Part II
Ace had been thinking these past few days.
Maybe it was his impending execution, or maybe it was because of everything Marco had said, but he had been thinking about the past more than he usually allowed himself to. He didn't like to think about the past, because that always inevitably led to thinking about the last time he had seen Luffy. The horrible guilt that had eaten at him that entire day was one of the few feelings of which the memory hadn't diminished with time, and it was threatening to engulf him once more.
It had been a normal day, at least as far as Luffy had been concerned, only that at the end of it he and Gramps had left for a special training session. The only one who had believed Ace would come back after that night had been Luffy.
He shook his head, because he wasn't going to let his mind go down that path again, and instead concentrated on the small thought that had been nagging at him ever since Marco had arrived into the cell. It was a small possibility, but every passing moment increased his need to see if it would get him anywhere.
He hadn't realized he had been staring at Marco until he spoke.
"What is it, brat?"
Ace was momentarily startled before he collected himself.
"I wanted to ask you something," he started tentatively. He may have asked Marco a couple of questions already, but he still felt strange doing so, and this one was far more important than all the others put together.
"Go ahead."
He really hoped Marco wouldn't decide to stop answering his questions now.
Ace was about to just ask when he decided that maybe he could explain himself a little. He wasn't sure why, but he wanted to talk about this with someone. Perhaps it was because he never really had talked about it with someone other than Gramps, and even then it was in short and bitter bouts of conversation that led to uncomfortable, guilty silences.
"I have a little brother," he began, speaking in a low voice that would ensure only Marco would be able to hear him. "He's a crazy little shit, really." He smiled, remembering all the ridiculous situations Luffy always managed to get himself into. "We had always wanted to become pirates, though for obvious reasons I couldn't do it." Marco raised his eyebrows at this revelation, but didn't say anything. "I know he did it, a few months ago. Gramps told me, but he hasn't told me much else. Man, he was pissed when he came to see me that day. Ranted for a whole hour at least."
Ace remembered Gramps hadn't had Luffy's wanted poster, he had ripped it to shreds as soon as he had seen it and headed out for Impel Down. Ace had wanted to ask him to bring it next time, but in the end hadn't. He wasn't a coward, but he wasn't sure either he would be able to deal with seeing Luffy's face now. Most of the time, Ace told himself he didn't ask his grandfather to bring it because he doubted he would do it, but today he felt unusually sincere even with himself.
"Whenever I ask Gramps about him," Ace continued, "he gets all mad and stressed, and refuses to tell me much. I only know my brother's bounty has increased a couple of times and that Sengoku has been yelling at Gramps more than usual because of him, but that's about it."
"You want to know if I can tell you anything about him?" Marco guessed, and Ace nodded. "What's his name?"
"Luffy. Monkey D. Luffy."
A smile, not really surprised, stretched Marco's lips, and Ace grinned, feeling hope bloom in his chest.
"You know him?"
"Everyone knows him," Marco answered, "he's one of the big time rookies. That kid has pulled some seriously crazy stunts."
"Tell me everything," Ace asked, not caring that he sounded a little bit desperate. This was the first real opportunity he had to learn anything about his brother's career as a pirate, and he was too excited to care about anything else. And Luffy was famous, so famous that freaking Marco the Phoenix knew about him. Ace was the proudest older brother in the world in that moment.
"I checked on him not too long ago, actually, after he did one of the craziest things I've heard of in years," Marco started, and Ace leaned forward in anticipation, his free foot bouncing in his excitement. "He started as a thirty million bounty in East Blue, which didn't really catch my attention then: that sum is a lot for that sea, true, but it's nothing extraordinary anywhere else. When I looked into it, I saw he earned it after beating all the strongest pirates there. Some weeks later, his bounty was raised to one hundred million, and his first mate —a swordsman, I don't remember his name, sorry— got a bounty as well. He caught my attention then because there was no story in the newspaper explaining that rise in price, and one doesn't reach that sum without a good reason, much less a rookie in the first half of the Grand Line. That only happens when the explanation behind the bounty would make the government look bad."
Ace was absorbing every word Marco spoke. He could easily guess Luffy would have laughed like crazy, maybe thrown a party, at getting a price on his head. He couldn't imagine it, though, because he didn't remember Luffy's face clearly anymore. Dark hair, stupidly wide grin and a scar under his left eye, sure, but everything else was blurred out. He pushed that thought aside, now was time to learn about his brother, not get depressed.
"Do you have any theories about that?" he asked. Marco seemed the kind of guy who didn't like to leave a mystery unsolved.
"Maybe," Marco grinned. "He later went to Water 7, which means there are only a couple of routes he could have taken when he entered the Grand Line. In one of them there is a kingdom named Alabasta, where around the time your brother might have been there —and it coincides when the time his bounty was raised as well— Crocodile lost his position as a Shichibukai. The official story is that a marine caught him, which could be of course, but that's an idea."
