Chapter Text
[“Apocalyptic Road Trip Gang” Group Chat]
IZOU - I’m done driving. Everyone still alive?
DEUCE - We’re going to try to get a bit farther before stopping for the night.
LAW - Still alive yoi. We found a few bikes and made it to the edge of the city, hopefully it’ll be safer when we reach less populated areas.
HARUTA - alive, had to pull over, gonna keep going for a bit
LAW - Don’t push yourself too far yoi, if you overdo it right away you’ll fall behind later.
HARUTA - whatever mom
HARUTA - hey 2ce didnt you mention a guy with three swords the other day? Bc i just saw a guy with three swords LOL
DEUCE - Yeah, and green hair, and he had no idea where he was going.
HARUTA - scar over his left eye?!
DEUCE - Yeah??? But we’re literally hundreds of miles away, there’s no way he got there this fast.
HARUTA - and a reindeer?!?!
DEUCE - wtf no
DEUCE - no reindeer
PERONA <3 - ASDFGHJK
PERONA <3 - HANG ON
PERONA <3 - [img]
PERONA <3 - YOU SAW THIS IDIOT???
HARUTA - yep thats the guy
DEUCE - I think that’s the same person
DEUCE - Hang on that makes no sense. Like at all.
PERONA <3 - THAT’S MY DUMBASS BROTHER
LAW - I could’ve sworn I saw him earlier today though.
LAW - yep im sure we saw him too
DEUCE - HOW would he get from where you are to where Haruta is in one day on foot?
PERONA <3 - Zoro’s stupidity defies all logic. I’d ask where you saw him but he’s definitely somewhere else by now.
PERONA <3 - if someone else sees him though PLEASE kidnap him, it’s for his own good <3
HARUTA - ok lol i hope he likes cats
PERONA <3 - he did once knock my favorite mug over while making direct eye contact with me >:(((
LAW - We have to go yoi. Stay safe.
HARUTA - see ya
DEUCE - Good night, I’ll tell Ace you all say hi.
IZOU - Good night
……
Deuce knew from experience that he and Ace could act like they hated each other’s guts for up to six days and four hours before they both gave in and admitted to themselves and each other that their friendship was worth more than their stubborn pride. He also knew, and suspected Ace knew as well, that the reason a spat started was rarely, if ever, the same reason it lasted. One of their first arguments began when Ace stole Deuce’s snacks—but it was the same week as Deuce’s first ever set of med school midterms and he was convinced one of his professors arbitrarily hated him enough to flunk him out of sheer spite, and Ace was still homesick for the Newgates and his old brother Luffy and a lifetime of stealing snacks from people as a love language, and they were both too wrapped up in their own worries to bother being the bigger person until they both got tired of feeling small.
So Deuce didn’t take it personally that Ace wasn’t talking to him. A zombie apocalypse wasn’t a good time for bickering, but they were both wearing down in every way. Luffy’s unexpected reappearance had delighted Ace, but he’d lost contact almost immediately after, and that seemed to be grating on Ace’s nerves worse than if he hadn’t heard from his little brother at all. The flamethrower seemed to cheer him up, but it was running low on fuel. On top of that, their food supply was limited and dwindling rapidly.
Yeah, it was not a good week.
Deuce also knew from experience that Ace would deal with his issues when he was ready to and not a moment sooner, so he devoted his focus to keeping them both alive.
Unfortunately, that was much easier said than done.
Which explained why they were currently perched on a rickety fire escape three stories above a mob of undead. The good news was that they’d gotten there on a retractable ladder, which they proceeded to retract, meaning the zombies had no way of getting to them. The bad news was that they had no way of getting away from the zombies. There were at least three dozen undead staggering into each other, heads tipped back to lock vacant eyes on their prey. Deuce might’ve made a joke about them being more task-oriented than Ace was most days if he wasn’t convinced they were about to die.
Ace swore as he changed fuel tanks on the flamethrower. “It’s almost out of juice.”
“You could throw an empty tank at them,” Deuce said through gritted teeth, if only to keep himself from breaking into a rant about how impractical a weapon it was.
“Great, let’s just throw things at them, I’m sure that’ll work,” Ace shot back, fumbling the empty tank. It landed on the fire escape, rattling their sanctuary.
