Oh look, here's where I left it. I knew I hadn't misplaced Ace's sanity yet...

Kidd pinched his nose and closed his eyes to ward off the oncoming migraine as Ace suddenly dropped to sleep. If the man wasn't a fucking mutant in a fight and if Luffy's chef wasn't such a pansy-assed neat freak, he would kill the fiery yonkou right now, with all of Sanji's knives.

Fortunately for Ace, Franky and Usopp dropped from the now completed living quarters above.

"Yo, Red-bro, whatcha still doing here?" Franky asked brusquely, swallowing a few extra nails that Usopp tossed his way. "I thought you'd be long gone terrorizing some poor marine training camp."

"Did that on the way in," Kidd responded absentmindedly as he pinched the bridge of his knife-like nose. "I was trying to figure out how the hell Ace stayed alive after Marineford, but the fucking, sleep-walking, sack of shit nodded off in the middle of his story. I hate unfinished stories. They make me cranky."

Usopp gave Franky a fearful, sidelong glance before smoothly insinuating himself in the seat furthest away from the magnetic yonkou.

"Where'd he leave off? Maybe I can pick it up for you," Usopp gently suggested, attempting - and failing quite spectacularly - to convince himself that a cranky Kidd was everyone's problem.

Everyone with an interest in living, that is.

Kidd filled them in as Franky spun a chair around and straddled it, idly positioning himself between the red-head and his long-nosed brother-in-arms. Usopp frowned quite a bit as Kidd jumped from point to point, mimicking Ace's storytelling style.

"Jeez, you really can't rely on a D. boy to keep a straight line, can you?" Usopp muttered peevishly after Kidd wrapped up. "So basically Ace hasn't told you anything that actually happened to him and Luffy after they got back? Let me fill in the gaps for you as best as I can."

"Finally!" Kidd barked as the sniper warmed up to his topic. The yonkou even ignored the way that Luffy's shipwright patted his shoulder in consolation.

[~~~]

Ace opened his eyes in the dark once more, but somehow he knew that this was not the dark of a moonless night or a lightless room. This dark was much more visceral and complete gloom - even though he could feel that his eyes were open, he couldn't see his the end o his nose far less his hand.

He felt like someone had interrupted him in the middle of a great quest, his hands still feeling around the abysmal shadow for-

hatLuffybootsLuffysocksLuffyknifeLuffybeltLuffyshortsLuffyshirtLuffyglovesLuffy -

"Luffy!" Ace screamed into the gloom, his voice barely moving the air in the silence. The Pirate King's son turned this way and that, feeling the air blindly, ears straining to catch the slightest sound, even the minuscule echo of his breathing.

"Luffy! Where are you? Answer me! Luffy! Li'l bro, where are yo-"

"Heya,"

Ace could feel the hairs on his body sticking out, as if he'd just avoided a lightning bolt. That voice...he hadn't heard it in about 10 years...

"How's it been hanging?"

Ace wanted to do something - run, scream, kick, bite, flame on, anything - but he couldn't even move a muscle.

"...Ss...s...s"

"Yesss, say it. It's true what they say; names are power, you know..."

He could feel the strong, wiry arms as they snaked around his throat, squeezing just that little bit too tightly. He didn't mind in the least. He'd missed this person so very much, especially the first day he went to sea.

"I'm so glad that you're alive. When I saw that hole in your chest..."

Head on a gibbet...

Crucified...

Drowned...

Stoned...

Run through...

Avalanche...

Briefly the tanned young man saw himself dead in six million different ways. He felt the scream bubbling in his throat as a synesthesia of images and sounds and scents slammed into his brain and nearly short-circuited it - involuntarily he closed his eyes and just flowed...

The images flickered out. His eyes opened to the darkness, but he could sense a lightening of the atmosphere - a glimmering that slowly bobbed directly behind him. From the very corner of his eye, Ace could make out a ragged top hat and a pale swath of hair. The stinking, seaweed breath was hot and moist on his ear.

"Come on an adventure with me," the voice crooned, cracking now man-deep, now boy-high. "This is the free-est ocean on earth - we'll find Luffy and sail away like we promised...!"

Ace was twelve seconds away from retching. He'd had this type of nightmare about his lost brother before, but never this vivid; so tangible that he could feel his gorge rising rapidly, even as he knew the horror behind him would be wet and caked with kelp; watery, bloated body sloughing off runny patches of charred skin...

"Oh, geroff 'im! Who the hell told ya that ya could impersonate me, you ass-fucker?"

There was a solid impact and Ace was suddenly able to move again. The darkness lightened considerably, but he still couldn't make out the figure pounding his nightmare to death with an old pipe.

"Ch," the figure hawked up a loogie and spat it contemptuously over the prone mass of rags. The top hat lolled on the ground, crumpled badly in the middle.

"That'll learn ya sodding void-walkers when ta geroff."

