pairing: ace/sophie
summary: "So like... Soph... growing up as a whitebeard pirate... being there when Ace arrived... imagine... the shenanigans... the chaos... THE BOOM" - bastetwrites on tumblr
words: 2300

i have a thing about fire

Marco was her favorite, and everyone knew it.

The only word she seemed capable of speaking when they first brought her on the ship was pineapple, growled squeakily by a scowly, dirty cub of about six or seven. Vista teased him mercilessly for it. A pirate in his prime, just shy of thirty, the right-hand man of Whitebeard no less, lugging around a little brat that refused to let go of his leg with her butt planted firmly on his foot? Attached to him like the world's most stubborn piece of tape?

Oh, the horror. The undignity. If the Marines ever got wind of this, it would be the end of the Phoenix's reputation forevermore.

But there was a second reason, aside from that fascinating mop of hair that curled up like a most excellent tropical fruit, that kept her entranced: sometimes he would glow.

And Marco knew it too.

The first slice was dull. Dull cuts were the worst. Didn't have the force to saw through cartilage, so he had to help her by pressing down to give the metal a little more oomph.

Blue fire erupted from the wound.

"…and that's how you cut through an ear. Well done, bookbug."

Her whole face lit up between splashes of blood. Small fingers prodded the newly-made shape, sun-browned, curving over the fresh cartilage and bone. Harmless cold flames licked up where the point of her fingertip met skin, teasing. She beamed.

Tiny fingers prodded Marco's cheeks, pulling and stretching the man's lean face. He was indulging her. Spoiling her with amputated body parts. He could tell she liked learning. She'd taken to writing and reading like a moth to a flame, and he was already contemplating what books to give her next. Perhaps something a bit more difficult, like mathematics, or scientific theories…

Marco stiffened, a terrible thought striking him. This was a bad sign, wasn't it? He was getting lulled into complacency. Pretty soon he'd start getting used to this bug crawling around him and he'd be teaching her the right way to cut open a jugular and the cleanest way to snap a femur, and that wouldn't do, it wouldn't do at all—

She clumsily patted his hair and raised the hand saw again, motioning that she wanted to try jamming it into his eye next.

"Let's eat lunch first. Thatch'll get his knickers in a twist if we're late and the food's gone cold." Marco picked her up easily, feet swinging, and carried her out the operating room. She stuck two fingers up his nostrils. "Ow, you little shit."

Gurgling in mischief, she threw her arms around his neck. In her little fists, she gripped his severed ear tight like it was her favorite new teddy bear. "Can we try acid next time, Marcle?"

"I'll do you one better, bookbug. I'll let you try dynamite."

Perhaps it was there when it all started. When she developed a… thing for Devil Fruit users. More specifically, a thing for fire.

It wasn't entirely Marco's fault that Sophie turned out the way she did.

(But it was for the most part.)

First Division, doctor's apprentice. Official title.

Unofficially: maker of poisons, student of chemistry, ardent lover of explosives.

She wore a sensible pink romper, the nurse's uniform adjusted for her age, and steel-toed boots on the advice of her big sisters, who hid pistols in their bras any time they arrived in a foreign port. Whitebeard's cross-and-crescent was tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, small and unassuming beneath a palm full of wrinkled, scaly burns.

Years passed. The ocean flowed onwards.

"Jinbe got him good, didn't he?"

"Poor boy. Waste of a pretty face."

"You think so? He looks a little…"

"Unconscious?"

"Feral."

Coal-black eyes blinked open. The Captain of the Spade Pirates jerked upright, snarling at the nurses. They shrieked as the bed burst into flames, his whole body blown red as he raged. Not even the chains could stop him.

"Get b-back!" A solid weight landed on his chest, thumped him good, pinned him down with Haki. A tranquilizer needle flashed and a hollering scream: "Marc-aaaaaale!"

The air scorched and shimmered in a heat haze. The veins on his neck tensed as he tried to rip or melt the chains off him, whichever came first. Sophie struggled to gasp for breath, sweat raining down her face.

