Chapter Text
Among the many things that the Whitebeards would question Ace on, his family is, surprisingly enough, not a very common topic. It isn’t that they won’t ask him, because as Haruta and their complete lack of self-preservation have shown, people absolutely will ask. It’s more that Ace’s family seems to be the most normal part of his childhood – a biological mother lost early in life, too far back for him to remember; a mother-like caretaker; a younger brother whom Ace loves to dote on and brag about (and then regale people with tales of the stupidity of); from what Marco can tell, no father was present during Ace’s childhood (though that’s… not really an odd thing when it comes to people who sought out the Whitebeards to join); and occasionally, he’ll bring up his grandfather to complain about how annoying the old man was.
All in all, a pretty tame family tree, as far as things go. Considering some of the other commanders’ family situations… Marco thinks Ace’s relatives might’ve been the most normal thing about him – though that’s not saying much. It is Ace, after all. Nothing about that human shipwreck is normal.
And as expected, Ace is proving that exact point right now as he and Thatch get into what appears to be a wrestling match over an absurdly large dead fish.
Marco sighs and drags a hand down his face, but honestly, what did he expect? It’s been far too quiet today anyways, something was bound to happen eventually. On a ship with so many siblings like Marco’s, one can’t take two steps without tripping over a veritable disaster.
This disaster is unfortunately getting all over the deck, and it’s all Marco can do to hope that his idiot brothers don’t start another fish brawl. It took them weeks to clean up after the last one, and he swears he can still smell the cinnamon and dead fish in his bedroom even after three months. Getting up from where he was sitting next to Oyaji, Marco walks over to the scene of the latest mess and stands over his bickering brothers, crossing his arms and giving them his best Disappointed Mom face.
(Apparently, his face of mild displeasure has been labelled the Disappointed Mom face by a few of his brothers, much to his confusion. He’s not entirely sure why he’s been designated the ‘mom’ of the ship, but, well… it’s not exactly an inaccurate title. Someone’s got to do it.)
Ace still almost immediately, but as he does, he takes the opportunity to essentially launch Thatch across the deck and away from the upsettingly enormous fish, which he then hides poorly behind his back. “Ah, Marco! Lovely to see you, how’ve you been?”
Marco sighs. “Ace, hand over the fish. We’re not having another pescatarian incident , yoi.”
“That was one time– ” Thatch starts, clambering to his feet and running over to no doubt roll Ace again, but a second later he devolves into spluttering as the fish disappears from Ace’s hands, yanked away by a previously unnoticed Haruta.
“I win the fish fight!” Haruta crows, hugging the fish to their chest like it’s an enormous plush toy from an island carnival. “Marco, what’s my prize?”
“Your prize is to give the fish to me and to not have to deal with it, yoi.” He holds out his hand. “Come on, hand it over.”
“Ugh, fine. Only because Izou hates the smell, and no other reason!”
“Wait, why do you care if Izou hates the smell?” Ace asks, tilting his head. “Can’t you just get rid of it?”
“You don’t get rid of dead fish smell, Ace,” Haruta says slowly. “And Izou won’t let me in to borrow his makeups if I smell like a dead carp.”
“I thought it was an ocean sunfish?”
Thatch gapes. “How do you even know that?”
“Well, it’s definitely not a carp, ‘cause I caught those way too often to not recognize one. Either that, or it’s just a really, really messed up carp.” While Ace talks, the sunfish somehow changes hands from Haruta back to him again. Marco never even saw it happen, but all of a sudden, Ace has the fish again, and as soon as he finishes talking, he bolts, Thatch and Haruta following a minute later.
Marco sighs for the millionth time that morning. Another potential tally to the list of Weird Ace Facts, then: an extensive knowledge of fish… and maybe pickpocketing.
But of course, this isn’t the only time today that Ace’s strangeness is brought up.
oOoOo
“Welcome to our bi-weekly meeting of ‘What the Hell is Wrong With Ace’!” Thatch grins, surveying the gathered gaggle of his brothers. It’s a fairly small group for the obvious reasons of ‘nobody wants Ace to be aware of the ‘What the Hell is Wrong With Ace’ club’, but there are enough of them to gather some highly amusing stories, at the very least. “Haruta, what have you to share?”