Ace frowned, mulling over Marco's words. Crocodile had arrived some weeks ago: he was a strange guy, at least for level six standards. He didn't particularly hate Ace —Crocodile hadn't insulted him when he was told who his father was, contrary to what most other newcomers did; it had been a nice change— but it had become clear early on that he did hold a serious grudge against Whitebeard.
"What's Luffy's epithet?" he asked.
"Strawhat Luffy." Well, no surprise there. The government guys weren't the most imaginative bunch, and Ace had never doubted that Luffy would hold onto his straw hat over almost anything else. It was his most valued treasure, after all, and he had promised to return it to the man who gave it to him someday.
"Okay," Ace said, nodding. He took a deep breath. "Oi, Crocodile!" he shouted, and that earned startled reactions from the other prisoners. Ace wasn't in the habit of starting conversations with anyone or drawing attention to himself. "Was it Strawhat Luffy who kicked your ass?!"
Whispers and louder conversations had started all over the place, but they didn't prevent Ace from hearing Crocodile's laughter. He knew the former Shichibukai was in one of the closer cells.
"How did you guess?" The question was enough of an answer to Ace.
All over the place, pirates had begun to ask who Luffy was, and soon it had become clear no one knew the name.
"I didn't. Marco did," Ace managed to answer before things outside spiraled into a long round of mocking comments aimed at Crocodile for being defeated by a rookie.
Ace didn't care, too busy grinning like a lunatic because Luffy had beaten a Shichibukai. Damn, his little brother had become strong.
Marco chuckled.
"There's something else."
"Tell me," Ace asked eagerly.
"A couple of weeks ago, the Strawhat Pirates successfully assaulted Enies Lobby to rescue a captured crewmember. The island was razed to the ground during the attack —but I'm not certain which side did that— and the entire crew escaped alive. Your brother's current bounty is three hundred million beli, and his entire crew has a price on their heads."
Ace was left speechless.
"What's sex like?" The question was so sudden that it took Ace a moment to realize he had been the one to ask it.
"What?" Apparently, Marco wasn't any less surprised than Ace himself was.
"Sex," he repeated.
It was something he had been wondering about for years now, even before his imprisonment. It wasn't strange for a boy of twelve or thirteen to start thinking about it, and though his curiosity had vanished somewhat after he was put in this cell, it hadn't really disappeared. Or, more precisely, it had, for a while, back when some other prisoners decided that using the prospect of rape to threaten Roger's virgin kid would be fun, but the curiosity had resurfaced once Ace had convinced himself that everybody around him were scumbags and that what they said wasn't the same sex he had been hearing about before, back at Dawn Island.
He had never had much information to go on —sadly, mostly what little information about not forced relations he gleaned from the conversations around— but he had always possessed a good imagination and it had helped him greatly these last few years.
As many other things, sex was one of those foreign concepts he always had heard about, but had known he would never be able to experience himself. Now, however, he might be able to experience it, and that thought alone had been enough to bring his curiosity back to the forefront of his mind. Probably not the most pressing thought he should be having in this situation, but Ace thought he could blame his hormones for it —twenty was still a valid age to do so, as far as he had heard.
Marco, to his credit, didn't laugh or look at him incredulously. Once, not long after his arrival to the prison and before he decided there was no one worth anything in level six, Ace had asked the other prisoners about it, interrupting what might have been either a conversation or a boasting competition of sexual skills, and had soon come to regret it.
"I can't explain," Marco answered after a minute of silence, and Ace made a face.
"Really?" He asked, disappointed. Marco shook his head. "Can't you try, at least?"
Another shake of the head.
"Sex is not a set process, and it's too much about sensations, emotions in some cases, to describe easily."
"Oh," Ace did his best not to sound or appear too disappointed by the answer. Then an idea crossed his mind and he almost grinned. "Show me, then."
"What?" This time Marco sounded even more disconcerted than before.
Ace stood up, pushing against the wall he had been leaning onto, and approached Marco, crouching before him.
"Show me. I know you can't move, what with being chained to the wall and all that, but I can, so if you tell me what to do—"
"No." Ace blinked, taken aback by the strength behind that single word.
"What? Why not?"
Marco sighed, and Ace thought he would have rubbed the bridge of his nose if he had been capable of it.
"Ace…" Marco sighed a second time, exasperation clear in the gesture, "I am not going to fuck you —or let you fuck yourself on me— in this hellhole two days before our scheduled execution."
Ace tilted his head to the side because, really? That was Marco's reason? Ace knew most prisoners here would gladly fuck with one another if they were in the same cell. Hell, maybe Ace himself, in one of his weaker moments, would have fallen for it, even if it was with someone nowhere as attractive as Marco.
"Why not?" he asked again.
A third sigh.
"I know morals aren't common here, but still…" he muttered under his breath, and Ace knew he wouldn't have been able to hear it if he hadn't been so close to Marco. "Ace," he spoke, louder this time, "contrary to most people here, I have some self-respect —and you should have it for yourself, too— as well as respect for others, and I refuse to take advantage of you in this situation, when you might regret it once we are out of this fucking place."
