Archive of Our Own

Sabo is on his way to the harbor, on the brink of his great escape, when he hears the rumor from two noblemen passing in the opposite direction. One of them gives Sabo an arch look for his torn cravat but spares him no more attention than that, while the other sneers that those thieving brats went up in smoke with the Gray Terminal last night—good riddance. 

He feels his insides turn to ice. His bag slips off his shoulder and hits the ground with a thump. 

He had been there, on the inside of the wall. He’d seen the fire. He’d been so certain that his brothers survived because if there was one thing Ace was good at, it was surviving out of spite, and he’d never let anything happen to Luffy. So they must have been fine. So Sabo wrote them a goodbye letter, and looked forward to meeting them again on the sea somewhere. 

No. No, those bastards must have been wrong. What do they know, anyway? What do they know about anything real, anything that exists outside their precious kingdom walls?

Sabo doesn’t realize he’s running until he shoulder-checks someone in the road. They shout after him for his rudeness, but he doesn’t hear. He dropped his bag somewhere. His heart is pounding so fast and so loud that he thinks everyone in Goa must be able to hear it. 

Ace, he thinks desperately, Luffy. 

The last time he saw their faces, when he went away with his father and left them crying out after him, burns its way into the front of his mind. Please, he begs of some higher power he doesn’t really believe in. He doesn’t know how to live in a world where they don’t exist. 

A hand catches his arm. He whirls around, teeth bared in an involuntary snarl, but after a second his eyes catch up and he realizes it’s one of Dadan’s men. Dogra. 

Immediately, Sabo feels a wash of relief. Dogra would be able to tell him that those stupid nobles were wrong. 

But the man’s face is pale and drawn, and his eyes are red and swollen. Sabo is in the middle of realizing, with a dull, sick sense of horror, what that look on his face must mean when Dogra says, “I wasn’t sure I would be able to find you. You need to come with me.”

The relief shrivels up and dies. The debris of it curls in the pit of Sabo’s stomach like bitters. 

He must black out or something, because he’s not really present in his body for the trip up the mountain. It feels like he’s walking to his death. Dogra is leading him with a sense of urgency that glances off of Sabo like water sluicing from an oilskin. Every step is painful. It takes, and takes, and takes, until he’s hollow inside. 

Dadan’s country comes into view through the trees. A familiar clearing, with two ramshackle little huts standing to the side of the building proper. Dadan herself is waiting outside. 

Sabo’s mechanical trudge finally stutters. Dogra’s hand presses gently into his shoulder. The bandit leader is gazing at him with unreadable eyes. Her face is tacky with recent tears. 

He can’t do this. He doesn’t want to hear this. He’ll die if they’re gone, he’ll really die. 

Why should all of those rotten, evil people in the kingdom get to live—to breathe freely, eat good food, laugh and drink and taste the tantalizing briny bite of sea-salt in the air—when his brothers, his favorite people, the best people on this entire island, don’t?

“—listening to me?” Dadan is suddenly standing in front of him. Her expression is irritated and concerned and tinged with sadness, a lot of things happening all at once, more than Sabo is capable of making sense of now. “How much longer are you gonna make him wait? He’s been crying for you all night.”

Every tumultuous thing happening in Sabo’s brain goes suddenly, terribly still. 

“What?” he gasps out. It’s a miracle it takes the shape of a word at all. 

“We’ve been keeping him inside, or he’d have gone haring off to find you, I’m sure,” Dadan says, pointing through the open door. “You’re his family, aren’t you? Get in there.”

It takes him a moment to process. The world has been ending all around him since that conversation he overheard near the harbor and now, abruptly, there’s hope. 

He stumbles forward in a run, shouldering past her and cramming his way through the half-open door that always sticks, eyes darting wildly around the room. The entire bandit family is here, though none of them seem able to look him in the face, but his entire world has narrowed into one single point of focus. 

The sound of crying. A familiar hitching, hiccuping sound. Sabo would know that sound anywhere. He’d be able to pick it out of a crowd of hundreds. His little brother is a crybaby, always has been. 

He’s alive to cry.

Sabo runs to him like there’s fire biting at his heels. Drops to his knees and all but crawls the last few steps to Luffy’s side, sweeping him into his arms and clutching him so hard that it would take whole entire armies to separate them now. Luffy’s miserable sobs cut off for a second, a surprised-sounding silence, and then when he registers who it is that’s holding him, he starts to wail. 

