Sabo forced his eyes open with a strangled gasp, struggling to regain enough lucidity to fully reform.
He wasn't sure how bad the explosion had been, but it had to have been strong because everything— the Pacifistas, the rubble, even the walls around him were gone; and flames are everywhere.
Fire coated everything so thickly he could no longer see the white and grey walls of the facility. No Pacifista parts on the ground, no burning papers or screaming metal or beeping of lasers. There was so much smoke that he couldn't even see the ceiling of the room anymore, blanketed entirely with a rolling cover of putrid black smoke.
So much fire, everywhere he looked.
Stumbling to his feet, Sabo choked on memories.
Becoming fire had barely prepared him for the absolute torrent of flames that currently surrounded him— the fires in the distance were so high, marking exactly where his brothers had to be, had to still be, trapped in the flames — Sabo desperately sucked in air.
He stared at his shaking fingers until they were solid and black in his vision, glowing red with flickering firelight. The disparity helped him to solidify more, until he was standing unsteadily on feet separated from the flames— until his tailcoats rose with the roaring air currents swallowed by the fire rather than flickered as flames of their own.
What just happened, Sabo wanted to scream.
"Don't you dare touch Luffy!"
Sabo's head snapped around.
He instinctively hyper focused on the direction the shout came from, feet already moving. The panic still swelled under his skin, roiling and boiling like magma in his gut— barely contained by the concentration on a single task.
A familiar task, writhing in anger and pain from the filthy, charred hands of a pirate Sabo only still saw in hazy nightmares.
Gritting his teeth so hard they collapsed back into flame, Sabo lunged.
The boy might have screamed at his sudden appearance, but Sabo couldn't hear a thing over the fire roaring in his ears, in his hands, in his heart. His fingers were clenched tight around Bluejam's meaty throat before he could even feel the contact of oily, grimy skin under his gloves.
The sick snap of bones and sinew was just as distant and unsatisfying as it always was.
He hurled the body away with a single disgusted movement, as though flicking a cockroach off his glove. It vanished immediately under the cover of flames and for the first time he wasn't certain he could be happier to ever see so much fire. His breathing was finally beginning to even out, just a little. Nowhere near stable, but enough for his brain to begin to parse through a little extra sensory than the blood rush of adrenaline and panic.
Shouting finally reached his ears.
Sabo spun around, startling the child into raising his pipe with shaking hands.
Grey eyes, silvered in the flames, remained as familiar and haunting as they always did in these dreams.
Ace snapped something at him. It might have been important. It might have been a threat, or a greeting, or a question.
None of it, not his shouting, or Luffy's hysterical crying behind him, reached him over the crackle of flames and burning trash.
Sabo thought, for a single moment, fuck, I must be dead.
Dead and dreaming, he decided, staring down at his two brothers. His dead brother, his littlest brother, glaring him down surrounded by the horribly familiar blaze of a junkyard.
None of that seemed to matter. No thinking or reminiscing. No time for decisions. He simply scooped up both boys, struggling and protesting falling to deaf ears, and ran as fast as he could.
If he had been even slightly more aware, he might have heard Luffy crying, Ace screaming curses as he sent panicked punches to Sabo's arm and back.
But he was only focused on barreling through the flames— Single-mindedly crashing through the charred remains of grey terminal towards the looming familiarity of the forest.
Sabo didn't stop running. He wouldn't, couldn't—
He didn't even pause when he crossed the threshold of cement and trash and fire into soft dirt and leaves. Didn't pause in leaping over gnarled tree roots and rocks with the ease of someone who had lived there forever— climbing, leaping, sprinting through the undergrowth, a hat too large propped precariously on his head and a pipe heavy fisted in one hand, grin mirroring those of the two boys at his heels — didn't even slow down until the fires of goa were far in the distance. Until all that surrounded them was trees thick and tall and impenetrable.
Fire continued to crackle in Sabo's ears. It drowned out the bugs, the leaves, the boys still kicking and screaming in his arms, his own quick-too-quick breathing.
In the absence of burning, everything ached.
Sabo collapsed to one knee into the soft dirt.
His arms swung limp and weak at his sides, allowing two equally exhausted and smoke smeared boys to tumble to the ground.
Sabo couldn't register them speaking. Not to each other, not to him. He stared uncomprehendingly through darkening tunnel vision as the unmistakable freckled face of his dead brother glared at him, lips moving sharply around words he couldn't hear. All he could manage to think in the moment, was a fuzzy My brothers, my brothers, my brothers. Safe–– alive.
Sabo's teeth clicked together as his eyes rolled back into his head, finally crumpling to the ground and into unconsciousness.
