A Miracle for Ace
Summary: Ace isn't dead, but mostly dead? What kind of bullshit is this old man spouting? A one-shot where Marco and Shanks take the recently deceased Ace to Miracle Max. A man rumored capable of bringing the dead back to life. Marco has his doubts, but for the sake of his brother, he's willing to try anything at this point.
Notes: A One Piece and The Princess Bride one-shot crossover. This idea struck me while taking a shower, where I get all my best ideas, and continued to pester me until I sat down to write it out. Honestly, I'm shocked, just shocked no one else has done this yet.
Disclaimer: One Piece and The Princess Bride belong to their respectful owners.
On the Red Force
Separate from the rest of his brothers, Marco the Phoenix stood at the bow of Shanks's ship as it left Marineford and the victorious Marines far behind. True to his word, Fleet Admiral Sengoku allowed them to retreat unhindered. Not a single Marine warship followed them out to sea. This provided everyone a chance to recoup, tend their injuries and… mourn their losses.
Marco gnashed his teeth together, dropping his head onto his folded arms when another round of tears threatened to fall. The surviving members of Whitebeard's crew needed him to be strong, he knew that, but as of now Marco felt anything other than strong. He felt weak. Helpless. Broken.
They had lost so much in Marineford.
They lost Pops.
They lost Ace.
It brought Marco some comfort to learn Strawhat Luffy, Ace's younger brother they had so desperately fought to protect from Akainu, managed to escape thanks to Trafalgar Law. Even so, knowing this did little to dispel Marco's heartache nor his feelings of guilt.
'I should have done more,' Marco thought, anguished. 'If only I had stopped Ace from going after Teach, then none of this would have happened. Pops! Ace!"
Defenses completely down, Marco did not hear or feel Shanks's approach until he felt the captain's hand gripping his shoulder. Marco's head shot up to meet Red-Hair Shanks's gaze and he quickly wiped away the tears with the sleeve of his jacket.
"Red-Hair," Marco said in greeting. Voice strained.
Shanks smiled sadly in return. "It's not your fault, Marco," was the first thing he said as he gave Marco's shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. Then, turning towards the horizon, Shanks rested his elbow on the rail beside Marco. "You remember how Roger was. Stubbornly never backing down or running away during a fight. Even when he was outnumbered. Ace… Ace took after him a great deal."
"That doesn't matter yoi! I should have stopped Ace or gone after h—" Shanks cut him off with a look and Marco closed his mouth with an audible snap.
"Ace, like Roger, was bullheaded and he would've set out to fight Blackbeard one way or another," Shanks shook his head, sighing heavily as he did so. He gazed out across the waves before meeting Marco's gaze again, eyes ablaze with something Marco could only describe as being hope. "Listen, I didn't come over here to discuss Ace's pigheadedness with you. Marco, there's another reason why I asked Sengoku to allow us to have their bodies. Especially Ace's."
Another reason? Marco raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Shanks took a deep breath before continuing, "It may well be too late at this point, but there's a slight possibility of bringing Ace back to life."
Marco's breath hitched in disbelief. Still, he asked, "How yoi?"
"There's a man rumored to be able to perform miracles."
"You mean Ivankov? Back on the battlefield, he told Strawhat there wasn't anything he could do to heal Ace's wound…" Marco trailed off, recalling the images of that time. Strawhat's desperation as he held his dying brother in his arms. Ace's blood everywhere, drenching the skinny teen in crimson. Ivankov's words of, "It's too late for Ace-boy." He clinched his jaw together.
"No, I don't mean Ivankov. I'm talking about a different man entirely. He's said to be able to perform all kinds of miracles, even bringing the dead back to life. I've already got us on course to where he's supposedly living, which is a small island not all that far from our current location, but we'll sail past without stopping if you decide against it. He is your crewmate after all."
"What about Pops?"
"Do you really think he'd want to be brought back, Marco?"
