Chapter Text
The guards don’t even bother to strip Ace before they throw him in Impel Down’s ‘welcome bath.’
He refuses to make a sound, even as the pain screams through him; heat a now-unfamiliar enemy. The boiling water drowns out even the little strength he had gathered, past the thick links of seastone circling his wrists and ankles or the heavy chains that hang, inhibiting his every movement.
When they drag him out, the guards alternate between shoving him around and skittering away from him every time he shifts.
Marine cowards. These might be the very worst of the lot: sadists and cowards, doorwardens to a man-made hell, with ‘Justice’ branded across its gates.
“What?” Ace rasps, as he’s dragged through cold, dark halls towards the elevator, soaking wet, already starting to shiver. “No fancy outfit for me?”
His hat is somewhere on Banaro Island, probably; on a shattered battlefield that should have been Teach’s fucking grave.
A measly Marine Captain had been all it had taken to keep him captive once he'd woken up in custody. The captain had taken his knife and his log pose, ripping the leather strap off his wrist with a particular sadism.
Ace grins viciously at the memory of taking a few teeth in return, and it only widens as the guards holding him in place shiver and jerk the chains harder to hide their fear. That Captain is responsible for at least half the additional chains weighing him down.
Ace should have broken more than a few teeth. Or killed him, for the insult; for daring.
The bare skin of his wrist pulses in his awareness, even half covered by a wide cuff. The discomfort of it is more real and present than even the torment of that fucking bath.
The Captain had sneered down at him, his Log-Pose dangling from his fingers, eyes full of a familiar, disgusted disquiet as they lingered on the bare skin.
And Ace hadn’t been able to help the flinch.
He knows it is stupid, knows that the Captain didn’t have any idea, didn’t have any reason to suspect. Ace’s Devil Fruit is one of the best known on the seas. The Captain couldn’t have been expecting anything else, when he ripped away Ace’s ‘Pose.
And yet.
He’s kept that vulnerable patch of skin covered since he was old enough to reason, and know he was wrong. Having that protection stripped away had left him feeling off balance, more vulnerable than he could stand and furious for it.
Voices from his childhood, never sufficiently silenced—
Should have been drowned—
Strangled in the cradle —
Would be glad to be rid of —
Worthless—
Poison—
—echoing in cruel voices, even though he knew, he knew that they were wrong. That it wasn’t anything wrong with him.
Or, well… he had been told that. He had tried to force himself to believe the explanation that Luffy, of all people, had provided; straight from the mouth of what Ace now knows had been a New World Pirate.
His Mystery Person must have eaten a devil fruit, just like Luffy’s had!
Logical. Neat. A reason for the defect that had haunted his entire life. Ace’s certainty that the lack of Compass was one more piece of proof that he never should have been born cracked wide open in an instant by an innocent voice, piping and carefree.
Luffy, who had completely shamelessly shoved his own bare wrist in Ace’s face, and was so utterly uncaring of the blank wrongness where his Compass should be, of the looks, the wariness.
Ace hadn’t known what to say, what to think, continued not to even in the face of Luffy’s intractable insistence, over years. No matter the casual assurance of a carefree child, Ace had never been able to drown out the voices.
The question.
Did he deserve to live?
Should he be alive?
It had been a relief, when he realized what that horrid fruit on Sixis had been. When he had crossed Reverse Mountain and realized what it meant.
Partly because it had let him and Deuce escape, of course, but also because it gave a reason .
An excuse for the bare blank emptiness on his wrist.
It may have been a Mystery in the East Blue, on sheltered and backwater Dawn, but on the Grand Line everyone knew that to eat a Devil Fruit was to give up the Sea's Gift.
To sacrifice your Soul’s Compass and Guide for the sake of power.
No Devil Fruit user retained their Compass. Anyone who’d earned even a measly Captain’s stripes knew that. Knew that was the reason for his blank wrist.
It was the fire that made him now, from his skin down to his soul, and which had burned the Compass off him.
It wasn't him. It wasn't—
Never should have been born!
—it wasn't that there had been something wrong with him since birth , since he killed his mother coming into this world, a cursed, empty, lonely existence from the start.
