Chapter Text
Your soulmate makes a part of you. This is a fact.
Your soulmate lends you your talents. This is a fact.
Your soulmate loves you. This is an opinion.
Ace didn’t believe in that shit. Maybe soulmates were really but it didn’t mean they were soulmates in the sense of the word. It was more like having a person who was supposed to match you but didn’t always do that. A lot of people never find their soulmates - not every talent is such an obvious thing.
Like Sabo’s. In the whole twelve years of his life, he had never realized what his soulmate’s talents were.
Ace wondered what about the people who didn’t have talents, who were average. Or whose talents were some useless things, like whistling or rolling your tongue into a trumpet. What about them, what about their soulmates? Did they not deserved the whole idea of perfect love? They had no chance to find their soulmates.
He and Luffy were really similar in that matter. Or their soulmates were.
Ace sometimes wondered what Luffy’s soulmate would experience - Luffy’s biggest talents were his good judgment of character and making people brighten up. Ace couldn’t imagine how that would work.
But his and Luffy’s soulmates had similar talents. At least in some aspects - it’s never perfectly the same, just similar.
Ace found out his soulmate was a doctor or some shit when Sabo broke his leg when they were eleven. He, whoever he was, gave Ace the weirdest knowledge and statistics about tibia bone injuries. And yes, it was definitely a he, Ace wasn’t lying to himself even as a kid, he was pretty gay.
Sabo broke his leg in the middle of a forest and suddenly Ace knew which bone was broken, how to stabilize his leg only using branches and leaves and knew how to build a makeshift stretcher in under twenty minutes. It felt unnatural, almost as if someone broke into his mind and left all this information there and then took control of Ace’s body.
Ace’s soulmate must have been at least six or seven years older or some genius because there was no way some normal teen would be able to know all those things.
Luffy was eight at that time Sabo broke his leg. They took him to the town’s doctor and the first thing he said was, “His tibia is broken.”
Understandably, it wasn’t something Luffy would know. Luffy didn’t understand half of the grown-up words and a word such as the tibia, well, it definitely wasn’t in his modest dictionary.
When asked how he knew, he answered, “I don’t know.”
Ace’s soulmate was some kind of a doctor. Not the best or brightest one but one who could easily work in ER in some big ass hospital. And a one with a very cold and calculative mind.
Something must have been broken in the soulmate system - Ace was a hothead, not some analytical asshole. They didn’t match.
Marco didn’t have any of his soulmate’s talents for some time. People could just not realize what the talent was but Marco knew it wasn’t the case with him. His soulmate’s talents just came in later.
He was almost thirty-five and didn’t really care all that much. Love wasn’t just some bond. He kind of hoped he would at least get some hint though.
He was in the crow’s nest, the biggest one on the Moby Dick that served as the main chart room too. Delayla was checking if everything was in order and if they docked properly. They were supposed to go for drinks with Thatch later and Marco decided he would fetch her before she started fretting about some other thing.
The thing with Delayla was, although she was the best navigator Marco had ever known, she was also a perfectionist. When she took over the Second Division, which at the time was made of exactly four men, she rearranged the whole space and workplace, along with work etiquette. It was hard for her to let go and leave things unfinished, even after all these years as the Second Division Commander.
Marco was just waiting for her to stop scolding whoever had drawn the last map. The same map, small pictorial view, was lying on the drawing table, dried up and smudged.
That was the moment.
His hand reached for one of the technical pens, adjusted the level of ink in it, took a sheet of graphic paper and started to draw on the drawing table. His wrist moved on its own, drawing an unbroken line that imitated the shape of the shore. He mapped the water levels on the coasts and shadowed the hills on the island. He used the navigation triangle and protractor to mark the angles. He didn’t even know this weird compass-looking thing was a protractor.
He blinked, putting down the pen.
“What are you doing?” Delayla asked, alarmed.
She walked up to him, stopping at the drawing table. She frowned, noticing the second map that wasn’t there twenty minutes before. She reached for it but decided not to move it, probably because of the fresh ink.
“Huh,” she said. “Maybe you should take my place, I’ve never seen such a perfectly drawn map in my life.”
“I didn’t do it,” he realized. She raised an eyebrow at that. “I didn’t even know you can adjust ink level in those pens.”
They stared at each other.
“Well, don’t look at me,” Delayla sputtered. “Unless you suddenly can sew, you’re not gonna be my soulmate.”
Marco grimaced at that - Delayla was like a big sister to him.
“Do you think it can be someone from your division?” he asked, still a bit awed.
It felt different. As if someone took over his body and made him do all these things. He was having goosebumps just remembering the feeling.
Delayla shook her head.
“Not a chance. If I had someone as competent, I could rest in peace,” she said. “None of my guys is this good, especially not while drawing everything in one go. Most of them wouldn’t get such good results even after using tracing paper for sketches and having an additional two or three hours.”
Marco snorted, his mind still hazy. “So they are some kind of a genius?”
“Oh, definitely,” Delayla agreed. “Let’s test it out some more. Do you know what weather we’re gonna have in the next five hours?”
Delayla always knew these things. She wasn’t the best when it came to recognizing clouds but she was extremely sensitive to air pressure and atmospheric changes, she could practically taste the rain or the electricity in the air.
