Fun fact: for some reason, when I planned this, I was sure that Nami had been sick for five days, and plotted everything accordingly. Then I checked the Drum arc and saw it was three days. I had to tweak my entire timeline and make a few adjustments to this chapter -sighs-

Chapter 5

Storms were an absolute pain. The first few hours of sailing the Grand Line had been easy enough —extreme changes in temperature were no big deal for either Ace or Marco, and the wind wasn't as much of a nuisance to the Striker as it would have been to an average ship— but then it had started raining. Marco hadn't been wrong when she said a few days ago that the Striker was useless in the rain. Or, well, not completely useless as long as they could cover the area that powered the engine enough for Ace to create a flame, but doing it was… tricky.

Which was how Ace found himself sitting on the Striker's seat, his burning feet shoved right against the engine, while Marco knelt on the floor of the small space that passed for a deck, folded over Ace's legs to try to protect his feet from the rain as much as possible. The flame was small, but at least they were moving.

"You know, anyone who looked at us now would think this is something else," Ace joked, keeping his eyes on the agitated sea.

"Oh, shut up," Marco told him.

The island they reached was reasonably larger than the previous ones they had been to, and even after circling it, Marco and Ace had to hike a good ways into the land to confirm that Teach wasn't here any longer.

They returned to the port town where they had anchored the Striker, and Ace made a beeline for the first restaurant he saw.

Marco followed him, amused. They hadn't finished all of their supplies, but Ace hadn't appreciated having to be careful about them and he was making up for it now.

Ace didn't put up much of a fight when Marco told him to go catch up on sleep while she asked around about Teach, and Marco left the hotel room with one of the sketches and her wallet as soon as Ace passed out on the bed.

Marco had expected their situation to change once they entered the Grand Line, but nobody seemed to recognize her around here either.

The Whitebeard Pirates had been more lax than she had realized if her face wasn't easily recognizable in the Grand Line. Marco would have to talk to Pops about it.

Finding someone who remembered Teach was easy. That raft Crocus had mentioned raised a lot of eyebrows, and soon Marco learned that Teach had left the island with one —or two, depending on one's perspective— addition to his crew: a sickly-looking old man and an equally sickly-looking horse. An odd choice, but Marco knew how little appearances could matter when it came to one's fighting skills. Or any other skill set, really.

The room was bright when Ace blinked awake. That was odd, he had expected to wake up in the middle of the night or something. Instead… He sat up and looked around until his eyes caught sight of the clock on the wall. It was morning. Ace had slept longer than he had thought he would.

Marco was curled up on the mattress next to him, asleep. Ace was glad to see she had managed it, even if he didn't know how long ago she had come to bed.

Deciding to let her sleep a little longer, Ace dragged himself out of bed and went to take a quick shower.

He stepped out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, naked and toweling his hair in an attempt to get it to stop dripping all over the place. He couldn't say he was surprised to find Marco awake and sitting on the bed. Marco raised her eyebrows, then pointedly looked him up and down.

Ace smirked.

"Like what you see?"

"It's not bad," Marco conceded in her most convincing tone of indifference, the one Ace knew meant she was feeling anything but indifferent.

Ace snorted.

"Yeah, okay. I may have left a bit of a mess in the bathroom," he warned her, but it really wasn't his fault that the damn shower head was so weird.

It was Marco's turn to snort.

"As long as I can shower, I don't care. I'm not the one cleaning here." She stood up and walked past him into the bathroom. She left the door open. "I dropped by a laundromat yesterday afternoon, so most of our clothes are clean," she explained, and Ace turned to watch when he heard her start to undress. "We'll need to buy some winter gear, though. The next island is a winter one."

Ace grimaced. Winter clothes took up a lot of space, they would be a nuisance.

"How long until we can leave?"

Marco stepped into the shower.

"The log pose should have locked by this afternoon."

"Oh, damn!" Ace said, lowering his fork.

"What?" Marco asked, looking at him with curiosity. They were eating breakfast at a small restaurant, and Marco hadn't noticed anything odd.

"I forgot to ask Crocus which route Luffy has taken," Ace said, almost like a whine.