His hands find purchase in Sabo’s coat and he clings, every bit as tight as Sabo does, and tries to talk through the sobs that wrack his entire tiny body. 

“Sabo—Ace is,” he chokes, “he’s—everything was fire, Sabo, and Bluejam f-found us—and Ace—”

That’s the thing Sabo doesn’t want to know. The fact of Luffy, whole and shaking in his arms, is evidence enough of who’s gone. 

Sabo’s crying, too. He thinks everyone in Dadan’s country is crying. Ace was so sure that he’d never be loved, so sure he didn’t deserve anyone’s kindness or care, and it makes Sabo sick that he’s not here to see how wrong he was. That his not being here is what proved it. 

At least he knew that Luffy loved him, Sabo thinks, in some floating, detached part of his brain. Luffy adored Ace, wanted to be just like him, wore his admiration plain on his guileless little face. He always ran to Ace first. At least he never had to wonder about that. 

“Enough, Lu,” Sabo says. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I thought you were gone, too,” Luffy bawls right over him. “I thought I was all alone.”

Luffy, who nearly died at Porchemy’s hands to keep Ace and Sabo’s secrets when they were still strangers to him—who was willing to die at seven-years-old if it meant that Ace and Sabo might not leave him alone anymore. 

Sabo plants his chin on the crown of Luffy’s head and says, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m never leaving you.”

Outlook III comes for him a week later. He brings the guard. He makes it entirely clear that he’ll have Dadan and her family killed, or at least hauled in to face justice, if Sabo doesn’t comply. It’s Outlook’s signature move, ferreting out the people who care about his son and then using them as pawns against him. 

Sabo burns with hatred. He wants to claw Outlook’s eyes out, snap his neck, drag his body into the jungle and let the big cats have him for a snack. He feels like a wicker creature, nothing but sticks brought to life with love like a magical spell from a storybook. Only it’s the burnt ends of love, the remnants of it after grief has eaten its fill, and heartbreak has turned the spell bitter, has given it teeth. 

Luffy’s hand is wrapped tight around his, and his eyes are wide and round and anxious, the way they always look when he thinks Sabo is thinking about going away without him. 

“I have a condition,” Sabo says, sounding, to his own ears, disconcertingly like his father when his father is doing business. 

It might be that, more than anything, that causes Outlook to consider him thoughtfully. 

“I’m listening,” the man says. 

“I don’t like it here,” Luffy whispers from his bed in the big room they share. Sabo leaves a little light on for him, since there are no stars or moonlight to push the dark away, and Luffy is newly fearful in a way he never used to be.  

“I know, Lu,” Sabo tells him quietly. “I don’t like it either.”

“How come we’re here, then? How come we don’t run away? We can go back to our treehouse.”

“Because then Dadan will get in trouble. They’ll take her and her whole family away.”

Luffy gazes at him with a troubled expression. He doesn’t understand. He’d never understand why these people are the way they are, why they think the way they do. It’s one of the reasons Sabo warmed to him so quickly, why he loves him so easily. 

If ever there was an antithesis for the people of Goa, it would be his little brother, who thinks of the world as a rather big playground, with room enough for everyone. Status, wealth, power, money—what does any of that matter? 

Sabo can’t help smiling at him, and shuffles over in his own bed, drawing back the duvet and patting the empty spot he’s made. Luffy scrambles to take him up on the invitation, bouncing at full-speed onto the mattress. Sabo lets out a theatrical oof when he gets an elbow to the stomach, and they play-wrestle until the worry that lives in Luffy’s eyes finally goes missing, and Luffy himself has gone all bendy and soft the way he does when he’s about to fall asleep and forgets how bones are supposed to work.

Sabo’s parents have more rooms in their stupid mansion than they could ever need or even use. But Luffy is used to the cramped spaces of the treehouse, and the always-crowded Dadan’s country. It’s easier for him to sleep when he’s close to his brother, because it makes him remember what it felt like to be safe. 

Sabo doesn’t mind. It makes him remember, too. 

“I miss the gibbons,” Luffy mumbles. “They were funny.”

“I bet they miss you, too,” Sabo tells him. 

