Archive of Our Own

His lungs and eyes burned as he frantically raced through the halls checking every room he could. The smoke and heat continued to spread as the fire licked the walls like it was starving for a snack. His father adores these kids with everything he has and Marco would be damned if he didn’t do everything in his power to protect that. 

“Marco! We need to leave!” He heard the voice behind him and didn’t care heading deeper into the building to continue his search. 

“Damn it, Marco, stop! ” The voice in his ear was still recognizable even past the hiss of his respirator. 

Knowing who had an arm around his waist, dragging him back did nothing to stop his frantic struggle. These kids meant everything to his father now that he and his siblings were grown and off following their dreams. He couldn’t let one of them die like this. They’d already been hurt too much to wind up here and now they were losing everything all over again. It wasn’t fair. 

“Let me go, yoi!” Marco snarled, voice fracturing around the smoke clogging his lungs. “The kids!”

“We got them out, you're the last one!” His best friend’s brother promised, still dragging him back to the front entrance. 

“Are you sure?!” Marco gasped, feeling the fire lashing at his skin despite Luffy loosening his hold just long enough to wrap the protective bulk of his bunker jacket around his mostly singed medical coat.

“Yeah!” Luffy called as he pressed a hand to Marco’s head forcing him into half a crouch as he pushed them to the door as quick as he could. “Now let me get you out of here!”

[ Anchor! You need to clear out of there! The roof is starting to give.]

“Understood! Bringing the last one out now!” Luffy called into the radio on his shoulder. 

Suddenly a sickening crack sounded above them when they were only mere feet from the front entrance. The next thing Marco knew he was stumbling out the door into the arms of his best friend. Looking back all he saw was that same bright smile that had always been aimed at him from a hospital bed vanishing under piles of wood, concrete, and metal beams. Not even Ace’s iron grip could keep his knees from colliding with the ground. 

“ You always fix me up when I get hurt! ” Luffy’s parting words after his last stint in the ER repeated in his head like a high-pitched whine as Ace’s scream of his brother’s name roared in his ear. 

When his mind jerked back to the present, Marco scrambled forward desperately on hands and knees without a second thought, uncaring of the cuts and burns, toward Ace who was dragging Luffy’s unconscious body from the still-burning rubble. Luffy who he knew was never still, but now was. This was his fault. He felt arms wrap around him forcing him away, his own body just damaged enough that fighting back felt impossible now that the adrenaline was steadily draining from his system. 

“Pl-ease!” Marco wheezed, voice smoke ruined and half smothered in his sobs. “L-et me he-lp hi-im. My f-ault. ‘S my fault!”

He was still begging when a second ambulance tore into the parking lot. He couldn’t take his eyes off Chopper and Hongo as they worked. He knew he wasn’t the same level trauma surgeon as Law, but he could still help. He was so focused on the pair working on the man who’d just smiled at him as a building collapsed over him that he never felt the prick to his own neck. The last thing he saw before waking up in a sterile white hospital room was Luffy’s broken body being loaded into the back of an ambulance. 

It was an image he knew was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. 

Shanks was having a good day, his arm wasn’t hurting for the first time in days, there had been no panicked calls from his crew and he was even able to get around to watching that show his Anchor had been saying he would like. 

He smiled fondly as his screen lit up, a message from Ace of Luffy being smothered in tiny felines that they had rescued from a storm drain with a ‘don’t worry we made sure he didn’t bring one home’ attached to it. 

Yes, today was a good day. 

Which of course for the record, ended in disaster. 

His phone ringing later brought him out of his head, smiling wide as his dad’s name popped up on the screen. “Hey old man, you…” 

“Turn on the scanner!” Rayleigh’s voice was pitched, it had Shanks’s heart dropping. 

He raced from the kitchen and towards his office, bare feet sliding across the wood floors and fumbling the switches on his radio. Frantic screaming filled the silence, sending a spark of panic flaring bright through him. Was it his house? How bad was the fire? 

‘…ghter Luffy please respond! Luffy check in! Anchor! Come on kid!...’ Beck's voice boomed over everyone else. Shanks felt his heart lodge in his throat as his eyes remained locked on the radio, there was a ringing in his ears that he ignored, refused to pay attention to while his son was being hailed… and unresponsive . 

‘LUFFY!’

‘Anyone got eyes on Anchor!?’

‘LULU ANSWER ME!’

