[ungunned]

pairing: ace/sabo theme: missing (you)

things go missing when sabo needs them, and ace doesn't help him look. he sprawls nearby—headphones clamped over his ears, tracking eyes, socked feet jittering—while the cushions come up and the wardrobe's gutted. sabo's mornings are a flurry; new chalk outlines for his keys, reminders that lead nowhere, and the vague sense that he’s losing his mind.

it’s two weeks after moving together that sabo starts a ledger. he’s got a bad head, one too many hits loose, and memory shares an address with his absent items. wallet bedside drawer, he writes. gloves top shelf, and his lighter, prone to the most migration, living room ashtray. he’s running out of paper by month three, at the same speed he’s running out of patience. 

then things appear where they shouldn't. 

ace’s pockets, turned inside out, were full of harvested buttons sabo doesn’t recall losing. ace’s backpack stayed bloated, and the demi-saison jacket sabo'd been sweating without, swapped for a peacoat at too-hot-degrees, is stuffed inside.

so, you’re nipping my shit, sabo stares down at a fountain pen he’d bought on impulse, used only once and freshly pulled from ace’s weed pouch. sabo would let him have anything he asked for. why are you filching my shit?

ace isn't even using any of it.

the ledger answers before ace does.

seasonal raids, when sabo's work conjured plane tickets on the table where he couldn't misplace them, waiting on a passport. ace hates dragon with gravity, sabo's work too, which smuggled time away from them. they'd video call in starved minutes between sleep and responsibility, ace bitching in his hammer-swung voice, sabo laughing it quiet. his ledger's obsolete. he closes it in time for ace to step out of the shower.

“oi, 'bo—” drawled and lazy. “you seen my razors? m’ scuffed.”

looking up, sabo’s smile pinches, teasing. “no clue.”

ace’s eyes slide to him, fluent suspicion, heat-red. “that right?”

sabo hums. “cross my heart—or yours. one n’ the same.”

the towel's hooked on ace’s hips, where bone hinges and belted muscle cuts inward. it’s a hand towel, if anything, far smaller than his preferred pick. sabo has a good idea of why that is. he takes a final sip of orange juice, staring at the pulp wisps. 

ace keeps glaring, and sabo can’t help the sliced, boyish grin he aims at him. 

“you can use my electric?” sabo trills, and the deadpan makes him laugh. he splays his arms. “search me, baby. might find what you're missing."

[ungunned]

pairing: ace/sabo theme: father's constitution

sabo's guilt has an address, right between the ribs, and ace lives there too. a needling on the left that pangs sharp and fades gradual. the sun's drafting across skin, and the balcony is coffin-narrow. they sit with a pecorino board between them, sweating wax paper, its rind dense with a smear of fig jam and pancetta unneat to match it. across, is the sea—and the sea belongs to luffy now, with its pressed eleven o'clock colour. no name for it in any language they knew.

ace doesn't speak of the sea anymore.

"i thought i'd be happier," he says. "that 'm here to see it."

luffy's era. sabo stares at him and bites through bread. its underside holds the grit of balcony tile. light's pooling in every ridge and white channel along ace's body, reorganised into tight, glossy sheets. ace tunnels his hand and spits out a cherry pit, meets sabo's eyes, gauging. the years had been the least of their ageing. sabo's bite is too small for how long it's taking to swallow.

"i guess i just didn't expect him to look like that," ace drops his shoulders.

"like roger."

mouth pursing, smile thinner than wheat stalk. "never saw the fool 'cept in print. fuck do i know, right?"

sabo doesn't have the heart to tell him roger survives in the mirrors ace avoids. "you don't know him." and judge him too much.