Deuce clung to the railing, but the rust buckling under his grip was anything but assuring. He didn’t know much about fighting; he’d taken Ace’s old baseball bat as a weapon but didn’t know how to use it beyond swing and hope. He could patch an injury, but that wouldn’t matter if they died first, just like how much fuel Ace had didn’t matter if it didn’t get them out of this. For the first time in years, he wondered if his old family was okay, if maybe they were worried about him. He’d never know. He hadn’t ever planned on going back, but it was odd realizing the option was officially gone forever.
He was catastrophizing a bit. He knew that. Knowing that didn’t help.
He looked up. He’d always liked the stars, and he could see more of them than ever with the city’s electricity slowly giving up. It was almost nice. You know, if he ignored everything else. Like the scratch on his glasses that he would never be able to get fixed now. Like the very limited options they had. Like the only safe direction, up, being one that would leave them cornered in a different way. Like how much harder it would be to fight zombies in the dark. Like this building, a convention center he’d had to go to for extra credit for the class with the teacher who hated him that had caused him way more stress than it was worth; he’d seen her there and hidden in the snack room, cursing himself for not knowing what he was doing.
Huh. Snack room.
Deuce grabbed Ace’s shoulder. “Let’s wait it out here for the night.”
Ace looked to the higher levels. A touch of fear had cut through the frustration in his eyes. “What then? We’ll have nowhere to go if they don’t leave.”
“There might be snacks.”
“Okay, let’s go.” Just like that, Ace was taking the stairs two at a time, his determination renewed by the promise of food. Deuce dragged himself after, the hope of rest dulling his adrenaline.
Two floors up from where they’d started, Ace smashed a window in with the empty fuel tank and they hopped through, first Ace and then Deuce.
And Ace immediately grabbed his arm and pulled him into a sprint away from their second horde of zombies that night.
“I thought Mar said they couldn’t do stairs,” Ace yelled as he released Deuce’s arm to vault over a table.
Deuce slid under the table and ducked around a pillar fast enough that one of the quicker zombies giving chase slammed into it and collapsed. He figured that if a single zombie had managed to get to the fifth floor while it was crowded with people, everyone could’ve been infected while they were already this high up. He didn’t want to waste breath saying so, though, so he focused on running faster. He wasn’t a fighter, but if he ran fast enough it wouldn’t matter.
The familiar click-fwoosh! of the flamethrower behind him told him that Ace had other ideas.
He slapped Ace’s arm to jostle his finger away from the trigger and dragged him along. “Buildings are flammable!”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Um—” Technically no, but he scanned the room and his memory trying to come up with one, and— “There’s a skyway on the fourth floor!”
They bolted, dodging purpling fingers scrambling for purchase on any part of them they could reach. The zombies were slow, but they had the advantage of numbers. Their bodies were a mass that might as well be a moving, living wall. But Ace and Deuce skirted the edge and made it to the door; it had been glass-paned before being smashed to bits, but at least now they didn’t have to bother opening it, jumping through the gap instead. Deuce chanced a glance behind him as they veered for the stairs; the zombies pressed against the broken door, tripped over the bottom of the frame, piled over each other in their mindless pursuit of fresh meat.
He and Ace were in a wide atrium, a large gap in each level allowing the skylight to shine all the way down to the first story. Across the opening, he could make out the entrance to the skyway—free of zombies, though the path to get there wasn’t. But it was far better than what they’d come from, just a handful scattered here and there, and they hadn’t even noticed the pair yet. They ran for the stairs. Ace slid down the banister.
Deuce took the stairs a few too many at a time and landed on the side of his ankle at the bottom.
He didn’t feel it as pain so much as oh, that’s not how my foot was supposed to land. His foot rolled and he stumbled and righted himself and kept going. It didn’t hurt yet. He knew it would later when the adrenaline wore off. If they were alive in the morning, he wouldn’t be able to get far on foot.
But they had to stay alive that long first.
Ace tracked him and stayed close, eyes blown wide in alarm. Deuce just nodded and got his bat ready. Three zombies were in their path, and one had noticed them.
Deuce lunged ahead of Ace and whacked the first one in the head. The skull crunched and caved in with a spurt of brain matter. The corpse collapsed.
Ace took the next one out with the empty tank, swinging it so hard it flew from his hands through the corpse’s spine away into the middle of the atrium, hitting the ground floor with a deafening clang that didn’t muffle Ace’s string of colorful curses. He hoisted his flamethrower and fired at the last zombie in their way.
Click-fffmp.
There were no flames left to throw.
The zombie swatted at the flamethrower’s nozzle. Ace stumbled to the side, caught off-guard and unable to counter-balance the weight shift in time.
