Chapter 5: An Unfamiliar Smile
‘You’re positive you want me to tell her the truth, Sabo?’
‘I am absolutely positive, Ace’, Sabo swore. ‘She might hit you, so brace yourself for that.’
They had returned to the hotel room— a place Ace did dimly remember being in as his hazy consciousness had swam in and out interfering with Sabo’s— and Koala had been quiet, unusually quiet according to Sabo, as the two of them made their way through the streets. Now that they’d arrived, she wore a strange and too-tight smile as she bustled about the cramped and dingy room and tidied it up.
Nerves, the answer came. Whenever Koala was incredibly nervous about something she tended to start slipping back into ‘old habits’ long broken. All the while she stole glances at him, worst case scenarios almost visibly flickering past her eyes.
“So this must be a real doozy of an explanation if you had to get us out of public for it, dear.” she started as she folded the sheets on the bed.
“Oh it’s a doozy alright, I’m afraid.” Ace flashed her his best apologetic smile, wondering if it looked anything like Sabo’s as he sat down heavily on the bed.
‘On your face? Nothing like mine. On my face… I don’t know.’
‘Touche’.
Maybe that was why Sabo was so insistent about telling her. He didn’t think Ace could pull off impersonating him. Admittedly, it was kind of a fucked up idea to try to impersonate him to his— girlfriend? partner?
‘She’s my. Well. We’re together, anyway.’
Koala’s large eyes narrowed very slightly, seeming to stare right at his smile. Maybe it wasn’t as convincingly ‘Sabo’ as it could be. In fact, her expression grew a little more confused, breaking through that weird smile that hadn’t quite left her face.
She paced, slowly moving around the room as she set the folded sheet down on the end of the bed without breaking eye contact.
“I have some worries about where this might be going, Sabo.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay now I’m kind of curious where you think it’s going.”
He felt Sabo inside him seized with the sudden fear that she was thinking that he wanted to leave her.
Koala reached up and grabbed the ends of her own hair, nervously tugging at the strands.
“You’ve been acting like someone else ever since you got your memory back,” she started. He noticed her break eye contact, her large and long lashed blue eyes flicking down as the fake smile completely evaporated off her face.
The room felt increasingly cold and the silence after the statement hung in the air like the still of the grave as she paced slowly back and forth.
“Which makes sense in a way. You’re remembering how you were before you lost your memory. Adjustments to be expected. I mean— you’re likely putting your whole life back in perspective. People you knew,connections, what’s important to you and what isn’t…”
She walked over to lean near the window, looking through the slats of the blinds at the street outside. “But during this whole investigation you’ve been acting like everything was new, even if you keep telling me you haven’t forgotten anything.”
Ace stayed quiet, listening as she spoke, resting his hands in his lap. In Sabo’s lap.
‘She’s really perceptive.’
‘I know. It’s one of the amazing things about her. Do you see why we can’t hide it from her?’
‘Yeah but, she’s going to freak out’.
‘Ace, you and I are both freaking out. We’ll freak out together’.
There was a thick feeling caught in his throat, heart thumping as he felt the depth of trust that Sabo had for Koala. The way he relied on her. It was a bond built and forged over many years. He realized with a start that Sabo had known her longer than he’d known him.
‘That doesn’t mean she’s more important!’ Sabo rushed to assure him. ‘But she is important.’
“So what’s the deal, Sabo?” Koala asked slowly, her eyes closed and her head against the glass of the window. “There’s more to this than just memory adjustment…we’ve been together for years, haven’t we? You can trust me with this. If there’s something wrong, or a gap in the memories, or— new priorities— just tell me and we’ll figure it out. I trust you, we trust each other…even if you are a reckless moron.”
“Guess that hasn’t changed for either of us,” Ace murmured under his breath. Reckless moron— that really summed up all three of the brothers, didn’t it? he took a deep breath. “I know I can trust you, Koala— because Sabo trusts you.”
Because Sabo trusts you.
Koala’s wide eyes had snapped back open at that, turning the full intensity of her stare at the man on their bed. It was an odd thing to say, wasn’t it?
Because Sabo trusts you.
As if he wasn’t sitting right there. As if there really was a stranger in his body, behind all those odd expressions and quirks of memory. As if there really was a stranger who woke up beside her from a nightmare in their couple’s bed… who used different phrases and smiled different smiles.
At first she wasn’t sure where this was going— her expectation was simple. Sabo had more holes in his memory than he wanted to admit, or maybe some of those old memories were far more important than the here and now that he built in the Revolutionary Army. Secondary memories, given secondary brainpower. Gaps in the memory where it otherwise didn’t make sense.