"I won't regret it," Ace assured, still mostly not seeing the point. If he had been feeling especially weak, or scared —not that he ever was scared, mind you— or worried about the execution and simply wanted to have some sexual experience before his death, then he would be able to understand Marco's refusal. But the point was that he wasn't. Sure, the idea hadn't occurred to him before, but that was because he had had a lot of things in his mind lately. But, once he had thought about it, he realized that Marco was really hot, and he liked him. Ace didn't like many people.
A sceptical eyebrow went up —and wasn't it amazing Ace was able to interpret the expression in under a week of knowing one another? The wonders of forced cohabitation every moment of the day— and he decided to elaborate.
"You're hot, for starters," he said, and continued before the eyebrow could do more than twitch. "No, really. I may have been thirteen when I got here, but I already knew I liked both guys and girls by then, and you are hot." He added a deliberate look at Marco's abs here. Ace may not have had much practice with conversations, but he had learned a lot about meaningful looks in his life. They were the best option when neither part was willing to put something to words. "And, okay, so maybe I'm kind of desperate, but you can't blame me for that. I've been wanting to do something for years. It's no fun being a virgin at twenty." The mockery he received for it wasn't nice, either, and even less were the offers that most often than not accompanied said mockery.
"I'm not doing it," Marco said before Ace could continue, taking the silence that short thought elicited as his chance to cut in, "so stop insisting."
"Fuck, you're stubborn," Ace stated, and crossed his arms.
Marco shrugged as best as he could in his position, which was more than Ace would have thought possible.
"Let's agree on something," he proposed. "When we get out of here, if you still want it, bring it up again. Then I will gladly fuck you."
Ace stared at Marco, Marco's lips twitched into an almost smirk. Ace sighed.
"Do you promise?"
"You have my word."
Ace nodded, understanding that he wasn't going to get anything better from him.
"I'll hold you to it, then," and, just because he could and he was a teeny little bit annoyed, he added, "old man."
Marco's look after that told him he was most likely going to regret that comment. Ace didn't care.
Ace had fallen asleep easily enough that night, but Marco was once more having trouble to follow. Not because he was too much on alert to sleep, he had finally gotten the hang of it after last night, but because of the conversation they had had not even an hour ago. It had caught him so off guard he hadn't known how to react, and a treacherous part of his mind had wanted to accept —he may be chained to the wall, but he was still perfectly capable of bringing Ace to orgasm with only his mouth and his hips. Luckily, he had reacted in time before he could agree to something he would regret later.
Despite being a pirate, Marco did have some morals, and he didn't care what Ace did or said: he wasn't going to fuck him in their current circumstances. Maybe if Ace wasn't a virgin he would, but Marco knew how some people got about their virginity. It wasn't something he wanted hanging in his conscience if, once free from this prison, Ace started to have second thoughts.
Now, if Ace took up his offer once they were out of here, that would be an entirely different story. It was true that Ace was unhealthily skinny and needed exposure to the sun, but those were things Marco had already decided he would remedy as soon as they left here. He knew, there wasn't room for any doubt about it, that the crew must have stocked up on a lot of food, prepared for the prospect of a party once everything was over, and Marco planned on feeding Ace as much as his stomach could manage without him getting sick.
After that, if Ace still wanted to, then Marco's bed was big enough for two.
Monkey D. Luffy wasn't a man known for his stealth or ability to remain silent, much less to follow a plan. Anybody who had met him, most notoriously his crew, would mark those as some of the traits that could never be used to define him. And yet, in this very moment, as he clung to Boa Hancock's body inside her clothes, he did his best to use all of those traits. While she walked, acting as if nothing was out of place, into the great prison of Impel Down, Luffy put every single effort on not moving, not making any noise and going completely unnoticed by the thousands of marines and guards stationed here.
Because here, somewhere deep down in this huge jail, was his brother, Portgas D. Ace.
Ace, the brother he had thought dead for seven years now. The brother Gramps had told him had died in an accident seven years ago when both grandfather and grandson had gone on a training trip. Gramps had never hinted at anything other than the story he had told him so long ago —and had Luffy cried, then, even more than when Sabo died, because then there wasn't Ace to be with him, to help him get through it and to direct his sadness to something else— not even when Luffy had met Gramps again barely weeks ago in Water Seven.
Luffy would beat up Gramps for this someday, he would beat him so hard that he would never be called a hero again by anyone. But, for now, he wasn't going to think about Gramps. No, now all his thoughts were for Ace, who was somewhere in this underwater building, alone. Alive.
Luffy was going to get Ace out of here, he would beat every single person standing in his way if he had to. Then he would take his brother to eat somewhere good —because he knew the government's food had to suck, and Ace deserved good food— and would tell him everything about his adventures, about his crew and about all he had seen and experienced since he became a pirate. And then he would offer Ace to join his crew.
Yes, because Ace hadn't had the chance to create his own crew, but he had always wanted to be a pirate. And Luffy would make damn sure that his brother became one.
