#aslbrothersweek2022

[kai-teaa]

ASL Brothers Week 2022 @officiallyasl DAY 6: ASL Pirates ♥ starting today we're brothers

I always wanted to try editing magazine covers for One Piece characters so I finally made one based off of Vogue for Ace, Sabo, and Luffy!! The little AU in my head for this is that this magazine was published after they took down Big Mom and Kaido, shaking up the New World. [click for better quality]

[officiallyasl]

Two weeks to go. Don't get caught!

asl brothers week 2022 (July 9th - 16th)

[goodlucktai]

lit a fire with the love you left behind

@officiallyasl 2022 day 1; soulmates

read on ao3

x

Luffy remembers the day he learned what the colorful little marks on his arms meant. He remembers chasing his brothers down the mountain, all of them shrieking like the barmy gibbons in the trees, and he remembers how he thought his heart was going to burst from all his laughter.

They came rambling out of the woods like a friendly pack of feral dogs, and Makino smiled widely from where she stood waiting outside Dadan’s hut. She tried to come visit at least once a week, to make sure their clothes still fit and they were getting enough to eat and other boring grown-up stuff.

Luffy ran right to her, with a billion new things to tell her about since the last time. Sabo picked his way behind him a little more slowly. Ace reluctantly brought up the rear, and stayed well out of arms’ reach. He always watched her hands very closely when they came near Luffy, like he was waiting for them to stop being gentle.

On this particular day, Makino made a soft, gasping noise, and grabbed Luffy’s arm carefully. Ace didn’t like that. He surged a step closer, all bristly like the jungle cats would get when a meal or a nap was interrupted, and said, “What’s your problem?”

“When did this happen?” she asked softly, turning Luffy’s arm over so the underside was facing the sky.

She must have meant the funny little mark that Sabo gave him, since it was the only thing there. Luffy explained that he didn’t know when it showed up, but it was probably around the same time that Ace’s mark did. When Makino just stared at him, he offered his other arm up as well, pleased to show it off.

They weren’t very big but they were bright and they curled like little licking flames. They were a perfect mirror of each other, in the same place on both of Luffy’s arms. Ace’s was a warm red-orange color, and Sabo’s was cool blue.

He knew, really really deep down, where you just knew things, that they belonged to his brothers. And he knew that Sabo had the red-orange mark on his right arm, but the one on the left was bold, sunny yellow—and that was Luffy’s! Luffy gave that little smudge to him!

Ace guarded his colors jealously, even from Garp and Dadan. In the hot summer months when he went without sleeves, Ace would wrap his arms up before they went into the kingdom or even the Gray Terminal. If people got nosy about the wrappings on his arms, he beat them to a pulp.

He didn’t mind Luffy or Sabo seeing them, but they were the usual exceptions to his fits of temper anyway.

Makino seemed bewildered by them in a way she usually wasn’t. She sat back on her heels and studied Luffy like he was something brand new and strange.

“These are soulmarks,” she told him. “They’re very special.”

“Of course they are,” Luffy said plainly. “They’re mine.”

Later on, he would learn that there was a lot of fables and fisherman’s tales about soulmates. People talked like they were fantastical things, right up there with merpeople and dragons. Makino did her best, as flustered as she was, to explain what made them so important, but Luffy had more pressing things to think about!

It was just so sunny and windy and perfect outside, and Ace promised they could go down to their secret part of the beach until it got dark, and they had cake waiting back at the treehouse—a fancy layer cake that Sabo stole from somewhere, with honey and cream and bananas! Luffy was so excited for all of it that he could barely sit still.

Every day is magical when you’re a child. Every hour you spend with your best friends is special and important. The moment the universe decided that Sabo and Ace and Luffy belonged to each other came and went without ceremony, slipping right past them like those tiny quicksilver fish that lived in the fast part of the river, there and gone in the blink of an eye.

“How stupid,” Ace grumbled on the way back up Mt Colubo that night. His olive skin was blotchy from all the sun, and his hair was salty and starched, and the necklace Luffy made for him, with a length of twine and a pointy spiral shell, swung against his collarbones with every step. He was still prickly about what Makino had said, even hours later. “Grown-ups are dumb enough to believe anything.”

“But it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?” Sabo interjected. “Some big cosmic force declaring we belong together?”

“We already belonged together,” Ace said harshly. “I don’t need a bunch of stars to tell me who my family is. You’d be my brother even if you never left a dumb blue thumbprint on my arm.”

Sabo laughed. “Luffy, too?”

Luffy was nearly dead to the world by then, face pressed into the back of Sabo’s shoulder, arms looped around his neck. He tired out halfway up the mountain, and his brothers made a bunch of exasperated noises and called him names, but they picked him up and carried him anyway.

Even though the sun had gone down and the jungle loomed around them, dark and dangerous and wild, it never occurred to him to be afraid. He was still just awake enough to hear Ace scoff and mutter, “Yeah, I’m stuck with that little brat, too,” and it made him smile so big his cheeks hurt.

He kept smiling until the night-time noises and Sabo’s steady steps lulled him the rest of the way to sleep.  

##

Luffy’s philosophy is essentially just the kinder parts of his brothers’ conflicting ideals smushed into one; he doesn’t need the stars telling him what to do, but it’s nice of them to think of him.

When he leaves Dawn Island, he has a red-orange mark on one arm, and an ash-gray mark on the other. Sabo’s color faded the day he died. Luffy misses it more than everything else he left behind put together—the treehouse, Makino’s bar, the funny gibbons he grew up with, everything. It’s strange that it’s been gray longer than it had a chance to be blue.

It hurts to look at sometimes, but only sometimes. Luffy isn’t a baby anymore. He wears the gray as proudly as he wears the orange, unflinching and unashamed, no matter how many sad or strange looks strangers may give him when they see.

Meeting Zoro is like meeting another part of himself that’s been wandering around a different part of the world this whole time. They understand each other, and they both have big, amazing dreams that other people call impossible, and they both have a soulmate who died.

When it’s just the two of them, in the dark of Merry’s belly with nakama snoring on all sides, or sprawled across on the sunny deck while everyone else is still in the galley, Zoro will talk about her sometimes. She was the person he wanted to beat, and the person he wanted to be, and one day he woke up and she just wasn’t in the world anymore. A hole was carved into his future and he had to learn to live around it.

Sanji leaves his soulmate on the Baratie, sailing away from his gruff adoptive father to chase All Blue. Miss Wednesday becomes Princess Vivi and when Nami shakes the life out of her for revealing the dangerous true identity of her ‘boss,’ color bursts onto both of their hands. Usopp hasn’t found his yet soulmate. Chopper doesn’t think he’ll ever get one, because animals don’t.

They meet Ace in Alabasta, and he’s a Devil’s Fruit user. He lights up, a tower of flame, and it makes Luffy bounce with every step, giddy and delighted—of course it’s fire. Sometimes the universe gets it right, after all.

His friends are excited to meet his big brother, and an order of magnitude more excited to meet his soulmate. The girls coo over the matching orange and yellow coils, and Chopper and Usopp demand the Story of When They Found Each Other, shrieking with dismay when Luffy and Ace both admit they really don’t remember the details. Everyone is very carefully not looking at the matching smoke-gray marks on their opposite arms.

Luffy doesn’t know why they do that. It’s not as though it’s a secret. It’s Sabo.

Before Ace leaves, he gives him a folded-up piece of paper, and says it will bring them together again. Luffy thinks his brother has been getting silly ideas from that crew he’s sailing with. They don’t need some paper telling them how to find each other anymore than they needed stars to do that. But he keeps it anyway, because he keeps everything his brothers give to him.

Robin and Franky leave color on each other’s hands in the middle of all the chaos on Enies Lobby. It’s easier to convince Franky to join them when Robin is smiling at him from the deck of his beautiful ship, the very soft and happy way she only recently learned how to smile.

Brook had three soulmarks before all of his skin fell off his bones. They were gray by the time I died, anyway, he’ll say, and then he’ll cackle, and it’ll sound insane.

Sometimes the universe gets it wrong.

##

The bandages on Luffy’s arms don’t come off right away. Even after the raw, angry wound on his chest no longer needs dressing, his arms remain covered. When Traffy changes them out, he makes Luffy look right at his face and nowhere else.

“I’ll remove your head from your body and let Shachi and Penguin play volleyball with it if you even think about moving,” he says shortly. He sounds like he means it. There’s a smudge of gray on one side of his forehead that’s shaped like a heart. The brim of his hat usually hides it, but he took his hat off for some reason, and now Luffy can see it.

Luffy looks at that faded gray heart and doesn’t look down at his arms until they’re wrapped again.

It’s not forever. Soon he’ll be able to look at Ace’s soulmark and it won’t feel like dying in Impel Down all over again. Soon he’ll be able to stomach the gray where his warm red-orange should be.

He remembers being seven years old, almost eight, and how it felt like the entire world was ending when they told him Sabo was dead. How he cried and cried like he’d never be able to stop. It took Ace making him an impossible promise, scolding and cajoling him in equal parts, to get him on his feet again.

