Got your tissues? Awesome.

Warnings: Character death (obviously), character afterlife, heavy despair, lots of swearing, everything you would expect from this kind of thing.

Part 1

"Please . . . pass on . . . what I'm about to say . . ." He was finding it hard to speak. Was he short of breath? Why was he so numb? "Old Man . . . Everyone . . . And you, Luffy . . .

"Even though . . . I'm so worthless . . . Even though . . . I carry the blood of a demon . . . thank you . . . for loving me!"

Everything blurred before Ace's eyes and his muscles, weak and failing, could no longer support him. He fell, his hand slipping from his brother's back as he collapsed on the ground.

The battlefield was strangely quiet, everything suspended as the teenager, a strange expression on his slackening features, went limp and still.

He was smiling, even in death, even as the hole in his abdomen continued to sluggishly leak blood. After a moment, that too stopped since Ace's body had no more blood left to give. Some of it had splattered around him with his fall, a macabre pattern against the cold stone ground. More crimson leaked from between his upturned lips but it could do nothing to disturb the serene expression on his face.

For Ace, it was all over. He knew it, somehow, a kind of knowledge that surpassed simple understanding; everything was slowing down, a tunnel of noises and lights expanding and darkening until he could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

Everything was numb, gone. He was nothing. A candle snuffed out, a light extinguished, nothing but a silent observer in the void that stretched for an undefined infinity.

And then he was something. Awareness ignited an agonizing pins-and-needles sensation in his body (his body?). He stood, shocked, until he automatically started coughing, the smoke drifting through the air triggering the response until Ace realized that he didn't need to be coughing. With the realization came the reminder that he was breathing and he put a hand to his chest, his eyes widening with confusion and hints of panic as he felt his unbroken skin there, whole and healthy as though a magma fist hadn't punched through and vaporized almost all of his internal organs and spine.

Sound flooded Ace's ears like a tidal wave, and coupled with the resurgence of his other senses Ace physically staggered back, trying to shut them out as a headache exploded behind his eyes, so intense that he fell to his knees, hands clamped over his ears to try to block everything out. His efforts were in vain, because one voice still reached him.

"Ace . . ."

Gods be damned, he knew that voice. Not wanting to open his eyes but instinctively knowing he had to, Ace forced his eyelids apart and found a scene that left him reeling.

There was his body sprawled on the ground, a bloody, broken mess, his tattoo destroyed, a jagged hole torn through his chest that made him nauseous just by looking at it.

And there was Luffy. God, Luffy. The poor kid clearly couldn't even process what had just happened—Ace couldn't process it, he was dead?—but there was a tsunami of horror rapidly encroaching on his little brother's mind. Ace would have to be blind to miss it.

He wanted the numbness to come back. He had been at peace, dammit, who the fuck got off on screwing with the afterlife? Who's idea of a sick fucking joke was this?

Ace barely realized that he was on fire, one arm almost completely burning, though once he did he clamped down on his abilities, extinguishing the flames effortlessly.

"Ace . . ."

The single, heartbreaking syllable hit Ace like a punch to the gut, so much more painful than anything he had suffered through before. Luffy, his energetic, happy, positive-until-the-world-ends-and-even-then brother, shouldn't sound like that. Ace reached out automatically, being within arm's length of his brother, and though he could feel when his hand hit Luffy's shoulder, he found that he could do nothing to gain his brother's attention. Even when he pushed or heated his hand to burning temperatures, Luffy didn't register his presence at all.

"Luffy," Ace whispered, feeling an uncomfortable burning in his throat, so similar to what had made him cry not a minute ago. "Luffy, please . . ."

But Luffy couldn't hear Ace's voice; his eyes were fixed on Ace's rapidly cooling body and his blood-soaked hands were shaking, the trembling growing more pronounced with each passing second. And then Luffy tipped back his head, for a moment fighting not to cry, and then he did, sobs half-interrupted by anger only to burst out anyway, each cry a knife to Ace's heart. He tried to reach out again, but again found he could do nothing to comfort his brother.

"Please, Luffy, don't mourn me," Ace tried, but his words did nothing.

Luffy's mind snapped with what might as well have been an audible sound. Ace could do nothing but stare, finding it more and more difficult to swallow. Even speaking became difficult, and his eyes were watering, but it wasn't from the smoke.

"I didn't know you . . . you idiot . . . I said thank you . . . that was right, wasn't it? Luffy? Say something! Dammit, you're my little brother! Say something!" Ace's voice broke halfway through when he tried to reach out to his brother and couldn't so much as make him twitch. "I . . . you . . . why . . . even now . . ."

Ace could remember his childhood years with Luffy with almost painful clarity, like his mind was being forced to dredge up every memory they shared. Ace's chest felt like lead, so different from the fiery freedom that had fueled his muscles since he had set off from his home island, even before he ate the Mera Mera no Mi.

It hurt. Death be damned, it hurt.

Luffy had cared for him from the start and hadn't given two shits about his status as the son of the Pirate King—besides his pestering about what his good-for-nothing father was like—and had treated Ace with all the affection and loyalty and love of a true brother.

Because they were brothers. Always had been, even before they really knew it.

Ace was crying again but he quickly wiped the tears away, opting to shuffle over to Luffy, who was frozen, his gaze empty while his mouth hung open in a silent scream of denial and agony.

He barely followed what happened next. There was Admiral Akainu again—Ace wanted to burn that bastard (was his sacrifice for nothing? No, Luffy couldn't die, not yet, he was going to be the King of the Pirates, marines be damned) but found he couldn't no matter how hard he tried—and Jinbe was there, and there were screams and the sounds of guns and cannons and mortars and pirates dying left and right (his crewmates, his brothers, his family falling with scams of pain while he was powerless to intervene) and then his surrogate father Whitebeard died standing with his pride practically radiating from him in waves and Ace couldn't handle it anymore, his mind stretching in a hundred different directions, pulled so tight it was on the verge of splintering.

He screamed, a bloodcurdling noise that made the air churn and roil with the heat bursting from his skin.

"STOP! MAKE IT FUCKING STOP!"

His scream went unheard. Time marched onwards, inexplicable and unstoppable.

Ace watched it, completely and utterly helpless for the first time in his life. He merely followed as Luffy was saved by a clown-faced pirate Ace distantly recognized and given to another pirate in a submarine that Ace also barely recalled from a wanted poster. He wasn't consciously following his brother; his feet carried him and he ran without knowing, his eyes empty and his mind in shock.

He was dead.

Why was he seeing this? Why did he have to see this? Why did he need to see the extent to which he was loved?

He knew, had known, that Whitebeard's crew and the man himself loved him as much as anyone else. It had never hit home. He was Whitebeard's son, the son of the King of the Pirates, the brother of Straw Hat Luffy, and he was loved.

But he'd never figured it out . . . even with his years on the open sea, traveling with the Spade Pirates and then the Whitebeard Pirates, he'd never managed to find the answer.

"Was it good that I was born?"

Death brought Ace a strange, detached clarity, but he couldn't focus. He didn't want to.

Because the answer dangled in front of him and he desperately wanted the question to remain unanswered because when he did acknowledge it, it would be over. All of it.

For good.

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