The Phoenix closed his eyes. A pained expression on his normally lax face. "No, he probably wouldn't yoi," he grew quiet as he fully considered what Shanks told him. Should they give it a shot? Or should they let Ace rest alongside Whitebeard? In the end, Marco decided to at least try. "Alright, we'll go. Just you and me, Red-Hair, without saying anything about this to the others. I don't want to give them a false hope in case this… doesn't work yoi."
"I understand, Marco," Shanks patted Marco on the shoulder. "For both Ace and Luffy's sake, I hope this works."
Marco nodded his head. "I hope so, too."
The Miracle Worker
When he and Shanks finally arrived at the small island where the supposed miracle worker lived, Marco found the man to be underwhelming to say the least. He can't really say what he was expecting once they got here, but it certainly wasn't an old man with flyaway hair in tattered robes and living with his wife, dressed in the same fashion, who constantly nagged him. There wasn't anything remotely remarkable about him at all.
Marco seriously considered walking out if it weren't for Shanks's hand on his shoulder, keeping him in place.
"I'm supposed to be retired," the man, having introduced himself as Miracle Max, grumbled as he examined Ace's body. "I told you we should have settled on a more remote island," he directed this at his wife, Valarie.
"It looked remote enough when we got here," Valarie harrumphed as he stomped about, snatching up whatever supplies her husband needed.
"Apparently, it's not as remote as we first thought because people keep dropping by in need of a miracle," Max bemoaned, though he continued with his examination of Ace. These pirates were paying him a hefty sum after all. After several painstakingly long moments of watching the man poke around Ace's body, Miracle Max straightened up. There was a loud crick and the old man rubbed his smarting back as he explained his diagnosis to Marco and Shanks. "You've definitely got a corpse on your hands," he informed them rather bluntly.
Shanks's eyes narrowed, unamused while Marco looked ready to knock the old man through the wall behind him. "We're quite aware of that yoi," the Phoenix ground out. Dangerously close to snapping.
Miracle Max held up his hands. "Don't get your sashes in a knot, boys. He's dead, but you're in luck. This fella is only mostly dead."
"What'd you mean yoi?"
"Mostly dead? How can someone be mostly dead? Isn't dead just dead?"
"There's different kinds of dead, sonny boys. You've got sort of dead, mostly dead and then there's just dead. Those who are sort of dead are easier to work with while mostly dead is rather difficult and just dead is much more complicated," Max explained, gesturing at Ace's body. "This fella here is mostly dead. We wait much longer he's going to be just dead. Valarie, grab my Encyclopedia of Spells and the Hex Appendix. It's been sometime since I last performed this procedure."
The pirates groaned in unison. This didn't bode well at all.
Seeing their twin expressions of doubt, Miracle Max waved away their concerns. "Don't you dare doubt me. Otherwise I'll kick you and your corpse out of here and will be keeping your money."
"Oi," but Miracle Max ignored Shanks's protests as he rifled through two heavy looking books his wife brought him.
"Now, let's see here… We'll just do what we did with the last guy we helped. Nice lad. Took down a terrible tyrant, and my old boss I should tell you, then rode away into the sunset with his true love. That dreadful Prince Pumpernickel—"
"Prince Humperdinck, Max," his wife corrected him.
"Oh, right. Humperdinck. Wooh, it's been years since I said his name."
"Can we get on with his yoi?" Marco impatiently stated.
"Don't rush me, sonny," Miracle Max snapped at him in annoyance. "Because rushing leads to rotten miracles. Is that what you fellas want, a rotten miracle?"
"Ah, no, of course not yoi. Sorry," Marco quickly apologized.
Miracle Max eyed him before continuing, gesturing at Ace's body where it was laid out on the table. Specifically, he pointed to the charred hole in the pirate's chest. "This, however, does complicate matters. His internal organs have been fried beyond repair and the pill we're going to make needs to be ingested. He certainly can't ingest much of anything with half his esophagus missing."
