Still Hot, Little Brother

The first thing Ace understood was that he was underwater, and that he was not drowning, and for a long, stupid minute he could not decide which of those two facts was more impossible. There was a ceiling of riveted steel above him, painted a cheerful yellow that had chipped at the seams. A lamp swung gently from a chain. Somewhere beyond the wall, a pump knocked like a slow heart, and under everything ran the low pressure hum of a hull holding back the whole weight of the ocean. A submarine. He was in a submarine, which made no sense, because the last thing he remembered was heat. Not his heat. Never his. Magma. He sat up, and the world tore down the middle. Pain went through him like a dropped anvil. He folded over it, gasping, and found his hands pressing into thick layers of gauze wound around him from his collarbone to his belly, back and front. Beneath the gauze, the flesh felt wrong, tight and hot and stitched. He remembered Akainu's fist coming toward him, and he remembered moving, though not why or how. He remembered someone's shoulder slamming into his, a blur of blue, the smell of burning hair. Then nothing. "Don't do that," said a voice. "I'd rather not open you up again. Once was tedious enough." A man was sitting in a chair by the door with a long sword propped against his shoulder and a spotted fur hat pulled low. Dark circles under his eyes. Tattoos across his knuckles that spelled out a word Ace could only half read from this angle. "Who," Ace managed. "Trafalgar Law. Surgeon. You're welcome." The man didn't move. "Your back took a glancing blow from a Logia that specializes in killing other Logias. Most of the damage went sideways because someone shoved you. You're alive because I'm good at my job and because you're too stubborn to listen to your own vital signs." Someone shoved you. Ace's mind flicked through faces like cards. Marco, maybe. Jinbe. The memory was still smoke. Then the real thought arrived, the only one that mattered, and he was already trying to swing his legs off the cot. "Luffy." Law sighed, as if he had been waiting for this and found it boring. He jerked his chin toward the far side of the room. There was a second cot. Ace had not seen it because he had not looked, because his eyes had gone to the ceiling and the stranger and the door, the way they always did, the way a pirate's eyes were trained. Now he looked. His little brother lay under a thin blanket with his arms bandaged to the shoulders and his face bruised so badly it had gone the color of a plum. Someone had set the straw hat on the small table beside him, crown down, the way you'd set something precious that you couldn't bear to hang on a hook. Luffy's chest rose and fell. It rose and fell again. Ace stopped trying to stand. He sat on the edge of the cot with his hands loose on his knees and watched his brother breathe, and the submarine hummed around them, and for a while that was the only thing in the world he could do. "How long," he said finally. "Two weeks for you. He woke up three days ago. He tore out two IV lines and nearly broke one of my crew's arms trying to get out. He thought you were dead." Law said it flatly, but there was something under it, a careful weight. "He saw you go down. You were in a strange position, from where he stood. Your blood was all over him. Then you stopped answering. He lost consciousness before Jinbe got both of you onto my ship." Ace closed his eyes. "Nobody told him?" "I told him. Jinbe told him. He didn't believe us." Law stood and picked up his sword. "He said Ace would never lie still that long if he was alive. Then he screamed until I sedated him. That was this morning. He'll be waking up soon." He paused in the doorway. "I'd prefer if nobody screamed this time. Bepo has sensitive ears." The door closed behind him with a hiss. Ace stayed where he was. His hands had started to shake, and he did not trust them, and he did not trust his voice. Of all the things he had imagined in Impel Down, the cold long nights in Level Six with the chains biting his wrists and the guards betting on the date of his execution, he had imagined this moment more than any other. Seeing Luffy again. In some versions he was angry, in some he was proud. In none of them had he imagined that Luffy would believe him dead. He knew exactly what that was like. He had been ten years old once, staring at the smoke rising over Goa where a small boat had burned with Sabo inside it. He had carried that smoke in his lungs for ten years. He would not let Luffy carry it for seven minutes longer. Luffy stirred. It started with his fingers, curling on the blanket. Then his breath changed, and his brows pulled together, and he made a small sound in his throat that Ace recognized from a hundred nights in Dadan's