Archive of Our Own ^beta

In the quiet moments aboard the Perfume Yuda as they sail back towards Marineford, Luffy feels like he’s being put back together and like he might just fall apart. It comes in waves: suddenly, then all at once, rushing towards him like leaning over a yawning emptiness.

In these moments, he is nothing but very, very still. After all, a single touch, a single movement could shatter him, sending him crashing into a million tiny pieces that slip between the cracks in the floorboard and fall into the ocean, sinking, as he would, to the lonely bottom.

Luffy wonders what it would be like to be older than his older brother. It is a sickening feeling. Luffy wonders what it would be like to be bigger than his bigger brother. It is a horrifying feeling. He has already had to contend with these feelings once before; he knows all too well how much it hurts, how every milestone you pass reminds you of them, how every year you get closer to passing the age they had been fills you dread. The day Luffy had celebrated his tenth birthday, he had spent it staring out over the sea, contemplating the love and life of Sabo, pondering if he was good enough to say that he had caught up to him.

Although Luffy can recall his childhood in startling clarity, most of his memories are of his brother’s broad back: the sun-kissed expanse of his freckled shoulders as they raced under the crowded trees. Luffy had loved looking up at him, tilting his head to see Ace block out the sun, the scowl on his face ever-present. He’d loved being saved by him, to cry out, Ace, help me, and to see the flash of irritation and worry cross over his stubborn older brother’s face. He was a little brother, so he was determined to act the part. A silly, annoying pest, who insisted on going where he wasn’t able to just because his older brothers were there.

When they were three, they felt like they were all Luffy would ever need. Together they could do anything, climb any mountain, defeat any enemy. Although Luffy had known what it was to be loved, what the three of them had then felt like nothing else and even now is incomparable. They were brothers who had chosen each other. 

After Sabo had gone ahead, Luffy clung to Ace more desperately than before. He discovered just how truly afraid he was of being alone. And Ace’s back—God, his back, he could’ve stared at his back forever. The slope of his shoulder blades, hidden beneath a taut layer of muscle and covered in mud and grass. The strength he had in them, able to carry Luffy and run for miles and miles. Luffy had been so small then. Ace had looked so big. Ace had looked so undefeatable, so unsurmountable, so unsurpassable.

He feels so naked now. Without the shadow of his brother, he feels thrust into a bright spotlight that blinds him and makes him want to turn away.

Luffy has never missed Ace before. When Ace left for the sea, he had thought of him, yes, but he hadn’t missed him. He knew what it was like to miss someone, after all: the simple instinct of turning to tell them about your day and realising that they weren’t ever going to be there to hear you. Ace had his own adventures to go on, and his own crew to form, and his own friends to make. But there was always the expectation that they would see each other again, so Luffy was never in a rush. Now Luffy finds that he can’t stop missing him. The crooked smile on his face. That glint in his eyes. The cheeky way he’d laugh. The warmth of his arms, bleeding through Luffy’s shirt on a cold winter’s day.

The wind blows a salty spray through his hair. There are a thousand stars in the cloudless sky, and the moon is huge and silver. The sea is a wine-dark expanse of nothingness.

Even before Ace had eaten his Devil Fruit, he had always felt like a fire. Sure, to many, he might have been the flames that burned the home and destroyed the forest. But to Luffy, he had always been the fire in the hearth: the warmth that brought with them a hot meal, a refuge from the cold, and a light in dark places.

Luffy has run through all the things he could have done differently to save Ace, but he can’t think of anything: at least, not with his current strength. But even if he were stronger, could he have done anything more? The trouble with Ace, though he never wanted to admit it, was that he loved too fast, too much, and too hard. Ace would never have been able to let those words against his captain—against his father—slide. There might only be one ending to this story.

“Jinbei,” Luffy says. His voice is soft, but the wind carries it to the shadow that lurks behind him on the deck, two determined eyes looking at his frail form. “Do you know what Ace said to me, just before he—” His body seizes. His hands tremble. When he looks at them, he sees them marred with bright red. Suddenly, he feels regret that he was never able to tell the Whitebeard pirates his last words. He’d meant it for them. 

Jinbei does not remark on Luffy’s abrupt words. His silence is a reassuring weight on his body.

Luffy draws up a deep breath and forges on. “He told me to tell everyone thank you for loving me.” His shoulder’s shake. The wind whips his hair up from his face. “Do you think he finally knew, then? That he was—” his voice catches again. “That he was loved?”

“Yes,” Jinbei replies, the deep baritone of his voice like a blanket, tucking in all his frayed nerves. “He knew.”

“Good,” Luffy’s eyes wet with big fat tears that roll silently down his cheeks. When they fall to the deck, the wood is stained with a dark colour that looks like blood in the dim lighting. To love Ace was such an easy thing to do, but to convince him of it was a different matter. Luffy had always known that there was something not quite right with his heart. Despite his big smile and confident hands, there was always a shadow that lurked in his eyes, and Luffy never really managed to chase it away, no matter how hard he tried.

When Ace had died, that smile had been the most honest one Luffy had ever seen on his face.

“The old man went to prove it to Ace, didn’t he?” Luffy plays with a loose thread on his trousers and feels the wound on his chest ache something awful. “I have never seen so many pirates in one place. And they all came for Ace. They were all calling out to him. I have…hic..never seen…” he sucks in a loud sniffle and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “I have never seen someone so loved.” He owed the Whitebeard pirates a bigger debt than just their help in getting to Ace: in life, they gave him strength, a family, and a place to belong to. In death, they gave him peace.

