#'the only way to get this out of your system is orgasms yoi'

[touchmycoat]

kinktober: day 28

day 28: writing on the body

this wasn’t meant to be sickfic, much less incomplete sickfic, but here we are. I’ll finish, clean, and post to AO3 later.

The rendezvous was on a summer island once more, the air so superheated this time that even Ace wanted to run around fully nude. He couldn’t feel excessively hot or anything, what with literally being fire and all—it was just the atmosphere the whole island brought about. It made him want to sweat and run for a dunk in a freshwater lake or wrestle someone for an icy shower.

Others didn’t have it so easy. Thatch’s hair had gone fully limp since day zeroth, whatever he used to keep up the ‘do melting and dripping off his forehead in nasty milky trails. Marco was okay, though little licks of blue fire keep getting spotted on his exposed skin, healing the sunburns he swore he didn’t get.

Sabo, when he got to the island, promptly took off all his clothes.

“Don’t,” he ordered, dunking his hands into the tub of water that had gone tepid in a matter of minutes after Ace prepared it, “touch me, ‘cause I won’t be held responsible for what I’ll do.”

“Aw, babe, I’ve missed you too,” Ace replied, tone as dry as Sabo’s hair was wet, now that he’s gone and sank his entire head into the water. “Aren’t Revolutionaries supposed to be hardier? You’re gonna let a little heat wave get you down?”

“I may also be running a little fever,” was Sabo’s admission. Ace scanned him in alarm, and now noticed an unnatural pink flush under his skin. “Everything is unpleasant and I’m dying.”

“I’m assuming that’s hyperbole.”

“Well I don’t keep sucking a doctor’s dick for no reason—where the fuck is Marco?”

Exploring, was the answer to that, and Sabo looked as impressed with it as Ace expected him to—which is to say, not at all.

“The one time I need him,” Sabo cursed in blatant mistruth. “That’ll teach me to ever trust again. There’s no way around it then—Ace, we have to go old school.”

“Unless you’ve brought your own eel’s blood, I can’t help you there,” Ace answered warily.

“I meant—”

“Nor do I have ginger root and all the necessary needles.”

With a sigh of frustration, Ace approached and hovered his hand about Sabo’s forehead, taking heed of Sabo’s warning against physical contact and hoping, sometime in the past five minutes, his fruit has given him some miraculous sensitivity to temperature in air convection. It hasn’t, but Sabo heaved a sigh of his own, and sullenly leaned his head into Ace’s hand.

“...Yikes.” It took a moment for Ace to translate the sensation on his hand to a normal human context. “You’re really burning.”

“If you truly love me,” Sabo muttered, peeling his head away with a grunt, “you’d go hunt an eel.”

“If I truly love you,” Ace corrected, pulling a den den mushi out of his bag, “I’d call Marco.”

One of Marco’s division members picked up.

“Hey Commander!” was Aoi’s cheery greeting. “Gimme a sec, our Commander’s left us a bit behind.”

“Just put me on the loudest volume,” Ace advised. As soon as she did, Ace yelled into the sparse canopy of trees in the broadcast, “hey Marco! Sabo’s dying!”

A beat. A burst of blue flames. A familiar face emerging with a frown.

“I’m assuming that’s hyperbole, yoi.”

“How would you know?” Sabo complained, not even looking at the den den mushi, so bleary-eyed he was and swaying on the spot. “You’re not here to anally probe me with a thermometer or anything.”

Giggling, and a cough. “Thanks, Aoi, I’ll take it from here.” Marco took his den den mushi and walked off down a more secluded path, waving his exploration team ahead. He wove between thick purple tree trunks until finally settling against one, staring into his side of the projection with overt concern. “Are you feverish? What symptoms are there yoi, and when did they start?”

This time, when Sabo opened his mouth to speak, a pallor suddenly washed across his face. He ended up tossing his head back in determined swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing as the tendons in his throat stood out in stark relief.

“Well,” Ace took over in dismay, “I think it’s safe to say he’s experiencing nausea. No coughing or sniffling so far. He just came in with a fever and didn’t want me to touch him.”

“Oh?” Marco took in the sight of Sabo standing completely nude, presumably assessing the cause. “Sabo, is it just general sensitivity, or does contact with your skin actually hurt?”

“Hurt is relative,” Sabo said, because even halfway to incoherent he needed to be difficult, “but I’m guessing you’re not telling me to compare it to being burned alive by actual fire.”

“Good guess yoi, I’m not telling you to do that,” was Marco’s flat reply. “Just compare being touched right now to, oh, your regular old knife wound.”

“Then sure, it hurts.”

“Okay any wounds, potential infections? Insect bites?”