"Then, there's nothing you can do?" Shanks asked, frowning sadly at Ace's body.
Marco shook his head. This whole trip turned out a waste of time after all.
"Now I didn't say that, sonny. We'll need to find some way to heal the damage first."
From where she stood beside a bubbling cauldron, Valarie suggested, "Why not use that stuff? It'll do the trick in no time."
"Y-yes," Miracle Max spluttered, turning towards his wife. "But, it's expensive and rare. I mean, really, really rare since there doesn't seem to be any of the beasts roaming about here. I've only got one jar left of the stuff you know."
"What stuff yoi?" Marco curiously eyed the pair.
"Unicorn Dust. You grind up a unicorn's horn into a fine dust and sprinkle it over the wound. It's powerful enough to heal any type of injury—even the one that killed your friend here. But, I've only got one jar."
"Will that be enough to heal his wound yoi?"
Miracle Max nodded his head reluctantly. "Yes."
"We'll pay extra. Just, please, help him yoi," Marco pleaded.
"Alright, alright. Stop begging, sonny, and fork over the money."
Marco nodded to Shanks who handed over another sack of beli, Miracle Max snatched it, counting through it before placing it on a counter. A moment later, the spry old man started searching through various cabinets until he found a small jar filled with a shimmering white powder. They watched, curious, as Miracle Max tipped the jar's contents into the palm of his hand then sprinkling it liberally over Ace's chest. He instructed Marco to roll Ace over so that he could do the same to Ace's back.
"Now what yoi?" Marco asked, laying Ace flat again.
"Now we wait, boys."
They were not forced to wait very long. Within a minute of the dust touching the wound, the horrendous injury started healing itself. Marco and Shanks watched, fascinated, as Ace's skin, organs, and bones that had been horrifically burned by Akainu's magma fist began to knit back together. Pretty soon, the dust completed its work.
However, it did not heal everything completely. An awful scar remained where the hole had once been. Still, the scar's presence was a definite improvement over the gruesome hole.
"Now that that's been taken care of, time for the true miracle," Miracle Max commented aloud. He turned away from them, consulting his hex book with his wife coming to stand beside him. They whispered quietly to one another as they worked.
While they did that, Marco left Shanks's side to stand beside the table and gazed down at his brother. With a visibly shaking hand, he ran his fingers through Ace's dark locks. "How long will it take to work?" He asked without looking up from Ace's pale face.
It was Valarie who answered instead of her husband. "It may take up to an hour for him to wake. Or a few seconds. As for moving around, considering how long he's been dead and the extent of the damage, it'll take a while. Possibly, months or maybe even a couple of years before he's back to full strength."
Marco nodded, saying nothing to that. He did crack a slight smile, though. Ace, he knew, wasn't going to like that one bit. Already, Marco could imagine his brother's complaints. Marco looked forward to hearing them.
An hour later, Miracle Max presented the pirates with his hard work; a dark brown ball roughly the size of an infant's fist.
"That's it? That's the miracle?" Shanks asked incredulously, eyeing the unappealing concoction.
"What'd you expect? A shiny orb covered in a rainbow of colors?" Miracle Max countered with a sniff. "Hmph. Trust me, this pill ought to do the trick," he dropped the pill into Marco's hand.
"What'd we do with it yoi?"
"You stuff it down his throat, that's what, sonny."
Marco traded glances of uncertainty with Shanks, but followed the old man's instructions. With Shanks's one-armed help, Marco succeeded in lifting Ace's stiff body into a seated position. A short struggle later, they forced open Ace's mouth as wide as possible so that Marco could drop the foul looking pill down into his throat. As with the unicorn dust they didn't have long to wait. Almost as soon as the pill disappeared down his throat, Ace lurched forward in Marco's arms, shouting, "LUFFY!"
Energy spent, Ace fell back, and Marco eased him back down onto the table. Throughout, Marco was unable to keep the tremendous smile off his face. "Ace! You're alive!"
Shanks grinned beside him.
