hi uh prompt: kid marco and kid asl meeting? i lov ur writing
“You don’t like Roger,” Marco whispers, watching the oldest of the boys who had helped him out closely. “Did he, you said he died, did he do something?”
“He was a pirate. Isn’t that bad enough?”
Marco hums, resting his chin on his arms, trying to remember all the lessons that Pops had taught him, “Pirate doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It means our money is dirty and that we’re dangerous, but we don’t have to be bad. Pops said that doing bad things and being bad were two different things. I forgot your name.”
“It’s Ace,” he answers, ignoring the not too quiet whispers of his brothers as they pretended to sleep. “You’re from the past right?”
“What’s he like then? Roger?”
“Rude, he’s always coming to fight pops and he has the stupidest cabin boys. Buggy’s not too bad, but Shanks is stupid.”
“He’s,” Marco pauses, thoughtful for a moment. “He was always happy, Luffy reminds me of him. He wasn’t stupid, but sometimes things went over his head. We, me and the other cabin boys, we would watch him and Pops when they were pretending to fight and really drinking.”
“Pops was mad at him in the end. Before I came here,” Marco’s hands shake as he remembers the horror on Toki’s face as she caught Marco in her Devil’s fruit with the marines attacking them, the way that Pops had shouted for him. “Roger, I mean. He wanted an heir, but he was dying.”
“Dying?” Ace repeats back to him.
Marco nods, “It was bad, he’d been sick for a long time. People were trying to help him, but it wasn’t getting better, only worse. He decided he wanted to have a family before he died. Don’t know how he could find someone who would like him. Did he have one?”
“Roger turned himself into the marines with rumors of a child spreading far and wide. The island they most suspected was in West Blue. They killed every pregnant woman who couldn’t account for the father or new born who looked close to him.”
The silence hurts, the idea that Roger died had been there for weeks, but the idea that the marines killed all those people for no reason hurts the same way that it had when Sabo had told him what year it was. How Whitebeard was still feared, but so old and close to death.
“Did, he had a friend on Baterilla. She, she kicked pops’ ass more then once because he was rude about letting the ladies fight. Rouge? Portgas D Rouge, I think, did she?”
“My mom,” Ace answers shortly, because he had been very quick to explain that he was an orphan. It wasn’t hard to guess what happened to Portgas D Rouge from there.
Marco closes his eyes and tries to breathe through the tears burning his eyes, “I want to go back home.”
Ace shifts, offering Marco one of his hands, “I’m sorry.”
“We’ll help you find him,” Luffy promises, eyes wide and glittering in the dark. “Can’t we?”
“Well, it’s not like gramps will let us keep him.”
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