They couldn't know, they can't know. No matter his loyalty to the Marines, Gramps would never have told them, so they couldn’t possibly know — but he'd flinched, and the Captain had drawn up, gloating and smug, but also questioning the reaction and—
Well.
That prurient curiosity hadn’t lasted long before Ace responded to that reaction the same way he had since he was five years old and running feral in a forest and a trash heap: he’d made a damned fine effort towards ensuring the face in front of him would never be capable of making that expression again.
It hadn’t, sadly, gotten him free, but it had been satisfying while it lasted.
The Vice-Warden, accompanying this shitty parade deeper into Hell, scoffs at his question, dragging him back into this moment, into the chilling, inevitable horror of it.
“A Uniform? For you? Why bother?”
It’s a grim sort of almost-humor that tightens Ace’s lips this time. They both know he won’t be here long enough to need a uniform. He’s known how this was going to play out since he woke up so weighed down by seastone he could barely breathe, deep in Paradise, far from any help, far from the Father he had disobeyed, the home he had fled.
Possibly the Marines also want to make sure he is clearly recognizable when they cut off his head in front of the world.
It’s probably both, honestly.
There is a moment, just a brief one, as the elevator lets them out on Level 6, a level he’s only heard rumors of before, where he wonders: Did Roger walk these same steps? Did they bring him here first, or cart him straight to his execution?
He wonders now, suddenly, in a way he could never bring himself to ask about before, if his mother and Roger had been soulmates. If a Compass on the Devil’s wrist was how they knew where his mother was. Is that how they found her? Had they looked at the wrist of the Pirate King and headed South? Was Baterilla, all those women, all those babies, and his mother, the casualty of the Compass on the wrist of a monster?
(Was the Son of a Monster so much more damned than the monster himself, that Ace had never deserved a Compass in the first place?)
Ace doesn’t know. He could never bring himself to ask, and Gramps had never volunteered the information.
Had Roger had a Compass?
Had his mother?
He doesn’t know what he wants, what he hopes is the truth.
He just knows he’s grateful, for the first time in his life, that there is no path on his skin, no promise of safe harbor on the seas — no path to the other half of himself, for the Marines to follow, to hunt and drive to ground and slaughter.
~~~~
What Ace doesn’t know, because he’s never asked, never wanted to know, is that Roger and Rouge were, in fact, soulmates.
Two Compases, two paired Gifts, given from the Sea to her beloved children, dark and clear on the soft inner skin of their wrists, and a needle as black as a moonless night, pointing the way. It had taken time, and more than a few missed chances, but they’d found each other, and their Comapsses had burned, joy and pain and promise .
They’d met, but…Roger had already been sick. Had already been dying. They had met, and they had known that they would never have long enough together, but they had taken every day, the same way they had always taken everything in the world they had wanted: fiercely, joyfully, without holding back.
Rouge, fierce and bright and cunning, and yet still… kind. Soft in the way that only the most powerful or wiley could afford to be. Roger, loud and larger than life, with dreams too big for the world.
They had lived, and lived, and lived, until they knew they couldn’t anymore.
In the end, they had tried their best to hide Rouge, to keep her safe. They had known that even if Garp wouldn’t hunt Rouge for Roger’s crimes, that there was no way the World Government wouldn’t do their best to find her. They would use every tool at their disposal, including the very connection that had drawn them together. The Compass that should be as sacred as the sea’s guarded depths would be just another tool. It would be inaccurate at best, since they wouldn’t risk not killing him immediately, couldn’t exactly drag him around the seas hoping his Compass would lead them to her, but…
They hadn’t wanted to risk it.
It wasn’t too hard, when the time came, for the Pirate King to find a Devil Fruit.
The juice had been disgusting, as Rouge bit deep into sickly, rotten flesh, the fruit an alarming green, swirled and unnatural. The pain of watching their Compasses fade was horrific, and the new instincts that came with a Zoan fruit had been odd, but for Rouge nothing, nothing , could match the wrenching agony of knowing that her husband was dying. Knowing that he was hastening it to try to buy her time. Neither, though, could anything on the seas match the absolutely unshakable determination within her to do whatever it would take to protect her child.
They both would.