Luffy’s not a baby anymore, and he’s fresh out of brothers to help him now, but he remembers what to do. You have to let it hurt while it hurts. You have to let it press you all the way down, right into the ground, because that’s how big it is, and there’s no way around that. And then the second you can stand up, you stand up. And the second you can take a step, you do that next. And that’s the rest of your life for the rest of your life.

He can do this. He’s done it before.

But when the bandages come off, there’s gray, and gray—and a splash of pure gold.

##

It’s a silly, swooping shape, playful and whimsical, and it looks like something different to every single one of them.

Franky thinks it looks like the sharp curve of a cant hook. Chopper giddily argues that it’s a banana, constantly patting the base of one of his antlers where the mark is visible through the velvety fuzz, as if to make sure it hasn’t run off. Sanji pointedly bakes buttery, flaky croissants to make his case.

Robin reads half a dozen books on semiotics and mythology. Usopp, as flushed and pleased as Chopper is about this development, makes up just as many legends of his own.

Even Brook bears the mark, right on his bone. He doesn’t seem to know how he feels about it, crying and laughing at the same time as he traces it with the tip of a phalange. He describes, to anyone who will listen, a traditional folk instrument he once played, a horn that looped almost into a perfect circle.

Nami is adamant that it’s a crescent moon, or a sun in partial eclipse. Zoro figures it out before any of the rest of them do. (It’s a smile.)

Luffy doesn’t care what the shape of it is. He loves it.

He loves that his friends love it, too. They each wear it in different places on their arms or shoulders or backs or legs, and they're stupidly pleased to wear it. And it doesn’t make any sense, and Robin has never heard of anything like this happening before. And it breaks all the rules of all those old fishermen’s tales that Makino used to tell him, when she’d use words like predetermined and destiny. And it’s the best thing in the whole world.

He carries his crew’s mark as proudly as he carries his brothers’.

Ace was right. Sabo was right. Luffy doesn’t need any old universe to tell him who he belongs to, but it’s nice to know someone’s been paying attention.

##

Someday, Luffy will meet a stranger in Dressrosa, and one of those phantom fires on his arms will erupt into painfully familiar blue, and a part of him he thought was dead will burn to brilliant life again.

[ocyus-stuff]

Day 3: Role Reversal

I've never really seen a revolutionary!luffy in any asl role reversals (or maybe I haven't searched hard enough) so I decided to take matters into my own hands

Luffy can be stealthy when he wants to as seen in the g-8 arc lmao, dragon probably taught him better. Besides, he can be the perfect distraction.

Here;s the general timeline of the au:

Instead of sabo going off on his own and getting shot by that asshole, it's luffy!

Dragon came by and saved him, luffy woke up with amnesia and dragon decided to take him in

Pros: We get luffy and dragon father-son bonding! :D

Cons: Sabo, Ace and literally everyone else suffers

Sabo and Ace promised to be stronger so they won't lose anyone anymore (Ace promises to be a better person in general for lu)

They also promised that they'll bring his straw hat to 'raftel'

Luffy wants to go out to sea and be pirate king even though he doesn't really know why but he feels like he can't yet cause he's missing something (his straw hat, it's with ace)

He decides that he'll go and be a pirate at 17

So in the meantime, dragon offers to train him and he joins the revolutionary army for the time being while he tries to remember

He gets his first bounty poster when he's 14 but his face is shrouded

He goes around the world and meets his crewmates, leading them to joining him for his future pirate crew after he saved them. (though some of them actively join the ra)

In sabo's absence, the chief of staff will probably be robin or koala

Meanwhile, Ace and sabo set out at 17 together, joining whitebeard later on

Ace gets captured a month before luffy's birthday, and luffy feeling a pull, goes to rescue him (he still doesn't remember tho)

Marineford happens and the three brother meet for the first time

They hug :'D

Luffy remembers, ace gives him his hat and he finally sets out for his dream

[capisback]

written for asl brothers week 2022 / @officiallyasl​

Day 1: Kisses

title: without you by my side

summary: It was a simple dine and dash, but when they turn around, Luffy isn't there. Ace finds him in Edge Town and discovers something about himself, whether he realizes it or not.

read it on ao3

They can’t find Luffy.

It was a simple dine and dash, something to cheer Ace up because he was in a foul mood – today is a day of celebration, the day the Pirate King died – and they were running, weaving through crowds, and when they turned around, Luffy wasn’t there.

They’ve been looking for hours. They still haven’t found him.

Goa isn’t particularly large, if you take High Town out of it even less so, but it has winding roads and buildings stacked together, crowds too big for too small streets, alleys everywhere, even in places you’d never look, and, as afternoon turns to dusk and then to night, very few lanterns to light the streets, and scum crawls from their gutters and into bars to raise a ruckus.

And they can’t find Luffy.

Ace’s grip on his pipe is tight, has been for a while, and it’s taking everything he has to not go barreling through the streets and smash something, anything, to release the pent up tension. It wouldn’t work, he knows, because it wouldn't solve anything, but he still wants to destroy something. Sabo is the one he relies on for sense, to remain calm, and even he has been looking out of his wits ever since the last of the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.

“Let’s split up,” Sabo says suddenly, when they once again come onto a main road. “If he’s running around, then we’ll have more of a chance to run into him if we go in opposite directions.”

“Okay. Let’s do that. I’ll go left,” Ace points his pipe down the road curling into Edge Town, “and you go right.”

Something apprehensive twitches onto Sabo’s face. “Ace – ”

“I’ll go left,” Ace repeats through gritted teeth. “And you go right. We’ll see each other in two hours at the base. If he's not here, he might be there."

A moment longer of conflict whirling behind Sabo’s eyes, and then he sighs. “Fine. But don’t do anything stupid.”

Anger twitches at Ace’s brow and he scowls. “I’m not dumb, Sabo. We’re looking for Luffy.”

“I didn’t mean – ”

“I’ll see you at the tree house,” Ace raises his voice over Sabo’s and briskly runs the other way.

It smarts, that his best friend, his brother, would think of him like that, as if Ace would risk his brothers’ lives, their safety, for a stupid fight. It hurts even more to know why Sabo thinks so, and that he can’t ever set it right.

Ace doesn’t dwell on it.

X

Where Mid Town has even pavers, some less kept but still pretty good, Edge town is a mess of cobblestones and broken tiles. It’s a pain to run on, always at risk of twisting an ankle, but Ace has traversed the shadier parts of Edge Town often enough to know how to get through it without injury. First he'll search the streets he’s most familiar with, then he’ll move onto alleys and the most dangerous parts of the town, but Ace hopes fiercely he won’t find Luffy there, and quickly shuts down the horrifying possibilities that spring to mind of what could’ve happened if Luffy did wander into those.

“Luffy!” he calls, more of a hiss, because he’s trying to be quiet. The last thing he wants is to draw drunkards’ ire, doesn’t want to be hindered in his increasingly desperate search for their little brother.

Ace turns right, onto a familiar road, one he’s crossed a dozen times before, since the age of seven, since his talk with his grandfather, and his heart stutters when he sees a familiar figure standing in the middle of it. Yellow light from an open bar door falls across Luffy’s lone figure, shadows even darker at its edges, almost as if they’re waiting to swallow Luffy whole. There’s a glare set like stone on Luffy’s face. It’s unfamiliar, because Luffy has never looked so enraged. He’s dripping wet, hair and clothes doused, and the familiar, bitter smell of beer wafts down the street. It takes Ace a moment to identify the shimmers on Luffy as glass shards, and when he looks closer, he can see scrapes all over Luffy’s face and arms. Some of them are bleeding.

There’s few times Ace has felt rage coil as tight as it has now, but it winds and winds and Ace’s pipe creaks under the strength of his fingers.

“Take it back,” Luffy says, fierce and steady, and it makes Ace pause. He has never heard Luffy sound like that before.

Someone laughs. A deep voice cut by raspy breaths. Ace can’t see him, but then there’s a large shadow that gets cast over Luffy, and a man Ace recognizes leans out.

“What do you want me to take back?” he sneers mockingly. “That it’s good the Pirate King’s blood has been wiped off the earth? Or that any spawn he had deserves to be boiled to death?”

Huh?

What?

“All of it,” Luffy growls – growls, and it sounds so close to Ace when he’s angry that it scares him.

The man laughs again. “Why should I? A runt like you comes in here and tells us to shut up, you think you can take us on, is that it? We’re just telling the truth!” Cheers and jeers come from behind him. “Get lost, pipsqueak. You’re not the only Roger fan around these parts that we’ve taken care of.”

“Not until you take it back!” Luffy yells.

Is Luffy really – ?

"I’ve had about enough of you. The Pirate King’s a piece of trash who deserves to rot in the ground. Anyone who shares his blood should be ashamed of being alive and do us all a favor and drown themselves. If you don’t like hearing it, go home crying to mommy about it, and do it quick, ‘cause my charitable mood ain’t holding out.”

Is Luffy trying to defend Ace?

