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taizi · 4 months

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a song to bring you home

one piece word count: 4k written for the its pirates server sake exchange ! my giftee was @portgas-d-aroace who wanted "anything asl" and gave me an excuse to write the most self indulgent fic of 2023

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“Again?” Sabo whispers, trying to sound mad. Whether he sounds that way or not doesn’t actually matter, since he’s already lifting his blanket in silent invitation.

“Sorry, ‘Bo,” Luffy mumbles thickly. He wastes no time crawling onto Sabo’s thin mattress, and Sabo pulls the blanket back down around them both, tucking it tight to keep the chill away.

Luffy attaches himself to Sabo’s side like a barnacle, tiny fists curled in his brother’s shirt as if he’s afraid something is going to swoop down and try to wrench them apart. Sabo huffs out a breath that fogs in the air and lets him.

“Nightmare?” he asks after a moment. He keeps his voice quiet in case Ace is still asleep, even though his twin is the lightest sleeper on the planet.

Luffy nods once, face buried against Sabo’s shoulder. He’s not trembling, but the way he’s holding himself completely still and silent is its own red flag.

It’s easy to forget that Luffy is not actually as spoiled as he acts. He whines and cries and pouts like any other privileged little master, he’s bossy and clingy and demands to go where his brothers go even though they all know he won’t be able to keep up, and sometimes—oftentimes—it grates on Sabo’s very last nerve.

But holding someone like Stelly up to someone like Luffy is like holding an orange up to the sun. There’s literally no comparison.

If Ace were actually as annoyed by Luffy as he pretends to be, then he wouldn’t be the first one to roll his eyes and throw up his hands and stomp back to collect their youngest when he falls behind. If Sabo actually meant all the mean things he says when they have to waste precious daylight dealing with a stupid scrape on Luffy’s stupid knee, then he wouldn’t suggest the pilgrimage down to Makino’s bar because she has those colorful bandages that always make Luffy smile.

Luffy is as much an orphan as Ace is—as Sabo pretends to be—and he was so desperate not to be alone that he was willing to die for their reluctant, backhanded friendship. He would run after them until his arms and legs gave out, and then at that point he would probably crawl, just so they don’t leave him behind.

Stubborn, selfish, stupid Luffy. The unwanted little kid that Ace and Sabo have begun to shape all their days around.

Something in Sabo’s chest hurts to know that Luffy is afraid. He tips his head and adjusts his arms so that the smaller boy is tucked more securely under his chin. Stars pinwheel slowly across the sky, winter constellations that Sabo will teach his brothers how to find once they manage to get their hands on a halfway decent telescope. There are clouds forming to the east, low and gray, that promise snow.

“Sing,” Luffy mumbles petulantly.

“You’re such a brat,” Sabo complains. But he doesn’t make Luffy go away, and it’s only another moment before he starts humming.

Sabo doesn’t know a lot of music, having successfully dodged his piano tutor for the last two years straight, but there’s a song he overheard on the docks a few months ago that stuck. Some sailors were singing it while they worked. Sabo didn’t catch all the words, so he made up the rest.

He made the mistake of singing it within his little brother’s earshot only once, but once was enough. Now he may as well be a performing monkey, because for every birthday and campfire and boring afternoon and bad dream, Luffy requests the same thing.

“Now you've got the chance to travel oceans,” Sabo half-says, half-sings, letting it settle somewhere between a story and a lullaby. “I hope the world’s as wide as you were hoping…”

Luffy sighs, a slow, satisfied thing. The fear-frozen shape of him softens with every word. He’s asleep again within one verse. Sabo sings two more, just in case.

—

Two weeks and five escape attempts after he nearly died at sea, Sabo is finally allowed out of the infirmary. It’s slow going, and the doctor isn’t thrilled with him, but stepping into the fresh air out on deck is worth the man’s grumbling and sidelong looks.

The whole left side of Sabo’s body is pins and needles and every breath feels like it burns, like the fire that almost killed him is still ready to snatch him up if he’s not careful.

