnival. That won’t work: it is heavily populated and has a solid marine presence, but the log pose had only needed an hour or so to reset there. The next island down the ‘Line had been a small archipelago, only hosting a couple of villages and extensive reefs and shoals. They hadn’t managed to get an eternal pose for that one, but they should be able to backtrack to it with little problem, and they hadn’t caused any trouble there the locals should have cause to remember them for. 

 

“Take us back up the ‘Line to Gras Central,” Law orders his navigator. “Then when the ‘Pose resets take us to down the ‘Line to that next island, the quiet one.” 

 

Bepo’s eyes widen. He bobs his agreement but his astonishment is plain as he looks at Law, as his Captain gives orders to take them away from the destination he’s been pushing them relentlessly towards. 

Law turns away from that look, not ready, not able, to explain, not yet. 

 

“Do it,” he snaps instead, and doesn’t look away from Fire Fist, a safer focus for his attention than any other in this room while he’s under his navigator and first mate’s watchful gaze. 

 

There is a pause, but then the door closes behind him, and shortly after that, a change in the pitch of the engines tells him they are turning, for the first time since they entered the ‘Line, away from their driving relentless progress towards the New World. 

 

This is just a temporary setback, Law reassures both himself and the memory of a smile so wide it hurt even just to look at. Just a pause to make some new plans, and integrate some new information. 

 

That’s all.

Chapter 6

Notes:

If you saw the chapter count go up, no you didn't XD

Ace knows he’s dying. 

 

He’d chosen to take that blow, chosen to leap forward, to hold his shaky Armament Haki as long as he could rather than go deliberately intangible around Akainu’s fist, because the other option just wasn’t acceptable.  

 

The other option was watching that bastard’s magma fist crash right through his little brother. 

Luffy, his little brother, who was the first one to tell him that he would be sad if he was gone. That his life was better with Ace in it. The first to tell him that of course he had a soul. His little brother who is so hurt, who had invaded the most secure prison in the world to save Ace’s life, who has gone through absolute hell in the name of saving his stupid, worthless older brother.

 

Luffy can’t die here. 

 

He is going to be king of the pirates, and a much better one than Ace’s stupid sperm donor. 

His little brother can’t die here. 

So he’d taken the blow, held on with every scrap of his will as instinct begged him to go intangible. 

At least the actual impact is too quick to hurt much. 

 

Luffy had caught him. 

He’d managed to thank his little brother, and the family he’d found, for loving him. 

 

And then he had died.  

None of which explained why he is cracking open crusty eyes to blink dazedly at a riveted metal ceiling, dotted with a truly alarming number of … he squints. 

Sparkly heart stickers, mostly in shades of neon pink, with a few blues and yellows fighting a valiant war for inclusion. 

 

Ace blinks at those for a long moment, feeling like every thought is traveling through syrup to reach him. 

He… should be dead. 

This isn’t the Moby. 

The Moby is dead, her graceful bulk sunk below the waves of Marineford, shattered and burning. 

 

…Pops is probably dead too. 

Ace should be dead. He’d been dying in— 

“Luffy,” he tries to yell. It only comes out as a rasping gasp, his lungs protesting, and he heaves himself into a sitting position to cough until his eyes flow freely and his chest aches. 

 

He presses a hand to his chest, into smooth warm skin. Nothing. Akainu had punched clean through him, and there isn’t a wound, there isn’t even a scar . 

 

Had that all been a dream? How is that possible? And where is he?

“Oh!” A voice comes from his left, and Ace swings his head to look, dragging a hand across his eyes to clear the reflexive tears from them. A huge bear stands in the doorway, wearing an orange boiler suit and clutching a clipboard. “You’re awake! I’ll get the Captain!” 

 

What the fuck?

 

…Mink, his brain slowly supplies. Probably not another actual animal that had found a Human Human fruit variation, like Luffy’s Doctor— 

 

“Luffy!” This time it is a curse, at himself, for getting distracted. He moves to swing himself off the bed. He has to go find Luffy! 

They’d both been— his stupid little brother who hadn’t even been on the seas a year had been there, at Marineford, facing off against Warlords and Admirals, and Ace doesn’t know where he is.  

 

He flings himself off the bed — and promptly collapses onto the ground with a crash as his legs simply refuse to hold him up.

Ace is cursing up a storm, reaching for the bed to try to haul himself up, when he’s interrupted by a scoff and a blue film washes over him. 

“Shambles,” an unknown voice says, and suddenly Ace is back on the bed, blinking at the heart covered ceiling again. “Well, I can’t say I was expecting you to be a well behaved patient,” the voice continues, and Ace turns his swimming head to see a lanky man watching him from the doorway, unimpressed golden eyes sharp and calculating, a long sword held sheathed in one hand. 

 
Ace surges back out of bed, forcing himself to rise past the weakness, the dizziness, ending up in a crouch, fists aflame. 

“Who are you?” he demands, heart pounding. This man looks vaguely familiar, but Ace doesn’t know him, he’s not someone he trusts, and the last he had known he had been dying. “Where am I?”

“Put that fire out, you idiot, we’re submerged!” The man snarls in return, stepping forward, hand going to the sword’s hilt. “If you waste our oxygen I’ll toss you right off my ship!”

 

Ace’s fire sputters out instantly, even though obeying grates against every one of his nerves. First Deuce, and then Marco, though, had beaten fire etiquette while submerged into him. Bubbles had a limited amount of oxygen in them. Wasting that uselessly was a quick way to a slow death, and he had no immediate reason to doubt this man was telling the truth. That doesn’t mean he’s interested in complying in any other way, though. 

“Who. Are. You?” Ace asks again, aggressive, harsh. “Where’s Luffy?” 

Because that is really the most important question. Ace is, impossibly, alive, but his little brother had been on a battlefield he was in no way ready for. His little brother, caught between New World monsters and the three Admirals, not to mention the rest of the Marines. Luffy, who Akainu had been aiming right for, even more so than Ace himself. His stupid, reckless, idiotic little brother had delivered himself practically right into the hands of the marines, first by invading Impel Down and then even when he escaped that inescapable prison he did it again by charging straight into Marine Headquarters in the middle of a war . 

 

Luffy, who had done all of that for Ace.

Luffy, who Ace had stupidly put in danger for his own inability to run away. Deuce had told him, Marco had told him, that it would get him killed one day, but who cares about that when it might have gotten Luffy killed— 

 

The man scoffs, glaring at him with those sharp gold eyes. 

“Where was that concern when you turned back to fight rather than getting him away?” 

Ace sucks in a sharp breath, hearing his own doubts flung back at him so precisely. 

 

That breath freezes in his lungs, like being plunged into the killing sea. 

He lunges forward, all weakness gone, and has the bitter pleasure of seeing those golden eyes widen before Ace slams into the man, shoving him up against the wall with a hand around his throat. 

“Where. Is. He?” he snarls right in his face, fury boiling in his veins, embers crackling in the tips of his hair. 

He isn’t some young, Paradise rookie anymore. He hasn’t been in years. He is a New World Pirate, and a Whitebeard Commander. He prefers to charm, to party and laugh, to eat and drink and generally have a good time. Even when people recognize him, even when they fear him, for the most part he tries to disarm that fear, like with that hilarious clown captain and his crew. 

 

He doesn’t like leaning into the fear his titles have earned him. He’s spent enough of his life being feared, and hated, and the novelty of not having to be either is something close to addictive. 

 

But by the Sea herself, he will be feared if that’s what it takes to get him answers. No one will ever stand between him and his brother ever again. 

Except— 

 

Except his fingers are digging into the flesh of this man’s neck, and it’s wrong. The skin is giving way beneath his fingers without the expected resistance, pressure sinking deep in a way that is heart stoppingly familiar . 

Ace stares, looking up into an expression that is rapidly smoothing out from a strangled, furious sort of fear into a slightly wary blankness. 

“You—” Ace starts, mind whirling, trembling on the precipice of inferno because that’s not possible . Only one person’s skin feels like that, only one Fruit causes it, and for this man to have it instead of Luffy — 

 

Madness threatens, and the man must be able to see it because he speaks quickly. 

“I am Trafalgar Law,” the man, Trafalgar, apparently, continues, one hand wrapped around the wrist of the hand around his throat, the other braced out to the side, fingers raised around his grip on his sword, and poised in what Ace knows from the intent in the air must be an attack, even if the man is holding himself back for the moment. His words are quick, but he’s not cowed, even with his throat in Ace’s grip, the words acerbic and biting. “And I am a doctor. You and Strawhat are both safe. Look behind you, Portgas-ya. Strawhat is fine.” 

 

Ace squints at the man for a moment, because that’s the oldest trick in the book, but he can’t help himself. He has to find Luffy. He looks and the relief almost takes his knees out from under him again. Luffy, there on a bed. He’s covered in bandages, but his hat is resting on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing. 

“He’s—” Ace stops, baffled, looking at the man. “You’re—”

 

The pieces are refusing to come together. There is only one possible reason for this man to have Luffy’s Devil Fruit power when Luffy himself is safe, and alive, and breathing, but— 

 

Ace looks at the man. He looks like an elongated twig, pale with deep shadows under his eyes and tattoos nearly everywhere. The hand around Ace’s own wrist has what must be death tattooed on the knuckles. 

Trafalgar smirks at his bewilderment, a cunning, nearly cruel curl of his lips, and reaches out to pull on his earring. The ear stretches, snapping back into place when the pressure is released .  

 

Ace boggles. 

“I am also, apparently, your brother’s soulmate. You can watch while I strangle him for eating the most inane fruit in existence.” 

 

…what?!

 

“Bullshit,” Ace blurts. 

 

~~~~

 

It is, unfortunately, apparently not bullshit. 

 

Ace sits at Luffy’s bedside, slumped — against increasingly irritated medical advice — in the chair he’d dragged over, and just— 

 

He just takes a moment to breathe. 

 

Ace is alive. Luffy is alive.

Luffy is also, bewilderingly, right about something.

His little brother did find his Mystery Person. He did have a Soulmate out on the seas, and he found him, Compass be damned. 

 

Luffy is alive and Ace is alive. 

 

So many of Ace’s family are likely dead. Pops is probably dead.

 

Ace doesn’t know who is alive, and Trafalgar is maddeningly logical about their inability to call anyone, about their need to stay secret, until Luffy is healed and they’ve found somewhere safe. 

 

Luffy is so very badly hurt that it makes Ace ache just to look at him. 

 

“Tell me what happened to him,” Ace says. Trafalgar hums from where he’s planted himself in his own chair, a book in one hand, his sword still in the other. He’s ostensibly here so that when Ace collapses dramatically again — despite the fact that even the lingering weakness is gone and Ace isn’t actually sure he’s ever felt better — Trafalgar can laugh at him in person. 

 

“I don’t know,” Trafalgar says flatly. “I don’t know any more than you do. Less, probably. I met him for the first time at Sabaody, and then he was falling out of the sky at Marineford. I don’t know what happened in between.”

A sharp laugh cracks out of Ace. 

 

“He broke into Impel Down to free me,” he says, still disbelieving. “But I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Neither do I.”

 

“But you know what it caused.”

“A truly remarkable number of injuries.”

“I want to know more, Trafalgar. I need to. He did it all for me. ”

 

Traflagar raises a brow at him, clearly doubtful. “If you’re sure,” is all he says, though. 

Ace is not sure. 

And Ace, as it turns out, is not ready. 

 

“—cardiac arrest several times on the table—” 

“—lacerations across nearly 60% of his body mass—” 

 

“—a useful case study on stress fractures on rubber bones —” 

“—-a truly alarming amount of different kinds of poisons. I’m not sure how he isn’t dead—”

 

“—would like a word with whoever is responsible for the adrenaline overdose, though I suppose it served its purpose in the moment—”

 

All the various ways that Luffy nearly died, all to save Ace’s worthless life, laid out neatly in the aftermath by the doctor who had saved both of their lives. 

“—done what can be done for now. The rest will heal in time. I can’t say what the long term effects will be, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and his devil fruit is unpredictable at best.”

 

Trafalgar sounds extremely frustrated with that, and Ace is reluctantly sympathetic. He was there while Luffy was figuring his devil fruit out, after all, and ‘unpredictable’ is in fact a very good word for it. 

 

The humor flickers out as quickly as it lit, though. It’s too much. Ace needed to know but he hates the knowing.

“Thank you,” Ace rasps out, holding onto control of his fire by a thread of will. Law had been very clear, before he agreed to tell Ace about Luffy’s injuries, about what would happen if Ace lost control of his fire on his submarine. Ace isn’t interested in testing that right now. The thanks is sincere, but he’s also hoping it will stop any further revelations. “Thank you for saving him. For saving both of us. I—”

Ace might not always be sure he should be alive, but Luffy? Luffy deserves to live, and be free, and achieve all his dreams. 

 

“How, though? How did you save me? I was— Akainu got me, didn’t he? I felt it. I saw it. That blow should have killed me. How did you fix that?”

Trafalgar looks at him, something Ace can’t read flashing across his face, settling in the corners of his eyes, the set of his mouth. 

“...I didn’t,” Trafalgar says finally. “I didn’t do a single thing to save you, Portgas, and you know it. There’s no need for this fiction.” 

 

Uh. Ace does not know that, actually. He says as much, and Trafalgar looks at him like he might look at slime mold. 

 

“You don’t have to continue to keep it a secret, Fire Fist-ya,” Trafalgar tells him impatiently, with an exasperation Ace feels is entirely out of proportion, given he has no idea what he’s talking about. “In fact I don’t see why you’re bothering. We all saw it happen. My crew won’t exactly run to tell the marines, though it likely won’t be able to stay a secret after this anyway. Half the world saw you die.”

“Trafalgar,” Ace says slowly, trying hard not to think too hard about that last sentence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

 

Irritation and impatience at least is clear enough on that face. 

“Portgas-ya,” is the exasperated snap he gets in return. “Akainu punched a hole straight through your chest. When I pulled you off that battlefield you were extremely dead . There was absolutely nothing I could have done to save you. Phoenix Fire resurrected you on my command deck. Your soulmate wasn’t a difficult leap from there.”

“... what?!” Ace shouts, bursting into flame in his absolute shock. 

 

When the yelling, and the threats of ejecting him straight out into the ocean, and the invasion and subsequent exiling of more crew in orange boiler suits is all said and done, Ace hasn’t gotten over even a tiny bit of that shock. 

 

“That’s impossible,” Ace insists, glaring at the other captain. “I’ve known Marco for years. There was never any sign of us being —”

Soulmates . 

 

“And yet,” Trafalgar says acerbically. Ace kind of hates him. “Glowing blue and gold flames healed a mortal wound and returned you from the dead. So? If you have another explanation for medical miracles and resurrection I’m dying to hear about it.”

 

Ace grits his teeth. The man is an absolute ass, but … he has a point that Ace can’t, actually, argue. Marco can heal others with his fire, but that requires direct contact, focus, and intention. But that doesn’t mean Marco is his soulmate! Everything else besides— 

 

“Marco’s never shown any of my fire!” Ace declares, galring. 

 

Trafalgar glares right back, not even needing to pause to gather a rebuttal. “And? Despite myself now displaying the absolute humiliation that is your brother’s fruit I did not see any sign of my own in him on the battlefield. Perhaps it simply goes one way, Portgas-ya. Perhaps it matters who ate their fruit first. It could be a dozen other factors. We just don’t know. It’s rare enough for anyone with a fruit to ever meet their soulmate: I’ve never seen a single documented record of a soulmate bond where both parts of the pair consumed a fruit. We’ve sailed straight past the edge of myth and out into the unknown, now.” 

Trafalgar doesn’t seem happy about that at all . Well, Ace isn’t either. 

 

This is Luffy’s soulmate? 

His kind little brother, sunshine incarnate, and this grumpy asshole is his perfect match in all six seas? 

 

Ace would like to call bullshit, but Trafalgar had very precisely demonstrated both his own devil fruit, as well as a familiar disconcerting stretchability. 

 

The only reasonable explanation is that somehow, for some unfathomable reason, the Sea had tied these two souls together.

 

“How does that even work?” Ace complains. 

 

Trafalgar sighs, put upon.

“I assume you’re not asking me about basic soulmate theory,” he snarks. “Seas’ Promised, bound souls, Compass of Fate, all that?”

Ace glares. “No,” he bites out. “I’m not.” 

 

“Good, because there’s no good explanation for any of that nonsense, either,” Trafalgar grumbles, slumping into his chair in a way Ace vaguely hopes is a recent, rubber-spined development, because it kinda aches just looking at it. “I assume at least that you’re familiar with the legends about Devil Fruit users finding their soulmates?”

“Passingly,” Ace says, like it wasn’t a subject he’d avoided nearly as viciously as that of the late Pirate King for years. “But only really once I got to the ‘Line. Most of the East thinks Devil Fruits are a myth, let alone has information about what Devil Fruits do to Compasses.”

Trafalgar’s brow jumps. 

 

“Really?” He asks, sounding bemused. “What do they think a blank wrist means, in the East?”

“That you’re cursed,” Ace says flatly, voice dead, refusing to dwell on the memories. “Soulless and damned.”

Trafalgar wisely doesn’t respond to that. 

 

“None of the official reports or studies I could find have any clear answers for what happens when a Devil Fruit user finds their soulmate,” he says instead, steepling his hands in front of his face and shifting his focus to Luffy, though he’s clearly still addressing Ace. “I did some more digging after I met Strawhat at Sabaody, for obvious reasons, but it’s not something there is an abundance of records on. In the examples I did find, all of which only involved a single Fruit user, what the records do agree on is that it happens at first meeting; some kind of connection forms that allows the transfer of powers.”

“I met Marco over two years ago,” Ace says, voice still flat. He feels curiously muffled. “I didn’t exactly start glowing blue, he didn’t burst into flame, and the few times I’ve been hurt since then I didn’t heal like Marco’s injuries do. Wouldn’t it show? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”

“According to the records I could find? Yes,” Trafalgar says, tense, frustrated, focus shifting back to Ace. “That’s how it works. The legends and stories take a more poetic approach, but all accounts agree that when a devil fruit user meets their soulmate the powers transfer instantly. The prevailing theory is that it forms along the same connection that directs the Compass, even though the Compass itself is gone. However,” Trafalgar leans forward, glaring at Ace. “ None of the stories talk about what happens if both parties have a fruit. There is not a single record, Portgas-ya. There isn’t even a single story or song that I have heard.” 

 

Trafalgar says that like it’s significant, but Ace isn’t sure what he’s driving at, and it clearly must show, since Trafalgar sighs again, and continues. “Your brother’s insipid power showed up in me almost instantly, with no provocation. I didn’t feel anything change, but I took several blows in the fight that immediately followed that, in hindsight, should have been much worse than they were. This leads me to believe that I gained his ‘abilities’ instantly. However, he hasn’t shown any sign of my power, even in the face of danger and near-death. The Ope-Ope does take more conscious control than most Paramecia, but if it was going to happen accidentally then a war likely should have done it. You, on the other hand, only showed signs of Phoenix-ya’s power when it was the only thing that would save your life. Do the circumstances matter? Time since the fruit was acquired? Type of Devil Fruit? Age of the people involved? Again, I do not know. It could be a hundred different factors I can think of, it could be none of them. But the fact of the matter is that however it works, the only known way for you to spontaneously produce Phoenix Fire is to eat the Phoenix Fruit yourself, or for Pheonix-ya to be your soulmate, and we both know which one it is.” 

Ace bites down his retort. Trafalgar is infuriatingly logical, and Ace hates it because— 

 

Because he wants so desperately for him to be right. 

 

He can’t possibly believe him, though, because if he’s right? If Trafalgar is right it means that Luffy was right. It means that Ace has had a soulmate all along. 

 

His blank wrist was never a sign that he was cursed, that all his father’s sins had come to rest with him, that killing his mother had stripped him of his soul. It was just the simple and plain fact that his soulmate is older than him, and has himself had his Fruit since his own earliest memories. Marco had been a young pirate already, making a name for himself across the seas for his strength and the power of his Fruit, by the time that Ace had been a thought, a possibility. 

 

The sea had hated Ace’s soulmate since before his conception, had stolen her Promise from Ace’s skin before he was even born, but that—

 

That isn’t the same thing at all as it never having existed. That isn’t the same thing as not deserving it.

Not the same thing as not deserving to exist.  

 

If Marco is his soulmate, if he has a soulmate, then every nasty thing he’s heard, every horrid thing he’s ever thought about himself, about the state of his soul, every heart-wound he’s accepted with a snarl and defiance and bared teeth but no denial— 

 

It is all wrong. It is all false, a lie, all so terribly untrue. And for all of that, somehow it still doesn’t matter. 

 

Because Marco had come for him, anyway.

Not because he is his soulmate, not in preservation of a connection neither of them knew about, but simply because he wanted to. 

 

Marco had come for him, and Pops had come for him, and so many of his siblings had come for him— 

 

And they had died for it.

And Ace loves them for it. 

 

And Ace hates them for it. 

 

Ace presses his face into the sheets of his brother’s medical bed, breathing ragged.

 

Trafalgar stands quietly, without another word. The door closes behind him with a nearly silent click , and Ace breaks, he weeps — for his brother, and his family, for his father, and for himself. 

 

For dreams, and lies, and truths more painful than any lie could be.

 