And then Luffy scowls, curls his lip back, and spits: “You’re a dickface.” And Ace wishes for the first time that his own mouth wasn’t so foul, and that Luffy didn’t copy everything he does, because that’s something straight out of Ace’s vocabulary.

Red splotches of anger mix with the pink tint of inebriation. Ace sees it coming before the man even reaches for his gun. Blood roars in his ears as he makes a mad dash forward, draws his pipe back as far as he can to gain as much force and momentum as possible, and bashes the man’s face in with a well-timed jump and well-practiced swing. The man goes flying back into the bar, crashing into tables and breaking through the wood, several people crushed under him or knocked over. Luffy’s eyes are wide and surprised, lips moving to form Ace’s name, but Ace can already see the rage drawing across the bar-goers, knows things won’t end well – they didn’t the last time something like this happened – so he takes Luffy’s hand and makes a break for it.

Ace knows intimately which corners to turn, which roads to take and walls to climb, to get away from angry drunkards as fast as possible. He never lets go of Luffy’s hand.

“A – Ace!” Luffy calls, stumbling over his feet, but Ace hauls him up before he can fall.

“Keep up, Luffy!”

They’re out of breath by the time they slow down, crossed straight through Edge Town and the Terminal, the forest welcoming them with hushed greens and fresh, cold, night air. The forest is bright where the town is dark, the moon and stars’ light able to filter through.

Ace doesn’t say anything. Not even when Luffy’s panting breaths start hitching and he presses his lips together in a tell-tale sign that he’s trying his best not to cry. Instead, he takes Luffy’s hand again, far gentler this time, and guides him through the forest.

“I’m sorry,” Luffy sniffles after a few minutes. “They were saying mean things about Ace, and I…”

“Shut up, Luffy,” Ace says without any heat, but his little brother doesn’t speak anymore, after that.

They stop by a small river that runs clean through the middle of Mt. Corvo. They learned long ago – only a few months, but it feels like years, the time they’ve spent together – that not letting a Devil Fruit user drown all comes down to the tightness of your grip and your ability to swim. The part they chose is shallow, but Ace makes sure to hold his brother tight as he dunks him fully into the coiling, cold water.

It takes a while longer to pick all the tiny glass shards out of Luffy’s hair. Luffy's clothes are wet instead of soaking by the time Ace gets the last one out. Luffy doesn't shiver. He doesn't whine.

Ace isn't sure why that bothers him.

X

The walk should have calmed him down, that’s what walks are supposed to do, but Luffy keeps sniffling, and his heart won’t stop hammering, blood won’t stop ringing in his ears, and by the time they reach the treehouse, the only thing the walk has cleared is his anger and instead replaced it with the dread and fear he’d tried to ignore, and there’s a queasiness taking hold of his limbs because Luffy almost died. He almost died because of something as stupid as defending Ace.

And nothing, nothing, could have ever set that right.

He lets Luffy climb the ladder first. He never does that, usually a scuffle and a dash to see who gets to go first, but Luffy doesn’t question him, instead climbs the way up without a word.

Ace won’t, can't, let Luffy out his sight. At least not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow, either.

When his head peeks through the latch, only a few moments after Luffy’s gone inside, he sees Luffy huddled by their beds, turned away, and it’s obvious he’s crying, but he’s still not making a sound. It hurts – because it’s all on Ace.

He doesn’t know what possesses him to cross the room and wrap Luffy in a hug, but that’s what he does. He sits down next to Luffy and draws him close, tucks Luffy’s head under his chin, and maybe it’s to ease his own mind, that he wants to hold his brother close, but the relief that Luffy’s still alive crashes into him like a flood and leaves him feeling boneless and, embarrassingly, wanting to cry along with Luffy.

“I’m sorry, Ace,” Luffy whimpers again. “I got lost, ‘n I was looking for you, but then these guys were saying mean things about you, and I was so angry… Are you mad at me, Ace…?”

And Ace can’t -

He’s only seen these things from afar, the movements foreign to him, but he cups Luffy’s head in his hand and places a kiss on his forehead. Luffy stills against him. Ace carefully places another, softer kiss, to Luffy’s temple, and with a sniffle, Luffy relaxes and nuzzles his head against Ace’s hand. Ace's heart swells, his chest feels ready to burst with warmth and guilt and how indescribably happy he is that Luffy is still there. His other hand comes up to cup the other side of Luffy's face, and Ace presses a kiss to his little brother’s cheek, then to the other, and then another kiss, and another, and another, and soon it feels almost desperate, like Ace needs this, needs to do this. And Luffy lets him. His tears have stopped, the tracks have dried, his hands are buried in Ace’s shirt.

There’s no words Ace can say, no words he can think of, so all he can do is hold his little brother as close as he can and hope Luffy understands.

X

Luffy falls asleep not long after, curled up against Ace still, Ace’s arms wrapped securely around him. Immediately after Luffy’s breathing evens out, there’s a creak of the floorboards, and Ace tenses, but relaxes just as quickly when he sees Sabo’s standing by the latch.

“Hey,” Ace greets and winces at how rough his voice sounds. “Have you been here long?”

“Long enough,” Sabo says. He looks a little lost, but Ace can’t figure out why. “What happened?”

“Scum from Edge Town. Luffy picked a fight with them. Got there just in time, so I took him straight here. Sorry.”

“That’s alright,” Sabo replies easily and seats himself on Luffy’s bed, the middle one of the three futons lined close together. His eyes run over Luffy, over Ace, too, and Ace has to fight off any embarrassment.

“What?” he mumbles.

It takes Sabo a moment to respond, and when he does, it sound like he’s struggling, but Ace doesn’t know if it’s that he’s struggling to say it at all or struggling to find the words. “I’m sorry. About before. I didn’t mean to imply…”

“It’s fine.”

“Ace…”

“Really, Sabo. It’s fine. I get it. I don’t care.”

Sabo looks conflicted, a small frown tugging at his brows, but he lets it go nonetheless, and Ace is grateful for that, at least.

Silence settles over them. It's not a comfortable one, but it's certainly not uncomfortable, either. Even at night, the forest is alive, and leaves rustle gently next to them, their treehouse nestled so high in the tallest tree they could find. The day slowly catches up to them, and soon Ace, and then Sabo, yawns.

“It’s late,” Sabo says in a bit of a mumble. “We should go to bed.”

“Yeah.” Ace nods slowly, and tries to maneuver without dislodging Luffy. It's harder than he thought it'd be, and he has to shift back up to get into a better position.

“Ace.”

Ace hums at the call of his name and looks at his brother, and he stills.

There’s a mischievous, teasing grin on Sabo’s face that never spells anything good for Ace, because his brother is a schemer and likes to press all the right buttons to make Ace feel embarrassed. He leans in, presenting his cheek and tapping a finger against it, and he cheekily asks: “Don’t I get a goodnight kiss?”

Ace’s face flushes red. So Sabo had seen –

“Piss off,” he grumbles, looking away.

Sabo snickers, the bastard.

“That’s too bad,” he says, and, oh, Ace hates the gleefulness that’s seeped into that tone. “Guess I’ll have to do without a kiss.”

He sighs, faking deep, weary disappointment, but there’s no hiding the mirth dancing in his bright eyes.

Ace won’t let him have this one.

He leans in quick and gives Sabo’s cheek a rough peck.

“There’s your goodnight kiss. Sleep tight, asshole.”

But his brother doesn’t respond, and when Ace looks again, he notes with victorious delight that he’s frozen in place, hand half-way to his cheek, and he’s turned far redder than Ace ever will.

It’s Ace’s turn to snicker.

“Good night, ‘Bo,” he says sweetly, and lies down on his side, Luffy still in his arms. He steals one last glance at Sabo, whose mouth is moving like a fish’s on dry land, and he closes his eyes while he tries to suppress a laugh.

It’s a few minutes later that Sabo settles next to them, and for the first time that day, Ace can truly relax.

He falls asleep with a smile.

[misslydian]

Chapters: 1/?

Rating: Gen

Fandom: One Piece

Characters: Monkey D. Luffy, Sabo

Relationship: Monkey D. Luffy & Sabo, ASL Brothers

Word count (ch 1): 567

Summary: He smiled warmly, his own eyes now pricking with tears, “It’s good to see you again, Luffy.” (Rewrite of the scene in chapter 794 when Sabo and Luffy meet again.)

-

-

-

Day 1: Kisses

“I won’t let you have the Flame Flame Fruit, Straw Hat Luffy.”

A young man in a gladiator helmet and obviously-fake beard turned to the new voice. He glared at the tall, blond stranger who had just appeared from the shadows of the long hallway.

“Luffy, it’s me,” the stranger said as if his identity should’ve been obvious.

“Huh? What do you mean ‘it’s me’?!” Luffy glared,  “Listen, if you want the Flame Flame Fruit then that makes you my enemy! And I don’t know why you’re calling me ‘Luffy’! Look at this beard, my name is Lucy!”

The stranger scoffed, but had amusement in his tone, “As if I wouldn’t recognize my own brother in disguise.”