hut, when the kid had nightmares and refused to admit it in the morning. "Ace," Luffy mumbled. Not a greeting. A wound. "Ace. Ace." "Hey." Ace's voice cracked. "Hey, I'm here." Luffy's eyes opened. He stared at the ceiling first, the way Ace had. Then his head turned on the pillow, slowly, and he found Ace sitting on the opposite cot, three steps away, bandaged, alive. Nothing in Luffy's face moved. "No," he said. "Luffy." "No. Stop it." His voice was flat and very young. "I keep seeing you. When I close my eyes. You do this. You sit there and you say my name and then I wake up properly and you're not there." "I'm here." "That's what you say every time." Luffy pushed himself up on his bandaged arms, and Ace saw how badly it hurt him, saw the effort it cost, and still Luffy did it. "You died. I was holding you. Your back was all burned and you said thank you for loving me, and then you..." Ace frowned. He didn't remember saying that. He remembered thinking it, maybe, while the magma came at him. The words had been right there, behind his teeth, ready to be the last thing. And then someone had shoved him and the fist had gone wide and his body had hit the ground and the world went dark before he could say anything at all. Luffy had seen him fall, covered in his blood, eyes closed. Luffy had filled in the rest. The idiot had written him a death scene. "I didn't say that," Ace said. Luffy blinked. "I didn't say anything. I passed out like a moron with my face in the dirt. Somebody tackled me. I think it was Jinbe, he's built like a wall." Ace laughed, and it hurt, and he kept laughing anyway. "Thank you for loving me? Seriously? You think I'd go out on something that sappy? With Gramps standing right there?" Luffy's mouth opened. "I'd have said something way cooler," Ace went on, because now he couldn't stop. "Something about the One Piece. Or I'd have told you to look after my hat. I'd at least have said something rude about Akainu's face." "You," Luffy said. Ace lifted his hand. It took a few tries; there was not much left in him. Then a single small flame bloomed at the tip of his index finger, wavering, the color of a candle at a window. It lit the yellow wall and the steel ceiling and the bruises on his brother's face. "See?" he said softly. "Still hot." Luffy looked at the flame. He looked at it for a long time. Then he came off his cot all at once, IV stand clattering, the blanket sliding to the floor, and crossed the three steps between them in a staggering lunge, and punched Ace in the shoulder as hard as a half-dead man could punch. It hurt a lot. Ace didn't mind. "You idiot!" Luffy was crying. Huge, ugly, wet sobs, snot and all, the way he'd cried at seven when a bear stole his lunch. "You stupid idiot! You jumped in front of me! Why would you do that? I came all the way there to save you and you..." "Yeah," Ace said. "I know." "Don't ever do that again!" "I won't." "Swear it!" "I swear it." Ace wrapped his arms around his brother and held on, carefully, around all the bandages, and felt Luffy's whole body shake against him like a sail in a storm. He put his face in Luffy's hair. It smelled like antiseptic and smoke. "I swear. I'm not going anywhere. You're stuck with me." Luffy cried until there was nothing left. Ace held him through it, and somewhere in the middle he realized that his own face was wet too, and that he did not care at all. Eventually Luffy's breathing evened out. He had fallen asleep again, slumped against Ace's good side with his fist still bunched in the blanket, the way he used to fall asleep against Ace's back after a long day of running away from Dadan. His mouth hung open. He was already drooling a little. The door hissed. Law looked in, took in the two of them tangled on one narrow cot, the toppled IV stand, the blanket on the floor. "I said no screaming." "That wasn't screaming," Ace said. "That was crying. Totally different." Law regarded him for a long, unreadable moment. Then he picked up the straw hat from the little table, crossed the room, and set it gently on the cot beside Luffy, crown up this time. "He kept asking for it," Law said. "When he was under. Didn't make sense to me." "It's a promise," Ace said. "It's his promise to someone." Law nodded as if that were a perfectly sensible medical explanation, and left again without another word. Ace leaned his head back against the cold steel wall. Somewhere above them, fathoms of black water pressed on the hull and the world was spinning on without them: newspapers printing his name, Marines counting their losses, a Yonko's crew deciding what to do next. He would have to face all of it. Soon. Not tonight. Tonight, he let the little flame burn on his fingertip for no reason at all, just so the room stayed warm, and listened to his brother snore.