Boy With a Scar

Chapter 1. Homecoming

Chapter rewritten on August 23, 2020, betaed by The Patient One.

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It was a beautiful day.

Mt. Colubo trees were ancient, timeless as their limbs seemingly grew all the way up to the sky, branches reaching up, grasping at thin air towards the sun. Occasional openings in their crowns allowed plenty of light to filter through and cast a warm luminescence over the ground.

All sorts of sprouts and medleys of flowers claimed sunlit spots in between roots; gnarled, twisted things that dipped into and out of the soil, wrinkled with age, yet their roughness had been worn down by the soft greenness of moss that had slowly made them home.

A cacophony of wild sounds added life to the forest and filled it with constant ambient. Birds twittered, chirping and trilling in various melodies. Small rodents scampered through the foliage, though it was drowned out by the greater beasts prowling and bellowing in the distance. The wind blew through the forest, rustling the leaves in the gentle breeze and bringing a salty taste of the ocean with it.

Exceptionally nice day.

Ace's lip curled up into a snarl and he punched the training dummy.

Rage soared inside with all the power of a wildfire, ready to ignite anything that he came in contact with. Every gust of wind, every cheery bird, the baby blue sky, and the sun itself—destroy all of it. Because Ace was alone with no one to share the beauty of this day.

Four years. It had been four years since Sabo died, Luffy disappeared, and the injustice of this world came crashing down on his head.

Blood hummed in his veins as anger took over, an untapped hatred boiling in his stomach. Pain blazed up Ace's arm as his fist connected with its target.

It was his fault. All of it!

He should have stopped Sabo from leaving, he should have never agreed to work for that bastard, he should have run from Bluejam, he should have tried to return home faster after the fire, he should have—

The wood creaked and splintered under his knuckles.

—done something!

Ace roared, an amalgamation of grief and rage and helplessness, and plowed the dummy clean off its support and into the far tree.

Sabo died. Murdered by someone so powerful that they could kill a child in front of thousands and go unpunished. No amount of denials or broken dummies could change that. Even now Ace still grieved his brother's death, but at least he knew what happened with him.

Luffy's disappearance was different. Ace woke up every morning with the harrowing knowledge that his little brother might still be somewhere out there, maybe dead, maybe alive. No one knew.

Voices, dark and unwelcome, sometimes whispered into his ear that Luffy was living a happy life now, away from him, that the little rubber ball of energy didn't need him anymore and was better without him. Other times, same voices, enraged and desperate, hissed at the back of his mind, spreading guilt like acid through his veins, conjuring millions of scenarios of what could have befallen his brother, each one worse than the last.

But Ace tried. Even now he still went to the Grey Terminal and Goa Kingdom almost every day to search for clues. Four years, numerous sleepless nights, thousands of conversations, missing person flyers, breaking into various offices for the smallest hints of information, and the only thing Ace could find was the straw hat in the heaps of trash. Luffy's straw hat. The thing that the boy seemed to treasure the most, the thing he always carried with him—abandoned, forsaken.