But it’s worth it. It’s so worth it to see the open ocean, stretching out forever under a sky vivid orange and blue with dusk. There’s enough sunlight left in the early evening that it cascades across the surface of the water so brightly Sabo can’t look at it for very long.

This is freedom. And it’s important, so important he’ll cling to it with tooth and nail. So important he would set out by himself in a barely-sea-worthy boat to claim it. He just doesn’t remember why .

Sabo knows his name. He knows he left something horrible behind—he dreams of running desperately through a place that glittered and gleamed to hide the rot underneath, of begging cold, lofty faces for help that never comes. He knows that he should be happy to escape whatever left that impression on his brain.

But there’s a pit in his chest. A gnawing emptiness where something important is supposed to live. Part of him is so desperate to go back to where he came from that he would swim there if he had to.

With time, that feeling would fade. He would overlook it so often that it would become second nature to pretend it wasn’t there. Time and distance would soften the frantic edges, years stacking on top one after the other until that little voice wailing I want to go home! was too muffled for Sabo to hear.

If it was important, he wouldn’t have forgotten in the first place, he would reason to himself. Right?

But today, Sabo wins the contest of wills with the doctor, and he steps out onto the deck, and there is someone by the bow humming a familiar song while they work, and the whole world stops.

“Hey,” the doctor says, alarmed, and a bracing hand lands on his shoulder, and that’s about when Sabo realizes he’s crying.

His damaged eye stings horribly, and he’s making a mess of the bandages on his face, and he can hardly get enough breath in his lungs to say, “Take me back where you found me. I have to go back.”

The concussion makes it difficult for him to form new memories right now—his brain was rattled pretty hard. So he thinks the faces that peer at him in confusion and concern are the same ones that have surrounded him since he woke up on this ship in the first place, but they all swim together. Names are impossible. He knows the doctor by the cross on his shirt, and he knows the broad, looming shape of the man who saved him, and he turns to those two in particular.

“I know that song,” he babbles, hysterical. “I made up the lyrics so I could sing it to my brothers. What if Luffy has a nightmare while I’m gone? Ace doesn’t know the words. I have to go back. Take me back.”

They take him back.

The air smells faintly of smoke and melted garbage and burned meat even as far out as the beach. It turns Sabo’s stomach. His brain is topsy-turvy and confused and he wobbles so badly that the doctor has a pinched, pissed-off look on his face that gets darker with every step Sabo takes.

But his feet know where to go. They’ve walked this coastline a thousand times. The sand gives way to grass, and he has to use his hands to make it up to the top of the hill, but finally he spills out on his back where the earth beneath him and the sky above him are utterly familiar and takes deep gulping sobs of air.

“I’m here,” he says nonsensically to the man who followed him. The man who stayed a step behind in case Sabo fell but otherwise let him fight his own way back to the place he needed to be. “I’m home.”

The man studies him without speaking, his tattooed face impossible to read. Sabo’s thoughts are all swimmy, but he hopes he remembers this guy. He hopes he can find him again someday. His vision greys a few times, and at some point the man isn’t there anymore, but there’s a strong wind blowing in from the sea—steady and unrelenting, just hard enough that the nearby tree boughs start to bend.

Someone says, “My hat!”

Someone else says, “You and your stupid fucking hat—hurry up, it flew this way!”

Sabo is humming to himself when they finally find him, and falls asleep somewhere in the middle of those voices shrieking his name.

Now he’s home.

—

“I can’t even look at him,” Ace grinds out, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. “That reckless little asshole.”

“Mm-hmm,” Sabo replies mildly. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, carding one hand through his little brother’s hair. “I wonder who he takes after more.”

“Shut up, ‘Bo! You’re just as bad as him!”

“If you children can’t get along, I’ll separate you,” Luffy’s friend, the extremely unsettling Surgeon of Death, says in a tone that suggests that he has both the means to make good on his threat, and also the absence of any god-given good sense to try it.

Sabo, ever the peacekeeper, smiles at Trafalgar without teeth. “We’ll be on our best behavior. Thank you again for being there for my brother.”

