Chapter Text
Ace was two when he got his first scar.
The thing is, he’d never been angry at the way he was raised. For a child that wasn’t supposed to be born, it was more than he should have expected. He knew pretty fast that Dadan’s raising wasn’t normal. He didn’t consider it abusive though, mostly because he probably deserved all the stuff.
He doesn’t remember getting his first scar. From what Dadan told him, he walked into a jutting nail. The house wasn’t baby-proofed.
Marco had scars when he was younger. He ate a devil fruit at seventeen and all of them disappeared - they never appeared again, not a single one. His healing factor was way too strong to give his skin time to scar.
When he was seventeen, all the scars were his. His soulmate either had no scars or was dead. All the soulmate’s scars fade when your soulmate dies, after all.
Marco was twenty-five when he missed a small scar, a white blurred dot on the inside of his feet. It faded out within three years, becoming almost unnoticeable. He still didn’t know it was there.
Ace was four when he started to go everywhere alone. He’d never gone to the town, mostly because people asked too many questions. Where are your parents? What are you doing alone? Are you hungry? Do you go to preschool?
Ace hated people from a very young age.
Scars piled up.
Most of them he outgrew - they faded out before he even met Luffy. They were all still there, pale and striking in the sun. Then, new ones came.
He was seven when his back got slashed by a tiger. It managed to claw into Ace’s back three times before he turned around and kicked it off himself. The wound was deep and the skin on the edge of it was shattered.
Marco was thirty when he noticed the scars.
He never really cared about looks much, he didn’t even have a mirror.
“This one looks nasty,” Vista told him.
The nasty scar was the first one Marco had noticed. It was too vivid too not notice and he would have probably seen it sooner if it wasn’t on his back. There were claws carved between his shoulder blades.
He started paying attention to his body.
Ace was fourteen when he fell down a very tall tree. Falling, his neck tied up in the veins and he could feel a burning stripe where it carved into his skin. There was a pinkish line, thick and red-rimmed, on the base of his neck, above his shoulder blades. After it healed, the scar was still pinkish but also white and dipping into the tissue.
Marco was thirty-seven when one of the most disturbing scars formed on his body.
It was on the back of his neck, mostly, a jagged line, sunken recess. He didn’t notice it until it was striking white and irritated.
When Nancy looked at it, she sat down, hiding her face in her hand. It took her a good couple of minutes before she calmed down.
“You know what it looks like?” she asked, in the end, eyes glassy and jaw tight. “It doesn’t have to be, but it looks like-”
Marco’s breath stuck in his lungs. “Like a hangman’s mark. Unsuccessful one.”
Ace was fifteen when he found out about soulmates.
Not from any of the mountain bandits or Garp but from Makino.
She brought him and Luffy a new batch of clothes the same day Ace kicked Luffy out of crocodile’s way and almost had his feet bitten off. There were angry, still very bloody, fang marks on his ankle. He wasn’t scared when the teeth sank into his skin but when Makino gave him this heartbroken look, he was kind of afraid.
She gave him that smile, that one which always made Ace feel guilty.
“At least your soulmate will know it’s you,” she whispered, her voice filled with the same heartbroken tone.
“What’s a soulmate?”
Ace was sure Makino was going to cry that very moment.
It made sense, he supposed, a lot of things made sense.
How Sabo never wanted to talk about that big scar on his back. It was taking so much space, creating some weird symbol. It also looked as if it was burned into his skin. Ace knew because he had cigarette burns all over his shoulders - the burned-out scars were always raised above the surrounding skin, making rough patterns. He had a couple of others, just as familiar to Ace - stripes made by a leather belt, tiny dots made by glass shreds.
How Luffy always had these tiny spots that looked almost like stains on their beaten up sofa in the treehouse. They were striking white on Luffy’s brown skin, making the weirdest patterns. Luffy had them as long as he could remember, probably already born with them. Ace used to compare them to a starry night, condensed on his chest and back and fading on his face and hands. They were the exact opposite of Ace’s freckles.
It all made sense.
Ace was fifteen and he wore his scars with pride.
He got a lot of stares in town, mostly from concerned adults. During the warmer days, he wore tank tops, shorts, and sandals, showing a very wide collection of scars.
