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Sabo wants to go home.
The problem is, by all rights, he is home.
Baltigo has been home since he was 10, aching and memory-less. It's been home since the moment he opened his eyes and knew he would rather die than go back to wherever he had been. Home, when freedom became a calling and people who called it the same stood beside him.
Sabo wants to go home.
It is a throbbing ache in his chest and the piercing migraines that followed him for years. A pair of voices, young and high and gone the moment he turns his head to answer. Home is a tree fort built by sloppy small hands and junk. It is dinners spent hollering and fighting and stuffing as much meat into his mouth like he'd never read a book on manners in his life. It's a forest, dangerous and free, a bar with a kind smile from the first adult who truly wished the best for him beyond the counter.
Home is his brothers, his by oath and heart and soul.
The thing is, Sabo is busy. (so busy he only knew everything after his brothers almost died how utterly laughable) It hasn't been long since he's become Chief of Staff, and it is a responsibility he took on willingly and aggressively. The world is in chaos, pirates resurging and marines reorganizing from top-down, and the World Government moves in the shadows of it all. Ivankov is returned, with news and recruits and information whilst backdated themselves. The Revolutionary Army cannot afford to spare a single officer, much less their second-in-command.
There's no time to look for a pair of pirates that have gone to ground so completely nobody can find them. (As they've already died-NO)
He doesn't- Sabo can't-
What right does he have? He's failed Ace and Luffy in every way a brother possibly could. He died on them, and that's all the memory they have to him. Sabo forgot his home and replaced them like those boys hadn't been his world. What could he possibly even say to them?
"Really?" asks Koala while crushing a knee into his spine and smashing all breath out of his lungs. "This was what's making you brood all over the place? One of the new recruits cried because of you, you know."
Sabo wheezes in indignation because he didn't need nor appreciate that incredulous voice directed at him, and Koala simply drives that out onto the floor as well. "Sabo-kun, let me tell you a glaringly obvious fact about life that you in all your broodiness missed.
You can have more than one home."
Sabo stills completely. Koala sighs and lets go of his shoulder to press her hand against his cheek, turning it so that their eyes meet. "You can have more than one home," says Koala, whose home had brought destruction upon the beloved one that opened her heart up back to the world. It's okay, says the girl who left behind a home that loved her with fear and forged a new one here on Baltigo with him, who shared her past with a boy who had none. "Your brothers clearly love their crews like a family and a home. Do you think they were replacing you when they joined them?" And Sabo slowly shakes his head.
"Idiot," sighs Koala again, utterly done. It's fond though, and she still lets him cry into her shoulder and drip snot all over her blouse.
Baterilla is a beautiful island located in South Blue, a practical treasure trove of fruit and flowers. Large tropical blossoms cover every inch of the island there possibly is, and the scent of citrus lingers thick in the air. Sabo thinks he can smell the faint smell of copper that lingers still after all these years. This is the island that suffered the most deaths during the purge in the year after the Pirate King's execution. The island where despite all that death, the actual child was born in secrecy and safety.
Sabo isn't sure why he is here, hours past already landing on the island's shore.
The Revolutionary Army managed to get their hands on quite the amount of information that inevitably leaked when the marines underwent complete reform. Among it was a report on the woman the previous fleet admiral only briefly mentioned during the live broadcast of Marineford.
Portgas D. Rouge. Ace's mom and the person who stretched the limits of possibility to the very end to make sure her son lived. He'd stood in the storage room holding that piece of paper for hours just staring at stark, impersonal letters printed black on white. Sabo only startled out of his fugue when Dragon swept inside, took one look at him and the report he was holding, and ordered him out. Very literally, out.
"Go. Report back on what you find there," intoned Dragon before sweeping out of that tiny storage room as dramatically he came in. And Sabo found himself on course for South Blue in a blink of an eye.
It is easy to blend in with the crowd considering there is more tourists than actual residents on the island. Sabo meanders through the marketplace, casually working through a basket of plums he bought cheap from an aging fruit vendor. He circles around and around, following the press of the chattering crowd until it pushes him out at the edges of a park, near a tall hackberry tree. The tree is almost hidden behind a grove of aged willows. Sabo glances at it, catching tiny scratches curling around bark and branches, almost invisible. Prayers and whispers of names that made it past marines and cipher pol agents to a tree where it couldn't be swept away into the dark sea depths like all the other tombstones during that bloody year.
He doesn't linger though, and walks in the opposite direction. Past the thicket, a worn dirt path appears and a set of gravestones are beside it, covered in colorful flowers. More emerge as he walks on until Sabo can faintly see a small grave of pale white stone set in a even smaller clearing of hibiscus blossoms. He's not sure what to do when he arrives there.
Parents had been a tenuous topic for both Ace and him, if for entirely different reasons. Naturally, the times they had talked about them were few and far between, and the times they did were generally vitriolic. But Ace's mom-
Sabo remembers a small scowling boy touching his freckles, who declared to the world proud, defiant that his legacy was named Portgas.
Still, he really isn't sure why that memory led him here or what he's even going to do when he is in front of her grave. Talk about Ace's childhood? Say hi, I'm your kid's brother? Thank her for giving birth to Ace so late so it lead to the two of them being the same age? Sabo snorts at the thought and shakes his head. Ace would have definitely held any age advantage over his head.
