Chapter Text
“PIRATES! IT'S PIRATES!”
Forehead twitching at the commotion, Zoro is forced to blink his eyes open from a nap with a tired yawn. Blearily taking in the fire breaking out to the left and the screams of civilian merchants as the ship is boarded by men carrying weapons, he scratches his head.
“How long was I asleep?”
Looking out into the distance and seeing nothing but blue waters, the boy realizes that it's been at least a day since none of the nearby islands can be seen. It should be disorienting to not know where you are, but then again - he never knows where he is. Or where he's going. He's always figured the why is more important, and that'll be enough to get him where he needs to be.
If his friends could hear his thoughts right now, they'd toss him overboard for the sheer nerve. The ones that didn't cry themselves into a fit laughing first, anyways.
“RUN, RUN!”
“AAAGH!”
Chaos reigns all over the ship as the pirate ship looms into view, its Jolly Roger waving briskly in the wind with some kind of snake around the skull. Most people would find it terrifying.
Zoro’s never seen the damn thing in his life.
“Boy, quick! Get up!”
Turning to the left, Zoro watches nonchalantly as one of the old merchants who agreed to let him on the ship for his sensei's sake crawls behind the cargo and beckons for him to come closer.
“This way,” the old man whispers urgently, his beady eyes glowing from the light of the flames. “Quickly, before they notice!”
Casually standing up and walking that way without a care for the chaos around him, Zoro gets yanked down as soon as he's within hand's reach.
“Foolish thing,” the merchant scolds. “Don't you know to hide and run when pirates are running amok!”
Assuming the young boy is stunned silent by the violence surrounding them, the merchant sighs mournfully and pats his small shoulders.
“I'm sorry, young Roronoa,” he says, his voice tight with sorrow. “This was supposed to be a simple journey back and forth, but you've ended up falling into such terrible circumstances because I was too confident in my ability to take care of you. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't be here on this ship fearing for your life. But don't worry too much, child - I owe your sensei my life, and so I will make sure that you survive this no matter what. The guards we’ve hired will certainly not be able to defeat their numbers, so we must plan for the worst.”
Taking in the determination in the old man's eyes even while his hands shake around Zoro's arms, the young swordsman nods.
“They got a name?” he asks, thumb rubbing against Wado Ichimonji’s ito thoughtfully. “Bounties?”
“I’ve never seen them before,” the merchant denies, his face no less grim. “And that means we must be even more careful, do you understand?”
As someone who’s sailed the waters in this area for over two decades, Yagi knows well enough that being new means nothing in the East Blue. While it’s recently been considered the weakest and safest by the surrounding seas, that’s only in comparison to the level of their strongest nightmares. The East Blue doesn’t have a Warlord or Emperor particularly bothersome in their waters, but they make up for it in sheer numbers of new pirates sprouting up. As of late, there’s been plenty of news of rookie pirates being eliminated before they can even get a proper bounty. A worrying number of them were entire ships wiped out overnight, with even more clambering to make up for their loss as the days go by. In the past few months, rookie pirates have grown even more aggressive in order to establish themselves as quickly as possible out of fear of the same thing happening to them. Only one survivor from their merchant alliance made it out of the hundreds attacked and lived to tell the tale for others to heed.
But there’s no reason to scare a young child with this information, so Yagi turns to figuring out how to solve the situation at hand.
“Your sensei told me you can swim. Are you confident?” he asks, thinking of the lifeboats still sitting deep below. If they can make it downstairs without being noticed amidst all the chaos, then there’s still a chance for the little boy to survive this disaster with his life. It takes at least one adult to open the emergency hatch, so Roronoa will have to climb in himself and be able to hide under the lifeboat if needed to dodge gunfire.
Whether Yagi will be able to join him remains to be seen.
Taking in the total number of pirates boarding and leaning forward to check how many are left behind on the other ship, Zoro mutters, “Fifteen? No, it’s seven. Twenty-two total.”
“Roronoa?” Puzzled by his muttering, Yagi watches as the young boy takes the bandana wrapped around his arm and begins tying it around his head. “What are you doing?”
“You brought me this time because you owe that dodger a favor,” Zoro mentions, tugging at his knot to tighten it. “So if I help you out here, you’ll have to keep bringing me along, won’t you?”
“No, you mustn't,” Yagi gasps, standing up at once. “You’re only a child!”
Dodging the withered hands reaching out to grab him, Zoro smirks. “I haven’t been a kid in a long time, old man.”
Placing a katana in his mouth and clenching his jaw, the young boy runs into the fray fearlessly.
Left grasping at his chest for breath, poor Yagi can only watch in terror as the child entrusted to him runs towards his bloody death at the hand of pirates.
“He’s quite strong for his age,” Koushirou had said while introducing Zoro. “Don’t be afraid to use him for help around the ship. He wants to experience more and grow stronger, after all. Ah, but…”
Smiling wryly, the mild-mannered instructor folds his hands into his sleeves. “He’s not very good at listening.”
What an understatement!
If his knees weren’t so weak from fright and the instinct to flee so ingrained in him, Yagi might have run after the boy to pull him back. As it is, he can barely focus on breathing in and out, an ability he loses the second Roronoa Zoro sweeps below a gleeful pair of pirates and cuts their knees out from under them.
No, he realizes from the obvious lack of limbs slipping apart, the tendons.
There’s another clash of metal, a gleaming swirl of steel as it catches the light of the nearby torches, and three more grown men are down. The young swordsman never stops moving - something is always twisting, spinning, sliding through the air - as if pausing for even a second will ruin whatever flow he has. It’s both fascinating and horrifying to witness such a young boy sweep through the hordes of men pillaging their ship, blood slipping off his katanas onto the wooden planks as he pushes ceaselessly forth. Perhaps it’s a miracle, or perhaps it’s the burden of talent that a child so young should be able to fight with such grace and skill that it puts many grown men to shame. Somewhere along the way, the confidence Roronoa Zoro moves with has convinced Yagi to fear less for him and more for the safety of the pirates boarding the ship instead. Even more astonishing than his skill with a blade is that he’s smart.
