Chapter Text
Ace wakes up in flames.
Not, in them. So close that he’s worried his hair will catch fire. He can feel the heat from them against his face, but he’s not sweating. His teeth chatter violently against each other. A pile of blankets traps him on the floor, in front of the fireplace. There’s something hard at his feet. It’s throwing off warmth, locked in underneath the blankets with him.
And he’s… shivering.
How long was he out?
Ace pushes up onto an elbow, and immediately regrets how it opens up drafts in his pile of blankets. The warm pockets of air leech out into the room. His head hurts when he sits up, and he immediately feels like vomiting. He leans forward into his hands, resting his forehead—
He must’ve hit his head hard. It’s wrapped in bandages. Ace traces it curiously with his fingertips.
“Ace?”
It's not Law's voice. Well, it is. He's standing there in the doorway, holding a kettle. There's nobody else it could be. It's just that, Ace has never heard it like this before. Rough and small and cracked thin. Ready to shatter into a thousand pieces.
No, Ace remembers. It already did. The sound of Law's voice echoes distantly in Ace's head, carried in by a rushing in his ears.
“What happened?” Ace asks. It comes out uneven. His mouth is dry and sticky with the taste of saltwater.
“Nothing,” Law tightens his fingers around the kettle.
Ace huffs out air. As much of a laugh as he can manage with his jaw tensed from the persistent cold in his joints and the ache in his skull. “It's not nothing,” he says. Ace knows that much, at least. He remembers slipping. He must’ve hit his head. It must be bad. The room feels unsteady, like he's stranded on a raft instead of solid ground. He'll get sick if he moves too much. “How long was I out for?”
“A while,” Law answers shortly.
Ace frowns, pulls the blanket tighter over his shoulders. Law doesn’t estimate time. One of his annoying quirks. He doesn’t accept “a little while ago” or “in a bit.” It's not like him to be vague.
“How long was I…” Ace looks out the window. The snow falls heavier now. “Out there?”
“How should I know?” Law snaps, pouring water from the kettle into a mug on the table.
Steam rises from the cup.
“It couldn’t have been more than an hour,” he offers.
There he is.
“What are you smiling about?” Law asks.
“What,” says Ace, sliding his feet underneath him, “I’m not allowed to be happy that I didn’t freeze to death?”
“It's not funny," Law says, standing up and disappearing into the kitchen.
Ace curls his knees up to his chest and sets his chin on top of them, staring into the fireplace. He’s probably right. It's just that, Ace was asleep for most of it. It hasn’t really clicked. He can’t wrap his mind around it. He can't wrap his mind around anything, what with the way his head feels stuck in a dream-like fog. Slow and heavy, like his thoughts are slogging through knee-deep water, slipping in the sand.
Law comes back in the room and drops something in the mug, stirring it. He slides it along the coffee table. Ace reaches for it, lets it almost burn his palms, warmth aching through to his knuckles. It’s not tea, just hot, honey-water.
“Sorry,” says Ace, consonants blowing the steam off his drink, making ripples on the surface.
“For what?” Law asks. He sits on the floor, and digs out the bed warmer from Ace’s blankets, uncorking it and reaching for the kettle.
Ace side-eyes him, but Law doesn't seem to notice. Instead, he scowls at the stream of water coming from the kettle, a hard-set frown carved into his face, like he’d scold it for spilling. Ace sighs. “It was starting to snow. I should’ve bailed on going—“
“That happens all the time,” Law interrupts, replacing the cork on the bed warmer and shoving it into the blankets.
Ace stares at him, unsure. “I didn’t tell you when I was going down there,“ he tries.
“You don’t have to." Law crouches in front of the fire to shift the logs with a fire poker. It was burning fine before.
“Okay," Ace agrees, "But it would’ve helped.”
“But you don't—”
“What are you mad about then?” Ace asks. His head aches. It's not working well enough to figure out what Law wants from him. “I’m sorry I ended up down there, it was an—“
”Stop saying that,” Law says louder, which ends up making him cough. “Stop saying that," he emphasizes. "You did everything I said, so stop apologizing.”
“Then why are you—“
“I told you the wrong knot,” Law interrupts, setting the fire poker down on the fireplace with a clang.
Ace winces at the noise. “What?”
“It’s my fault,” he says, sitting down in front of the fireplace, legs crossed. He glances at Ace. “I told you the wrong knot. And then you—“ he coughs, swallows hard. “The post is square, it hates a clove hitch. It should’ve been a midshipman’s.”
Is that what he's— “The post hates a clove hitch?”
“You know what I mean.”
Ace stares at him, face half-dark, half flickering in firelight. Law has the food rationed out so they have a solid extra month if they get stranded here, more if they need to stretch it. There’s never been a faulty part without an available backup. He scrubbed a boulder clean, just to make sure Ace didn’t slip on his way in. He's not a person who lets responsibilities slip.
He's still not.