“‘Brother?!’ Hey! The only people who can call me brother are Ace and one other person,” Luffy growled, “though he died a long time ago so… “ Luffy’s words trailed off as he took an unsure step back. His brown eyes, fixed on the mystery man, slowly widened and filled tears as realization dawned on him.

“You—you’re—” Luffy choked out, tears now dripping down his cheeks. “SABO!” he cried.

“The very same who once stole Dadan’s booze so we could share cups,” Sabo winked. He smiled warmly, his own eyes now pricking with tears, “It’s good to see you again, Luffy.”

He had just barely begun to spread his arms when Luffy flung himself onto Sabo, the boy now full-on sobbing. Luffy wrapped himself so tightly around Sabo he could barely breathe, but right now he just couldn’t care. He brought his arms around his brother and clung back just as strong.

Sabo sunk until his knees hit the floor and Luffy slid down as well, both sobbing into the other’s shoulder.

Luffy’s arms now wrapped around Sabo’s torso, his face tucked into the crook of Sabo’s arm. Sabo adjusted one arm around Luffy’s shoulder and curled the other around his head, and he clutched his little brother close to him.

“Luffy,” Sabo began, “thank you for being alive.” Luffy’s cries picked up again at that. “Thank you so much. For surviving. For still being here with me.” Sabo choked on his words as he tried to hold back the sobs threatening to burst out. “And I’m sorry! ” he cried, “I’m so sorry! I should’ve been there for you and Ace. I think I've failed at being a brother.”

Luffy pulled away, a fierceness in his eyes as he looked at Sabo. “No! No, don’t ever think like that! No one’s mad at you—I’m not mad at you—for not being there, Sabo, there wasn’t anything you could’ve done. If anything… if anything I should have done better because I was right there! And I—” his lips wobbled and tears started spilling out again, “I’m just glad you’re not dead too, Sabo!” Pain erupted in Sabo’s chest as he gazed at Luffy. “I thought I was alone.”

Shaken by the compassion Sabo was sure his brother wouldn’t have for him, Sabo hesitated for the briefest moment before reaching over to pull Luffy close to him again.

“Hey, it’s not your fault either, Luffy,” Sabo said softly. He pressed his own trembling lips together in an effort to collect himself.  

Sabo tucked Luffy into his chest. Closing his eyes, he placed a kiss on his little brother’s head. “I’m glad we’re both here too,” he whispered in Luffy’s hair, “Together.”

[majoraop]

New Beginnings

The day those three children arrived at Grey Terminal, everybody began whispering about them.   In particular, people living in that smelly tip spread strange rumours about two of those kids. “The blond siblings,” they murmured, “are nothing less than Tenryuubito, the ��deities’ who inhabit a faraway land.”   Yet, according to the ASL trio, the most worrying child was the black-haired one, Vergo. He was friends with the older of the two blond siblings, Doflamingo, but the younger, Rocinante, didn’t seem to like him.   The new trio immediately ended up on the “watchlist” of the local trouble children: Ace, Sabo, and Luffy. While the latter was curious to know them better, his sworn brothers weren’t happy to see their "territory" suddenly menaced by a rival gang, especially since the newcomers looked strong—well, excluding the younger child. The blond kid was always hiding behind his older brother, trembling.   “He reminds me of you,” Ace told Luffy with a smirk. “You’re both crybabies.”   “I’m not a crybaby!” Luffy pouted, offended.   “Yes, you are!” Ace yelled at him louder than he intended to. He was upset because Vergo had glared at him earlier, as both groups had been busy searching through the trash piles for “treasures” to sell in Goa’s black market.   Sabo noticed the tears forming in Luffy’s eyes. The poor kid was uselessly trying to fight them back, sniffling. “Ace…” Sabo sighed. “You should apologise to Luffy.”   “For what?” The dark-haired boy retorted. His freckled face, though, showed a hint of remorse.   “You’re always making fun of me, that’s why!” Luffy blurted out, not caring about hiding his tears anymore. “Sabo is way nicer than you,” he murmured between the sobs.   Ace glared at him and then at Sabo, who grinned back whimsically while hugging their younger brother. “Ace is nervous because those new kids are getting all the best stuff. Don’t mind him, Luffy.”   At that, Luffy seemed to calm down. Still, he didn’t let go of Sabo’s sleeve as he looked at Ace with large accusing eyes.   “Fine, fine...I’m sorry.” Ace finally gave in, looking sideways.   “Ace!!!” Luffy yelled happily, throwing himself at him and making the both of them tumble to the grassy ground.   Sabo chuckled, but then his eyes caught a glimpse of pink among the trees. A colour he wouldn’t expect in the forest covering Mount Corbo. “Who’s there?” He yelled while standing before his brothers, one of his hands closed in a firm grip around his metal pipe.   “Fufufu, not need to be so tense, lesser noble,” Doflamingo stressed the difference in their lineage.   Albeit not offended by that remark—who cares about stupid nobles?—Sabo still retorted, “At least, I hold my stick in my hands instead of having it stuck up in my ass.” After a dramatic pause, he added, “Renegade.”   Ace’s eyes went large at the insult—Sabo could be brutal when he wanted to. Ace glanced at Doflamingo; as expected, his expression was bewildered. Ace could still tell that he was utterly furious even beyond his shades.   “How you da—”   “Cut it out, Doffy.” Vergo grabbed Doflamingo by the arm before he could attack the ASL trio. “Don’t forget that we’re looking for Rocinante.” Vergo didn’t sound like he cared about Doflamingo’s younger brothers, but maybe he disliked seeing his friend distressed?   “...I won’t forget about this,” Doflamingo hissed, glaring at Sabo. Then, a menacing grin opened on his face again. “If you see him, I suggest you not lay a finger on Roci. I will kill whoever dares to harm my little brother.”   At that, even Sabo remained silent. He could understand—and respect—that kind of reasoning.   “See you around, losers,” Vergo said, ruining the mood again. Then, after casting a contemptuous glance towards them, he followed his friend.   Once he was sure the two were too far to hear him, Sabo asked, “What do you think about this?”   “What do I think about what, exactly?” Ace replied, aloof.   “Come on… You know what I’m talking about!”   Ace just stared at Sabo, but the latter held his gaze. “Ok, ok...” Ace finally conceded with a sigh. “You want to search for that crybaby, too.”   Sabo grinned at him. “That Rocinante is just one year older than Luffy, after all...” he said, his tone turning serious. “I hope he’s alright.”   Mount Corbo wasn’t exactly the safest place for children—or adults, for that matter. That said, there was something amiss…   “—Luffy!!!” Ace and Sabo yelled at the same time.   While they had been distracted, their younger brother had disappeared. --- Luffy had grown bored of the argy-bargy between Sabo and that boy with ugly sunglasses. So, unnoticed, he had decided to wander around on his own and search for something fun to do.   For a little while, Luffy just walked across the forest, singing a silly song about silly people on a silly island, tapping the trunks with his pipe in time to the music. Before the fourth stanza, though, he stopped abruptly.   A crying voice?   Was someone hurt or lost in the forest? Luffy hadn’t listened to the whole conversation between the other children, so he didn’t know that the younger of the two former nobles had gone lost.   “B-brother... where are you?”   That voice again.   “It sounds a bit like mine when I got lost and called for Ace and Sabo,” Luffy admitted, his head tilted to the side. “Are you hurt?” he called back, trying to understand from where direction came the whining sound. However, he couldn’t see anyone around.   After a moment of silence, the tiny voice said feebly, “I-I’m not hurt, but I’m stuck in a hole...” A sniffing sound followed those words, but at least the other kid had stopped crying.   “That’s one of our traps!” Luffy exclaimed, finally understanding what was going on. “We use pitfalls to capture animals for dinner.” He grinned. “Stay still, and I’ll take you out in a moment!”   “O-ok...AHHH!” Rocinante screamed in fear when Luffy’s elongated arm reached him. “A s-snake is attacking me!!!”   “Shishishi! That’s my Devil Fruit’s ability—I’m made of rubber!” Luffy beamed, proud of his powers.   “I… I see,” replied Rocinante. He was calm now and let Luffy grab him.   Luffy lifted the tiny child into the air and then put him on the ground roughly (he was still learning to control his ability). “Done!” he said happily.   Rocinante was rubbing his butt with an expression of pain on his face, but he still murmured a quiet, “Thank you.”   Luffy remained silent for a moment, observing the blond kid: he looked frail, and Luffy couldn’t see his eyes well since messy bangs covered them. “My name is Luffy,” he finally said. “And I’ll become King of Pirates!”   “I-I’m Rocinante...” replied the other child. “But you can call me Roci.” He wasn’t sure how to respond to the “King of Pirates” part: to him, pirates were scary people who wanted to pillage his native land. However, that cheerful kid didn’t seem like a bad person…   “Rocinante, you shouldn’t make friends with strangers.”   The child before Luffy jumped upon hearing that stern voice. Then, he turned around to face the older kid with something always stuck on his face (it was a half-eaten fruit this time). Luffy didn’t like him, even if he couldn’t exactly tell why.   “It’s fine, Vergo,” another voice talked as a second child stepped out from behind him theatrically. His head turned to look at Luffy, and then he asked as if already knowing the answer, “Fufufu... You must be Luffy, am I right?”   Luffy nodded, staring at him. He was both afraid and fascinated by that boy who looked like a king—albeit differently from the kind of king Luffy wanted to become.   “Thanks for helping Roci, Luffy-kun,” Doflamingo said with an expression halfway between a genuine smile and a sneer.   Rocinante had been looking between them, indecisive on what to do. Then, he finally ran to his brother’s side and held on to his pink shirt.   “Let’s play together next time we meet!” Luffy told Roci with a wide smile.   Rocinante was taken aback. He wasn’t used to being around genuinely kind children. Only his late parents had talked like that to him. After pondering what to do, he smiled back at him, nodding, but didn’t dare to reply. Vergo stared at him with cold eyes, disapproving of his new friend. At least his brother didn’t seem to mind, but Rocinante knew that Doffy wouldn’t stop Vergo if the latter decided to do something to that gentle child.   “Tell Sabo that I would enjoy talking about nobility and whatnot with him when he has time,” Doflamingo told Luffy in a mocking tone.   However, Luffy didn’t catch the provocation and nodded with a serious expression. Then, he waved at the kid still hiding behind Doflamingo. “See you, Roci!” he exclaimed with a big grin.   After that, the black-haired boy wearing a straw hat ran away, soon disappearing between the trees.   “He’s an interesting brat, isn’t he?” Doflamingo asked his younger brother.   “Y-yes...” he smiled slightly.   Rocinante remained silent for the rest of the day, but when he thought about his new friend's joyful voice, he felt a little more confident.