Ace's dream, his biggest dream, even more than becoming a pirate, had always been to be freer than anyone else in the world. For years, Luffy had thought Ace had lost the chance to fulfill it, but now he knew he hadn't, not really. Ace may not be free right now, but Luffy would do everything in his power to make sure that he would be.
For now, that meant escaping the full body check Hancock would have to go through. It was a good thing she was so strong.
Getting into Impel Down had been easy.
Luffy had thought he would have to run and pray the guards didn't see him, but Hancock had fixed it using her powers and now he was one floor down in the prison, in some cavern-like space full of cells. Once he was inside —and the guards that had opened the door had disappeared from sight— Luffy landed on the walkway before the upper row of cells and started to run.
He didn't go far, however, before a prisoner called to him. Luffy stopped. He was going to simply leave when he thought better of it. He didn't know where he had to go, only that —as Hancock had told him— it would have to be down, so he could as well ask for some directions.
Ignoring the questions he was being asked —mostly what he was doing here and why was he outside of a cell— Luffy asked a question of his own.
"Do you know where Ace is?"
That made the prisoners stop talking.
"Ace? Who's that?" the one who had originally stopped him asked.
"Dunno, never heard that name," said the man next to him.
"Oh, right, you wouldn't know his name," Luffy realized. Ace wasn't a famous pirate, after all. "The guy who's gonna be executed, Roger's son."
They did know who that was, but that didn't mean they were of any help. They started laughing, much in the same way as people had done at the notion of Roger having a son when Ace had been young —he had told Luffy about it, and about how he had beat anyone who had laughed and said that he should die. When Luffy said he wanted to save him, some guy said to leave him alone, that Ace deserved to die. Luffy punched him through the bars, because that was what Ace would have done, and the guy crashed into the wall at the other end of the cell. The other prisoners stopped laughing to stare at him.
"Do you know where Ace is, or not?" Luffy asked them again.
"Well…" the men stared at one another. "He would be on level five, wouldn't he? That's where they send all the criminals with over a hundred million on their heads."
"Yeah," another agreed. "I don't know what the guy's bounty is, but he's got to be dangerous if he's Roger's son."
That was what Hancock had said —Ace didn't have a bounty, but the government thought he was dangerous— but Luffy needed more information than that. Before he could ask how to get to level five, however, one of the men spoke again.
"That's totally impossible!" he exclaimed. "Instead, why don't you go to the jailer's room and steal the key for us?"
The other prisoners began to agree and Luffy was going to ask them if they knew how to get to level five or not —he was in a hurry, after all— when a scream cut through all the voices.
Before Luffy could really process what was going on, everybody was screaming and he found himself running from some weird beings along with the guy they had been pursuing.
"WHAAAT?! STRAWHAT?! WHY ARE YOU HERE?!" said person screamed and, turning his head to look, Luffy recognized him.
"Oh, it's you, Buggy," he said, still running.
"HEY! DON'T MAKE FUN OF ME!" Buggy, still as weird as ever it seemed, yelled again. "You're conceited as always! I didn't know you had got caught, too!"
"I entered by my own. I didn't get caught," Luffy explained. He had the feeling he would have to explain that more times today. To Ace, too. Man, he wasn't looking forward to the scolding that would earn him. Or, well, he was, because it would be Ace the one to scold him. Luffy would gladly get his ass kicked —he wondered if Ace would still be able to beat him as easily as when they were kids— because that would mean Ace was with him.
"WHO IS IDIOTIC ENOUGH TO GET INTO A PRISON BY HIMSELF?!"
Buggy was as much of an idiot as always, it seemed, still talking to himself and all that. Luffy didn't mind, not usually, except that today having him yelling all over the place really didn't help his plan.
"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ALL TO YOURSELF?!" Luffy yelled back. "I PROMISED I WOULDN'T MAKE RUCKUS, BUT YOU BROUGHT ME INTO THIS!" He hoped the guards wouldn't realize Hancock had helped him get in. He didn't want to get her in trouble after everything she had done for him.
They argued, they always argued when they met, now that Luffy thought about it, but it was fine, because then Luffy realized a very important fact. He grinned.
"I'm in a hurry. And I already made a ruckus anyway." And that made things better, because it meant he didn't have to run from the annoying thingy gorilla guards or try to go unnoticed. That had sounded difficult, what with all the den den mushi and everything around the place.
"That is what I hate about you and that redhead. Always going ahead no matter what…" Buggy said, not yelling anymore, and that —though Luffy wasn't paying all that much attention to him— was good to hear. It always cheered Luffy up to be compared to Shanks. "Alright, got it. I just gotta do it, right?" Buggy muttered, agreeing to Luffy's new idea.
"LET'S CHANGE THE PLAN TO A BIG UPROAR!" Buggy yelled as they both turned to attack the guards, Luffy agreeing just as loudly.
"YOU WANT TO SAVE YOUR BROTHER?!" Buggy yelled, again, once the guards were down. These guards had been kind of strong, and it would be a problem if they all were like that. Luffy didn't have that much time to waste here. "Shhh, they'll find us," Buggy then added, as if he wasn't one raising his voice all the time.