So. She let a devil into her soul, let it destroy her compass. She courted the hatred of the Sea she loved nearly as much as she loved Roger, and she prayed that would be enough.
And it was, in the end. It was just the barest edge of enough, combined with her Will, and the extra resiliency of a Devil Fruit user.
She only held her son once, held him and named him, but it was enough because he lived and that was worth absolutely everything, even dying with a wrist as bare as the world had felt since she watched the broadcast of her husband’s execution.
~~~~~
Gramps’ arrival into the cold dark of Impel Down is honestly a shock.
The lights come up in a way they only bother with at meal times, but it can’t have been more than an hour or two since the last load of slop.
Nearly the last person Ace expects to see stride in after the Warden is Garp.
He looks ancient. Tired. Sad.
Guilt twinges in Ace’s guts, to see Gramps looking like that, for him.
The marine hero dismisses the Warden, and lowers himself to sit in front of where Ace is chained, strung, arms spread wide against the wall.
Helpless.
Trapped.
They regard each other in silence for a long minute. It’s the first time the two have seen each other since Ace was sixteen, scrappy and angry and trapped on an island that was growing smaller and smaller every day, yearning for the freedom of the seas.
Garp is the one to finally break the silence.
“This isn’t what I wanted for you,” he says. He sounds frustrated, almost angry, and Ace can’t help a bitter smile.
The only tone of parental love he’d known his whole life.
No wonder Pops had to work so hard to convince him: he hadn’t been speaking a language Ace recognized.
Fuck.
I love you too, Gramps.
I’m sorry.
It was always going to be this way, wasn’t it?
“It was never going to go your way, Old Man,” he says instead of any of the rest of it.
“I wanted you and Luffy to become great Navy men!” Garp says, like he didn’t even hear Ace, thumping an angry fist into his knee. “Instead you became sallywags!”
Luffy!
Ace aches for his little brother. Luffy never pays attention. He’ll be adventuring somewhere, free as the wind, and then Ace will be dead. It’s for the best, but it still aches, the thought that he’ll be breaking his promise, that Luffy will be all alone.
Something of it must show in his face, because Gramps sighs, slumps a little, resting his fists on the ground beside his crossed knees.
“Oh yes. I spoke to Luffy about his father. He was surprised to learn he had one.”
Ace glares at the thought of Luffy’s good-for-nothing father. Ace’s may have been the devil incarnate, but at least he’d had the decency to be dead. Dragon just couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about the son he’d fathered and then abandoned.
“Neither Luffy or I care about that,” Ace snapped. “In fact, we’d rather not talk about it. The fact that we both have world-class criminal blood flowing through our veins… there’s no way we could ever have been accepted into the Navy. But… I owe the name Portgas a great debt. I got it from my mother. I’d rather forget about my good-for-nothing father. I don’t owe him anything. I don’t even remember him.”
“That may be, but he has his own reasons for—”
“Give it up, Gramps. Whitebeard is my only father!”
Garp is silent for several long minutes after that. What else is there to say? It’s true, and Ace will never deny it. Only one man on the seas has Ace’s love, his trust, his loyalty, the way Whitebeard does — the love of a son for his father.
Ace thinks he’ll simply leave, after that, and he does stand to go, but… Gramps’ eyes linger, for a long moment, on his left wrist, mostly hidden as it is by the broad cuff of the shackle. There is something like relief in his eyes, and Ace knows what he’s thinking. After all, hadn’t he been thinking much the same?
He still doesn’t want to know, he thinks, the answer to his earlier thoughts, about his — his mother. But maybe he can get an answer for another question.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Ace asks, another question he’d never sought the answer for. If Shanks had been capable of relaying the information to Luffy, there was no way that Garp hadn’t known what Ace’s lack of Compass meant. (What it could mean. What he’d hoped it meant, since he’d heard it was possible; maybe he wasn’t broken, irredeemable. Maybe he’d simply lost his Compass to a devil, rather than being a devil himself, and unworthy, soulless.) The Hero of the Marines would know as well as anyone that those without Compasses had soulmates who had eaten a Devil Fruit, but he’d never said. Ace has never actually wanted to know why, but, well; it is literally his last chance to get an answer. “What it meant?”