But that one phrase threw her off completely. “…because Sabo trusts me.”
“You remember the dream? About Ace?” He looked at her with those big, dark eyes. Those eyes that seemed to have something just subtly different about them.
He’d told her about two dreams involving Ace. One that very morning— about being there when Ace had died. And before, the day he’d awoken from his three days asleep and remembered the life he’d lived before.
“I remember. You had a couple about him…two, if I remember correctly. Two dreams about your brother.”
Her eyes met his. Her chest felt tight, like every breath was through a soaked cloth. She wasn’t sure what drove her exactly to ask, her arms crossing under her chest.
“…you are Sabo, aren’t you? My boyfriend, Sabo? My partner?”
He held out his hands, palms up in a reassuring gesture. “Don’t worry, Sabo’s still here. He’s with me but— I’m not Sabo. I’m Ace.”
He smiled that apologetic smile again, the one that was utterly unlike anything she’d seen on Sabo’s face.
That wasn’t Sabo’s smile— but it did bring something to mind. Some distant piece connecting against all odds, a newspaper article and an infamous pirate’s smile on his wanted poster. A smile currently written across Sabo’s face in an uncanny mirror.
“….Ace. Fire Fist Ace.” She said slowly. “…Sabo’s brother, and the focus of that whole horrible war in Marineford.”
“Sabo said you’d figure it out right away, and we had to tell you.” There was a chuckle under his breath and he looked up at her with the kind of mischievous look you’d get from a boy you’d caught in the cookie jar.
“Well he was fucking right, you know!” Her head was spinning. She felt faint even as she pushed herself off the window to jab her finger at him with wide eyes and a frown. “If it wasn’t such an impossibility I’d have put a name to it within the DAY. You woke up murmuring Sabo’s name, you forgot to answer to it a few times!”
The world wasn’t a pleasant place— it was a place of mystery and wonder, but mostly in the service of tragedy. As a slave, as a pirate, and as a revolutionary agent, Koala had seen all manner of strangeness over the years.
Even as the answer kept nagging at her— ‘he’s not himself’ ‘he’s like someone else’, ‘he doesn’t answer to his name’ ‘he forgot what his own face looks like’ ‘he probably forgot you , his touch is hesitant and he’s looking at you with fresh eyes’ ‘who is this man in my bed?’ ‘why did he forget how to act like an infiltration agent?’
Every nagging question came to the same impossible answer. Iis that really Sabo? It seems like someone else’. But a dead man in her boyfriend’s body was—
It was impossible. If ghosts existed, Koala would have met them. She’d begged to see them enough for it, yet she’d never gotten anything like an answer.
He held his hands up again. “In my defense, I didn’t even know it was happening. Didn’t know why I was– we were– so confused all the time until today. Sabo wants to promise you, it’s really not that we were hiding this. It snuck up.”
“It snuck up,” Koala repeated as her lips drew a little tighter. She wasn’t angry at him…them??? Even if her voice raised and her body language grew guarded and tense, she wasn’t angry.
She was confused, scared, unsure. Feeling unsure was the same as feeling vulnerable. Vulnerability made the old scar on her back ache.
She pressed her hand to her face. “Sabo’s in there? With you. His brother, who somehow appeared in his body like a ghost.”
“He’s here,” Ace(?) reassured her. “We’re uh. We’re both a little frustrated and confused why he can’t seem to like, uh, connect with the body right now? It happened when we were on the stake out.”
“Good to know it didn’t happen while you were watching me change,” Koala said dryly, leaning in to jab her finger against the tip of his nose, albeit gently. “He really can’t connect with the body. Meaning it’s been you since…we were tracking Petterman….”
Her face slowly passed from vaguely warm to a full blown bloom of heat.
“A—Ace, this is all a little hard to believe, even if my own inklings kept yelling something similar…” she trailed off as her voice started to shake. “But…if you really aren’t Sabo, and you’ve really just gotten full control of…the body? The body…during the investigation…”
He put a hand on her shoulder, gripping it firmly in a way probably meant to be reassuring. If it had been Sabo, it would have been reassuring. But it was some stranger staring back at her through Sabo’s eyes.
Or else Sabo had lost his mind.
Either possibility held complications. Lots, and lots of complications.
Her breath picked up in her chest, her heart pounding out of control as the room swam in front of her. She tried looking into Sabo…Ace’s…eyes, only to find the light of some man she’d never met flickering deep within them.