"You're the one who was yelling," Luffy pointed out.
"Who's your brother, anyway?" Buggy asked after, again, yelling at some prisoners to shut up. The prisoners had started to ask to be let out of their cells again once the guards were down.
"His name's Ace, and he's gonna be executed tomorrow if I don't save him."
"Executed? But the ones who'll be executed tomorrow are Marco the Phoenix and the Pirate King's son."
"That's Ace," Luffy said, grinning, and he was going to punch Buggy if he laughed or said anything bad about his brother.
Buggy didn't laugh. It was weird, Buggy laughed at everything, but instead he just stared at him, blinking.
"You want to save Gol D. Roger's son?" he asked again.
Luffy nodded.
"I want to go to level five. That's where Ace is, right?"
"How should I know?!" And Buggy was back to yelling. At least it wasn't so loud this time. "If you wanna go, then go on your own! Do you think we're friends or something?! I'm not going somewhere that dangerous!" Buggy started to walk away. "Later. If you're not coming with me, then I'm escaping on my own."
"Even though there are ten warships outside?" Luffy had seen them from the cabin where he and Hancock had been back on the marine ship. He had thought they would be a problem, but he would deal with them later. "Can you really escape?"
Buggy paused, and started muttering to himself. Luffy caught something about a beard. Weird. Whatever, Luffy didn't have the time to spare for this.
"Guess I'll have to ask someone else…" he thought aloud, looking around. He turned to Buggy. "Well, see you later! Good luck escaping!"
"HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, STRAWHAT!" Buggy, suddenly in Luffy's face, yelled, grabbing him by the shoulders.
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!" Luffy yelled back, getting annoyed at him already.
"THERE THEY ARE!" Right then the guards found them again.
"THEY FOUND US!"
"WHY ARE YOU YELLING?!"
They had to run again, but this time around Buggy was clinging to Luffy's arm, the one with the band he had gotten back in Thriller Bark.
"H-Hey… that armband! I-It's amazing!" Buggy said. "Hand it over!"
"What's with you all of a sudden?!" Luffy would have punched him if they weren't busy running. "I got this from Nami," he added. And it was weird, getting anything for free from Nami.
"I'll tell you how to get to where Ace is!" Buggy exclaimed.
"Really?!" Luffy grinned.
"In return, will you give me the armband?!"
"Sure!"
And, just like that, Luffy had found a guide.
Impel Down was weird. That was a conclusion Luffy had reached pretty soon. First it was the gorilla guards, then level two was full of weird monsters —like the basilisk Luffy had smashed into the guards' room, or the human eating strange lions— but at least now he had another guide, one that actually knew how to get to level three. Which apparently Buggy didn't.
His new guide was Three, the annoying guy from Baroque Works Luffy had beat back in the island of the giants. It seemed he was bound to meet people he already knew today. Luffy hadn't liked Three at all when he had first met him, but he knew how to get him closer to Ace and for that alone Luffy already liked him.
Luffy had had to explain about Ace again —while they ran from the human-faced lions who knew how to speak— but at least Three hadn't said anything about Ace, and was taking him to the stairs.
Or, well, they would go to the stairs once Luffy beat the old guy-faced giant lion that Three said was the guardian of the staircase. A Sphinx, Three called it.
Or maybe he wouldn't have to.
For some reason, Three had created a lot of copies of himself, and the beast was playing to smash them. It was fun, so Luffy started to point them to it. The monster's hits —and that thing was strong, Luffy would have loved to fight it properly if he had had the time— broke the floor, and they fell all the way down to level three.
Things were going better and faster than Luffy had expected they would.
Sengoku wasn't paid enough for this. He really wasn't paid enough for this.
He had been counting on Whitebeard pulling something to free Marco the Phoenix, most likely involving a violent and heavy in casualties attack on Marine Headquarters hours before the scheduled execution. He hadn't counted on that damned brat Monkey D. Luffy charging straight into Impel Down to rescue the brother he had thought dead for seven years.
Garp, who had been even more annoying than usual this past week for not being allowed to visit his other grandson in Impel Down, was currently almost rolling on the floor with laughter, a half-eaten cookie still in his mouth, while Sakazuki glared at him with his deadliest and most impressive glower. A glower that didn't have any effect on Garp, of course.
As soon as the news of the intrusion had arrived, Sengoku had told the disconcerted prison guards about the reason behind it. There was no need to send in reinforcements, and the Strawhat brat didn't have any real chances of reaching, much less freeing, his brother. All that may be true, but it didn't make the situation any less stressing.
That fucking family would be the death of him.
And Garp was still laughing.
For a moment there, it had seemed like things were going to go all south. They had reached level three —which was great— but had been captured because, it seemed, the guards had been waiting for them. Then the weird giant lion that had fallen down with them had woken up and broke the net where Luffy, Buggy and Three had been trapped with it. Buggy and Three had decided to head back up —probably to try to escape— which was a pity because they had helped him a lot, but it couldn't be helped.
