Weakness

Luffy knelt on the ground in a clearing on the island of Amazon Lily, screaming in agony. Ace was dead. Ace was gone. Ace hadn't kept his promise.

Luffy hadn't been able to save Ace.

"I'm still so weak!" he wailed. "I can't protect a single thing!"

"Luffy-kun…" It was the fishman. Jinbe.

"Go away!" Luffy howled. "Leave me alone!"

"I'm afraid that will not be possible," Jinbe said flatly. "I cannot stand to see you injure yourself any further."

"It's my body! I can do what I like!" Luffy snarled.

"In that case, Ace-san's body too belonged to him alone. It was his own choice whether to live or to die."

"Shut up! You say another word and I'll punch your face in!"

"If that will help calm you please feel free;" Jinbe said sharply, "I too am wounded but I will not be defeated by you in this state!"

Luffy lunged for the fishman, but was thrown over onto the ground and sat upon. The rubberman then bit Jinbe, who grabbed him by the neck and slammed him into a rock, cracking it.

"Are you no longer able to see anything at all?!" Jinbe shouted at him. "That brimming confidence that led you to believe you could overcome any obstacle, your own great strength which you never doubted for an instant! The unsurpassable hordes of enemies who cruelly shattered those beliefs apart! Your brother who was always your guiding light upon these oceans! Certainly, you have lost much; you are allowing that mighty obstacle known as the world to block out your entire field of vision! At this rate you will lose sight of everything! You will be engulfed by clouds of self-condemnation and regret! It may be hard right now Luffy, but you must silence those thoughts!"

Luffy wanted to say something, anything, but the hand around his throat made it impossible.

"Stop counting only those things that you have lost!" Jinbe roared. "What is gone, is gone! So ask yourself this: what is there that still remains to you?"

Luffy stilled, staring. Jinbe let go of him, panting. Luffy sank to the ground, staring at his hands. Counting.

Zoro.

Nami.

Usopp.

Sanji.

Chopper.

Robin.

Franky.

Brook.

Fox.

Oh, no. Fox! Ace was her nakama too! Her best friend! How would she have felt to have Ace arrive in her arms already dead!

"I still have my friends!" he choked out. "And, and I need to talk to one of them right now!"

"Now?" Jinbe repeated. "But-"

"Fox!" Luffy howled. "Dracule Lisska! Lisskaaaaa!"

His throat tingled and he blindly threw himself forward into the arms of the figure that materialised in a flash of white in front of him.

"Fox!" he blubbered, clinging to her and sobbing into her shirt. "I'm sowwwwy! I tried really, really hard! Bu-bu-but I couldn't save Ace! Not even with your massive favour you gave me! I didn't use it properly! I feel useless! I wasn't strong enough!"

Fox wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "Shh, captain," she said soothingly. "Shh, it's alright."

"S'not," Luffy sniffled. "Ace's dead!"

"Your brother was just fine when I left him," were his assassin's soft words in his ear as she stroked his hair. "A bit unsteady on his feet perhaps, but not dead."

Luffy froze. Could it be..?

"He's… not?" the rubberman croaked disbelievingly, pulling back from her. "But… I saw…"

"What did I promise you, Captain?" Fox said gently. "What were your orders that you gave the person I sent to help you?"

"You, you promised to heal Ace after I rescued him," Luffy said, a spark of wild hope sparking in his heart, "and I told Ghost-guy not to let Ace die, no matter what-"

Fox smiled gently, tapping her right hand over her heart. "You are my captain, Monkey D. Luffy. I will always obey your orders so long as it is in my power to do so, and keeping your brother from death was not beyond me."

Luffy stared, transfixed by the firm, reassuring smile on his assassin's face. Then joy exploded within him and he jumped her, knocking her over backwards onto the ground and rolling her in the dust.

"He's alive! He's alive! Jinbe! My brother's ALIVE!" tears ran down his face in sheer relief and gratitude and he untangled himself from her and fell to his knees, banging his forehead on the ground.

"Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!" he chanted, before bouncing up and launching himself at her again and wrapping his rubber arms tightly around her body and burying his face in her shoulder.

Fox hugged him back this time, having kept her arms out of his grip. "It's okay to cry, Luffy," she whispered in his ear. "A strong man knows when to cry; there's no shame in it. Better to let it all out than to trap it inside to fester and rot."

Luffy sniffed, hiccupped and burst into noisy tears of relief as his assassin ruffled his hair with one hand and hugged him around the waist with the other, rocking gently back and forth as he howled.

Fox hugged her captain tightly, feeling bad about delaying her trip to visit him even by the amount of time it had taken her to find a clean shirt –Luffy would wake up on a laundry day– and a pair of shoes. She had no real idea who the shirt she was wearing belonged to; she had ended up rushing out of Shanks' cabin and grabbing the nearest dry one off the rigging before dashing inside again to grab the delivery case with the letter by Ace inside it. She knew she likely looked an untidy mess, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that her captain knew the truth now, and that even though he was bandaged from neck to ankle he was going to be okay.

Luffy's tears finally subsided into sporadic hiccups and he rubbed his nose on his bandages. "Is he really okay?" he sniffled in a small voice.

"He wanted to come along but I wouldn't let him," Fox said gently, "as he's not anywhere near properly healed yet, just like you aren't. He wrote you a letter though." She sighed. "Luffy, healing Ace cost me. Really cost both me and Zoro. It cost Ace a lot too, though he doesn't seem to mind that much."

"Cost? What kind of cost?" Luffy demanded.

"You remember how on Thriller Bark you found me and Zoro unconscious and it took us three days to wake up? And how we were different afterwards?"