"I'll kill 'im," the growl ripped out of his chest, livid and fierce, "I'll kill Whitebeard, kill that bastard dead!"

She yanked his jaw open and stuffed a live grenade down his throat.

All was light.

When the smoke cleared, Sophie realized belatedly that she wasn't holding onto dead, goopy chunks of feral idiot. She was curled around a body that was decidedly breathing, covered in fading embers. The corner of the sick bay was blackened with ash. Struggling to move herself out from under him as he half-crushed her, disoriented, she blinked fire from her eyes.

He belched fire, puffs of hot, sulfurous smoke pushed out by heated lungs. Rolling upwards, he gripped her by the chin, breathing fumes in her face like a dragon. His voice was roughly accented, marking him as a desperado from a nowhere island in the backwaters of East Blue: "You're a shit nurse."

She stabbed him with the tranquilizer.

The new crewmate was ruining everything.

Not only did Sophie have very valid reasons to hate him (he'd been trying to kill Pops the moment he stepped on the Moby Dick, he'd destroyed three windows already, and he was getting blood all over the deck like a scoundrel!), but she also irrationally despised how easily the rest of the crew had taken to Ace.

Once the whole fervor settled down and he demonstrated he could behave not-homicidally, he was actually kind of charming. He was polite, and he did his chores, and every morning he was up at sunrise with the other men pulling up a massive net of the day's first catch. He lit cigarettes before anyone had to ask him to, finger-gunning and blowing smoke out of the tip of his pointer finger, laughing cheekily. It was enraging.

And the worst part was: Ace was pretty.

He was way prettier than her.

He had to die.

"Pops," she'd said, "Pops, he's insane, he's a madman, he's a shirtless devil roaming the Moby, I've lost count how many times he's tried to kill you, and he'll try more if you don't sort him out quick—"

"I've made up my mind. Ace is my kid now, same as you. Less talking, more ale. I said more ale, brat, not more needles!"

"Marcle," she'd urged, "Marcle, you have to get rid of him. He's a liability. Two of us. Dead of night. We'll throw him overboard."

"He's a good kid, once all that homicide left his system. I recall a little bookbug used to be the same way, yoi."

"Thatch," she'd badgered, "Thatch, let me add a liiiittle bit of poison to his dinner? Puh-leaaase?"

"For the last time, get out of my kitchen or it's extra veggies tonight."

"Izooooo—"

"No."

"But Izoooooo—"

"It's Izo's quiet wine time, little one."

"Teach," she'd grumbled, "Teach, you're the only one who understands me."

"Aye, why not give the lad a chance? Boy made of flames. I've never seen power like that on a kid so young. Useful thing to learn from."

"Rrrrgh!"

"Curls, wait up—"

Ace had never been on a battleship as massive as the Moby Dick before. A thousand pirates moved inside her. Sophie walked ahead of him, sure-footed, stepping around her crewmates as if it was a prepared dance, a routine he was still getting the hang of.

She was doing her best to ignore him again, which was very funny when you took into account that her favorite pastime lately was spying on him. Sophie was incredibly obvious about it, lurking around corners with her shadow conspicuously on the floor, and she'd smack into the wall in her haste to run away as he approached, whistling casually.

It was something like divine justice to follow her around in the daylight, while she took to snooping through his things at night while thinking she was being so discreet about it. Snooping for another battleaxe, or poisoned darts, or something else to kill Pops with, even though he told her, time and time again, that he was done with the attempted murder. Whitebeard was his Pops now, same as her. Not his first father, but the right one, the best one. Yet Sophie seemed to pretend the mark on his back, rippling between muscle, didn't exist whenever he caught her squinting at him over yet another book.

"Marco your dad or somethin'?"

Her nose wrinkled in disgust. "Ew. No. Pops is my dad. Marcle's my… Marcle."

"Can I call him that?" Ace asked brightly.

The look she shot him was withering.

It made him grin wider. "I'm guessing 'bookbug' is off-limits, too."