“Law?” Ace says.
“What?”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it's not," Ace argues.
“I almost got you killed,” he says.
“No,” Ace repeats, “That would be the ten foot cliff and the sub-zero temperatures. You kept me from freezing out there.”
"Everything that happens here is my responsibility. If something goes wrong, it's because—"
Ace stops listening. Law isn't even looking at him, anyway. He's talking toward the fireplace, going on about procedures and whatever. Even if his skull wasn't full of mud, Ace wouldn't be able to talk him out of that. He can see it in the way Law's fingernails dig into his palms. Stubbornly planted against his skin.
No sense in talking, then.
Instead, Ace reaches out of his blanket cocoon and yanks on Law’s sleeve. He turns, a frustrated tilt to his eyebrows, mouth open mid-sentence, the rest of his words hanging on his tongue.
Ace ignores that, pressing his mouth against his. For a second Law doesn’t react, and Ace hesitates. Law never did seem interested. Not in the way Ace is used to.
But then Law grabs the blankets over Ace’s shoulders, pulling their bodies together into a mess of fabric. He kisses back, tongue running over Ace’s teeth, breath hot against his face. It's sweet. It's smoky. Ace's tongue chases the taste of it, pressing forward. Law's hands stray from their tight, professional lines, dragging heavily over the places he's only brushed before. His fingers burn a handprint over Ace’s hip bone, pressing hard into the skin. Maybe his self control, too, got battered out at sea, left behind on the shore. It's fine, Ace thinks. He'd never wanted it in the first place.
Law’s lips trail from Ace’s mouth, dripping like rain along the lines of his neck and dropping kisses along the way. His breath lingers on Ace’s collarbone while Law’s fingertips find the scattered fringe of Ace’s hair near his ear, twisting it. Just hard enough for Ace to, for a second, forget the steady pounding over the back of his skull. A small sound escapes his throat, and he shivers.
Law stops.
His breaths puff against Ace’s chest. Heavy. Fast. He touches Ace’s back, feather-soft. Fingers passing weightlessly over his spine, like the flickering edge of candlelight.
“Sorry,” Law whispers, clearing his throat. “You should get some sleep.”
Ace’s head aches again. Why is he apologizing? There’s an edge to Law’s voice. A jagged, cliffside tone that scrapes and tears. Ace is falling from it. Why won't he make eye contact? Why is he standing, leaving behind a rush of cold air? Why are his footfalls echoing in Ace's head as he disappears into the kitchen? Why is—
"Law—"
Now it's Ace's turn to sound cracked, shattered into a thousand pieces.
Law pauses, hand on the doorframe, hesitating like he's not sure if he's heard something. "There's more phenol in storage somewhere. I'll go find it."
He leaves.
Ace shuts himself in the blankets, burying his face in them. He's breathing hard, and it's making him dizzy. Calm down. He squeezes his fists around the layers of fabric. He tries to collect his thoughts, but they're getting dragged out to sea with each wave of gnawing, aching pain inside his skull. He doesn't get Law. Law is a wave crashing ashore, then pulling back out to sea. He's hands reaching desperate and eyes dead-set. Until he's not. Until he's a draft of cold, empty air in the living room and a face that wouldn't dare turn toward him.
What is Ace supposed to do with that?
Fuck, his head hurts.
It's this goddamn rock. The endless gray, the constant clouds, the heavy fog. He can hardly remember the blue southern sky or the warm air off the coast. There's only Law, and the lighthouse, and the dark, yawning sea that stretches out from the island. He's looking for a signal, but he's already stranded.
Ace lays fully on the floor, staring into the charred wood in the fire. It's no use, right now. He's too sick. Too concussed. Too confused. And, mostly, too fucking tired.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Law doesn’t let him do anything but lay in bed for a week. Ace complains about being bored, which, he is, but he’s only awake for a few hours each day. The head injury and the sleep deprivation have caught up with him. Ace would rather be asleep, anyway. His waking hours are spent staring at the ceiling. The days are marked only by the shifting slivers of light passing by the heavy curtain and the meals that Law leaves quietly on his nightstand. He doesn't talk. Probably for a number of reasons, but, in part, because he's practically working all hours. Ace catches him sleeping, only once, and it's a restless, fitful thing.
During the second week, Law lets Ace take his shift on watch. Ace wouldn't do well in the daylight hours, but he can at least stare out at the darkness of the night for six hours, wrapped in a blanket with his feet up on the railing.
In theory, it means Law can sleep more. In theory, it means their routine could get back to normal. At least, as normal as it was before Ace cracked his skull open on the rocks, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
“Law–” Ace says when he comes in one morning, after his watch, “Did you even try to sleep?”
Law’s bed is made and he’s sitting on the edge of it. He’s staring at the shift log, lying open on his lap.
“Yeah” he answers. Which could mean, yeah, he did sleep, or yeah, he at least tried.