Bile rose in Shanks’s throat, tears pooling and spilling silently down his cheeks as he slapped a hand over his mouth. His son was hurt and Shanks wasn’t there to pull him out, to look because just like Anchor he couldn’t leave someone he could help. 

Please… 

Please god… 

Not him… 

Not his precious Anchor…

Not his son!

Voices and sounds became a cacophony of noise till a piercing familiar shriek of a PASS alarm sounded, bringing everything to a haunting silence. It takes exactly thirty seconds of inactivity for the alarm to trigger and out of everyone in the house, Luffy was the only one to never trigger a false alarm. He couldn’t with the way he was always moving. 

The shrill alarm echoed through the open lines despite being buried under rubble. He could hear his husband barking out the orders to form a chain to dig their son out from the collapse. His youngest had always reminded him of the larger-than-life man who’d raised him. Death wouldn’t be so cruel as to take his son the same way it took his father, right? Right?!

‘Get that concrete off of him!’ His husband’s voice roared over the line. ‘Move, move, move, this building is still unstable!’

‘Don’t you give up, LuLu!’ He listened as his oldest son screamed over and over for his brother, begging him to just hold on. ‘We’re coming ok?! Damn it, Luffy, call out!’

‘We’re coming, Cap! God damn it, Roux, bring me a halligan to pry up this beam!’ He could hear Zoro crying out and snarling for a tool as metal and wood bent and burned away. ‘Cap, if you can hear us call out!’

He listened as they pulled his son free and the relief only lasted a brief moment before he realised that Luffy didn’t respond, Anchor always responded.

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday this is Lieutenant Benn Beckman from House 22 we have a firefighter down at Whitebeard’s Orphanage, need additional…’ 

The world spun and the floor went out from under him, a scream tearing from his throat. He felt arms catch him and when he looked up, when he stopped screaming his son's name , his father’s tear-filled eyes stared back.

Benn choked back the tears, hands grasping Ace’s turnout gear as they watched Luffy being wheeled away toward the ambulance. Pulling his oldest kid tightly back against his chest, he held on for dear life as Ace struggled to follow his brother into the ambulance. His heart hammered, eyes locking on the blood drops that trailed after them like a bad omen. Gods, let his baby boy survive this. 

The wound was bad, Benn knew that, not just from experience, but because of how Hongo’s face had paled when they pulled Luffy from beneath the piles of metal, wood, and concrete and there was a broken-off pipe embedded in his son’s chest. The veteran medic’s hands shook as he cut away the fabric of the turnout gear. A fine tremble in his voice as he ordered Chopper to gather supplies so they could do everything they could to save their reckless brat. 

He dropped to the floor as Ace’s legs gave out, a continuous cry escaping his lips, and Benn… Benn was numb, he could barely think because the kid he’d watched grow from a small child, watched every heartbreak and success was somewhere beyond those doors fighting for his life under Chopper’s careful hand while Hongo raced for the hospital like the devil himself was chasing him. It hurt to know that the devil wasn’t but Death was. God, this was Roger all over again, wasn’t it?

He didn’t really remember a neighboring house showing up to take over the scene, rushing over the second a mayday had been hailed. He knew at some point he got Ace back into the truck with him. Uncaring how it might look to others he held his oldest son tightly in his lap. Ace being a grown man be damned, Benn couldn’t help save his youngest’s life right now, that was in the hands of the medical professionals, but he could certainly keep his oldest together.

Tears flowed as he clenched his eyes shut against the world, trying to force the image of Luffy broken and bleeding under Hongo’s and Chopper’s hands from his mind. He needed to focus, he needed to make sure that Ace didn’t break in his hands, and oh god…

How was he going to tell Shanks? 

How was he going to tell Anchor’s father that their son may not make it? 

The rest of the ride to the hospital was done in silence, Ace’s cries and the sirens the only noise made by those who rode with them, which was a far cry from what it usually was. Truck was typically the liveliest of them all and it was heart-wrenching to think about just how much of that was contributed to Luffy and his never-ending cheer. It was Hongo that met them at the door as soon as they pulled up, pale and bloody. 

“Chopper took the ambulance back, he’s going to gather us spare clothes and Penguin said he’d keep us informed,” Hongo explained with slightly blank eyes. “Law is the one operating and we know Law is the best, he won't let anything happen.” 

It was a relief to them all at that news, Law was one of the best surgeons they knew and was known for performing miracles. If anyone could keep Luffy alive despite the sheer amount of trauma that collapse had induced then it was Trafalgar Law. 

