Work Text:
Luffy remembers the day he learned what the colorful little marks on his arms meant. He remembers chasing his brothers down the mountain, all of them shrieking like the barmy gibbons in the trees, and he remembers how he thought his heart was going to burst from all his laughter.
They came rambling out of the woods like a friendly pack of feral dogs, and Makino smiled widely from where she stood waiting outside Dadan’s hut. She tried to come visit at least once a week, to make sure their clothes still fit and they were getting enough to eat and other boring grown-up stuff.
Luffy ran right to her, with a billion new things to tell her about since the last time. Sabo picked his way behind him a little more slowly. Ace reluctantly brought up the rear, and stayed well out of arms’ reach. He always watched her hands very closely when they came near Luffy, like he was waiting for them to stop being gentle.
On this particular day, Makino made a soft, gasping noise, and grabbed Luffy’s arm carefully. Ace didn’t like that. He surged a step closer, all bristly like the jungle cats would get when a meal or a nap was interrupted, and said, “What’s your problem?”
“When did this happen?” she asked softly, turning Luffy’s arm over so the underside was facing the sky.
She must have meant the funny little mark that Sabo gave him, since it was the only thing there. Luffy explained that he didn’t know when it showed up, but it was probably around the same time that Ace’s mark did. When Makino just stared at him, he offered his other arm up as well, pleased to show it off.
They weren’t very big but they were bright and they curled like little licking flames. They were a perfect mirror of each other, in the same place on both of Luffy’s arms. Ace’s was a warm red-orange color, and Sabo’s was cool blue.
He knew, really really deep down, where you just knew things, that they belonged to his brothers. And he knew that Sabo had the red-orange mark on his right arm, but the one on the left was bold, sunny yellow—and that was Luffy’s! Luffy gave that little smudge to him! Ace, too!
Ace guarded his colors jealously, even from Garp and Dadan. In the hot summer months when he went without sleeves, Ace would wrap his arms up before they went into the kingdom or even the Gray Terminal. If people got nosy about the wrappings on his arms, he beat them to a pulp.
He didn’t mind Luffy or Sabo seeing them, but they were the usual exceptions to his fits of temper anyway.
Makino seemed bewildered by them in a way she usually wasn’t. She sat back on her heels and studied Luffy like he was something brand new and strange.
“These are soulmarks,” she told him. “They’re very special.”
“Of course they are,” Luffy said plainly. “They’re mine.”
Later on, he would learn that there was a lot of fables and fisherman’s tales about soulmates. People talked like they were fantastical things, right up there with merpeople and dragons. Makino did her best, as flustered as she was, to explain what made them so important, but Luffy had more pressing things to think about!
It was just so sunny and windy and perfect outside, and Ace promised they could go down to their secret part of the beach until it got dark, and they had cake waiting back at the treehouse—a fancy layer cake that Sabo stole from somewhere, with honey and cream and bananas! Luffy was so excited for all of it that he could barely sit still.
Every day is magical when you’re a child. Every hour you spend with your best friends is special and important. The moment the universe decided that Sabo and Ace and Luffy belonged to each other came and went without ceremony, slipping right past them like those tiny quicksilver fish that lived in the river, there and gone in the blink of an eye.
“How stupid,” Ace grumbled on the way back up Mt Colubo that night. His olive skin was blotchy from all the sun, and his hair was salty and starched, and the necklace Luffy made for him, with a length of twine and a pointy spiral shell, swung against his collarbones with every step. He was still prickly about what Makino had said, even hours later. “Grown-ups are dumb enough to believe anything.”
“But it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?” Sabo interjected. “Some big cosmic force declaring we belong together?”
“We already belonged together,” Ace said harshly. “I don’t need a bunch of stars to tell me who my family is. You’d be my brother even if you never left a dumb blue thumbprint on my arm.”
Sabo laughed. “Luffy, too?”
Luffy was nearly dead to the world by then, face pressed into the back of Sabo’s shoulder, arms looped around his neck. He tired out halfway up the mountain, and his brothers made a bunch of exasperated noises and called him names, but they picked him up and carried him anyway.
Even though the sun had gone down and the jungle loomed around them, dark and dangerous and wild, it never occurred to him to be afraid. He was still just awake enough to hear Ace scoff and mutter, “Yeah, I’m stuck with that little brat, too,” and it made him smile so big his cheeks hurt.
He kept smiling until the night-time noises and Sabo’s steady steps lulled him the rest of the way to sleep.
Luffy’s philosophy is essentially just the kinder parts of his brothers’ conflicting ideals smushed into one; he doesn’t need the stars telling him what to do, but it’s nice of them to think of him.
When he leaves Dawn Island, he has a red-orange mark on one arm, and an ash-gray mark on the other. Sabo’s color faded the day he died. Luffy misses it more than everything else he left behind put together—the treehouse, Makino’s bar, the funny gibbons he grew up with, everything. It’s strange that it’s been gray longer than it had a chance to be blue.
It hurts to look at sometimes, but only sometimes. Luffy isn’t a baby anymore. He wears the gray as proudly as he wears the orange, unflinching and unashamed, no matter how many sad or strange looks strangers may give him when they see.
Meeting Zoro is like meeting another part of himself that’s been wandering around a different part of the world this whole time. They understand each other, and they both have big, amazing dreams that other people call impossible, and they both have a soulmate who died.