Deuce slammed the bat over the zombie’s head before it got any closer to his friend.
Ace lifted the flamethrower and set off running again, Deuce hot on his heels. There were a couple other zombies scattered on the fourth floor of the atrium, some of them starting to wander towards them, but they just ran. The entrance was close, so close—
And then the double-doors of cracked glass were right there in front of them.
Ace shouldered the doors open and Deuce dove through after him. Ace looked around for a moment, cursed again, and set the flamethrower in front of the door like some odd combination of a memorial and a barricade, not that the splintering glass would hold up against an onslaught of undead. Then they were off at a run again. They had to put more distance between them and the mobs of zombies in the convention center.
“I think there’s a hotel up ahead,” Deuce called to Ace between breaths.
Ace’s bared teeth flared into a grin. “Should have a parking garage,” he called back. “I bet someone left their keys.”
Deuce had been hoping more for a secure room with a bed and a shower and snacks that no one was left to charge them for, but better transportation to Loguetown was good too. When the skyway branched off, with the left path leading to the parking garage and the right path to the hotel, Deuce didn’t have the energy to protest when Ace led them to the left.
He was just starting to wonder how, exactly, Ace planned on finding a car he could steal without setting off an alarm when they both stopped short at the sound of scraping. Or, Ace stopped short and Deuce ran into his back and they both stumbled into the ground.
Deuce didn’t realize he’d lost his grip on the baseball bat until he heard it clatter to the ground. When he told his hands to retrieve it, told his legs to stand up again, none of his limbs would move. He could only watch Ace pick the bat up, could only dimly take note of the blood smearing on the handle beneath his hands, could only sit on his hands and knees as his ankle finally began throbbing.
He’d gotten as far as he could manage. It was all down to luck now, and his luck was shit.
The scraping had stopped, replaced by footsteps. Crisp footsteps, but that didn’t promise safety. Something was alive enough to move and it was approaching them and he couldn’t do anything about it. Ace staggered to his feet. The bat trembled in his white-knuckled grip.
And then a man with long, spidery limbs and terrific afro rounded the corner and held up both hands in a gesture half-greeting and half-I’m-harmless, the latter of which was somewhat lost between the blood splatters on his cane. “Hello there,” he said. “Lovely, I was hoping to find someone alive.”
Ace hefted the bat. “Why, what do you want?”
“Well—ah, this is awkward. My band was supposed to be touring, we had the van all ready to go and venues booked and everything, but now the band is just me and the van has broken down and I’m afraid the audience isn’t particularly… alive anymore.”
Ace lowered the bat half an inch. “So…?”
The man spread his hands in something like a shrug. “I was hoping for some mechanical advice, or possibly an audience, or, failing that, some better company than the walking dead I’ve been avoiding for days now.”
The bat sank another inch. “Okay, say I’m a car mechanic. Hypothetically. Why should I help you? What’s in it for us?”
“I don’t have anywhere to be, so if you do I could give you a ride.”
“Just like that?”
“It’s not like I can get far like this. Besides, I really would appreciate the company. It’s just my goldfish and I, I’m afraid.” The man sighed, face creasing into a frown. “I can’t lie, I’m a performer at heart. We had Sabaody Park Stadium sold out, but now our dream concert will never be. All I really want now is someone to share my music with.”
Deuce could almost laugh at the look on Ace’s face, an incredulous bewildered delight starting to sink in through the deep-set suspicion. “What kind of music?” he finally asked.
The man laughed. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Soul King Brook!” His smile was all teeth, but it wasn’t frightening; he looked more like a fairytale grandpa who would leave sweets and coins in your pocket and whisper spellbinding stories in your ear.
Ace shrugged and looked to Deuce, who mustered a shrug of his own. He had no objections to soul music, but he knew Ace wasn’t just looking to him for confirmation of musical taste (not just because they’d already had enough debates about which rock group was actually the greatest of all time to know the other’s preferences). He ran calculations in his head and could see Ace doing the same. Speed at the price of trust. Strangers, dangers, Deuce’s twisted ankle, Ace’s out-of-touch brothers, both their dying phones. He nodded.
Ace fully lowered the bat. “Okay. Brook, yeah?”
“Oh yeah!”
“I’m Ace, this is Deuce. We’re heading in the direction of Sabaody too. And I am a car mechanic. Not just hypothetically.” He smiled. Or, he turned his grimace into a very nearly convincing smile, but it was a valiant effort and Deuce could give credit where it was due; all he could muster was a wave.
