#koala also gets bitten by sabo and she has to get used to it at some point

[beanghostprincess]

i think sabo got the habit of biting as a love language from luffy and ace and now every time they see each other sabo will go chomp chomp on luffy's cheek and luffy will go nom nom on sabo's arm and everyone around them witnesses two of the most influential men in present history biting each other like lunatics

[hollowistheworld]

Never Say Never Say Never

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Sabo misses one New Year's party and apparently he misses all the important family updates.

A lot of people wanted to know how Sabo felt about this dating thing, so here’s a quick one-shot of him finding out. 

“Koala,” Sabo protested in a tone that was definitely not a whine, “I have to go. Do you know how much of a douche it’ll make me if I’m late to my own brother’s birthday dinner?”

Koala added another laptop charger to the bundle already in his arms. “No one in your family has ever been on time for anything. You’ll live.”

Sabo scowled at her, though it didn’t matter because she’d already gone back to rummaging around in the cabinets. “I thought deep cleans were supposed to be done in the spring.”

“It’s the new year, Sabo. I’ve put up with all of this garbage for too long. You said you’d help me clear it out, and now you’re going to.”

Sabo frowned down at the steadily growing pile of wires and cords and boxes and who knew what else that kept appearing from their apparently bottomless cabinets. “I didn’t think you meant on the first. It’s a holiday, you know.” He was not pouting.

“Only for white collar workers.” Koala reemerged and added several more cords to Sabo’s arms. “There. Finally. What, were they breeding in there?”

“They must have been. I don’t think we have a phone that goes with that one,” Sabo said, nodding vaguely to one of the charger cords.

Koala waved him off. “Go see which of those don’t work and then you can go.”

“I don’t remember you getting promoted over me, Koala.”

She raised an eyebrow and held eye contact with him for an impressively long time. Sabo could withstand one of her stares better than anyone else she knew. Sometimes he could even outlast her.

Not today though, apparently. “Alright, alright,” he said, surrendering. “What are you doing?”

She gestured at the main computer. “Clearing all the useless files off of this thing. So be glad I gave you the easy job, okay?”

Sabo stuck his tongue out at her and went to find an outlet to start testing the cords in.

It wasn’t too bad, once he started working at it. Half the cords could be tossed out without being tried; they were frayed or cracked or had tooth marks (from what, Sabo couldn’t even guess). A few were a pain, sending him on a wild goose chase for something to plug them into, but he was still done in under forty-five minutes, leaving him with plenty of time to meet Luffy and Ace at Sanji’s restaurant, as long as he got a decent cab driver. He'd mostly said he might be late in the hopes of convincing Koala to let him skip out on helping her clean.

“I’m leaving, Koala!” he shouted back into the store, front door already half open, not intending to give her a chance to find something else for him to do.

“I expect you to come in early tomorrow to help me finish!” she yelled back, and Sabo shut the door in a hurry, already planning to insist he’d been gone before she’d said it.

He loved his job, and he loved Koala, but he wasn’t going to spend one second more cleaning than he absolutely had to. That wasn’t why he’d joined up.

Knowing Koala would likely blow a gasket if she was bothered by someone who didn’t know how to read a CLOSED sign, Sabo locked the door behind him and made sure the sign announcing the store as DRAGON ELECTRONICS was turned off before turning to find a cab.

He’d probably have been more willing to help Koala clean if they’d been cleaning stuff up in the important parts of the store. Down in the basement - which was actually a much nicer workspace than the store above - shredding documents they no longer needed and couldn’t risk anyone finding, organizing files that had been left scattered across desks for far too long, or checking that the computers were still up to date and secure.

Sabo didn’t know how the electronics store itself, which was just a cover for an entirely different sort of business, could possibly have generated so much clutter in just a year. It rarely even got more than two customers in a day, though those customers had an uncanny ability to walk in at the worst possible times. Listening to people complain about their computers catching viruses from visiting sites they had no business visiting was a drag at the best of times; it was worse when they had ten minutes to get out of the building before their chance to get corrupt-rich-bastard-of-the-month taken down vanished.

Sabo shook his head to clear it. He had to be careful about thinking about work while outside of work, or he ran the risk of saying something he shouldn’t in front of Ace and Luffy - and once Luffy knew a secret it was only a matter of time before the word spread. He could be persuaded to keep his mouth shut if one could impress the seriousness of the secret on him, but Sabo would prefer to just avoid the problem altogether.

Ace, meanwhile, would probably burst a blood vessel if he ever found out that Sabo’s ‘boring IT desk job’ was a cover for what could generously be called a vigilante gig. His big brother instincts tended to only kick on in extreme situations, but Sabo was willing to bet committing felonies would be enough to set them off. And Ace would notice if Sabo let something slip that he hadn’t meant to, unlike Luffy, who could be easily distracted.

