#finamore

Marco swipes at Ace for getting distracted and then gives Thatch a look. “Have you tried trapping it? Stalking it back?”

He doesn’t ask are you sure it’s even there because Thatch knows it has been clawing at Marco’s door as well.

(Deeper gouges, the scent of ash at sunrise, different from the cooling unburning flames of the phoenix.

And Marco hadn’t noticed it with Haki either)

Thatch huffs, flopping further on the crate he’s using as a table. “Yep. Pulled three all-nighters and tried three different types of traps in the galley, and only wound up with paranoia and giving Jim from Third Division a broken toe.”

Marco winces at that, because getting that means you go down to the infirmary, where their medical staff’s age is ten times worse than any injury.

(They seem to have a soft spot for Ace – Thatch doesn’t know if it’s because Ace is stupidly polite to them, or just makes this confused look when they imply they should be the ones to help his injuries.

Ace tends to go to Deuce more often, (something about fire proof bandages?) but still, the soft spot is there. Thatch has used Ace to get out of trouble for kitchen injuries once or twice.)

“Have you tried bait?”

“Yeah.”

“Ambush?”

“That’s what the all-nighters were for.”

“Asking for help?”

“That’s what I’m doing now.”

“How about- “

Before Marco can give another useless bit of information, Ace cuts in. “Have you tried just, hunting it?”

“Observation Haki isn’t working on the thing.” Thatch explains, casting aside the idea.

Ace’s brow furrows, as if Thatch is an idiot. “I never hunted with haki, you don’t need it.” There’s something more to his frown, something sharp peeking out, but Thatch dismisses it.

“Yeah? You want to try then?” Thatch challenges him.

“Sure, it’s been a while.”

And that’s the start of it.

-

Thatch leaves Ace to his hunting, trusting that he’ll get the work done or give up trying, but that doesn’t stop him from curiously observing his new brother.

“Doesn’t that hinder your grip?” Thatch asks, referring to Ace’s right hand.

“Hm?” Ace says from his position at the top of their storage hold’s rafters.

“Your right hand.”

“Oh! Nah, I’m used to it. Say, pass me the turkey?”

“To eat or for bait?”

“Uh. Both?”

Thatch laughs and almost misses the way a part of Ace’s body seems to sink into the rafters. He tries to ignore it, he really does, but he can’t even tell if he saw it in the first place.

What.

Ace notices his stares. “Thatch?” He asks in that concerned voice of his, which sends all sorts of guilt up Thatch’s spine.

“Uh, nothing!” He searches for a new topic. “How’d you lose it, anyway?”

Shit! Not like that! Could be sensitive you dolt!

The ever present watching invisible creature seems to agree in Thatch’s mind.

Ace’s body (which gets all fuzzy, save for the tattoos, when Thatch stares to long, which he associates with the flame-flame fruit) is missing a crucial part.

“My pinky?”

His right pinky is a stub, stretched with scratched scars, like teeth dragging over skin that didn’t sink in on the hand until the base.

(Thatch is growing increasingly concerned as he swears he saw those marks glowing, he did, he did but he can’t say anything, can he? He can’t mention how the pinky stub itself has something dark around it, like a promise, like a curse, can he, without seeming insane and untrusting?)

“Yeah.” Doesn’t seem to be a sensitive subject, because Ace looks down at his missing finger with a grin.

“Just something that happened when I was a kid. Accidents happen when you live where I lived.”

“And where did you live?”

“A bandit den, for a while.”

“What.”

“Then a trash heap, just for a bit. Place was fun, lots of fights.”

“What.”

“Built a treehouse too though we grew out of it.”

“Oh my god.”

“What?” Ace looks confused and it would be funny if it didn’t…

“This explains so much, oh hell.” Thatch rubs a hand over his face. No wonder Ace is half feral, it’s a miracle he learned manners at all. He ignores Ace’s face and changes the subject. He’ll wait till Ace brings it up with the others, then he’ll tease him about it mercilessly.  “You done?”

“Yep! If your little thief is who I think it is this should catch ‘em.” Ace looks proudly at his contraption in the rafters – a bed of blankets with a few slices of meat in a bowl.  “Can’t believe I didn’t know he crept on here the bastard. Should have known anyway.”

