Epilogue- Just an Ordinary Boy
Portgas D. Ace never returned to the sea.
He was a Shichibukai and the older brother of the King. He could have asked for anything and received it on a platter of silver studded with inset jewels, yet he had lost his appetite for both food and adventure after seeing the one child he loved die. He proposed to the Queen of Alabastra a week into the new Age.
They planned a small marriage in a country still picking up the rubble from its civil war. The populace seemed dead like its queen and her betrothed; they knew who had saved them, who had brought the happy couple together. And that child was newly deceased.
They were content together but spoke in strings of silence, comforted only by the entanglement of arms that linked them together. They would sit like thus for hours on end staring into the empty sea. Men whispered that they were waiting for the King to come home on his tiny vessel, shining golden in the dying sun.
Alabastra gained a new protector, a new Shichibukai whose strange power allowed him to stay under the hot sun without burning. Life went on. Time came and went and there were soon minutes on end when they forgot about him.
That was where she found him. On the same cliff, looking into the same sun with the same expressionless face; the memories hit him hardest at sunset. It was under the setting Alabastra sun that he had seen his brother for the last time before his death.
Though his body was warm she sensed the coldness underneath, the shock and numbness. His weights lay casually tossed to one side. She knew he was constantly pushing his training past the point of safety in a futile attempt to block out the memories with pain. It never worked.
"Ace-kun?"
He turns to her; a half-hearted smile pasted on his face. "Stop calling me that. You don't have to."
"Ah…gomen. May I sit with you?"
"Certainly." She was reminded of the red-haired navigator who commented on how polite he was so many years ago. The tears she had been holding back came all at once; she collapsed to his side and buried her head in his naked chest, sobbing. He could do nothing but cry silently with her.
They called him Straw Hat Shanks for a while after that. He didn't like being famous just for giving an article of clothing away and never receiving it back, and soon his name returned to Red Hair Shanks like it had been before despite his newly dyed black tresses.
It sounded bad. He secretly liked the former name; it reminded him of the tiny child with a bandage under his eye wailing as he sailed off.
He didn't smile as much as he had before, since hearing of Luffy's death. He had no more reason to. He had been waiting for so long to see the boy again, to hear of his adventures and meet his nakama and tell him he could keep the stupid hat. It had never meant much to him anyways.
There was a thin skin healed over the scars on his left eye. It hurt when he cried anyways.
The Marines praised him and gave him honours and made speeches about him and he wasn't listening. He refused to. It shouldn't have ended this way. He was too young, much too young to have to put up with this.
They said he was a prodigy to capture the Pirate King at the tender age of sixteen. They didn't know half of it.
And how could he explain that he had been scouting the uninhabited island known as Juvarra, probably sent there on a suicide mission (the admiral had issues with sending him to his death multiple times in the past) when in the middle of the night whilst taking a stroll on the decks of his warship he had noticed the tiny piece of wood acting as a raft for the most dangerous pirate on the known planet?
Never mind that he was holding a strange treasure in his hand that was confirmed to be a fragment of the One Piece. Oh, that had changed things quite dramatically.
Helmeppo was still speaking as if he had been awake when the events had transpired. If only he had known how he had felt the moment he realized he realized who the boy on the raft was. But that was in the past and they were calling him to speak for the millions of Marines he couldn't care less about.
Sweat danced in his hair. He ran his delicate fingers through the pink locks, adjusted his glasses and stepped up to the podium. His speech was going to be heard throughout the world, better make it interesting.
He
cleared his throat. There was a lump forming in it that confirmed he
would not get through this presentation without embarrassing himself
on a global scale in the form of salt water.
"It
started two years ago."
He
was celebrated throughout the globe for being the first and last man
alive to see the King as a pirate.
"I
was just a child, by chance aboard the ship of a lady pirate…"
Such an ordinary boy. Born an ordinary birth without strange marks or strange prophecies or a strange upbringing.
Was
it fate?
Was
it destiny?
Was
it just luck?
It wasn't fair whichever way he looked at it. Right side and left side and upside-down side were all the same. Inside-out side showed some promise but returned nothing. He was dead, he died, they killed him. He was the King. He had accomplished his goal and lost everything in the process, leaving him only with the feeling that this was not the way things were supposed to turn out.
Just one more day in paradise, the journey and not the goal that was important. Before you got there and all of the sudden everyone is dead and off goes your head. All because of the stupid, stupid One Piece.
Oh, how ironic; reaching out for your whole life for something that wasn't even there.
Death, at least, was nice and dark. It was better than a lot of other things like living without nakama. He wondered if they were somewhere near him and started searching before he had made up his mind.
Unfortunately, the One Piece had made other plans.
-end
/kanthia