There’s no tackling them recklessly, no shouting to announce himself. Roronoa fights like he’s been on the battlefield for decades, using the terrain to his advantage and forcing some of his enemies to turn on one another through swift movements. Four get taken down by friendly fire when he ducks halfway through a swing, and another three get shoved below deck where the hired hands are still defending most of the goods. Five of the pirates decide to corner him together, vulgar words coming out of their mouths that no child should ever hear.
“Please,” Yagi whispers, leaning forward to gain a good view despite his instincts telling him to run. “Please.”
It’s a plea for Zoro to stay safe, and a plea that he succeeds against all odds to save them from these damned pirates.
There’s a moment where the boy pauses temporarily, the first time since he entered the fight. His eyes seem aglow like this, filled entirely with the fires floating nearby to illuminate the night. He twists a wrist almost considerately, as if wondering what his next plan of action is. Before Yagi can even scream a warning, Roronoa jams the pommel of one katana into the man sneaking up from behind and hits him directly in the balls.
Oof. Instinctively, withered hands reach below his abdomen to protect his own family jewels as if he might be next.
Having made a decision, the green-haired boy climbs up some of the boxes that litter the deck to reach the ratlines and slices his swords. The rope falls away quickly, taking him with it, and he uses his weight to swing it towards the incoming group that had just been moving towards him.
“Fucking bra-”
With a satisfied curl of his mouth, Zoro uses his three swords to help sweep a handful of pirates into the waters below, strengthened by physics just enough to make it work. And it does.
“Not bad,” Zoro murmurs to himself as he observes the damage, untangling himself from the torn ratlines. He’s gotten rid of everyone that wasn’t engaged with the guards, which leaves barely a handful of stragglers, and the plank went down with the rest of the lot from earlier. “But not good enough.”
Losing years of training by becoming a child again is no excuse for being weak, and it irks him greatly to think about how he wouldn’t have even needed strategies to fight if he were his old - older - self; still, Zoro lives in the present, and that means he needs to compensate for his weaknesses until he no longer has any left. If they went through all the trouble of traveling back in time, he’ll make damn sure that he never makes the mistakes he did before. And those mistakes include being complacent in his own strength and leaving his crew alone when they needed him most.
When Luffy needed him most, Zoro stuck on a monkey-ridden island begging for help because he was useless to protect or save that which was precious to him.
Heading over to the corner where Yagi remains on his knees, astonished, Zoro spits out Wado Ichimonji into a hand to speak. “Hey, old man. That good enough for you?”
“W-What?” Yagi stutters, as if they aren’t even speaking the same language.
“Listen,” Zoro scowls as he explains it reluctantly, “I need money and combat. You owe two favors. I take out pirates, claim their bounties, and you get free protection.”
Before he can even begin to process the information just handed to him as a business transaction, the merchant feels his lips move. “T-Two favors?”
“I just saved your life, didn’t I?” Zoro gestures impatiently towards the rest of the ship, where most of the deck is clear of pirates and the sounds of violence have lowered to a tolerable level.
“I suppose you have, yes,” Yagi replies faintly, still unable to believe the events he’s witnessing.
Eyeing him critically, Zoro decides to cover his bases. “Fine then. I’ll take the rest out, too. Watch your head, stay in the corner, and don’t miss a single thing I do.”
One time trip my ass, he thinks, grabbing a few torches to toss onto the pirate ship just across. If he's lucky, they’ll cause a fire big enough to burn the ship down. Worst case scenario, it buys him time to deal with the idiots already here while they figure out what to do without a plank to board again. Heading to the upper deck where there's still fighting, he uses his height to his advantage and creeps in below swinging arms with a quick twist of his hands; one man goes down, his dying gunshot distracting most others. Pushing the body forward makes the pirate crash into another fight, and Zoro uses his back as a jumpspring to leap over everyone's heads. He's spent months on the island learning how to move his body the right way again - how to do the same things he's always done with shorter limbs, smaller hands, fewer muscles, and swords that weigh differently than he can remember. Months of running through katas and katana exercises until he knows exactly how to move to get what he wants, even if the options available are much more limited. Many a wrist go slack as he slices through flesh to disable them, and grown men are left wailing from pain as a mere child tears through their ranks. Zoro doesn't know enough about them to kill just yet, and he'd rather not miss out on any bounties he might be able to cash in.
“What are you,” one of the guards breathes out shakily, his throat trembling. His sword has fallen to the ground from shock, which Zoro frowns at. “That's-”
“You're just a child,” another says, putting pressure on a bleed by his shoulder. “How can you fight like that?”
“I'm not a child,” Zoro says curtly for what must be the hundredth time this trip. Maybe now they'll take him seriously. “I'm heading downstairs.”
With a running jump below, tucks into a roll and makes for the cabins below where there's still loud clashes echoing throughout.
Zoro might have needed time and training to adapt to the body he's found himself in, but there was nothing beyond that for him in Shimotsuki Village. Once it became obvious that the surrounding towns and villages held no challenges for him either, he realized he needed to find a way out. If he can’t grow stronger on the island, then of course that means he’ll have to set sail instead. It won’t be home, won’t be the Sunny - but it’s a means to a very necessary end. Tightening the bandana wrapped around his head for good measure, Zoro stretches his shoulders and heads for the nearest scuffle to earn his free passage.
If he set sail by himself, he might just end up back when he came from, and then his crew would never let him hear the end of it.
“Are you nervous?” Robin asks, observing him with a stir of her spoon.
“What would I be nervous for,” Sabo replies instinctively, a tinge defensive. Realizing who he's talking to when she smiles at him, he sighs.
“You used to spend all day waiting by the bow of the ship, and now you spend all day in your hammock,” Robin teases, fishing a lone carrot chunk out of her soup. “Unless you’ve suddenly become ill from a parasite draining you of all your strength, there’s no reason to be laying there so much. It’s not like you’ve been sleeping that whole time.”
“Of course I'm nervous,” Sabo mutters, feeling the bags under his eyes with a scowl. He didn’t think they’d be so obvious in this lighting. “Aren't you?”
Laughing lightly, Robin dabs at her mouth with a napkin and sets her bowl aside. “Not at all.”
Taken aback, he looks at her with curiosity.
“I'm excited,” she tells him softly with glittering eyes. “You can only be nervous if you have something to fear. I'm not afraid of this being hard, or scary, or even of messing up. If I fail here and now, I can still make up for it in the future. And in the future-”
“-I'll have my friends by my side, won't I?”