“Wait, you know who-” Thatch is interrupted by a deep mrrowh? Coming from his left. He turns, catches a glimpse of Ace smiling, and is greet with the vision of an absolutely monstrous cat.

It looks like a lynx with simply monstrous fangs – but that’s the thing. It only looks like it and the way its eyes are wide and unseeing… well…

“What.” Thatch says as Ace makes a delighted noise.

“Kotatsu you little bastard! There you are! C’mere.” The lynx flies into open arms and suddenly Ace is holding a cat almost twice his size. That’s wearing pants. “Have you been stealing from Thatch?” Kotatsu, as Ace calls him, swipes at Ace’s face, smushing it to the side. A faint burning smell fills the air but Ace appears unconcerned, so Thatch lets it slide in favor of staring at the cat.

Upon noticing, Ace smiles at Thatch and tells him “This is Kotatsu! The Spades’ Cat. I thought he was with Skulls and Banshee on Moby Four, but no, you like stealing my food, don’t you? Bastard.”

Ace shoves his face into Kotatsu’s fur and is almost consumed by the fur that… that doesn’t really look like fur.

In fact, a lot of things don’t look like they are when dealing with the Spades.

“I’ll take care of him, making sure he doesn’t steal anything else.” Ace’s voice is strangely unmuffled as he walks away, Kotatsu in his arms and trap untouched.

Thatch stares dumbly and feels the sense of oddness washing away.

What?

God, he sounds like a broken record.

But now that the mystery of the stolen meat is gone…

A new mystery arises.

How the hell did that cat hide itself?

-

Thatch can’t sleep at night, now that he knows the watching feeling is Ace’s giant pet cat, which is too large to fit in any shadow yet still stalks him.

Something is up with the Spades pirates. All of them.

(It’s in the way Ace laughs or fights or exists on deck. His eyes are never the same color, his teeth a tad too sharp in certain lights, and his tattoos, emblazoned on his shoulder and back by Deuce’s skillful hand, have an unworldly shine to them

It’s in the way there is ash left in his footsteps soot where his fingers grip a tad too tight. Looking at him, directly, it’s like there’s a burning sense to eyes, like Thatch is looking directly at a blinding fire.

It’s in the way Deuce never takes off his mask but his entire face reacts a little too late to what he is saying, like he’s a second behind himself, like he’s a fault mask at work. It’s in the way Banshee lives up to her name and Skull’s skulls are always different but look a little too real for the odd horned shapes they have. It’s in the way everyone gives Finamore a wide berth but he’s less than five feet and the way Saber’s hat has five holes on either side, same as Ace. It’s in the way they all grow blurry when the sun goes down but no one mentions it, and the way Ducky Bree’s eyes aren’t ever exactly eyes.

The crew loves Ace, loves the Spades, for they are brothers and they won’t ever not love them, but they shy off, sometimes, when the dark is a bit too dark for anything normal.)

Thatch is going to find out what, because while the rest of the crew may chalk it up to Grand Line madness (a crew of misfits, the newspapers said) Thatch, and the other commanders, and some of the old hands of the crew who were around in Roger’s reign, know better.

What are you, Ace, really? What’s going on here?

He starts talking to the other Spades more often, trying to find out what’s going on, only to be met with laughter.

(Deuce’s mask shifts when he laughs, as if it’s not used to making that expression. He turns his head to fix it and Thatch swears his face slides forward just a bit, like it’s not even his. Its dark, under there, and it's gone for a second, but Thatch can’t stop staring.

He doesn’t talk to Deuce for a while after that.)

“Thatch,” Mihar says, tipping his hat up. “Be careful, won’t you? There are things you do not want to learn.”

Thatch doesn’t heed the warnings and backs off from Mihar too. But the rest of the Spades? Thatch is going insane.

He can’t explain it, he really can’t, he tries to tell Marco and Izo and everyone but he can’t explain anything beyond “It’s off.” His throat locks up when he tries to speak about Deuce’s face or Finamore’s presence or the way Banshee walks through counters in the kitchen and he thinks he’s going insane.

Kotatsu waits outside his door in the morning, and Thatch see’s agonized faces in his fur.

