Chapter Text
“Do you know who the other parent is?”
Ace grits his teeth. He doesn’t, and he is resolutely not thinking about why he doesn’t, but there is one thing he knows for sure regardless of the exact answer: “Not someone I want in the kid’s life.”
“Fair enough.” Koza snorts out a friendly half-laugh, like they’re sharing an inside joke; Vivi glares at him, pink eyes glinting sharply. It’s not all that effective, going by the blush that rises on his sandy cheeks.
“I take it that means you intend on keeping it? You should know that you have other options, and there’s no shame in any of them.” The princess’s voice is gentle, softer than anything he’s heard in months, and Ace isn’t sure whether he finds it comforting or takes umbrage at being treated like he’s made of glass. Maybe both, if he weren’t so exhausted.
“One of our old buddies is a midwife in training,” Koza adds, sober-faced and softer now as well. “She’ll be able to help, whatever you decide.”
“I’m keeping it,” Ace says. It’s automatic and much more certain than he even realized he felt, and for a second he wonders whether it’s just a reflexive protest of their sudden delicacy… but no: he really, genuinely means it.
See, when it’s him, he can understand - even agree with - the things he’s been told all his life about his cursed blood and diabolical nature. He’s internalized it, accepted it, the knowledge sunk in bone-deep by this point that he lives in active spite of the world, that every day he lives is an undeserved blessing brought about by Gramps’s dubious kindness. There are people who love him, yes - at least three of them, one of whom is even still alive - but some part of him has always felt and probably will always feel like he’s deceiving them into it somehow, and that’s not even getting into the danger he puts them in just by existing.
He’s been wondering for all his life whether he ought to have been born, and for fifteen out of twenty years he’s always, always had the sense in the back of his mind that the answer is probably no.
But when the same question is posed of his family? When it’s someone else who’s his to protect, even if he hasn’t actually met them yet? Even if they barely exist as more than an inkling, a collection of symptoms that might so easily still fade to nothing?
For them, the mere thought of the demonization and insults and attacks seems so unbearably unjust… and he knows from personal experience that giving them up to be raised by someone else might very well not help in the least, or only let them live on borrowed time. He thought he’d accepted that for himself, but he can’t accept it for the one person who’s inescapably in the same boat - not any more than he’d accept it for his brothers.
He’d almost come to terms with breaking the promise he made to Luffy all those years ago, but Luffy is a captain with his own crew, with the strength to live on and maybe even fulfil his dream someday. Ace hated the thought he wouldn’t be there to see it, wouldn’t be there to fight his brother for the chance to crown Pops first, but overall he felt he’d had a good life, albeit a little too short. If resigning himself to his fate means he would abandon the most vulnerable member of his family, though, just like his bastard of an old man… then he can’t. He’ll live. He’ll fight with everything he has, not only for his own dreams but for them to have a chance to find theirs.
As for the logistics of it, well… He raised Monkey D. Luffy - noted trouble magnet and quite possibly the single most chaotic child on all the Blues - mostly on his own, and a lot of that was while he was a child himself. By comparison, how hard can single fatherhood be?
>*<
Out of the frontier agents of Baroque Works, Miss Wednesday had the lowest kill count - but being as it was an organization of bounty-hunting assassins, “lowest” certainly didn’t mean zero. So, when Vivi was making her plans and it clicked that her best option involved sinking a large Marine warship and using intoxicants to ensure the casualties were as close to 100% as possible, she was able to remind herself of something with all ease and honesty: she’d done worse things to better people.
In fact, when she found Ace deep in the inner compartments of the ship (not in the brig, but nearby, in an officer’s quarters), some part of her got the distinct feeling that she’d done these things to very few worse people - that there were few more deserving to consign to a watery grave.
Her fury spurred her on in collecting as many of the ship’s noncombatant support staff as she could in one room at the forecastle to maximize their chances of being rescued; by the time Caroo dragged her and Ace to their getaway vehicle, the Marines sinking within the iron-sided cage of their ship weren’t only a necessity but an act of vengeance.
>*<
Igaram is a great man and a great retainer to the Royal House of Nefertari - and because he is so great, Vivi can’t in good conscience loop him in on this. Nor in good judgement, for that matter: Igaram is fiercely loyal, but far from blindly obedient, and there’s a strong chance he’ll deem the risk she’s taking too severe for its lack of benefit to her family and country.
He wouldn’t necessarily be wrong about that, either. However, from the moment she heard the news, she had a much less dangerous way to approach this than would have been available to any of her friends - and she absolutely wouldn’t let Luffy kill himself for his big brother, especially not when she can do something to make sure he doesn’t need to.
As she originally planned, the mission to rescue Ace and keep him hidden long enough to get him back to his family should have just been her and Caroo. However, she needed some help arranging a few distractions and manipulations, then a more secure escape route (by desert duck standards, Caroo is an accomplished swimmer, but not by the standards of waterfowl in general and anyway he can only do so much on the open ocean), and then Koza revealed that their old friend Dima had fallen in with the Revolutionary Army and got some counterintelligence training that would be useful in keeping them far from Cipher Pol’s list of suspects, and well, one thing led to another…
Now, it’s a group effort involving almost every member of the Sand-Sand Band from their childhood - all except for those who’ve passed away, two in the droughts and three in the war, and Tasnim and Dayaram, who married young and have a toddler of their own to consider. (That, Koza tells her, was a real hassle to remind them of, since they’d wanted to help anyway. She resolves to visit them as soon as she gets the chance, with three years’ worth of birthday presents for little Mai.)