With her bright smile and warm eyes, she pats him on the head gently as if he's just a child.
Even knowing that she was always older than him - and especially so now, given that he's a child again - Sabo flushes pink.
“It was much scarier for me to look for you,” Robin tells him frankly. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to remember right away.”
If he hadn’t, she’d be-
-alone. Again. Possibly stuck working by herself in a world where she had to wait for her friends to remember that they’re hers. Because as much as she’d love them in any shape or form, in any time and space, she might have cried to love them and receive a blank look back. While she would have survived, as she always does, it would have been quite the unbearable circumstances. As long as even one of them still remembered, still cared, she wouldn’t feel alone, and she wouldn’t feel lonely.
Robin hasn’t known what it’s like to be alone in quite some time, and she’s not sure she’d handle it as gracefully as she did before.
“What are you scared of?” she asks him, the candle lighting the mess room flickering in the corner. Sabo opens his mouth and shuts it with a defeated look that makes his childish face look suitably pitiful. Paying no attention to the others still eating nearby, Robin tidies up her dishes and stands up to drop them off.
She knows he won't be able to answer her, and she doesn't need an answer. It's a question she asked for him to solve on his own.
Sighing for what must be the hundredth time today alone, Sabo holds his face in his hands.
What am I scared of? What else is there to be afraid of?
Just like Robin, Sabo isn’t afraid of making mistakes. Traveling back in time before everything went wrong is the best that it gets, and he’s not spoiled enough to ask for more. He’s certain that plans will fall apart, that people will be lost, and that it’ll take decades of hard work to complete his goals. Even so, he’s fully capable of making sure that the people and things he cherishes will continue to remain by his side as long as he’s willing to put in the effort. To him, miracles are less about divine intervention and almost entirely made up of a combination of all the people who worked their hardest to create a solution for an impossible problem.
Sabo isn’t afraid of saying something wrong or ruining plans that multiple people have put their heart into for him. He’s afraid that he didn’t work hard enough to earn this himself, and that he has no right to the opportunities that lay before him. It’s one thing to make a mistake - it’s another thing to have never even tried.
Even though it makes him nauseous, the blond boy continues to sip at the meal in front of him in order not to waste any food.
“LAND AHOY!”
Flinching in surprise, Sabo drops the spoon he's holding into his soup. Lurching to his feet, he heads upstairs immediately in order to see it for himself. When nothing but shimmering blue waters greets him, he frowns and climbs up the rat lines deftly.
“Sabo? What're you here for?” Dorne asks, having just made the call.
“Can I have the scope?” Sabo pants, lifting himself into the crow's nest with sweat littering his brows.
“You worried we’ll run out of food before we hit land again because o’ yer damn stomach?” Dorne laughs, ruffling his hair as he hands it over to the child.
Ignoring him as he hurriedly extends the barlow, Sabo holds the scope up to his eyes with a dry mouth. Sure enough, there’s a faint green looming on the horizon. The East Blue has about three areas with green-tinged waters, and they’re not expected to cross any of them. Trees, he realizes. A forest of them.
“It’s Dawn Island,” he whispers, his breath catching in his throat.
Home, once. It’s a place with some of his most miserable memories, but also the most precious. Maybe one day, when the world is free of the Celestial Dragons, he’ll call it home again.
“Been looking at the maps again?” Dorne rolls his eyes and grabs the scope back to settle it on a belt loop. “How many times have we told you not to be in places fer adults?”
“I’m not a child,” Sabo responds automatically as he jumps onto the rat lines below again. He misses the scoff that earns him while his brain turns into a soup of the same swirling thoughts over and over again.
I’m here, I’m here, they’re here, I’m going to see them, I missed them so much did they miss me how long has it been since we were kids again God I hope they don’t cry I don’t wanna cry either I’m finally here-
“Robin! Robin!” Gasping for breath, he searches amidst the newly bustling deck to find his friend while the ship prepares to hit land.
“Sabo!” Waving to him from her spot by the helm, she grins widely. “You’ve heard the call?”
“I checked it myself,” he tells her, leaning over to catch his breath on both knees. “It’s definitely…definitely Dawn Island! Now that the wind is picking up, we’ll be there in just a few hours.”
A full-body shiver of excitement runs through Robin, and she nearly claps her hands from delight before she takes in the gray tinge to his face and trembling fingers.
“Okay,” she says, nodding decisively. “You need sleep.”
“What? I’m not tired,” Sabo replies, startled by the change in topic.
“You are,” she tells him, rushing him below deck. “Down you go.”
Before he can even figure out what’s going on, she’s picking him up and sitting him into a hammock. Lifting a small cloth he’s been using as a blanket, she shoves him down and lays it over him gently. Sabo struggles futilely to escape, but he just ends up swinging around limply in the hammock - the past few days of sleep deprivation have left him with little to no strength, and whatever’s been holding him up recently has drained out of him at the sight of Dawn Island.
“Go to sleep,” Robin orders, forcefully tucking him back in and straightening out the hanging ropes that got tangled during his struggle. “I’ll wake you up when we get there.”
“I’m not tired,” he argues petulantly, shrinking back from fright as Robin’s aura grows shadowed with danger. “But I’ll lay down! For now. Just until we land.”
Smiling, she says, “No, you won’t. But I’ll make sure you do! Good night, Sabo.”
The hands sprouting from the wall behind him land a cheerful chop on his neck, and the lights fade out between his eyes.
When he finally wakes up again, the ceiling of the crew cabin that he expected is nowhere to be found. Instead, the bright blue of the warm sky dazzles his eyes, and he raises a hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s rays.
“Wha..?”
Almost at once, the sounds of the waves lapping on wood, the too-loud cries of the seagulls above, and the rocking of the boat around him that are too strong to be found on a proper ship bombard his senses.
“What the hell,” Sabo chokes, his hands flying to the sides of the tiny raft he’s on. “Robin?”
If he can’t help the betrayed dismay that leaks through his voice at the sight of her rowing their tiny raft over to the beach, he can pretend it’s just puberty.
