#a little offering for the future kings bday 👑

[taizi]

because it’s his birthday, can I ask for some fluff for the sunshine boy himself 🥺🥺

thankfully his birthday fell on a sunday and i had some extra time !! <3 <3

read on ao3

x

It’s hard to pin Ace’s little brother down in a way that doesn’t fall short of the truth. 

Summer boy, the villagers sometimes call him, but that’s not right. Luffy in the cold brittle heart of winter shines in exactly the same way he does the whole rest of the year. 

Golden child, and it comes a little closer, but the connotations, Sabo will say, nose wrinkling at something he heard all too often from the soulless tutors his parents hired, aren’t all good.  

Sunshine, Ace calls out once, not knowing he was going to say it until he did. Sabo blinked, taken by surprise. He turned to look at his twin, curiosity clear on his face along with a complete lack of confusion that was telling. 

They both knew who he meant. Luffy knew it, too, and came running the way he always came running when one of his brothers called his name. There were leaves in his hair and scraggly flowering weeds crammed in his pockets and—always—a big smile on his face, bright and beaming. 

It’s easy to complain about him because he makes it easy. Luffy is as low-maintenance as any little kid could be but he has an attention span so short you had to bend down to see it at all and he wouldn’t know how to stop talking if someone put a gun to his head. 

Ace gripes about him all the time, and sometimes he really does get angry at him and lose his patience, but in his heart he would sooner die than live without him. Ace may groan and drag his feet on those days in July when the heat is at its peak and the rainforest is humid and muggy, but he wouldn’t really want the sun to go away. Not really.

They need that stupid thing. The world would be dark and cold and unlivable without it. 

“Sunshine, huh?” Sabo says later that night, with Luffy a haphazard pile of rubber limbs sprawled bonelessly across his legs. 

Ace runs hot, and the idea of his little brother’s deadweight pressing into him on an already warm evening makes him want to kick his feet restlessly. But Sabo carries a chill around with him that he inherited from that mausoleum of a mansion he grew up in. Sabo always manages to feel cold. He never minds when Luffy dogpiles on him, clinging with sticky rubber limbs so that Sabo couldn’t shove him off even if he wanted to. 

Somehow, Luffy is the best at telling when Sabo gets cold. There’s no change in the air or the sky that gives it away—maybe Sabo is quieter than usual, though, or doesn’t laugh as much. So Luffy beelines for him, clambering over whatever or whoever is in his way until he can attach himself to his immediate older brother like a stubborn tree frog. 

Sabo, patient and indulgent where Ace is anything but, smiles down at Luffy when he gets particularly clingy as if Luffy is the one doing him a kindness. 

One day, the Celestial Dragons will come to Dawn Island and blow Sabo’s ship out of the water and blow a whole clean into Ace’s life, and his heart, and his future. He’ll understand then, that chill in Sabo’s house that stuck to him, that was never really about being cold as much as it was about needing warmth. 

Ace runs hot, but sometimes he’ll pass beneath a cluster of the bright tropical birds Sabo liked best, or Makino will drop off a case of the snacks they would always clamor for not knowing they were Sabo’s favorites, and Ace won’t even realize he’s shivering until Luffy crashes into him and loops rubber arms around him over and over and over. The sun coming out after a storm—and it was always there, just behind the clouds, it was always going to come back out. 

It will take Sabo’s departure for Ace to understand why he looked down at their sticky little brother like he wanted to thank him, he just didn’t know the right words. 

For now, Ace scoffs, tossing a stick into the fire. 

“Suits him, right? Annoying and gets in your eyes and follows you everywhere.”

Sabo laughs. Luffy turns his head towards the sound without waking, the way a flower unfolds in the morning light. 

———

Law is familiar with loss. The weight of it feels like a coat he never managed to outgrow, one that he’s been dragging around since he was a child. Sometimes the shape of it changes. Sometimes it settles a little kinder on his shoulders, not quite so heavy. Sometimes he can almost forget he’s wearing it at all. 

Eventually the grief becomes a thing you live with. Grow with. Something you unbox and sit with from time to time but know how to pack away again. 

But when it’s brand-new it’s a shit-show. 

Strawhat’s is outright destructive. 

The kid breaks apart everything around him, trying to tear enough chunks out of the world that it feels even a fraction of the pain he’s in, and when that isn’t enough he moves onto tearing chunks out of himself.

When Jimbei hauls him out of the forest, trembling and too weak to stand and bleeding through his bandages, Law thinks I risked myself and my crew and my whole goddamn mission for nothing because Strawhat looks like he’s about to drop dead. 

It was a shot in the dark in the first place, and the surgery was long and grueling and just barely on the right side of impossible even for the master of the Op Op Fruit. The only way Strawhat could live through it is if he wanted to. 

Law understands loss. Law once sent himself on a suicide mission when he was barely more than three feet tall because his life was empty where it used to be so full and he couldn’t conceive of anything that could make it worth living again. 