Her cheeks flamed and her mouth pursed, cheeks puffing up in silent indignation at his invasive questions. Twiddling his thumbs as he sat on the edge of the sick bay's bed, Ace supposed he could cut back on the teasing. It was a nasty habit of his, using his one thousand-watt smile as a weapon. She wasn't even carrying any grenades to stuff inside his mouth again.

She opened the medicine kit and got to work disinfecting the superficial wounds he received after coming back from a short campaign with Jozu and Marco. Most of the blood Sophie wiped away was someone else's. He didn't have to point that out; her eyes were narrowed, as if thinking irritably that she didn't even have to be here. As the youngest and least qualified of the nurses, she was relegated to taking care of minor injuries.

But she wasn't being lazy about it. Her brow was furrowed in concentration as she inspected his face, tilting his head this way and that. Any jokes he might've cracked to ease the tension faded in his throat. He found himself watching her.

Something came over Ace, and he said, "All my life, I've had loads of brothers. But I've never had sisters before. Let me know if I get something wrong."

Sophie slowly met his gaze, her brow still creased. She poked her finger into his eye.

"Ow!"

"You didn't turn into fire." She sounded disappointed.

"Warn me next time," Ace snapped, rubbing his eye churlishly. He hadn't meant to get distracted.

He flinched slightly at her touch, and then went still. His eyes fluttered closed, and he felt her smooth her thumb over the crease of his eyelid. When he opened his eyes again, the look on Sophie's face was distant, thoughtful.

"We're two of the youngest pirates on the Moby," she said carefully. "Most of the guys here are like uncles. I'm not told 'no' very often, so I… may have been a little spoiled growing up. If you keep me in check, I'll do the same for you."

And then she touched their foreheads together so quickly Ace wasn't sure if he'd really felt it. It was a clumsy, awkward version of the greeting the children of Whitebeard did amongst each other, but it was also a gesture of acceptance.

"I can work with that," Ace murmured, resisting the urge to touch the heat on his forehead.

Sophie studied him with a look like—well, it felt like a shameless desire to break open his ribs and see what he was made of. It was a challenge. It surely had to be a challenge. Ace had never, would never, run from anything, so he stared back, not quite knowing what he was getting into, only that he sure as hell wasn't gonna back down from it.

"I made a brew that I distilled from petrol," she blurted out, pushing her pointer fingers together. "According to my hypothesis, your firepower should grow exponentially with more fuel. We could… have an experiment."

That sounded intriguing. "Make sure you keep your Haki up. Could burn you on accident."

"Promise?" She said it without meaning to, clearly, by the way her mouth snapped shut and how she glared in mute horror at herself.

Ace tilted his head, lips twitching. He glanced down at her mangled hands.

"I'm h-horrible," she admitted with a stammer, flipping her knife between her fingers like a stim. "I'm a little creep. You shouldn't have agreed to that. You should be terrified out of your wits."

What a perfectly strange girl. He expertly feigned boredom. "A mad scientist in a pink dress. I'm shakin' in my boots."

"I have a thing about Devil Fruit users," Sophie warned, never breaking eye contact as she smoothed the cold flat of her knife against his throat. Ace didn't summon his flames. He kept himself solid, allowed the sharp edge to rest dangerously on his neck in a way he'd almost forgotten. She swallowed, her tongue darting out to lick her lips. "Specifically, I—I suppose I have a thing about fire."

Oh, he thought. Good.

"I think," he said a while later, looking around at the burned debris cluttering the deck of the Moby Dick, "we should've found an uninhabited island for this."

"Ace." Marco emerged in blue wrath. "Bookbug."

"My brothers and I," Ace whispered urgently to his partner in crime, "used to trade off who'd get blamed for our collective dumbassery, so all three of us wouldn't die on the same day."

"You're a Whitebeard pirate now, fool," Sophie hissed back, clutching his wrist so he wouldn't bolt. "We go down together."

"Fuck me." He laced their hands together. "Let's do it."