Chapter Text
You shouldn’t turn around. You know this. But knowing doesn’t stop you from doing, and so you turn around, and you bite back, and you lash out, and you’re punished for the effort. A fruit that overpowers your own, a fight you can’t win.
You shouldn’t have turned around. You know this, but when Akainu ignores you and goes for Luffy, you know it, and desperation tastes like the blood in your mouth when you launch yourself toward that inevitability like you can stop the gears of fate from turning by shoving your bare hands into their teeth.
You should never have turned around. In your bones, past skin and muscle and all the way down to the marrow, you know it. Akainu’s boiling fist slams into Luffy while the kid’s looking up, the smoldering scraps of your goddamn vivre card fluttering in his fingers, and reality breaks down around you into fragments of moments.
Luffy slumps around the fist embedded in him with a strangled cry; Akainu yanks that fist out; globules of magma fall hissing to the ground, and it’s only the acrid stench of cauterization that explains why it’s not blood painting those stones instead.
You say Luffy’s name, maybe, or try to as you fall to your knees next to him, catch him, hold him, beg him. He’s so small. So still. There’s a storm of cerulean and gold fending off the volcano behind you, but you only note it for the way the light hits Luffy’s glassy eyes.
You say Luffy’s name, but it comes out as a cry that doesn’t sound like his name at all. You don’t know when it slipped from your control but your fire is everywhere, everything, the blood and bricks and dirt beneath turning to flames that roar up into air that’s boiling from the heat of it all, and even the admiral can’t risk staying close. You don’t care about him, don’t care about any of it anymore, because your heart is dead in your arms and no amount of warmth can ever bring him back to you.
The fire roars, and you—you scream until your voice gives out and when it goes you go with it, you fall into the black, you run—for the first time, running—because the truth is right there and it burns.
You didn’t save him.
You can’t save him.
You failed.
The world beats this into your head that first time. Then you wake up to a world where Luffy’s still alive and it does it twice. Ten times. Twenty. Fifty. Still you claw at the strings that fate tied around your neck, gasping for air like a fish ripped from the ocean, kicking your feet like there’s anything left below, and you fall.
You fall, and fall, and fall, and you think there’s gotta be a bottom somewhere you can splatter against in one final miserable contribution to the world that’s hated you from the moment you could in theory exist and despised you ever since you took your first breath and had the audacity to keep breathing, but there’s nothing and no one to stop your hurtling into the abyss.
A hundred times. A hundred handfuls of a life stacked up on top of each other, a ladder of failure with success nowhere in sight. History doesn’t repeat exactly but it all ends the same way, the same nightmare, the same reality.
You weren’t actually tracking them, at first. Didn’t understand what was happening. What it meant. Thought you were dreaming. God, you wish you were dreaming. The horror’s familiar these days, tamed like a pet, sitting ready on your shoulder whenever you bother to acknowledge it.
Tell me this is a dream, you order it when you’re too long from sleep, and it laughs when it tells you no.
So this might be your hundred and first time. Or it’s your hundred and twelfth, or hundred and fifteenth, or who even cares anymore. You’ve stopped caring about so much.
And yet, this time, when the ice breaks under his sandal and he plunges into the water, you can’t help screaming his name. Can’t help diving in after him, because at least if you follow the ocean will have all three of you and you’ll be together, maybe, in some stupid and final way, for the brief instant before time resets.
Even knowing how it ends, you can’t help fighting the ocean’s weight, fighting the water in your lungs, fighting, fighting, fighting, because you can’t give up. Not him. Not if it takes a thousand times and you can’t even speak by the end of it. It’s a promise you made on the fifth attempt and you’re going to see it through no matter how many times it kills you, because you can stop caring about so much but never him.
The ocean takes you, fills you up, and carries you down. Its currents, kicked up by the war waged in and around them, rip you and Luffy apart. You used to be able to swim. You think about that, as you drown, as you endure a way of dying that should be familiar by now but is as desperate and agonizing and slow as the very first time.