~~~~

 

Luffy wakes screaming his brother’s name. 

 

There are hands on him, and voices shouting, and Luffy can’t hear any of it. All he can see is Ace’s bloody smile, the soft edge of his eyes. All he can hear is the last rasp of breath out of charred lungs. 

All he can smell is the suddenly-revolting stench of burning meat, Ace, Ace — 

 

“ Ace! ” 

He screams it, devastation and denial and refusal. The metal walls around him rattle in stuttering bursts as he wails, a gaping hole in his own chest where the knowledge of his brother’s promise sat, where he held the knowledge that somewhere out on the sea Ace was following his dreams, was sailing free. 

He’s hollow, grasping, empty, and he screams for Ace, flailing out with fists and legs against the hands that try to restrain him, something swelling in him, something blue, as he reaches with every part of himself to bring Ace back to him!

 

“ Captain !” A voice calls, panic rising, but it isn’t him, he isn’t Captain, he has failed, failed, failed, his crew ripped away from him. He hadn’t been strong enough, hadn’t been able to protect them, or keep them together— Zoro so injured he couldn’t even run, all of them falling one by one—

Too weak, and now Ace— 

 

“ ACcceeeeee !” 

Sound fades again, there is only the swelling blue, and Luffy grabs for it, unfamiliar and new and pulls — 

 

“Fuck — that’s — go get—” 

Snap !

 

Blackness descends, a hammer blow of unconsciousness. 

 

Bepo and Sachi look at each other, wide eyed and terrified, the recovery room in absolute, well… Shambles . Everything not bolted down has been swapped all over, including them. 

 

The familiar cool-smooth-liquid snap of their captain’s power was instead harsh and raw edged like the crackle of lightning — and centered on Strawhat. 

“Well,” Law drawls, and their captain’s familiar deadpan is a relief, coming from where he’s leaned against the doorframe, Commander Portgas peering over his shoulder into the room. “I stand corrected. Apparently Strawhat-ya does have my powers as well. Interesting.”

Chapter 7

Marco misses most of the final retreat from Marineford.

 

There is violence and blood. Betrayal. Teach.

 

His father is dead. 

 

But after Shanks steps in to stop the bloodshed, when it becomes clear that at least some of them will live to retreat, Marco’s priorities shift. 

 

He doesn’t know who gathered Pop’s body, who coordinated the final retreat onto the Mini Moby, doesn’t know who collected the few red beads that are all anyone can find of Ace and his brother. He doesn’t know what the Marines did, how many of them went along with Shanks’ order, how many had to be made to. 

 

All he knows, for hours, as Marineford’s shores shrink behind them, and the Red Force escorts them and their allies out of the Calm Belt, is blood, and the screaming of his brothers and sisters as he tries, grimly, to save whoever can be saved. 

 

He is First Mate. His Captain is dead. His father is dead. Ace is dead. He should be grieving. He should be coordinating their retreat, and figuring out how to hold the family together, what they will do next. 

 

But he is also the Head Doctor. He’s not the only one on the battlefield with medical training, but he’s the best, and he is the only chance far too many of their siblings have, especially until they can meet the Moby 2 and 3, where they left most of their non-combatants. 

 

There are too many injured and not enough hands and the triage is brutal, numbing. The dead lay alongside the living, and between them are those whose lives hang on the thread of how quickly they can receive help. 

 

Marco has seen many a bloody battle, assisted in the aftermath of natural disasters when tragedy hit one of their territories. 

 

Nothing, nothing has ever matched standing on the deck of the Mini Moby in the aftermath of war and knowing every single face, bloody, damaged, screaming for help, and knowing, equally and without a doubt, that he cannot save them all. He tries, though, because he loves every one of them. Just as they could not have failed to at least try to save Ace, Marco cannot give up on them. 

 

He gives orders, drags everyone who can even figure out how to wrap a bandage into trying to buy their injured siblings another minute, another hour, another chance.

 

Hongo joins him, as soon as his own crew is seen to, and Marco nods at the other half of the deck he hasn’t made it to yet, the boards slick with blood. The deck had been converted to a makeshift ward as crewmates were dragged off the battlefield — dead or alive.

 

They don’t need any words, Marco and the Red Force’s doctor. This is a far cry from the cheerful comradery of patching up idiots in the wake of a party between the Red Hairs and the Whitebeards, but Marco trusts the other man to do his best. 

 

Hongo goes, and Marco turns back to his work. He is the Head Doctor. But he is also The Phoenix. 

 

Blue wraps around a hand as he forces the fire of his regeneration past the bounds of his own skin, demands that it seal the hole clear through the side of the woman beneath him: Kira, a vicious fighter, beautiful and graceful with a sword. She screams, too conscious for this, but Marco doesn’t have time to be gentle as muscle, bone, skin, and nerves reform in the wake of flowing blue flames. 

 

If he could have just gotten to Ace —

 

Marco forces himself away from Kira as soon as he’s sure she’ll live, even though her side is still raw and open and weeping blood, regeneration incomplete. A crew member falls in at her side to wrap the remaining wound up tight in bandages. Marco doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to hold a sword, ever be able to fight again. 

 

He doesn’t know if she’ll hate him for saving her life if she can’t. 

 

He can’t worry about that, already onto his next patient, hand wrapped like a steel band around the arm of Pito, a navigator and an excellent marksman, arm broken in three places, a compound fracture that had cut a major vein. The tourniquet had saved his life but will cost him his arm, and there is nothing Marco can do to change that: if he’ll live Marco can’t spend any more time on him, he simply has to move onto the next sibling bleeding out on their deck. 

 

And the next. 

 

Next.

 

Next.

Something like reprieve comes, finally, when they reach the backup ships. The arrival of the nurses and the rest of their non-combatants crashes over the rails like a wave in a summer sea, warm and buoyant. Marco looks up from a patient who will live but likely lose their leg, his vision swimming. He meets the eyes of his head nurse, Ren, and knows the work is still only starting. 

 

She looks at him, expression grim as Marco knows his own is, and takes over coordinating both the nurses and the makeshift medical team with the brisk efficiency that had Marco recruiting her off her island himself in the first place. 

 

Marco turns back to his next patient. 

 

Blue fire swims in his veins, in his eyes, at the boundaries of self he no longer knows how to define. 

 

It gets easier, and harder, from there. 

 

Those they can’t save are taken care of. Those whose life hangs in the balance are brought to Marco, but more and more there is little he can do except pour blue fire into them and pray . 

 

He doesn’t know how long it is, in the end, before he looks for his next patient and finds no one being shoved beneath his hands in desperate hope he can scrape life out of his veins and share it. 

 

There are still nurses moving on deck, still patients, but everyone he can see is wrapped in bandages, being settled in with blankets. The deck is still an extended medical ward, but for now, everyone who still lives has been seen to. 

 

It’s done. 

 

He must make some kind of sound, because Ren looks up from where she is in discussion with Loda and Brisk. She places a hand on each of their shoulders and they nod, heading off, before Ren approaches Marco. 

 

“Go to bed, Commander,” Ren says gently, nodding to two of her nurses who scrape him off the deck as his knees refuse to hold him. “We’ve done everything we can, for now.”

 

Marco imagines, for a second, protesting, but— 

 

He meets Ren’s eyes, and sees the gentle steel in them, the affectionate loyalty that comes with a refusal to allow him to get away with anything. 

 

It’s the same look she gave Pops, when she hooked him back up to his lines, or denied him another round of sake. 

 

Marco’s throat tightens. He’s never been on the receiving end of that look, before, always a conspirator, never a recipient.  

 

No one has called him Captain yet. 

 

Marco is unspeakably thankful, in that moment, for the title of ‘Commander’ on Ren’s tongue.

 

He nods, and lets himself be guided away.

 

He doesn’t know where they lead him, only that he’s asleep the second he’s released onto a horizontal surface. 