Sabo was just grateful that Garp rarely came up to visit for anything besides Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving, and a summer camping trip. He’d kick Sabo’s ass through half the city if he knew what Sabo really did for a paycheck.

So Sabo carefully but quickly, with the efficiency that came from years of practice, boxed up all of his thoughts about work that went beyond ‘Koala’s making me help her clean the store and it’s a nightmare’. By the time the cab stopped at the curve Sabo was fully back into the persona of ‘the best behaved brother’, a position he had worked hard to maintain. He would also argue he deserved it even with his job - he may have been breaking the most laws of the three of them, but he had better intentions than either of his ‘chaos storm’ brothers, as Dadan had used to call them. And everyone always said that he was the most polite.

Sabo entered the restaurant and made his way to the usual table, where Ace and Luffy were already sitting, Luffy staring towards the kitchen with laser focus.

“Look at you two, being on time for once,” Sabo teased with a grin.

Ace was frowning at Luffy rather than joining him in staring at the kitchen in anticipation, which struck Sabo as odd. All three of them tended to hyper-focus on food, and it was generally a bad sign when something could distract them from it.

“Marco gave us a ride,” Ace told him, still eyeing Luffy, tone distracted. “He had to come out this way anyway, to talk to Doma about one of the dogs.”

“So he dragged your asses out of the house kicking and screaming, I take it?”

Ace finally looked at him, grinning a little. “Luffy went kicking and screaming. I can be easily bribed.”

Sabo knew it. Marco didn’t seem to have a lot of interest in getting Ace to do much of anything most of the time, but when he was interested Ace rarely lasted more than a few minutes against him. Sabo figured that was probably a good thing - if Ace was allowed to run out the full gambit of his stubbornness his partner would probably murder him in cold blood. And he’d deserve it.

Sabo slid into the booth next to Ace, sidling up closer to his brother than he usually did. Being close to any of the three brothers during a meal was dangerous - every one of them had bitten at least one person who had gotten too close to their food over the course of their lives. Most often, it had been each other. Luffy was lucky to not have scars in the shape of Ace’s teeth marks.

But food hadn’t arrived yet, so Sabo was safe for a little while longer. And Luffy was thoroughly distracted by the prospect of dinner incoming, so he was unlikely to eavesdrop.

Not that Luffy was much good at eavesdropping anyway. Eavesdropping required at least a little bit of subtlety, and Luffy and subtle didn’t have so much as a passing acquaintanceship.

“What’s going on?” Sabo asked in a low voice, just loud enough for Ace to hear over all the background noise of the restaurant.

“Huh?”

Sabo rolled his eyes. “You’re looking at Luffy like he’s grown an extra head. What’d he do?” Sabo would have thought they were immune to Luffy’s oddities by now. Sabo had over a decade’s worth of exposure, and Ace had twice that. What could Luffy pull out of his hat that wasn’t some variation on something they’d seen a hundred times before?

Ace shook his head. “You are not going to believe this.”

There wasn’t much Sabo wasn’t ready and willing to believe in. “Try me.”

Ace shook his head harder. His expression was complicated - Ace’s expressions often were - but Sabo had had years and years to learn how to read them. There was fondness, exasperation, a little bit of annoyance, and a lot of disbelief. “Luffy’s dating someone.” He kept his voice low, so that Luffy - now chatting to one of the waiters who had made the mistake of passing too close to their table while collecting empty glasses - wouldn’t hear him, but the words seemed to burst out of him all the same.

Sabo raised an eyebrow. “Dating someone?” he repeated. That didn’t seem likely at all. Luffy had never once expressed an interest in dating. He was scornful of soulmate bonds, and beyond that he’d always seemed vaguely skeptical of the idea of romance or crushes. He’d certainly never showed any interest in trying it out for himself.

Ace nodded. “You remember that doctor with the gang tattoos?”

Sabo considered once more telling Ace that he was in no position to be judging other people’s tattoos, but decided it wasn’t really the time. “Yeah, the one whose dog we watched at Christmas, right?”

“That’s him.”

“What about him?” Sabo glanced at Luffy - if Sanji didn’t hurry up with dinner he was going to break into the kitchen - and back at Ace. “Luffy’s not…?”

“Yeah. Announced it last night. This morning. Whatever. At the party.”

Ace and Luffy had spent last night - New Year’s eve - at Whitebeard’s place, at one of their impressive parties. Sabo hadn’t gone, desperate to catch up on his sleep after a string of bad luck had nearly landed Hack in prison. And then he'd been nice and come in to help Koala with the cleanup from all that, and she'd tricked him into helping her clean up the literal mess of the storefront. See if he every volunteered to help her with something again.

“How long has that been going on?”

Ace shrugged one shoulder. “Not that long. At Christmas I - Luffy, where do you think you’re going?”

Luffy had sprung up from the table. “I’m gonna go find Sanji.”