"know enough," the scoff is missing bite. ace is softer in his hurt than his ego; sabo's guilt cramps. he's strong, speaking around the stem in his mouth, wincing with each pulse of phantom pain. spits the thing sideways off the balcony without knotting it. "call me a virgin birth, at this point. got no daddy, if i get the worst who ever did it."

sabo's mind sees outlook's hands. vein-wrought, sliding cutlery across the table. he thinks of calf-skin belts, wet when whipped. whiskey stains, round and drying amber, on wallpaper. his door pulled from its hinges and his mouth bleeding on the inside. "luffy's king. we're alive. he ruined nothing."

ace's blink shutters. "ruined me."

sniffing, sabo dusts his hands and crawls over; wine canister tumbling, bread abandoning the board, settling into his lap decided. crossboned legs are not comfortable to sit in. ace's arms come around him, and sabo mumbles into his mouth. "i owe roger my life." indebted. "without him, that house would've killed me."

sabo's never thought of roger much before this moment. startling, how he existed in sabo's constitution unseen until now. "sooner or later, i would've slipped off corvo with too much intention."

the brush of lashes tells him ace has eyes wide open. sabo's looking at his mouth. "sabo."

"wouldn't be me, without him." he continues. "wouldn't be me, without roger, 'cause i wouldn't have you. who would've saved me from myself, ace?"

"owe my mother, if you wanna owe," the hand on his lower back fists and wrings fabric. "but don't thank her for it." it. their lives are it.

"thank you, rouge." sabo hums, presses into a kiss. "and thank you, roger, since your son won't."

[ungunned]

without flash | sabo + ace | by gunplay (1/3)

(on the worst night of the year, ace stops trying to outrun the calendar. sabo doesn't keep calendars at all).

[ungunned]

no better | sabo + ace | by gunplay

(baltigo has no spirit. sabo has no past. ace has no patience for either).

[ungunned]

pairing: sabo/ace theme: blood liturgies

failure makes men pray; sabo scrubs.

sabo's pulse is in his fingertips and his hands writhe in water. it’s crisp, iron-cool, and the bucket is halfway full, its lip too narrow for the coat he’d forced into it. he scrapes wool against itself until his elbow’s wetter than his face, fabric fuzzing and pilling. the safehouse is no more than smoke, possibly humility. 

the body count is still being tallied. 

he rips at pockets, turns them inside out. cold water pulls protein apart, they’d said. egg and dairy. pig’s blood, too. blood. the water's a vague shade of brown, not brown enough; darker means his coat is cleaner. sabo is the perfect idiot. a dry, furious sob barks out of him. forty hours of insomnia, of tactical crudities and directional errata and maps to nowhere. his men dead in uncomplicated, preventable ways. 

his head fragments in rushing colour and mosaic. the particular ache of shoulders tensed for days. 

sabo jerks his hands from the bucket, presses them over his face. fuck, fuck. a sleeve smacks over the rim, and when he reaches back—violence in motion, maybe if he uses nails, soap scum, the heel of his palm, pulls seams loose until it’s flat fabric—a hand yanks him by the elbow, forcing sabo from a crouch into a seat. 

tipping, the back of his head hits ace’s knees. sabo meets those stern, lidded eyes, and shame bursts in his chest. 

“it’s not gonna come out.”

sabo’s jaw locks. “yeah.”

sighing, ace reaches for his face, kneels until sabo’s head is cushioned on thighs. he eases a thumb into sabo’s mouth, hooks his jaw open and kneads circles into his gums. the finger pulls back, streaked with blood. he massages the hinge of his jaw. “stop clenching. you’re hurting yourself.”

“hardly matters,” brows peaking, sabo’s lip rises over teeth. he sucks the blood off them. “i forgot to die, twice. should’ve tried harder.”

ace smacks his cheek, tender. “people die when they die. not your fault or your decision.”

“stopped you from dying, didn’t i?” sabo’s voice scrapes, pities itself. “once.”

ace leans to knock their inverse noses. his face is stiff architecture: knife-cut jaw, cliff-fall nose, bones in his cheeks. his mouth is soft when it finds the corner of sabo’s. the words move in place. “in another life, you didn’t. i would’ve loved you, still—as they do, now.”

the safehouse is a singed, irresolute black, empty and made to echo. the bucket rings cold when sabo kicks it over, desperate to crawl back into ace. sabo—long-limbed, apollonian, chief like it mattered—reduced to hurtling joints. liturgy on his breath, crooked with failure.

“i’d follow the dust that took you—” sabo crashes into him, teeth on the neck, and ace’s skin streaks red; a goat slaughtered at the throat “—i'd never wash the blood off me. not yours.”