Knowing there was no use delaying the inevitable, Benn let Zoro take his son from his arms to help his best friend’s older brother clean up. The green-haired man always did his best to look after everyone in the house but Ace and Luffy to an exceptional degree. Benn scrubbed a hand down his face wincing when he felt his son’s dried blood scrape off his skin before with a bracing breath he pulled his phone out to call his husband. 

He didn't know if it was good or worse that it was his father-in-law who answered the phone and not his husband. He feared that both may have been listening in on the scanner. Even retired, Rayleigh craved the action and was nearly as restless as his son was from being laid up after tearing the muscles in his shoulder when he threw himself against a ledge to stop a teenage jumper that had reminded them both a bit too much of their oldest in his younger years. 

“Please tell me you both weren’t listening.” Benn sighed, pleaded more like. 

The silence that followed was telling and Benn felt his heart drop. It was bad enough that he was there, that he had to watch and listen firsthand as his kid was trapped and unresponsive but for Shanks? For Rayleigh?

Shanks had suffered so much and this would have reminded him, reminded them both, of when they lost Roger. 

“We’re five minutes out,” Rayleigh informed after another beat, a rarely heard warble in his tone. “Less if I break laws.” 

Benn paced the entirety of the entranceway once the call ended, back and forth, hands itching for a cigarette that he had long since quit. Benn knew, he knew that he needed to make more calls, to ring Sabo and Garp but right now what Benn needed most was to pull himself together. 

He could feel the thinly held-together string on his composure fraying at the edges and right now he needed to be strong, he couldn't break not here, not yet .

It wasn’t much longer till Shanks came into view, clothes rumpled, hair a mess, and tear tracks down his face as he slammed into him, his injured arm crushed between them while his good one came up to clutch tight at his back. Rayleigh was not far behind him, ashen face and eyes distant and Benn wondered what the old man was seeing.

“Beck, Beck…” Shanks sobbed. 

A flicker of something shone behind Rayleigh’s eyes as Benn caught his gaze. “How bad?”

“Bad.” Benn swallowed thickly, tears prickling at the edge of his eyes. “Penguin came out not long after we got here, it… fuck… he said it wasn’t looking good. Two floors collapsed on top of him, he was impaled and crushed… just… I can’t get his smile out of my head.” 

He couldn’t continue, not when Shanks fell silent in his arms, not when Rayleigh stared at him in mute horror.

Flickers of a memory washed over Rayleigh’s eyes, of a similar situation. A building collapsed, fire everywhere, Roger’s laugh being the last thing he heard, his smile the last thing he saw as that bastard, that utter bastard pushed him out the window into the awaiting bag below just as hell fell around him. 

A smile that haunts him, because it was the knowing in the eyes that matched it, the ‘I’ll save you first come hell or high water, above all else, including myself.’

For not being of Roger's blood, Luffy sure did take after him, in the worst of ways, in the best of ways. 

“Where’s Ace?” Shanks asked after swallowing thickly, peeking up from his husband's chest to look around with confusion, he had thought his firecracker would have been plastered to Benn’s side, would have tackled into him by now… especially now. 

Benn grimaced, “Zoro took him to clean up, I don’t think he realised it but he couldn’t look away from the blood on his hands, couldn’t stop trying to rub it away. He’s inside.” 

“We need to go to him,” was the immediate reply from his husband, hand curled tight around his wrist as he was pulled back inside. “Have you called Sabo?”

A grimace. “Not yet, he was next.” 

Ace was a wreck, he could barely recall anything after watching Luffy being taken from him and wheeled to the ambulance. Faintly he could recall someone leading him to the bathroom and cleaning him up once they reached the hospital, but he wasn’t too sure on who. Probably Zoro, his baby brother’s best friend always looked after him whenever Luffy got hurt. Luffy got hurt a little too much for anyone’s comfort but his heart had always been too big to leave well enough alone when someone needed help. 

Everything was blurry and he felt detached from the world.

‘He’s currently in surgery but it’s not looking good, I’m sorry we’ll inform you when we know more.’

With shaking hands, he pulled out his phone, tears spilling as the image he had taken only hours before of Luffy smiling and laughing as he was attacked by kittens popped up on his screen. How has it only been a few hours since then? His brother was just right there… 

Forcefully shaking his head Ace took a breath, forcing back the sob in his throat, and dialed Sabo.

‘Ace! If you’re just calling to tell me another thing our…’ Sabo’s voice trailed off as Ace cut him off. 