Gramps sighs. “You never asked.”
The sound that cracks out of Ace might have been kin to a laugh, somehow. Wasn’t that just fucking typical. No, he hadn’t asked, had he? He’d learned his lesson about asking Gramps questions when he learned he was the son of a devil, that his mother was dead because of him, that as far as his Gramps was concerned the answer to ‘should I be alive’ was ‘maybe’ at best.
“Go away, Gramps,” Ace says, tipping his head back to rest against the wall, refusing to look at him any longer. “I’m not your problem any longer.”
He refuses to respond to anything else Garp has to say, and the return of the darkness when he leaves is a relief against the stinging in his eyes.
At least he's got a cell to himself, a moment of relative peace, before the end.
Much to his surprise, it didn't stay that way, though.
Jinbe at least gets led into the cell rather than dragged in while unconscious, but it is such a shock to see him, as he’s chained to the walls, that it takes Ace until the guards are retreating to gather his wits enough to question his presence here.
"Jinbe," he rasps, throat dry from thirst and disuse. "What—"
"Ace," Jinbe says, voice deep and — that is pain, those bastards have hurt him. They— Why? Jinbe is a Warlord whatever else he is — "I have refused to go to war against the Good Old Man. And so..."
Jinbe spreads his arms slightly, as far as he can, great chains rattling against each other with the movement. Ace tries to process that, poorly, because it simply does not make sense.
"The Marines are— War?” He asks, blankly uncomprehending. “They can't invade the New World, that's— that's stupid ." The Marines are a lot of things, but stupid on that level isn’t normally one of them. The New World tolerates a Marine presence, but they won’t tolerate invasion. Pops might even agree to be in the same hundred mile radius as Kaido and not try to kill him for Wano, if the Marines are stupid enough to charge into the Emperors’ waters in force, rather than continue on in the cautious balance of power they currently maintain.
Jinbe looks at him, gentle and stern at once in the low light.
"Ace," he says, even and steady. "They announced your public execution three days ago."
That was fast, is Ace's first, nearly nonsensical thought. But that still doesn’t make what Jinbe has said make sense. How does that equal—
Ice crawls down his spine, deeper and more vicious than the chill of this hell.
"No," he croaks out, voice breaking. "Jinbe—"
The First Son of the Sea's voice is implacable, for all the sympathy in his eyes.
"Whitebeard has called all of his allies together,” Jinbe says, his voice far too gentle for the news it bears. “They will go to war."
War. The word feels like it echoes in his brain.
Whitebeard will go to war.
The motley, tumbling collection of brothers he has gained on the wildest sea will go to War. War for—
War for him.
"No," Ace shouts, fierce and desperate. "Jinbe, no, they can’t! ”
Jinbe's face actually cracks into something like a smile.
"Ace," he says. "What wouldn't Whitebeard do for one of his children?"
" NO! " Ace screams, and there should be fire, there should be something , some tangible reaction from the world at the sheer force of his denial but— but his fire is cold and dead in his chest and for all his anguish it is not true denial. He knows. He didn't— as soon as Jinbe said it he could see it.
No matter what anyone might dare to say — though not more than once where a Whitebeard can hear them — Pops loves them. He loves them all, improbably knows every single one of the names of his children, the wide family he has collected across the seas. They are his Treasure. He knows their dreams and their wishes, learned it all with the dedication of every good pirate to the thing they treasure the most, of a father for his children, and he will brook no hand to harm them.
Everyone knows that.
It's their greatest strength.
It's about to become their greatest weakness, all because of Ace.
He should have known. He’d known they were going to kill him, he’d known that his stupid mistakes had put him here, but— he should have— he wasn’t just a loner anymore, wasn’t just one of a pair or a trio. He wasn’t even just a captain anymore. He wasn’t the place where the decisions stopped and the consequences rested. He had a captain of his own, but more importantly he had a father; he had someone who would take his burdens as his own, without question, without hesitation.
He’s had people who would die for him before. A few. But never— never so many. Never against such odds.
This isn’t one asshole pirate captain, or giant beasts, or the rabble in the Terminal. This isn’t a rival crew. This is the entire weight and might of the Marines, the strong and vicious military arm of the World Government. They would love absolutely nothing more than an excuse to take out Whitebeard, to rob his Pops of his freedom, to crush his siblings and destroy one of the four pillars of the New World.