"You can wait until he appears on the newspaper again and figure it out from there," Marco suggested. Being Ace's brother, and from all the stories she had heard, Marco wouldn't be surprised if she saw Luffy on the newspaper before long.

"I guess," Ace said, and then perked up suddenly. "I'll ask around to see if he's been here! I just need a copy of his bounty…"

That was how Marco found herself spending the last few hours on this island asking about Monkey D. Luffy and making sure Ace didn't accidentally get into any fights as he stole various copies of Luffy's bounty poster from bars.

They were silent. It had taken Ace some time to notice, but aside from the conversations that were necessary for their trip and a bit of banter here and there, Ace and Marco had barely spoken since they left the Moby Dick.

Ace didn't like it.

Marco was currently folded in the space before the seat, careful to keep today's newspaper out of the reach of the fire at the bottom of the Striker as she read the news.

Ace bent forward and rested his chin on her shoulder.

"Anything interesting?" he asked to break the silence.

"Not really. Unless you consider the government's anti-Revolutionary Army propaganda interesting. They've upped the tone since the revolutionaries got Vira a few days ago," Marco replied distractedly.

The Revolutionary Army? Ace thought, just as an idea crossed his mind. He grinned widely. Gramps would murder him if he found out about this.

"Hey, have I ever told you about Dragon?"

Marco glanced at him sideways.

"You know him?"

"Not in person, but he's Luffy's dad."

Marco turned around suddenly —Ace had to pull back to avoid an accidental hit— and lowered her hands. The newspaper caught on fire, but Marco didn't seem to care.

"Are you serious?"

"Yup," Ace replied, still grinning. Marco's eyes were wide open in genuine surprise. It wasn't often that Ace managed to surprise her.

"Wait," Marco said, narrowing her eyes, and Ace could see how she was reaching the right conclusion, "does that mean that Dragon is Garp's son?"

"The very same," Ace confirmed.

Marco shook her head in disbelief.

"So Garp, the great hero of the marines, has a son who leads the Revolutionary Army, a grandson who is a Commander in the Whitebeard Pirates, and another grandson who wants to be the Pirate King." Marco snickered. "Damn, I'd pay so much to see his reactions when any of you appear on the newspaper."

"He caught up to me once, you know?" Ace said casually. "Scared the crap out of my whole crew when he showed up, and then started yelling at me and trying to punch me."

"I can imagine that easily," Marco said with the expression of someone who had met Gramps.

"He wanted us —me and Luffy— to become marines. I think he was so insistent because of what Dragon was doing."

Ace started on a tale of some of the most outrageous of Gramps' training sessions.

As the cold weather stabilized, Marco and Ace put on their new winter clothes. They had only bought coats, long pants, gloves, and —in Marco's case— a pair of boots. Those were only the garments that would be on sight, but they had made a considerable dent in their funds.

"Maybe I should sell those jewels," Marco mused, adjusting her black gloves. "They're worth around ten million belis, so they should take care of our money issues for a while."

"Ten million?" Ace repeated, glancing down at Marco's bag. "But they're… just a few," he finished lamely, gesturing with his hands to illustrate how small they were.

"A few high-quality pieces old enough to be deemed relics," Marco said, grinning. "I doubt those guys knew what they had on their ship."

Marco stepped up to Ace and buttoned the two top buttons on his black coat, ignoring his grimace.

"It's a winter island, and probably in one of their cold seasons judging by the snow out here. You'll stand out."

"This is ridiculous," Ace said. "And you'll stand out more than me anyway." He glanced very pointedly at Marco's uncovered head.

"It's not my fault there wasn't an acceptable hat," she said, crossing her arms.

"Maybe if you hadn't chosen a purple coat…"

"It's the one I liked. It's not my fault they didn't have any normal colors. Did you want me to buy the orange hat or the red one?"

"What's wrong with orange hats?" Ace asked defensively, raising a hand to touch the rim of his hat.

"Paired with a black coat? Nothing. With purple, however… Oh!" she exclaimed, pointing over Ace's shoulder.

Ace turned and saw a quickly growing dot on the horizon. The island, covered in snow as it was, was hard to distinguish against the monochrome background of the grey sky, but as they approached, Ace saw that it had many turret-like massive mountains that would be a pain to climb for anyone who wasn't accompanied by a devil fruit user who could fly.