“Sa– Sabo…” A cry, broken and devastated. “ Lu–”

‘Where are you? Ace what’s happened!? ACE!’ Sabo’s voice was frantic, only growing louder and desperate the longer Ace cried, even now he wasn't strong enough. 

He wasn't fast enough to get his brother, wasn’t strong enough to pull the broken beams off his otouto who was so silent and still and surrounded by so much red. Why had he let Luffy go alone for the last checks? It was his best friend running around in the building, Luffy being the fastest when geared up wasn’t enough of an excuse. It should have been him. God, why couldn’t it have been him!?

“At the hospital… Sabo it—it’s bad.” Ace managed to get out, hand coming up to curl in his hair tightly, tugging sharply to bring him back into focus. 

“ Fuck.” Sabo’s voice hissed in his ear. “I’ll be there as soon as I can! Has anyone told Mom?”

“I think Dad’s called him, or trying. I—I don’t know.” Ace managed to get out, hysteria and panic welling within as he realised all the people he needed to inform. His eyes flickered up to look for Benn but the room was devoid of their dad, only half the house was in the waiting room all scattered about. 

Lucky and Yasopp were in the corner, legs bouncing rapidly as they stared blankly ahead. Hongo was wearing scrubs, hands buried in his hair, head between his knees. Limejuice, Usopp, and Bonk were missing but Zoro was on the phone near the door, face stressed. 

“Sabo… I need you here, please, please.” The words were a whisper, pulled from his lips like acid. “He needs— Lulu will need us and I don’t… Bo… Bo, they don’t think he’ll make it.”

‘I—I’m on my way. I’ll be there in, fuck Ace, I’m coming… just please if there is any more news.” Loud thuds and the slamming of a door, followed by Koala’s panicked screech followed by her yelling at Sabo about even thinking of driving in his condition. 

“Let Koala or Hack drive Sabo, please, I can’t… If I get a call to attend another accident for my other brother then…” He trailed off, unable to even say the words. 

A sob of his own escaped Sabo’s lips at that. ‘I promise, I’ll be there soon, hold on Ace-nii.”

At the tone dial, Ace buried his face in his hands, uncaring if the phone dug into him. He ignored Zoro when he took a seat by his side, ignored whoever was trying to gain his attention as he fought off the scream that wished to burst from his throat; teeth aching with the force. 

“ Ace!” His mom’s voice had his head snapping up, tears spilling freely over as he surged forward and buried himself into Shanks’s embrace.

“Shanks… mom, mom!” Ace choked out, fingers gripping tightly to the material of Shanks's shirt. 

Shanks swallowed as he held Ace tight, Benn pulling them both into his embrace, Rayleigh’s hands settling heavily on their necks in comfort. “He’ll be okay, he’ll be okay. It’s Anchor, he’ll bounce back, he always does.” 

The words were uttered with conviction though uncertainty remained and Shanks didn’t know who he was trying to convince more, his eldest or himself. 

Shanks swallowed thickly as he stepped into the room, tears forming once again as he took in the view before him. Luffy, his son, his little Anchor, lay still and looking ever so small against the stark white of the hospital bed, tubes and wires flowing everywhere. 

He was so still and that is what drove it in for Shanks that Luffy was hurt, and hurt bad at that , because his son was never still. Not even when he spiked a fever when he was young, or so drugged from having his wisdom teeth removed… yet now, here… 

“How did this happen?” He asked thickly, throat tight as he stepped closer and took the empty seat by his son's side, taking a cold hand in his own. 

Cold but alive… his mind whispered as his hand shifted to wrap around Luffy’s wrist to feel the pulse. Shanks didn’t care that he could see and hear the steady rhythmic beat of the machine, he couldn't believe it till he felt that beat with his own hands. 

Ace choked and stifled the sob that was building in his throat, body slumped forward in Sabo’s hold, the blonde’s own hands shaking through Ace’s hair like he did when they were kids. A self-soothing practice that Shanks hadn’t seen in them for a long time. 

“It’s my fault, I should have just stayed with him, if I did then…” Ace choked out, only stopping when Sabo squeezed his brother tightly, face pinched. 

Benn sighed tiredly from behind them all as he stepped into the room, cleaner than he was before. “Ace, Luffy made the decision to split up, you needed to get the last child out and he went to fetch Marco. This was not your fault. You followed the orders your Captain gave you. ” 

“He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself either, Firecracker,” Shanks whispered, eyes turning back towards Luffy who was swathed in bandages and breathing only because of the machine. “Anchor is still alive… and he always comes back to us no matter how hurt he gets. We just need to be patient and wait for him to wake up.”