“I wish we could go back.”

He might still be talking about the treehouse. Sabo thinks he’s talking about something else—something even more impossible. Sabo bites the inside of his lip so he doesn’t cry until he’s sure Luffy is fast asleep. 

He’s a wicker boy, puppeteered by whatever love becomes after grief. 

I wish we could go back. 

Luffy is off-limits to everyone in the mansion, and in exchange Sabo doesn’t cause trouble for his tutor, keeps his silence at dinner, and lets Stelly walk around without any broken teeth. It’s the deal that Sabo made with Outlook. It’s non-negotiable. 

But that doesn’t mean that Luffy is allowed to run amok in cut-off pants and dirty shirts. His wild hair meets a comb, for possibly the first time ever. His sandals are replaced with serviceable leather shoes. He’s dressed properly, even though it makes Sabo’s skin crawl to see his baby brother in short trousers and a button-up shirt with ruffled sleeves. 

Still, Luffy is Luffy, a tiny force of nature. A pocket-sized hurricane of a human being. His suspender straps flop around his waist, his shirt goes half-untucked, and one of his shoes is perpetually untied. His hair may be combed in the morning, but it still falls in chaotic hanks around his face. 

“He’s a mess,” Stelly sneers. “I can’t believe you ran off and risked our family’s good name for someone like him.”

“He’s worth a hundred of you,” Sabo replies sharply. He shows his teeth, that toothy grin he inherited from Ace, and feels something like peace settle into his heart when Stelly’s pasty face goes gray with fear and he scuttles away from Sabo like a rodent.

Outlook gives Sabo a dirty look over lunch, because Stelly is a whiny tattle-tale, but Sabo meets his eyes without flinching. What he said was true and he stands by it. In the chair next to his, Luffy is timing spoonfuls of soup to each spoonful that Sabo takes, because table-manners are quite literally a brand-new concept to him. 

He’s worth a thousand Stellys. It’s literally no contest. 

New clothes aside, Luffy adamantly refuses to be parted with his hat. When it seems like Didit might insist, Sabo makes eye-contact with her above Luffy’s head, and possibly looks as though he’ll murder her in cold blood if she so much as thinks about the hat ever again. She wisely chooses her life over a campaign against a seven-year-old’s comfort item. 

Still, he worries about the possibility of his parents sending one of the servants into their room at night and removing the hat while Sabo isn’t awake to stop them. So he replaces the string with a thin pale yellow silk scarf, and tucks some orange and yellow ladybirds into one side of the red ribbon wrapped around the crown. 

Luffy grumbles about the changes, but he trusts Sabo implicitly, and was happy to help pick out the flowers. And it does the job of pleasing Sabo’s awful parents—Didit even smiles at Luffy when she next sees him, the way that a person will smile at cute little animals for doing something clever. 

Sabo doesn’t like his mother smiling at Luffy. He doesn’t like the considering looks his father will sometimes send Luffy’s way. He doesn’t like that they’ve moved from ignoring Luffy’s existence in their home to introducing him to guests as their ‘ward’. 

Three months after Ace died, Stelly pushes Luffy down a flight of stairs. Luffy bounces the entire way down, and lands looking a little ruffled and no worse for wear. He seems confused, more than anything, as if wondering why Stelly is willing to play with him all of a sudden. 

It doesn’t stop Sabo from throwing himself on top of Stelly and punching him repeatedly until he’s physically dragged away by the steward, the gardener, and one of the footmen. He probably would have dived back in anyway if not for the very quick-thinking maid who hauls Luffy back up the stairs and all but pushes him into Sabo’s arms. 

“Woah, Sabo,” Luffy says, looking impressed. “You made his whole face look like a plum.”

“He’s lucky he still has all his teeth,” Sabo replies. He can barely see anything past his brother, he’s so pissed off. He understands Ace in a way he never has before. 

Almost immediately, they’re called into Outlook’s office. Sabo palms a kitchen knife off the maid’s service cart on his way past it and slips it into his back pocket, just in case. 

Outlook only gives them a cursory, if displeased, once-over. 

“A gentleman doesn't lower himself to physical violence at the first sign of discord. Leave that to the Gray Terminal scum.”