When it’s just the two of them, in the dark of Merry’s belly with nakama snoring on all sides, or sprawled across on the sunny deck while everyone else is still in the galley, Zoro will talk about her sometimes. She was the person he wanted to beat, and the person he wanted to be, and one day he woke up and she just wasn’t in the world anymore. A hole was carved into his future and he had to learn to live around it.
Sanji leaves his soulmate on the Baratie, sailing away from his gruff adoptive father to chase All Blue. Miss Wednesday becomes Princess Vivi and when Nami shakes the life out of her for revealing the dangerous true identity of her ‘boss,’ color bursts onto both of their hands. Usopp hasn’t found his soulmate yet. Chopper doesn’t think he’ll ever get one, because animals don’t.
They meet Ace in Alabasta, and he’s a Devil’s Fruit user. He lights up, a tower of flame, and it makes Luffy bounce with every step, giddy and delighted—of course it’s fire. Sometimes the universe gets it right, after all.
His friends are excited to meet his big brother, and an order of magnitude more excited to meet his soulmate. The girls coo over the matching orange and yellow marks, and Chopper and Usopp demand the Story of When They Found Each Other, shrieking with dismay when Luffy and Ace both admit they really don’t remember the details. Everyone is very carefully not looking at the matching smoke-gray coils on their opposite arms.
Luffy doesn’t know why they do that. It’s not as though it’s a secret. It’s Sabo.
Before Ace leaves, he gives him a folded-up piece of paper, and says it will bring them together again. Luffy thinks his brother has been getting silly ideas from that crew he’s sailing with. They don’t need some paper telling them how to find each other anymore than they needed stars to do that. But he keeps it anyway, because he keeps everything his brothers give to him.
Robin and Franky leave color on each other in the middle of all the chaos on Enies Lobby. It’s easier to convince Franky to join them when Robin is smiling at him from the deck of his beautiful ship, the very soft and happy way she only recently learned how to smile.
Brook had three soulmarks before all of his skin fell off his bones. They were gray by the time I died, anyway, he’ll say, and then he’ll cackle, and it’ll sound insane.
Sometimes the universe gets it wrong.
The bandages on Luffy’s arms don’t come off right away. Even after the raw, angry wound on his chest no longer needs dressing, his arms remain covered. When Traffy changes them out, he makes Luffy look right at his face and nowhere else.
“I’ll remove your head from your body and let Shachi and Penguin play volleyball with it if you even think about moving,” he says shortly. He sounds like he means it. There’s a smudge of gray on one side of his forehead that’s shaped like a heart. The brim of his hat usually hides it, but he took his hat off for some reason, and now Luffy can see it.
Luffy looks at that faded gray heart and doesn’t look down at his arms until they’re wrapped again.
It’s not forever. Soon he’ll be able to look at Ace’s soulmark and it won’t feel like dying in Impel Down all over again. Soon he’ll be able to stomach the gray where his warm red-orange should be.
He remembers being seven years old, almost eight, and how it felt like the entire world was ending when they told him Sabo was dead. How he cried and cried like he’d never be able to stop. It took Ace making him an impossible promise, scolding and cajoling him in equal parts, to get him on his feet again.
Luffy’s not a baby anymore, and he’s fresh out of brothers to help him now, but he remembers what to do. You have to let it hurt while it hurts. You have to let it press you all the way down, right into the ground, because that’s how big it is, and there’s no way around that. And then the second you can stand up, you stand up. And the second you can take a step, you do that next. And that’s the rest of your life for the rest of your life.
He can do this. He’s done it before.
But when the bandages come off, there’s gray, and gray—and a splash of pure gold.
It’s a silly, swooping shape, playful and whimsical, and it looks like something different to every single one of them.
Franky thinks it looks like the sharp curve of a cant hook. Chopper giddily argues that it’s a banana, and constantly pats the base of his antler where the mark is visible through the velvety fuzz, as if to make sure it hasn’t run off. Sanji pointedly bakes buttery, flaky croissants to make his case.
Robin reads half a dozen books on semiotics and mythology. Usopp, as flushed and pleased as Chopper is about this development, makes up just as many legends of his own.
Even Brook bears the mark, right on his bone. He doesn’t seem to know how he feels about it, crying and laughing at the same time as he traces it with the tip of a phalange. He describes, to anyone who will listen, a traditional folk instrument he once played, a horn that looped into almost a perfect circle.
Nami is adamant that it’s a crescent moon, or a sun in partial eclipse. Zoro figures it out before any of the rest of them do. (It’s a smile.)
Luffy doesn’t care what the shape of it is. He loves it.
He loves that his friends love it, too. They each wear it in different places, on their arms or shoulders or backs or legs, and they're stupidly pleased to wear it. And it doesn’t make any sense, and Robin has never heard of anything like this happening before. And it breaks all the rules of all those old fishermen’s tales that Makino used to tell him, when she’d use words like predetermined and destiny. And it’s the best thing in the whole world.
He carries his crew’s mark as proudly as he carries his brothers’.
Ace was right. Sabo was right. Luffy doesn’t need any old universe to tell him who he belongs to, but it’s nice to know someone’s been paying attention.
Someday, Luffy will meet a stranger in Dressrosa, and one of those phantom fires on his arms will erupt into painfully familiar blue, and a part of him he thought was dead will burn to brilliant life again.