 

~~~~

 

When Marco wakes up too few hours later the work only continues in a different form. 

 

Ren politely, but immovably, bans him from the medbay, or from helping on the deck. The makeshift infirmary there has reduced, as the walking wounded disperse, but there is still work to do. Ren is not interested. She also informs him that if she sees even a hint of Phoenix Fire for the next 24 hours she will sedate him. 

 

Marco believes her, and doesn’t protest. 

 

He is physically fine, as always. His siblings crack and break, bleed and die, and still he remains perfectly uninjured. Which doesn’t stop the hollow ache in his bones, the way it feels like the fire is breathing under his skin, spilling out of his center, reaching for something he can’t name, and doesn’t know how to give it. He doesn’t have the time to coddle his Phoenix right now, though, because Pops is dead. 

 

Whitebeard is dead. 

 

Perhaps if he continues to repeat the words it will begin to feel real. 

 

Their father is dead, and so are so many of their siblings. 

 

Ace is dead and they don’t even have a body to bury. 

 

Luffy is gone, vanished off Marineford without a trace, and no one, enemy or ally, knows how, or where he went. 

 

Ace’s little brother, the one their father ordered them to protect, who Ace died to save, and they failed. 

 

They failed to save Ace. Failed to save Luffy. Failed to save Pops. 

 

Their home, their ship, is burnt and broken on the bottom of the bay of Marineford, their allies hurt and scattered, and they have nothing to show for it. 

 

Shanks stopped the war, but everyone knows the Whitebeards had already lost. 

 

He sees the same knowledge in the eyes of his fellow Commanders, when he steps into the meeting room. 

 

He meets eleven sets of eyes, and also sees the same resolve sitting alongside the despair. 

 

“We need to get back to our territories,” Marco says, stepping up to his place at the table, accepting the papers Haruta hands him. He cannot, quite, bring himself to take the space at the head that is Pops’. Not… not yet. “Plans?” 

 

The meeting that follows is heartbreaking in its familiarity. Ideas fly between the Commanders, pros and cons of plans debated, but there is no impossibly large presence guiding it, nudging it.  

 

When the time for decisions comes there is no Captain to make them. 

 

So Marco does what he always knew he would have to do eventually, but was somehow still so incredibly unprepared for. That’s what it means, to be first mate, and yet: he could never truly picture what it would mean to outlive his father and Captain. 

 

“Do it,” Marco orders, before the silence can stretch on too long, because there is no other choice. “Moby 2 to Sphinx, Moby 3 to Junction. Warn all of our territories you pass to bunker down. Keep an eye out for any of our allied crews and help as you can. Tell them that we’ll do our best for them, but that change is coming.” 

 

It is the grim truth Marco has no interest or ability to sugarcoat. They will do what they can for their territories, but they are reeling, wounded, their numbers reduced and their captain dead. Every enemy they have made in the last forty years is about to start crawling out of the woodwork. There is only so much they will be able to do. They are going to lose people and places that have depended on them, some of them for as long as Marco has been with the crew. The knowledge burns . 

 

“Stay in touch with each other,” he continues. “The Mini Moby will warn Fishman Island and do what we can for them there and then meet you at Sphinx. Two of you stay with me, everyone else split up between the Moby 2 and 3.” 

 

There is general agreement, and a dispersal to see to it. The Moby 2 is carrying enough sap to recoat all three ships, and has enough spare to coat one or two allied ships if they need it. Marco trusts his fellow commanders to distribute themselves and their divisions logically among the tasks ahead of them, and ensure they make it back into the New World. 

 

As soon as he’s alone, Marco lets his head fall to the desk and just breathes for a moment, mind blank, fire an unstable, reaching thing inside him. He gives himself ten minutes to wrestle it down and think of nothing at all besides that. Then he steps out of the meeting room. He has one more stop he has to make today before he can go sweet talk himself past Ren and into the medbay to work himself back into unconscious sleep to quell the burning in him. 

 

The Captains Quarters stand empty and untouched. 

 

Everyone very kindly doesn’t say anything, or even really look at him, for the entire half hour he paces, dithering, outside the door, while he attempts to wrangle the idea that it is his now. That he is expected to step through that door, and take up the mantle of the Strongest Man in the World. 

 

It’s a little late for the realization that he doesn’t want this; that Marco has never wanted to be a Captain. Being Pop’s first mate felt natural. This whole crazy sprawling family is his , and the seas knew that if Pops was left in charge of the logistics of it all they’d all subsist on nothing but sake for days at a time. So Marco just … did it. He is good at those parts of it that involve keeping the crew running, and when it comes with certain expectations, well… it hadn’t really mattered, because Pops just was. He had been there since Marco was barely more than a ball of feathers, and it hadn’t felt real that there would ever be a time where he wasn’t there, with his booming laugh and his love. 

 

Yet here they are.

 

Here they are, and Marco will never let his family down. He can’t. He won’t, even when he hurts. They need him. 

 

They need a Captain. 

 

He steps through the door, into a cabin that Pops has never inhabited and yet was always held ready for him. The Mini-Moby’s captain has her own cabin. This one was for the Captain of the Whitebeards, and has always been something close to ceremonial, except for the way it was completely sincere: a place big enough for Pops to be comfortable if he ever needed to be here on this ship for any extended length of time. 

 

It’s empty, blank, barren of all personality. 

 

 
Pain sears through Marco, and he presses his unruly phoenix down. He knows. He knows . 

 

There is nothing personal here. Every single thing his Pops has ever touched, the few trinkets he had carried through his long life, all of it is sunk to the bottom of the bay of Marineford. There is nothing left of Whitebeard except them; this crew, his children. Which makes it worse, far worse yet, to know the number of their dead who littered the parade grounds of Marine Headquarters, and the others they had lost to their wounds since, given sea burials far from the territories they all called home. 

 

So many of Pop’s treasured children, dead. Pops dead to buy them time to retreat with Ace. And yet they had still failed. Ace is dead. Pops had died, knowing they had failed.

 

Marco closes his eyes for just a moment, lets the grief have him. 

 

Then he opens them. He has work to do. He presses forward, heading towards the desk. 

 

A fluttering catches his attention. Marco steels himself for what he knows he will find, steps over to the little set of sixteen glass tubes arrayed in their stand, each one ready to be transported to Navigation as needed, but all tucked safely for now into their holders. Tiny shreds of vivre cards. Each ship in the fleet has a set for their most common travel companions and closest allies, in case they got separated and needed to find each other again. Vivre cards are a much more reliable way to do so than attempting to navigate their way back to each other with a ‘Pose. 

 

The Mini Moby has its own set, in her captain’s quarters, with her closest allies’ and Pops’ cards. This is the Moby’s set, personalized by Pops, and removed to the Mini Moby from the Moby Dick before they went into battle — just in case the worst happened. 

 

Marco’s chest is tight as he approaches them. Pops knew, Marco can’t help but think. It’s not the first time he thinks it, but it hits again all the same, and he’s swallowing against tears as he runs fingers over delicate glass, all but one of the tubes bearing in them the tiny fluttering scraps of paper that are both proof of life and guide. 

 

… all but one bearing… 

Marco stares, heart in his throat, frozen on the cusp of disbelief and impossible hope. 

 

Sixteen little glass tubes. Fifteen tiny scraps of paper, where it was only possible for there to be fourteen . 

 

And yet. 

 

One tube, topped by a jaunty little chef’s hat, sits empty forever. 

 

One, with a candle melted to the top, houses an impossible fluttering scrap. 

 

Marco freezes, unable to move, unable to think, for a long moment. 

 

“Izou,” he croaks, barely above a whisper. He clears his throat. Tries again, a little louder. Maybe he has cracked. The stress and the pain is making him see things that cannot be.

 

“Izou!” Marco manages, finally, loud enough to be heard outside. There is a flurry on the deck, a crest of voices, and then hurrying footsteps. 

 

“Marco?” Izou’s voice comes from behind him, at the door he left open, worried and tentative as the man rarely is. “Are you okay? What—”

 

“Do you see that?” Marco demands, hoarse and disbelieving, pointing at the impossible before his eyes, the tiny scrap of paper, not even singed, pressed against the side of the glass on the opposite side of all the others— reaching back up the ‘Line, deeper into Paradise, in the direction of the person it’s connected to. 

 

Izou doesn’t answer directly, but the cracked hope in his whisper of “ Ace? ” is all the answer Marco could possibly have needed. 

 

~~~~

 

It’s not really a discussion, in the end, for all that it is in direct contradiction with everything he should do. 

 

It is his responsibility, now, to guide his family, to lead them back into their territory, to safety, to figure out how they will survive, how they will carry on, how they will protect themselves, and their territories, from the chaos that is about to engulf them. 

 

But as they all stare at the tiny scrap of paper leading deeper into Paradise there really isn’t a choice. 

 

He has to go. 

 

It’s impossible. Marco saw the blow, the wound, the blood. He knows exactly, in excruciating detail, how much damage even a Logia can take before it is simply too much. And yet. The vivre card doesn’t lie. It can’t. 

 

They have to know for sure. 

 

No matter that he has just resolved that he needs to suck it up and be the captain he promised to be in this very eventuality, when he took the position of First Mate. Marco is the only one who can go fast enough, without gaining undo attention. He is the only one who can fly, who can follow that card without the need of sails and a crew or even supplies. 

 

He has to be the one to go. And every logical argument notwithstanding, he feels like he might actually vibrate straight out of his skin if he stays in one place a minute longer knowing that he has a path to Ace.  

 

Izou still has to literally throw him over the railing of the Mini-Moby, because Marco has devoted the last three decades of his life to this crew and to his Pops, and— and Pops is dead . The care of their family falls to Marco now. 

 

But they… they need to know if it’s possible. If they didn’t fail in everything they tried to do. If it’s true, if it’s possible . 

 

If Ace is really still alive, they cannot abandon him a second time. 

 

The remainder of the family will head back to the New World without him. They’ve managed to coat their ships, the Moby 2 and 3 already submerged. The Red Force is just waiting for them, now.

 

They didn’t, exactly, owe Shanks an explanation of their actions. He is a rival captain who is a sometimes-friend. But since he had saved all their lives he does deserve one. And besides, Shanks had been on Roger’s crew. He may not have known Ace well, but he had a right to know his Captain’s son might yet live. 

 

Shanks had been silent, as he stared at the scrap of vivre card in Marco’s hand, listening to his explanation of who it belonged to. It had been one of the most intense silences of Marco’s life, before the man had just nodded, and retreated back to his ship. The Red Force would keep shadowing them, carrying Pop’s body in state, fulfilling both Shanks’ promise to get them all the way back to the New World, and to see Pops interred. 

 

Marco doesn’t know if they will survive this, but they have to try. He has to try. 

 

He is not a Captain, though. He has never wanted to be. He was happy where he was, with who he was. His is not the drive, and the passion, his is the steady burning flame that maintains the dream. 

 

The dream is dead with Pops, and Marco doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to revive it. The irony doesn’t escape him. Revival is his speciality, but bodies are easy, compared to a dream. 

 

So Marco lets Izou chuck him overboard and rises with blue wings aflame, circling once over the remains of his family as they begin to submerge, before he consults the little glass tube strapped to his leg that contains the scrap of paper he’s resting all his disbelieving hopes on. He orients to its juddering pulse, and sets his wings against the breeze, spiraling upwards until he can glide deeper into Paradise, heading away from Saboady. 

 

~~~~

 

It’s a long flight, but not entirely unbroken. Even following an impossible vivre card instead of a log pose, Marco passes islands. He gives them as wide a berth as he can, though, just as he does any ships. 

 

Flying may be a fairly discrete way to cross Paradise, but his form isn’t the most unremarkable of the flying Zoan fruits. Glowing blue firebirds aren’t an everyday occurrence, even on the Grand Line, even when the world isn’t shaking in the aftermath of a broadcasted war he played a large and visible part in. 

 

The last thing he needs, if this miracle is somehow possible, is to lead the Marines back to Ace if he managed to escape them and survive. 

 

Ace can’t have survived. Marco saw the wound. He’s a doctor. He’d known instantly that there was no chance. The fact that Ace had managed to say his farewell to his brother was the next closest thing to a miracle that Marco has ever seen, only explainable by the absolutely illogical nature of a logia, given that he’d been missing… spine, lungs, probably a chunk of liver too, upper intestines, ribs, if any of that mattered by that point. 

 

Marco’s never going to forget the sight of Akainu’s fist through Ace’s chest, Marco himself too slow, too slow and careless, he let someone get a cuff on him, the seastone sapping his strength, grounding him, preventing him from getting there on time. 

 

If he’d been closer, if he’d shoved his own fist, his own fire, into the gaping hole in Ace’s chest in the bare seconds following Akainu’s blow then— maybe. Maybe Marco could have saved him.

 

But he didn’t. He was halfway across a battlefield instead, bound in seastone and helpless, and Ace had died.  

 

Paper flutters against glass. 

 

Marco expects every moment for it to crumble away to nothingness. 

 

Hope is a thing with claws.  

 

Marco flies on, deeper into Paradise, and hopes anyway.

Chapter 8

When the Polar Tang arrives at Gras Central two days after the battle at Marineford, they do not surface. 

 

One very good reason for that is the packed harbor, and the several hulls that they can clearly see from below are of marine make, studded with seastone. The thick cloud cover hovering over the island is another reason not to surface, though it’s not one Law will be telling Portgas about, if he ever bothers to stir himself from Strawhat’s bedside to ask. 

 

There is no way, Law is sure, that his interference in the battle at Marineford went completely unnoticed, even though the Tang never truly surfaced. His Room is moderately subtle, in full sunlight and in a chaotic battlefield, but it’s not invisible. Every eye at Marineford had been focused on Portgas and Strawhat when Law whisked them away. He’s truly astonished that they’ve gotten this far without someone, like an admiral , catching up to them. He would like to keep it that way, which means not taking any more risks. So far that has meant not even risking being surfaced long enough to let a News Coo find them. 

 

Law is also entirely uninterested in testing to what extent Doflamingo can still predict him, after all these years. 

 

So they stay submerged for the hour and a bit it takes their Log Pose to reset at Gras Central, and then slip quietly back down the ‘Line to the far less inhabited shores of the Needle Archipelago; a collection of islands and atolls that were once one large island, eroded away into what is now a collection of sheltered bays and shallows crowned by a few small islands with varying levels of forestation. It’s not the easiest place for a submarine to navigate, but Law has faith in his crew’s abilities. Needle Archipelago has very little population, isn’t a common marine destination, and is a summer island in the dry season and as such it is very rarely cloudy. It’s perfect for their current needs. 

 

“Find us a deep enough bay that we can stay submerged when we wish,” Law instructs. “But also somewhere uninhabited, with cover on land and enough space for us to make a camp. I don’t want to keep Strawhat sedated much longer, but I also don’t want him waking on the Tang again. Who knows what he could do.”

 

Bepo nods in uneasy agreement, and Law reaches up to pat his thickly furred shoulder in wordless comfort as he leaves the control room, heading back for the medbay. It had been disconcerting, having Law’s powers used on him by someone who was not the Captain he trusted. After that demonstration Law had given in and sedated Strawhat for the remainder of their journey. It was safe enough: by that point Law had cleared enough of the other nonsense out of his system that it wouldn’t be dangerous. Portgas hadn’t been happy about it, but thankfully he was reasonable enough to agree that an uncontrolled new Devil Fruit, an extremely distraught man whose last memories were his brother dying, and a submerged vessel were a bad combination. 

 

It didn’t stop him from fretting like a broody hen, of course. Law isn’t even surprised to find that Portgas has dragged himself back out of the bed Law had attempted to install him in to sit at his brother’s bedside, one of Strawhat’s bandaged hands gripped gently in Portgas’ own unmarred ones. 

 

“We’ll be surfacing soon,” Law tells the Whitebeard Commander. It is still disconcerting to have this man on his ship, though that is mostly a combination of not expecting to confront an Emperor’s crew anywhere near this soon and his discomfort about how many of his secrets Law has been forced to reveal. “As soon as we find a suitable place, I’ll stop his sedation and we’ll take him ashore.” Law has no interest in seeing what kind of damage Strawhat could manage to inflict on the Polar Tang if he wakes again as incoherent as he had been last time, or has another uncontrolled outburst with Law’s power. 

 

Portgas nods, and is silent for a moment before; “Could you feel it? When he used your power?”

 

Law hums, delaying. He seriously considers not answering. It’s none of Portgas’ business, frankly, and it seems a disturbingly intimate question, coming from a stranger. More than that; the fact that Portgas knows what Strawhat is to Law is a gaping hole in his defenses he’d rather didn’t exist. Since it does exist, he’d rather ignore its existence rather than discuss it so lightly.  However, Portgas is in the same situation as he is, and is also Law’s only point of scientific corroboration on this phenomenon, so he’s forced to cooperate if he wants any additional data.

 

“No,” is Law’s response, after that moment of consideration. “I didn’t feel anything when he used my powers. I didn’t feel anything when I met him, either: nothing like you’re supposed to feel, according to the stories.” Law can’t resist the urge to pry, since Portgas is being so free with his questions. “Are you feeling something from Phoenix-ya, then?”

 

Portgas twitches at the blunt question — a startled jerk of his head that is both negation and lingering denial were Law to make a wager about it. If Law wasn’t rapidly getting the impression that this man has never bothered to lie about anything in his life — his entire existence being itself a lie is a truly stupendous contradiction — he might feel inclined to commend him on the thoroughness of his commitment to denying that he and Phoenix Marco are soulmates. 

 

Instead, Law is growing rapidly frustrated. He marshalls his frustration with more difficulty than he should really be having, but it’s been a very long couple of days. For both of them. Law’s not even the one who died, though, he reminds himself. He can have a little patience. He tugs irritably at one of his earrings, and scowls harder when the nervous tic only drives in the changes he’s experiencing as the lobe stretches. Damn it. The motion catches Portgas’ attention, though.

 

“Is that how you knew?” Portgas asks, nodding at Law’s hand, an amused smirk twitching at his lips. Law drops the hand, shoving it in his pocket.

 

“No,” he says bluntly, and doesn’t elaborate. Portgas rolls his eyes. 

 

“I borrowed a knife,” Portgas says, and Law raises a brow at him. He wiggles his hand at Law, a smear of blood still present, wiped haphazardly clear of unmarked skin. Law suppresses his first three reactions — irritation over both the lack of sanitation and the lack of a witness if he was going to be experimenting, fascination over the apparent continued healing, and disappointment that he wasn’t there to observe — in favor of a raised brow. 

 

“I can use Haki to keep the flames contained,” Portgas continues, apparently misinterpreting his query. “Wait — do you know what Haki is yet?” 

 

Law scowls. 

 

“What about me makes you think I’m an idiot, Portgas-ya?”

Portgas, infuriatingly, cracks a smile.

 

“I mean. You’re apparently this idiot’s soulmate, so…”

 

Law can’t yell at him, though it’s tempting. Not with the heartbreaking fondness in his voice and face as he looks at Luffy at that, reaching back out to hold his hand again, careful, like he thinks he can harm rubber flesh. 

 

“You borrowed a knife and apparently stabbed yourself to test your healing abilities,” Law prompts. “Which was stupid to do without supervision, since by your own account it has never worked like that before.”

 

Portgas scoffs this time, turning back to Law. 

 

“I didn’t stab myself. It was just a small cut. And it did work this time,” he tells him. “I don’t know what changed, but as soon as I let the Haki go the cut healed. It’s never done that before. It would have been really useful while facing Teach, for one. So what’s up with that?”

 

Law rolls his eyes. “While I’m flattered I’ve somehow given you the impression I have all the answers —”

 

“You haven’t answered a single one of my questions! That one was rhetorical —” 

 

“ — once again I have to reiterate that I do not know. I can speculate, but we also have no way of proving any theory I might come up with.” 

 

Portgas stares at him for a long moment.

 

“You’re a lot of fun at parties, aren’t you?” 

 

It’s clearly sarcastic. Law’s fingers twitch. It would serve him right to spend an hour with his eyes and ears swapped, running into walls. 

 

Law takes a steadying breath. 

 

“None of the records or legends talk about an ongoing feeling of connection with a soulmate within normal people,” he says. Calmly, because irritating or not, Law doesn’t actually want to start a fight with Fire Fist Ace on his submarine. “There is supposedly a feeling of ‘connection’ localized to the Compass itself when two soulmates first meet. ‘The Sea’s Promise weaving souls together’, apparently,” He can’t help the edge of derision in his voice. “Except that all of us have given our souls to devils , cursed and forsaken.”

 

Portgas flinches, and Law blinks at him for a moment. 

 

Soulless and damned, he’d said. That’s what the East Blue thought. That’s what Portgas had probably thought. Given what Law knows of the Phoenix, it’s likely something Portgas had thought his entire life, until he was out on the Grand Line only three years ago.

 

“But after that initial connection there aren't any proven accounts of continuing awareness of the other person,” Law continues, modulating his tone back to factual. “There are always stories, and people who insist that they just know what their soulmate is doing half a sea away, but there is no proof that’s not just superstition and wishful thinking. There isn’t any reason to believe that you or I would feel anything if our — if Phoenix-ya or Strawhat-ya used our powers.”

 

Predictably, Portgas takes the one thing out of that statement that Law wishes he wouldn’t.

 

He grins at him, wide and a little malicious and says: “You mean when our soulmates use our powers?”

 

Law twitches. 

 

Portgas cackles. “You can’t get pissy when it takes me a while to accept that apparently Marco and I broke even this crazy set of rules and are actually soulmates even after years of not knowing, and then deny that the guy who you met and immediately became rubber for is your soulmate.”

 

Law straightens, indignantly, glaring. He’s not denying anything! He just — There is no way–!

 

Law slumps again. 

 

Portgas is, sadly, not wrong. 

 

“The Sea must have been insane. Or my devil is. Both.” 

 

Portgas, thankfully, simply cackles louder rather than taking offense on his brother’s behalf. 

 

Law loves the Sea. She has given him freedom, and solace. She cradles them, protects them. They shelter in her depths, and ride her currents. She hates him, though. It’s a reality he’s long accepted. 

 

Law can’t help but wonder, nearly against his own will; what does Strawhat think of it? Of the sea? Of his permanent estrangement from her? Did he know what it would mean, to eat a Fruit? That he could never again trust her? According to Portgas the East Blue doesn’t know much about Devil Fruits at all. 

 

Did Strawhat know eating one would make his compass vanish? Did he know the Sea herself would reject him? Would he have cared, if he had found one before Law did, before it didn’t matter any longer for either of them? 

 

Did Strawhat eat his Fruit for power? Most did, but surely no one looked at a Fruit that turned you to rubber and decided that was the path to strength. Did they? 

 

And if Strawhat had… 

 

Well he hadn’t precisely been wrong, had he? 

 

For all his complaining, Law isn’t entirely blind to the benefits of Strawhat’s Fruit. On a purely practical side Law’s fairly sure he’s bulletproof now, even if he’s not thinking too hard about that, lest he spiral back into memories he can’t afford to delve too deeply into. But Strawhat has done more than just weaponize a certain invulnerability to damage. 

 

Law can see it, still. Strawhat’s small form against the monsters of the world. And he lost, true. But to have survived the attempt, survived long enough for Law to get him that last, tiny distance? It was impressive. It was its own victory. How much of that is his Fruit, and how much is his will . And what will he think of Law when he wakes? 

 

Law has no answers, and certainly none that will be found staring at the sleeping face of the man the Sea had thought to Promise him, and then tried to keep him from. Law thought he wound’t care, on the impossible chance he actually met his soulmate. He doesn’t know how he feels now. He has a mission, still, and a goal he will not set aside for anything. This small deviation doesn’t count. He hadn’t been at Marineford for Strawhat, he hadn’t known the other captain would be there. Law had been there to see the birth of a new era. He had gotten a lot more than he’d bargained for. 

 

He should go. See to their docking, to arranging to transport Strawhat off his ship for his doubtless violent awakening. And yet. 

 

Law can still feel the sense memory of a rubber heart struggling in his grip, pounding, pounding, pounding. The sound echoing like drums in Law’s ears as Law refused to let this be the end. 

 

The steady beep of a heart monitor is a comforting metronome, in comparison.

 

He can stay a little while longer. Enjoy what gut instinct tells him may be his very last quiet moments in his soulmate’s presence and just… listen to his heart beat. 

 

