"Mouda widened her eyes as the pirate was suddenly holding her up now, bracing the girl against his chest with one arm as he started to limp away from the pair of marines." — A Country Girl's Pirate, chapter five.

—Ace finds that there is something distantly familiar about his rescuer.

Nostalgia

The girl was of average height for someone her age- sixteen, maybe- but compared to him, she seemed very tiny, and he wondered how difficult it was for her to hold him up like she was.

The man felt her body trembling underneath his weight, and he deiced it must have been pretty damn difficult. The marine boy they were with wasn't helping at all, too busy being scared witless behind them. Ace found that he would have liked to remove some of the weight from her, but his legs couldn't hold him up right.

"Sorry" he got himself to mutter. "I'm, uh, having a bit of trouble getting my muscles to work…"

Damn marines and their damn seastone, he cursed to himself. It must still been messing with me. Not to mention I haven't eaten in a while. God, I'm hungry…

"It's okay" the girl told him softly- she sounded so worried for him. "You deserve all the rest you can get…"

Guilt forced him to admit that hunger and seastone energy wasn't the only reason he didn't lift himself up. His face was into the crook of her neck and it felt good enough to fall asleep against. In the back of his mind, she also seemed really familiar. It wasn't her voice or looks- not that he'd been able to take a good look at her anyways. It was…the way she smelled.

He'd smelt this before. A mix of hay and clean sheets and feminine scents- but from where, he couldn't quite recall.

She was talking to the marine- judging from the energy behind him, the pirate guessed they'd been caught by someone. Whatever. He could take them in a couple of minutes.

What the hell is this from? He questioned himself again, breathing deeper into the girl and half-heartedly hoping she didn't notice. He knew the answer, damn it, but-

Someone started laughing behind them, and Ace found the conversation going on around him harder to ignore because of it.

"You, beat me?!" said a gravely familiar voice. "Impossible, lad!"

The pirate's body went ridged as the owner of the voice continued talking, the man finding it to sound more and more like someone he knew with each syllable.

"Alright Coby, I guess I can let you off the hook this time- you were helping my grandson, after all!"

"Yes sir!" the boy behind them squeaked. "T-thank you very much, sir- wait, grandson?! But I thought Luffy-san was your grandson!"

Without a second thought Ace used the arm the girl was holding and wound it tighter around her frame, lifting her off the ground. This felt good too, and he was sad he couldn't enjoy it because of the circumstances.

"A-Ace?" the way she stuttered was pretty cute, he thought absently. "Are you okay?"

"Sure" he told her through a hidden grin, using his wayward thoughts to ignore the pain spiking through his body as he limped along.

"Hey," she pried. "Didn't that marine just say you were his grandson?"

"Yeah. We should hurry" he sighed, being pulled back to reality. He forced himself to move faster, and luckily it hadn't been too hard to do. The seastone was wearing off, finally.

"But isn't he your grandda?"

"Uh-huh" her sliver of an accent was cute too, but he just didn't have to time to think about it right then

"So why are you running away faster?"

The answer was obvious when Garp shouted at them from where he stood some two hundred meters away.

He groaned loudly and started running, tripping over himself and the girl's legs a few times as the remaining bouts of pain became harder to ignore.

Fine, he grumbled to himself as he reached the south side of the port and began speaking with the strangely familiar in his arms. Forget about how she smells. More importantly, which boat is the one I'll be stealing?

He had to hand it to the marine kid; he did a good job of breaking the law.

After the girl had slipped out of his hold and said some nonsensical apologies to him, she started to look through the boats for this bag of hers. Ace took a seat where she had left him, his muscles and cuts aching as he propped his arm up onto his knee to hold up his head.

She was pretty, he saw now, with long blonde hair and big blue eyes and a baby-face that completed her image. He hadn't met anyone quite like her before, he figured, but the nostalgic sensation inside of him wouldn't leave. Surely, he hadn't gotten so close to her in the past, had he?

Something hazy appeared in his mind- A pillow. White, frills, lavender. Tiny fishes. Had he been sleeping? Yes, he'd defiantly been sleeping when he'd encountered the scent.

A bed? He asked himself in wonder.

Her bed?

Ace's thoughts were cut short when the girl called out to him from a boat near the end of the dock, waving to him with as smile lit up her face. The pirate couldn't help but think it wasn't the first time he's seen her look at him like that.

Something I thought would be fun to do, and also something that would be useful to people who wanted to know how Ace felt during the time spent with our favorite country girl. As I've said in the summary, it's a companion story to 'A Country Girl's Pirate', and you'll be feeling really lost unless you read that too. ACGP is written in such a way that the reader only sees into Mouda's mind- so to help balance things out, this is written to only show Ace's thoughts.

As for how each chapter of this story would be structured- it's supposed to be sort of drabble-ish, showing an important part of a chapter, but from Ace's point of view and not Mouda's. I give a quote from a certain chapter to let the readers know where about in the storyline the following scenes happen at, and to let people know what part is especially important. At some points I'll even write whole scenes without Mouda in it, little parts that happened in between her story's chapter scenes. Consider these two stories to be something like xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles- one provides things to the other that aren't necessarily vital for the reader to know. But in my personal opinion I think that if your reading xxxHOLiC then you should defiantly read Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, or vise versa.

This one probably won't be updated as frequently as ACGP, because after all, it's just a side thing. But it'd at least let me give you something to read if I get stuck on the main storyline, right?

As a little note, I'd like to mention that this side story will become M in the future. Mouda's point of view is more innocent, since she's a girl, not quite an adult yet, as I've emphasized many times throughout the story. Ace is a full-grown man. His thoughts, I imagine, would sometimes stray into the gutter, and stay there as long as they like.