“Oh, you’re not gonna believe this,” they start gleefully standing up with a grin. “You know how Ace has some sort of adoptive mother figure and we couldn’t figure out who she was?”
“Yes,” Thatch says, and heads around the room nod with him. “Did you figure it out?”
“Well… kinda? There are two options. It’s either some sweet angel of a barmaid who may or may not be having it on with Akagami no Shanks–”
“Akagami’s fruity as hell and borderline whipped for Mihawk, so probably not.”
“–fair. Well, it’s either her, or… Curly Dadan, the Bandit Queen.”
In less than a second, the room goes quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Izou, who is for some reason at these meetings despite the fact that he claims he isn’t a gossip, is the first to recover his wits.
“Curly Dadan – as in, the one with the worldwide network of bandits?” He asks, though no one answers. Izou just keeps going. “The one who terrorized the World Government for a good two decades before disappearing into literal thin air and never being heard from again? The one who refused to join the Revolutionary Army specifically because she thought ‘Dragon was a little wimp’?”
Haruta nods. “Yep. Her.”
The confirmation looks like it has Izou on the verge of fainting, and a few nakama lean closer in case he tumbles. “Seas-damned Curly Dadan. Ace might have connections to the Bandit Queen.”
Thatch grimaces. “Ohh, that’s gonna be a fun ordeal.” Now would probably be a good time to have Marco on hand, but their collective big brother was currently doing the most important job of all: keeping the 'What the Hell is Wrong With Ace’ club a secret by occupying Ace himself.
“Well, I've actually got something to share as well before poor Izou has an aneurysm,” pipes up one of the men from Jozu’s division, Lindell.
“Izou, you good?” Thatch receives a tentative but confirmatory nod, and he turns back to Lindell. “All right, go ahead.”
Lindell takes a deep breath. “Upon the topic of Ace’s family, I… think we may need to revisit our assumption that his grandfather is normal.” His words stir up a fair cloud of murmurs amongst the other club attendees, but they quickly die down as he opens his mouth to continue. “He was saying earlier that his grandfather apparently left both him and his little brother in a jungle when they were little kids.”
“...how little is ‘little’, exactly?” Asks Wress from Izou’s division, receiving a helpless shrug in response.
One of Thatch’s own chefs, Sabatta, shakes his head. “There’s no way some old man left his grandkids in a jungle. Where would they even find a jungle? I thought Ace grew up in East Blue, not Paradise.”
“That reminds me of the other conversation we had,” Thatch groans. “Nobody’s quite sure what island Ace grew up on, but we all agree that something in his story has got to be an exaggeration, because there’s no way that tigers, bears, and crocodiles all lived on the same island, let alone that an Eastern child would be able to hunt any of them for dinner.”
“He hunted them for dinner?” Comes a horrified whisper, which Thatch is pretty sure originated from Ashley, one of the navigators.
“All right, so obviously we’re gonna need more information on that. Thank you, Lindell – did he say anything else?”
“No, just about being thrown into the jungle. I… think he mentioned something about a bottomless pit too, but then he said that he’d realised it was just a thousand-foot chasm as he’d gotten older.” Lindell looks quite shell-shocked after revealing what he’d heard Ace say, and for good reason. Thousand-foot chasms? What is this kid made of?
Whatever it is, Thatch isn’t sure that he actually wants to know, because it’s quickly becoming possible that Ace is some sort of horror unknown to man (or Fishman, because Namur is equally concerned), and if they figure out his secrets, they’ll never sleep soundly again. Ace is a force to be reckoned with in his own right, but that’s just… as a kid?! How in the hell would a tiny, sweet, little baby Ace have handled something so treacherous and risky? Not to mention that he was apparently protecting his little brother the whole time, whom they know to be three years younger than him–
“Hey…” Thatch says, interrupting his own train of thought. “Why is it that we only know about Ace’s little brother? He’ll ramble and brag about Luffy to anyone that’ll listen, but he’s barely said a word about anyone else in his family. Why would he only talk about his brother and nobody else?”
But just like with every other inexplicable detail they’ve discovered about Ace, nobody has a good enough answer to be accepted as a proper explanation.
oOoOo
Izou is on deck with Ace when it happens.