They circled the island once, as was customary by now, and Marco determined that Teach wasn't anywhere near the coast. They would have to fly over the place to check the center part of the island. There was no way Ace was dealing with the hassle of trudging through who knew how much snow when Marco could fly.

Ace spotted a bay that seemed like a good place to anchor the Striker and he directed them towards it.

They had to climb up the rock a little to reach firm land. There was no village or town on sight.

"Tell me you can pick up some presences with haki. I don't want to wander this place looking for civilization," Ace nearly begged.

Marco chuckled.

"I can. From what I sensed, there doesn't seem to be any towns right on the coast here. A bit odd, but I don't know what this island is like," she said with a shrug. "That way," Marco said, pointing in one of the many all-white directions.

They reached a village after about half an hour of walking, and by that time it had stopped snowing.

The place looked like it had seen better days. Marco wouldn't quite say that it was the sight one would expect in the aftermath of a battle, but it certainly seemed to have been ransacked recently, and as if the citizens were in a hurry to fix the damage as quickly as possible.

It was a very bad sign.

"I don't like this," Ace muttered from next to her, and Marco nodded somberly. They were both clearly thinking about the same thing.

"Keep the sketch hidden," Marco advised him right before they reached the outskirts of the village. Marco hoped their luck would hold up and no one recognized them here, because the last thing they needed were terrified citizens who had clearly just been attacked.

By fucking Teach.

Goddamn it, this is on us.

Ace nodded.

They received a few mistrustful looks as they entered the village, but there were no startled exclamations, panic, or people reaching for weapons, so it was safe to assume that nobody recognized them.

Ace walked straight for the first restaurant they saw and Marco followed him. It was a safe enough move for any traveler to make. The place had a few customers, but it was easy to find an empty table for them to sit. A table for four, because Ace's plates tended to take up a good amount of a table's surface.

"You waiting for anyone?" a waiter asked when he approached them, looking dubiously at the two empty seats.

"No," Marco replied, making sure to sound friendly and unassuming, "but he," she pointed at Ace with her thumb, "eats like five people. We'll need the extra space."

The waiter looked at her just as dubiously, but he seemed definitely amused by the time Ace was done ordering his meal, which was, as Marco had said, five times the amount of food that she ordered.

It took four trips for all of their food to be on the table.

"I don't want to be rude," Marco started just as the waiter set the last of the plates before Ace, "but did something happen here? This place looks like it just saw a battle or something."

The waiter scoffed in an odd mix of annoyance and sadness.

"That's a way to put it," he muttered. "It was as one-sided as you can have it."

"Oh?" Marco raised her eyebrows in curiosity. Ace had started to eat, the perfect image of someone too hungry to be interested in the conversation, but Marco knew he was paying attention.

The waiter seemed to ruminate for a moment before shrugging in a gesture that could be easily read as 'what the hell, why not?'

"Mind me sitting?"

"Not at all," Marco said, gesturing to the empty chair next to her.

He sat down.

"Okay, so a few days ago these pirates showed up. I'm not sure of the details, it wasn't here, but I've heard they made a friend that joined them or something at Gyasta —that's down south. Whatever. Nobody thought much of them because they were just five guys and they weren't known faces. Until they decided to attack. They overwhelmed the royal army in no time, and that useless piece of shit of a king we had hightailed it, taking the remaining army with him. We had to let the pirates do whatever the hell they wanted, because we just couldn't do anything about it," he said the last part through clenched teeth in very clear frustration. "At least they left quickly."

"Did you happen to overhear any names? Or the crew's?" Marco asked, very carefully filing what little information there was away. Pirates who just had arrived from the Four Blues rarely had the strength to overpower an entire army. Teach was strong, that was true, but to do that… he must have found some interesting crewmembers. That was troubling. And there had been nothing about this incident on the newspapers. Was the government covering it up or did they simply not know?

"Everybody got their crew's name, they were pretty vocal about it. The Blackbeard Pirates."

Marco nearly snapped her fork in two.

You can't be fucking serious.

"Blackbeard?" she repeated mildly, carefully putting the fork down.

The waiter nodded.

Marco reached for her bag. This was worth a shot.