“You were a wreck,” she informs him matter-of-factly. “A hot mess express. A melting cauldron. A-”
“Yeah, I get it,” Sabo mutters, flushing with embarrassment as he sits up. “So you knocked me out and kidnapped me?”
“Is this considered kidnapping?” Blinking her eyes rapidly while she ponders over that thought, Robin shakes her head clear to focus on Sabo before he can do something silly, like fall out of the raft. She certainly wouldn't be able to do anything about that. “We’re almost there. You should freshen up!”
Looking around incredulously, Sabo makes a vague gesture with his hands towards the wide blue waters surrounding them as if to say, “where?”
“Wait,” he says suddenly, reason returning to him when he takes in how truly small the emergency raft they’re drifting in is. “Robin, why are you here?”
“To row the boat,” Robin answers, a pair of strong hands extending from the rim to paddle forward with the oars. “It’s not like you could have done it.”
“Yes, but you can’t swim,” he replies earnestly, his brows furrowing. “You shouldn’t have taken the risk! I could have woken up flailing and knocked you into the water, or capsized the boat!”
“But you didn’t,” she says, continuing to look forward without a single twitch. “And now we’re almost there. Amazing how something so disastrous can work out so well, isn't it?”
He almost argues with her again just for posterity’s sake - because if had done that, he’d have blamed them both for it endlessly - but shuts up with a bite of his lip.
You know why she did it. Just be grateful she hasn’t laughed at you for needing this much help in the first place. You’re a grown man, not a child! It’s time to act like it.
Climbing onto the seat by him, he realizes Robin brought his pole along. Warmed by her consideration and the ability to wrap his hands around something familiar, he holds it upright before using it as a forehead rest. If he doesn’t watch the island come closer little by little, he can pretend he’s still on the main ship with all the time in the world to prepare. Robin is thankfully quiet, lending to his illusion until Sabo’s stomach churns so heavily he decides to speak instead.
“It’s a shame Luffy’s already back,” he says thickly, focusing on the rust fluttering off into the air as the breeze takes it off his pipe. “You’d have liked it a lot, seeing him as a kid. A real kid, I mean. He was-”
Lips twitching fondly, Sabo says in a voice so hopelessly fond that it makes a man’s chest ache, “He was even more of an idiot, and much cuter for it.”
While he certainly believed the first half as a child, Sabo would never have thought of Luffy as particularly cute; how could he, when he had hardly known anything else? He’d never known how lean and scrawny Luffy would look in wanted posters as a teenager, how heavy and dense his muscles could be when he grew into a man. When Sabo was really, truly a child, all he had known was that his little brother was an idiot, and that he loved him endlessly. Unlike Ace, who was filled with such grim determination and a temper, it felt like Luffy would never grow up. Even back then, Sabo and Ace thought of themselves as adults watching over a bumbling little toddler. He knows that they were children too, but…it’s different. The memories he has of Ace are of a young boy who grew up too early, an independent little beast who knew deeply what it meant to live in filth and squalor. He’s seen all that there is of Ace’s childhood, and very little of what he was like as a grown man on the seas. He’d never even kept up with Ace’s exploits in more than word of mouth, too busy climbing ranks to prove himself as a member of the Revolutionary Army in every way he could think of.
But even though he never got to watch over Ace become the great man that everyone seemed to know him as - one so different from the wiry brat Sabo thought of in childhood memories - he got to watch Luffy instead. Watched the baby brother he once thought might need protection forever flourish into a man that stood his ground for his beliefs, for his friends, and for his dreams. He watched Luffy defeat the most feared pirates in the world, befriend the most insane comrades, and accomplish goals people older and smarter than him had attempted their entire lives. His baby brother grew strong and firm, baby fat melting into hard muscle while his rubber skin grew littered with scars.
Sabo watched their silly, foolish Luffy turn into a man who’s every move changed the world, and it had been so wonderful that his lungs hardly had room for air with all the pride bubbling up inside. It was so good that it hurt, and it felt-
Well. He can’t even count the number of times he grew so excited he accidentally started burning newspapers after catching up with Luffy’s latest adventures, nor the amount of times he was scolded for it. There were times Sabo thought the joy would burn him up until there was nothing left but glowing embers, as if there was any way for a man made of fire to burn out.
But those experiences made him cherish his childhood memories of a stumbling little crybaby even more, and regret the missed opportunities of knowing a mature, kind Ace. Sabo missed years of Luffy’s life, but still had the chance to watch Luffy grow. He never got that chance with Ace, never knew an Ace that wasn’t a child.
But thinking too far along those lines brings back the wrench in his stomach, so Sabo focuses on Luffy again. Robin’s already told him about Arlong and Garp, and they both agreed on what it meant. Whether Nami has returned is still up in the air, but they’re sure that Luffy is back. Who else could have arranged such an impossible, ridiculous thing such as sending Monkey D. Garp to the middle of nowhere in the East Blue after a secretly budding pirate empire?
“I used to get so frustrated,” Sabo tells her, a huff of amusement escaping him. “He was just such a mess, you know? He couldn’t look after himself at all. He didn’t know how to take a proper bath, didn’t know how to cook meat, didn’t know how to start a fire, barely knew how to put on his own clothes. If there wasn’t someone constantly watching out for him, he’d find a new way to get himself killed. We loved him, of course, but we almost killed ourselves trying to keep him alive.”
The same memories he never particularly thought twice of, memories he loathed to recall from fear of a headache-induced stroke have now become ones he’s extremely attached to. Rather than loving Luffy despite all the ways he was a troublesome gnat, Sabo has grown to love him because of who he was. Laughs softly at the thought of his chubby cheeks, the way he’d cry over nearly everything, his endless curiosity, his constant need for affection, the way he used to get tangled in his blankets and throw limbs over whoever was close by.
He was the most annoying little brother in the world when they were growing up, and yet the only one Ace and Sabo ever wanted. They’d been children capable of wonder and excitement for their future, yes, but they were still broken. Before Luffy came into their lives, they hadn’t really understood the concept of love, much less unconditional love. Two broken little kids who wanted nothing more than to be free of the world’s burdensome expectations as they clawed their way out of the dirt met their match in a single Monkey D. Luffy, who could love anyone at the drop of a hat. Literally.