“So like, could I pull off a dress? Absolutely. But the only reason I wouldn’t is because all of the ones I’ve seen just look so hard to move in.” Ace shrugs. “I had a few skirts as a kid that I’d gotten as gifts, but I think it’s only really the kids who wear short skirts – adults always seem to wear long skirts or jus–”
He freezes, cutting himself off mid-word as he stares off at something on the horizon. Izou tilts his head in confusion, following Ace’s line of sight to see what in the seas he could be so shell-shocked about, but it’s just another Marine ship. They deal with those pretty much every day. What is it about this specific one that’s got Ace acting like this all of a sudden?”
“Ace? What’s wrong?” Izou asks, but Ace is shaking his head before Izou can continue.
“Izou, I need you to do me a favour,” he asks near-silently, voice dropping to a shaky, terrified whisper. “Like, life and death hanging in the balance kind of favour.”
Izou nods immediately, but he’s still completely and utterly baffled. “Of course I’ll do it, but what–”
“I need you to pretend I don't exist and never have and that you’ve never ever heard of me in your life. Just for like… a week? Maybe two?” Ace is looking steadily more and more frazzled and panicked, not breaking eye contact with the ship all the while. “And if you could get Marco, Thatch, and Haruta in on it – maybe Oyaji too? No, that’s too much– but what if he–” Cutting himself off once again, Ace stands abruptly, body tense and fingers twitching like he’s preparing for a fight.
“Ace, what’s going on? Why would I need to falsify your nonexistence?”
“There’s no time. He’s already on his way here. Izou, you cannot let him know I’m here.” Ace’s voice is deadly serious, and a second later, he’s gone.
Completely gone.
Even with his abnormally powerful Observation Haki, Izou senses no signs of Ace’s presence. Just like he said, it’s as if he doesn’t exist and never did in the first place. But… as far as Izou knows, it was his job to teach Ace Observation Haki while Marco taught him Armament, and they hadn’t even had the chance to start the lessons, let alone for Ace to learn how to conceal his presence so completely. That was the sort of thing that could take months to learn, if not years. They’d been planning to start lessons after the passed the next island, since they were going to resupply there, but Izou was sure that Ace didn’t know Haki yet – he’d been completely clueless when Marco had brought it up a few days earlier.
What the hell is going on? Ace shouldn’t know Observation Haki yet, much less have so much skill in concealing his presence, and now he’s panicking over one Marine ship. Something about this whole situation is just downright bizarre, and Izou intends to find out what it is.
He stands, brushing off his kimono before storming over to Marco’s cabin, knocking insistently on the door. A second later, the First Commander opens the door, looking a bit surprised to see Izou acting so intense.
“Izou?” Marco asks, blinking. “What’s going on? Is something wrong, yoi?”
“Do you sense Ace anywhere on this ship?” Izou asks, coming into the room as Marco moves aside as an invitation.
Marco shakes his head. “No, I don't, but I thought that you had the better Observation, yoi. If anyone could sense him, wouldn’t it be you?”
“Apparently not.”
“Wait– you’re not teaching him Observation now, are you? I was under the impression we were waiting until we passed Hikolly Island to teach him, or else I would have started sooner.”
“We are waiting. That’s the problem. Ace saw a Marine ship on the horizon, promptly asked me to please pretend he didn’t exist, and then vanished. I didn’t see where he went, and now I can't sense him anywhere – not inside, not outside, and not even in the ocean. He’s disappeared into thin air.”
“...what the actual hell.”
“Precisely.” Izou sighs, sitting down in one of his brother’s comfortable armchairs as he presses his fingers to his temple in exasperation. “On the one hand, I would like to inform Thatch of this, but on the other, I seem to be developing a very sudden and pointed headache.”
It’s Marco's turn to sigh at that. “I’ll go retrieve him, yoi. Wait here – do you want anything for your head?” Such a good big brother he is, making sure that Izou’s Ace-induced headache isn’t too miserable.
“A painkiller would be greatly appreciated… and perhaps some of the strongest alcohol we have. Absinthe may do.”
“I’ll get you some aspirin and ask Thatch to make ganmodoki, yoi.”
“Acceptable.”