"Did the captain happen to resemble this man?" she asked, pulling the sketch out and unfolding it.

The waiter tensed.

"That's him," he practically growled, and gave them an extremely suspicious look. "Friend of yours?"

"We want to kill him," Ace replied before Marco could. More crass than she would have been, but that would have been essentially her response.

The waiter gave them an evaluating look.

"I won't be the one stopping you, but those guys are dangerous."

"We're aware," Marco said.

"Oi, Marco," Ace said. He put down the spoon from his dessert, "what's the next island?"

"It's…." Marco took the map out of her bag and unfolded it, "Alabasta." She whistled softly. "It's pretty far from here. It'll take us over a week to get there, I think. We'll need to resupply. Why do you ask?"

"I've been thinking about Luffy. I know it's unlikely, but I'd like to meet up with him."

Marco hummed and looked down at her map.

"Well, I suppose we could take a break. Besides, Alabasta is a large kingdom, it'll take us a little longer to search if we don't catch word of Blackbeard quickly."

Ace grimaced at the name, feeling disgusted that Teach dared to make such a bold declaration by calling himself that. Focusing on the present, he opened his bag to look for one of Luffy's wanted posters.

"Great. I'll leave a message for him, just in case."

"He's not on this route," Marco pointed out reasonably. Ace chuckled. Reason was the last thing anyone should trust where Luffy was concerned.

"Knowing him," Ace said, and grinned when he found the rolled-up bounties, "he'll probably jump through three or four routes before he reaches Sabaody."

Marco had her eyebrows raised when Ace looked up at her.

"You know, I'm growing more and more curious about this little brother of yours."

Ace chuckled, cheered up by the thought of Marco maybe meeting Luffy, and stood up to go leave a message.

Marco followed him with her wallet out. She always refused to let him leave without paying after a meal. That was such an odd quirk for a pirate.

To be continued

Something very important I have to say is that I'm ignoring the timelines Oda gave back in the Drum arc (or at least what the scanlations say). I think that's one of the things Oda messed up in the plotting, because back then he said that Drum had been attacked by Blackbeard months prior to Luffy's arrival, which contradicts the flashback where Ace shows Whitebeard Luffy's wanted poster. I decided to go with the later timeline because it made much more sense (also because it's more likely to have been thought out more thoroughly; back at Drum Oda didn't expect One Piece to last more than 10 years).

According to the Drum timeline, Ace had been there a week before Luffy. I made a closer estimation of how long the Strawhats really must have taken to reach Drum since Luffy's bounty came out, and leaving a week is impossible. So for this story's sake, the Strawhat Pirates reached Drum the day after Marco and Ace left.

No armed force appeared to stop Marco and Ace at Drum because, as they had the sail folded, there was no sign on their boat that they were pirates. Also, they did not disembark on the same place as the Strawhat Pirates. I've kept them going to the same village where Ace left his message, which is relatively far from the places the Strawhats went to.

Also, figuring out the routes in the Grand Line is a bit of a mess here, considering that the Strawhats didn't exactly follow a normal one, but this is what I've settled on.

-Ace was following a log pose, so it's likely to assume Alabasta actually follows Drum as part of that route (also because we don't have any reason for him to go there specifically: the anime filler one sounded ridiculous even to 13-year-old me who didn't know that was filler).

-From Igaram's words at Whiskey Peak, we know that Alabasta is also in the Strawhats' original route, and yet I find it very unlikely that the Strawhats managed to find their next island without a log pose when they reached Drum (remember that it hadn't locked at Little Garden, so it was still pointing to that island). So I'm working under the assumption that two routes merge at Alabasta: the Strawhats' original one, and Drum's route.

-And, for this plot's sake, I've decided that the Blackbeard Pirates never made it to Alabasta: they attacked a pirate ship halfway there and found an eternal pose to Jaya. Aware of that island's reputation, they knew they were much more likely to find a pirate strong enough for their purposes there than at Alabasta, so they followed the eternal pose.

-Jaya is not part of the Alabasta route. Right before that ship fell from Skypiea, Robin said that the island that follows Alabasta is an autumn one, but Jaya is a spring island and is very close to Alabasta (it didn't take the Strawhats even a full day to go from one to the other in the manga. There was a lot of filler in the anime).