He’s old enough to know now that they had been loved by Garp and Dadan in whatever way those two could muster, but it was only when Luffy came into their lives that they felt loved. Love comes in many forms, Sabo knows now. Love can be quiet and easy, bold and passionate, fierce and twisted, innocent and kind. Love can make you stronger or tear you apart, as much of a tool to grow stronger as it a weakness depending on how you let it shape you.
Luffy’s love was overwhelmingly bright and desperate, and it was the only kind that could have made those two broken boys turn around and stumble their way into loving him back. It turns out that when you’ve spent their whole life thinking there are requirements to being worthy of love, that you’ll never meet them, that you’ll never learn how to love because no one ever loved you - it turns out after all that, someone can choose to love you immediately and wholly just to keep you by their side. That despite showing this person the absolute worst sides of you and trying to eliminate them from your life, they can still cling to you because they saw something they liked in you and chose to never let go. That even if this someone is pathetic and weak and useless, they can give you something no else in the world ever has, in a way that you cannot possibly deny.
Ace and Sabo had to be taught love not from the brute force of physical violence as the adults in their lives tried, but from the impossibly deep loneliness of a little crybaby who didn’t know how to survive without people to love.
“So he relied on you both a lot,” Robin surmises, finally turning her cheek to look at him.
“A lot?” Sabo snorts, unable to help it. “He was completely dependent! He could hardly survive five minutes without someone else by his side, and that’s only emotionally. Physically, it felt like everything in the world was a danger to him even though he ate the Gum-Gum Fruit. He was always clinging to us, and then the second he wasn’t, we’d be saving him from a fall off a cliff.”
Silence ensues, and it drags on long enough that Sabo musters enough curiosity to look up and see what’s wrong.
“Are you…pouting?” he asks, eyes wide. “I-I’ve never seen you pout before?”
He couldn’t be more confused if he tried, and he’s sure it shows on his face. Even when he’d learned what kind of silly thoughts run through her head and grew close enough to witness her cold exterior thaw on Baltigo, Robin had never looked so childish. If he had to describe the look on her face, petulant would be the best he could think of.
“Maybe,” she says, her tone a little sour as she crosses her arms. “And?”
“What part of that could have possibly made you,” gesturing to her face, “that!”
She returns his question with a look that would probably make him feel stupid if he wasn’t already so lost. “You’re just rubbing it in, aren’t you?”
“Rubbing what in,” he nearly shouts, his pole nearly slipping overboard before he scrabbles for it belatedly.
“It must have been nice,” Robin sniffs, her pout receding into more of a frown. “To be depended on.”
Oh, Sabo thinks dully while his brain slows to a stop. She’s jealous. She’s jealous?
“He must have been so lovely,” she laments, wringing her hands in disappointment. “I’d have pinched his cheeks all day! And he would have been so soft and round as a baby, no muscles and scars at all!”
As if the very thought of it causes her despair, she buries her face into her hands and makes a sound that could pass off as the sad combination of a wail and a growl. He didn’t even know humans can make sounds like that.
“And you got to take care of him just like that,” Robin adds between her fingers, “just like that! All the time! And he relied on you! You took care of him every day for years!”
Feeling a flush creeping over his cheeks, Sabo clears his throat as if it’ll rid his chest of the new warmth growing inside. The more Robin speaks up, the more he feels as if he’s beat her in some kind of strange competition without even trying. Even more strange than the idea of this imaginary competition is that aside from the little burble of guilt in his stomach, Sabo's pretty happy to be winning.
“Well,” he hedges, playing around with his collar to loosen it slightly, “I’m his big brother after all.”
“I’m his nakama!”
“Of course you are,” Sabo says in as soothing a voice as he can. “He loves you! I looked after him as a kid, but you’re the one who’s been looking after him the past few years, Robin. I owe you a lot for taking such good care of him.”
“Don’t try to get out of this,” she mutters, pulling her head out of her hands to stare blankly at him. “I worked so hard to be strong, so hard to be useful, so hard to be dependable-”
Watching in concern as she grows increasingly frazzled, Sabo shrinks down in his place and clutches his pole as a final defense.
“-but he never relied on me like he did with you! Not even Chopper has relied on me like that! And now Luffy’s a baby again but not inside, and you’re out here rubbing it in that I missed my chance TWICE!”
Blue eyes glitter dangerously before Robin sniffs again and crumples into a depressed heap with enough strength to rock the boat.
“I’m sorry?” Sabo wheezes, still in shock.
For a moment, he thinks she might not accept it, but then she nods.
“Apology accepted,” she says, her cheeks thankfully still dry. If she’d cried at all, Sabo would be left with no choice but to jump overboard and let her cool down alone. He’s certainly not afraid to comfort crying women and children in the face of grief or loss, but he’s also never been the reason a grown woman burst into tears before.
And I hope I never am, Sabo thinks with a healthy dose of horror. This feels like one of those moments the other men in the Army mention when they talk about romance, like how easy it is to say the wrong thing that’ll make a woman irrationally angry or teary. He’s never considered being in a romantic relationship before, but if it feels like this, he’ll stay away from them his entire life!
“It’ll be okay. He might be a little more grown up on the inside, but he’ll still be plenty cute on the outside! And, and, he’ll be relying on you to help take care of things until he’s grown up enough to leave the island, and you’re the one who helped Maira figure out a way back, so if you think about it then really you took care of me, which makes you much more dependable than I am,” he babbles with large, sweeping gestures of his hands. “So between helping me out, taking care of Luffy, taking care of your crew, and giving him Ace back, you’ve done the most out of everyone!”
“You’re right,” Robin agrees, her matter-of-fact way of responding stunning Sabo out of his prattling. “I've done a great job so far. Actually, Luffy and Maira did the heavy lifting on bringing us back, but the rest of it is quite right. Oh, look, we’re here.”
“Wait, wha-”
Eyes going wide as he realizes that they’re a mere handspan away from shore, Sabo lets his gaze slide between a smiling Robin and the shoreline rapidly with an open mouth.
“You, you, you,” he stutters, lifting a twitchy finger to point at her.
“Me,” she nods, crossing her legs with a grace that doesn’t make sense in such cramped quarters.
“You PLAYED me,” Sabo blurts out in realization, mind jumbled up with betrayal, shock, and awe. “I didn’t even-! This is ridiculous! Did you seriously mean any of that?!”