I wrote this one-shot for DAY 1 (“free theme” prompt) of the Corazon Week 2022 @corazon-week and DAY 7 (“canon divergence” prompt) of the ASL Brothers Week 2022 @officiallyasl. This is my second story based on an alternate timeline featuring the ASL trio meeting other One Piece characters as children (the first one was “The Marine Recruit and the Kind Pirate”).

[goodlucktai]

let me steal this moment from you now

@officiallyasl 2022 day 7; canon divergence

read on ao3

part one of three; 

(next)

x

Luffy falls mid-step.

It’s so sudden that Ace doesn’t notice right away. He runs a few more paces before he realizes the wheezing breaths by his shoulder are gone. And when he spins around, searching the mass of bodies packed in around him, squinting through smoke and grit and flashes of gunfire, he’s expecting to find his brother drawn into a skirmish or cut off by an opportunistic marine.

Ace finds him on the ground instead. Just lying there, like all the life blew clean out of him.

It’s the scariest thing he’s ever seen—scarier even than the moment Luffy appeared at the Marineford in the first place. Ace’s heart turns to solid stone. He's never been less graceful, the way he scrambles back, little tongues of flame licking off his skin as he goes.

“Hey, hey,” he says, getting his hands under Luffy’s shoulders and hauling him up. “This is no time for a nap, kid.”

His brother’s head lolls back, limp and unresisting. It’s literally like something out of a nightmare. Ace’s brain stops working, right there in the absolute chaos of an active warzone, and the clutch of his hands tightens. He can feel the air around him get super-heated as he starts to fully lose his mind.

“What the fuck,” Ace whispers, and snaps his head up when someone approaches at a run—that Ivankov person his brother showed up with, who looks horrified at Luffy’s prone sprawl but not at all surprised. Ace zeroes in on them as someone with information, and Iva’s step falters under Ace’s undivided, probably wild-eyed stare. “What the fuck happened to him?”

“Ace, you can’t just sit there,” someone else shouts. It sounds like Vista, daring to split his attention from his duel with Mihawk in order to scream sense in Ace’s general direction. “You have to go now.”

But what actually brings him out of what is shaping up to be a truly historic meltdown is the tiny flutter under his hand—a pulse. Luffy’s juggernaut heart is still beating, weak and unsteady but proof of life all the same. That’s all Ace needs.

He jerks into motion, hauling Luffy’s body up with him. It’s like muscle memory. How many times has he carried his baby brother around on his back? From an angry mob, even? Easily hundreds. They’re old hat at this.

“Yeah,” Ace is saying, like a crazy person, “yeah, we gotta go, Lu. You just—you just hang tight, and I’ll bail you out again, like I always do. That’s my job, huh? Gotta pay you back for this mad-cap rescue of yours anyway.”

Luffy doesn’t answer, but the hot puffs of his breath against Ace’s neck are answer enough. Ivankov is still nearby, and looks torn between pity and a sense of grief that Ace cannot begin to deal with the implications of right now.

Behind him, Pops is holding what might as well be half of the entire Marine army at bay. The rest of Ace’s family is clearing the way for him as best they can, but there is still the odd sword to dodge, a sudden cluster of gunfire to roll away from. Adrenaline carries him forward. The wharf is within sight, so close he can taste the salt even through the acrid smoke clogging the air.

That bastard Akainu is shouting something, but Ace doesn’t catch it. His entire world has narrowed into two points of focus. His two treasures. Luffy and the sea. His brother and the open arms of absolute freedom.

The ships are not even two dozen feet away. Barely more than a handful of running steps. Ace has a moment to think, deliriously, We made it.

And then a blast of heat sears the air behind him. On all sides, nakama are knocked clean off their feet, and the sudden crush of falling bodies has Ace tumbling down, too. He loses Luffy in all the chaos and he shoves Izou and Marco off of him, searching wildly for that familiar straw hat, that bright yellow vest.

There—blinking muddy brown eyes, trying to push himself up on shaking arms—Luffy. It’s such a relief to see him awake that Ace loses a second of reaction time to sheer relief.

And then a group of opportunistic soldiers seize that moment, capitalizing on his obvious disorientation, and spill towards him with their swords raised. Behind them, Akainu is approaching at a run.

“Motherfuckers!” Ace snarls, digging his hands into the stone beneath him, leaving scorched grooves behind.

And then, in a literal sense, he raises Hell.

Izou shouts and rolls away from him. He can see Marco’s blue flames out of the corner of his eye, protecting their nakama from the inferno.

Ace feels like a wild animal. He feels like one of the jungle creatures he grew up with on Mt Colubo. The big cats and bears and crocodiles had as much of a hand in raising him as the bandits did. They taught him how to tear survival out of the world with teeth and claws.

By the time he had the Spades, Ace knew how to survive the human way—with cleverness and charisma and no shortage of help from kind-hearted strangers. By the time he was folded into Pops’ family, he was practically tamed, even accounting for all his screaming attempts on the giant yonko’s life. A smile was just a different manner of baring your teeth.

So he knows, in the back of his mind, that his friends are slightly taken-aback by him. He just doesn’t have the capacity to care at the moment.

He tears through every single body between him and his brother the way the harpy eagles back home would rip apart smaller birds for a meal, so angry that sparks fly off his skin with every move. And he runs his mouth the whole time.

“You put your filthy fucking hands anywhere near him and I’ll rip them off and feed them to you, you puke-faced piece of shit! You want to try me, asshole? I was putting bitches like you in the hospital when I was eight!”

It’s like he’s back in Gray Terminal. It’s like he’s ten years old again and the world is on fire. Only it’s not Bluejam holding Luffy’s life on the line, it’s Akainu, standing over his little brother with a magma fist at the ready, sparing a moment for some self-righteous monologue about good versus evil or whatever bullshit, and Ace feels what’s left of his rationality burn and burn and burn away.

He’s not close enough. He’s not going to make it. Even if he managed to shake off the soldiers in front of him and just threw his whole body at full-speed between Luffy and Akainu to take the blow, he wouldn’t get there fast enough. He doesn’t have enough time. He’s going to lose another brother, only this time it’s going to happen right in front of his eyes, from seven—five—three feet away.

He’s ten years old again and learning what grief is. He’s ten years old and all that’s left of Sabo is the letter in his hand and a shared dream and the promise that Ace will look after their silly baby brother while he’s gone.

“DON’T TOUCH HIM!” Ace screams. It’s pure desperation. It’s the last human thing he’ll ever say if Luffy dies here.

He’s not prepared for it to somehow work. The soldiers around him fold like paper, dropping to the ground. Even Akainu stumbles. It’s not much—it’s barely anything—but it’s enough. Akainu’s killing blow doesn’t land fully, only drags across Luffy’s chest instead of punching through it. It burns away all the skin there and Luffy cries out. In the next second, Jimbei has scooped Luffy off the ground and one of the Shichibukai is up in Akainu’s face, her fair features twisted with rage. Ace’s nakama have peeled away to the wharf. It’s enough.

With one last mighty heave of his naginata, Pops gives them the opening they need. And then, because today is a day of unexpected arrivals, Shanks appears next to him as if plucked out of thin air.

The Red-Hair pirates’ entrance puts the Marines on the back foot. It gives Ace’s family a real chance to get the hell out of here alive.

The ships are readied to sail. Jimbei bundles Luffy gently into Ace’s arms. Ace holds him, trying to remember how to be a person, and has a terrible moment of indecision.

