Does your name hold any special meaning to you?
♠ interview the muse | anonymous
And what would this name be? Ace? Portgas? Gol? No, not that - in Ace’s mind, the third option did not even exist.
As for the remainder options, yes, both given name and surname held a special meaning to Ace. Part of this significance had to do with his other name - D. - as it was said those branded with it were believers of some sort. What Ace knew about his middle name he’d learnt from two elder men, Old Gramps and Pops himself, as he did not dedicate much time thinking of prophecies and mysteries alike.
That would have been quite a question to bring forth an lay upon Ace’s table, about whether he trusted in prophecies and sayings of old; ask him to expose his thoughts in the non-palpable things of the world and those of the spiritual realm. While it would be untrue to say he’d never cared for such things in his twenty years of life, it would also taste a lie to say Ace cared nothing about them, even if a big part of the image he showed was that of a carefree man?
How could he not care when his entire life ahd been and remained to be about questioning what was beyond the visible? How much power could a bloodline hold? How sin could an infant carry, if it did carry a bit at all? Oh, but he did…! But to what point and how exactly could he free himself from it? What made a man ‘good’? What value did the word hold in this world?
Yes, those were things Ace thought about. Perhaps not in the course of brotherly merrymaking or when carrying his father’s benevolent work, but in moments of loneliness and internal distress he would. It was a shallow and pointless exercise, riddles that would never be answered. Yet, Ace asked the same questions every day, lest he die before he even tried. While death could be regarded with passivity by he who had always expected it, there was no excuse for sheer inertia. At least anger made life move on.
Those were, however, moral and philosophical questions any other soul could think about. Of the mysticism around the name of D., Ace cared not. Whatever it was it was and he’d chase his dreams and goals all the same, who gave a shit about what someone had once written in stone History knew how long ago?
“My name, you ask? Yes, it does” And believing Nonny was asking him not about his surname - his mother’s name - but his given one, Ace proceeded.
Names had meanings. Therefore, Ace’s name had to have one. He knew it was the name of a playing card - after all, had he not been captain of the Spade Pirates? - just like he knew it carried other interpretations in informal talk while the card itself was used for more elevated readings. Of those he could not speak by either knowledge or experience, but he’d seen fortune tellers make a playing deck the instrument of their trade.
Perhaps Ace had originally been a male name before the card appeared, meaning something grand like “king” or another something quite distant from it, like the name of the droppings for a specific species of bird. Or the card had come first and some person with a gambling fixation had decided it was nice enough for their son.
Why had Rouge named him ‘Ace’ anyway and not ‘Johnny’ or ‘Zack’?
Alas, she was not here to answer the question and Ace had little patience to visit a library and look up name meanings. As far as he was concerned, ‘Ace’ was special not because of its definition, but because of what it was.
“It’s not much… but it’s mine” His name. His very own and his alone, not Roger’s, not even Rouge’s. It could not be sold, traded or shared. It could not be erased. “No one can take it from me”
Other pirates could take his belongings. The Government might one day take his head and do with it and they willed. Two things Ace knew for sure - he would die with his boots on and holding his name in his possession. Maybe that was not much for a man to keep, for a soul to take to the afterlife, if it existed...
But to a boy turned man with little estate and who had done naught but to prove himself he had a right to exist, something as personal and non-transferable as a name meant a whole lot.
Ace was Ace. He was his own person. And in his name he reminded himself of that.
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