It feels good to talk about it, like he’s letting out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “I am the only one left now,” he says. “I had…another brother before this. His name was Sabo. He was much nicer than Ace.”

Luffy looks out over the horizon. He sees blonde curls and a gap-tooth, feels a gentle hand on his head.

“He died too.”

Jinbei's voice is kind when he replies, “I’m sorry, Luffy.”

“I bet they’re both looking at me together now, making some ugly face and laughing at me,” Luffy scowls. “They’re leaving me out again. Ace is calling me a crybaby and Sabo is telling him to be nicer to me.”

The gentle hand on his head is replaced with a solid knock. Luffy can still feel the shiver of pain down his spine, hear Ace’s scratchy kid voice yelling at him to quit it with the mushiness.

“I’m a little brother,” Luffy mumbles. “How can I be older than them?”

Jinbei sits down next to him. The two of them stare out over the empty ocean together.

“Everyone knows how much he loved you,” Jinbei says, hands on his knees. His eyes never move from that faraway horizon. “He had so much to say about you. He was very proud to be your big brother.”

Luffy sucks in a deep breath, then exhales it shakily. He feels like he hasn’t done enough to be worthy of it. He knows Ace would’ve celebrated anything he did, even the smallest of things. He probably folded up and took the first wanted poster Luffy ever had around with him, even when he was only worth a mere thirty million, that softhearted big brother of his. Minutes pass before he speaks again.

“I will become stronger,” Luffy promises—whether it is Jinbei at his side, or the two spectres over his shoulders, he does not know. “And when I’m done seeing the world I’ll tell them all about it. Though,” he laughs a little, in spite of himself. “They probably won’t believe me.”

“That’s what brothers are for,” Jinbei agrees. “I’ll put in a good word for you.”

Luffy offers the former Warlord a tear-stained smile. “Thanks,” he says.

In the morning, they will find Luffy looking impossibly small as he lays curled up on the deck, a worn blanket thrown over him. But for now, he watches the ship carve a path through the midnight waves and wonders about how to best surprise his brothers when he meets them again.

Finding the One Piece is a good start, he thinks.

The next two years pass in a blur. Being on the island with Rayleigh makes him recall the times he spent hunting bears and tigers with his brothers and another old man shouting directions from the sidelines. If he closed his eyes, the scream of the cicadas would melt into the sounds of Sabo yelling at him to be more careful and Ace taunting him to keep up. Rayleigh tells him that when he dreams he often talks to them, calling out their nanes, reaching for boys who aren't there anymore, who will always stay boys.

Getting used to the sounds of the forest without the chorus of laughter that his brothers would bring hurts in the way a healing wound does, much like the cross on his chest. When he leaves the island behind, everywhere else is strangely quiet.

The first time someone recognises him, it’s on Fishman Island.

“You know,” says the shopkeeper, as he follows Nami around the stores, eagerly looking for something shiny and tasty. “I think I know you.” 

Luffy stops in his tracks, squinting at the fishman as Nami prances this way and that, piling her arms full of clothes. “You know me?” 

“Yeah,” the shopkeeper looks at him up and down, then nods. “I thought you were familiar when I saw you fighting in the plaza. You’re that Fire Fist’s little brother, aren’t you?” 

The whole world draws to a sudden silence. Luffy’s eyes widen and he can feel the wound on his chest burn as though it is reopening. 

“Yeah, he came here often,” the shopkeeper blathers on, seemingly unaware of the turmoil he’d just cast his customer into. “This used to be Whitebeard’s territory, after all. He’d pulled a Wanted poster out from his pockets and showed it to me. Told me it was his little brother and to give you a discount when you came by.” 

A Wanted poster out of his pockets. Luffy feels his eyes well with tears that he resolutely does not let fall. He’d cried all he could about Ace on Hancock’s ship, he had no more tears left. Ace would laugh at him. “Ace told you that?” 

The shopkeeper nods. “He was very proud of you. He had so much to say! Yeah, wow, I see why now, you really put on quite the show…” 

Luffy had left in a daze, his head swimming. He wonders how far his big brother went, and how many people he told about him. How many people he told to expect him. There had been no doubt then, in Ace’s mind, that Luffy would ever fail to reach the New World. 

He’d told the shopkeeper to give him a discount when he came by. 

That’s right. That’s how it should be, Luffy thinks, and his heart feels two sizes too big for his chest. He is Fire Fist’s little brother. Even two years on, Ace still burned through people’s memory. It gave him an overwhelming sense of relief. He didn’t have to let go of his older brother just yet. There were still pieces of Ace left in this world that he had yet to find: glimpses of him in the lives and memories of the people that he’d touched on his adventures.

Then, it happens again on Punk Hazard. He’d been introduced to that pirate’s crew as Fire Fist’s little brother, and though he felt frozen to the bone it surged through him like a wildfire. Once again, he is Fire Fist’s little brother. It lit him up from the inside out like a firework going off. 

One day, he will go where his brother has never gone before. He has to. There is no other way to continue the story. And when he does, people will stop knowing him as Fire Fist’s little brother. It’ll be okay, though. Luffy has a Wanted poster in his pockets too and he’ll tell them all about him. In those parts, Ace will become Straw Hat’s older brother. He can’t wait to rub it in Ace’s face when he finally sees him again at the end of his voyage.

But after all is said and done, when Luffy does find the One Piece, when he finally becomes the Pirate King…some part of him hopes that someone out there will learn the news and do a double-take. They’d blink once, blink twice. They wouldn’t see him as the King of Pirates, nor a legendary outlaw, nor the son of the revolutionary Dragon. No, they would simply stare and say, “hey, isn’t that Fire Fist’s little brother?”