Confusion
Ace had wanted to spend more time with his fellow Whitebeard Pirates after lunch but after a sudden narcoleptic attack that nearly ruined all of Fox' hard work Marco ordered him back to bed.
"You were in pieces yesterday, yoi," the First Division Commander reminded him. "You need a lot more rest before you're well again."
Marco also persuaded Fox to get some more sleep, reminding her that she'd been up for three days straight and needed to rest more as well. It was rather awkward for Ace to be sharing a bed with his best friend when he knew she was involved with another guy and pregnant, but Fox didn't make anything of it so he soon relaxed. At least she was wearing a bit more now than she had been the previous night, though she had made him take off the borrowed shirt so she could keep skin contact.
"I need to be able to monitor your heath," she'd told him, "and skin contact is the most reliable way. If you develop complications I want to know as soon as it happens, not when you're puking blood or having a heart attack."
Ace had capitulated quickly at that and Fox had gone to sleep with her face buried in the nape of his neck and her arms around his chest. He had to wonder what her lover thought of her getting into bed with other men. He wouldn't like it at all if she was his lover. He yawned and sleep came with an abruptness that he had long since gotten used to.
Ace dreamed. Not nightmares, but long, rambling dreams that didn't make much sense. Not that he really noticed at the time; there was a lot less rational thought going on while dreaming. So he didn't feel any alarm when he dreamt of fighting Mihawk with three swords or of crafting an Eternal Pose. He also dreamt of his little brother's ship, of sailing with Luffy and his ragtag crew of highly capable rookie misfits –other than Fox who had never been a rookie– up a vertical current to an island in the clouds. He drifted disembodied in that dream, wandering across an island full of fighters and arriving in a ruined city in time to see Fox decapitate someone he instinctively knew was the Bad Guy while wearing an outfit that reminded him of the pictures he'd seen of her on Mystoria. She looked very sexy, so he wandered over to her and kissed her.
The kiss got very heated and his hands had been exploring under her dress when a fist hit the side of his head and he was suddenly fighting off a three-faced, six-armed, green-haired demon that couldn't seem to choose between ripping his limbs off and beating him to a squishy pulp. Ace retaliated by trying to burn it to ash, but it didn't catch fire: instead the city around them did and then they were falling down, down, down into the sea.
Ace knew the feeling of drowning very well indeed: when he'd been trying to kill Pops he'd been knocked overboard several times and they hadn't always been all that prompt in fishing him out again. The water weighed down on him, paralysing him and crushing his lungs. Weirdly enough, he could still just about breathe. He landed on the sea bed and looked around at the fish and odd coral formations as the six-armed demon landed a few feet away and gave him the evil eye. Ace raised his middle finger back and noticed absently that he was still on fire. Scratch that; he was made of fire. That was neat. He was absorbed in checking out his new look when Fox appeared on the scene, wearing nothing but gold jewellery on her upper half and Yuda-tailed below the hips. It was a good look for her, especially with the golden hair and two pairs of sleek steel wings. He wondered if Shanks had seen those wings; he had said she was spikier than she used to be and those feathers were all sharp.
"The only people who've seen me like this are you and Zoro," Fox said. It wasn't quite words; there was language in there somewhere but there were pictures, sensations and concepts all tied up in it that conveyed her meaning far more precisely than mere language could ever achieve. Ace now knew that the six-armed demon who'd attacked him was Roronoa Zoro, Fox' lover, and that no matter how he looked on the outside this was who he really was. He was also rapidly gaining coherence and had a feeling this was real, never mind that he was supposed to be sleeping.
"Is this real?" he asked.
"For a given value of real," Fox agreed, communicating a whole lot of concepts that were highly mystical, complicated and intrinsically linked into how she'd put him back together and kept him alive. Including what the green-haired Asura had done while she was healing him.
"Sorry man," Ace apologised to the other man. "Wasn't quite myself back there."
Zoro cocked his head on one side, two pairs of eyes following Ace while the other pair watched Fox. "That wasn't exactly true, was it?" he said, voice deep and menacing. "You want her. Want her whimpering under your hands and body and screaming your name."
The images conjured as he spoke were vivid and detailed, involving all five senses, making Ace' body harden and his breath catch in his throat in a strangled moan.
"Did you mean to share that?" Fox asked, sounding a little breathless herself. Her words were accompanied by a dozen other brief flashes, kaleidoscope snatches of intimacy and passion that were not particularly explicit but still carried with them an erotic charge and a strong sense of longing.
The demon swordsman looked away. "Communicating like this is challenging," he grumbled, shifting uncomfortably.
"No privacy whatsoever," she confirmed gently, amusement threading through her words alongside an image of Shanks groping her in his sleep while nuzzling her ear. Zoro growled again.
"When was that?" Ace asked, an image of himself waking to a naked, sleeping Fox drooling on his chest flitting through his mind. There was a snort; Zoro thought that memory was funny for some reason. Another memory, this one not his own, flashed past his mind's eye: Fox slumped on a broader, scarred chest, strings of drool hanging from the corner of her mouth to puddle on tanned skin. Ace glanced over at the Asura.
"You too, huh?"
"Definitely not a goddess," Zoro confirmed, several different conversations flicking past in an instant. Ace chuckled, remembering his own meeting with Sako and how he'd teased Fox in Alabasta.