The supernova cuts a sharp glance at him, dark eyes unreadable. His gaze travels to Ace for a long moment, and then finally drops to Luffy in the bed between them. There is something in his face—something more than the spite-and-caffeine-fueled monster of a man he would like the rest of the world to believe he is—something not quite so old, not quite so burdened, that looks down at Sabo’s little brother and sees someone who deserved to be saved.

But all Trafalgar says is, “Would’ve been too boring to let him die now.” He leaves the room after that, the door shutting behind him solidly.

“Didn’t Nami say that guy only met Luffy once?” Ace says, bewildered. “What the hell is he doing risking his neck for a stranger?”

“Sometimes that makes it easier,” Sabo says. “A stranger could be anyone.”

Ace wrinkles his brow, an uncomprehending twist to his mouth. He has come leaps and bounds from the hateful little boy he used to be, but he has always clutched his brothers closest and kept everyone else at arm’s length.

Since forming the Spade pirates, that tight-knit circle in his heart has inched wider. Ace thinks the world of Deuce, even if he will literally attack anyone who implies as much like a rabid coyote. Masked Deuce, who has actually referred to his captain as a rabid coyote on more than one occasion, within his earshot and to his face, would kill for Ace indiscriminately. The rest of the Spades are equally as long-suffering and entirely devoted.

Secretly, Sabo believes that Whitebeard is going to get through to him one of these days. The last time Marco and Thatch came around with a recruitment pitch, Ace only set them a little bit on fire.

Maybe some people would call it selfish to put you and yours first, but Sabo doesn’t think so. As long as Ace wants to live for his brothers and his crew, he wants to live. He’ll endure prison with gritted teeth, he’ll fight the guards every step of the way to the execution scaffold, he’ll never, ever go gently.

That’s all Sabo asks of him. Hang on for one more minute. Survive one second longer.

It was no grand fleet or sprawling armada that spread across the horizon to retrieve Fire Fist Ace from the hands of the World Government, but the Revolutionary Army was hardly going to stand by on this one. Not when it was their Chief of Staff’s beloved twin brother at stake. And so the war began long before the battle had a chance to start.

Half of the military forces meant to be stationed at Marineford never arrived, picked off ship by ship in the week leading up to the execution. All radio frequencies were jammed the day of, transmissions in and out of the island blocked universally, and the media blackout of what was promised to be a globally-televised event had people talking.

The only thing available on every channel was music—the tone dial recording of a skeleton musician bowing a familiar song on his violin. Looping on every station, every monitor, every snailphone. It drowned any attempt the soldiers made at communication, and more importantly it irritated the hell out of them, but it had a secret third purpose as well; if Ace heard it, he would know exactly who was coming for him.

(Ace heard it. The morning he was slated to be killed, a harried guard ran from one end of the cell block to the other with a malfunctioning den-den in hand, and the music echoed off the stone walls like it was trying to make a point.

It wasn’t his brother’s voice, but it was his song. Ace knew it like he knew his own name. Shackled as he was, he couldn’t reach his fire—but for the first time since he was captured, he didn’t feel cold.)

In another world, his execution was overseen by all three admirals and most of the warlords, the military rightly assuming that they would need to meet the full weight of Whitebeard’s infamous protection head-on.

But in this one, Ace is a powerful pirate captain of a relatively small crew, rising in fame and bounty, but attached to no great superpower. Still the demon spawn of the Pirate King, still an example waiting to be made, but there was no way Sengoku could have anticipated the battlefield Marineford would become.

The Spades, the Strawhats, the Revolutionaries and the handful of ships sailing in Whitebeard’s name to fight for that cocky young captain he was so fond of brought more than enough of a fight with them. The Red-Hair pirates’ fashionably late arrival was kind of an overkill.

Sabo made sure to say so.

“What, so I should just sit back and watch?” Shanks laughed as they made their retreat, one newly liberated prisoner folded safely into their ranks. “No way. I’d like to be able to look Roger and Rogue in the eye when I meet them in the afterlife, thanks.”

“Is there a reason you’re covering your eyes?” Ace asked hoarsely, sounding a little bit like he didn’t want to know the answer.

