thanks theLaziestHufflepuff for the beta and all the encouragement! :)
Russian translation available on AO3, thanks Lena013!
meet me in the sunlight
(ten thousand times and then once more)
"I ask you to take care of Luffy, and you end up in Impel Down?"
Ace stares. He and Luffy have often hallucinated Sabo as grieving children, but it has already been years since. Odd. His dead brother has never appeared this tall before him. Childish features have shifted in this feverish daydream; who would have expected a sharp jawline out of Sabo?
In Ace's memory, Sabo remains forever ten, beaming in the sun.
But ten now he is not. This is no normal vision of grief, then. Perhaps he is already dead, and his brother has come to meet him in death.
"Knew it'd be you sending me to hell," Ace manages a smile. Because he would have chosen no one else.
Sabo smiles back, but there is sadness in those steely eyes.
"No, Ace. I'm here to save you."
His brother swoops in soundlessly and summarily breaks his chains, with a vicious swipe of steel pipe so nostalgic that it leaves Ace speechless. Even the damned steel pipe has grown with him, though his movements are still somehow intimately familiar.
But this is only a dream. And so he can say whatever he wants.
"Then where were you?" Ace demands quietly but clearly, as the apparition checks him for injury. "We missed you. Always. Still."
Even as a ghost, Sabo pauses and looks at him with visible hurt. Ace looks away.
"I couldn't..."
Ace knows. He does. Sabo is the kind, selfless and brave brother - the best he and Luffy would ever have; the loving caring one who would throw away his life and freedom without looking back, if it meant the safety of his brothers.
If Sabo weren't there, it would only be because no one could have managed it.
And he is here now, in Level Six of fucking Impel Down, for him, when the rest of the world wants him dead and cannot wait for it.
"I know," Ace admits, and reaches for Sabo with both arms.
Sabo hugs him back, shoulders relaxing.
It miffs him only a little that grown-up Sabo seems to have not noticed Ace's suffocating grip at all. He only moves to pick Ace up, and with no real apparent effort.
"Oi," Ace taps at his brother's spine, half-heartedly.
Sabo chuckles as he backs out the door.
"Losers who get chucked into Impel Down don't get to whine."
A snail rings somewhere in Sabo's pockets, merry and fearless, an airy echoing reminder that there is an entire world out there waiting.
"Ah, that'll be them. Come on, your crew and Luffy's friends are almost here."
If this is only a dream...
"Let me guess your genius plan," Ace muses, putting idle, indulgent fantasies into a list.
"You're blowing this place sky-high, you'll sweet-talk everyone into taking down Blackbeard, and then you'll take his Fruit too when no one's looking...and – sake again, after that."
Given this, he thinks he might even no longer care who knows what runs in his blood.
"Mm...but that's only Part One," Sabo winks, grinning as he ignores his ringing snail.
"Yeah?" Ace smiles. "What's Part Two?"
Ace stirs, to a ringing that he slowly realises is not a snail, but distant panicked shouting from the Marines.
"Those are Revolutionary colours!"
Huh. He closes his eyes again. The Whitebeard or Straw Hat flags would not have been entirely surprising. But if the Revolutionary Army had business at Impel Down, it would not be with him.
The commotion fades as the conflict presumably shifts away.
Again, left alone in silence and emptiness. He tries to drift off once more, against injury and cold and hunger, back to family and brothers and shining summer days.
No warning, no nothing.
The door to his cell shatters wide open.
Ace startles wide-eyed and fully awake at the explosion. He blinks dumbly at the stone and metal shreds now strewn across the corridor. That's new. This has never happened before -
Light floods in. For a second before his eyes adjust, the new intruder is merely a shadow. With a back-lit silhouette edged in blinding white and flickering in shadow, he doesn't quite look real.
A long coat and top-hat in summer? What rubbish.
But this man is no joke. Ace has not even heard or sensed him coming. The door has entirely shattered along with its fragmented doorway, but he sees nothing in the stranger's hands and smells no gunpowder.