“Sort of seriously,” Robin admits with a shrug of her shoulders, pleased as the cat that caught the canary. “I really am jealous of all those things, but not enough to distract you. I had to make it seem much more dramatic or you’d have wallowed yourself into an early grave. If I left you alone any longer, you would have died from overthinking with brain matter slipping out of your ears! On a somewhat unrelated note, I needed to see if I can manage to pull wool over the eyes of someone who knows me well. One of my goals in the next few years is trying to become a better actress. I haven’t had much practice on account of no longer having to lie after making so many friends, you see.”
She returns his wordless gaping with an expectant look. “So? How did I do?”
If anybody else had been in his position instead, Sabo would be applauding her right now. It takes a high level of skill to thoroughly bamboozle one of your closest friends into getting out of their own head with an innocent prank without them noticing, and Koala would have laughed herself into tears watching. Robin’s little plan left him no time to panic over himself or the approaching island, and her reveal has now pulled him out his head again enough to miss that somehow they’re beaching.
“You’ve been messing with me all day,” Sabo gasps almost as if he's a dying fish that’s been beached and not a grown human man in a teenage body, “and you want me to rate your success like, like this is some kind of mission?!”
“Not rate my success,” she reassures him, having the gall to look surprised at his reaction. “I was thinking more like advice, actually. You probably aren’t in the mood now for that, so I’ll ask you again later.”
She lifts him right out of the raft and onto the sandy shore before he can come up with a response.
“I’ll move it out of sight,” Robin says, ignoring the silent meltdown she’s just forced her friend into. “You go ahead, I’ll just wait here. I know they live in the mountains, but it wouldn’t be good for me to be seen by someone in the know.”
Brought back into the present with the reminder, Sabo snaps his head to the right and clears the coast both ways before he hurries to help her hide the boat near one of the cliffs formed by the mountain range. Robin’s right - the last thing they need now is someone who spends all day staring at wanted posters to spot them and call in the entire Navy to get rid of her. There isn't much to do in a small village like Fuusha, which means that entertainment is limited to whatever news the papers bring and the gossip that goes around at the bar. If Sabo can recall all the reports on the desperate hunt for Nico Robin when the Navy first set a bounty, he's sure plenty of villagers without brain damage can do the same. While Woop Slap and Makino are kind enough to trust him by word alone, even they won’t be able to hold back the angry mob that’ll bubble up if one of the villagers finds out they’re harboring Demon Child Nico Robin. Tensions must be high enough as it is after the burning of Gray Terminal, and Sabo wouldn’t want to put more on their shoulders than they deserve. He’ll go see them before he leaves, of course, but he’ll likely have to do it alone.
For just a moment, he wonders how they all felt when looking at Luffy's wanted posters. Ace and Sabo never grew up in Fuusha like he did, after all, and the only people they could claim any connection to were Makino and the mayor. Makino would certainly have saved everything clipping she could find and save it aside in the way she always did whenever they took pictures. In fact, she was probably the first person to ever take pictures of the three of them. Shaking his head, Sabo finishes hauling the raft into a hidden corner and wipes at his forehead with a sandy sleeve. Robin settles down with a book he didn't even realize she brought, and he flaps his mouth twice before snapping it shut.
Lingering awkwardly by the raft with his hat spinning around his knuckles, Sabo sighs when he figures out she won’t bother listening to any of his apologies or half-baked plans until he does what they came here for. With today's track record, he's lucky that she hasn't spontaneously decided to drag him up the mountain in a rucksack.
“I'm off,” he says with an unsettled grin, puffing up his shoulders. “Don't do anything I wouldn't do!”
Peering at him over her book with amusement, she gestures for him to hurry up and go away.
“Right,” he says, swallowing around the nerves jumping in his throat. “Right.”
Hat set upon his blond hair once more, Sabo scouts for the nearest path up the beach into the mountain. Frustration begins to swell in his belly when he thinks he should know where it is automatically, but then he remembers that they hardly ever came down to the beach, and certainly not after Luffy came. Whatever they could have wanted from the beach was easily found in the river: food, water, a place to swim, a way to bathe. Going to the beach with the amount of people they'd stolen from and an accident-prone little brother who couldn't swim was just plain stupid.
I'm doing it again.
Shaking his head doggedly, Sabo keeps walking until the pale sand beneath him hardens into a dark brown dirt, determined to stop thinking. The more he thinks, the worse he feels, and he can’t - won't - let himself get this far just to mess it up by being a coward. It would be nice if he could simply beat it down with his bare fists, but his problem right now isn't another person.
Maybe Robin should have hit him harder back on the boat. A bit of physical pain has never hurt when you've got to tell yourself that it's time to pull your shit together. Koala would do it if she were here, but she isn't. Not the Koala who pulls him together, keeps him on track, frets over him but knows he can handle himself. That Koala is in the future he left behind, and it'll be years before she comes around again.
But Sabo only wants Koala, and doesn't need her.
Using his pole as a hiking stick and lodging it into the ground for balance, he wipes the sweat at his brow and lets the fresh air fill his lungs. It smells of wet leaves and moist dirt and salt from the ocean just behind, and he lets it wash over him as a flock of birds take flight overhead. He can hear trees rustling in the wind, four-legged animals running through the shrubs, the croon of a songbird he hasn't listened to in years. Sabo has spent years and years dreaming of all the ways he could have come back to find his brothers, and none of them have ever been real before today. As he stands there in the edges of the forest he grew up in, he can feel the reality of it settling in.
“I'm going to see Ace,” he whispers, tongue heavy in his mouth from the weight of what he's saying. “I'm home, and he's alive, and we're all gonna be okay.”
Sabo has said this over and over again since the day Robin arrived on Baltigo and woke him up. With shock, with wonder, with joy, but…never with the understanding of what that truly means until now.
Ace is alive, and he's only fourteen. He will never know that he died in a war Sabo should have fought in, will never know that Sabo left Luffy to bear the grief alone for two whole years, will never know that Sabo grew into a Revolutionary with a different dream and absolutely no chance to share it with him, and will never know how badly his best friend failed him. For all the goals Sabo accomplished and all the miracles he's pulled off in life, not a damn one seems good enough to redeem him in the face of that - but Ace will never know, and Sabo will never be able to apologize for it.