Luffy's aim was to go down, and for that he had to escape the lion, the gorilla guards from level one that were down here now and all the other guards with them. That and find the way down to level four, as Three had told him the stairs only went to level three.
When Marco woke up, he hadn't got nearly enough sleep for his slowly weakening body. Still, he wasn't the only one awake, as the presences he could clearly feel coming down in the elevator had drawn Ace's attention as well. They shared a look.
"You know who else is there?" Marco asked, because Hannyabal and Magellan weren't the only two coming down. "I think one of them is a marine, a vice-admiral I believe. We have met before. But the other two, I have no idea." Nor did he know the animal presence with them, but that wasn't the priority here.
Ace closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall.
"The weaker one is a warden. Domino, I think her name is. I haven't felt the last presence before."
Which meant there was a powerful unknown person coming down. The vice-admiral was strong, and so was the guard woman, though not nearly as much as the marine. The unidentified presence, however, was more powerful than them, easily on Magellan's level of dangerous. Probably stronger.
Marco moved to a more comfortable position, as much as the chains allowed, and he saw Ace settle down against the other wall on a seemingly relaxed and most certainly forced manner.
They didn't need to guess too much to know the visit was for them. Today, of all days, the chances of a higher level marine and someone that powerful to come down to level six for any other prisoner were too slim to even be translated into a percentage.
The elevator's doors opened with their ominous sound and the party approached. When they stopped before the cell, Magellan, the female guard and the vice-admiral —Momonga, Marco remembered belatedly— stayed behind, while Hannyabal moved closer to the bars, the unknown person and the animal hidden by his bigger frame.
"We have a special visitor for you!" Hannyabal announced in that superior voice of his that grated on the nerves. "You have never seen her face, Ace, and I doubt even you have met her before, Marco." Marco didn't usually mind people using his name, but he felt the urge to punch the Hannyabal about right now just by the way he had pronounced it, as if he was somehow superior to Marco.
Marco ignored the man's words, because he had a thing for pompous speeches that were frankly boring, and instead fixed his eyes on the spot he was covering with his body. When Hannyabal finally moved aside and Marco could see the ones behind him —was that a snake?— he had to admit that it was true he had never met the woman in person before, but he knew just who she was.
The Pirate Empress, Boa Hancock.
Marco wondered what she was doing here. She had no business with either of them, Ace's face told him he didn't know her more than by name either, and yet here she was.
Hannyabal's overblown introduction had drawn the attention of every single inhabitant of level six, and now their annoying neighbors were yelling all sorts of obscenities at the Shichibukai. Marco had to admit, however, that Hancock lived up to her reputation. Still, the background noise was annoying from the moment it started.
"What do you want with us?" Ace asked, ignoring the noise with the expertise of someone who had been exposed to it for years.
"I have no business with either of you," she said, and wasn't that a strange response? "I just wanted to see you for myself, the men who will be the trigger for the battle in which I am set to participate."
Huh.
"Some show we are," Ace muttered.
Marco, however, didn't believe her words. She was wearing kairoseki handcuffs and was surrounded by some very powerful men in the depths of the most secure prison in the world, a place not even someone as strong as her would have been able to escape in her current condition. No one, even less someone with a reputation to despise the government the way she did, would agree to submit herself to such conditions simply to see the reason for which there was going to be a war.
Marco almost called bullshit on her words, but decided to hold back and wait to see if she would do or say anything else.
Meanwhile, the prisoners had become the most annoying they had been ever since the day Marco had come in and they had been mocking him, and Magellan was starting to lose his temper. Marco hadn't been here long, but he was fairly sure that Magellan losing it wasn't a good thing to happen.
"Degenerates!" Hancock then exclaimed, cutting through all the yelling around the level. "If you persist in shouting at me in such uncouth voices… I shall be…" she did a short pause, raising a hand up to her face and blushing in what to Marco seemed to be a perfectly rehearsed way, "afraid…!"
That intensified considerably the ruckus going around. The prisoners became even more excited at Hancock's apparent reaction to their words and increased their efforts to make themselves be heard over the rest, which in turn made Magellan —who was drooling over Hancock just as must as the prisoners— finally lose his temper.
Marco watched in interest as the Chief Warden unleashed what was helpfully identified by the other inmates as 'the freaking hydra', a name that defined very well the giant monster made of poison that grew from Magellan's body and was launched at the prisoners. Whoever was hit by it, it seemed, would unavoidably die. Marco wondered if he could call dibs on fighting Magellan. That technique alone promised it would be interesting.
Once he was done with his little show of power, Magellan turned to Hancock.
"Now, Hancock-dono, continue, please."
"No, I have just finished my business here."
Marco raised an eyebrow, because, really? But then, before he could finally call attention to how absurd this whole visit had been, he heard Ace speak.
"Hey…!" he called after her, and there was something desperate in his voice that made Marco pause. "Are you… serious?!" 'Serious'? What had Marco missed?
She turned to look at him, and there was something in her eyes that for a moment Marco mistook for pity. But that wasn't what it was. No, it looked more like sympathy, and he wondered what had just happened.