~~~~

 

Law had disconnected the heart monitor and various other pieces of machinery in the process of transporting Strawhat to the shore. His crew had found a good spot to set up in; open enough to handle any startled awakening but sheltered enough to be secure, and just removed enough from where they were setting up camp to provide some privacy. They’d brought him out on one of the portable stretchers and then left him with just Portgas for company and Law for medical supervision as the last of the sedatives worked their way out of his system. 

 

Law is glad for the decision, and that his equipment and ship are safely out of the line of fire, when Strawhat wakes with a scream of his brother’s name and a lunge upright that would have snapped a dozen delicate cables Law can identify off the top of his head. 

 

“ACE!” Strawhat’s scream of his brother’s name is equal parts anger, fear, and hopelessness. It is at once a demand thrown at the feet of the world for his brother to be returned to him, and the bone deep knowledge that it is too late. That his brother is gone, dead, taken from him by this fucking awful world . There is devastation already written all over that expressive face and Law cannot breathe for a long second, turning away, the brim of his hat shading his eyes as that pain echoes, resonates . 

 

Lami!

 

Cora-san, no!

 

But where the world has never offered Law so much as a single good hand that he did not scheme and fight for, it has a miracle ready to lay out at Strawhat’s feet in answer to his demand. 

 

“Luffy!” Portgas calls, reaching out, grabbing for his brother’s shoulders even as the younger man struggles. “Luffy, I’m here! I’m right here, I’m okay! Hold still, you idiot, you’re hurt!” 

 

“Ace!” Strawhat sobs as his eyes focus on his brother’s face. “Ace you’re alive!” 

 

Huge heaving breaths are coming quick, disbelief and the beginning of joy breaking across Strawhat’s face like sunrise , and Law… 

 

This is not for him, this outpouring of emotion; this relief, and joy, and hope.  

 

 Law turns and walks away, unnoticed, leaving the two brothers to their reunion. 

 

~~~~

 

Of course, if Law expects it to be left at that he is sorely mistaken. 

 

It’s been just less than a hour, and the yelling, crashes, and more yelling coming from the direction he had left the brothers in had finally died down. There had been worried looks from his crew, but frankly Law is of the opinion at this point that he had done his job already, and if they hurt themselves again being idiots it is not his problem. Besides, Portgas will apparently heal just fine from presumably anything, and he doesn’t believe the man would let his little brother get too badly hurt after all the drama they just came through.

 

Actually… Law adds ‘ability to heal others?’ to the mental list of questions he’s compiling to ask Phoenix Marco if he ever gets the chance to pick the man’s brain about his powers. He could ask Portgas, he supposes, but he’d hate to give the man the impression he wanted to spend more time than necessary talking to him. Besides, Portgas has had these powers for a couple of days, and Phoenix Marco has had them for decades. It would be inefficient to go anywhere other than the more informed source. Law is contemplating other questions he would like answers to when there is a twang, a startled gasp, and then something with the approximate force of a cannon ball slams straight into him. 

 

Law goes tumbling sideways in a rolling jumble of limbs. Blue sparks at his fingertips, and he’s just about to call a Room and cut whatever this is into shreds when he registers — arms wrapped around him, and a face pressed into his chest. The babbling tumble of words is too quick and incoherent to be decipherable at this exact moment by his rattled brain but they are, by their tone, half desperate thanks and that is just — 

 

“Oi!” Law shouts, off balance and irritated, plastered flat to the ground. His leg is twisted alarmingly under him at an angle no leg should be at. Just because it doesn’t hurt and he has to remind himself that breaking any bones now would be a much harder prospect, and in fact the tackle hadn’t hurt at all when it really should have, he’s unlikely to even bruise since they had really more bounced than anything else — and all of that is entirely besides the point. He growls his displeasure, attempting to literally peel Strawhat off of him and being thwarted by the way that any part of the man he attempts to get a solid grip on just stretches as he pulls. “Get off of me, you idiot!”

 

The squirming on top of him stops, but it’s no real relief because what he gets instead is the tilt of a head, and the full, focused, unwavering attention of dark eyes and a beaming smile that is pure, concentrated sunshine . Entirely against Law’s will he feels himself flushing, stilling in uncertainty. He’d been prepared for some kind of thanks, of course. He had gotten the brothers off that battlefield at great risk to his crew and ship, even if he’d had no part in Portgas’ miraculous resurrection. But he hadn’t quite been prepared for the full force of that smile.

 

“Torao!” The man pinning him down to the sandy ground declares — like that meant something? “Thank you for saving Ace, Torao!”

 

“What— That’s not my name!” Law protests, struggling, not yet quite willing to use his powers to get free. Simply because he isn’t sure how they will interact with the echo of his own power in Strawhat, of course. “And Portgas-ya should have told you: I didn’t have anything to do with saving him.” 

 

The moment the words are out of his mouth Law wishes he could bite them back. If Portgas hadn’t told Strawhat then the information could have been some sort of leverage— 

 

But Strawhat is laughing, open and so joyful it makes something in Law ache.

 

“I know!” He says it so cheerfully, so easily, like he can’t still see the gaping hole punched through his brother’s chest, feel the blood on his hands, against his skin, hear his last breath. “It was his Mystery Person! He found them, and their powers saved him, which means I was right and Ace is an idiot!”

 

There is a protesting shout from Portgas off to the side, but Strawhat doesn’t look, he just stares down at Law like his face holds the secrets of the world, dark eyes burning burning burning. 

 

“And I found you, ” Strawhat says, and the words are quieter but they’re also like the bedrock that holds up a mountain, unshakable, running deep down into the core of the world, the intent in Strawhat’s eyes very nearly a physical weight on him. This is him, Law thinks on the border of bewildered wonder. This is the man the Sea promised him. The thought carries an entirely different weight in this moment than it had at any point previous, when he was bemoaning the stupid Fruit, and the ridiculous situations. This is none of that. This is pure, concentrated focus. This is the man who burned down Ennis Lobby for a crewmate, and punched a Celestial Dragon for a friend, and stormed both Impel Down and Marine Headquarters for his brother. What might he do for Law ? “You’re my Mystery Person. I knew I would find you, no matter what. I always knew it. And now you’re here. ” 

 

Law does the only reasonable thing possible in that taffy-stretched moment, looking up at his soulmate as he looms above him. A Room springs to life around them and he abruptly finds himself holding a spoon, as Bepo yelps in alarm and catches Strawhat before he can tip into the fire or knock over the cooking pot.

 

Strawhat’s startled shout at his abrupt relocation is cut off as he seems to realize what has just happened and he whips his head around a full 180 degrees in the most disconcerting display Law has seen since he first learned how to swap limbs and heads. Law is braced for the yelling, the indignation. Strawhat yells, but it’s excited, not upset. 

 

“ Is that your power? ” Strawhat demands, squirming in Bepo’s grip, trying to get free, limbs noodling. “That’s so cool! Can I do that?! What else can you do? Oh! Did you get my —”

 

He pauses. His head swings back to Bepo. His eyes widen like they’re about to fall out of his head. There is a moment of tense silence, and Law stiffens, sitting up straight because soulmate or not if Strawhat says a single bad thing about Bepo—

 

“Bear?!” Strawhat nearly shouts, apparently having no other volume, sounding absolutely delighted. There are very nearly hearts in his eyes as he stares up at Bepo. The barrage of questions that follows has Bepo blushing and pushing his paws together, but also relaxing slowly, and the rest of Law’s crew with him. 

 

Law turns his head to look, incredulously, at Portgas. 

 

The man is grinning straight at him, deeply and obviously amused. He gestures at Luffy as if to say ‘all yours!’ 

 

Law glares. Looks back. 

 

Strawhat seems to be in the process of attempting to coerce Law’s crew into some sort of incomprehensible dance that involves chopsticks. 

 

Portgas is laughing at Law, even as he moves to join in. 

 

Law glares harder. 

 

This is the man the Sea promised him?

 

~~~

 

Eventually, eventually, the excitement ebbs a bit. 

 

Strawhat’s body seems to remember that he just spent two days unconscious from injury as a result of a particularly damaging previous series of days. Law finds himself sitting relatively quietly with his soulmate at his side, Strawhat humming as he works his way through another alarmingly large portion of the stew Law’s crew had concocted. Portgas is lingering beside his brother as well, apparently unwilling to be out of arm’s reach if at all preventable.

 

Law doesn’t particularly want to be the one to broach this subject, but eventually, when it seems that Strawhat is not going to, Law decides to attempt it.

 

“How did you know?” is what he ends up asking, without context or lead in.

 

Strawhat turns to blink at him for a moment, confused, and Law attempts to clarify.

 

“Earlier. You said you knew you would find me. How? The chances were poor even before either of us ate a Devil Fruit. After that it should have been impossible. So how did you know?” 

 

The answer has to be some sort of stupidity. Arrogance. Ignorance. Strawhat turns to face him. He’s inelegant, the last of his bowl being slurped down loudly before he sets it aside. He cocks his head at Law, eyes shining with that intensity once again. There’s a noodle hanging from his chin before he slurps it up. Law is breathless again, anyway. It’s incomprehensible.  

 

“Because you’re my Mystery Person,” Strawhat says plainly, face open, eyes open. Heart open. The sense-memory tattoo of warm flesh beats against Law’s palm, tingles in his fingers. “My soulmate. Shanks told me why my Compass disappeared, but I didn’t care. Of course I was going to find you. And here you are.”

 

That last is said, again, like Law has performed the miracle here, just by existing. No, that’s not exactly right, because a miracle is unexpected, impossible. Strawhat declares Law’s existence, his appearance here in Luffy’s life, like there was never any other option. Like it’s simply a matter of faith, of inevitability, of trust. 

 

Law doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t even know where to start because he left that kind of faith behind when he was still a child. And yet here he is, himself one fourth of a two-fold miracle. Four fruits, three seas, and two soulbonds between them. 

 

It’s impossible. 

 

Insane. 

 

And yet.  

 

“I think you’ll find,” Law says, dry as he can when he can feel the flush attempting to creep up his neck. “That I in fact found you, Strawhat.” 

 

It’s a challenge, Law squaring his shoulders. He’s still struggling with what this means but he’s never been one to deny what’s right in front of him. Impossibly, he has found his soulmate. Strawhat doesn’t get to claim all the credit for this meeting when Law is the one who did all the work. 

 

But rather than being insulted, Strawhat laughs, loud and gleeful, and slings an arm around Law’s shoulders, dragging him in against his side as he giggles. Law flails, cursing, and shoves at Strawhat, who lets go, tipping off the log they’d been seated on, sprawling out comfortably on the ground, looking up at Law, trusting and open.

 

“You did!” He declares, beaming up at Law. “And you have such a cool power too! I knew you would! We both have powers! That’s so awesome! You have to show it to me! And I can show you mine! Did you see my gear two? And three?”

 

Law looks down at the man happily beaming up at him, like he’s not practically a stranger, not still a rival pirate, still the next best thing to an enemy. 

 

“Don’t act like this. You don’t know anything about me,” Law says, suddenly tense, bristling. He hasn’t come this far to be underestimated by anyone, soulmate or not. He’s a pirate, he’s a captain . “We’re strangers, rivals, soulmates or not!”

 

Portgas has tensed, and Law’s crew is silent, watching them.

 

Strawhat sits up, folding into a cross-legged position, staring up at Law, serious once again.

 

“I know,” he says, nodding firmly. “But we fought together, on Sabaody. And you saved Ace, and me, and you didn’t have to. So we’re nakama, no matter what else!”