His nakama pile onto the Moby and he doesn’t follow. He’s frozen. He knows they’ll be pursued, probably to the ends of the earth. With the sheer amount of resources already expended and the entire world watching, the World Government has too much to lose. They won’t just let him go. Ivankov said Luffy needed treatment, but he won’t be able to get it if they’re running for their lives. He won’t be safe.

I don’t know what to do, he thinks, his heart racing double-time, adrenaline bitter in the back of his throat, his brother heavy in his arms. The armada is beginning to set sail, ships pulling away one by one. He’s bringing almost certain doom down on whichever vessel he boards. His friends are waiting. Luffy needs help. I don’t know what to do.

Through the smoke, he sees a glimmer of color in the ocean. He turns his head in time to watch a submarine surface.

The sea spills off the smooth sides in a thundering rush and then a water-tight hatch swings open. A young man steps onto the small deck, crossing all the way to the rail in quick strides. He has dark eyes and tattoos and kind of an air of walking tragedy. The Jolly Roger painted on the sub is vaguely familiar, but Ace has no idea who the fuck this guy is or what he’s doing here, the very last place a pirate with no stake in the war ought to be.

It’s like a moment of pure absurdity. Ace is beginning to think he might have snapped in Impel Down.

Then the strange pirate calls out, “Bring Strawhatter to me—I’m a doctor!”

Ace is running across the wharf without another thought. A hand catches his arm before he can leap off the edge onto the submarine, and he turns with his teeth bared, but it’s Marco. Exhausted, bloodied Marco, who looks both tired of Ace’s shit and unrelentingly fond of him at the same time, who just fought in a war for him and threw his whole body into protecting Ace’s brother when he couldn’t protect himself.

He reaches around Luffy and puts something in Ace’s pocket. When it squirms disconcertingly for a minute, Ace realizes it must be a baby snail phone. Then he squeezes Ace’s arm and steps away.

“Okay, crazy,” Marco says, every bit as though nothing between them has changed, “now you can go.”

Behind Marco, Whitebeard is still alive. Shanks is holding the outcome of the war in his bare hands. Luffy makes a quiet sound of pain against Ace’s throat, barely even lucid anymore, and the pirate on the submarine shouts, “Come on!”

Ace has known from a young age that survival is a stolen good. He’s never known it to be given freely, every single person around him trying to push into his hands, willing him to grasp it.

He’s always clutched at life stubbornly, selfishly, outright refusing to die because he made two seperate promises to two separate brothers and they’re more important than his spite or pride. He’s a child again, running back into the wilderness that raised him, plunging headlong into the unknown because fear is for people who can afford it.

“See you later,” he tells Marco. He doesn’t have time to say everything he needs to say.

He holds Luffy tighter and takes the leap.

[ocyus-stuff]

Day 4: Mafia AU

For some reason, sabo looks the most menacing. Maybe it's the smile :)

I got sick yesterday and the medicine I got knocked me out for the entire day lmao. A day late but here's the fourth entry ᕙ(`▿´)ᕗ Probably be a bit late for the rest too since homework is coming for my neck :'D

[officiallyasl]

Only one more week! Eat up!

asl brothers week 2022 (July 9th - 16th)

[ocyus-stuff]

Day 2: Age Up

yeah.. let's imagine I was not 30 minutes late 💀💀 Was a bit busy today, went to a shop to take a family photo, pc suddenly stopped working so a bit late for today's entry.

Took a bit of liberty on luffy and sabo's design ;) totally wasn't because I wanted to see luffy with his hair tied up

Also an extra: Age Down

[ocyus-stuff]

Day 1: Soulmates, Kisses

Soulmate marks and a moonlight kiss ✨

One piece au where everything's the same except I give the asl brothers platonic soulmate marks

Yayyy, the asl week hosted by @officiallyasl has finally started!! Honestly had to redraw the ocean a few times but I like how everything turned out in the end :D

Bonus:

[goodlucktai]

unaware i’m tearing you asunder

@officiallyasl 2022 day 8; sabo remembers

read on ao3

part two of three;

(previous) (next)

x

Sabo truly believes in the Revolutionary Army as a whole. He has respect for their work and trusts in their leadership. He’s seen firsthand how his own efforts have paid off in liberating the oppressed and dismantling tyrannical local governments. Every second he’s put into his life here has been more than worthwhile.

That said, sometimes Sabo would appreciate a fucking break.

He and Koala are back in Baltigo, fresh in from a month-long undercover op—just walked through the front door fresh—and the only immediate plans on Sabo’s mind involve debriefing, showering, and then sleeping for approximately thirty-two hours straight.

The barely-controlled mayhem he’s immediately confronted with inside headquarters throws a wrench into those plans with impeccable aim. Everyone is hurtling toward the situation room, and Sabo gives himself two seconds to daydream about slipping past whatever fresh hell this is and bolting to his quarters before he trades a bolstering glance with Koala and follows.

Dragon, sitting at his desk in the back of the room, makes absolutely no attempt to restore order. In fact, he only looks up to establish direct eye-contact with Sabo—clearly a reminder that, as Chief of Staff, this is his problem.

I owe him everything and have nothing to gain by flipping his desk over, Sabo reminds himself sternly.

“What a welcome committee,” he says, loud enough to carry over the room. The cheer in his voice is a hidden blade. Koala calls this his angler-fish tone and in his periphery he sees her twitch uneasily. “Glad to see how you conduct yourselves when I’m not around!”

It’s maybe slightly unfair. But he’s tired. And his staff is better-trained than this. If it’s an actual emergency, there’s protocols to follow, and this scrambling around is both time-wasting and makes them look stupid, which is slightly more unforgivable in his eyes. If it’s not an emergency, then they’re keeping him from sleeping in a bed for the first time in three days for nothing, and he’s fully prepared to take that personally.

A good two-thirds of the room has gone still and silent; the rest are the people who seem to be actually working, so he’ll take it.

“Terry,” he calls out, “fill me in, please.”

The intelligence officer doesn’t even look up from the snails he’s coaxing into position; a little Cameko and its partner Proko, neither of which are immediately familiar to Sabo at a glance.

“The Paramount War is over,” Terry says, succinctly explaining the frenetic energy that Sabo and Koala walked in on.

Sabo feels his spine straighten—in two days, there still hasn’t been any new information in the papers about the outcome of the war. The World Government has been tight-lipped and they’re clearly leaning on the press.

He and Koala hadn’t been in any position to access the broadcast of Fire Fist’s execution during their mission, but even if they had, apparently the live feed went dark at a certain point. The whole thing smacked of a cover-up.

“They stopped the broadcast but the transponder snail kept recording,” Terry goes on. “One of our moles was able to make a copy and it’s just arrived.”

“All of you are forgiven for acting insane,” Sabo declares, clapping his hands together. Koala snorts, and Hack rolls his eyes. Dragon just turns a page in the reports he’s reading, looking entirely unconcerned by the potential uncovering of a grand conspiracy, because Dragon is a soulless individual who hates fun things.

The Cameko finally settles, and the Proko’s eyes light up, and everyone’s attention flies to the video projected onto the wall. Sabo studies the scene—an incongruously sunny sky hanging above an execution scaffold, a young man on his knees with a curtain of dark hair hanging in his face, and Fleet Admiral Sengoku beside him, voice magnified by the transponder snail in his hand.

Typical of the World Government to make a production of this, Sabo thinks, disgusted. How dare they show this man’s death off like it’s a sporting event?

And he’s angry, he realizes. Angry as Sengoku goes on about Fire Fist’s true lineage, all while the pirate himself denies it. His desperate shout of “Whitebeard is the only father I have!” is drowned out by the implacable, damning truth that rings out for the world to hear:

“Your real father is Gold Roger.”

Immediately, the situation room is buzzing—this is news, big news, that Gol D. Roger had a son and he’s already made a name for himself on the Grand Line—but it’s all static to Sabo’s ears. White noise. He can’t hear anything. He’s having an out-of-body experience.

He knew that already. He knew Roger had a kid. How did he know that?

And why is he so furious he feels like he could come apart with it? That secret wasn’t Sengoku’s to tell.

In the recording, Fire Fist has yet to lift his head, kneeling there behind those crossed swords, but the defeated slump of his shoulders and the painful clench of his hands makes Sabo want to scream.

That’s not what he should look like. That’s not where he belongs.

Fire Fist Ace, Second Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates. He’s smiling in his Wanted posters, a devilish smirk that gives the game away that he’s every bit as dangerous as his bounty suggests. The combination of that wicked expression, and his dark complexion, and the freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose always causes Sabo’s gut to clench unpleasantly. He doesn’t give the posters more than a passing glance when he sees them because they make him feel oddly seasick. Homesick. Something.

But now the picture’s burned into his mind. He can’t blink it away.

Suddenly, he can see that smile and those freckles on a much younger face. A tangle of dark hair, always a little too long, because he hated letting grown-ups near his head with scissors and he didn’t trust his brothers not to make him look stupid on purpose. Tiny hands clenched around a length of heavy metal piping, strong enough to do whatever damage he needed them to, still learning how to be gentle.