Ace stared at Marco's hovering face above his. His eyebrows crinkled together in confusion. "I'm alive? How? What happened? Where are we?" Then, tone becoming panicked, he exlaimed, "Where's Luffy?!"
"Calm down yoi. Let me explain," the commander paused, thinking. "No, let me just sum up. Akainu killed you and you're alive because of a resurrection pill. We lost the war. Right now, we're in Max's hut. Luffy is… We don't know where he is exactly. Last we saw of him, he was in the care of that super rookie, Trafalgar Law. After you died, Akainu continued to pursue your brother and hurt him badly. He's alive, though, as far as we know yoi."
It pained Ace to hear his brother had been hurt, but he believed deep down that his brother had made it. Luffy was going to be King of the Pirates, so he had to have survived. "Pops?" He asked, voice quiet.
It did not come as a shock when Marco simply shook his head. Ace felt tears prick his eyes. "He died standing," Marco told him, looking sad but proud at the same time. "Before you get upset with me, I don't think Pops would've wanted us to revive him from the dead. He was very sick. Shanks," he nodded to the red-haired man. "Has offered to help with his burial. We're burying him on an island in the New World. We'll worry about all that stuff tomorrow. For now, let's get you back onto Shanks's ship so that you can rest, okay?"
"Yeah. Okay."
With Ace unable to walk, or move much at all, Marco slipped his arms beneath his brother and picked him up bridal style. They thanked Miracle Max and his wife, bowing several times, before they left.
Max and Valarie stood outside their door, waving the pirates off with wishes of good luck. "Eh, looks like I still got it in me. I could really use a bar of chocolate now," Max said as he and his wife stepped back into their hut. Shutting the door behind them.
Back on the Red Force
Their return to the Red Force had been met with happy cries from the former Whitebeard pirates. All of the commanders flocked around Ace as soon as Marco helped him onboard, hugging him and ruffling his hair affectionately. Afterward, after everyone had at least touched him at least once or twice—as if to reassure themselves Ace was real—Marco carried Ace into the infirmary where Shanks's doctor immediately set to fussing over him.
Now, lying in bed too weak to really move much of anything, Ace stared up at the ceiling. As much as he missed Pops, his thoughts continually went to Luffy, wondering if his baby brother was okay and where he was.
Turning his head, Ace cleared his throat, catching Marco's attention. "What is it yoi?"
"Marco, once I'm able to stand on my own two feet again, I want to look for Luffy. He needs to know I'm okay. I-I can't imagine what he's going through right now," Ace glanced away from his friend. "No, I can imagine it. Which is why I need to find him as soon as possible."
Marco leaned forward in his chair. "Of course. Knowing your brother, though, I bet he'll turn up in the most unexpected place possible yoi. In the meantime, you need to rest and regain your strength. Since the world believes you're dead, we're going to take advantage of that to train you up in secret until you're stronger than ever before. Pops is right; there's going to be another war in the distant future. Somehow, I'm sure, your little brother is going to be at its center."
"No doubt. What about our territories and Blackbeard?"
Marco frowned at Ace. "We aren't strong enough to fight against Teach right now. He'll get what's coming to him someday. That I can promise you, Ace," he reached a hand out to pat Ace's arm. "Get some sleep. We've still got a long way to go before we reach the island."
It was then Ace realized just how exhausted he was. He managed a slight nod at Marco then closed his eyes only to open them again. "While I was dying, I finally found the answer to the question I had been asking myself my entire life."
"What question is that yoi?"
"Whether I deserved to be born."
Marco grunted, feeling physical pain that his brother ever felt the need to ask such a thing. "What was the answer yoi?"
But, Ace had already fallen asleep by then. Marco smiled softly down at his brother, realizing he didn't need bother asking such a thing for he already knew the answer.
"Yes, Ace. You do yoi," Marco whispered. He pulled the blanket up to Ace's chin before sitting back down, continuing with his vigil over Ace.
end