“I’m not allowed to meet Luffy again until he’s become a great pirate,” the man replied cheerfully, jogging down to the wharf blindly with his hand clamped over his face. Deuce, glued to Ace’s side for the foreseeable future, traded a long-suffering look with Benn Beckman.

After the clusterfuck that was Sabaody, Kuma sent the Strawhats safely to Baltigo one by one. When an RA mole within the Marines brought news of Ace’s execution, half of Luffy’s monsters went back to retrieve their ship, and the other half forged ahead with the rescue mission.

So it’s the Thousand Sunny they made their getaway with, the cheerful little lion ship an extra special fuck you to the Marines that made Sabo feel warm inside.

The team has since scattered, the Revolutionaries and Red-Hair pirates breaking off to lead the Marines on a very merry goose chase. The Whitebeard pirates don’t go away without first passing Ace along yet another offer to join their ranks—to their credit, they seem amused by the whole thing, as if Ace spitting sparks in sheer annoyance and the Spades’ prickly, proprietary offense are all part of the game. The Polar Tang is nesting abeam the Thousand Sunny while the Heart’s captain consults with the Strawhat’s very young doctor, something that seems to put the little reindeer at ease.

They’re in the aftermath. Sabo takes a deep breath for the first time in what feels like weeks.

Luffy collapsed the second his feet hit the grassy deck of his ship, his body crumpling beneath him like a puppet with its strings all cut. It would have been horrifying, if he hadn’t been snoring loud enough for Sanji to hear it from the galley and come out to investigate. Zoro scooped him up and Nami held the door open to the room she and Robin share, what would have been the captain’s quarters on any other ship, and Luffy was deposited carefully in a soft bed.

“He needs a bath,” Nami said, nose wrinkled in a way that did nothing to disguise her affection as she combed his dirty, sweaty hair away from his face with her fingers.

“It’s laundry day anyway,” Usopp replied, coming through the door with his arms full of someone’s well-loved blanket. Sabo smiled to see his spoiled little brother tucked in by his friends. Some things never changed.

“Glad you’re okay,” Sanji said to Ace, the last one to linger in the room, keeping the door propped open with his hip. “Ghost pepper chicken curry for dinner,” he added, which was Ace’s favorite food, and the final straw for Sabo’s twin brother. He sat there blinking wetly at his own hands, at the bruises the sea-stone manacles left on his wrists, finally letting himself feel the weight of what he had survived.

And now Sabo pats the bed beside him. Ace glares at nothing for a moment longer, before he gets up to join his brothers. It’s inevitable, like an act of gravity. The mattress gives beneath him and Luffy mumbles crossly in his sleep, turning toward them without waking.

“Brat,” Ace all but whispers. Then he says, just as quiet, “Thank you.”

Sabo says, “Nothing exists in this world that could have kept us away from you.”

Ace puts his head on Sabo’s shoulder, this wild young thing who doesn’t know how to want to live for himself yet. It’s okay. He’s figuring it out. He’s getting closer and closer. Someday soon he’ll understand that his siblings and his crew—his family—wouldn’t go to the ends of the earth for someone who wasn’t worth all their love. He’ll realize how deserving he is of all that. Until then, Sabo will believe it for him.

“I’m on your side and you can call me and just like that,” Sabo sings under his breath, “I’ll sing a song to bring you home.”

“Hey,” Ace protests when he stops, muffled against Sabo’s shoulder. “Keep going.”

So he does.

—

Sabo is twelve, almost but not quite thirteen, and he’s much too old to cry.

He had been sneaking through the market, ceramic festival mask on his face and hooded cloak hiding his hair, pockets full of those hot cinnamon candies his brothers love so much, when he glimpsed them.

His parents. They were strolling along the decorated streets, arm-in-arm. Stelly was walking at Outlook’s side, talking importantly and waving his hands. And on Didit’s side, holding her hand, was…

Sabo had to run away before he did something awful, like show weakness where one of the rich monsters might see it. He ducked into a side street and started running the second he was out of sight. His heart didn't settle until he was weaving through the familiar dingy corners of Edge Town and picking his way over heaps of trash in the Terminal.