Ace. The name surfaces from the bottom of his heart, but it doesn’t belong to a stranger anymore. It’s not some random Whitebeard pirate, not some distant, unrelated prisoner about to meet his end at the hands of the corrupted World Government.

Ace, he thinks, and it comes to him in a sunburst. A supernova. My brother.

“—bo? Sabo?” Koala’s voice beside him makes him jump. He realizes she’s shaking his arm, that she’s probably been saying his name over and over. “You’re going to hyperventilate if you keep this up, Sabo. Breathe.”

He breathes. He’s in the back of the room and a few people are eyeing him in concern, but everyone else is still watching the projection in the front. He’s free to press the heel of his hand against his sternum and try to force steel into his heart.

It doesn’t work. For all of his training, for everything he’s seen and done up to this point and everything he’s survived, he can’t keep the panic from corroding his good sense like acid.

Oh god, he thinks helplessly, as the situation in the video rapidly deteriorates, the Whitebeard pirates arriving to stake their claim and the Marines refusing to give ground and his brother, his brother, caught in the middle of it all. Oh god, don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t let him die.

But it’s pointless. Sabo is watching this from the future. He’s standing here where he’s completely useless, where he can’t do anything that matters, miles and days away from the spot where his—where Ace—

“Ace!” His own voice, young and rough, right on the edge of laughter. He’s a child, standing on a lopsided wooden dock where a ramshackle-looking fishing boat is moored. He’s happy to see his friend break out of the dense woods and make his way down to the cove at a jog. “You finally showed up! Took you long enough.”

His brother blows out an annoyed huff, bare feet thudding across the wheezing, sun-bleached planks. He knocks his shoulder into Sabo’s as soon as he’s close enough. His affection masquerades as antagonism because that’s the best he knows how to do, but Sabo can tell the difference.

“Yeah, yeah. I told you to go ahead without me. It’s not like I don’t know how to swim.”

A smaller body collides with both of them, arms wrapping around them in a way that defies physics, but it isn’t alarming. It isn’t even weird. If anything, Sabo thinks it’s cute.

“No way! We had to wait for you!” another familiar voice says petulantly. “We have to go together, dummy!”

“Oh, you’re the last person who can call me a dummy, Lu!”

“Sabo, I’m not above dragging you to the infirmary,” Koala says, squeezing his wrist. “You’re freaking me out.”

“I’m fine,” he says, or he thinks he says that. He says something, probably. He doesn’t know.

His entire life is in upheaval. Memories he’s suppressed for the last ten years are inching their way back, making room for themselves, painting everything else he knows in a new light.

Some of it trickles back slowly, reluctantly, like water picking its way around a bend—a locked door, barred windows, uncomfortable family photos. Running through the streets while the world burned down outside the kingdom walls, searching desperately for someone, anyone, a single person who might care.

The rest comes roaring through like a flood. A treehouse at the top of the mountain, where they could see for miles. Racing through the city with his pockets full of stolen gold, laughing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath, certain he’s won their bet of who could score the biggest. That stormy night spent clustered in the hollow of a giant tree because they didn’t make it home before the sky cracked open. His little brother had fallen asleep as soon as they stopped moving around, as he was wont to do, his head nestled comfortably on Sabo’s shoulder. Sabo stayed awake, and watched Ace spend the better part of an hour coaxing a fire to life in a pile of scavenged sticks and damp leaves, just to keep them warm.

There’s another sudden arrival on the screen. A boy falls from the sky and an entire, presumably stolen, warship falls with him. It’s a ridiculous, explosive entrance to the stage, and it puts everyone on the back foot. He’s tiny next to the titanic Whitebeard—tiny next to everyone on the Marineford—but appearances are deceiving.

This is Straw Hat Luffy, the rookie making waves across the sea, the pirate who inexplicably broke into and then out of Impel Down, for reasons known only to himself.

No. No, the reason he did that is obvious. It’s exactly the kind of thing he would do. He’s just the same now as he’s always been, inexhaustible, inexorable, brought up by the do-or-die laws of the jungle and two big brothers who never taught him to know when to quit.

Luffy, who feels too strongly and loves too hard and dreams too big. Luffy, who walked right into Hell for his brother because it wouldn’t occur to him to do any less. Luffy, little Luffy, always running after them. The other half of Sabo's heart slotting neatly into place.

Luffy throws up his arms and calls Ace’s name, as if he’s exhilarated to have made it in time. He is the only one happy about this development.

For the first time since he was brought out onto the scaffold, Ace surges forward against his chains. His expression is wretched before it screws up into a snarl.

“This has nothing to do with you,” he bellows, loud enough to be heard across the plaza, over the heads of hundreds of soldiers. “I don’t want your help! Get the hell out of here!” 

He sounds angry, properly furious, and scared out of his mind. Sabo feels a moment of hysterical camaraderie. The mind-numbing dread Sabo felt at seeing Ace on the execution scaffold has nothing on the absolute terror of watching their baby brother show up there.

Luffy claims Ace for the entire world to hear, and Sengoku reveals his parentage, too—he’s the son of the worst criminal in the world, Sabo’s own boss. If he weren’t having a dozen panic attacks all at once he would have more of a reaction to that, probably. He’s definitely going to put a pin in it for later.

It feels like he died and came back to life and now he’s dying again. It feels like he’s gone entirely insane. His brothers are in danger and he’s standing back and watching like it’s a theater performance. He hates this. He hates this. He can’t tear his eyes away.

When the recording comes to an end, the last thing Sabo sees is Akainu burning a chunk out of Luffy’s chest. Ace’s desperate scream is still ringing in his ears.

The room around him is full of some of the brightest minds in the world, and they’re already deep in discussion. They’re mulling over what they’ve seen, what they’ve learned about Fire First and Straw Hat, what this means for the next generation, what the World Government is going to do next.

None of them are asking the important question, so Sabo takes it upon himself to direct them. He is their Chief of Staff, after all.

“Where are they?” he demands. “Find them. Now.”

[goodlucktai]

the future’s a mystery and anything goes

@officiallyasl 2022 day 5; freedom

read on ao3

this is set in the smile again au :^)

x

When Ace was a child, he didn’t see a future for himself at all. The world was too big and he was all alone, and he had no idea how to visualize a life that could be worth all the shit he put up with just to live it.

It was like he was living in a cage and every day it got smaller and even if he did manage to grow up wouldn’t he just be suffocating the entire time?

Then he met Sabo, quick as a whip and twice as clever. Sabo had a chipped tooth from the time one of his dad’s friends slammed his face into a table and a healthy disdain for authority because of the environment he was raised in. He would disagree with anything a grown-up said just for the pleasure of picking a fight.

Ace was angry and lonely and spiteful—Sabo was all of those things given the sharp edge of purpose.

When they had only known each other for two months and some change, a stranger followed them into an alley and grabbed Ace by the arm, trying to haul him off to god-knows-where. Ace’s brain didn’t even have a chance to catch up before Sabo was throwing his entire body into action—he collided with Ace hard enough to knock him clean out of the stanger’s hands, then scrambled back to his feet and dragged Ace back up with him.

He was tiny at eight years old, and terrified, and so pissed off that Ace half-expected him to burst into flames.

“Touch him again and I’ll kill you!” Sabo screamed, shaking hands clenched into fists. “That’s my brother!”

Suddenly, growing up didn’t seem like such an impossible thing. The world was way too big for one discarded kid, but it was just the right size for the two of them. His cage door swung open and Ace could take a big deep breath for the first time in ages.

And then a little over a year later, Ace’s grandpa showed up at Dadan’s place to leave her another check and another kid, with about as much ceremony as someone coming around to drop off some mail they’d gotten in their letterbox by mistake.

“Where’d you come from, anyway?” Ace asked, over the muffled sound of Garp and Dadan screaming at each other in the hallway.

“I used to live at the bar!” the kid said cheerfully. “Makino watched me! She was nice! But the lady from the state told Gramps that I couldn’t stay there anymore.”

Luffy had brown skin that was a few shades darker than Ace’s olive complexion, and a head of messy dark hair, and big brown eyes that gazed around the unfamiliar apartment curiously. It was pretty clear that the kid was used to being dumped in random places.

His skinny arms were covered in bandaids. There was a curving scar under his left eye.

Ace watched him for a second longer—the way his eyes darted toward the door and he tugged nervously at his fingers every time the grown-ups’ voice got particularly loud—and made a decision he was certain he would come to regret.

“They’re stupid, so they’ll be at it for awhile,” Ace said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

Little Luffy was completely trusting, happy to follow Ace wherever.

There was no way that Sabo wasn’t going to go on a vigilante warpath the second he met this kid. With his unhinged sense of justice when it comes to children and the cruel adults that put their hands on them, he was gonna take one look at Luffy, introduced to him as their new sibling, and come unglued.

They climbed out the broken window in Dadan’s room onto the fire escape. It was a big metal death-trap and liked to shriek a metallic warning every time Ace took the steps a little too hard. He didn’t want Luffy to be scared, so he made it more of a game than he usually did, and Luffy was giggling by the time they finally made it to the ground.