And that, Robin, is fucking terrifying.
There is no one in the world he can look to for guidance, no manual in the world with the right instructions, and no book that carries someone else's valuable experience in the same situation. There is no one else in the history of the world who watched their brother die without even knowing they loved him and then traveled back in time to a brother that never died. The very worst part is that Ace isn't back but Luffy is, and that means he'll have spilled the beans in whatever discombobulated way he could, and Ace might know that Sabo is alive but never how much the blond regrets the way he lived. The one thing he's grateful for is that Luffy won't care enough to ask too many questions about why Sabo brought this all into motion, and he may never have to tell his little brother what a failure he is. Was.
So. That leaves him here on the edge of the forest with all his regrets, and Sabo wishes for a miserable moment that he was swallowed by the earth into a deep pit where he can pay penance for his sins right before he remembers that he's a greedy goddamn bastard who can never let go of his dreams and toughens the hell up. Time-travel is only as good as the opportunities you make of it, and Sabo damn well can't afford to waste a single one given the mistakes he's already made.
It's just a little funny that no one tells you how scary it is to finally have your wildest dreams come true. Something he’s wanted for years is right at his fingertips and it just makes him nauseous.
Embracing that fear so that he can welcome the joy and relief that will come with it later, Sabo decides to pick up the pace. Breaking into a run, he lets the forest blur around him while the burn builds up in his thighs from the steep incline. He runs and runs and lets a strangled laugh leave him, if only because being alive is such a great thing, and now he and Ace will both live. They may not fit into each other the way they did before everything started falling apart, but they’ll love each other, they’ll fight for each other, and they’ll have another brother to rely on. It’s more than Sabo ever got to have in their last life, and he’s willing to take every last snatch of time he can get with Ace in this one.
I wonder if Ace would join the Revolutionary Army-
“LOOK OUT!!”
And then everything goes black because there are two bodies slamming him into a tree as they roll downhill.
“Ow, ugh, I told you to be careful! That's Luffy's body you're in! What if you two got hurt?”
Sabo groans as bark digs into his back, pole discarded in the chaos. His head feels dizzy, but not enough to worry about a concussion. What’s more worrying is that whoever fell onto him is completely tangled up in his legs, and his brain doesn't even get the chance to pick up on the use of Luffy's name before an elbow stabs him right in the family jewels.
“Fucghcf,” he wheezes, turning onto his side and gasping for breath through the blinding pain.
“But he's made of rubber!”
“That doesn't mean you get to send him flying off a mountain, kiddo,” an exasperated voice replies, the pile of limbs wriggling again. Something about it tugs at Sabo's mind, but then the pitch cracks in a tell-tale sign of puberty and he loses track. “Look! You dragged me down and then hit someone else, and neither one of us is made of rubber.”
“Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt anyone.” What a strange voice, this one is. It sounds as if two children are speaking in tandem, like mixed twins chorusing at someone. But there are only two pairs of arms fumbling around, so it can't be twins. It’s coming out of the mouth right by his ear, so he’d know. “Sorry, mister…huh? Luffy? What are you…”
“Come on, let's apologize together,” that unfamiliar familiar voice sighs, a little exhausted but mostly encouraging. “Can you-”
Thump. The little one goes down.
And then Sabo's brain manages to complete an intelligent train of thought that isn't holy fucking shit my balls hurt and he scrambles to sit up as the pile separates into three people.
“Aaaand you’re out. I should have guessed. Well, at least you got a full hour this time.”
It's Ace.
His black hair is tangled with leaves and tiny twigs from their roll down the hill, a faint pink scratch glistening on his right cheek. His skin is a warm wheat color that looks nothing like the pale black and white photo Sabo saw of him in the papers, and his nose is slightly sunburned in a way that gives him a constant flush. He's gangly and so much taller than the blond remembers, but the sinewy muscle he’s built up is entirely firm when he props Luffy up mid-fall.
No wanted poster or newspaper clipping of him has ever looked this good. Not even his fond, rose-tinted memories of old have never come close to the Ace in front of him now, and it takes Sabo's breath away.
Breathe, he thinks as he watches Ace's mouth move, and then promptly forgets everything that's ever happened in the history of the universe because the mouth stops moving when Ace looks back to see who they're apologizing to.
Gray eyes go wide, wide, wide, as if he opens them large enough then the things they're seeing might make sense. Or disappear. Or start speaking, maybe. Sabo wishes he could make that happen, but he's suddenly found himself in a body that doesn't seem to understand basic human functions anymore. Ace flushes and then pales, the freckles a stark contrast against the white of his face. Calloused hands drop to his side before trembling uncontrollably, and Sabo watches with a distant fascination as he swallows with a gulp so large it must hurt. There’s a glint in his eyes like he’s realized something that shifts the world around them, shoulders weighing down with its enormity. Luffy’s bobbing head slips right into Ace’s crouching lap as soon as he’s free, and they both freeze. Gaze darting down to his sleeping face with its pouting mouth, Sabo feels something break open inside his chest to let light seep through, and the grin it summons is as easy as air despite the way his eyes sting.
“Hey,” he says, ignoring how the word comes out of his thick throat like molasses. “Missed me?”
It’s the kind of thing he would have said if they were really two teenagers meeting again for the first time since that stormy night, unaware of grief and loss and tragedy, and the kind of thing he might have said if they had met in a field of ice amidst a brutal war instead of a grave. It doesn’t feel right, exactly, but it’s the only thing he can think to say without losing part of himself right here on the forest floor to the emotions waiting just below to swallow him alive. If it were the Ace he knew before that fateful night so long ago, he’d have probably punched Sabo in the jaw and then hugged him without ever letting go. If it’s the Ace that Luffy told him so much about, the one who was maturing into someone different but still so achingly similar, then he might have tackled Sabo straight away into a hug all while swearing at him.
This Ace does neither, and that’s the first sign that should have stuck out. Instead he inches as close as he can without sending Luffy sliding off, and raises trembling fingers to let them brush over the raised edge of Sabo’s scar right by his cheekbone.
“I don’t - He didn’t say anything about this, and I thought-” It’s so small it’s barely a whisper, straining his ears. “You’re here. You’re…real.”