For the moment, Ace is hidden in the mountains just up the coast from Tamarisk; Koza is meant to be nearby for work, surveying and drafting plans in an area where some mountaineers found shallow magma and high-flow groundwater. It’s looking promising for a new town, this time placed to benefit from the rain shadow effect while using the mountain range as a natural shield against the Grand Line’s most extreme sea changes. Meanwhile, Vivi’s secretly building up a stockpile of supplies, and the plan is for her to attend a highly public event where she’ll swap places with a decoy who can vaguely pass for her from a distance before returning to the hideout to wait until ground is broken on the new settlement so they’ll be able to blend in with the ships coming in and out to furnish the construction.
(They’re planning to name the town Tsumegeri after the unit of the royal guard who threw away their lives senselessly over Crocodile’s manipulations; it was Koza’s idea, intended as a gesture of reconciliation between the people following the civil war. How he can still think that he’s no diplomat at this point is beyond her.)
Vivi hasn’t told her father about her plans, but she thinks he might know anyway; as soon as she returned to Alubarna, he gave her a secure Transponder Snail and an Eternal Pose pointed to Alabasta. Igaram and Pell, on the other hand, certainly don’t know, going by the way neither one has yet had an aneurysm, but she plans to be gone for at least a couple of months at a stretch and there’s no way they won’t notice eventually. She’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it, though: for the moment, her primary concern is getting to a point where she and Ace will be ready to leave at the drop of a hat once the time comes… and most pressingly at the moment, that includes figuring out where they’re going.
Some of Dima’s Revolutionary contacts are apparently nearby, scheduled to pass within a baby snail’s range of Alabasta sometime in the fortnight. They’re used to managing quick and quiet extractions, says the older girl, meaning they should be easily able to arrange a rendezvous for an escape to wherever it is that the Revolutionary Army spend their downtime… but whether they’d be willing is a different question. Since rescuing Ace likely did much more to anger the Marines than to cause them any notable damage, they’d likely need a lot of convincing for an alliance of any kind - convincing that, by the very nature of her existence, Vivi cannot help with.
Meanwhile, the now officially-renamed Sakura Kingdom is only a few days’ voyage away, depending on the winds. Vivi is loath to put them at risk, but if they avoid direct contact with King Dalton and just go to Chopper’s old house in the forest - as he invited all of them to do if the need should ever arise - it should be possible to ask some of the island’s renowned doctors for help in case of a difficult birth. It’s probably their best option; Vivi draws a line at actually asking any of her childhood friends to come along, and there’s only so far that a ship crewed by two people can sail, especially when one of them is as injured as Ace is.
At least he seems to be regaining energy by the day, and his wounds are healing up well - the external ones, at least. When she returns from Koza’s survey site, Vivi sees Ace sitting up and not visibly nauseated or dissociating, and she’s a little heartbroken by how much those simple facts feel like a blessing.
Given that he’s Luffy’s brother, it’s pretty worrying that the pirate isn’t borderline inhaling all of the food she brings as soon as she brings it, though she knows it’s been hard for him to keep things down. On the bright side, there’s something oddly cute about the sight of him feeding tiny pieces of flatbread to her new secure snail, pausing occasionally to pat it between the eye stalks with one or two fingers. The mollusc flaps its foot in response, making happy little splashing noises as it eats.
“I used to watch Gramps do this with his snail,” he says. “Think it was the only time I ever saw the old bastard tryin’ to be gentle - or something close to it, anyway.”
Vivi sits down on her bedroll, blushing as she realizes just how long she stood there in silence. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare.”
“Nah, ’s fine. Anyway, this guy’s not bad company for a snail.” With a more offended look than she ever realized the creatures were capable of, the snail swings one of its ocular tentacles to bop Ace’s fingers… and, predictably, starts to tear up from the pain of using its own eye as a weapon. “Even if he is a little stupid.”
When the snail whacks Ace again - this time with both eyes - Vivi can’t hold back a giggle.
“We should be ready to depart in a week or so,” she tells him. “We’re about half a day’s walk away from the coast, and Koza’s been very public about his new initiative to use abandoned ships as storage for food and water support in the early phases of construction on the new town.”
“Where’re we going?”
“I’m not sure, but…”
She sums up the two main options and the mention of the Revolutionary Army elicits a grimace - almost more of a growl, in frozen silent form like a mask. “Absolutely not. We can’t trust that bastard - I mean, them.”
“Good to know,” says Vivi, painting on a smile and not questioning just what bastard he means. For all she knows, maybe he ran afoul of some Revolutionaries while imprisoned. Every group large enough has some bad actors, and she’s not inclined to pry - not any more than she already has thanks to his half-asleep pleas. “So then, Sakura Kingdom it is!”
Ace mirrors her forced cheer, a fraction of a percent more relaxed than she managed despite being far more at risk between the two of them. She can certainly see why Luffy adores his big brother so much: when he smiles like that, it feels for a moment like things will probably be okay.
>*<
Ace is dead.
Hancock just got the report: that he was moved early and sank the ship he was on, taking nearly five hundred Marines with him. They’re calling him all kinds of things - demon, monster, craven… and worse, just below the photo of the burning wreck, they’ve put his picture beside his father’s, to make the world remember him by the one secret he never wanted to share.
Luffy, on the eve of breaking into Impel Down, deflates like he hasn’t in years.
By instinct, part of him has always known the ocean to be kind - nurturing, loving, carrying the voice of all life along the gentle, rumbling nerves of its currents. It’s a friend, something insists from deep within his hindbrain, unaffected by the fact that seawater hurts him like nothing else and has for most of his life.
The ocean is supposed to be a friend - family, that same mysterious something insists.
So then… why has it taken another brother from him, so similarly to ten years ago?