There was no time to protest. Luffy could really move when he wanted to, even if he wasn’t actually running. He was halfway across the restaurant before Sabo or Ace had finished hearing what he’d said.

Ace waved him off. “He’s lucky he’s got a friend who’s a cook. Anyone else would have banned him ages ago.”

Sabo laughed. “Pretty sure he is banned from every restaurant between here and our place.”

“Probably. Anyway, as I was saying - I ran into the guy at Chopper’s birthday party. Law was getting fucking smashed at the bar, having a crisis about soulmates.” He looked at Sabo expectantly.

Sabo looked back, confused, for a few long seconds, and then his eyes widened. “Luffy’s that guy’s soulmate?” It shouldn’t have surprised him so badly, really. Just because Luffy didn’t have a soulmate didn’t mean anything about someone else having him for one. But it was still strange to even imagine.

It wasn’t personal towards Trafalgar Law. Sabo would have felt equally shocked no matter who Ace had said it was. With the possible exception of Zoro. Sabo could have believed Zoro had Luffy for a soulmate, he thought. But the idea of anyone else made his brain buck a little.

“Yeah. Not even two weeks after Trafalgar gets done telling me about how he can’t ever see himself dating his soulmate he’s sitting on our fucking couch holding Luffy’s hand, with Luffy’s damn name written on his arm.”

Sabo paused a second, distracted from the point. “It’s Luffy’s name? That’s his soulmate mark?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Nothing, it’s just…” Sabo laughed a little. “God, that’s so cliche.”

Ace smirked, and it broadened until he was laughing too. “Christ , I know, right? Poor guy. He said it didn’t start as Luffy’s name, but can you imagine going through life with something that boring for your soulmate mark and then that comes hurtling into your life?” When he said ‘that’ he gestured towards the kitchen, where Luffy was no doubt making a nuisance of himself.

The two of them laughed, trying to be quiet at first, then realizing Luffy wasn’t there to overhear and demand to know what was so funny, and they grew louder and louder until they were doubled over the table, clutching their sides and getting funny, judgmental looks from the other restaurant patrons.

Sabo recovered first, wheezing and hiccuping back to sanity in fits and bursts. “Okay, okay,” he managed, struggling not to start laughing all over again at the sight of Ace still giggling to himself. “Does Luffy at least seem happy with him?”

Ace shrugged. “Dude, it’s Luffy. He seems happy with everyone.”

That was a fair point. “Happy dating him. Like, Law’s not being… I don’t know, weird about it? He’s not trying any shit about how Luffy has to do whatever he wants because he’s his soulmate?” It was hard to imagine Luffy allowing somebody to be a dick to him for any reason, soulmate mark included, but Sabo was his older brother. He was supposed to worry about things like that.

“Not that I saw.” Ace took a drink of water and reached for the table’s pitcher to refill his glass. “I don’t even know if Luffy knows they're soulmates.”

“Should we tell him?”

Ace shrugged again, but with a more serious look on his face this time. This was one of the things he’d been thinking about while he’d been staring at Luffy. “I don’t know. You’re better at this relationship crap. What do you think?”

“How am I the one who’s good at relationships? Apparently, I’m the only single one.”

Ace made a broad, vague gesture with one arm. “Not just dating. You’re better with people. It’s why you’re in retail.”

Sabo was nowhere near good enough with people to really be in retail, but he didn’t say so to Ace. “This just started last night?” he asked instead.

“Yeah, far as I know. And like I said, Trafalgar was having his life crisis at Christmas time, so it couldn’t have been much longer than that anyway.”

Sabo glanced back towards the kitchen. Luffy had reappeared, walking backwards, as though he had to guide Sanji to their table. “Let’s give him a couple of days. If he doesn’t tell Luffy about it, we’ll know he’s a bastard, and we’ll send his ass back to kingdom come.”

“And if he does tell Luffy?”

“Then we’ll play it by ear. Come on, this is Luffy we’re talking about. If Law pisses him off we’ll be able to hear him complaining about it from space.”

Luffy reached the table, Sanji and dinner in tow, and Sabo slid a safe distance away from his brother. It wasn’t surprising that Ace was so concerned. In addition to his - their whole family’s - complicated tangle of emotions regarding soulmate bonds, Ace just didn’t trust other people very easily, particularly not where his brothers were concerned. He was always worrying about the sort of people Luffy was hanging out with, if they were trustworthy, if they might take advantage of Luffy’s friendly, trusting nature.

Sabo worried about that sometimes, but mostly he tended to worry about what he considered to be more realistic concerns - like Luffy falling off a building while parkouring around town and splitting his head open on the concrete. Maybe dating a doctor would be for the best.

“So, Luffy,” Sabo said as the three of them began digging into their dinners. “I hear you have a boyfriend?”

Despite having his mouth full, Luffy grinned.