Brook grinned widely at them both. “Well, Ace and Deuce, welcome aboard! Come along, I’ll show you to the van!”
“Thanks.” Ace held a hand down to help Deuce up.
Deuce took it, stood, and nearly fell over again the moment he put any weight on his ankle. He hissed through his teeth. His eyes squeezed shut of their own accord, like if he could hold everything of himself inside then the bad would go away, like a kid closing his eyes to pretend he was in the dark of his own free will. It didn’t work. It never had. All he could do was keep his balance and wait for the spike of pain to fade.
It took a bit too long after the moment had passed to realize Ace was clinging to him. He pulled away just enough for Ace to notice and mostly release him from his vice grip. It wasn’t like Ace was the only thing keeping him upright, for all Ace seemed to think so. At least he hoped not.
“It’s not far,” Brook assured them.
It felt far. It wasn’t, but it felt like it. Deuce could manage it (though Ace still seemed to disagree), but each step reminded him that if they hadn’t run into Brook, he’d be as good as dead. Maybe even now he was a lost cause; maybe Ace couldn’t fix whatever was wrong with the van, or Brook was actually luring them into a trap with a good-natured facade.
The van was impossible to miss with its bold colors and enormous SOUL KING logo. It was gaudy enough that the hood being popped open was the last thing he noticed, not to mention the thing was huge. Deuce couldn’t decide if it was awesome or hideous. He didn’t really care, though, as long as it was zombie-free.
Ace leaned the baseball bat against the side of the van when he got there, reaching towards the engine.
Deuce caught his hand. It was bleeding, and his arm was scraped up too, probably from body-slamming a cracked glass door in short sleeves. Idiot.
Ace frowned at his unspoken question. “It’s not that bad.”
“Do you want to risk getting infected?” Because it wasn’t just classic infections he was worried about. This bizarre zombie plague was a big unknown, but it was transmittable through biting, so it was safe to assume that any infected matter getting into an open wound would spell the end. With how much splattering was involved with zombie-killing, leaving a cut untreated was a death sentence. He couldn’t help but feel slightly vindicated by his thought process—see, the conflict-avoidant med student is worth something in a zombie apocalypse after all.
Ace was wavering, though. He glanced between Deuce and Brook and the engine.
Deuce rolled his eyes and tugged Ace away from the van. “C’mon. Let me help you.”
Ace hesitated a bit longer. Deuce tapped his backpack to indicate his first aid kit, but he wasn’t just talking about the cut and they both knew it. Even if they hadn’t known each other so well, it was hard to miss how uncharacteristically quickly Ace had decided to trust a stranger, how worried he’d gotten the moment he noticed something was wrong. Ace was Ace, though, and it would still come down to whether or not he was willing to acknowledge it.
But Ace relented and sat down.
“I’ll keep an eye out for trouble,” Brook said, excusing himself to the other side of the truck. Deuce was grateful for the illusion of privacy. He sat and dug into his backpack for his kit.
“How’s your ankle?” Ace asked, finally breaking the hesitant silence.
“I’ll live. Think you can get the van working?”
“I won’t know until I look at it, duh.”
“You’re not doing that until I bandage your arm. Who knows what’s in there?”
“I do, smartass. It’s just an engine.” Ace was looking anywhere but at him.
Deuce pulled Ace’s sliced hand towards him with more force than strictly necessary and set to work cleaning it. Neither of them spoke for a long time, and Deuce didn’t plan to break the stalemate first. He could be stubborn too, and he wasn’t feeling charitable enough to give Ace an easy opening.
But.
He was tired.
“Thatch is tough, I’m sure he and Luffy are fine.” Granted, Deuce had only met the chef once, but he carried himself with an infectious confidence that Deuce couldn’t help but trust.
Ace twitched. “I—look, I know that, it’s just—that’s not what I’m worried about.”
Deuce gave Ace a Look. Quit stalling and talk.
He sighed. “Fine, I feel like a shit brother because I probably made Luffy cry in what could be our last conversation if I don’t get home alive. Happy?”
“And what would your brothers say if they heard you talking about yourself like that?”
Ace rolled his eyes. “Point taken, whatever.” He stopped talking again, but he seemed to be deep in thought, so Deuce didn’t argue the point even though he suspected it was not, in fact, taken.