Luffy frowned. "Yeah: you were like one person with two bodies. It was weird."

"Zoro died, Luffy," Fox said flatly. "I just refused to let him leave."

"Zoro's a zombie?!"

"No, Zoro is not a zombie! Zoro… he ran out of life-force, so his soul tried to leave his body; that's what happens when you die, you see," Fox explained patiently. "I caught his soul and stuffed it back into his body, then shared my life-force with him so he could heal. So our souls are stuck together now, which is why we sometimes act like a single entity." She paused. "Am I making sense?"

"Zoro got exhausted and died, but you reversed it!" Luffy determined. "Is that what you did for Ace?"

"Sort of; Ace had bits missing I had to replace as well, which took a lot of time. But the result is the same: Ace' soul is now stuck to mine and Zoro's."

"So you are all three going to be like one person in three bodies?"

Fox snorted. "That's one way of putting it," she conceded, "but here's another: to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Sound familiar?"

Luffy's eyes widened like saucers. "You're married to Ace? Wait, you're married to Ace and Zoro?!"

"Essentially," Fox confirmed, "and the crazy part: they're married to each-other as well."

Luffy clutched his head, eyes crossing. "Gah!"

Fox chuckled. "Quite; imagine how they feel about it."

Her captain stilled, looking up at her. "Is Zoro angry with me?"

A very pertinent question. "You are the captain; Zoro recognises this," Fox stated, prompted by the firm acceptance of her lover humming in the back of her mind. "Because you are the captain, you make the decisions. You ordered me to save Ace; because you ordered it, Zoro helped. We have no complaints."

Luffy didn't smile. "What about the baby?"

"The baby is fine, I think," Fox said, not as certain as she would like to be. There wasn't much she could do beyond monitor her pregnancy.

"Shouldn't you see a doctor?"

"Shanks' doctor doesn't know much about obstetrics; that's the fancy word for pregnancies, by the way Luffy," Fox added hastily in response to his confusion, "and I can't exactly have Shanks or Benn Beckman escort me into a doctor's surgery and ask for a checkup. Ideally I'd have a doctor on call until I give birth, but I'll manage without."

Luffy frowned. "Jinbe? Do you think the doctor guy who fixed me knows anything about pregnancies?"

"We can ask, Luffy-kun," Jinbe said. "I would be much happier if you at least let him look at you, Scamp."

"Scamp?" Luffy repeated, glancing from Jinbe to Fox and back again.

"You remember Jinbe is my uncle, Luffy?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, I was quite a naughty child," Fox confessed with aplomb, "and a rather wild teenager as well. Jinbe is my sensei as well as my uncle and he spent a lot of his time chasing after me and dragging me back to where I was supposed to be. So he calls me Scamp; I earned the epithet a hundred times over, I'm afraid."

"Shishishi! Really?" Luffy chuckled.

"She did indeed," Jinbe confirmed with a faint smile. "Now I am glad to hear Ace-san is still with us, but perhaps we should now return to the submarine and ask Trafalgar Law if he can examine her."

"Yeah!" Luffy agreed, pulling her to her feet and looking at her properly for the first time.

"Fox?" he asked, puzzled, tilting his head on one side.

"Yes?"

"Why are you wearing Shanks' trousers?"

Fox looked down at the old, battered, faded, many-times-mended pair of brown trousers buttoned partway down her calves. "It's laundry day, Luffy," she told him solemnly. "I didn't want to mess up my clothes so Shanks let me use these while I helped with the washing. He never wears them anymore anyway."

Luffy made a funny face. "Shanks was wearing those when I first met him."

"Really?" Fox hadn't known these old scruffs had a history. "I didn't know that."

"They look really strange on you," her captain said. "And whose shirt is that? It isn't yours; it doesn't fit properly."

Fox looked down at herself, taking in what she was actually wearing. It was a cheerful pink dress shirt. "This belongs to Marco," she said out loud, slightly surprised. "I didn't notice."

"Who's Marco?"

"He's a phoenix Zoan and a Whitebeard Pirate," Fox elaborated, not wanting to outright say that he'd been at Marineford. "He turns into a blue and yellow bird made of fire."

Luffy paused. "Hey, I saw him! He's cool; but why are you wearing his shirt?"

Fox scratched the back of her head, noticing as she did so that her hair was a total rats' nest from rolling around in the dust. "Well, I wasn't wearing a shirt to do the laundry and I felt you calling, so I grabbed the first dry shirt that I found," she admitted sheepishly.

"Oh." Explanation made, Luffy promptly lost interest. "Come on, the Doctor-guy is this way." He took her by the hand and led her off, Jinbe following behind them.

"You probably shouldn't tell people Ace is still alive," Fox said as they walked through the trees. "If the government found out they'd send people after him and he isn't anywhere near well yet."

"I'm a really bad liar," Luffy admitted candidly.

"Then say you don't want to talk about it when people ask you about Ace," Fox suggested. "Oh, and before I forget," she fished the letter case out of her waistband. "Your letter."

Luffy accepted it with trembling hands. "From Ace?" he whispered.

"Yes; it's one of my special letter cases, like Beastie is, so you can write back," Fox told him. Luffy stared at the flat tarred wooden case longingly, then shoved it through the waistband of his shorts.

"I'll read it while Doctor-guy is examining you," he said firmly, voice and legs both wobbling slightly. "I have to look after my crew!"

Fox kissed him on the cheek. "You're a wonderful captain, Luffy. Never believe otherwise."

Luffy finds out Ace isn't dead. He also finds out some other, more disturbing, things.