"Now you've stopped antagonising each-other," Fox said lightly, attracting their attention, "we get to the hard part."
"Hard part?" Ace echoed.
"We're stuck like this," Zoro muttered, granting Ace a flash of frustration-confusion and the difficulty of fighting when you really aren't sure how much of what you can feel is actually under your control. "Forever."
"So this kind of thing might happen again?" Ace asked, his dreams thus far coming back to him in flashes. None of those were his own memories, he realised now.
"Will happen again," Fox corrected him gently. "Sleep brings down the barriers. We'll always wander in our dreams; the trick is staying separate while awake. You didn't wander while you were unconscious so you're less confused than Zoro was, but you need to learn to stay within the limits of your own mind while conscious until you can instinctively recognise where the edges are." The images, concepts and sensations accompanying this monologue were many and most of them did not involve Zoro at all, but seven different faces, all male, and a sense of profound sorrow and loss.
"Your nakama," Zoro whispered, a white fox-mask and a shimmering sword flashing through his words alongside profound hatred for the World Nobles.
"I can't exactly control what I dream of," Ace admitted sheepishly, a dozen different fantasies involving Fox briefly surfacing, half of them involving other women. Zoro made a slightly strangled sound in his throat as Fox giggled, conjuring a much more realistic scene involving her and a lithe, dark-skinned woman with purple hair and a deep throaty chuckle.
"Laila?" Ace asked, his memory of Fox punching Mihawk in the face threaded through his words parallel to the memory of the hawk-eyed swordsman admitting his culpability with regards to her death.
"Laila," Fox confirmed wistfully, a barrage of memories involving the same dark woman shooting past: sparring together, picking mangos in Laila's orchard, fixing the roof of her farmhouse, milking goats, playing with her niece and making out on the beach under the stars while topless and dripping wet.
Zoro made another deep, hungry sound that had no visual component but made Ace shiver at the sheer lust and predatory intent that bloomed in his bones, begging to be let out.
"You realise that, as we are now, no two of us can be intimate without the third knowing what's going on?" Fox said quickly. "Mentally we are all stuck in the same room, as it were. We can ignore each-other to a point but certain things can't be ignored. Shared things in particular will be intrusive." A brief image splashed into being of the three of them in a small room, her and Zoro making out while Ace sat with his back to them with his hands over his ears and scowling.
Zoro subsided, his central face scowling blackly but the other one that Ace could see looked more thoughtful.
"I miss you," he said simply, conveying a tight tangle of wanting to hold, wanting to touch, wanting to spar and just plain wanting sex.
"Hmm," Fox agreed, an answering tangle of indecision and hormonal frustration bouncing back. Both Zoro and Ace rocked slightly on impact.
"I wish you'd let me help you with that," Ace said before his good sense caught up with whatever part of his mind had temporarily taken charge. Probably his libido; it would get him into trouble. The way Zoro turned to stare piercingly at him and three of his hands dropped to caress the hilts of the swords at his waist suggested he was going to pay for that comment.
"Bad idea," Fox said firmly. "Zoro would chase after you into your mind and might end up bodysnatching you." The brief image of Zoro's Asura silhouette superimposed on Ace' physical body wandered past. "That would just cause more confusion and we'd all get hurt."
Ace noted that Zoro was radiating a sense that bodysnatching might be worth it if it meant getting to have sex with his lover.
"Don't," Fox said flatly. "It's still Ace' body, so he'd be able to feel what was going on even if he couldn't control it."
Zoro pouted playfully, an entirely disturbing expression on a being so shamelessly predatory. "I'm having difficulty caring, since he'd feel it anyway," the Asura admitted candidly. "We're stuck, remember? I might as well make the most of it."
Fox folded her arms under her breasts, making them bounce appealingly. "Are you propositioning Ace, Zoro?" she inquired archly. "Or trying to wear down my will with the idea of a threesome?"
Both those images painted themselves vividly across the flame Logia's mind, making him briefly lose track of which reality was more important. The idea of having Fox pinned down between him and Zoro was rather appealing, though the image of Fox watching Zoro kiss him was brain-breaking in a whole new way as it was accompanied by Fox' very real erotic interest.
He mentally returned to the underwater grove to see Zoro pinning Fox down and tickling her mercilessly with all six hands, his face red with embarrassment.
"You, Limpet," Ace said decisively as he sat up, "are evil incarnate. I can't ever get away from you and you are going to use that to your advantage and wear me down until I obey your every whim, aren't you?" He paused. "Wait, you just did that on purpose to distract us both, didn't you?"
Zoro let up so she could answer. "Yes, I did," she admitted, "because what Asura-kun suggested is possible, but it all boils down to how much of a voyeur he's willing to be and I know that where I'm concerned he has no limits." Truth. Absolute, unadorned truth. Especially the bit about Zoro being willing to try anything if it meant he got to sex up his lover.
"Talk," Zoro said threateningly, interest swirling with anticipation.
Fox shook him off in a boneless movement and performed a move Ace had once seen Jinbe use. The water around them coiled in her grasp and the flame Logia barely had a moment to say "Shit!" before he was blasted away and into wakefulness.
Because it was bound to happen sooner rather than later and Zoro is both highly obsessive and very fatalistic. That is a bad combination as it leads a person to do things nobody else would ever consider.