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"You're awake."
His words are muddled by a trick of the wind, but Robin recognizes the voice almost immediately. Turning from her seat on the foremast to see the deck below, her eye catches on the yawning movement of a hatch to her left, her shipmate's shadow beginning to wedge itself into the lamplight with an incongruous air of caution. Plain sight confirms her suspicions, finding a source in the bright-eyed young man whose reaching hand now begs the question of her own. "C'mon down from there." He says, wiggling his fingers for emphasis. "Current's nasty tonight. It'd be a shame if you fell into the ocean after all the hard work you've done, huh?"
She smiles cordially, taking the hand in her own and stepping carefully down from her perch. "Good evening to you too, Sabo-kun." Then, a little more thoughtfully: "Although it could hardly be considered evening anymore, I suppose."
The sky is darker than she's seen in weeks; yesterday was a new moon all together, and so tonight there's only the tiniest sliver of white left hanging up above, not adding much of anything to visibility. The light of the city they'd left behind earlier that day has long since disappeared over the thin horizon, and she can barely tell the black of the water below from that of the sky above.
"Robin." Sabo turns, suddenly, to look her in the face. It's unnerving. She's still not used to people looking at her like that (or looking at her at all, really). But Sabo is Luffy's brother through and through, and he seems to pay as little mind to social graces as the rest of his crew—or her's, for that matter.
"Are you having trouble sleeping?" He asks. Just like that. She almost envies the ease with which he meddles in the business of near strangers; he seems so at peace in this dark, shoulder to shoulder with a trained assassin who he's known for less than a month. The question has an implacable undercurrent to it, murmured so it shifts without settling and leaves her feeling more than a little overexposed.
Robin has no response, so she does not give him one.
He seems to pay it little mind, though, opting instead to fill in his own blanks. "I can't sleep either. I never can, the first night after we set sail again. There's always something on mind, y'know? Especially these days. Everything is so different now." He admits.
Sensing the open pause in his rambling, she acquiesces. "It is…strange, I suppose. To be away from him for so long, after everything." There's no need to clarify the him to which she is referring—wherever Luffy is mentioned, they are of one mind.
"Yeah." Sabo closes his eyes. "It always is."
It's easy to intuit what he means, all things considered, but Robin is less than enthused about prying into the marrow of their mutual heartache. Besides, she never even knew Ace—her pain is more or less vicarious, but his remains an open wound. There is nothing she can do.
Right?
Still, to keep silent at this point would be decidedly unkind. While she's at least marginally familiar the etiquette for dealing with situations such as these, she's pretty rusty in the people skills department (not that she has any need for such things, back home), and her ability to empathize has always left something to be desired.
"Would you…like to talk about it?" She finally ventures, with no small amount of dread.
Sabo blinks back at her, shock clear on his face. Obviously, he is equally ill-prepared for whatever turn their conversation seems to have taken. Swallowing the worst of his disquiet, he hesitates. "I don't know if…I mean, I haven't seen him since we were kids, and…and." He clears his throat, brow furrowed in the thick of regret. Such a countenance is more suited to a confused child, really—although, she thinks, perhaps the difference is not so great. "I couldn't say anything without putting them in danger. Either of them. I never even…it's just, I always thought there'd be more time…"
"You had no reason to believe otherwise." Robin levels, her uncertainty taking refuge in logic, casting off her fears. But in the pause that follows, alien feelings thought dead by fire resurrect against her better sense, crippling as the memory-dreams of her youth. It is not the images of loss that haunt her now—not since her homecoming from Enies Lobby—but she is weary of the inevitable pain they bring.
She doesn't turn, doesn't even spare him a glance, eyes fixed stubbornly on the tangled stars above them. "It's okay to grieve, Sabo-kun." It seems like a silly thing to say, all things considered, but she knows the way that guilt pervades across miles, and how it infects the light of day from the silence of night. You owe it to yourself… "I know that you loved him, too."
(Sabo covers his face, but he's not crying.)
"I also know," She continues, passive gaze flickering over the occlusive coil of his mouth, the space between his hands, "that he would never blame you for any of this, even if he knew the truth."
He shakes his head, all rattled-guts and guilty pleas. It's not as though he wants to be at fault, but any attempts to convince himself otherwise have only ever left him feeling irresponsible and more ashamed than he'd been before. How the hell is he supposed to man up and face the music when everyone else is only hearing silence?
"You don't get it. I wasn't even there, not for either of them. And besides, how could you know—"
"—Because he's my captain." Robin replies simply, firmly, like it should answer all of his questions.
And.
Maybe it does.
Sabo bows his head. "Robin…" He breaths, but when he opens his mouth again to speak he finds only that same silence, the conspicuous absence of whatever music awaits his condemnation. The sound of her voice, of the way she'd said my captain, it all makes him feel like he's taken a blow to the windpipe from Koala's busōshoku uppercut. He's running on empty, now.
Ever since this woman had come aboard his ship, he had been struck endlessly with the sensations of being both closer to and further from his brother than he'd ever felt since their separation; had, in equal parts, avoided her and sought her out, as though she were the cause and cure for every wicked thought he'd had. He knows next to nothing about her, and yet his feelings have already become so dichotomized. Still, he hadn't even considered that any of it would come to a head like this, that she would have the gall to confront him on such things—
But she is Luffy's crewmate, Luffy's nakama, and he shouldn't have expected anything less. He owes them both that much.
So he stays beside her, picking the stars apart. They pass the hours like that, in spans of silence and sound, in the company of asterisms whose names he doesn't think to ask. Instead, it's her with the questions, and him with the answers. All this talk doesn't make it stop hurting, really, but the memories lend him strength, and the strength gives him hope. For what, he doesn't know just yet, but it's worth taking a chance on. That's what Ace would've wanted, too.
"That kind of man…who was he, exactly?"
(The man: not the son, not the brother, not the legend, not the pirate.)
He tells her.