“ Fuck, ” Shanks whined low in his throat as realization hit that he needed to call Buggy. “Beck, I need to call Bugs, he needs to know.”

He knew his brother wouldn’t be able to come but that didn’t change the fact that the man needed to know that his youngest nephew was knocking on death’s door. The blue-haired man would need to know so that he could make arrangements to come back home if… if… No , Shanks refused to give life to that thought. Anchor would come back to them he always, always, came back to them.

He wouldn’t accept any other option. Couldn’t.

Rayleigh stood just inside the door, eyes locked onto the figure on the bed, bile burning the back of his throat. Luffy had grown in the last few months since Rayleigh had seen him last, the boy training for something that wasn’t of matter right at this moment but… His eyes flickered to Ace who was near a spitting image of his mother and then to Luffy who was starting to look more and more like Roger the longer he stared. 

This was a familiar sight, too familiar that it burned something fierce within him. Same circumstances, different hospital, different people but still the same. Within one blink and the next it was Roger on the bed, swathed in more bandages than not still sootstained and red , a breathing tube down his throat but unplugged, still and cold. 

“I’m sorry for your loss, we did all we could…” Rayleigh could barely remember anything after that, nothing beyond the thought that the world was now a little more joyless, colourless than when everything was swathed in the radiance that was Gol D. Roger. 

He hoped to all the gods there were, will be, and have been that history didn’t repeat itself here in this room, with this child full of sunshine. 

He wouldn’t be able to survive that again, nor would his son. 

It had been a week since the fire and Luffy still remained unconscious, still laid pale and unmoving with too many wires and lines connected to him in a sterile hospital bed. There was more bandaged skin than not between the casts and the sheer mess that his chest had been. The pipe that had been embedded in his youngest’s chest had missed the man’s spine by mere millimeters and even then it had left devastation in its wake. Benn never knew that there would be a day that he was thankful , happy even, that a life had been cut short. 

But, there he sat in the dead of the night, visiting hours long over, thanking the young man killed in a car wreck while Luffy was still in surgery. Luffy’s right lung had been shredded and without that death and a small check on the stranger’s license, their son never would have stood a chance. His body could still reject it after so much trauma, infection and just about a million other things could go wrong, and even if the emergency transplant continued to take his son would have to be on medication the rest of his life. But that was fine, as long as Luffy was alive nothing else mattered. 

“I’m not sure if you can hear me, kid, I hope you can,” Benn spoke softly as he took Shanks’s vacant spot. 

It had taken Rayleigh, Sabo, and Ace’s combined efforts to drag the red-haired man from the hospital, to force him home to rest . Benn knew he wouldn’t rest much but their oldest boys had been staying with them at the house instead of their own apartments ever since the accident. He couldn’t help but think that their presence the past week was the only reason Shanks hadn’t shattered completely. 

Especially after Luffy went into respiratory failure with only him in the room while Benn took their eldest boys to get some food. 

The air heaved from his lungs in one weary sigh as he pulled his son’s one uncasted hand towards him and pressed a kiss to the palm just like he’d done so many times when Luffy was younger. When his son was vibrant and full of life, love, and happiness and just all in all everything that he wasn’t right now. 

“But I know that you never give up, so don’t start now you hear me, Anchor…” Benn breathed, words mere puffs of air against the skin of his son’s palm. “Your… your mom has lost so much, so much and I know he cannot survive losing you. So please kid, wake up, wake up!”

Just like every day for the past week there was no response from Luffy. With a shaky breath, Benn pressed his lips to his son’s palm once more before folding his hands around it. The nurses had caught all of them crying more than once but even still Benn did as he always did and pretended nothing was wrong despite the tears cutting scars down his face. Nonetheless, he forced his voice to be as normal as possible while he told his son everything that had been happening back at the house during his absence. 

Marco hesitantly stepped into the quiet room, heart hammering loudly in his ears and nearly drowning out the rhythmic beeps of the heart monitor and the whoosh of the ventilator completely.

It wasn't the first time that Marco had snuck into the room, nor would it be his last, but each time he couldn't stop his heart from spiking. Couldn't stop the guilt that ate away at him as he checked over Luffy's file and watched day by day as his cheeks sunk in a little more. 

Tonight was different though, tonight he just needed to see him, especially after the news they got from Garp who had done all he could to hunt down the culprit that started the fire. 