On his back, one could find more scars than actual freckles. Both his knees had been skinned so many times there were actual white patches there and his ankles had bite marks and scratches that formed permanent socks marks.
There was burned tissue on his forearm after that one time his hand came too close to the campfire and there were stretch marks on the skin of his knuckles that stayed there after that one time Ace fell down the cave and carved his way out, bloody hands and all.
He was so excited to meet his soulmate.
Even though Makino looked at him with pleading eyes every time she saw him.
Even though he got so many pity looks from strangers.
Even though they were itchy after sunburns, even though no child had so many scars at his age.
For some time, Ace even thought about writing his soulmate a message. The scar he had on the knuckle of his index finger was made when he had caught the knife on his sleeve and used a little bit too much strength to untie it - the sleeve snagged and the blade made a tiny line. He could carve words into his body and call out to his soulmate.
Then, Luffy asked, “But, Ace, which scars are your soulmate’s?”
Ace was sixteen when he realized all the scars were his.
Ace was sixteen when he started to be ashamed of his scars.
He grew out his hair to cover that ugly line on his neck. He stopped wearing tank tops and started wearing t-shirts. When t-shirts weren’t long enough to cover his scratched elbows and burned forearms, he started wearing long-sleeved shirts. He stopped wearing shorts and exchanged them for cargo pants. He ditched sandals and started wearing combat boots. No matter how hot it was, how sweaty he got, his scars were hidden.
It didn’t change the pitying looks, if anything, it increased them. People remembered how his body looked, at that point, they probably remembered it better than Ace - he tried not to look.
It was stupid. These people didn’t even know that all those scars were Ace’s.
He hated them. All those scars.
Marco was thirty-nine when he counted all the scars.
He asked Izou to do it for him, he lost count a couple of years ago.
“Just the clearly visible ones first,” he told Izou.
It was a very hard process. Izou painted over every scar he has counted to not lose the numbers. Marco was there, sitting just in his underwear, feeling cold every time the pink paint touched his skin.
“It’s sixty-four,” Izou told him in the end.
Four claw marks, twenty three sunken dots, four long, burning slashes, twelve raised dots, two white patches of scratched off skin, seven clear knife marks, three overcrossing scars on his ankle, a line between his toes, six tension marks on his knuckles, three burned lines on his forearm, the hangman’s mark, and one scratch that normally would be under the hairline.
The paint-decorated his skin almost on every part of his body but it was his back and shoulders that screamed.
“Now the ones that have already faded out.”
“I’m sorry, Marco, but-“ Izou crooked out. “Your whole back is going to be pink.”
They counted up to two hundred when Marco decided it was pointless.
Ace was seventeen when he ate a devil fruit. His scars didn’t heal.
Marco was forty when fresh scars stopped appearing. He was afraid.
Ace was seventeen when he met Shanks. It was a very weird experience.
Shanks was the first person that openly showed who his soulmate was. He didn’t have much choice with the funny pattern they both had over their left eyes.
When Ace stared at his face a bit too long, Shanks only smiled.
“The claw marks are mine,” he told him, his voice light-hearted. “I got it from a fella named Marshall D. Teach. I don’t know where Benny got his, it was before we met.”
He was so at ease with it, as if that was the most casual thing in the world.
Ace didn’t comment on that. He didn’t care.
He sat there, surrounded by different sounds, the fire crackling in front of his face.
“Hey, I know someone with the same scar,” Shanks told him.
He looked down at his hands. There was a small scar, very pale on his tan skin, sitting on the side of his knuckle, on his index finger. He had this weird habit of caressing it whenever he was lost in thought.
He glanced at Shanks and said only one word, “No.”
Shanks didn’t insist.
Ace was seventeen when he started wearing fingerless gloves.
Whenever someone asked, he would tell them it was his style.
Marco was forty-two when a new scar appeared. Or rather two of them.
It was a bullet scar - both exit and entrance wounds were on his shoulder, the exit wound big and uneven.
He was afraid.
Ace was nineteen when he woke up on the Moby Dick.
Ace was nineteen when a scarred hand gave him a warm bowl of soup.
There was a knife scratch on the side of his index finger and white veins over his knuckles. It was Marco’s hand.
Ace was wearing gloves.