You’re going to save him. You promised.
You think about this when your eyes open to Masked Deuce prodding you awake, the Spade Pirates flag snapping from the top of the mast you’d apparently fallen asleep against after battling a storm you don’t even remember anymore. The ocean is calm, the sun is shining, and it’s a beautiful day.
You’re going to save him, the world tells you, over and over again, as often as it tells you that you can’t. You have no choice.
You have one choice, though: how. You’ve explored every crevice of that choice, tried every option you can think of, but it always ends the same way.
Luffy dies. He dies in front of you, he dies behind you, he dies before you ever see him, he dies alone or with his crew or with you and he dies and dies and dies. He dies and you wake up alive and he’s still dead and it hurts, it always hurts, you refuse to let it do anything other than hurt because you do not want to know who you are if you don’t love him enough to grieve him.
This time, when you wake and the water in your lungs is just a nightmare again, you’re tired. More than that, you’re angry. A hundred pieces of a life that stutters over itself like a scratched record are still a kind of experience, and that experience is a molten core that aches with every beat of your heart. All this time, you still haven’t saved him. What haven’t you tried? What isn’t working? Why aren’t you enough?
You’ll never be enough. Can’t be. You’re not supposed to be here. So why the fuck does the world take him instead?
It’s not fair. It’s not right.
You’ve tried so hard so many times to save him from the world. This time, you’re too furious to play protector, older brother, family. There’s no place in the fire for any of it.
If you can’t protect Luffy from the world, then you’ll burn the world down.
Maybe it’s a good thing you get thrown back the moment he dies. Maybe the world that’s doing this to you is hoping you’ll show it mercy by letting you avoid the aftermath.
You won’t. You are the aftermath, a hundred and however many deaths of it, and you are going to sear your grief into this broken fragment of history just waiting to be overwritten.
The kid—because he’s a kid, Marco sees, can’t be older than twenty—doesn’t bother getting up when Whitebeard steps into the courtyard of what used to be a marine base. Now, there’s nothing left of the fortress’s mighty battlements but scorched sea stone tossed around like children’s building blocks, bits of slagged metal, and ashes drifting in the midday breeze. This is only identifiable as a courtyard because it’s mostly flat, and that’s only by the grace of the rubble falling elsewhere.
The kid’s just…sitting there, in the center of it all. He would’ve had an easy view of the Moby Dick’s approach with the main gates blown off. Plenty of time to run. But he didn’t.
As they approach, Marco takes a brief inventory of him. There isn’t much to see: he’s got an orange hat shadowing his features, no shirt, a four-letter ASCE tattoo on his arm with the A and S crossed out, black shorts with a sheathed dagger at the waist, and black boots in dire need of a shine.
The base, though. Marco’s never seen destruction like this, even when Pops and Roger clashed years ago. This isn’t just destruction, it’s complete and utter desolation. It’ll be years before anything will grow here again, if it ever does. If the wind doesn’t just scour the ashes and dirt away and leave a sad and barren rock behind.
They come to a stop, a line of commanders, Whitebeard a half-step ahead of them. The kid looks up at the strongest man in the world and doesn’t even blink.
“I asked you to leave me alone,” he says, and Marco almost does a double take. When he opens his mouth, there’s light crawling up his throat, flickering and dangerous with every word. Fire. Even when he’s not burning anywhere they can see, he’s still stoking his flames.
Marco gets a very, very bad feeling. The kid’s not right, and that’s what they all should’ve expected from someone who can find a way to call Whitebeard’s snail out of the blue and tell him to back off.
Not that telling an emperor of the sea to back off will ever do anything. Whitebeard had been so surprised by it that his laugh hadn’t come until after Ace—that’s all he goes by now, just Ace, no family or crew or anything to claim him—hung up.
There’s none of that laughter now, now that they know what prompted that call. Ace might not want any epithets anymore, but he’s earned a new one anyway. Gone is Fire Fist; it’s Hellfire these days. Undirected, wild, and distinctly damned.
