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Sabo’s been sitting in the same spot for almost thirty hours.
By this point, the Heart Pirates have stopped trying to offer him a bed of his own, or even a chair, though they do still aim pitying glances in his direction when they think he won’t notice. It’s fine. Or- it’s not important, anyway. Nothing is important right now, other than the two heart monitors steadily beeping, and the pair of patients they’re connected to.
He doesn’t need a nap. Thirty hours is nothing. He’s been awake longer than that, after all. He’s been awake since a scream tore him out of a three-day coma, seventy hours entirely too long, and threw himself into finding two boys who vanished off a battlefield, who couldn’t be anything other than alive and waiting for him somewhere. They just couldn't.
(Koala tried to make him hold still for a doctor’s examination. A dozen and more subordinates did what they could to keep him from leaving Baltigo. Dragon simply took one look at his face, and told Sabo to take as long as he needed.)
His brothers are going to have matching burn scars on their chests. Bigger versions of the one that’s marked Sabo’s face for a full decade now. Maybe that’s what they should be called now, the ‘Burn’ Brothers.
...or maybe that’s too morbid. He’ll workshop it. Perhaps try to go with a sun-based angle rather than strictly fire-related. His mind is full of sunshine smiles, now, chasing away grim scowls like they’re nothing more than pesky clouds. Memories that took ten years too long to return to him, and only thanks to that footage, that damn snail footage-
There’s an inhale.
Deeper than usual.
Sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed occupied by his brothers, where he’s been perched for the past thirty hours, Sabo leans ever so slightly forward.
It’s Ace.
Of course it’s Ace.
Always the first to rise, slapping or kicking to wake up two other boys and fuss about getting a move on, so they could hunt some breakfast and get on with their day.
(The one who tried, who tried, to put himself in-between their little brother and a fatal blow, only to get there just a second too slow-)
Ace takes another deep breath, his brows scrunching together, before one eyelid warily eases upward.
Sabo doesn’t breathe at all.
“...hh,” Ace hums, second eye also easing open, so he can squint in Sabo’s direction. “‘M- M’I de’d?”
Silently, Sabo shakes his head.
“Oh,” his brother sighs. “S’rry.” Again. He shakes his head again, harder, more in disbelief than anything else. But Ace keeps going, “‘M s’rry, S’bo, y’gotta- gotta- be ‘lone, lil’ more.”
Oh.
Oh, Ace.
Smiling in an attempt to keep from bursting out into loud, ugly sobs, Sabo tips his head meaningfully towards the other body lying in the extra-wide medical berth. Ace’s hand twitches- finds Luff’s fingers- grabs and holds on tight.
There’s nothing worse than being alone.
They both know it. They both remember, now, that wobbly little voice, and the tiny boy who insisted he’d do anything to have someone stay in his life, and maybe they weren’t brothers yet at that point but that was where it started.
(Sabo would rather have gone another ten years unable to find his brothers than for Ace to have left Luffy alone.)
“M’ss you,” Ace whispers, his eyes squeezing shut again, “M’ss you so much, ‘Bo, m’sorry-” and whatever else he might have said is choked out by wet gasps.
He’s still healing. Still being pumped full of painkillers, to dull the agony of the patched hole in his chest. And that’s just fine- Sabo can wait. Sabo can sit here, ready and waiting for his brother, both his brothers to wake up, lucid, able to understand the person perched at the end of their bed isn’t a specter of death, haunting them from beyond the grave.
Thirty hours, forty, fifty - whatever it takes.
Sabo will be ready.