And wasn't that a kick to the teeth when they found out.

“Hey Luffy-yoi. I thought tonight I could update you on what's happened.” He whispered, moving closer to the man's bedside, hand carefully brushing away the black lock of hair that had fallen into the younger man’s face. 

Luffy didn’t answer, didn’t even show any reaction at all to Marco’s presence in the room. He didn’t know why that still clawed the pit in his chest deeper each time it happened. It had been that way for nearly three weeks now. The nurses knew it was him Luffy got hurt saving they quieted when they knew he was around, but it didn’t stop him from overhearing when they didn’t. 

‘ Dr. Edward sneaks in to see that firefighter all the time.’

‘He’s in denial. The man hasn’t shown any signs of waking up even if he is mostly breathing on his own now, at this point he probably won’t. The family is just prolonging the inevitable.’

“Turns out the fire wasn’t an accident, yoi,” Marco murmured. “The security footage gets instantly backed up so they managed to catch this bastard that worked with Pops at his other company setting fire to the place.”

“They’re still questioning him to try and find out why he would do this. The old man thought of him like a son and he did this to us. That’s not even considering the fact he could have killed those kids.” The words left him in an angry huff, eyes clenching tight at the thought of all the ‘what ifs and could have been’s’ again. 

He collapsed down on the chair like a puppet with all its strings cut, chest aching. All this suffering for what!? Revenge? Greed?

Children lost their home , what little items they held, and nearly their lives . His best friend was barely functioning, and daily counseling to deal with the trauma of nearly losing his brother wasn’t doing much of anything to help. He couldn’t help but think only Luffy waking up would help his friend to actually start healing. Luffy… Luffy was hurt so badly that even his devil's luck couldn't bounce him back. 

Shanks was a mess, his father, Garp, and Rayleigh in constant talks trying to mitigate everything while Sabo reminded everyone as to why he was promoted as Partner to Revolutionary Law so young. 

And here Marco was… avoiding them all.

“You need to wake up Luffy, it's not the same without you, yoi.” He whispered into the quiet room. “I didn't think I would miss someone I barely know, but I do. I didn't even realise how much until I thought about how I hadn’t heard your laugh in weeks , how bright your smile made my day…”

It was the truth though, he couldn’t claim he was happy per se when the rambunctious firefighter was his patient but it’d be a lie to say the younger man didn’t make his day anytime he did pop up in the ER. His energy had always been infectious and the soot he tended to wear like a second skin made his bright smile stand out all that much more. It felt strange these last few weeks to have patients brought in from fires or wrecks and then not see Luffy appearing as soon as shift ended with some kind of stuffed animal to check on whoever they’d saved hours before. 

A soft grumble suddenly snapped him out of his thoughts. Jerking his head to the only person who could have made the sound, Marco held his breath as he watched Luffy’s hand start twitching on the bed. It was the most reaction the younger man had given to anything in three weeks and Marco couldn’t help but wonder if he actually deserved to be the first face Luffy saw coming out of a coma when it was his fault that Luffy was in this position to begin with. 

Talk to him, you idiot! A voice that sounded suspiciously like Izou hissed in his head. 

“Luffy, c’mon it’s time to wake up you reckless idiot,” Marco whispered only just barely keeping his voice from cracking. “Everyone has been worried sick, yoi.”

The hand on the bed twitched again and Marco noticed the heartbeat on the monitor spiking just the barest bit as Luffy’s mouth twitched behind the breathing mask on his face. C’mon, wake up. Marco felt his breath catch when Luffy’s eyelids slowly fluttered open, dark eyes glazed and confused as they took in light for the first time in three weeks before snapping shut with a broken whine as he flinched away from the harsh lighting.  

Seeing the flinch of the younger man, Marco leaned forward, using his bulk to block the harsh light from view, his hand coming up to brush his thumb across Luffy’s cheek and catching the lone tear that fell. “I’ve got you.” 

A soft scrunch of Luffy’s nose had Marco’s heart spiking, he watched as Luffy hesitantly began to open his eyes again, blinking slowly to adjust to the light comfortably. 

“Birdie…” he murmured voice sounding like gravel from disuse as his eyes finally focused on who was in the room with him. At the same moment, recognition struck and a slow, sunset-soft smile spread on his face and stole Marco’s breath away along with it. “Shishishi, I’m glad you’re alright.”

A slight hysterical laugh escaped him, tears spilling down his cheeks. “Thanks to you, you idiot .”