She could feel his hand squeeze her shoulder distantly as she squeaked out “I kissed you on the lips! After you …we…I mean, you said I was a beast and…”
“I mean. It would have been rude not to kiss you, right?” He turned red too, rubbing the back of his neck. “And Sabo’s here and all— sorry though.”
“I kissed Sabo’s brother. The famous pirate Ace,” Koala murmured dizzilly. “Should I … I mean a slap isn’t really the right response here, I kissed him, not the other way around. And Sabo’s theoretically in there—”
She looked down at him with a shaky smile “Well this is a tad awkward if we’re not all just going crazy, huh? But don’t worry! No need to be sorry about the kiss, I’m sorry!”
“He did say you might hit me so you can go on and do it if you think that would help,” Ace offered. “Sabo’s pretty sure he’s going crazy. Sorry about that too… I know I’m an interloper here— I don’t even know what happened. One minute I was dying and then…”
He trailed off with an intense, distant look in his eyes that had stopped meeting hers.
“I swear I’m not that violent!” Koala protested with a puff of her cheeks, still, for good measure she pinched his cheek. Like she was trying to wake him up from the dream she felt like she was just a part of.
Only she didn’t vanish, and the three— three? Three of them still stood in stillness of the hotel room as she sank down next to him. “One minute you were dying and the next you saw Sabo reaching out to you, right? Like in the dream.”
She pressed her hand to her face. “…I…I..wow. Okay. So Ace. It’s not your fault, if this is real or not, so don’t go calling yourself an interloper or I really will slap you.”
He fussed with the hems of Sabo’s gloves and chuckled, not pulling away at all from the sharp pinch she’d given him. “Sabo said the same thing, so I’ll try not to call myself that again. But yeah… that’s right. I felt like Sabo was there with me and after that everything was fuzzy and strange. Until today when it all snapped into focus.”
“In the marketplace when you hit the ground, right?” She asked carefully. “Before that it was just brief moments when you woke up, or…or those times you were acting strange. You were ‘fuzzy’ all that time.”
Her fingers let go of his cheek and dropped to her lap, twisting the fabric of her shirt around her fingers. This was so odd, so confusingly odd. Both options loomed before her— a true case of possession or her beloved partner’s sanity finally snapping in two. And she really had no idea which it was.
If this really was Ace— Ace the stranger, Ace the man who felt like an interloper— Ace, Sabo’s beloved and recently remembered brother then she’d simply have to get used to his presence, right? Get to know him. Offer her support.
Be there for him and for Sabo.
But even as she thought that, and felt the resolve to not let them down, she felt her body shaking. All she wanted in the world at that moment was a hug, and for the ends of her hair to be tugged.
“It must be scary,” she said quietly, “especially being dropped into a room with a stranger.”
“I mean. There are a lot scarier things,” he replied, equally quietly. “At least I have my brother here. You— Sabo and I are worrying you probably feel really alone right now…”
Koala dropped her rumpled hem and ran her hand through her hair, tugging gently on it as she sighed.
She should lie, say she’s fine and that everything was going to be fine. That was the responsible thing to do. Offer unconditional, smiling support– she wanted to support him, them, whatever— in whatever was going on.
She nodded once. “Little bit. More than a little bit.”
“Is it okay if we give you a hug?” he asked quietly. He looked at her from under Sabo’s bangs which had fallen tousled in front of his face. “Sabo said you’d probably want one. I understand if it’s too weird though. But— I could kind of use a hug, too…”
Koala sniffed quietly, finally turning to glance at him with a lopsided and shaky smile “I think I’d like a hug very much, Ace.”
Her fingers were still wound in the locks of her hair, and she knew her expression wasn’t the firm source of strength and resolve she hoped it’d be.
But she meant it genuinely. Even if he really wasn’t Sabo. Even if somehow the memory—or the spirit— of Ace had taken residence inside him.
She wanted to find the way for it all to work out. “I think we could both use one very much,” she murmured as she opened her arms. “Please.”
He nodded firmly and leaned into her, wrapping his arms around her. They were lean, strong, familiar arms, and the smell of him as he hugged her was familiar too. She didn’t know whether she was imagining things, but it felt different, just the same. As though he put his arms in a slightly different position than Sabo usually did, or hugged her with a slightly different level of force.
“Thanks, Koala. I promise, I’m not planning to steal Sabo. I want to give him back.”
Koala wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him tight, letting her cheek rest against the familiar space of his shoulder as she took a soft breath, shaking slightly.