After another long moment, though, Ace spoke again. “I told you about Sabo, right?”
Deuce blinked.
He wasn’t expecting that. To be honest, he hadn’t expected Ace to bring it up at all. The one time he’d heard about Ace’s long lost brother, they’d both been high as fuck. Ace had said out of nowhere, “I miss Sabo,” and rambled for a bit about his group home days before saying “fuck, man, I hope he’s not dead, but how should I know?” and Deuce replied with something along the lines of “that’s rough buddy” because what the heck was he supposed to say about that? And that was the one and only time Ace had mentioned Sabo. Except for right now.
Deuce settled on replying with, “Yeah, a little. One of your brothers from foster care, right?”
Ace nodded. “Him and Luffy, yeah. And I told you I was going to go back to Loguetown soon anyway to meet Luffy, right? Because he’s finally aged out of the system, he can go wherever he wants. We knew we wouldn’t have a reliable way of staying in touch if we ever got separated, so the three of us promised to meet on Loguetown Island the month after Luffy’s eighteenth birthday. And we did get separated, and Luffy and I are going to Loguetown, but…” He gestured vaguely.
“I can’t fill in the blanks here, Ace,” Deuce said, as gently as he could manage, though he probably just sounded tired. He started bandaging Ace’s hand.
“I don’t know what happened.” When Ace started speaking again, it was like a confession. “His birth parents came for him, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. He didn’t want to leave. Luffy begged me to go after him, but I always refused, it just wasn’t realistic. But then there…” Ace’s voice faded. He shook himself off. “There was a fire,” he finally said. “Their whole town. Luffy was convinced that Sabo got away, and that we’ll get to Loguetown and he’ll be there waiting for us, but—shit, I don’t know. I don’t want him to put all his hope in something that might not even—” He paused to breathe. “We were texting about seeing each other again and I said as much and… he got upset. He was always such a crybaby,” Ace almost laughed, suspiciously watery. “And Thatch’s phone died. So if I don’t make it back to see him, he could be down two brothers and the last conversation I had with him was that.”
“Well shit.” Deuce hadn’t meant for that to slip out. He was so damn tired. The cracked, gasoline-smelling, suspiciously stained asphalt of the parking garage was looking awfully cozy. “But you’ve said Luffy forgives easily, right? I’m sure he wouldn’t hold it against you or anything.” There, that was better. A-plus friendship advice moment, he could totally do this.
Ace chuckled again. “Yeah, he forgave me right away, the little idiot. I just… it’s stupid, he forgave me. I’ll see him soon anyway, it’ll be fine.”
Deuce looked up at Ace as he finished bandaging his arm. He didn’t look convinced. “Maybe…” He shook his head like it would chase away the brain fog. He hadn’t meant to say anything, he hadn’t fully formed the idea yet. “Maybe you could text Thatch what you actually want him to hear from you. The two of them will beat us to Loguetown, so Thatch can charge his phone and Luffy will see it before you even get there.”
Ace gave him a sharp look. “I thought I was supposed to save battery.”
“Like it’ll last the trip anyway.”
Ace turned a shade of red. “It’s not that bad,” he muttered.
“What’s it at now?”
“I pleaded the fifth.”
“That was this morning, and that only applies when you’ve been arrested.”
“Smartass.”
“Bastard.”
“Prick.”
The teasing had lost its cutting edge, and Deuce felt his mouth tug into a smile. There, that was closer to normal.
“Let’s not do the heart-to-heart thing again for a while,” Ace said, clearing his throat and standing up like he could pretend nothing had happened.
“Sure, just don’t have an emotional crisis again for a while.”
“Fuck you.”
“Whatever, go do the car mechanic thing.”
Ace gave a long-suffering sigh, but watched him with genuine concern out of the corner of his eye even as he searched his backpack for the few tools he’d been able to bring. “Be careful, okay?”
Deuce looked up from probing his ankle. “I told you, I’ll live.”
“You’d better.”
“Ace.”
“Hm?”
“We’re going to make it.” Deuce put all the conviction he had into those five words. It was more than he thought he’d find in himself.
Ace nodded. His face cracked into something like his usual smile. “Yeah,” he said. “We will.”
……
[ACE to THATCH]
ACE - Hi Luffy, I know you won’t get this for a little while but I wanted to make sure I tell you how much I love you. Like your hope and optimism and believing in everything, I only push back because I don’t want you to be disappointed. I can’t wait to see you and the rest of the family again. I love you so much.