Marco looked at the window. The information just made its way into his head and he had to blink, overwhelmed. Goosebumps were back.
“It’s going to rain for an hour, then there will be stronger wind and thunders and then it will be just the wind.”
Delayla chuckled. “I don’t know who your soulmate is but I hope they will be in my division someday.”
He told that Pops. Pops wasn’t too impressed.
Then Marco showed him the map he had drawn and he just stared.
“What?” Marco asked. “Do you recognize it? The style?”
Pops licked his lips. “I do,” he admitted. “But I don’t think it’s possible.”
He raised an eyebrow, his enthusiasm fading out. “Why?”
“I’m pretty sure that she’s been dead for more than ten years,” he said. “And had another soulmate.”
Well, Pops didn’t say much more about that. He silenced out for the whole day and never mentioned it again.
Marco didn’t know what that meant.
His soulmate’s talent came in handy though, and Ace wasn’t going to complain.
He and Deuce were both ship doctors. He was a navigator too. No one questioned that, Ace was just so good at pretending he actually knew what he is doing and not uses some random information his soulmate shoves in his mind from time to time. The only one who knew was Deuce and that’s mostly because he was a perceptive asshole.
He used his soulmate’s talents as often as they were needed.
He saved Deuce’s arm with emergency surgery after he was shot. He took care of his crew during a flu epidemy. He treated his own bullet graze when Deuce was taking care of others. He treated malnutrition on Wano. He did everything his soulmate allowed him to.
He bandaged up Jinbe.
Jinbe’s wounds weren’t serious. Ace wasn’t aiming to kill him and most of the injuries were superficial, except for a couple of broken ribs and a sprained ankle, it was the overall exhaustion that made him unconscious. He made sure Jinbe was alright, gave him some water and an IV and basically waited for the Whitebeard Pirates to show.
He would never admit it but he was tired. Fighting Jinbe wasn’t the plan. The plan was to either kill Whitebeard or die. Being this tired, Ace would probably have to take option two. He couldn’t just say, “Hey, I’m tired and my soulmate basically says I have three broken ribs, can we reschedule our fight to the death to next Friday?”, and leave the scene. That would have turned out great, Ace bet.
This, Ace thought when Whitebeard showed up, is how I’m gonna die. No regrets though.
Seeing Ace for the first time had been a little breath-taking. It was like staring at fireworks. Like watching the sunset. Like watching a beast. This is an experience Marco won’t forget.
There was no reason to not admit it to himself, Ace was attractive. He was old, not blind.
This is why, when Jozu said, “He’s going to be in my division,” Marco’s response was,
“Hell no.”
Jozu just gave him a stare, making a face. It looked like a smirk, smug and preceptive.
“He’s a fighter,” Jozu pointed out. And, Jozu, as a commander of a fighting division had every right to point it out. “Just because you have a crush-”
“I don’t-“ he protested. He knew it was a lost fight so he simply changed the topic. “Have you seen how precisely he took care of Jinbe’s wounds? He’s coming to the First Division.”
Jozu just snorted at that, rolling his eyes.
“Your private little nurse, I presume?”
Deuce often told him he was a dramatic fool. Maybe he was - Whitebeard hadn’t killed him and his whole dramatic monologue was wasted.
When he woke up, his ribs were still hurting, his head was pounding in a way he hadn’t felt for the last year, since he ate his devil fruit, and he definitely had a concussion because he basically wanted to throw up with every movement. At least he was alive, though.
After half an hour, he got up, basically fried that weird-ass dude from the Fourth Divison who spout all that nonsense about being brothers, and Ace left, searching for someplace with medicine and bandages. He sneaked into what probably was infirmaries and into one of the small offices there.
There was not much he could really do - taking his shirt off, he checked his ribs and there they were, three broken ones with fractures in various places. He took a deep breath, sharp pain alarming him about the places where his chest was injured. Dizziness made his moves a little unbalanced and he still had a headache but he would live.
When Marco found him in his own office, he was a bit surprised but also relieved.
Ace was sitting on the small sofa in the corner, the back of his head leaning on the wall, his eyes closed.
“Ace?”
He opened his eyes, his gaze dazed. His head was swaying a bit and Marco was pretty sure he had a concussion.
“I need to check up on you,” he told him. “I don’t think you’re fully conscious so I’ll be talking to you for some time, try to stay awake.”
“Are we gonna play doctor?” he asked, his words slurring. “That’s not fair, I’m already half-naked.”
Marco smiled to himself, shaking his head. “You definitely have a concussion.”
“Three broken ribs and five fractures,” Ace said, his eyes shutting and his chin falling down onto his chest. “And a concussion.”
Marco stepped up to him, kneeling beside him. He shook his leg, trying to wake him up again. His hand moved to Ace’s forehead, checking the temperature.
“What?”
He looked Marco straight in the eyes, suddenly a shade paler.
“I’m gonna throw up,” he announced and then he promptly vomited all over Marco’s feet.
It doesn’t take Ace long to join them. Just a month or two.
“You’ve been assigned to the First Division,” Marco told him during the welcome party. His face looked weirdly smug.
Ace grimaced. “As a fighter?”
“And a medic,” Marco added.