He hates the name, that’s clear in the violence that erupts whenever someone says it to his face. At least, according to the stories. Most of which come from the marines.
“I don’t wanna fight you,” he continues, pushing himself to his feet. Despite taking on this whole base by himself, there’s no sign of injury on him, no hint of strain while he stares at them. More fire flickers intermittently behind his steel-gray eyes.
And yet, Marco realizes, for all that tightly leashed power, he looks awful. His hair is greasy and hangs over his face, there’s stubble from a beard barely tended, bags like bruises squat under his eyes, and his cheeks are sunken. His fingernails are cracked, his freckled skin covered in grime. His clothes are torn and badly mended, like he couldn’t be bothered to do more than the bare minimum. His whole body is lean with clear signs of deprivation.
To his left, Thatch purses his lips, having noticed the same.
“I find that hard to believe,” their captain replies. “You’ve been picking a fight with the whole world, brat.”
When Ace laughs in Whitebeard’s face, it lacks any of the false bravado Marco’s used to hearing. If anything, it’s tinged with a bit of hysteria. He’s heard that before too, but not like this. Not from anyone entirely unbothered by Whitebeard towering over him.
Whitebeard’s grip on his bisento tightens and his frown turns heavy with displeasure. They hadn’t known exactly what they would find when reports of Ace’s attack on a nearby marine base reached them, but this? This just makes Marco’s heart sink.
“Is that all you want?” Whitebeard challenges. “Is that why you’ve sailed through my territory? Hurt my family?”
A hint of irritation crosses Ace’s face. It causes the fires behind his eyes to burn brighter, drowning out the gray of his irises in shifting torrents of red, orange, and yellow. “I only sailed through to get where I needed to go. Jinbe was alive when I left that island.”
Marco shakes his head. Jinbe still kicking isn’t the point. The kid doesn’t get it at all. He really thought a call in the wake of that insult—before Whitebeard had even gotten word of the event—would be enough.
“If you’re fighting the world, you’re fighting my family, and you’re fighting me. You issued a challenge by attacking Jinbe, brat.”
Ace’s irritation grows. Flames lick at his shoulders. The day, already warm, becomes hot and Marco resists the urge to pull his shirt away from where sweat has stuck it to his skin. “I’m not challenging you. You’re not the problem, old man. The navy, the World Government, they’re the ones causing this. They’re the ones to blame.”
Whitebeard snorts. He’s heard this kind of speech a hundred times; for his part, Marco’s heard it a couple dozen. “You’d find more company with the Revolutionary Army than pirates.”
“I’m a pirate,” Ace snaps, so quick and hot that embers fleck the air by his lips.
“You’re a child lashing out,” Whitebeard corrects. He shifts his weight and Marco knows what’s coming next won’t be pretty. But he thinks of the trail of pain and destruction in Hellfire’s wake, and his pool of sympathy turns shallow. Not every casualty in his crusade was a marine or politician or pirate. His flames weren’t discerning enough for that. He’d razed an entire island just because of a rumor that a navy admiral was born there. And when that admiral had tracked him down, a nearby fleet of merchant vessels had all been caught in the crossfire.
When Whitebeard moves, the breeze picks up and catches his coat at a better angle to sweep it to one side. The family behind him finally gets a good look at Ace—and Ace at them.
The temperature spikes so fast Marco’s next inhale scorches his throat. Ace is across the whole courtyard in a blink, killing intent thickening the air and flaming haki-coated fist headed for Teach’s face. There’s a brief flare of flame hanging in the air where he’d used his fruit to alter his course clear around Whitebeard.
Whitebeard moves faster than anyone, even Marco, who’s half-transformed but knows he won’t make it. He swings his bisento around and catches Ace’s fist and flames on the flat of his blade. The impact makes the legendary weapon ring like a struck bell, and with the sound comes an explosion of black lightning that sends everyone, even Marco, sprawling. Only Ace and Whitebeard are unaffected.