Ace blinked stupidly as the figure swaggered over to him. The voice and face were the same as in his nightmares, but he'd never come up with Sabo shining quite so brightly. The young man, now wearing a ragged top hat that fit his head just a bit too tightly, grinned his cracked-tooth smile and began to run towards Flame-Fist. The devil-fruit user was too stupefied to even protect himself.

"Oi, Ace, what took ya so long? Motherfucking, gluttonous narco!"

And then there was another impact and both young men were bowled ass over teakettle as Sabo slammed shoulder first into Ace's chest. Ace found that 10 years of nagging Luffy about his cry-baby ways couldn't stop the snot and tears running freely down his own face.

"Sabo! You're alive! Oh God, I've missed you, you cock-sucking, snaggle-toothed klepto!"

[~~~]

Luffy walked on and on in the absolute darkness, turning at random and even doubling back as needed. Zoro would have approved highly. Nami would have beaten his head in by now.

"Ace! Ace, are you here? Come on, Ace, lemme know if you're here!"

The rubber boy stopped momentarily and strained his eyes and his ears, quite literally stretching the latter into platter-sized satellites. He could hear something...just on the edge of sound...

"Mother..."

And then gone.

Luffy scratched his head for a bit, his straw-hat - wonder why I didn't notice it before? - resting comfortably on the nape of his neck. He shrugged and decided to following the whisper back to its origin. It wasn't as if he had to avoid anything - the roads in his dreams were always flat and clear, although he was used to them being ocean blue.

After walking, rolling, bouncing, skipping and inching along with his chin -

- Briefly he thought he saw a yellow-haired dude doing the same thing, but he was doing it to rescue Team 7 or something like that. It seemed really mysteriously important to the foxy looking kid, so Luffy stopped and went back to walking -

Luffy realized that a small glow was growing in the distance, shimmering and winking minutely in the gloom. As he approached, he realized that it was a small, sallow boy, hunched over himself with crimson speckling his fingers. A sharp piece of glass was in his hand. It dripped red.

"What's the matter?" Luffy called easily, not even remotely suspicious about the fact that he could see such rich hues of vermilion in a darkness that was nigh impervious. The boy raised his head, sniffling. He wore a snow leopard skin as a crude hat that slipped over his brow rather easily.

"Who're you?" the boy snuffled loudly, streaking red across his top lip as he tried to clean himself up. Luffy eyed the lad with barely restrained curiosity, rocking from foot to foot with his eager hands laced behind his head.

"Name's Luffy. What's yours?"

The boy's eyes grew wide. His bottom lip trembled as he sucked in great gulps of air.

"You're real..." the youngster gasped, rapidly breathing through his mouth, "Even though you aren't wearing the Holy Vault-suit... You're not just one of Baso-papa's stories!"

"I feel real enough," Luffy reasoned in agreement, moving to crouch near the skittish boy. The rubber man gave a quick nod in the direction of the jagged piece of glass. "Hey, are you okay?"

The boy's eyes grew watery again, but no more tears fell.

"Mother...she died again. Even though I tried to cut it out - it was a huge lump in her throat, she already couldn't drink soup any more - she died again. Again. I tried it out on pig-rats and kree-cats and mutie-dogs and everything, but she still..."

For many minutes, there was no sound or movement from either of them until Luffy finally, resolutely, took off his hat and placed it on the small boy's head. Then there was a series of hiccups that devolved into heartbroken wails as the boy threw his scrawny arms around his bony knees and wept.

[~~~]

Ace blinked at Sabo again. He realized that he'd gotten pretty comfortable with wearing banal incredulity on his face - he swore it'd been that way since he watch the carnage that Luffy and his crew wreaked in Alabasta.

"You're a what?"

Sabo grinned and slurped loudly from the bottle marked "Ninjin's Pick-me-Up."

"I'm a ghoul - undead's the closest explanation, I guess. I'm of the vampire subspecies t' be exact. One of the Shiners - I glow like a neon light when I get pumped up."

"So wait, by vampire, do you happen to mean that you're drinking..."

"Oh, don't worry, it ain't human - it's pig-rat. The next best thing!"

Ace tried very hard not to shudder as he observed his friend's sharp teeth nibble the glass bottle a little too eagerly. He was beginning to wonder about the way Sabo kept glancing at him - not at his tatts, but at the nape of his neck. Sadly, he found that he'd offer it up to him, if the pale man ever asked. Better not to pursue that thought any further.

"Anyway, what in hell are you doing here?" Sabo asked in annoyance. "I know you two D. boys are stupid as hell, but so stupid as to walk into a mind-mire? Willingly?"

Ace looked at Sabo purposefully, trying hard to follow his train of thought. Tanned met pale and they stared at each other for a while before Sabo dropped his head in his hands, muffling his speech only slightly.

"Oh. So that's it. You fell through - not quite all the way, but still...Ah shit, now I gotta save you too."

