A/N: Luffy had to sit with a dying loved on in his arms in the manga. Ace took the hit for him. In this world- whichever world it is- things happened differently.
Just a drabble. C: Take it or leave it.
And it was Luffy running, Luffy reaching out and slamming him out of the way just in time, a second to spare a breathless stare, the world suspended in slow serendipity - and then things were happening too fast, the events colliding one after another, crash after resounding crash, and someone screamed.
The universe spun on fast forward and Ace sat dumbly on the hard concrete in a small pocket of absolute stillness, staring at what had happened, unable to connect it to reality. He turned slowly, lifting his eyes to the wide-eyed man behind the gun. They looked at each other for an instant, and then there were loud footsteps, loud voices, loud faces, loud panic and the man was torn away.
Ace reached over and pulled Luffy to him. Red was blossoming across the front of his soft shirt, and he lay limp in Ace's arms - face pale and silent, he could have just been sleeping.
Other people crowding in, touching and not-touching and crying. Cellphones glittering innappropriately in the street lamplight, all their voices at once panicked and repeating the same story to different people, Zoro snarling something terrifying at the man he had on the ground, Nami crying and messing with Luffy's hair for some reason, a crowd of strangers and so many seperate unrelated moments winding together-
Ace sat, and held Luffy until the moment he was lifted away. Then things changed with an eerie lack of transition; one moment there, on the street- the next looking through a window and watching the world flash by- and then a sterile white hallway, hushed sorrow, no answers.
"Wouldn't it be cool to be a rubberman?"
He shouldn't have laughed at him that time.