He also learned the hard way—the stubborn, gritted-his-teeth, fought-it-every-step-kicking-and-screaming way—that you can survive losing everything and come out the other side. 

Cora-san showed him that other side. Cora-san carried him there, betraying and abandoning everything else, making a promise he knew was a lie because it was the kindest thing he could do.  

“I love you,” he said, knowing as he said it that he would die because of it. Choosing to. There was no other choice he could make.

And somehow Law survived losing him on top of it all. It was a choice he had to make, too. One he still has to make, some days. 

Fire Fist Ace died in about the worst way he possibly could have. He couldn’t have made it more traumatizing for Strawhat if he had actually tried. But it was an act of love like Cora-san’s. Protecting something more important to him than anything else with his own life, his own body. 

If Strawhat Luffy survives, it will be because he wants to. Because he dug in his heels and put in the work and fought for it. 

Jimbei sits him down on a bed in the recovery room, his deep, proud voice rumbling, “I’m going to find a blanket. You’re freezing.”

Strawhat hums as he leaves, eyes lined with red and puffy from crying. He studies the rust-stained bandages on his hands, flexes his fingers, and looks up at Law.

“I’m cold?” he says, like it’s a question. 

It’s the first coherent thing he’s said since waking up that wasn’t just hopeless, helpless screaming for someone who would never answer him again. Law doesn’t know what exactly he’s asking, but he says, “Heat loss is normal after a surgery. You’ll be fine.” 

There is a brightness to the younger supernova that draws the eye. A boldness that was apparent from the very first moment Law glimpsed him at that auction house in Sabaody. Something simple and magnificent at the same time.

Back then, Law looked at him and saw a stranger it might be worth it to take a chance on.

Now, despite himself, he sees someone young and hurt and far away from home. 

He can’t be for this kid what Cora-san was for him. He can haul someone back from the brink of death but he can’t give them a reason to keep existing. There isn’t enough of himself left to carve out that kind of hope or kindness for someone else. There isn’t enough of himself left to even really want to. 

All he has to offer is, “Shachi is making soup.”

“Sanji’s soup is better,” Strawhat announces with perfect authority, even though there is no way he could possibly know that, having literally never tried Shachi’s cooking before.

Law is too exhausted to feel anything but mildly annoyed. It’s enough of a return to what passes for normalcy that he leans in to begin checking the kid’s vitals. 

Hand on Strawhat’s wrist, he says, “If you want Sanji’s soup so bad, go get it then.”

Strawhat tilts his chin up, defiant. His pulse thunders beneath Law’s fingers, like one or two or a dozen drums. 

“I will!” he declares. 

This is the boy who shot down the World Government flag at Enies Lobby, and attacked a Celestial Dragon while knowing what would come after, and stormed an impenetrable prison and then the front lines of a war, all for one person. 

Each time, for just one person. 

How stupid do you have to be?

How simple and magnificent, like looking up at the same sky you see every day and letting yourself be stunned into stillness by the endless, vivid blue?

By the time Jimbei comes back with a quilt under one arm, and a meal tray in the opposite hand, it’s a much livelier Strawhat Luffy who greets him. 

The recovery room, sparse and sterile, is always a little cold. But as Law sits back in his chair and draws his newest patient’s baffling medical charts closer, the thought occurs, fleeting and insignificant, that it feels warmer than usual. 

———

Someday, when the Gum Gum Fruit that was never actually the Gum Gum Fruit awakens into something spectacular and Luffy unlocks his fifth and final gear, his crew acclimates with startling quickness. 

His crew, who sometimes had to squint when they looked at him, like they were staring at something high in the sky in the middle of a cloudless afternoon. His friends, who spent every day and night beside him and got used to it early on—the packed heat he put out like a little furnace, the way whatever room he was in would always get warmer when he laughed. His nakama, who loved him in all shapes, in all weather, from the beginning and all the way to the very end. 

“Sun god, huh?” Zoro would say. Discarding a former truth and embracing this new one, as casually as every other impossible thing he had ever done. Future historians would be ripping their hair out, trying to make sense of what it could mean. According to legend, the pirate king’s first mate only said, “Sounds about right.”

But in this moment, in the underbelly of a colosseum, Luffy’s fruit is still just the silly, bouncy thing he ate when he was a little kid and there’s no reason to believe it will ever be anything else. 

He’s wearing a costume that does nothing to hide his identity from the people who really know him. 

He’s anxious and seems torn in two directions, wanting to help his friends but unwilling to leave his big brother’s fire in the hands of someone who wouldn’t use it the way Ace would want. It makes him short-tempered and quicker to pick a fight than usual, frowning at the stranger who approaches him so familiarly. 

He’s the brightest thing for a thousand miles, the focal point of every room he walks into and the center of the galaxy, but not because of any fruit.  

And looking at him, at his wide brown eyes and the curve of a smiling scar on his cheekbone, the chill in Sabo’s chest warms to nothing for the first time in twelve years.  

His little brother, all things summer and golden and shining. Didn’t Ace say it best?

“Hi, sunshine,” Sabo says.