And Ace has given them one. He’s baited a trap he didn’t see coming.
They are— Ace hadn’t understood, at first. They are Whitebeards, they are pirates, but they are also hope and protection. Stability. They are a force that protects, that gives the people on the islands they claim an option. Their flag says: you do not have to bow. You never have to bow.
It had taken Deuce, and a few very sharp words, before Ace had even begun to understand. That kind of thing was so far outside his usual experience, his knowledge of the world, that it was almost incomprehensible. You take care of your family, like Dadan does, and everyone outside it doesn’t matter. The same with your crew. They are where your responsibilities and cares end. Everyone is out for themselves and their people. Ace would face down the whole world for his crew, both old and new. But more than that…?
It hadn't been until he was watching Marco, honestly, that he had begun to understand. Wasn’t until he traced the first mate through each island, through check-ins with the locals, and problem solving when presented with issues. Ace had watched him as he worked tirelessly, when they were summoned by a plea for help after a disaster. The Whitebeards are a pirate crew, but they are also … more than that, to the people on their islands. To their people.
And it had been so… novel, the intricate play between the crew and the territories. Far less lawless than he was used to frankly, and occasionally stifling, but… but it was worth it — to always pay for his meals on Whitebeard island, to never cause more rowdiness than the locals expected, to help when asked — for the way that they looked at him.
Complete strangers smiled, when they saw his tattoo, and even if there was still wariness there was no fear , and it was…
He had liked it.
He had known, for the first time in his life, the acceptance of strangers and the safety of people who were both stronger than him and wanted to use that strength to protect him.
It had been so hard, at first, the realization that they were all stronger than him. He couldn’t beat a single one of the Commanders, let alone Whitebeard. His strength had meant nothing, his trials, his power and determination and will , not in the face of theirs. It had been terrifying, when it wasn’t infuriating. He was at their mercy, and mercy had always turned her face from him, every day of his miserable life. It had been harder still, the slow realization that all they wanted to do with that strength was to protect him, to accept that.
But he had, slowly, come to accept it, and he’d grown, and loved them, and then Teach—
His rage had known no end, an ocean of fire, and he’d thought he was stronger, now. Two years of training and fighting and improving. He didn’t need their protection, now. He could once again be that protection. So he’d left. He’d dashed after Teach with no thought and—
And now his family would follow him, straight into War.
Maybe mercy had simply been waiting, to turn her face from him when it would hurt the worst.
~~~~
After Gramps, and then Jinbe, the last thing Ace expects is another visitor; Impel Down isn’t exactly a hot tourist destination.
And yet. The lift doors creek open, and the ruckus tells Ace this isn’t just an unexpected visit from the guards, well before the party advancing through Level Six makes it into view.
The Warden, guards, and a woman, a pirate , one Ace recognizes even without Jinbe’s exclamation.
The Pirate Empress.
Suspicion chills Ace’s spine. There is no good reason for her to be here. There is no connection between them, like Jinbe has, to give her a reason to resist orders.
There is no possible reason she’s here for anything good.
She’s in chains, but the guards aren’t shoving her, don’t even have a hold of her.
She, too, speaks of war, and Ace refuses to give her the satisfaction of a reaction even as the knowledge that they’re calling in all the Warlords, arraying every power they have against his family—
And then she creates a diversion, leans in close to speak as Magellan erupts, and—
Sometimes Ace hates being right.
There’s a weird sort of sick relief, mixed into the stark terror of her news, as the Pirate Empress floats away.
Luffy is here. His stupid, reckless idiot of a brother somehow managed to smuggle himself into Impel Down, a place every sane person does their best to stay far away from. A place that was the next closest thing to impossible to escape from again.
But he is alive. At this moment, he is alive. Teach hasn’t followed through on his threat to hunt him down, Luffy hasn’t faced down the man Ace had so grossly underestimated, or that terrifying fruit.
Luffy is alive.
Ace is going to die, promise broken.
He can only pray, to gods he doesn’t believe in, that he won’t take his little brother with him.