The pressure is so light that Sabo barely registers the touch, and it takes him twice as long to process the words as he should have. Intelligence is a requirement of someone who takes up a position like Chief of Staff in the Revolutionary Army, but Koala did say his brothers have a habit of making him a brainless idiot. A single, flickering lamp illuminates his brain right now with all the strength it can muster, and then the tiny flame explodes into a flare that sends shattered glass to all corners of his mind.
Ace isn’t acting any of the ways Sabo thought he might because he’s not any of the Aces Sabo thought would be here. The initial epiphany, the slow touch, the aborted mention of Luffy, the creeping wonder and hoarse voice that confirmed his guess-
Ribs aching from exertion when his breath quickens, Sabo stares at him even more fiercely without feeling the slip of hot tears down his cheeks. He wants to ask but doesn’t know how, and then for a moment he’s struck with the enormous fear of how to accept whatever the answer would be, but then Ace flinches back like Sabo’s tears have burned him and begins to heave himself.
“Ace?” he asks slowly, hesitantly. Pulls onto his knees and creeps forward like one would with a skittish animal, ears roaring with a scream he has yet to set loose.
Ace opens his mouth to reply but then snaps it closed, lips pursed. Before Sabo can decide what that means or why it feels like being slapped, he watches Ace straighten his spine and nod as if he’s come to a decision. Luffy is gently lowered to the side, calloused hands lovingly running over the damp curls in his hair, and Ace rises to his feet in the spring sun with a look that takes Sabo back to the very first time he found out who, exactly, his best friend was.
Then Ace rips off his shirt with the same ferocity one might chop off a head, his chest puffed out with a dangerous set to his stubborn mouth that means he’s daring Sabo to make a comment; he refuses to bend, refuses to let even the slightest sign of weakness slip through, and he’s goddamn proud. His torso ripples with pink lines that all gather into a knotted, rough circle in the middle, a shining medal of his past that didn't exist before they started playing with the strings of time.
A fist, Sabo recalls in a haze. Through his chest. Almost instantly, they said.
The guttural cry that escapes him in that exact moment is a kind only animals might ever understand, because it's full of the most primal kinds of grief and joy that humans rarely have the depth to express. Sabo doesn't have the kinds of vocal cords, lips, or teeth that animals do to create these deep, wounded cries, but he was once a wild child that swung from trees and sniffed at the earth, and the intense emotions swirling within him have to be expressed in the only way he's ever seen it be properly conveyed.
He cries out like a wounded, grieving animal that's been saved from the grasp of death at the cost of another, and then jumps forward to wrap his arms around Ace’s neck with a sob that sounds infinitely more human while Ace uses every bit of strength he has to hold onto him right back.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he chokes out into Ace’s collarbone, face slick with endless tears that drip down a bare chest. “Ace, I’m so-”
“Thank you,” Ace whispers fervently, running his hands over Sabo’s back, rocking back and forth. “Thank you for being alive, thank you for coming back, thank you-”
“Thank you,” Sabo throws back with a hysterical hiccup, “for not forgetting, for Luffy, for-”
“I’m sorry,” Ace says back, as earnest as he’s ever been, his flood of tears gently wetting a spot on Sabo’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I left you, I should have looked, I should have-”
The words ball up in his esophagus and twist his tongue into a mess until he bites down, hard, his breath hitching, and when Sabo tries to collect himself to see what’s wrong-
“I love you,” Ace says, the words hanging over them suddenly. “I love you, dammit, and I miss, missed you.”
The weight of his admission sits on them like a mountain, heavy and impossible. They are beautiful, fascinating words that Sabo has never heard before from the mouth that said them, and he laughs because it feels like it might be the only way for his heart to survive the experience. Not even in his wildest dreams could he have come up with that confession, and it makes the moment too real and too unbelievable at the same time. It's not a surprise that Ace feels that way, but it's definitely a surprise that he'd ever be vulnerable enough to admit that out loud in words for anyone else to hear. In fact, it's such a vulnerable sentiment that Ace might have never even thought those three words in the safe walls of his own mind, toeing around it and choosing to show instead of tell.
“I love you too,” Sabo tells him, still laughing through the steady sobs. He has no such problems with the words and all the practice of a lifetime with saying them to Luffy. It's the sort of thing you get used to saying when you only have one precious sibling left with the World Government wanting you both dead. But then he's struck by a terrible thought, pulling back to cup his hands around freckled cheeks so he can look his brother in the eyes. “You know, right? You knew? ”
He doesn’t want to think that Ace ever didn’t, but he never got to make sure. He’ll make sure now, no matter what it takes.
“Yeah,” Ace nods, a quick jerk of his chin. “I knew. Others maybe not - mostly not, until the very end. But you? Always.”
Even now, with his cheeks ruddy from irritation and lashes wet with tears, ugly wheezes escaping his lungs, he looks a far sight better than the corpse that haunted Sabo’s nightmares. He’s so alive, warm and heavy and foolish and real, and Sabo doesn’t understand how this is possible in the slightest. It shouldn’t be possible that the boy in front of him is the same man who died in Marineford, but Sabo supposes that the three of them are in the habit of making impossible things possible.
It’d be pretty hard to change the world without that.
“I’ll be there,” Sabo swears, eyes glittering with the determination that allowed him to become a man feared by even the Celestial Dragons. “If they come again, I’ll be there. And-”
Clenching his fists into black waves of hair as the blond crushes Ace to his chest again, he continues, “-at the very end. Whenever that is, when we’re old, and ugly, and we’ve done it all, I’ll be there.”
“You’d better,” Ace hisses through gritted teeth. “Or next time I’ll be the one who has her bring us all back.”
He knows something, Sabo realizes with a little flicker of panic. He knows why it happened. Who told him?
Luffy can't know, because the whole point of escaping death with time-travel was that Luffy would never know a life where both his older brothers left him behind. There's no line he wouldn't cross to keep their baby brother from having to live through that, which is why they're where they are now. But there's plenty of time to ask later, and not enough time in the present to concentrate on other things. Right now, it's much more important to imprint every last detail that makes up Portgas D. Ace into memories his brain will never, ever forget.
“I promise,” Sabo says, and he has the rest of their life to prove it.