 

He says it so easily, like it’s a simple fact, and Law is left reeling again, speechless. 

 

A shriek from above breaks the tightening silence, piercing and loud, startling all of them.

 

Luffy braces, and Law’s hand twitches, a Room sparking, but Portgas spins, launches himself to his feet and throws his arms open. 

 

He takes a blue and gold comet straight to the chest and staggers back with a cry full of joy. 

 

“Marco!”

Chapter 9

Ace can barely breathe as his arms come up to wrap around Marco, hands burying deep into long feathers, warm and real and yet simultaneously cool; intangible fire sliding against his fingers as huge wings come up to wrap around him, sheltering him from the world .

 

“Marco,” Ace rasps it this time, and fuck, he’s crying, tears spilling over as he holds on, choking on everything he hasn’t let himself really feel over the last few days of focusing on Luffy, on arguing logic with Trafalgar, on everything except what had happened, what he had lost, what his actions had cost. 

 

In his arms Marco croons, his long, deceptively delicate neck stretching to tuck alongside Ace’s own. The silken slide of feathers makes Ace’s suck in another breath, only for it to come shuddering out of him again in a sob as a wickedly sharp beak nuzzles gently into his hair. Claws that Ace has seen disembowel a man brace carefully against Ace’s thighs.

 

A sound is wrenched out of Ace, grief, and a helpless, angry sort of relief. 

 

Marco is here.

 

Marco survived, and Ace is still alive, and they’re here, and together, and – 

 

“I’m sorry,” Ace sobs out, holding on tighter, fists clenching in fiery feathers as he sinks to the ground, to his knees, unable to hold himself up any longer. “Marco – Marco, I’m so sorry. ”

 

He’d been so stupid. He’d disobeyed orders; so angry, so sure that it was his responsibility alone. Teach had been one of his, one of his Division, and his actions were Ace’s responsibility. Teach had killed a crewmate. There was no excuse he could possibly offer, for spitting on everything that Pops offered them, on their family.

 

Worse, he had killed Thatch, who was everyone’s friend, who was one of the first people Ace had connected to, who Ace had adored. He had been the big brother Ace had never had before, someone to tease and taunt, but also to lean on, to go to for advice. Someone stronger than him that wanted to use that strength to protect Ace. It had been novel, impossible. Ace had hated it, and mistrusted it, and finally, slowly, come to accept it, cherish it. 

 

Then Thatch was dead and it was one of Ace’s men who had done it. 

 

He’d had to make it right, even if it meant defying Pops in the process.

 

He had thought that he’d have time to apologize when he came back with Teach’s head.

 

And now Pops is dead and so are so many others, and Ace will never see them again and it is all his fault.

 

“Marco , ” Ace gasps it out, shuddering, folding over Marco’s graceful form, so light like this, so seemingly fragile, and yet so impossibly strong. “I never should have gone, I should have listened to you, to Pops. I was just so angry. He killed Thatch. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t think. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. ” 

 

It doesn’t matter though, does it? How sorry he is. He still did it, and they still came after him, and they fought and died. He’s so stupid, always so stupid, he never thinks his actions through, not until it’s too late, and he’s trying to pick up the burnt, bloody pieces. Even when it literally killed him in the end he hadn’t been able to back down and think.

 

“Come on, Strawhat,” Ace hears Trafalgar say quietly, standing, moving away. “Let’s give them some space. I guess I can show you some of my abilities, just to make sure you don’t accidentally kill yourself doing something stupid and undo all my hard work.”

 

As two sets of footsteps move away, Marco shifts under Ace’s hands. Feathers give way to skin and cloth, and in a heartbeat and a swirl of flame Marco kneels over Ace, broad shoulders blocking out the world just as easily as his wings had. His hands slide up, one to cradle Ace’s face gently, the other pressed dead center on Ace’s chest, pressing into unmarred skin, holding his gaze firmly. 

 

“Ace,” Marco says quietly. “You’re alive. ”

 

The wonder in Marco’s voice would have taken Ace’s feet out from under him if he’d still been standing. As it is, it tangles in his chest, snares and hooks deep, and Ace can’t breathe.  

 

It’s wonder, but it’s also the same forgiveness that had been in Pop’s voice, at Marineford, when he rejected Ace’s apology. The promise that so long as he stayed alive , as long as he came back to them there was nothing he had done that couldn’t be forgiven. 

 

A promise that they loved him. Always. No matter what.  

 

Ace wraps his arms around Marco, presses his face into his chest, and sobs. 

 

~~~~

 

Marco lets him cry himself out. 

 

It would be humiliating, but Ace can’t dredge up the energy to be embarrassed. He just feels heavy, tired. He leans against Marco’s chest and just… drifts for a while, his head full of noise, like he’s got both ears pressed to sea shells, listening to the rushing imitation of the ocean and letting it block out everything else. 

 

Marco just holds him through it, both of them having shifted to a more comfortable tangle, with Marco leaning against a stump and Ace curled up against his chest. One of Marco’s hands has shifted to press against the middle of Ace’s upper back, right over the bare, barren skin in the center of his tattoo, right where Akainu’s fist had hit him. Killed him. Marco’s fingers are firm against unmarred skin, steady, rising and falling with Ace’s breath.

 

“That was Trafalgar Law, wasn’t it?” Marco asks eventually, when Ace’s breathing has slowed. “I’ve seen his bounty poster. A promising rookie. They call him the Surgeon of Death.”

 

Marco trails off.

 

“Ace, I saw your wound. Did he…? How are you alive?”

 

Ace can’t help the disbelieving huff into Marco’s chest. At least he’s not the only one who was confused by his continued survival.

 

“I asked the same question,” he tells Marco. He pulls away slowly, forcing himself to climb off Marco’s lap, blushing faintly. Marco’s hands tighten on him like he doesn’t want to let go, but he does, slowly. Ace doesn’t really want him too, but he can’t have this conversation literally sitting in Marco’s lap. “He told me he didn’t do anything at all. I… It seems… I don’t know how but…”

 

Ace stutters to a stop, unable to continue, staring mutely at Marco. 

 

At his soulmate. Prospective soulmate? Definitely his soulmate. Trafalgar is right, there is no other explanation, truthfully, but it still seems so very impossible. 

 

One of Marco’s brows has lifted, slowly, and he stares at Ace slightly sardonically, clearly waiting for an answer.

 

Ace curses.

 

“I’m just gonna show you,” he says, pulling out the knife he’d wheedled off one of the Heart crew. “Don’t freak out, okay?”

 

Marco’s other brow jumps up to join the first.

 

“Ace, what -– Ace stop !”

 

Ace doesn’t let him stop him though, just slides the blade of the knife across the back of his hand. Blood wells for a bare instant before blue fire licks across the wound, leaving his hand unblemished, barely a few beads of blood lingering to show there was a wound at all.

 

He keeps his eyes on his hand, unable to look at Marco, unable to bring himself to watch his face as realization overtakes him. It’s gotta be clear, right? He doesn’t have to spell it out. Like Trafalgar said, there is no other explanation for Ace having Marco’s powers now, even if the fact that he hasn’t had them all these years doesn’t make any sense. 

 

Not looking means it’s a complete surprise when Marco rips the knife out of his hand. Ace’s head jerks up in time to see the knife go flying, embed itself hilt-deep in a nearby tree, bark shattering at the impact, a crack splitting up the length of the tree as the whole thing shakes. Ace stares. He’s seen Marco land a dart dead center in a suspended paper target without so much as tearing through: a much harder game of control than the overpowered displays of rookie pirates with something to prove. With all their effortless power, the Commanders make a game of it; of the delicacy of control, precision without power, who could get the drunkest without destroying their target. Marco is the best at it: Ace has never once seen Marco anything other than rigidly, exquisitely controlled. 

 

When Marco’s hands come up to cradle Ace’s own, a thumb smoothing over the line where a cut had been, they are trembling. 

 

The remaining blood smears under Marco’s thumb. Ace looks up at him, speechless.

 

“Don’t do that,” Marco says, and his voice is hoarse, raw. His eyes are like whirlpools, and Ace is trapped. “Nothing you could need to tell me means you should hurt yourself, Ace.”

 

“Sorry,” Ace whispers, shaken, eyes sliding away. “Sorry, I just didn’t know how to say it. I was… I did die, Marco. Trafalgar says I stopped breathing on his command deck, bled the rest of the way out. And then Phoenix Fire brought me back to life. He doesn’t know why it didn’t manifest when we first met, and he gets pissy when I try to brainstorm with him. He’s really prickly. It’s actually kinda hilarious. But, well, there doesn’t really seem to be any other explanation. There is no way I should have Phoenix Fire other than if… if I were…”

 

“You’re my soulmate,” Marco says, quiet and full of reverent surety, one of his hands coming up to cup Ace’s jaw. “Ace, look at me, please.” 

 

And how can Ace deny that? He gives into the gentle pressure of Marco’s hand, tips his head up, and meets wondering blue eyes. 

 

“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Marco asks quietly. “That we’re soulmates. That the Phoenix saved your life?”

 

“I know you said you didn’t regret not having a soulmate,” Ace blurts, words tumbling out of him in a rush. “And I swear I didn’t have any idea. It doesn’t make sense, we should have shown the ability immediately, right? Luffy and Trafalgar are both showing each other’s powers and they’ve barely met. It’s been years, but I’ve never shown any sign of your power before this, and I don’t think you’ve shown any of mine? I don’t know how this happened.”

 

Marco closes his eyes, looking pained, and Ace’s heart sinks straight down into his boots. He swallows ice, waiting for Marco’s disappointment. He said he never would have traded his family for a soulmate and now his soulmate has cost him everything.  

 

Ace tries to pull his hand away, and Marco’s grip closes like an immovable vice around it, black flickering at the edges of his skin vision as he refuses to let go, let Ace go intangible to pull away.

 

“Ace,” Marco says quietly, eyes sliding open to pin Ace with fiery blue. “Please stop sounding like you’re apologizing for something that saved your life.” 

 

Ace cringes. Marco has always seen him far too clearly. 

 

“I’m not!” He protests, reaching out for Marco in turn with his free hand, grabbing onto his arm, squeezing gently, turning his trapped hand in Marco’s grip until the hold is mutual. “I’m not. I swear I’m not. Not really. Or at least that’s not what I meant. I just — I’m confused, I guess. I never expected to find my soulmate at all, let alone like this. And neither of us asked for this. I don’t know how this is possible, but neither Trafalgar or I could think of a different explanation, so…” 

 

Marco looks steadily at him.

 

“Do you want a different explanation?” He asks calmly. Ace blinks at him. Marco’s lips quirk. “Ace, we’re pirates. This doesn’t have to mean anything we don’t want it to. You’re alive. That’s more than I could ever have hoped for. If you don’t want to delve into how, I actually don’t give a fuck. You’re alive. ” 

 

Ace’s throat closes again, and he’s desperately afraid he’s going to start crying again. Thank the seas Trafalgar drew Luffy away; Ace is definitely the crybaby today, not the cool older brother. But that’s okay, because Marco has never once made him feel weak, not even in those earliest days when Ace was a wild, snapping thing, more pride and rage then sense. Even then he’d treated Ace like an equal, even if one who maybe needed a swift smack on the side of the head to gather some sense. He had been the one who confronted Ace directly, who told him to shape up, or to ship out: leave if he refuses to accept what they are offering and come back when he is strong enough to take it, or accept what they are trying to offer with an open hand and grow stronger with them rather than against them. Even then there had been faith, a belief that Ace could do it — if he pulled his head out of his ass long enough to accept the world as it was, and to fight for how he wanted it to be. 

 

“I thought I was cursed,” Ace croaks out. Marco frowns, leaning in, shifting his grip to hold onto Ace tighter, forearm to forearm, bracing. “The East doesn’t know much about Devil Fruits. I was a child, and I had no Compass at all and no one knew what it meant. For as long as I could remember I was wrong. Everyone knew there was something wrong with me, even before I knew what it was. Even before I knew who my—” Ace’s throat closes against the words, and he swallows. Marco knows. He has to know. He knows and he came for Ace anyway, so he has to care anyway, right? He forces the next words out, all of it coming out in a tangled jumble as he tries to explain. It’s not that he doesn’t want Marco to be his soulmate, it’s just so much . After everything, after his whole life. He needs Marco to understand, but it’s just — a lot . “Even before Gramps told me about my— about Roger, and about how I — how I killed my mother. I thought, I thought I didn’t have a Compass because I didn’t have a soul. That the Sea had known from the beginning that I didn’t — That there was something wrong with me, that I didn’t deserve to live. I… Marco?”

 

Ace stumbles to a stop, the desperate, wrenching explanation grinding to a halt because Marco is… Marco’s hands cupped around his elbows are still firm but gentle, but the look in his eyes. Marco breathes, and Ace feels like he can’t because there are sparks lighting the air around them, flickering off Marco’s hair, limning him like the ghosts of his feathers, except rather than cool blue they’re burning, fiery red. Marco inhales, exhales. The sparks glow and dim with his breath. The look in his eyes is rage, untamable, unquenchable. He leans in and presses his forehead to Ace’s, gentle, careful.

 

“When I kill Garp,” Marco says, and it’s a vow, violent and ruthless and certain. “I’m going to make it hurt.” 

 

Ace jerks back, startled.

 

“What?” He asks, bewildered. “Why would —? You can’t,” he says firmly, collecting himself, even if he can’t quite take his eyes off the red dancing around Marco. That’s his fire. That’s his fire! He knew, he saw Marco’s fire on his own skin, but somehow seeing his fire on Marco hits entirely different, hits somewhere deep and bleeding but the collision is like a balm rather than a blow. “Gramps did what he had to, same as I did. We both made our choices, and understood the consequences. You can’t go after him for that.”

 

The look Marco levels at him says something approximately along the lines of ‘yes, I can, and not even the entirety of the Navy can stop me,’ and that’s not fair at all because this isn’t Gramps’ fault. Thankfully, Ace has the perfect distraction ready. At least he thinks he does, because he’s rapidly losing the ability to think of anything else at all.

 

“Marco,” he says, awed, freeing a hand to run it through Marco’s hair, gathering a palmful of sparks as he does. “Look. That’s my fire. You’ve got my fire too.”

 

Marco blinks at him, and the vicious fury drains out of him slowly, fond exasperation replacing it drip by drip as he studies Ace’s awe, a smile crinkling the edges of his eyes.

 

“Of course I do,” he says, and his voice is warm again, amused and indulgent. “If we’re not ignoring the obvious then that’s part and parcel of the deal, Ace.” 

 

Ace swats him, absently, even as his ears heat with a flush. 

 

“Trafalgar’s caught up on the idea that it shouldn’t work like this if both of us have Devil Fruits,” he says, trying to distract himself from his reaction to that. “He’s in a bit of a tizzy about it.”

 

Marco shrugs. “Rookies are always stressed,” he says, amused, scooping the sparks out of Ace’s hand and focusing on them. They grow a little, under his regard, and then sink harmlessly into his skin. “It’s logical, isn’t it? If one Devil Fruit user in a soulmate pair shares their power then it makes sense that if there were two they’d share both powers.”

 

Marco shifts his hand, frowns a little, and the tips of his fingers light, first with blue and then, stutteringly, shift to red. A grin flickers across his face. “Well, isn’t that something?” 

 

Ace nods, mutely, eyes wide. It’s something alright, something tight and wondering in his chest. 

 

Marco is his soulmate.  

 

“Any idea why we didn’t know?” Ace manages to ask, slightly breathless in the face of this proof .

 

“I don’t know,” Marco says, but he’s smiling as he plays with the fire on his fingertips. “It doesn’t match the way the stories go. I used to wander any island we landed on, you know? Hoping someone would, I don’t know, light into blue fire upon meeting me, and we would just know, instantly. It never happened . I’d quite given up hope at this point. But Ace,” he meets Ace’s eyes steadily, and Ace forces himself not to look away. “I’m glad it’s you. I’m glad you’re my soulmate . And not just because it saved your life. Because it’s you. ”

 

Ace’s cheeks flush hotly, and he can feel the tips of his ears catch on fire. 

 

“Marco,” Ace protests, freeing one hand to futility attempt to pat out the flames. “You can’t just say things like that!” 

 

Marco laughs at him, and pokes the fire, coaxing it to greater life as Ace protests and tries to squirm out of reach. It turns into a half-hearted wrestling match, and Marco lets Ace pin him, staring up at him with such open wonder that Ace has to use all his strength to resist the urge to plant his palm right on Marco’s face so he can’t see that expression anymore.

 

“Fuck, Ace,” Marco says, staring up at him. “You’re alive. Everyone is going to be so happy .”

 

Just like that, Ace feels like a bucket of icy seawater was dumped over him, every muscle stilling. Everyone. Because they thought he was dead. Because they saw that blow and then he vanished. Because they fought a war for him, and lost so much for him, and Pops is dead.  

 

“Will they?” Ace asks, and his voice cracks. “Marco, I got Pops killed. ” 

 

Marco shakes his head, though, fierce and sure, and wraps his arms around Ace’s shoulders, pulling him in against him. 

 

“No,” he says, bedrock and certain. “No, Ace. Pops chose to fight. He knew what it might mean, and he decided it was worth it. The same can be said for every single one of our siblings and allies who were on that field. They chose to be there. You don’t get to take that choice away from them.”

 

“I still started it!” Ace cries, struggling against Marco’s hold. “They wanted me and I let myself get caught! I always knew they’d want to kill me more than anyone else, and I practically handed myself over on a silver platter! I am the son of a monster! I wasn’t worth their lives! You should have just left me to die! It was my fault! I was so stupid! I was reckless and arrogant and —”

 

“Then do better!” Marco snaps, harsh, demanding, shaking him sharply even as he refuses to let Ace pull away from him further than it takes to look him in the eyes again, fierce and strong, and no less powerful for the way he lets himself be vulnerable, laid out beneath Ace’s kneeling form. “Don’t you dare pull away from me, Ace. From us. If you want to blame yourself for this I can’t take that choice away from you either, but you listen to me! None of us would have made a different choice. You’re family, Ace, and none of us would have left you there, no matter who you are. Do you think it really makes that much of a difference, that you’re Roger’s son? I don’t give a fuck about that! It doesn’t matter! You think the Marines wouldn’t have done the same thing, no matter who they caught? You were convenient bait, Ace, and your history made a good excuse, but it’s not the part of you that mattered! You said it yourself, Ace. Whitebeard is your Father. He’s the only father that matters.”

 

Ace stares at him, his entire world view shaking on its foundations. Pops had said the same thing though, hadn’t he? He had called Ace a child of the sea, like all of the rest of his children, and told him his past didn’t matter. 

 

Marco’s voice softens. “Would you have made a different choice than we did, if they’d caught me ? Would you have left me there, to be executed, without bringing every force to bear to save me? What if it was Haruta? Jozu? Any of us?”

 

Ace shakes his head, mutely. Of course he wouldn’t have. If the Marines had caught one of his siblings, strung them up to execute, he’d have been right there in the middle of things, even knowing it had to be a trap, a taunt. He knew the point Marco was trying to make. That didn’t make it any easier to swallow. 

 

“Then if there is any fault here it lies with the Marines,” Marco says firmly. “Who made the choice to start this war. They would have done the same thing no matter who they caught, and so would we. I will never regret fighting for my family, Ace. I will never regret fighting for you. Not ever.”

 

Marco’s expression softens, then, and his restraining hands do as well.

 

“Come home with me, Ace,” he says softly. “Pops is gone, and yeah, it hurts, and it’s going to be hard. So hard. But we’re still a family, and we need you. I need you. 

 

Ace swallows, harsh, and curls forward. Marco lets him, helping guide him until his forehead presses against Marco’s shoulder. Marco wraps one arm around his back and the fingers of the other comb through his hair.

 

“Come home with me,” Marco says again, voice soft. “Help me lead our family through this. We’ll make Pops proud, and keep his legacy strong. Together.” 

 

Ace has cried too much today. He doesn’t think he has any more tears in him. So he just breathes deep, pressed against Marco, feeling safe for the first time since they found Thatch dead, and nods his agreement. 

 