“A gentleman wouldn’t survive two seconds in the Terminal without an armed guard within screaming distance,” Sabo replies pleasantly. He’s holding Luffy’s hand, aware of his brother glancing around the richly decorated room with disinterest. Not one of the precious baubles means anything to him, beyond what they might be able to hock it for. 

Birdsong outside the big bay window catches his attention almost immediately and his round eyes stray that way, so Sabo walks them both over, and boosts Luffy up onto the ledge so he can look out.

He’s waiting for the condemnation. The knife in his pocket feels like it’s burning through his clothes. He’s fully prepared to go diving out the window with his brother and cut through anyone in their way if he has to.

But Outlook takes him by surprise. He rolls his eyes and returns to his ledger, picking up a fountain pen and scrawling something across the page with unnecessary force. 

“Stelly broached the terms of our agreement before you did,” he mutters through pinched lips. “So I’ll consider this matter forgotten.” 

What the fuck. Sabo stares at him, not even looking away when he reflexively shoots a hand out to grab Luffy by the back of his shirt before he can tip forward out the window. 

“What’s the catch?” he demands. 

“I’m a man of my word,” Outlook replies, and then sends them both away. 

Didit finds them in the garden later and fusses over Luffy as if he’s her own little princeling. Luffy looks as bewildered as Sabo feels, taking the sweets she offers him like he’s never seen anything like them before.

Sabo doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t trust their intentions to be anywhere near the general realm of good. He doesn’t like it. 

It all comes to a head the week Sabo turns eleven. 

A servant called him into the house because Outlook was looking for him. Sabo glanced at Luffy, who was laying on his belly in the flower garden, having an animated one-sided conversation with a caterpillar, and decided not to drag him out of the sunshine for a boring conversation. 

“Stay right here, Lu,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

For once, Luffy was too distracted to be tripped-up by his abandonment issues. He tipped a beaming smile Sabo’s way, the brightest thing in Sabo’s whole life—the only reason he was still trapped in this rotten kingdom and the only person he was willing to suffer certain hell for. 

“Okay, ‘Bo!”

But nearly twenty minutes later, when Sabo returns to the little clubhouse they carved out of the corner of the flowerbed where the massive hydrangea bushes tower almost like the wild plants in the jungle, Luffy is gone. 

Sabo blinks, and glances around for some sign of him. He looks behind the flower bushes, and trails across the yard to the garden wall, peering over the gate into the street. 

“Luffy?” he calls. When Luffy doesn’t answer him, alarm sets in. “Luffy!”

“What are you screeching about?” Stelly demands sourly from the open window of whatever room he’s lounging uselessly in. He keeps a healthy distance from Sabo at all times these days.

“Did you see which way Luffy went?” Sabo calls up. 

“I have better things to do than watch you two roll around in the dirt,” Stelly replies. Then, with a mean grin, he adds, “Why? Did he finally wander off?”

Sabo immediately removes Stelly from his brain as a waste of time and climbs up the crawling ivy as easily as Didit might pour a cup of tea. Stelly makes a baffled sound from his precious little window seat, but Sabo is already perched on top of the wall and peering around, mind racing. 

“Luffy!” he shouts again. 

“Sabo, get down from there,” Outlook bellows from the conservatory door. “You are not an alley cat.”

“My brother’s gone,” Sabo says, forgetting himself and the distance he keeps his biological family at, letting his distress seep into his tone. “He was right here when I went in to talk to you and now he’s gone.”

“Oh, dear,” Didit says, appearing at Outlook’s shoulder. She presses her fingers to her mouth, watery blue eyes wide. “Luffy’s gone?”

Her worry is slightly more palatable than Stelly’s sneer, but still completely useless. Sabo is about to jump off the wall into the street when Outlook lifts a hand to stop him. 

“You’re so eager to disgrace yourself. Let’s call the guard and have them do what they’re paid to do,” the man says. It rankles. 

“I can’t just sit inside, like a little doll, while Luffy is missing,” Sabo says in measured, icy tones. 

“We don’t know that he’s missing,” Didit points out. “He’s excitable. Maybe he saw something interesting in the street and chased it.”

He wouldn’t, Sabo wants to screech. Maybe he would have even a year ago, but a year ago he wasn’t freshly traumatized and terrified of being left alone. The Luffy who used to run headlong into fun or trouble has sidestepped into a boy who hesitates at the last second—who glances over his shoulder to make sure Sabo is still behind him before he finally dares to take the leap.