(Save us, they seem to scream voicelessly in inky black non fur (wasn’t Kotatsu brown?) Save us from this -)

He shuts the door before they can finish, and doesn’t come out till Ace starts making noises at Kotatsu to move.

-

He keeps quiet about it to others aft that, but now Ace seems to have caught on. He smiles at Thatch, baring sharp teeth and pricking him with too sharp fingers. When they slump together at drunken parties Thatch feels the point of something poking into his cheek.  

Ace is Thatch’s beloved little brother but he can be a little shit sometimes. Especially when he takes his giant cat around (which Marco avoids like hell and is the source of Thatch’s amusement if not for the fact that Kotatsu keeps stalking him.) and rides the thing, leaving sharp gouges (in the Adam Wood deck) everywhere he goes like a king on a carriage.

(Thatch is sure the beast grown and shrunk twenty different time since it showed up. He doesn’t know how big it is, truly, only that Ace can ride it and carry it.)

He’s no closer to figuring it out than when he started, just more horrified.

-

As always, Pops has the answer, if in an unconventional way this time.

The sky is dark as the Moby battles in the midst of a hurricane. Some upstart pirate, strangely strong, had taken to attacking the ship.

Pops was impressed at his tenacity at first, then caught him throwing crewmates who objected over board. Then that impressment quickly turned to anger.

Now, in the middle of the storm, Pops was taking no chances to prolong the battle especially with the predictableness of a Grand Line’s storm.

Conqueror’s Haki cut through the air like an executioner’s sword, dropping everyone on the opposing ship dead. Thatch didn’t particularly care what happened to them.

But, for a second, Thatch’s eyes were opened.

(The Veil was gone, raging at a King’s force in which it could not fight.)

There was Ace, fire and volcanic ash in the rain, horned and glowing and made up skin just barely holding together some force. His eyes shone as did his tattoos, red in the light but shifting to blue as he watched. The necklace around his neck was floating wrapping around him with soft power as Ace raged with a sharp tooth grin across the deck.

Next to him, Deuce stood, if that was the word, tall, limbs bent and strange and his face…

Deuce didn’t have a face. Only a smile made of knives.

Hot breath went down Thatch’s neck.

Kotatsu, Thatch knew without seeing, K’oltqevo.

(The name comes in whispers)

He doesn’t look back. Ever.

(The Veil hides what should not be seen and not a soul knows why.

But, occasionally, it is so the world doesn’t fall for what it doesn’t know.)

Lightning strikes and Ace is ‘human’ again but Thatch knows what he saw.

-

He can’t come up with an explanation. He can’t. Thatch tries summoning stuff in the basement only to have Kotatsu land on him, maps out conspiracies, places where the Spades might have turned into this, this whatever it is.

Kotatsu laughs at him in that cat way of his, and Thatch is suddenly very afraid of how often Ace insults the lynx looking thing to his face.

(Little bastard, Ace affectionately says, coaxing Kotatsu to leap at Marco, who is more skittish now because he too saw the truth in that storm, Come on, get em.)

Thatch has gone insane.

-

Whitebeard laughs when Thatch tells him his theories.

“You’re brother,” Whitebeard says, “Is a true son of the sea. Tell me, what sea does your newest brother hail from?”

“The East- Oh.” Thatch remembers now.

His father, the one he was born to, had toured the world with him, but never went to the East.

“Son,” He had said, “The devil lives in that Sea.”

Guess it was literal.

(The whispers now, of Garp and Roger and Ace and Dragon, seem a bit more literal now, a bit more terrifying. Monsters, they were called, demons.

But who could have guessed it went beyond mere power?)

“Could’ve explained that from the start.” Thatch grumbles, though he knows no more now other than that the East Blue is a demon sea.

Whitebeard has a twinkle in his eye, and thinking back to the battle he had with Ace, Thatch wonders if he knew it from the start.

(After all, wouldn’t Whitebeard know better than anyone? Demons attacking you in the night (Ace, tenacious bastard, had attacked at all times) would alert anyone to the truth.)

“Where’s the fun in that?” Whitebeard rumbles. “Treat him kindly. This is his home.”

Thatch squawks. “Of course! He’s my brother!” Pops knows that, he knows, he’s just teasing.

He waves goodnight to his father and avoids Kotatsu’s giant tail in the hallway.

Brothers, we are brothers.