It must have been bare hands.
The stranger steps forth, heeled combat boots clicking deliberately - and then this is no dream at all.
With a graceful tip of top-hat and gleaming goggles, he reveals smiling, familiar blue eyes and a scar that Ace instantly knows should not have been there on those aristocratic features.
Striking and almost shockingly so, this face is completely new. He would have remembered seeing it anywhere - whether in dream or reality or anything in-between.
But he knows who this is.
The revenant sighs theatrically, in direct counterpoint to the brisk haste in his stride. His light hair is long, wavy in a way Ace had never expected, and he is even taller than in all of Ace's delirious dreams.
"Oh, Ace...I write you to take care of Luffy, and you end up in Impel Down?"
He stares, as his brother leans in to reach the sea-stone. He sounds unmistakably, fully, adult – while he has never heard this voice before, this is a homecoming and so he feels no grief for the voice he remembers – but what stops Ace short is that choice of words: write, not ask.
He has never let anyone but Luffy see that letter.
This is real.
"Lean forward for me – don't worry, we're getting out. Promise."
His brother is alive.
He listens again, and hears his ten-year-old brother in this familiar warmth. No, memories don't die. The brother he remembers has come back to him all grown-up, for yet one more first meeting and one more swashbuckling rescue.
The next thing he hears is sea-stone, beginning to crack.
He has wasted far too much time in the dream, earlier. Does he really need any answers or explanation?
No. Sabo is alive and Sabo is here, intent on saving his life - and succeeding. Nothing else matters.
The moment Sabo breaks him free, Ace grabs his brother tight and never lets go. It shocks him anew to feel this familiar bodily warmth, when he has never once noticed its absence in all of his delirious dreams.
Real. This is real. Sabo is real. The treasured name leaves him in a deep exhale, along with a decade's worth of strain that he has only just noticed with its disappearance. He can breathe again.
"Sabo."
Squeezing the air entirely out of his not-dead brother is much, much more satisfying in reality.
Sabo hugs him back. And so, nothing else matters at all.
"I am back, Ace." The ritual words fall with the soft, silent weight of first snow...and with it, Ace can finally see spring.
One hand reaches for the jolly roger on Ace's arm. Ace instantly understands, and smiles.
Who could ever have known that he remembers his brother's personal scent? He is glad he does. It takes him instantly back to glittering rivers and rippling forests, and he squeezes harder – but when he does, this new dazzling reality only solidifies.
"Welcome back, you bastard."
Ace catches the glimmer of a laughing exhale. He is now well and truly miffed that his grown-up brother does not notice his suffocating grip, only moving to pick Ace up and effortlessly backing out the broken doorway.
"Oi," Ace raps his brother's spine, only to find it completely buried under new sinew lines and solid muscle bulk.
Sabo grins. Ace blinks upon seeing that Sabo has all his teeth in; this new smile gleams ghostly-white and perfectly razor-sharp.
He looks like a literal light in the dark.
The gap-toothed child-like vision from Ace's dream evaporates entirely, in the face of this new shining reality.
"Losers who get chucked into Impel Down don't get to complain!"
Somehow, the bastard manages to be more obnoxiously radiant than even in cherished, glowing memories of a childhood spent conquering trash-mountains.
"Shut up."
"Nope," Sabo chortles, popping his consonants rebelliously.
A laugh escapes Ace before he can stop himself. He really should have seen that coming. Then Sabo snickers as well, as they clear yet another level. Yes, he remembers this sound.
"…thought you came to bring me to hell, y'know?"
Sabo snorts like that is the stupidest joke he has ever heard, when they've grown up with Luffy's -
"And who says I'd let you? Dumbass - "
Ace hides a begrudging smile into Sabo's shoulder. Fine. He should have known better.
"…shut up."
"How about...nope. Dream on!" This time, Sabo's obnoxious laughter rings through all the corridors, echoing and layering all over itself like sunlight multiplying in mirror and water.