~~~~

 

They get a decent stretch of silence after that, enough time for Ace to breathe through the emotions, to let them settle alongside the determination that wells within him. He’s laying alongside Marco now, back on the soft, sandy ground, staring up at the cloudless sky through the dappling of the trees, just… breathing. 

 

Marco is right. Ace is alive, and their family is hurting. He’s going home. They need every pair of hands at the ready, and Ace will fight for them just as fiercely as they fought for him. Do better, Marco had demanded, and Ace will. He can rise to that challenge, just like he’s risen to every challenge Marco has ever issued him. 

 

He’s not actually sure where they are. He hadn’t been paying attention, if Trafalgar had even bothered to tell him; Ace too caught up in Luffy. But Luffy is okay, now. He’s still covered in bandages, and clearly hurting even if he’s never been introduced to the idea of calm convalescence and is already running around. 

 

…Not that Ace really gets to say anything about that either, at least according to both Deuce and Marco. Fuck. It’s only been a couple of months, but Ace misses his first mate like a limb. Deuce is going to beat his ass bloody for this entire stunt, and Ace is going to let him. 

 

Worse, Deuce is probably going to just hug him and forgive him, and then Ace is going to grovel for the rest of their lives anyway. Seas, Ace wants, so badly and with a suddenness that threatens to swallow him whole, nothing more than to be back with his crew, with his family. Wants to beg their forgiveness, and then earn it, by doing whatever it takes to see them through this storm. 

 

Like he can feel Ace’s sudden resolve, Marco reaches over to tangle their fingers together, squeezing softly. 

 

“Ready to go find the others?” He asks. Ace groans, but nods.

 

“Yeah, we probably should. Who knows what kind of trouble Luffy’s found already?” 

 

“Ace!” Luffy howls in the very next instant, like the words were a prophecy. Ace bolts upright, heart pounding and adrenaline crashing through his system. Luffy isn’t hurting or afraid. Oh no, it’s worse than that: that particular tone of ecstatic glee is still hardwired into Ace’s head alongside brilliant ideas like ‘fishing for crocodiles by jumping into the pond’ and ‘taunting the Lord of the Coast.’ “Ace, Ace, I can move things with my mind! Tarao’s powers are so cool! Watch this!” 

 

A wash of blue. A disconcerting snap of power. Ace is suddenly falling from a tree branch, too close to the ground to catch himself. He collides with the ground in an undignified splash of fire and rolls over with a groan. 

 

Luffy is collapsed on the ground, clutching his stomach, pointing at Ace and howling with laughter. Ace draws himself up with a snarl and launches himself at his brother, who, gratifyingly, yelps, dodges, and bolts away, with Ace in hot pursuit, cursing and yelling. 

 

Ace is going home. 

 

But first he’s going to grind his obnoxious little brother’s face into the dirt.  