Ace couldn't resist cuffing Sabo in the back of the head, leaving a few conspicuous scorch-marks

"Oi, no fucking reason to sound so smug about it!"

The young men looked at each other for another long moment before they burst into side-splitting laughter that left them bent over double.

"A Flame-Flame devil fruit, huh?" Sabo wheezed, tears still standing in the corners of his eyes. "That's so fitting, it's disgusting. You were always flaring up about something or the other!"

"Says the kid-turned-vampire who used to dress in black all the time anyway," Ace muttered with a smirk. "Now all we need to do is find Luffy and get out of here to celebra-"

"No, I gotta find Traffie first. I can't leave my kid here."

To say that Ace's eyebrows shot into the air would be an understatement proportional to the size of his stomach. Sabo snorted in ill-concealed mirth.

"Not my real kid - can't have any of them anyway. Traffie's one of my urchins from my new world. Fool boy went into a mind-mire hoping to save his mother, but... you can't control the when or the where with these things. For us to meet is just pure chance."

Ace nodded slowly - Sabo had been explaining a lot to him about the mind-mires and their roles as gateways to new dimensions. The pale vamp's voice caught his attention once more.

"Actually, I don't think this mind-mire existed before," Sabo continued, albeit a bit hesitantly. He sounded like he was trying to tiptoe around the edge of a bed with a monster lurking under it. "Usually that means something real big and real unexpected happened somewhe- Oi, Ace! Ace, you okay?"

Ace stood frozen in shock as his mind connected the images from his nightmare to Sabo's words.

"Alive, I'm...I'm not...I made it...I'm not supposed to be alive!"

Sabo now mimicked Ace's petrification, while the sun-baked man in the orange hat began to speak rapidly.

"Oh hell, Sabo, I'm supposed to be dead! Dead! I mean, I was dead, I had a frigging fistful of lava gut me like a kidney pie, but now I'm not dead and I saw it, all the ways I was supposed to be dead, but, oh fuck, Luffy and the old skeleton in his crew saved me, so now I'm alive or kinda, I guess, 'cause I haven't woken up in about a month it feels like, but I know I'm alive and that's what caused the mind-mir-"

Sabo slapped Ace across the mouth twice before the darker man would shut up.

"Stop it! None of that matters now, what's done is done. You're not dead and the universe will work with whatever else happens. Now listen to m- I said listen to me or I'll shake you like a bottle of pop!"

Ace gibbered for a bit, wild-eyed still but capable of functioning. Sabo nodded in approval, his control over his radiance slipping a notch in his haste.

"We need to find Luffy and Traffie as quickly as possible and get to hell out of here. New mind-mires are chockful of those void-walkers; they prey off of the energies of the new dimension and drag off anything that wonders in between the worlds. Unless you want to go back a blubbering lunatic, or not at all, we've gotta start running."

"But running where?" Ace asked plaintively. "This place is a wide as all of the Seas combined - we can't possible find them!"

"We don't need our bodies or minds in here. Here, the best way to navigate is from the heart."

[~~~]

"Wow, you're really smart, Traf!"

The little boy gave Luffy a sallow smirk in reply before going back to his rearrangement of the rubber man's ears. He was on Luffy's shoulders, perched precariously through the power of his long legs alone as he arranged a rusted piece of wire over the straw-hat and into each ear.

"Ok, Mr. Luffy, now swing your head around, again. Maybe we can pick up the signals a little better now."

"Cool, Traf! Help me open my eyelids some more, maybe I can see something!"

Traf nodded in quiet agreement as he took hold of an eyelid in each hand and slowly pulled them over Luffy's forehead. Preparations complete, the Goat-Donkey-Pig-Rat Rubber Satellite began to spin in its stationary orbit.

Time passed. Luffy idly realized that he wasn't getting dizzy anymore - if Bon-chan were alive, he'd have gone wild with approval, but the Straw-hat captain had not been able to save the ballet dancer either. On so many levels, Luffy had failed the people around him, but now wasn't the time to worry about that. He needed to find his way out of the dark and back to his crew and his brother.

"Hey Traf, this isn't working eith- Oh wait, I see it!"

Stopping mid turn, Traf peered into the darkness, his eyes following the twist in Luffy's body position.

"Maa, I still don't see-"

A blink, sickly green, then out.

"See! See! It's a cool, mysterious light! Let's go see who it is!"

Traf hugged the rubber man's head tightly as the young man began jogging at a deceptively swift pace.

"I know Baso-papa's glow anywhere!" Traf yelled in excitement. "If anyone knows how to get us out, it's Baso-papa!"

[~~~]

Author says:

And the links should be closed now. The stories still don't align completely - as Sabo aka Baso-papa said, the when and where are fairly random - but you should be able to understand what's going on in both stories. If not, PM me - if I get enough requests, I'll make a full explanation chapter.