"I see no reason why I would lie," she spoke softly, and a small smile crossed her lips. "Incidentally, he was worried that you might be angry with him."
Marco stared at Ace's shell shocked face, but waited until the elevator's doors closed behind their visitors before he spoke.
"What did she say?"
Ace, the same person who had been awaiting his own execution with utter indifference, brought his knees up to his chest, draped his arms around them and barely held his head high enough that it couldn't be said he had buried it between them.
"Luffy…" he breathed out, and the word alone seemed to pain him. "She said he's here. She said he came here to save me."
And then Ace did bury his head in his knees.
Oh, fuck. Marco thought, and for a moment there that was the only word that crossed his mind because it was ridiculous, completely stupid, and yet it made absolute sense that the guy who had assaulted one of the government's strongholds to save one of his crewmembers would do the same again for his brother.
"Here?" he repeated, just to be sure.
Ace nodded morosely.
"I should've thought of it," Ace, who now sounded very much like a lost boy, said, his voice quivering. "Luffy's an idiot, he never thinks, and I didn't even stop to think how he would react to that damn article. I didn't want to think about it, I've been doing my best not to think about Luffy for years because I'm a fucking coward, but I should've realized he would do something stupid and prevented it."
"How?" Marco asked, because now Ace was rambling, voice fast and desperate, and making less and less sense with every word he said.
"I DON'T KNOW!" Ace yelled, his head jerking upright to glare at Marco, and it was a good thing the other prisoners were too distracted commenting on Hancock to pay them any mind. "ANYTHING! I could've asked Gramps to track him down and beat the shit out of him so he wouldn't show up or something like that!"
"Are you listening to yourself?!" Marco demanded, unable to react in any other way at how sure Ace sounded that he should have done what he had just said. "You would set fucking Garp on your brother?! He may be his grandfather, but that wouldn't stop him from practically killing him!" And Marco knew, because he had seen him fight. He had fought him some times, and he had seen the men he 'trained' whenever there was a fight soon after one of those training sessions. The Whitebeard Pirates had even agreed at one point that, if those men didn't do anything to enter the fight, they were to be left alone. No one liked to beat a half dead enemy.
"AT LEAST HE WOULD BE ALIVE!" Ace yelled back. "But what now?! He's going to be caught, and if they don't kill him then they'll put him in the fucking level five until he dies! How's that any better?!"
Marco closed his eyes. This was the worst thing that could have happened. Everything had been going so well… Not that he didn't admire the kid, because, really, one needed a special kind of balls to launch a solo assault on Impel Down with the objective of freeing one of the top level prisoners, but it was still too fucking inconvenient.
"Your brother is a lucky guy, isn't he?"
"Nobody's that lucky," Ace growled through clenched teeth.
Marco ignored that. This was going to be hard, even worse than any way he had pictured the conversation would go. It was worse than worst case scenario. But, well, Marco had been into near death situations for less than this.
"Lucky enough to survive until tomorrow?"
That caught Ace off guard.
"What?" Then he frowned, his glare intensifying once more. "You're not saying he should slip into a marine ship. There's no fucking way he'd be able to do that."
"No, I know. But tomorrow, at this hour, this prison will be swarming with Whitebeard Pirates."
Marco took the moment Ace was left stunned to take a deep breath, hoping he would be able to finish before Ace decided to do anything like punch him. Ace leaned forward, brow so furrowed that his eyebrows almost touched and gaze so intent it would be terrifying to most.
"What are you talking about? How can you know that?" Because, reasonably, there was no way Marco, imprisoned here as he was, could know for sure where the attack to rescue him would happen, and everybody would assume the most likely place would be at Marineford, with the entire world as witness.
"Well, I may not have been defeated as the marines thought, a week ago," he answered, and watched intently for a reaction.
It didn't take Ace long to understand what he meant, and his eyebrows did a strange little dance. He bit his cheek and clenched and unclenched a white-knuckled fist.
"Explain," he demanded.
"It's kind of a long story," Marco warned, because he didn't want Ace to accuse him of not getting to the point.
"Explain," Ace insisted.
Marco moved to lean his back against the wall and looked at the wall above the Ace's head. He had hoped, futilely he knew, he wouldn't have to be the one to tell this story. Not because he didn't want Ace to know everything, but because he hated remembering it.
"You've heard a lot about us, so I guess you know that we don't let anyone get away with killing someone from our crew, much less if the person who does it is another crewmember." A curt nod. "Well, a few months ago, after a fight with another crew, Thatch — the Fourth Division Commander— found a devil fruit. He didn't know which power it had, and wasn't sure if he wanted to eat it. In our crew, the fruit belongs to whoever finds it, and if they don't want to eat it then it's up to them to decide what to do with it. Thatch wanted to think about it, but later that night we found him dead, and the fruit gone." An image of Thatch, bleeding on the floor and his eyes unseeing, crossed Marco's mind. He shook his head, refusing to linger on it, and continued. Thankfully, Ace didn't say anything. "We figured who had done it, because he was the only one missing when we checked. A member of the second division, his name is Marshall D. Teach. Normally, the division's commander would have gone after him, but the second division has no commander right now —we had offered him the position and he had refused— so I was going to go after him myself. But Pops stopped me. He said there was something wrong about all this, and that he had a bad feeling."