Picking himself up, Marco realizes with a tightening in his chest that Ace has conqueror’s haki. He’s not just any brat with a powerful fruit. He’s worse.
With a grunt of effort, Whitebeard shoves Ace back. Ace flips in the air and lands on his feet, eyes ablaze with fury while he skids to a stop.
“Move,” he snarls, and there’s an animal where the man used to be. Whitebeard squares off with him, bisento in hand catching the light in the wrong way. Marco stares, stunned.
There’s a crack in the blade.
“Back!” he orders his family, that bad feeling crystallizing. “Everyone back!”
He moves toward Teach because, for whatever reason, he’s more of a target than Pops. Jozu has the same idea, and it’s a good thing too, because in the next blink, Ace there again. Getting past Pops again. Jozu catches his flaming kick on crossed arms that glitter with diamond skin, but even braced, he’s brought down to a knee before Marco is there to knock Ace away with a swirl of blazing azure wings. Midair, Ace turns to flame and splits in half around Whitebeard’s swinging weapon, then reforms and dodges the follow-ups.
He’s fighting Whitebeard, he should be, any sane man would focus on that alone, but he’s only defending until his next chance to reach Teach.
“Coward!” he yells when that chance isn’t quick to arrive.
“What did you do-yoi?” Marco grunts as he bats aside a couple flaming spears strong enough to leave scorch marks his fruit has to heal.
“I don’t know!” Teach says, still scrambling for distance. There’s no cover amid the ruins, and the layer of ash makes it hard to tell what’s level ground and what isn’t. Thatch is the one guiding him, hand on Teach’s wrist so the guy can keep an eye on the one gunning for his head. “I’ve never seen this kid before!”
Could’ve fooled me, Marco thinks. Ace is acting like Teach did something unforgivable, but Marco can’t think of anything in Teach’s time since joining the family. Besides, Ace’s trail of chaos starts in the East Blue, and Marco’s pretty sure Teach doesn’t have any notable history there.
Ace’s furious voice cuts through the clash of weapons and crackle of flames warring against fractures in the air: “Hiding behind your crew when you’d betray them in a heartbeat! You don’t deserve to carry his mark!”
“And your crew?” Whitebeard thunders, incensed at the insults to his family. “Where are they?”
Right. It’s easy to forget, the way he is now, but Ace’s debut was with some rookie crew. The…the Spade Pirates, or something. No one had heard from them in a while.
“Safe,” Ace growls. “I’m not dragging them into this.”
The answer catches Marco by surprise, and he’s not the only one. The way Ace acts, Marco half-expected that he’d done in his own crew, or that this vendetta against the world was because the world had taken them from him. But no.
That’s the end of the conversation, though, because Teach is almost to the beach and the skiff that can take him back out to the Moby Dick. Ace’s eyes flare blue—blue!—and once again he blitzes across the distance in a blink. Pops is ready for him this time, though, and his bisento catches Ace on the arm, turning his lunge into a backwards tumble while the ground behind him tears itself apart for a hundred yards from the force of the blow and the man and fruit behind it.
For a second, the ashen haze hanging in the air obscures their view, and Marco dares to hope Ace was taken down by the blow.
But Ace staggers to his feet amid the rubble, scowls down at the arm hanging at his side, and shakes it out while the sheen of haki retreats from the skin. His roll through the ash has left swathes of his body painted black, and his hat dangles over his back, kept in place by the cord around his neck.
“Fine,” he mutters. He spreads his hands and they break up into flames. His wrists and forearms follow suit, the flames growing and growing, until there’s a tidal wave bearing down on the beach. Its edges move swiftly to cut off their escape. Those bringing the skiff in close have to back off to avoid the fire.
Marco shifts to his phoenix form and braces behind his wings for the heat of the main wave. He’s vaguely aware of Pops clearing a massive swath of the flames with a single swing only to find that Ace isn’t where he’d been.