It’s been half a year, and Luffy has finally been coming out of his shell. Half an hour ago he was right here in the flower beds that remind him of home, playing with bugs and trusting Sabo to come back for him from wherever he went. 

“We’ll send for the guard,” Outlook says with finality. “They’ll have this resolved before dinner, I’m sure.”

With one last desperate look around the street, Sabo steels his heart, and jumps down from the wall—landing on the inside, scuffing up the manicured lawn. 

“They have until dinner,” Sabo says in that tone that sounds almost like his father’s. He hates it. He hates that it’s the only thing that will make his parents listen. 

He feels like a livewire, dangerous to be touched and jittery with electricity. It’s tantamount to a betrayal, letting himself be herded back into the mansion while his brother is unaccounted for, pacing around a lavish sitting room in the manner of a caged tiger, ready to snap at the first person who ventures within snapping distance. 

He’s literally counting the seconds. Every minute on the dot, he glances at the clock, to make sure it’s keeping time with him. It takes almost ten minutes for the guard to show up. It takes a very annoying six minutes to impress urgency upon them, in the form of Sabo’s wild eyes and his father’s heavy-handed bribe.

And then it takes two hours and seventeen minutes for them to return with Luffy’s straw hat. 

Sabo goes cold inside. 

He’s gone back in time. He’s running away to the harbor and overhearing those two noblemen smirking about his brothers’ deaths. He’s living through the end of the world all over again. 

“No,” he says out loud. 

“Oh, dear,” Didit simpers, taking the hat from the silent soldier who holds it out. It looks wrong in her hands. “What happened to him?”

The guard captain is talking about a kidnapping gone wrong. Some criminal from the Terminal slipped into the kingdom and found what they thought was a little noble child left unattended and made off with him in hopes of demanding a ransom. There was a struggle when he was apprehended, and unfortunately the boy was killed. 

Sabo is barely listening. He’s staring at Luffy’s hat in Didit’s hands. At the stupid scarf that Luffy hated, the cosmos he actually liked a lot. 

He’s existing in an empty universe. He doesn’t think he can survive this a second time.

“No!” he says again, voice climbing into a shout. Railing against it, the way Ace always railed against every slight the world tried to throw at him. “He’s not some lily-livered little master like Stelly. He grew up in the fucking jungle! He had to fight bears to get a good meal! Our psychopathic grandpa threw him into ravines regularly! Whatever might be able to kill Luffy doesn’t exist in this pathetic kingdom!”

“Sir,” the captain says uncomfortably, but Outlook silences him with a hand. 

“You’ve done your duty. We appreciate your time,” the man says in a grave tone. “If you’ll excuse us.”

“Of course. We’re very sorry.”

The door closes behind the soldiers when they leave. A few of the maids bustle out to sweep after them, and more than one of them is dashing a stray tear out of her eye, but all Sabo feels is claustrophobic. Didit approaches him as if she might offer some comfort, but it only brings Luffy’s hat within his reach. 

Sabo snatches it from her, teeth bared. She doesn’t come any closer. 

“Pull yourself together, son,” Outlook says. “We have to move forward from this.”

“That’s right,” Didit says tearfully. “Those awful guards—what a joke! How hard could it be to arrest one man? Are they so terrible at their job that they’ll let a little child get killed?” 

Stelly is looking between his parents with a furrowed brow, lips puckered into a frown. He looks as discombobulated as Sabo feels. 

He doesn’t know what’s happening. He’s going insane. He clutches Luffy’s hat, staring at the cheerful flowers beginning to wilt. 

His parents keep going, talking about lobbying the government, making changes. New policies. The movement that Sabo could spearhead when he was a little older, to make sure that nothing like this would ever happen again. How he might be able to make this kingdom a better place. 

Justice for Luffy, they say, and his mind catches on that. It’s the only thing they’ve said that makes sense. Justice for Luffy. He can get behind that. He’ll do whatever it takes to—

A figure bursts through the door of the sitting room, stumbling to the floor. A familiar figure, in short trousers and untied leather shoes and a ruffled shirt that won’t stay tucked for longer than five minutes. 

Stelly says, “What in the fresh hell is going on?” It’s the first time Sabo has ever agreed with him. The room, after Stelly’s exclamation, is very still and silent.