Sabo was waiting at their clubhouse, a twenty-minute walk away even when there wasn’t a little kid tagging along, and the sidewalks would be crowded and hectic. Ace took Luffy’s hand to make sure he didn’t get lost.

And he never really let go of him again.  

After that, it seemed like the life ahead of them was a given. He had to make it there because Sabo was counting on him—because Luffy depended on them both—and Ace would never abandon them as long as he lived.

“We’ll do it together,” Sabo said the night he convinced Ace they didn’t need anybody else to survive, as much a force of nature at ten years old as when he was eight and screaming down a grown man four times his size for daring to lay a hand on his friend. “We can do anything.”

Ace believed him. Sabo offered his hand and Ace put his whole heart in it.

And now here he is, living in someone else’s future. He never imagined he’d be doing this on his own.

The apartment door creaks softly when Ace pushes it open, and again when it closes. The deadbolt slides home with a friendly, familiar click, and that last little bit of tension in his shoulders finally deserts him. The living room is warm, half-lit, and smells like garlic and chilies from what must have been dinner.

Ace kicks off his work boots, drops his keys in the dish on the console table, tosses his jacket over the back of a chair—and that’s about when he notices his brother slumped sideways on the sofa, gazing at Ace over the top of his bright yellow Switch.

“Hi,” Luffy says with a cheeky grin that Ace has literally built his entire life around.

“Uh, hi,” Ace replies, crossing his arms. “Funny meeting you here, at two o’clock in the morning, on a school night.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Zoro stole all the covers again. And Sanji came over and made vaca atolada for dinner, extra hot. There’s leftovers in the fridge.”

“Don’t you dare try to butter me up with food.”

Despite himself, Ace ruffles Luffy’s mop of hair on his way past him to the tiny kitchen. The promised beef stew is waiting in a covered pyrex dish he didn’t even know he owned, along with another dish full of rice, and he grabs both.

Luffy hops over the back of the couch and wanders across the room to seat himself on a stool at the little dining bar. He plops his chin on top of his folded arms and watches Ace’s hands as he goes through the motions of filling a plate. The lamp in the living room and the little light in the range hood above the stove are all they have to see by, but neither of them bother to flip the overhead lights on. They’re used to living with less.

“Zoro stayed over again?” Ace asks, sliding a plate into the microwave.

“Yeah. His new group home sucks, but not as much as the last one.”

Calling their apartment a shoebox is generous, and probably an insult to shoeboxes, but Ace points at Luffy with a spoon and says, “He’s family. He can come over whenever he wants. There’s plenty of room.”  

It makes Luffy grin, that ear-to-ear number that dimples his cheeks and makes the scar under his eye pucker. He doesn’t sit up, just sort of bobs his head in a nod without lifting his chin. He knows already. Zoro and Sanji, Usopp and Nami, little Chopper, they all come and go as they please, bringing along their homework and video games and tricky recipes and sometimes little heartaches and sometimes big fucking problems. It wouldn’t make sense to ask them to leave any of that at the door. They’re Luffy’s family, which means they’re Ace’s, too, and while he might have a pretty skewed sense of what that means, he thinks he’s doing an okay job of making sure all of these lonely kids know they have someplace to go.  

“Wanna talk about why you’re really awake?” Ace asks, leaning on his elbows.

Luffy thins his lips and rocks his head side-to-side this time, clearly a “no thank you, mind your own business” but Ace can out-stubborn him any day of the week. Ace learned from the best.

For a minute, there’s only the sound of the microwave humming behind them, the tinny music of the game Luffy abandoned on the sofa, the sounds of traffic outside the window, muted from the second floor but as constant and steady as everything else about the city.

Then Luffy says, “It’s stupid. You were late. Usually you text when you’re gonna be late, but you didn’t. And I kept thinking that you usually text. So I couldn’t sleep.”

There’s something dawning on him, something slow encroaching and terrible, but Ace doesn’t make the connection right away. He blinks, pushing away from the counter slightly, and says, “Yeah, I’m sorry. My phone died. It’s like four years old, the battery life is shit these days.”

Luffy is nodding already, not looking at him. “Sanji said that probably happened. Zoro said we could call your project manager but I didn’t want to get you in trouble. I knew I was being stupid.”

“Stop saying that,” Ace says, some close relative of anger fluttering in his chest. “You’re not stupid. Sometimes our brains decide to freak us out just for the thrill of it. And I gave you all those numbers for a reason—if you think you need to call, you call.”

Ace hasn’t worked with his crew very long, but they’re all good, dependable guys. If Marco got a call from one of his workers’ worried kids in the middle of the night, he would sooner take a bullet to the chest than he would say or do anything to upset them further.

He’s opening his mouth to explain this when Luffy raises a hand to rub at his eyes, and Ace realizes that they’re glassy with tears. His mouth snaps shut, hard enough it hurts his teeth. Behind him, the microwave beeps and then goes dark.

Luffy used to be a crybaby but he’s largely grown out of that. These days the sight of it is so disarming that it’s enough to knock Ace off his feet, emotionally speaking.

He’s up and around the counter the second his brain is back online, turning Luffy by his shoulders so that the stool seat swivels to face him.

“Hey,” Ace says quickly, jumping straight into ‘fix this immediately, no matter what the personal or financial cost’ mode, the most dangerous and destructive of all modes, “if this is because I didn’t text, I really am sorry. I’ll replace my phone tomorrow. It won’t happen again.”

“It’s not that,” Luffy says, slightly grumpy the way he always is when someone’s hovering. He’s not self-conscious, because he’s generally impossible to embarrass in any situation ever, but he does look like he really wishes he hadn’t started crying in front of the one person who would literally die before they would entertain the idea of just letting it go. He reaches up to one of the hands Ace has on his shoulders, digging his fingers into Ace’s sleeve, and says, more to the counter than to anyone else, “Sabo was late that day. He never came home.”

That awful, slow-reaching understanding finally crests, crashing over him like high tide on the shore.

He pulls Luffy half-off the barstool into a tight embrace, arms around his shoulders, one hand buried in his hair. He feels his little brother’s stringy arms wrap around his middle in turn and Luffy shoves his face into Ace’s dusty work shirt.

It’s not that he forgets about Sabo. It’s not like he’s gone a single day without missing him. It’s just that he’s grown up with that grief, has grown around it the way trees and vines grow through buildings and machines left abandoned in the woods. It’s still there, but it’s packed away, and Ace is so busy working and paying bills and cooking meals and raising a motley crew of damaged, deranged teenagers, that sometimes it doesn’t get unpacked again for awhile.

And then there are these moments, where that hurt comes out of nowhere like it’s still brand-new, raw and fresh and bleeding.

“Next time,” Ace says into Luffy’s hair, “call every single number you have until you find me. Do whatever you have to. Kick down doors. Start a riot.”

“Okay,” Luffy says, sounding very young.

“I’m sorry I scared you, Lu. But I swear, I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me. The two of us, we’re a team. We got out, we got free, and now all that’s left is the rest of our lives.” He lets go just enough to lean back, and Luffy looks up at him, as bright and trusting as he was the day they met. “And Sabo’s right here with us, because he lives where we live. He’s watching over us all the time. That’s what brothers do.”

Zoro comes wandering down the hall a little while later, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and it only takes him like ten seconds to convince Luffy to go back to bed. Ace re-reheats his food and eats it mechanically and mentally restructures his schedule tomorrow around replacing his phone first thing in the morning.

I’m doing my best, and I’ll just keep doing my best, and that’ll be enough, he thinks. I’m never going to let either of you down.

“Watch me, Sabo,” he says. He imagines that his brother, co-conspirator, partner in crime, and very best friend can hear it, wherever he is, and the thought makes him smile.

This isn’t the future he imagined, but it’s the one he’s got. And he’s goddamn lucky to have it.

##

Physical therapy is painful and frustrating. His progress limps along inch by inch. There are years-old burn scars covering the left side of his face. He’s mostly blind in that eye.

He doesn’t know any of the people who come to see him. The doctors’ faces all swim together, variations of the same amorphous creature. They say that retrograde amnesia is not entirely uncommon, that the memories might come back in time.

Little things have come back already; inconsequential flashes of memory that he treasures beyond all reason. A busy, smoggy city under a gray sky. The ticking of bicycle tires, wheels turning so fast the spokes are a blur. The smear of brightly-colored paints. A grassy hill beside the ocean. Tiny things. Not enough to build the person he used to be.

It’s a miracle that there’s no brain damage, that he woke up at all. Be kinder to yourself, the nurses say, when he grits his teeth through another grueling session of forcing his atrophied limbs to bear his weight and drag him forward, you have plenty of time now.

But he doesn’t have time. He needs to get better, he needs to stand up. He needs to go home, wherever home is. He’ll get there, even if he has to drag himself on his hands and knees.

“Watch me,” he whispers, but he doesn’t know who he’s talking to.

[officiallyasl]

It's the final countdown! Three more days until #aslbrothersweek2022 👒🔥🎩

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[officiallyasl]

Set your alarms for tomorrow! Only one more day until #aslbrothersweek2022 👒🔥🎩

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