 

~~~~

 

“If you undo all my hard work I’m going to skin you,” Trafalgar grumbles as he stomps up to where Ace has Luffy pinned to the ground, flailing and complaining. 

 

“It won’t stick,” Ace says cheerfully, voice raised above Luffy’s wailing. 

 

“You say that like it’s not part of the appeal,” Trafalgar snaps back, fingers clenching around his sword hilt like he’s seriously contemplating it. “I could use an anatomical dummy to show my crew what happens to idiots. The fact you’ll apparently grow back anything I remove is a feature not a flaw.”

 

Ace turns his head to gape at Trafalgar for a long moment, then switches from grinding Luffy’s face into the dirt to dragging him up against him, hanging on tight, protective.

 

“Why is your soulmate so creepy? ” He complains to Luffy, pinching his cheeks between his fingers and stretching . “It’s just not right. Look at you.” 

 

Luffy cackles, finally squirming out of Ace’s arms now that he’s sacrificed his leverage, his cheeks snapping back into place. Trafalgar’s dismayed expression at Luffy’s everything is especially hilarious on the face of a man who both just casually threatened to vivisect Ace and is now perfectly capable of the same feat and clearly horrified at the indignity of it. Good thing Luffy’s never had any dignity to start with. 

 

Oblivious, as usual, Luffy bounces straight up to Trafalgar and loops his arms around him — twice. 

 

“Torao is great!” Luffy declares happily. 

 

Trafalgar goes red and shoves at Luffy until he realizes that isn’t going to work, and then Ace gets another demonstration of Trafalgar’s power when he curses, and switches Luffy with a rock on the other side of the small clearing they’d first let Luffy wake up in, where Ace had chased him down to.

 

“Stop touching me,” Trafalgar snaps. “Or I’ll put your head back on backwards!”

 

Ace cackles because —

 

“You can do that?” Luffy demands, bouncing straight back up to Trafalgar, though in his defense he doesn’t actually grab him again. “That’s so cool! Can I do that?” 

 

Trafalgar looks gratifyingly horrified all of a sudden. 

 

“Absolutely not,” he says, suddenly and entirely serious. He reaches out for the first time Ace can think of, gripping Luffy’s shoulders firmly. “Do not try it. Switching things is probably fine, but the Ope Ope relies on the user’s knowledge . I am a doctor. I know how the body works. You’ll kill someone without even meaning to if you mess with that.” 

 

Ah, okay, yeah. That’s not something Ace’s idiot little brother should be messing with. 

 

“The Ope Ope?” Marco’s voice is casual as he wings into the clearing, wings shifting back to arms as he comes to a landing. Ace’s heart stumbles. His wings are a breathtaking blend of blue and gold and red. “I remember a rumor about that. So you ended up with it, hm? That explains your moniker.” 

 

Trafalgar eyes Marco warily.

 

“Marco the Phoenix,” he greets, but it’s not exactly a pleasantry, as he cuts straight to the question that has very obviously been bothering him since Marco arrived. “How did you find us?” 

 

Ace snorts lightly. So much fun at parties. Still, he’s grateful that Trafalgar gave them the space they needed before he asked what he clearly thought was a pressing question. 

 

Marco wordlessly pulls a small glass tube out of a pocket, the small scrap of paper in it shivering its way towards Ace. Ace’s chest tightens, recognizing the tube from Pop’s set of vivre cards. They must not have been on the Moby when she went down. Of course, of course that’s how Marco found him, how he knew he was alive to find. 

 

“Vivre card,” Trafalgar’s voice is short and full of tension. “Of course. Wonderful. Anyone else you want to tell me about who can follow a scrap of paper straight to us?”

 

Marco turns to face him from where he’s landed between Ace and the other Captain. It’s protective, and it makes warm embers flare hot in Ace’s chest, even though he knows it’s not necessary. Trafalgar didn’t save them just to betray them now, even if he’d really only been there for Luffy. 

 

“Bird?!” Luffy exclaims, stars in his eyes, before Marco can answer Trafalgar. “Ace, your friend can turn into a bird? Like that guy of Vivi’s, in Alabasta?! That’s so COOL! Wait, isn’t he your Mystery Person? Ace, can you turn into a bird now too?!”

 

Ace laughs helplessly as Luffy bounces right back over to him again, poking at his arms like they’re going to turn into wings any second. Luffy’s wonder is an infectious thing. It helps that Trafalgar is looking at Luffy again with that look of utterly bewildered disgust, presumably for the fact that someone this close to the New World can’t recognize Marco the Phoenix. Poor guy. He’ll have to get used to Luffy’s single minded obliviousness eventually. 

 

….not that Ace had known who Marco was, either. Look, that’s what Deuce was for, okay?

 

“Yeah. Luffy, this is Marco, First Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates. He’s got the Phoenix fruit. Marco, this is my little brother, Monkey D. Luffy. And this is Trafalgar Law, captain of the Heart Pirates, who pulled us out of Marineford.” 

 

Marco’s regard falls heavily on the two Rookies, the mood in the clearing shifting as official introductions are made. Luffy looks right back, no hesitation, still hanging off Ace’s shoulder, his search for Mysteriously Appearing Feathers coming to a brief halt. Ace’s little brother regards one of the strongest men in the New World with guileless eyes — and promptly sticks a finger in his ear, scrubbing vigorously, unconcerned, before resuming his search for feathers. Ace scruffs him when the poking starts to tickle. Luffy whines and goes limp and big-eyed in his grip. Ace shakes him, watching all of him wiggle, fondness threatening to spill right out of his pores. His crazy, stupid, wonderful little brother. 

 

Trafalgar is obviously feeling the weight of Marco’s gaze a little more, but just as obviously refusing to show it, ticking up an impatient brow as his question goes unanswered. Ace relents, after another shake of Luffy that makes Trafalgar’s eye twitch. Teasing Trafalgar is so much fun.  

 

“My first mate, Deuce, has a piece in his things, but he’s —” Sudden worry stabs him. Ace has avoided, thus far, asking for details on the fallen, but surely Marco would have told him if — “He’s probably still with the Whitebeards?” Ace directs that last question towards Marco, worry in his voice, dropping Luffy back to his own feet. 

 

“I talked to him,” Marco confirms instantly, reassuring. “He’s fine. He was helping with medical on the Mini Moby. I think he planned to stay with the Mini until we rendezvoused, rather than head back into the New World with the Moby 2 or 3. I didn’t see any of the other Spades, but Deuce didn’t mention anything about them.”

 

Ace grimaces and turns his head away. He is proud, of course, that no matter how much Deuce had hated being a doctor that he jumped in where needed, but it’s a vicious reminder that his family was hurt, that many are dead, and it was all his fault, no matter Marco’s words about choices. He’ll find out if any of his crew paid for that choice with their lives when he and Marco get home. 

 

A hand lands on his shoulder, squeezes, and Ace leans into Marco’s side in wordless thanks and assurance both. Marco slides that hand along his back, his other shoulder, pulls him in tight against his side, with clear intention not to let go anytime soon. 

 

Ace has absolutely no problems with that.

 

“He may have lost it with the Moby, though. I think he stopped carrying it all the time about the same time I made Commander,” Ace continues roughly. “Either way he won’t be a problem. The only other people with a piece are Luffy and Yamato, but since Yamato can’t get off Wano he’s not exactly going to show up either.” 

 

Trafalgar sighs, though, exasperated rather than relieved like Ace expected. “And I assume the entirety of the Whitebeards know about Portgas-ya surviving, then?” 

 

That question is aimed at Marco, and Ace can’t help the flicker of amusement at Marco’s slow blink and the twitch of his lips. It isn’t every day that Paradise babies are that blunt with Marco the Phoenix. 

 

“Gossip keeps the sails filled,” Marco says placidly, a tacit agreement. 

 

Trafalgar rubs his face with the hand not still holding his sword. “Too many to pretend Portgas-ya is dead, then.”

 

Surprise jolts through Ace, and Marco’s brows twitch up. 

 

“He’s not dead.” Luffy says, stubborn and straightforward, at the same time that Ace asks, bewildered. “Why would they pretend I’m dead?”

 

Trafalgar rolls his eyes like they’re all idiots, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring. 

 

“It’s not like it’s going to be reasonable to hide that you and Phoenix-ya are soulmates if you just show up completely healed,” he says. “And I for one am not interested in going the same way as Ohara.” 

 

Ace blinks at him. Luffy stiffens, whipping his head around and the focus on his face almost distracts Ace from Trafalgar. How the hell does Luffy know about Ohara? Oh, right, he’s somehow managed to get Nico Robin on his crew. Ace needs to get that story out of him, but first… 

 

“What are you talking about?” He asks Tragalgar, bewildered. He gets an exasperated scoff for his trouble. 

 

“You haven’t been listening to a single thing I’ve said, have you? There is not a single record or story of this being possible, that two Devil Fruit users can be soulmates, and share their power equally between them. Yet here we all are. It’s happened twice now, so it’s obviously possible. So where are the records, the legends? The only things that there is an absolute void of information about are things the World Government has deliberately wiped out of existence. ”

Chapter 10

 

Marco rolls his eyes. Honestly. Rookies are so excitable. Trafalgar has been in Paradise for, what, a little more than a year? And he thinks he knows all about what’s possible or not on these seas?

 

“I think that’s a bit alarmist, Trafalgar,” Marco says, dry and a little exasperated. The absolutely pissy look he gets in response makes him stifle a grin. Okay, he sees where Ace is coming from. Trafalgar is fun to rile. He huffs a laugh. “You’re gonna have to loosen up before you get to the New World, kid,” he says, shaking his head. “And redefine both your definition of ‘possible’ and your idea of how much you think the World Government knows. They make a big production of being all knowing, but they’re not. We discover new things all the time. I’ve been on the Grand Line my whole life and it still keeps surprising me. Despite four of us being right here, devil fruits are rare. It’s strange enough for one Fruit user to find their soulmate. Two is definitely pushing the bounds of chance, but I doubt it’s quite as big of a deal as you’re making it.”

 

Trafalgar doesn’t look mollified in the least. Rookies. 

 

“Time on the seas obviously hasn’t made you think,” Trafalgar snaps, vicious. 

 

Marco frowns, true irritation snapping through him for the first time. Trafalgar sees it, clearly, and he braces like he thinks Marco might strike out, but he doesn’t back down, tense and twitchy and clearly… that’s fear. Something about this has truly frightened the Captain who apparently snuck into a war to steal the two main prizes without a moment’s hesitation. 

 

“You don’t think the fact there is no evidence of this happening before isn’t at all suspicious? You don’t think it’s the kind of advantage they’d stomp out of their enemies with all the ruthlessness they showed in places like Ohara? You don’t think, if it was something they were willing to admit was possible, that it’s the kind of advantage they’d grasp with both hands in the Marines? If they knew they could get their soldiers two powers at once for the low price of finding a pair of suitably impressionable soulmates? Can you picture someone like Akainu with Magma and Ice? It’s too obvious of a way to create an even more powerful solder so why haven’t they done it? ”

 

Marco pauses, caught off guard by the question. Okay, that’s… that’s actually an interesting point he hadn’t considered. He supposes he isn’t used to thinking of soulmates like that; like a resource to be used and allocated. It would be very like the Marines to do so, though; Trafalgar is right. In Marco’s experience there is a lot more chance involved than deliberate planning, when someone finds either Soulmate or Devil Fruit, but he knows the Marines are more strategic with them than that: It’s not a chance, for example, that the three Admirals are all very powerful Logias. If the World Government could get their enforcers two powerful Devil Fruit each, he doesn’t see any reason why they wouldn’t. 

 

What Law is proposing is logical, even if it’s very cold. The theory also involves finding a pair of soulmates in the ranks with suitable ambition and temperament that the World Government would be willing to give them that much power, and presupposes the willingness on the part of a soulmate pair to both become anchors. Even setting aside the stigma, prejudice, and fear people hold of Devil Fruits, especially because of their effect on the Compass, people who find their soulmates first, know who the Sea had Gifted them, still don’t often seek out a Fruit at that point. Lots of people just don’t want a Devil Fruit. The powers are a bonus, but they come with undeniable drawbacks. There are many paths to strength. Just take Roger, though Marco’s never going to make that comparison where Ace can hear it. Roger stood up to monsters with Devil Fruits and took the seas by storm with nothing but Haki, pure strength, and force of will. So while Marco still thought Trafalgar was overestimating the situation, the amount of manipulation of resources and personnel it would take was well within the capabilities of the Government. So why didn’t they know about it? Trafalgar is right about that part at least. But the thought process behind the logic…

 

“Why are you scared?” It’s Luffy that asks the question Marco is thinking. The young captain steps forward past Marco, and there is nothing of the playful boy wrestling with his older brother in him right now. “You’re afraid of something. Something like Ohara. What happened to you?” 

 

Trafalgar looks at Luffy and for a split second there is something raw in his expression, a second of vulnerability so painful that Marco nearly looks away from it. 

 

“That’s none of your business,” the doctor snaps, though, expression closing like a slamming door, looking back at Marco like he’s planning to ignore his soulmate entirely. “The point is that we need to try to keep this a secret, for all of our sakes. Portgas-ya is the weak link in that secret, so if it’s possible to mislead the Marines about his survival we should do so for as long as possible.”

 

“It is my business,” Luffy insists before Marco or Ace can respond to that, taking another step closer. Marco can’t see his expression, but when Trafalgar looks back at him, clearly planning on snapping again, he pauses, looking caught. “You’re my soulmate. You’re nakama. You’re my nakama and someone hurt you. Tell me who it is.” 

 

It’s a demand, and there is anger in Ace’s little brother, a protective, furious snap that crackles like static in the air. Marco looks at the slim shoulders of the boy standing before him and wishes so fiercely that his Pops could have lived to see the next generation take the seas by storm. It is going to be glorious. 

 

“Why should I?” Trafalgar snaps, hand clenching around the hilt of the sword he carries around like it’s as much a comfort item as it is a weapon. “It’s none of your concern! What does it matter who?” 

 

“It matters because they hurt you!” Their future King says, clear as crystal, and as simple as breathing.

 

Trafalgar snarls, though, drawing himself up, furious and insulted.

 

“You can’t fight the whole world,” he hisses. “The greed and lies of the world wiped my home off the map, turned every hand against us, killed every single person from my island except for me. Killed my sister. ” 

 

Marco draws in a slow breath. Ace is barely breathing beside him. Not Ohara, they would have heard about another survivor, given the manhunt for Nico Robin. Some other obscenity, one Marco doesn’t know well enough to pinpoint.

 

“Watch me,” Luffy declares, unmoved. “I destroyed Ennis Lobby for Robin. Burned the flag of the World Government because they hurt my nakama! They made Robin think she shouldn’t live! They were wrong and I proved it to her! Tell me who hurt you! I’m not afraid of them!” 

 

“You should be!” Trafalgar screams it, flinging a hand out towards Marco and Ace. “They killed your brother , Strawhat! He was dead! There is no denying that, and no forgetting it! The fact that he’s alive is a miracle, and you can never forget that! They killed him and you weren’t strong enough to save him! We’re not strong enough yet, neither of us are!” 

 

There is a long silence after that, thin and crackling. Trafalgar is breathing heavily, and Ace is gripping Marco’s hand so hard it hurts. 

 

“You’re right,” Luffy says quietly. His head is dipped, his eyes in the shadows under his hat, but his shoulders are still straight and strong. “We’re not strong enough yet. I wasn’t strong enough to protect my crew on Sabaody, and I wasn’t strong enough to protect Ace.”

 

Ace shifts, like he’s going to protest, and Marco tightens his grip on his hand, urging silence. This is important. This is a lesson Ace hadn’t learned before charging into the New World. He’d had the good fortune to capture Pop’s attention, but not everyone is that lucky. This is a lesson Marco had been afraid that he would have to try to impart on Ace’s brother before they parted, or else see him be crushed by the New World in short order. It would come much better from a peer he already respected than it would from Marco. It spoke well of Trafalgar, and his chances in the future, that he had recognized it. 

 

“But Torao,” Luffy says, and he tips his head up again, clearly meeting Trafalgar’s eyes again, undaunted. “We’re going to get stronger. Strong enough no one can take away anyone we love ever again. It wasn’t just the world, was it? Someone killed someone you loved, like I love Ace. Didn’t they? While you watched and couldn’t do anything to save them.” 

 

Trafalgar flinches like he’s taken a body blow, dragging in a breath that shakes. He shakes his head.

 

“When he falls, it will be because of me,” Trafalgar says. Not denying Luffy is as good as a confession that he’s exactly correct. The world really is a cruel place. Marco knows that, has known it his whole life, but sometimes it hits him harder than others. “He took the only person I still cared about away from me, shot him right in front of me, because he’d defied him to save my life when I didn’t even want to live. I’ll destroy everything he’s built, everything he’s worked for, and he’ll know that it’s because of me."

 

Luffy nods, decisive and firm. “Good,” he says, and Trafalgar obviously wasn’t expecting that. “When you’re ready, I’ll help.”

 

It’s a blanket offer of support, unconditional. Dangerous.

 

Trafalgar scoffs. 

 

“You still don’t know anything about me, Strawhat,” he says. “You’re too trusting. Just because we’re soulmates doesn’t mean anything.” 

 

Luffy shrugs, though it doesn’t really look like agreement. 

 

“You didn’t have to save my life,” he says. “But you did. You’re nakama. I’ll help you when you need it.”

 

Trafalgar growls, looking ready to argue, but Marco can sense a pointless fight when he sees it. 

 

“You make some interesting points,” he interjects, before this can devolve further. “About our situation. I hadn’t thought of it like that. We likely can’t pretend Ace is dead, not for long at least. The crew knows, and so does the Red Force —”

 

“Shanks?” Luffy gasps, spinning to look at Marco. “Shanks was there?”

 

“Marco will tell you about it later, Luffy,” Ace interjects while Marco blinks at Luffy for a moment, surprised at the strength of the reaction. But then… his eyes shift to the Straw Hat, and, oh, ohhhhh , Shanks had said he’d bet his arm on the future, hadn’t he, when he’d come back from the East? “This is important first.” 

 

Luffy pouts, overblown and adorable, and none of the intensity of just a minute before.

 

“Right,” Marco continues, with a short laugh. Ace’s brother is hilarious. “Between our crew and the Red Force, that’s a lot of people. We don’t exactly talk to the Marines, but that’s a big secret to keep hidden. Also there is the fact that, frankly, if we have a hope of holding onto any of our territory we’re going to need all of our powerhouses. Ace was one of those even before he gained my powers as well. We’re not going to be able to hold him in reserve for long, not without risking more lives than the secrecy is worth.”

 

Trafalgar looks frustrated, like he’s about to protest, so Marco holds up the hand that isn’t wrapped around Ace, asking for patience. 

 

“I agree with you, in part. It’s strange that the Marines aren’t taking advantage of this if it’s possible. Since it’s happening to us, we know it is possible, but we don’t know why, or how. I’m not going to risk my entire crew and all of our territories by not using every resource at my disposal, on the chance that keeping this secret is worth it. Especially since I’m not entirely convinced it’s as dire as you seem to think. For all we know there are drawbacks that we haven’t encountered yet that the Marines consider serious enough not to want to deal with, or, again, I have to stress that both Devil Fruits and completed soulmate pairs are rare. I agree it seems unlikely, but we can’t rule out chance. Fate, even.” 

 

Trafalgar scoffs and Marco sighs. 

 

“No one knows how the soulmate phenomenon works in the first place,” Marco reminds him. “But if you want to scoff at the idea of fate, fine: if there is backlash, then once we’re back in the New World we will be the ones in the best position to weather it. We’re already going to be a target. There isn’t a lot they're going to be able to threaten us with that’s worse than what we will already be facing from both the Marines and other pirates. We are not going to be able to afford to pretend Ace isn’t with us, or to hold him back when we’ll need every strength we have. We can try not to flaunt it immediately, but it’s going to come out.” Marco tosses Ace a grin. “If nothing else, we’re going to have to teach Ace here how to fly.”

 

Ace’s eyes widen, and he twists to gape up at Marco for a startled second. Then he lights up , going absolutely incandescent with joy.

 

“You mean it,” he says, breathlessly, like it really hadn’t occurred to him, despite Luffy’s question earlier about Marco’s Phoenix form transferring. “You think I’ll be able to fly?”

 

Marco shrugs but he’s grinning helplessly, heart bright at Ace’s joy. “I don’t see why not. The Devil Fruit transfer is supposed to be a full sharing of power, right? You’ve shown the fire already, and I’m a Zoan. Sure it’s a Mythical, and no one really knows everything about those, but theoretically the fire should be secondary to the Phoenix form.”

 

Ace looks ready to run off and try it right now and Marco reels him back into his side with a laugh. “Slow down, firefly,” he says, scuffing Ace’s hair, ignoring his protests at the move. They need to find his hat; he looks incomplete like this, even if the free access to soft dark waves is nice. “We’ve got time to experiment with that later. The point is that I’m hearing you, Trafalgar, and I think you’re completely right on one point, at least: you and Luffy aren’t strong enough yet to withstand the backlash, if there is any. You two should keep your new powers a secret for as long as you can manage. We’re already going to have a target painted on us, let us feel out the response.”

 

“That won’t be hard,” Trafalgar says flatly. “I’m never going to tell anyone about having this idiot’s ridiculous power if I have any choice in the matter.” 

“What?!” Luffy yelps. He turns on him, betrayed, puffing up in indignation. “Rubber is an awesome power! It’s the best!”

 

Trafalgar scoffs, stepping into Luffy’s space to snag a piece of his messy hair where it emerges from his hat, and pulling. Even that stretches, and snaps back when he lets go. “It’s ridiculous, nonsensical, and humiliating, Strawhat. What possessed you to find a Fruit that turned you into rubber and then decide to eat it?!”

 

Luffy grins, looking entirely unconcerned with the rival captain in his space, head tilted up to look at him. Marco thinks that if Trafalgar is trying to intimidate his soulmate he should probably stop looking so fascinated every time he forgets to be grumpy and dismissive.

 

“I didn’t know it was a Devil Fruit,” is Luffy’s cheerful response. “I just knew Shanks said it was important! It tasted awful .”

 

Trafalgar gapes at him.

 

“You stole a Devil Fruit from an Emperor?” He demands. “Are you stupid? No, don’t answer that, I know the answer already.”

 

“He wasn’t an Emperor yet,” Luffy says, pouting. “He was just Shanks. He’s the best, he saved my life from a Sea King when I was little! He’s the reason I became a pirate!” 

 

Trafalgar looks bewildered.

 

“I thought you were from the East Blue?” He says.

 

Luffy blinks at him. 

 

“Yeah?” He says, confused.

 

Trafalgar looks at Ace, like he’s seeking sanity. Oh, poor ignorant soul.

 

Ace grins at him. “We were raised by bandits, in a forest with giant tigers” he chips in, somewhere between cheerful and maliciously enjoying Trafalgar’s confusion.

 

The doctor glares, then switches his gaze to Marco in a last ditch search for sympathy in the face of insanity.

 

Marco laughs. There had been a great deal of confusion and yelling on the Moby as they slowly pried the contradictory, confusing mess of Ace’s backstory out of him. Marco still doesn’t have a clear picture of his home island in his mind, but he knows it is a wild place. 

“Welcome to the insanity, Trafalgar,” Marco says. “These two are just like that, apparently. You’ll get used to it.” 

 

“I hate all of you,” Trafalgar tells them all blankly. “So much.” 

 

~~~~

 

His opinion doesn’t seem to change when he finds out the next part of Marco’s plan. Rookies. So excitable. 

 

“You want to call the Whitebeards,” Trafalgar demands, incredulous. He’s pacing, and gesturing with his hands, and occasionally creating one of his Rooms to counteract the hyperactive experimenting Strawhat is doing. It’s actually fairly hilarious to watch. Luffy’s getting better and better at swapping things as Marco watches, really quite a quick learner, but that doesn’t keep him from creating disasters left and right. Trafalgar, without deviating from his stressed back and forth in front of Marco, is alternately aiding, abetting, and mitigating those disasters on a sliding scale that seems to range from ‘relatively harmless’ to ‘property damage but funny enough to let continue’ to ‘stop messing with my Mink.’ It’s an interesting display of control and temperament both. “From an unsecured island containing at least two pirates the Marines would literally kill anyone to get their hands on, one of whom is still injured, even if he insists on running around. ”

 

The last is clearly aimed at Strawhat, who doesn’t even have the grace to notice. Marco rolls his eyes, again. This man is going to have to learn how to relax a bit. At least he’s had the good sense not to try to do something stupid and overreaching like attempting to forbid Marco from calling or something, even while he points out what he considers the flaws in Marco’s plan. Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — for him, Marco came prepared. 

 

“I brought a White Den Den with me,” Marco tells him dryly, pulling the protective case holding the little snail out of his small pack. “And Izou has the other one. No one is going to eavesdrop on us, and it’s not like I’m planning on telling him where we are, anyway.”

 

Marco blinks, thinking about it. Shrugs. 

 

“I don’t even know where we are, actually, other than part way back up Paradise. I just followed the card.”

 

He dials Izou before Trafalgar can gather a response to that, glad they haven’t gone that far back up the ‘Line: they should still be in range, unless Izou was forced to make a break for Fishman Island instead of waiting for Marco.

 

The Den Den rings for a couple long moments. Marco is just starting to get worried when it’s answered, the snail taking on Izou’s face.

 

“Marco!” Izou says, relieved and worried and clearly afraid to hope. “Is it true? Is he…?”

 

“Izou,” Marco greets, and he knows his brother can hear in his voice all the relief Marco felt when he first saw Ace standing there, whole and healthy and alive. “I’ve got someone here who’d like to say hi.” 