He looks up and- freezes in place.
There's already someone standing in front of Portgas D. Rouge's grave.
A gray haired man with a heavy brown cloak draped over him stands before pale marble. Sabo can make out the bottoms of clunky leather boots, and drags his eyes up to fixate on what seems to be the ends of dark plastic glasses sticking out of coarse strands of hair. Nothing he recognizes. Nothing he sees as special. The somewhat suspicious outfit only stands out because of the festive atmosphere of this island, and is only fairly standard sailor gear. There's something about him, though. Something about that silhouette that catches his eye, that stance with the shoulders thrown back and tilted down chin. Something that has the migraine pulsing in the back of his head whispering looklooklook, a buried instinct pointing to that man and saying-
shouting-
screaming-
There's a strange feeling of nauseating buoyancy when a person witnesses something impossible, a ringing disconnect from reality even as it happens right in front of their eyes. It feels like a movie reel Sabo once saw when he infiltrated a high-class gathering. There is a screen and on it, there is a pair of legs moving, sprinting forward; sudden heavy breaths choking a throat; hot tears stinging scarred flesh. A gloved hand reaches out and grasps a cloaked shoulder, nigh wrenching it back-
And there is a face.
It is covered by a pair of dark plastic glasses connected to a comical fake nose and mustache, framed by a wiry cheap wig, obviously not real from this distance. Patches of blush dabbed on both cheeks poorly hides freckles. And the eyes- Silver eyes glare at Sabo, clear and guarded and scowling. A familiar, so familiar snarl greets him. A breath, not even a sigh, escapes Sabo. The dirt path rushes back up and collides with his feet and lurches his gut straight up. He wants to throw up. He wants hug him and never let go. He wants to-
"What the fuck do you want, assho-!"
Sabo punches Ace right in the face.
There's something to be said about siblings and fights.
Over a decade of amnesia, a week of traumatic recovery, months of worry and guilt bubbling like sulfuric acid in the pit of Sabo's stomach and the first thing he and Ace do is roll around in the dirt like a pair of jungle brats.
It's downright nostalgic.
"You dumb- you have orange shorts on! You don't even have a shirt on!" shouts Sabo, spitting out a mouthful of dirt directly at the hand that stuffed it in there.
Ace, true to memory and every news article and information report Sabo could get his hands on, slams his slimy dirt palm into Sabo's eye and roars back, "What the fuck do you care? Who even are you?!"
"Every organization with half a brain is looking for you and you- a fake nose?! The cheapest wig on this side of the Grandline?"
"The nose is foolproof, you bastard-!"
"What about your back, one wrong breeze and you're declaring yourself to every marine, pirate, and CP agent crossing the street-" And Ace throws himself at Sabo, furious and scorching and mad like a wild beast, slamming him into the ground by the throat.
"Whitebeard's mark is my pride," Ace growls, fingers growing tighter and hotter. Sabo looks up at him, dazed and almost mesmerized. There's a boy's voice overlapping with the man talking in front of him, on the cliffside, in front of him- "My father and my crew saved me, they loved me enough to die for me and to live with me. This- this is the proof that I lived."
It's the same burning conviction, bright as sunlit waves crashing against cliff rocks.
"I will never run away from it."
And Sabo can't help but laugh. It's choked and strained, but it overflows from him in rolling bursts. He feels Ace look down at him in growing confusion, anger draining away at the way Sabo is practically giggling. The hand around his neck slowly lets go and Sabo coughs, trying to get it back under control. Ace leans back warily, pinning him in place through his body weight crushing Sabo's waist while he gets his breath back. He smiles back at the man observing him, and watches silver eyes steadily, incrementally widen in disbelief.
"You haven't changed a bit, Ace," Sabo says, helplessly fond.
It's a lie and it's not. Sabo does not know this Ace, the pirate with shadows skulking through his eyes and spine straight, not with rebellious defiance but with a surety of being loved. Even so, it is Ace though, his kid brother, just like how Sabo has grown into something different from the noble boy with a story to write, but is still Ace and Luffy's brother.
Ace reaches out, wavering, and Sabo closes his eyes at the touch of calloused fingertips tracing scarred skin. Warm droplets splash onto his cheeks and he laughs again.
"Sabo?"
He opens his eyes and Ace has leaned down, pressed their foreheads together.
"It's been a long time, Ace," replies Sabo with a wide, wide grin. "You've become a bigger crybaby than Luffy!"
And Ace laughs in return, lousy disguise long forgotten into the dirt. "Shut the hell up, you asshole." Strong hands curl into his coat and hold on like they'll never let go. "Where were you?"
Sabo holds on to his brother just as hard and lets the moment sink in. The ever-present pounding migraine at the back of his head is gone and the voice in his ears is only Ace, grown and real. Relief spreads in his chest like cool gel on a burn because Ace had laughed at the mention of Luffy, meaning their little brother is okay. The strain on his shoulders release, and Sabo lets himself relax because his brothers are safe, and he's found them. He has time again like he thought he did in their childhood to talk and share what had happened to him, to them. To share the new places and people they each made into a home.
So Sabo replies, "Home."
And Sabo says, "I'm home."