“Thanks, Ace. I know you’re not trying to steal him or…or any of that. I can tell you’re not that kind of person. I’ve got a good sense of people.” She squeezed him tighter with a quiet hiccup. “But you’re here too, I’ll have to adjust, and continue doing what I can to support you both, even if you’re new to me.”
He rubbed her back with his warm, gloved hand and leaned into her. “I don’t really have the words to say how much I appreciate that, you know? This is… it’s really confusing, even if I’m glad I’m here. I don’t want to make things hard for Sabo and you.”
He made a face, squinting one eye and grimacing. “Sabo says you should smack me for saying that.”
She reached up, even if the angle was a little awkward, and delivered a sharp slap across his cheek.
“Tell him I’ve delivered it. Geeze. For a big bad pirate you sure seem to have a low opinion of yourself.” She looked up at him with a little pout. “I bet it’s very confusing, and very scary. I know Sabo’s glad you’re here, and I may not know you but— but if this is a spiritual thing or a mental thing, or whatever? I think it’s wonderful that people can persist beyond death and I’m glad you’re here too. Sabo and I…we’re…we’re gonna be okay. But I want to make sure we’re ALL okay.”
He chuckled roughly and leaned on her, taking the little slap with grace. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not feeling like much of a big, bad pirate right now. I’ll do anything you and Sabo need me to, to figure this thing out.”
She laughed with him, her hand falling back on his shoulder as it turned into a quiet sigh. “I’ll forgive you. I…” she bit her lip. “We’ll have to figure out the mystery of all this at some point. And we’ll have to get you accustomed to our mission and Sabo’s body. But …well..”
“Yeah I haven’t had my hands on Sabo’s body in a long time,” he chuckled. Some of the sheer tense awkwardness had gone out of him now, and he seemed more like he had been before she’d called him out— while they were on the mission. Teasing, and friendly. “Not that we ever got this close before. But anyway— you have some thoughts?”
Koala sputtered for a moment, before she lightly thumped his chest with her fist. Honestly, that friendly and teasing air was vastly preferable to the self-deprecating and awkward heaviness that had permeated the room.
Ace was a mystery to her, a face in a paper and a shadow in Sabo’s past. Was this how he really was? Playful, teasing, casual in ways Sabo rarely was?
“Yes. Something pressing that we’ll sadly have to manage between the mission.” She sighed sharply, shaking her head. “Nothing for it, sadly you dropped in right in the middle of a critical operation that I can’t deal with failing. Not when the Human Auction House is a personal grudge. So we’ll multitask.”
“Honestly, that suits me a lot better. I go a little stir-crazy with nothing physical to do.” He chuckled again, smiling broadly. It was an unfamiliar kind of smile on Sabo’s face, hitched just differently enough to call attention to it. “Beating up slavers is something I’m good at, at least.”
Koala’s smile grew a little wider.
“Oooh, Then I think we’ll get along, Ace. Beating up slavers is one of my favorite activities.” She prodded his chest “Which is good, because the first order of business if you’re going to be around, which it seems you very much are, is for us to get to know one another.”
She leaned back enough to offer her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Koala. Yes, like the animal. No, I don’t have any other name anymore. Just Koala.”
He took her hand and shook it firmly. “It’s nice to meet you, Koala. I’m Ace. Sabo’s brother. I have— probably too many names, let’s stick with Ace.”
“It’s a nice name, a fun name” she chirped with a broadening of her genuine smile. She gave his hand a squeeze. “Sadly I missed out on most of Sabo’s fun brother stories until the last week or so. So I’m looking forward to getting to know you!”
She huffed, puffing her cheeks like a pufferfish “just a warning, though! I’m a very physical woman!”
“I’m looking forward to getting to know you too, Koala. Sabo seems to really adore you.” His broad grin flashed again. “Don’t worry, I’m pretty physical too.”
Koala’s face flushed brightly “he does, doesn’t he? Well. the feeling’s mutual.”
Already, the world was still a whole lot weirder, sure, but she was already feeling more at ease.
Just like she’d said when this conversation started. They’d just have to work it out together, even if there were more of them than she initially thought!
“Good, though. That’ll make getting to know one another go far, far more smoothly.” She leaned over with a grin .”Especially since you’ve already seen me in my underthings.”
He laughed, sitting up and rubbing the back of his neck self-effacingly. “Well… I mean I guess that’s true, isn’t it? Oops?”
“Oops.” She crossed her arms with an amused huff. “Let’s call that incentive for getting to know one another. We’ll make that whole thing less awkward with hindsight.”