The sound is clear, bright, unrestrainedly loud and so fearless that Ace loves him for it, for coming back for him and laughing in the face of hell –
"We're on schedule, by the way. We'll be gone before Luffy or anyone else gets here!"
Oh. His brilliant brother tells him in just one sentence what he hasn't even known he needs to hear. Sabo knows him better than he does himself still, after everything. And this is how he knows this is real, because no dream would ever be this good.
No one else will have to risk themselves coming here; Sabo has made sure of that. And most of all – that Luffy and the Whitebeard pirates have indeed come for him, are still coming for him –
It takes him too long to compose any reply.
"Huh. Luffy's going to be so mad."
Ace squeezes Sabo's ribcage tighter. With him and Luffy having no one else left in the world, he has grown up with a thousand hugs from Luffy. But he does not remember last embracing his very first friend, and so holds him tight enough to hurt.
"You think I'm the one in trouble with him? Ha. You're the one who got chucked in here!" Sabo laughs again, light and effortless, seeming to have felt nothing.
He sounds like a rose-tinted dream, of faraway sun-lit childhood memories made manifest.
But this solid body under his hands is real, and barely notices Ace's best attempts at hugging the breath out of it. Something in Ace's chest unclenches, at the new dawning understanding that no matter what runs blighted in his veins, he is simply no longer capable of hurting this man.
It feels like salvation.
Ace smiles, and lets Sabo have the last word just this once.
"Your eyes were red with Observation Haki when I broke in," Sabo remarks blithely. "See anything interesting?"
"Oh. Were they?" Ace hums, trying to ignore his rumbling stomach. That is news to him. Then his last dream must have been premonition, from this new semi-developed Observation Haki.
Sabo seems to feel the rumble; he leans his head comfortingly against Ace's right cheek, as he passes him a water-skin.
If Ace's dreams had any truth in it...
"- what's Part Two? Of your plan." Ace drinks and passes it back.
"Hmm?" Sabo winks and feigns innocence, grinning secretively as he sips obligingly and then elbows Ace into drinking more.
Sabo comes to a graceful stop before a towering wall of stone. He raises one clawed hand instead of the blood-soaked steel pipe as tall as either of them, but it does not matter. Ace already knows that the rock will only shatter into mere sand.
His brother grins like he is ten and triumphant, vicious and invincible atop a sprawling city of trash.
But now Ace knows the truth: Revolutionary Sabo is ten times the man anyone has ever thought he might become, and Impel Down will simply never be the same after today.
"Well..." Sabo drawls casually, sounding exactly like the East Blue undesirable they so fondly remember.
His gleaming hand swings down with sharp, inhuman force, and Ace almost expects to hear the knell of an executioner's bell.
"Starts with this - "
Sabo breathes like he is just awakening from sleep. Their chests automatically shift together, like they have ten thousand times before.
"Hey, Ace. Guess how many other parts I've got..."
(Ace cannot wait. He wants now, to be back out in a world where he can no longer hurt the very first person he has ever cared about, and find out what his adult brother's hair looks like in the sun; he wants all the chances that Sabo's very materialisation proves he still wishes for Ace. Right now, it feels like he has never once been hurt - )
He remembers ten thousand times.
(But there has been one more time waiting for him all these years, and it feels like Sabo has saved him twice - )
"Ten thousand and one!"
And this time, it feels like sunrise.
Doors and walls shatter all the way to the rose-gold sea on a dragon's glittering exhale. Today is the day Impel Down collapses, and a glorious ocean-breeze comes breaking in from over the horizon.
It smells like freedom.
Dawn rises, and light overflows.
end-notes: cross-posted to tumblr and ao3 for the In Memoriam: Ace event
thread heading with my beta: "ace never died fite me"
#hi guess who never got over it (me) #anyone else in Cat 2? let's be friends #oda gives us only Ace&Luffy and Luffy&Sabo and i Demand Justice
sabo: guess how many parts to my genius plan to take over the world
ace: ...10,001?
sabo: AAAND YOU'LL BE RIGHT
thanks for reading! ^^