Even when he makes it into the forest, and the trees shelter him on all sides and the owl monkeys make their racket in hello, even when he’s headed in a straight line toward the place he feels safest in the whole world, he still hurts.

They replaced him. Again. With a little girl this time. She had blond hair and brown eyes, as if her whole little person was spun from gold. Her pinafore dress was cookie-cutter perfect.

Sabo wonders which noble line they adopted her from. He wonders if they even told her Sabo’s name, or if Stelly is the only brother she’s aware of, or if she would care one way or the other. He wonders what kind of person she is—if she’ll fit in, or get eaten alive.

He doesn’t care what his parents think of him. He doesn’t. He is certain in his heart that they’re the worst sort of noble—they’re selfish and shallow and don’t know the first thing about what it really means to be a human person on this planet. He knows all that.

He was unbelievably lucky to fully escape his family, to be presumed dead in their eyes, and he’s never going back. An act of god couldn’t drag him back.

But there’s this awful pressure behind Sabo’s eyes and nose, and his face feels hot and prickly, like there are needles poking at him.

He doesn’t love them.

It’s stupid, so stupid, that there’s a tiny part of him that still wants to be loved by them.

Sabo climbs the ladder to the treehouse with numb hands, easing the trapdoor open carefully so the hinges don’t squeak.

The ancient camping heater Makino gave them glows a steady orange in the corner, clanging occasionally as it works against the December night air.

It’s early evening yet, but Ace has been pretty sick, and Luffy has subsequently been glued to his side. Even with the noisy fireworks down on the beach from the end of the year festival in Goa, they’re both sleeping soundly, curled up tight together like leopard cubs.

There’s a pile of quilts folded messily on the other mattress, waiting for Sabo when he comes home. The sight of them causes a sharp pain in his chest that he can’t explain.

He takes off the mask, climbs out of his boots and cloak, and drags the extra blankets over to his brothers. One by one he adds them to the nest, layering them neatly and tucking in the edges, and then worms his way in next to Luffy, because Ace doesn’t rest well if he feels stuck or boxed in.

Sabo’s parents replaced him for the second time, two years after he was, to the best of their knowledge, blown apart at sea by their precious Celestial Dragons. Had the ink on his death certificate even dried before they brought their new daughter home?

Sabo’s brothers saved him blankets, the best ones without any holes, even though they could have used them. Should have used them. Even when he wasn’t here, they were thinking of him. They didn’t want him to be cold.

The sob takes Sabo by surprise. He stuffs a hand over his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut against the tears. He sobs again, as quietly as he can.

He doesn’t notice when Luffy wakes up, but he feels it when clumsy fingers land in his hair, pawing through it as his baby brother hums a familiar tune. A well-meaning mimicry of every time Luffy’s older brothers have done this same thing for him.

“So you can keep me somewhere out of reach but if you need me,” Luffy’s voice warbles like a sweet little bird, “just hum these memories and you can feel me. I’m always standing by.”

If Sabo opened his eyes, he would see that Ace is wide-awake, scowling up at the sky; their tiny family’s stalwart protector, standing guard even when he has a fever and he’s buried under a small mountain of quilts.

And he would see Luffy’s sleepy, scarred face split in half by a smile, beaming like he was trying to put the sun out of a job.

But Sabo keeps his eyes shut, and buries his face a little further for good measure, that tiny part of him that wants to be loved crying I am! They do! It’s such a big feeling he doesn’t know how to hold it. He wants to just sit with it for a bit longer.

“Ace, sing,” Luffy breaks off to scold loudly.

“Don’t even dream of bossing me around, Lulu,” Ace snaps back.

Ace’s voice sounds hoarse and sore, but he joins in anyway. Of course he does. Only Luffy gets some of the words wrong in every verse, and it sparks a scathing argument each time—the two of them alternating singing together and shouting over each other, putting their rowdy owl monkey neighbors to shame.

It’s the best thing Sabo’s ever heard. He’s laughing too hard to cry anymore.

#one piece #opfic #asl bros #revolutionary sabo #portgas d ace #monkey d luffy #op #my writing #porgas-d-aroace

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