“Not that I can see,” Ace reported, after an inspecting circle around Sabo. “Do you think he was poisoned then?”

“I mean, maybe?” Neither Sabo nor Ace had a response to Marco’s bewilderment. “But if he’s not saying anything about being poisoned yoi, we should just assume it’s a regular cold.”

Ace frowned. “How do you mean?”

“How do you mean, how do I mean?” Marco asked slowly.

“Well someone must’ve done this to him,” Ace argued logically. “How else could he contract an illness?”

“He could be immunocompromised for any number of reasons, and just—germs, viruses yoi. I don’t—” At Ace’s unyielding moue of incomprehension, Marco scratched frustratedly at the back of his head. “Honestly, if you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, then that actually makes the possibility of Sabo being poisoned higher. How about it, Sabo? Any possibilities?”

“Yes.” Sabo blinked, and almost actually collapsed, knees buckling for just a tiny moment. Ace darted out to catch him, but refrained at the last moment from actual contact when Sabo managed to stay upright. “Okay I confess, I wasn’t listening to anything you guys were saying.”

“Lie down, for goodness sake,” Marco hissed, more out of worried sympathy than anger.

“It’ll hurt.”

“It’ll hurt a lot worse when you fall on your face, and I gotta carry you over to the bed,” Ace pointed out. He waved his arms about to herd Sabo in the direction of the mattress. “Just—lie flat on your back, and don’t move.”

“Breathing hurts too,” was Sabo’s whimpering complaint. But he did shy away from Ace’s hands and start moving toward the bed. His movements were stiff and obviously pained, and when one knee sunk into the mattress, Sabo made a sound of such utter distress that Marco flinched, all the way on the other end of the line.

“Okay yoi, I’m on my way back. But in the meantime Ace, grab the first aid kit I brought.” The tree trunks started to blur behind Marco as he jogged, then sprinted down the mountainside. “There should be a jar in the top right corner full of thick dark red paste.”

The first aid kit was a sizable buckle-up box that Marco brought onto every island landing. Every doctor and nurse practitioner in his division carried one.

“Looks like chili? Yup, got it.” The jar was larger than Ace’s fist and densely packed. He popped the top and sniffed it, expecting a punch of spice. What he got instead was an herbal sweetness, not overwhelming at all.

“Water down the paste a little bit, but leave it thick enough to paint with. There should be a pretty big brush in the kit as well yoi.”

When Ace found the brush and wielded it up in the air, Sabo’s eyes widened.

“You better not be planning on touching me with that thing.”

“At this point,” Ace commented with a side-eye look at Sabo’s awkward positioning, three limbs braced on the bed with the fourth still pending pain, “would it be worse?”

“Hopefully it’ll relieve the discomfort.” Marco made an unhappy noise, aimed at himself. “I gotta hang up—I’ll get there faster if I fly. But yes Ace, paint the liquid on any surface of the skin that’s in pain. It should be absorbed pretty quickly, and it’s fine if you paint over the same spots yoi. If it hurts worse, stop, and we’ll figure it out when I get back.”

“Got it.” Ace offered Marco a little smile meant to reassure. “We’ll see you soon then.”

Marco hung up with a rush of blue flames, and Sabo let out the most agonized groan yet, settling fully back onto the mattress. He’d tossed the pillow on the floor, and now held himself so rigidly against the soft sheets. Ace busied himself with the preparation of the water and paste in the basin he had given first to Sabo, but could barely take his eyes off of Sabo’s expression, eyes screwed shut and lips pressed into two pale, bloodless lines.

“Sabo,” Ace said lowly, in comfort, “the medicine’s ready. We’ll start with a small spot, okay? Where does it hurt worse?”

Sabo’s hands couldn’t even clench into fists—they were flexed tightly, like even touching himself was out of the question.

“Chest,” he bit out through teeth gritted so hard, Ace was genuinely keeping an eye out for blood spots along the gums. “Over my heart.”

The paste that Ace has mixed up looked like Thatch’s signature berry reduction, dripped with the consistency of that same dessert topping. With just one corner of the flat brush (the kind used for painting planks of wood and walls), Ace soothed a spot of it on Sabo’s left pectoral, watching in fascination as the color immediately soaked into the skin, drying until it sat like a tattoo.

“Can’t feel a thing,” came Sabo’s grudging admission. “You might need more.”

“Alright,” Ace agreed, soaking the entire width of the brush bristles. They were soft-ended and flexible, as if Marco prepared it for this very purpose in mind—minimizing pain in hypersensitive skin. “Here we go.”

Sabo’s breath came ragged and harsh when Ace stroked the brush more fully down his chest. The moment the paste started soaking into the skin however, a keening cry of relief left Sabo’s throat.

“That,” he demanded. “That. Just—everywhere.”