Chapter Text
It started out as a normal day. Wake up, go hunting, go to Grey Terminal to steal for their treasure fund, hunt more. Sometimes they had to add “hide from shitty gramps” to that list, but this most certainly was not.
They were heading back to their treehouse, Sabo taking the lead as they crossed the rickety old bridge, and their crybaby baby brother was following behind as always.
Ace heard a snap.
Luffy yelped.
Ace whirled around and leapt after his falling brother. Perhaps some would say he jumped a bit too far when he began falling too as he reached out to grab his brother, but they were dumb to say that because he had Sabo.
Sabo grabbed one hand as Ace held onto Luffy’s with his other, and his twin managed to stop them from falling. Again.
It was a common routine for the three of them, because their idiot little brother refused to try and memorize which planks on the bridge were sturdy enough to cross properly. “I know Ace and Sabo will always catch me!” Luffy always said, and Ace always swore that he should let him fall next time. He never did. Luffy did not need to know how warm the fact that he so shamelessly put all of his faith in him to protect him made him feel.
Ace didn’t even know how there were still rotten planks left to break with how often this same scene played out. He was fully expecting this time to be the same as it always was. It wasn’t.
Sabo was trying to use his grip on the rope to pull the three of them up to one of the safe planks, but there was another snap. The rope gave out. They were all suddenly free falling to the rapids below.
Luffy tried to fling his hand up, but his aim was ever-so-unreliable and he failed to grab onto anything before his hand came back.
Ace used his grip on his brothers to pull them in as closely as possible to him, trying to position himself to be on the bottom.
Sabo struggled and fought him, but Ace refused to let either of his brothers take the brunt of the fall.
The water stung as they slammed into it, and it knocked the air out of Ace’s lungs. He didn’t know which way was up or down, it was just water everywhere. He choked as his lungs tried to expel the onslaught of water, but there was no air to replace the water with. His lungs burned as they screamed for air.
It took everything in what remaining power he had left to hang on to his brothers as he blacked out.
—
Finally, Thatch was cleared to leave the ship! He couldn’t help but feel giddy as he wandered around the island. Could you blame him? He was a pirate! Being confined to the infirmary after a traitorous piece of shit stabbed him in the back for as long as he was would have made anyone on the crew go stir-crazy. Anyone who said otherwise was a liar.
The beach he found, that he was currently exploring, was gorgeous!
Though he could do without their resident mother hen hovering over him.
“Don’t give me that look, you get carried away too easily-yoi. What if you reopen the wound?”
“I’ll be fine!” Thatch assured, “I’m not Ace.”
Marco gave him a flat look.
Okay, maybe saying that he was better than the fool who went off chasing after Teach for stabbing him was not saying much. Thatch would admit to that, “I’ll be fine. Besides, look around! How could I possibly strain myself too much?”
Marco looked out to the sea, squinting.
“Dude, I love swimming, but even I’m not dumb enough to do that while I’m still recovering.” He was frankly a tiny bit offended.
“No, Thatch. I think there’s something there.”
Thatch blinked, feeling the heat from Marco’s sudden transformation into his phoenix form.
His brother took off, and returned soon after with a top hat with goggles resting on the brim in his hands.
“...that’s a weird item to find floating in the middle of the sea.” Thatch commented.
“It doesn’t make sense-yoi.”
“Huh?”
“The goggles should have made it sink, but it was only just starting to.”
Thatch blinked, staring at Marco, “Uh?”
“It’s like it just got there, but it was too far out for anyone to throw it from shore, and I didn’t see any ships nearby.”
Thatch decided that he did not want to think too deeply on the mystery of that hat, and decided instead to see if he could find any clues about the owner. So he took a deep breath and focused on his Haki. He almost immediately picked up on three young, and extremely weak, presences.
He rushed over to where he felt them, ignoring the sharp glance Marco sent his way. He found three young boys washed up on the beach. All of them had scratches all over, but only two of them were bruised.
He only needed one look to see how tightly the middle one’s hands were locked with the others’, even though none of them seemed to be conscious.
On one side was the only blonde. His head was a lot more bloody than the rest, and his other hand clutched at a straw hat which clashed horrendously with the cravat he was wearing. For some reason the hat that Marco found felt like it would match the rest of his outfit better.
The kid on the other side was much smaller than the other two, with messy black hair. The scar under this kid’s eye seemed distinctly familiar for some reason. Thatch couldn’t help but think of the bounty poster that Ace would shove in his face every time he felt like gushing about his little brother for some reason, but he quickly dismissed it. They were in the New World, and Ace’s little brother was out in Paradise, and while he was a kid last time he checked, he wasn’t nearly as young as this kid.
No one looked more familiar than the kid in the middle though. “Hey Marco?” Thatch asked, staring down at the freckled kid with wavy black hair, “Did Ace have a secret kid that he never told us about?”