Sabo doesn’t feel alive. He’s a wicker boy. 

Then Luffy lifts his head, and his eyes are wet with tears, and he sobs, “Sabo!” and Sabo remembers how to move and breathe again. 

He’s across the room so fast he might have teleported. Crashes to his knees and pulls Luffy up to get a good look at him, grabbing the sides of his face so hard that it sort of squishes out of shape. 

There’s a magnificent bruise in the middle of his forehead. Sabo can’t make sense of it. Luffy doesn’t bruise. 

“It’s okay, Lu, you’re okay,” he babbles. “I’m here, you’re okay. Please don’t cry. What happened? Where did you go?”

Luffy clutches the front of Sabo’s jacket in a tight fist, rubs at his eyes with his opposite hand and only manages to make a bigger mess of himself. He’s alive. He’s two times a miracle. 

Sabo wraps his arms around him and hugs him so tight that it might have hurt anyone who wasn’t rubber. 

“What happened, Luffy?” he presses, sort of rocking them back and forth a bit the way he saw Makino do once, trying to calm the younger boy down. 

“I was in the flowers,” Luffy mumbles. “I was playing with the caterpillar. Someone came to the gate and called for me, but I didn’t go, ‘cause Sabo said to stay.”

“That’s right, good job,” Sabo says inanely. “Keep going.”

“Then he said that you were busy inside, and you told him to come find me. I was confused, ‘cause you never talk to people from around here, ‘cause you don’t like any of them, so I didn’t know why you’d tell him that. Um, but he said you’d be mad if I didn’t go.”

Sabo can hear the conversation in his head perfectly. Luffy is entirely guileless—a horrible liar and trusting of complete strangers and operating under the belief that people are mostly good. It never seems to occur to him that someone might have bad intentions until it’s too late. 

“Maybe we should—” Didit starts to say nervously, but Sabo cuts her off.

“Keep going, Luffy.”

“He took me away a bit. I thought it was okay, because we only turned a couple times, and I knew the way back.” Luffy starts tugging at his fingers. He’s still crying, tears dripping down his face. “Um, then he told me that I was troubling? That I was making your life troubleful?”

“Troublesome,” Sabo corrects absently. He’s trying not to get distracted by the hatred blooming in the pit of his chest. “And he was lying. You’re the best thing in the entire world and you know it.”

That cheers Luffy a little bit. He smiles briefly, and Sabo realizes he’s missing one of his baby teeth. Who the fuck knocked out my brother’s tooth, Sabo wants to shriek into the sky. 

He settles instead for reaching up onto the serving table next to them and patting around until he finds one of the linen napkins and then yanking it down. It comes away with a clatter of upset dishes and Stelly makes a distressed noise at the spilled tea, but Sabo honestly couldn’t give a fuck less. 

“Don’t leave me hanging, buddy, finish the story,” he says, mopping at Luffy’s tear-stained face. “So that ugly bastard lied right to your face, then what?”

Luffy giggles a bit, and squirms to escape the napkin. “Uhh, he said that you were in the place you belonged, and that I didn’t belong here, so I had to go away. It didn’t make sense?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Sabo says calmly. 

“Right! And I didn’t believe him at all, but then I remembered—that night your dad came and took you away? And for a second I wondered if maybe—”

“Nope,” Sabo cuts him off. “That’s bullshit.”

“It’s bullshit,” Luffy echoes, sounding relieved. His smile comes back, a little wider this time. “Yeah, that’s what I thought! You only left to keep us safe. We could tell you were really sad to go, that’s why we tried so hard to stop you.”

It’s not the right time to burst into tears, so Sabo puts a pin in it for later. 

He touches Luffy’s bruised forehead with the pad of his thumb, made anxious by it. “What about this, Luffy?”

Sabo is prepared to hear just about anything, he thinks. But he’s actually completely unprepared for the way Luffy’s eyes get wide and he sits up a little taller and exclaims, “He shot me!”

It’s possible that Sabo has suddenly stopped understanding Eastern because those words don’t make sense in his brain for a solid ten seconds. 

“He shot you,” he clarifies, just in case.