The flames hit, but they don’t hurt. Instead, they seem to part around Marco, warming without burning. Cold realization cuts through the haze.
It’s not a tidal wave. It’s a smokescreen.
“Teach!” he yells, voice tinged with panic. Observation haki has Ace all around them; the kid’s split himself up amid the flames, several dozen sources producing ever more fire, making it impossible to tell where his next attack is coming from. But it also makes him a big target, and one of those pieces takes a hit from Pops, another dozen suffer the commanders’ defense, but one—one makes it through.
Marco’s fast. Not as fast as Jiru, but fast.
He’s not fast enough.
There’s Ace, body wreathed in flames, only his head, chest, and outstretched arm made flesh. In that arm is his dagger, and that dagger’s blade is embedded in Teach’s neck. Teach’s haki-coated arm had aimed for Ace’s chest, but he’d misjudged the angle, scraped ribs instead of breaking them.
“You’re never getting that fruit,” Ace snarls, and Teach’s last expression before Ace rips the blade out sideways and his body goes slack is one of complete surprise.
For a second, as the flames flood back into Ace and Teach’s body settles, no one moves. Jozu, two steps to the right and body smoking from another attack he’d turned aside, is staring. So is Thatch, his grip on his brother released so he could fend off a pair of fiery blue lances still smoldering in the ashes at his feet.
Ace’s shoulders drop. There’s blood pouring down his body, mingling with the ash, and he’s favoring his left leg. One of his eyes is bruising, and his nose is crooked. He’s holding his left arm a little stiff. That smokescreen ploy hadn’t come without consequences.
The bit of his chest where Teach’s last attack hit is already turning black.
He sheathes his dagger and, with some difficulty, pulls his hat back onto his head. All his aggression is gone, his overwhelming haki pulled back tight to his skin.
“I know you won’t forgive it,” he says, not even turning to Pops, who’s just as stunned at his own inability to save his son as the rest of them at their own failure to protect their brother. “Not this time. I…I don’t always get to him. It never ends well if I don’t. I had to do it now.”
He lets his hand fall from his hat and finally faces Whitebeard. There’s no hint of guilt or shame in his face; just determination. And a little bit of pride. “He didn’t deserve you.”
Pops’s knuckles turn white and his bisento shakes. The ground by his feet is cracking, the air itself trembling. There are tears in his eyes.
Before he can bring word or weapon to bear, Ace breaks up into flames. Those flames shoot into the air in random patterns that not even Izo can track.
Marco takes off faster than he’s ever flown before. The traces of Ace’s presence move at dizzying speed, but he’s not angling for the open ocean. Marco understands why a moment later: docked at a small bay on the backside of the island is a bobbing yellow single-person craft. Ace’s ship.
He and Ace reach it at the same time, and Ace’s net of flames intercepts Marco’s diving kick that would’ve reduced the ship to splinters. Reverting from his Phoenix form, Marco seizes the momentum. They devolve into a flurry of close-quarters blows, their every motion kicking up a flurry of ash and trailing blue and orange.
It’s not like any other fight Marco’s been in. For one, his main goal is destroying the boat, and taking down Ace is secondary. For another, Ace is going out of his way to not hurt Marco. All his moves are defensive, and more than once he takes a hit he could’ve avoided if he was willing to lose his ship.
Little by little, Ace gets more desperate. They both know the rest of the Whitebeards are closing in.
When Ace curses and switches to offense, the level playing field tilts alarmingly in his direction despite his injuries. Hits that merely shoved before now bruise, and Marco finds most of his energy dedicated to healing, and that slows him down—just enough for Ace to get past his guard and land a heavy chop to his throat.
Choking, Marco falls to one knee while black spots dance in the corners of his vision. Ace doesn’t finish him, though.
By the time Marco’s blinked his eyes clear and staggered to his feet, Ace is a rapidly disappearing blur on the water, black flag bearing that crossed out A from his tattoo snapping in the wind.