"And you didn't go?" Ace interrupted, incredulous. It was obvious by his tone that he would have gone all the same.
"One doesn't survive in the New World for so long, much less with a title like The Strongest Man in the World, without listening to his instincts. We weren't going to just let it go, but decided to figure out why Teach, who had been a part of the crew for over twenty years, had decided to act now."
"And did you?"
"Yes." Marco closed his eyes. It was so stupid a reason that Thatch had had to die for that. "He wanted the fruit. There was a book in his cabin, a guide about devil fruits, and this one —many of us identified the picture of it— was marked." Thatch had been one of the nicest guys in the crew, if Teach had simply asked for it, explained he really wanted it that much instead of attacking him, Marco was sure Thatch would have had no problem in giving it to him.
"Okay, that sucks. But what has that to do with you being here?" Ace asked, surprisingly not as impatiently as Marco had expected. Perhaps because he could sympathize with the feeling of losing a brother.
"I'm getting there. That fruit's power is a very special one, it is said to disable any devil fruit power it touches. That would leave many people helpless against Teach. He's a strong guy, and that way he could probably have taken down some of the commanders if they had gone alone. I'm not so sure about myself, but I'm a weird case when it comes to fighting with my powers. Anyway," he was getting off track, there had been a long conversation on the Moby Dick about the implications of Teach's new power, "by the time we had buried Thatch and had gathered all the information we could, the word had spread that we had let Teach escape, and many pirate crews began to attack our territories, thinking we had grown weak. Kaido has been especially annoying in that matter. We had to fight them off, and by the time the attacks decreased, any lead on Teach had vanished." They were going to get him, no doubt there, it was clear Teach had a plan, and would have to resurface at some point to enact it. "Still, the situation is a problem, and we thought we had to make it clear we will take on anybody who dares to challenge us. Then the news about your execution came out."
Ace's eyes widened considerably at this, and Marco waited for him to make all the connections.
"What… the fuck?" He stood up and walked to the bars, turned around and headed for the back wall of the cell. "You're not fucking telling me what I think you're fucking telling me."
"If you think I let myself be caught on purpose to have a reason for the crew to assault Impel Down, then yes, that is exactly what I'm saying."
"WHAT. THE. FUCK?!" Ace yelled again. "That's the most stupid shit I've ever heard. Why would you do that?!"
"Various reasons, actually." Marco's calm when he responded threw Ace off, and he took the chance to continue speaking. "First of all, we are getting across the message that no one messes with our crew. Not even Teach. If he's got a working brain cell in that head of his, he'll know we'll go after him. Second, we are showing we won't do as everyone expects us to, by attacking here instead of Marineford, and while we are at it we will prove wrong this place's fame of being impregnable." Maybe they were a little late on that one, Marco thought, but a full scale attack still would be impressive, previous insane intruder or not. "And we are busting your ass out of here because it's not right they want to kill you simply because you exist."
Ace didn't say a word for so long that Marco thought he wasn't going to speak again, but when he did speak it wasn't anything Marco had been expecting to hear.
"Is that why you've been talking to me?"
"What?"
"These days. All that crap about escaping and everything, you were trying to convince me to go along with this."
"In part, yes. I wasn't expecting to be in the same cell as you, to be honest." That had been a surprise, but not one Marco was complaining about. He liked Ace, and making him stop thinking it was fine that he was going to be executed had been better than anything Marco had expected would happen this week.
He didn't move an inch when the wall next to his head cracked at the force of Ace's kick. Looking up, he met his murderous eyes head on. Ace was close, standing as close as Marco's crossed and chained legs would allow, glaring down at him.
"So you've been lying?" It was barely audible, even at that distance. Ace's hands were clenched so tight that blood was dripping down them, no doubt from where his nails pierced the skin. His entire frame was shaking in barely contained rage.
"No. Everything I have told you is true."
"Yeah, sure," Ace spat. "Were you getting your kicks out of it or simply bored?"
Not waiting for an answer, Ace turned around and walked to the other end of the cell.
"Neither," Marco said, but the only response he received was Ace kicking the opposite wall with as much strength as he had used on the one Marco was chained to.
He hadn't noticed the silence around them until it was broken by amused pirates.
"TROUBLE IN PARADISE?!" Someone yelled to general laughter.
Before Marco could say anything to shut them up, Ace did.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU ASSHOLES!" A burst of what was undoubtedly haoshoku haki accompanied his words, and various bodies dropping down could be heard. Ace sat down, facing the wall and his taut back turned to Marco.
"Fucking brat! We told you to stop doing that!" someone yelled, but was ignored.
"Ace," Marco called him, to no avail. Ace didn't move, nor did he speak again.