onepiece_ficathon | winter 2015-2016 ficathon: take me with you to the sea

take me with you to the sea
A ONE PIECE FICATHON

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later, during the war—they’d called marineford a war but it wasn’t, war is something more wretched and insiduous, a long-lived thing that settles on them and in them and chews up the bodies of pirates and marines alike, takes in people and spits out bones and leaves them all with nothing—he finds out that sabo’s alive.

he finds out because sabo comes to find him, on the eve of what (ace learns later) will be a great battle. a brother he’d thought lost, a ghost from his childhood; an impossible apparition standing on the doorstep of the hovel ace occupies, bathed in the harsh too-bright light of day.

for a long moment ace only stares. thinks that this is it, the alcohol’s finally done in the last of his sanity, washed his mind away in its numbing tide. another dead brother, conjured by his guilt to make him pay.

“are you going to let me in?” sabo says.

when ace does—still staring, still shell-shocked and wordless and deeply hung over—his once-brother stares around the dark shack with faint distaste, nudges one of the empty bottles on the floor with the toe of his boot. he doesn’t pass comment, though, only says, “i thought we should talk. before i go.”

“go?” says ace, uncomprehending. “go where? you’ve only just arrived, you’re alive, all this time i thought—we both thought,” and he breaks off, then, because already he’s stepped in it, brought up the sick and awful thing they might have danced around for minutes more.

“i’m sorry,” sabo says, still looking idly around the shack, not looking at him, “that he never got to find out i was alive.”

ace doesn’t say anything. can’t say anything, throat tight and closed, doesn’t have anything to say that isn’t meaningless. what he’s done is leagues past i’m sorry, into the kind of silent guilt where even an apology would be a slur against the deed, a weak string of words in the face of a crime so great that none remain.

sabo goes on, “i couldn’t remember much of anything, after the explosion. that’s why i never went to him, or you. i didn’t remember until after the day they ran his death in the papers.”

and he looks at ace at last, gaze cold, and says: “you were supposed to take care of him.”

the words tear out of ace, despite everything. “i’m so sorry.” anything, anything, to convey the depth of his regret, his shame, how well-deserved he knows his blame to be. “i’m so sorry, sabo, i fucked up, i fucked up so bad, i was so fucking stupid, it was all my fault—”

“you’re damn right,” sabo snaps, cuts off his babbling apology. ace shrinks against the wall he’s standing by, the fire in him a damp ember compared to the fury and disgust that burn in sabo’s eyes.

a beat, and sabo twists away. drops back into something colder, denser, filling the room from wall to wall. no longer pinned by sabo’s gaze ace slumps bonelessly, watches him.

without looking back, sabo says, “they told me, when i found them. marco and the others, they told me what you did.” a pause. “before that, i thought—i thought i still had one brother left, to share the pain.”

it hits him like a physical blow. ace had thought nothing could hurt, anymore, not in the face of absolute guilt, absolute pain; but this—sabo, back from the dead, sabo, alive and no longer his brother, that hurts down to his very marrow, some old and hidden part of himself dredged up and broken open. “sabo,” he breathes.

“do you remember,” sabo says, like he hasn’t heard. “when we first met, and all the times after, when everyone would call you a demon, and say you didn’t deserve to live, and only i disagreed. i remember—i keep remembering, more and more, in pieces, and i remember how they talked about roger’s son, how they hated you just for what you were.”

“of course,” says ace, his own voice hardly reaching his ears, old pain flaring. “of course i remember.”

“i loved you,” sabo says, and ace’s mouth is dry. “they hated you, but i never did.” ace has never needed a drink more in his life; he needs a bottle of whiskey without a glass just to process what’s happening, just to be able to swallow.

“every time they said the cruelest things about you—every time you heard—i wanted to strangle them on the spot,” sabo continues. “i wanted to fight all of them. i wanted to stand on rooftops and scream at them and anyone that would listen that they were wrong, that you were better than that, that they had no right to condemn someone they’d never met.”

sabo looks back to him one last time, the boiling anger settled into something hard, his expression steeled. “i didn’t realize until i spoke to marco that they were right.”

and with that: he turns on his heel, and walks out the door. leaves ace to slide down to the floor with his knees giving way, knocking bottles aside with his landing. walks out of his life again just like he’d walked back into it less than half an hour prior, enough time to have reached in and torn out his childhood, the last of his memories that the rot of guilt hadn’t eaten in full.

ace drinks himself into a stupor.

+

a week later he reads in the paper that sabo has died.

the body of the revolutionaries’ chief of staff found in the aftermath of a failed assault on mariejois with a musket round buried in his brain. a fluke, to die to such an inaccurate weapon, to be standing at just the right place to be struck. another brother—no longer a brother—gone, and ace still here, left with the weight of their lives, stolen from this world in an instant he didn’t prevent.

ace burns the paper and drinks. and drinks, and drinks, and drinks until he can’t think or remember, until he can’t even grieve. drinks himself blind, and keeps drinking.

outside, the war wages on.

OP here. Holy cow. As soon as I reached this line at the beginning:

//akainu is a monolith over him, heat emanating from his hand in waves, the god of death stepped out of myth onto the field of battle to sear out the heart of a boy playing at hero.//

I had my hand at my mouth, and then it stayed there as I read on and on. Oh my god I want to scream a little bit this is everything I could have wanted and more and I LOVED IT goSH omg omg. I'm speechless.

There are so many beautiful lines. So many of them hit me in the face. I'm not sure how many times I said 'omg' to myself in the space of this fic but sheesh. Wow. OUCH. I wanted it and I'm still surprised but how much it hurt. You write beautifully.

My favourite lines are definitely all of the sucker-punches god:

//right in his face, trafalgar says, “it is not my fault that you killed your brother.”//

//“i didn’t realize until i spoke to marco that they were right.”//

Thank you thank you thank you omg. It's perfect. Eiii I love it so much.

- kurgaya

P.S. haha oh wow I literally just received a notification about this on AO3! I'm going to leave this comment here anyway :)

i'm so pleased you liked it so much!! :')) you're most welcome & thank you for the enthusiastic commentary (the prompt is just the most awful thought but it's so easy to imagine the ripple effect, god, especially since i feel very strongly about luffy being the ~hand of history and the will of the universe, the meta-narratives of one piece and how every timeline would tend to push all these people together is my favorite thing to think about. a timeline that breaks because somehow luffy is not longer in it is, naturally, just as interesting to consider)

...fuck. Fuck!

I...don't know what to say to this. Other than it hurt to read. It hurt to think about. It hurt that Sabo....fuck.

This fic hurts. <3

Brilliant!

Ryuichi

winter 2015-2016 ficathon: take me with you to the sea

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