Title: Burn for Me
Rating: T
Pairing: Smoker x Ace
Topic: Song Lyrics
Word Count: 252
"…I'll be executed," Smoker had said. The sky was a shade of cold black. The stars twinkled slowly that night, and Ace remembered every detail by painful nightmares. It shook him to remember. He couldn't dare forget.
"I'll be executed," he had repeated, "A week from today. Hina's being court-martialed. I don't know what those bastards are doing to Tashigi, but it's probably worse."
"You could run away," Ace had said, his voice a wrinkle in the ocean. "Become a- well- a pira-"
"Never." So much finality could kill a man.
Ace learned what it meant to hold back; the stars, be they burning, paused in their mighty slumber.
"…Shoot." His bare chest hurt from too many stars.
"I'm not blaming you, Portgas." Smoker exhaled, and a white snake curled into the night sky. "It wasn't your fault we got caught. That's the different between me and you- I'm going to make up for the shit we did. You're going to run."
"You're wrong," Ace had said, "You're not making up for anything. You're being killed to save face and you know it, you know it-"
"It doesn't matter." There was something about him, that lonely night on the forgotten beach, which made Ace feel like dying. "…It doesn't matter, anyways. The stars were watching us the whole time. We were bound to get caught."
If anything, Ace remembers more of that last night then of the actual execution. He was left with the horrible longing for the stars to be blind.
x x x
Er, the challenge for that week was to write a drabble inspired by song lyrics.
If you can't guess what inspired me, it has to do with stars and blindness.
...I'm rather sorry.