 

Ace looks at him, uncertain, trepidation all over his face, but he slowly takes the receiver Marco is holding out to him. As soon as he takes it they can both hear Izou’s stifled sob, as the Den Den on his side takes on Ace’s appearance. 

 

“Hey Izou,” Ace says, hoarse, tentative and unsure. “I’m okay.”

 

“Ace,” Izou says, and it’s a gasp, a sob. “You idiot. You foolish—” His voice cuts off on another sob, and Ace is tearing up, biting his lip, and Marco wraps an arm around him.

 

Izou draws in a shaky breath, clearly gathering himself. Marco hurts for him. Izou has lost so much. No one on the Moby has a past devoid of loss, but the scope of Izou’s is larger than most: a king, a sister, a purpose, a homeland, and now Pops and yet another home. Marco is so glad to be able to bring him back this one thing.

 

“Where are you?” Izou demands. “We’ll come get you.” 

 

Marco shakes his head, taking the receiver back. “No, Izou, hold position, we’ll come to you. You’re at the agreed upon rendezvous point?” 

 

“Yes,” he says, brisk. “We haven’t gotten any pushback yet, though there has been a scout ship or two. The Red Force is holding position with us, and no one seems interested in pushing us right now.” 

 

He pauses, and Marco knows he’s not going to like what comes next. 

 

“The Moby 3 is already reporting devastation in our territories, Marco,” he says grimly. “They fought off the ones they’ve encountered so far on their way to Junction, but they can’t stay and consolidate right now and they know it. They’ve helped the islands they’ve passed batten down, but it’s not going to hold long. The Moby 2 had to detour to Fishman Island instead of waiting for us to do it, there were already groups causing problems for the kingdom. They’ve helped get the most vulnerable out to the forests, but…”

 

But just like they can’t delay on the islands in the New World right now, they can’t stay at Fishman island, and they can’t rely purely on Pop’s reputation to keep the peace there. They won’t be able to do much more for them until they manage to build their own reputation back up without Pops’ standing at their backs. Marco was right: he hates it. It’s only been a few days and everything they’ve been working for for decades is falling apart. His hand clenches on the receiver. Ace pries it out of his hand again, his other hand reaching down to hold onto Marco’s, twining their fingers.

 

“We’re coming, Izou,” Ace says, firm and determined and fierce. Marco watches him, as he stands tall and dauntless. He was sobbing in Marco’s arms not more than an hour ago, but he’s found his resolve again, and he’ll stick to it. Marco is so proud of him. “Tell them to hold on. We’ll join you soon, and then we’ll all go home. We’ll do everything we can for our territories. We’re not beat yet. Pops’ dream lives with us: it survives as long as we do, and we’re gonna fight for it.” 

 

Izou is silent for a long moment on the other side of the line, and then he breathes out, and the snail smiles.

 

“I missed you, kid,” he says. “We all did. Hurry back.”

 

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Marco assures him, taking the snail back. “We’re not too far away, though it might take us a couple days, depending. Hold tight, we’ll call again when we’re close, check in.” Mostly to find out if they’ve had to submerge, since in Marco’s pack is also Izou’s vivre card, to make sure he could get back to them once he had found Ace. They won’t get lost, but following a submerged ship while carrying a passenger isn’t Marco’s idea of a good time. Though, actually…

 

“Gotcha, Marco. We’ll see you in a couple days,” Izou acknowledges. There’s a pause, and then he says: “Did you happen to run across a certain Monkey where you found our Firefly? There’s been no reliable word on him, and I’ve got someone here who’s been trying to find him.”

 

Marco’s brow ticks up, curious. Izou wouldn’t let anyone who meant Luffy harm onboard, even if Shanks would have let anyone inclined that way get anywhere near them.

 

“Yeah?” He says, curious. Who could it be? Marco is sure the kid’s crew is looking for him, but he’s pretty sure a Rookie wouldn’t know how to find Izou, let alone manage to talk themselves onboard. Who else would be looking for him, though? “I might have. You got a message to pass on?”

 

The snail switches face, and Marco’s other brow jumps up to match the first, at the familiar features the snail now sports. 

 

“Kid, you’re surprisingly hard to track down, for someone so loud,” Silvers Rayleigh says. Ace chokes on nothing beside Marco, glaring. Trafalgar looks like he’s moved past surprised right to resigned. Luffy yells something unintelligible and leaps at Marco, abandoning his games in favor of wrestling the receiver out of Marco’s hand. Marco lets him win, amused and curious. How in the six seas did Luffy meet Silvers Rayleigh? And get to know him well enough for the exasperated fondness in the old pirate’s voice to come through so clearly? “I’m glad to hear the rumors of your death are exaggerated, though.”

 

“Old Man,” Luffy says, strident, clearly ignoring that last part. “What are you doing? Where are you? You’re supposed to be on Sabaody! Is my crew there? Have you seen them? That bear man sent me flying! He must have done the same for the others! Did any of them make it back yet?”

 

“Slow down, kid,” Silvers demands, but he still sounds bewilderingly indulgent. Marco’s honestly a little miffed; how long has he known the man, and he’s pretty much never seen him anything but drunk or dismissive. Often both. “He did. And he told me where he sent you. I expected to find you on Amazon Lily, went all the way there, first. The Empress is tearing up this section of seas looking for you. Where did you end up?”

 

“Dunno,” Luffy declares cheerfully, clearly unconcerned with this fact. “Torao saved me. We’re somewhere. Where’s my crew, Old Man? It’s been too long, we said three days! I was just gonna head back to Sabaody to find them!” 

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“You’ve seen what you’re up against now, Luffy,” Silvers says, and it’s serious. He must have come to the same conclusions Marco had; the Strawhats aren’t ready yet. Marco is desperately curious what made this crew different from every other rookie crew Silvers has seen come and go, that he’s apparently decided to do something about it personally. “I’m glad your brother is alive, but he shouldn’t be. That’s not a miracle that’s going to repeat itself for anyone else. Are you ready? Is your crew? Do you think it’s a good idea to just go ahead now?”

 

Luffy looks, interestingly, not to Ace, or Marco, but to Trafalgar. Equally fascinating, despite all of his bluster, and protests of still being a rival, not an ally, Trafalgar is looking back, steady and sure. Their gazes hold for a long moment before Luffy looks aside, his hat shading his eyes. He doesn’t look like a boy like this, he looks like a young man, on the cusp of something great.

 

“I know that,” Luffy says. “I gotta get stronger. A lot stronger.”

 

Silvers’ Den Den face grins. “Good on you kid. I got a couple ideas for that, but first we gotta let your crew know about the change of plans. They’re scattered all over, according to Kuma, so it’ll have to be something eye-catching.” 

 

“You got a plan, old man?” 

 

“Don’t call me that, brat. And yeah, I do, if you’re up for it.” 

 

~~~~

 

Ace hates the plan. But then again, Ace has never been that fond of Silvers, which at least now Marco has an explanation for. Ace isn’t fond of anything tied to Roger. His First Mate would be no exception. It does make Marco wonder, though: Did Silvers know about Ace? How could he not? But if he did, where was he?  

 

Where was he when Ace was a child, being raised by bandits? Where was he when Ace looked down at a bare wrist and was allowed to continue to think himself soulless? Where was he when he should have been tearing Garp the Fist to shreds for letting Ace think he killed his mother and didn’t deserve to live?

 

They’re not questions Marco expects to necessarily ever get answers for, honestly, but he is wondering, now. They’re certainly questions he would like answers to. But perhaps he should settle the war he already has brewing before he attempts to start a new one. 

 

Either way, Ace hates the plan. Unfortunately for Ace, Luffy cares a lot more about making sure his crew knows what’s happening than he does about Ace’s grumpiness about who the plan comes from. He, apparently, likes Silvers, and the feeling seems to be mutual. It’s unprecedented, in Marco’s experience: Silvers doesn’t like anyone, except Shakky. Then again, Luffy seems to be the exception to many rules.

 

“At least Jimbe is going to be there,” Ace finally settles on, when it’s clear Luffy won’t be dissuaded. He’s pouting as he slouches next to Marco and watches Luffy cheerfully browbeat a not-convincingly-reluctant-enough Trafalgar into promising to take him towards Amazon Lily, where Ray is apparently planning on meeting him. “He’ll take care of Luffy. He promised me he would, in Impel Down. He’ll make sure he survives this stupid plan.”

 

Marco, quite graciously, doesn’t bring up any number of Ace’s ridiculous plans, not the least of which have involved infiltrating Marine bases in bad disguises to eat all their food. 

 

“I’m glad you weren’t all alone in there,” Marco says quietly. It had been its own torment, thinking that Ace would have spent his final days alone, surrounded by darkness and people who hated him. “Even if I’m sorry that either of you had to experience that place at all.”

 

Ace looks away. 

 

“It’s done, and I’m never going back,” is all he says, though. 

 

Marco accepts that this particular subject is closed, for now, and nods to where Luffy has wrapped himself back around Trafalgar, who is flailing and yelling again. 

 

“Well, it looks like your brother has gotten himself a ride to Amazon Lily. Do you want to stick with him until he gets there?” 

 

Ace cocks a look at him, clearly questioning. “You got another plan for us to get back down the ‘Line if we don’t? Trafalgar’s submarine is a little cramped, but we’re shy on transportation, otherwise. This place doesn’t look like it’s got any boat worth stealing, either.”

 

Marco shrugs. “We can stick with them for a little while, if you want to spend some more time with your brother, but if they’re going to Amazon Lily they’ll be veering into the Calm Belt fairly soon. I can take us both the rest of the way from there, but if I can avoid flying in the Calm Belt then I try to. The lack of winds doesn't make it a lot of fun. Less soaring, lots of flapping.” 

 

Ace looks at his brother, and the smile on his face is small. It’s a little bit sad, but it’s also genuine.

 

“Nah,” Ace says, and he sounds certain, despite the sadness in his expression. “I’ve disrupted his adventure enough, it’s time for him to get back to it without his big brother hanging over his shoulder.” He grins up at Marco. “Besides, why would I pass up the chance for a ride on the Phoenix Express if you’re offering a passenger service.” 

 

It’s a relief that Ace is feeling steady enough to tease him again. Of course, Marco isn’t just going to take that lying down. 

 

“I can carry you, if you think you need me to,” Marco drawls, leaning into Ace’s space a little, drawing his hands down from his shoulders along his arms, to grip his wrists and press blue fire out past the edges of himself, watching as the Phoenix under Ace’s skin responds, blue ghostly feathers flickering into life and fading. “But it only took me about a day to make it here from near where the Mini Moby will be. If we stay here we will have an extra day or so to see if we can’t get you going on your own set of wings.” 

 

Marco grins down at him, challenging and still so enraptured by the idea that this is real. Ace is his soulmate. After years of looking, a decade and more of quiet acceptance that it would never happen, here he is. 

 

His, and here, and alive, by the grace of a connection Marco had never even suspected. Now they have time , time and enough, to figure out what this will mean for them, to settle into new powers, and use all of their strength for their family. 

 

“Deal!” Ace laughs. “Just watch, I’ll be flying before you know it. Izou will be so surprised.”

 

It’s a good thing that Trafalgar is far too distracted wrangling Luffy to hear this discussion, because he somehow thinks that two firebirds traversing Paradise does not fall under the paranoid Rookie’s definition of ‘subtle’ and ‘keeping this a secret as long as possible’ but it’s going to be worth it . 

 

“That he will. And so will everyone else. We’re going to be unstoppable,” Marco tells Ace, and it feels like hope for the first time in a long time, hope; in warm dark eyes and the spreading flush on freckled cheeks. 

 

“Yes, we will. All of us, together ,” Ace agrees, and it’s a fierce promise. Then it softens a little, and he says, gentle as no one ever expects him to be, and all the more devastating for it: “We will. Captain .”

 

The title is soft on Ace’s lips, but it still hits Marco like a body blow, like a seastone bullet. 

 

He can’t jerk away from it, though, because Ace has turned the grip on his wrists, quick as a snake, and is holding on, gentle and implacable. Marco stills, breathes through the pain of it, meets that gaze and the steady faith in it, and… what can he do, in the face of that? What can he do other than accept the challenge there, the faith, and belief, and support all offered up freely. He swallows, nods. Tips forward to rest his forehead against Ace’s in acknowledgment, when the words still won’t come. 

 

“Let’s go see off my troublesome little brother,” Ace says, some irrelevant amount of time later, squeezing Marco’s wrists even as he pulls away, winking cheerfully at him. “And then I’ve been promised wings. Chop chop, let’s get going, no time to waste. It’s time to go home.” 

 

Marco laughs, and lets himself be pulled towards the shore, and into the future. 

 

~~~~

 

“Stop sulking, kid.” 

 

Luffy isn’t sulking . He’s just disappointed, is all. 

 

He had known that Ace and his Marco couldn’t stay with them. They have to go take care of their crew, and get back to their own adventures. Especially with Ace’s new Dad gone now, their crew needs them! It had been so good to see them, though, and to see Ace happy. Marco makes Ace happy, in a way Luffy doesn’t think he’s ever seen. He isn’t Ace’s little brother, he doesn’t need to be taken care of and worried about. He takes care of Ace . Ace lets him.

 

Ace who is alive. Luffy had been so scared. He’d been so sure that Ace was dead, and gone forever . He had been, kinda. He would have been if it wasn’t for his Marco, and Marco’s powers. Luffy hadn’t been strong enough. He needs to get strong enough, and that’s gonna take time. 

 

So Luffy had known that Ace and Marco couldn’t stay, even before they said goodbye to them on those islands. He had known that, but…

 

“I don’t see why Torao couldn’t stay and train with us,” Luffy says grumpily, hugging his knees and looking out to sea from the front of Ray’s small boat, still floating where he’d met them on the edges of the Calm Belt. He’s watching where his soulmate’s super cool submarine has vanished back beneath the waves. He’d asked Torao to stay, but he’d said no. Something about them both being captains, blah blah blah. Of course; Luffy knows all of that already, he isn’t stupid. He just doesn’t see why any of that means Torao can’t stay.

 

“I didn’t sign up for training a whole ship full of brats, kid,” Ray says, leaning over him. “And he’s got his own adventures to have. That boy’s no idiot, though. He’ll find his own path to strength, I’m willing to bet on it.” 

 

Well sure, Luffy knows that too! And it will be fun to see how strong Torao gets while training on his own! It’s the same thing Luffy’s crew will be doing, he’s sure, just as soon as he sends them the message. Still… he wishes someone could have stayed with him. These two years are going to be lonely. Luffy had thought having a crew, meeting his Mystery Person, both of those things were supposed to mean he would never have to be lonely again. 

 

He puts his hand on his arm, where the message he’s going to send to his crew is already written. He’s not alone, though. Not really. He still has his crew, this is just a short break. Blue lights his fingers, just a crackle. And he still has Torao, too, even if they’re not together. 

 

Luffy grins up at Ray. “Right! Torao is super cool! And he’s got a bear navigator. Nami’s the best, obviously, but Bepo is a bear!”

 

Ray laughs, and scuffs Luffy’s hair. 

 

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all about it already. Up, kid, we’ve got a scene to cause, a crew to get a message to, and then work to do if you’re gonna make the most of these two years, yeah? Jimbe’s gonna meet us near Marineford. He says he knows when it’ll be pretty empty for us to make our move.” 

 

Luffy makes a face but hops up. He takes a moment, breathes in deep, looking out over the sea.

 

“Right!” He shouts, throwing up both fists, a challenge to the very heavens. “Two years! And then I’m gonna show the whole world! I’m Monkey D. Luffy, and I’m going to be the King of the Pirates!” 

Notes:

It's done!!! Thank you all for sticking with me on this journey, and thank you to everyone who lefts kudos, and comments! It was so amazing to hear all your thoughts and theories. This is officially the longest thing I've finished and posted and I'm so excited! I have some other thoughts for this world, so don't forget to subscribe to the series!
Vague series plans include:

Norland follows his Compass into the fiercest seas in the world. It brings him adventure, love, and heartbreak. He doesn't regret it.

Get Rekt Doflamingo

Zoro has a Compass on his wrist; how is he always so lost?

And more!

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Don't Go ('A Following The Compass Rose)