“With a gun!” Luffy says, nodding rapidly. He gazes up at him with that earnest, wronged expression, and Sabo has no choice but to accept that he lives in a world where Luffy got shot with a gun. “Right on my head, Sabo! I didn’t know it would bounce, it was really scary! And now it’s real sore.”

Sabo bites down on a bark of hysterical laughter. It’s sore. A gunshot to the face, and he’s miraculously not a splatter on the pavement somewhere, but it’s sore. 

“I bet we can find some balm for it,” Sabo says, absently pushing back his mane of dark hair. “It’ll be okay. You’re the toughest guy I know.”

“Yeah?” Luffy says brightly.

“Yeah. So he—” He can’t even say it. “What happened after he tried to—?”

“The bullet that bounced off me hit him in the shoulder and he fell down. So I ran away,” he says plainly. “He was really angry and yelling about uhhh—a stage something. Stage napping?”

Things are making an alarming amount of sense very suddenly. Sabo says, “Staged kidnapping?” 

Luffy nods. “Yeah, that sounds right. He said he didn’t get paid enough for it, or something. I wasn’t listening. I was really scared even though I’m very brave! And the man said you’d be mad and I didn’t believe him but I was worried about it anyway. I wanted to run all the way back to Dadan’s country. Um, but Ace told me—” He blinks, eyes glassy with fresh tears, and his mouth wobbles for a minute before he can go on, “Ace told me to always run to you when he’s not here. He made me promise. So that’s what I did.”

Sabo yanks him back into a hug so suddenly that he makes a squeaky noise in surprise. They’re both still clustered on the floor of the sitting room, and spilled tea is dripping steadily onto the carpet beside them. Luffy’s little shoulders start hitching as he starts crying again, and his arms wrap around Sabo two times more than human arms rightly should. 

Thank you, Ace, he thinks. I’ve got him. I’ll take care of him. Thank you. 

“Hey, Luffy,” he says. “Wanna run away?” 

Luffy peels away from him and stares. “Really? You mean it? Back to the mountain?” 

“Wherever you want to go,” Sabo says, smiling. He picks up the discarded hat, slides the scarf out of the holes where the string used to be, and plops it on Luffy’s head where it belongs. “Will you run up to our room and get our stuff?” 

The kid hops to his feet and takes a few running steps, but he hesitates in the doorway. Glances over his shoulder, with that quiet worry that Sabo had almost gotten rid of for good lurking in his eyes again. 

But he takes off for the stairs before Sabo can say anything to him, bounding up three at a time and trampling over some of the house staff in his way by the sound of things. 

As soon as he’s gone, Sabo looks at his parents. Outlook looks thunderous, and Didit looks pinched. They both, however, seem slightly uneasy. 

“You tried to have my brother killed,” he says conversationally. “You faked the whole thing. You paid off the guard, too, didn’t you? God, you’ve been planning it for months. You knew I’d blame you right away if it happened while you hated him, so you’ve been acting kind. It’s a good thing you’ve never been kind a day in your lives, or maybe I’d have been fooled.”

Stelly shifts uncomfortably on the loveseat, like he’d bolt from the room Luffy-style if he wasn’t afraid of drawing Sabo’s attention. 

“You hired someone to abduct and murder a seven-year-old,” Sabo says, speaking as plainly as he can. “A little kid who never did anything wrong to anybody.”

“He’s not a person,” Outlook snaps. “He’s nothing but waste from the Gray—” 

“I will fucking kill you,” Sabo snarls with a rage that makes him feel distorted, like his skin is peeling away and revealing a monster underneath. A wicker boy, just tinder waiting for a spark. “I will burn this mansion to the ground with every single one of you inside. Do you think I won’t? That’s what we do, isn’t it? It’s who we are. We burn away the filth.”

Ace burned. Ace, with his impossible dreams and his stubborn grit and his refusal to bend or bow or break. Ace, who was still learning how to be gentle—who snarled at his siblings when they were being annoying but threw his whole body into protecting them from giant boas and bears and crocodiles—who groaned and grumbled when Luffy fell asleep in some weird place but always, without fail, lifted him up and carried him home. 

Ace should be alive. He should be here. He shouldn’t have burned. 

Outlook, Didit, and Stelly are all staring at him like he’s a feral animal. Like he’s some rabid creature that came down from the mountain and wandered into their house. It’s the way someone might look at a hungry bear that happened to cross their path. He feels every bit as wild as all of that. 

They tried to have Luffy killed. They tried to trap Sabo in this kingdom for good, tying him up in the strings of avenging his brother until he was too well-tangled to ever be free. His only brother. The brother Ace entrusted to him. 

“It’s time for a new deal. Come after me again and I’ll kill you,” Sabo says. It takes the shape of a vow. “Come after my friends and I’ll kill you. And Luffy—if you ever touch Luffy again—I swear to god I will make you live to regret it.”

“But you can’t,” Stelly says, dumbfounded. He glances sidelong at his adopted parents, and then back at the boy who—in another life—could have been his brother. “You’re just one kid. The guard would be more than enough to detain you. If you killed our father they’d take you away.”

“Yeah,” Sabo agrees easily, “but your father would still be dead.”

Didit sucks in a frightened breath. Her hand on Outlook’s arm tightens there, the knuckles standing out like a string of pearls. Outlook is staring at him as though he’s starting to believe him. 

That’s good. Sabo means it. He’s been carrying a knife around with him every day because he means it. He would stop at nothing. He would kill Outlook III with his teeth if he had to. 

This kingdom is nothing but rot. Everyone who lives within its walls are the worst of the worst, shallow and selfish and cowardly and mean. Sabo hates them. He hates all of them. He lets it burn in his eyes and Outlook is the one who blinks first. 

Thumping footsteps on the stairs announces the return of his brother, bouncing back into the room with his arms full of a clumsily-packed rucksack. He lights up when he sees Sabo standing exactly where he left him, and Sabo tucks away every hateful thing in his heart until the only thing left on his face for Luffy to see is a wide smile. 

“Ready to go, Lu?”

“Ready!” Luffy chirps, shoving the brim of his hat out of his eyes. “Your parents aren’t gonna make trouble for Dadan though, are they? That’s why we were stuck here before, wasn’t it?”

“That’s true, but we’ve made a new deal now,” Sabo says, matching his bright tone. “At least, I think we have.”

“Get out,” Outlook spits. “I refuse to be threatened in my own home. As far as I’m concerned, you died in the fire, playing with garbage. I’ll send a messenger to the courts this evening and have it made official. Never darken our door again.”

Freedom. 

It’s the closest he’s come since that morning he almost set sail.

They leave without another word. There’s no fanfare, no goodbyes. Stelly keeps looking between everyone in the room in complete bewilderment, and the steward is staring, and one of the maids, out of sight on the other side of the staircase, gives them a secret wave and a smile. 

Sabo grips Luffy’s hand and rattles his arm as they slip out the service door, hyping him up. His little brother grins ear-to-ear and hops with every step. 

“I’m coming back, you gibbons!” he howls up at the sky, like his monkey friends will be able to hear him from so many miles away. “Wait for me!”

Laughing, feeling lighter than he has in ages, Sabo says, “What’s the first thing you wanna do?”

“Say ‘hi’ to Dadan,” Luffy announces without hesitation. “Let’s catch her a giant crocodile to cook for dinner! Then she’ll definitely be happy to see us!” 

Slipping over the wall and through the Terminal is like going back in time. How many times did they do this? Dine-and-dashes, pick-pocket contests, racing through the kingdom like Hell was at their heels and laughing so hard they could barely breathe. 

They were stuck on this island, but they were stuck there together. It wasn’t so bad as long as it was like that. It still isn’t. 

“Y’know, Sabo, your dad said something funny,” Luffy says, playing a game of what looks like hopscotch with himself as they walk. 

The mention of his father sends white-hot wrath shooting through his veins, but out loud, Sabo only hums in mild interest. 

“What he said about playing with garbage. There’s lots of good stuff out here. Maybe some of it’s broken but you can just fix it again! Or let it stay broken, if you like it better that way! We found treasures, so anyone else could, too. Don’t you think?”

Sabo tilts his head back, staring straight up at the sky. That way he can pretend it’s the sunlight causing his eyes to burn. Luffy tugs on his arm, laughing, and asks him what he’s doing, isn’t that making him see spots? Sabo’s so weird!

Luffy’s right, in the simple, straightforward way he so often is. The junkyard is full of discarded things and absolute treasures. And if you’re lucky the way Sabo was twice-lucky, you might find something that’s both.