“Let me stay on watch longer,” Ace offers. “I sleep all day.”
“No,” Law answers, closing the shift log and tossing it onto his bed. He stands up, stalking past Ace and muttering that he can handle it.
Ace grabs his wrist, instinctively, before his brain can tell him not to. He's surprised to find Law’s pulse racing underneath his fingertips.
Law’s eyes make contact with Ace’s. Briefly. Shorter than the time between the steady ticks of the wall clock. Law’s eyes looked the same before, on the day they dragged the crate up. Wide. Stormy. Pooling black with fear.
He pulls out of Ace's grip and leaves.
Ace sits heavily on the bed, letting out a frustrated groan. He gets it, Law doesn't want anything like that. Ace could be fine with that. (Okay, he's not, but he could be). They could at least talk, though. They were friends before, or something like it. Now, it's like Ace is another chore to check off the list.
Ace flips open the shift log. He shouldn’t read it. It’s not going to tell him anything he doesn’t already know. It’ll only make him feel worse reading through the days and days of him doing nothing but lying in bed. How much his pay is getting docked for Law having to do all the work. Law’s prognosis for how much Ace will be able to do by the time he leaves, which, as it’s going, will be very little. All in Law’s neat, matter-of-fact handwriting, spelling it all out in his short, dry tone.
Actually, he doesn’t read any of that.
Instead, he stares at a solid stack of blank rows, the dates marked neatly on the lefthand edge. The last filled entry, marking the day the fog lifted, and then, nothing. There's no mention of Ace slipping on the rocks. It's all blank.
Ace tosses it back on the bed and lays back down. His head hurts. He doesn’t know what it means.
The third week, it storms. The rain flies into the windows. The wind forces the buildings to creak and strain. Ace takes over the keeper house. He can at least cover the indoor chores. It's then, he notices that the crabs and clams have been conspicuously missing from their meals, and there's none in their food storage. Law’s avoiding the shoreline. Ace stares at the rocks on the windowsill, the shark tooth marking the end of the line.
Ace finds a leak in the back corner of the living room. It's a slow drip. They'll have to fix the roof when... No, Law will have to...
Ace puts a pot underneath the drip, eyeing the yellowing crack in the ceiling. Thunder rumbles outside, and lightning flashes outside.
A few hours later, Ace dumps out the pot and replaces it on the floor. He puts some towels underneath, in case it spills over while he's sleeping. He's about to stand up, when he hears the front door open, then close. Law leans his back against it. He doesn't move for a long time, but Ace thinks he can hear him breathing between the rolls of thunder and heavy rain. It's loud, and wheezing slightly. His jacket and hat obscure his face. Ace is shrouded in darkness in the corner, blocked by the couch. He doesn't move either.
A clap of thunder rattles the windows and shakes the door, like it's trying to force it's way inside. Law stumbles away from it, dropping his jacket and his hat on the floor as he goes. He grabs his bag and digs out a cigarette, dropping heavily onto the couch. He sniffs. Clears his throat. Lights the cigarette and breathes in deep.
He's a wreck.
Ace watches the water drip into the pot. This whole place is falling apart.
Without a sound, Ace shifts to sit against the back of the couch. He watches Law's shadow on the ceiling, stretched by the low angle of the fireplace. It moves when Law adjusts his feet on the coffee table, or taps his fingers on his cigarette. The smoke rises between them, and Ace enjoys the smell of it, even though it's bitter now. He hears Law's breathing even out, drifting into steady waves.
Ace falls asleep there.
When he wakes up, the room is dark and the storm has subsided into a steady rain.
The pot is full again.
The fourth week, Ace's headaches lessen. Now, the only start up when the sun is out (a rare occurrence). And he thinks if they have to turn the foghorn on, his head might actually split in two. He’s still stuck doing housework. Law's sleep hasn't gotten any better, from what he can tell. But it's fine. Soon enough, Law can focus on taking care of the lighthouse again, instead of Ace.
Ace’s last day at the lighthouse arrives on a Saturday.
He's been bored. Law's been mostly ignoring him for weeks now. He should want to leave. There’s no reason for him to be emotional about it. He always knew this was a part time job. A short stint to keep himself occupied while the heat died down. It’s only a job. Money for labor. Why would there be anything sad about that?
His gut disagrees. He barely touches his breakfast, says his head is making him nauseous, even though that symptom tapered off last week.
In the afternoon, Ace drops his travel bag near the front door.
Law stares at it from the living room.
"I'll put it on the front step," Ace concedes.
"No, don't. You don't..." Law hasn't stopped staring at it. His brow furrows. "You leave today?"
It's a gut-punch of a question. Ace feels sick, and also like he might throw a fist at Law's face if he doesn't leave the room.
"Yeah," he says, dragging his bag and knocking shoes off the rack. He slams the front door behind him and drops onto the front step.
Law's fucking rock is staring back at him. Ace thought, at the very least, he'd give a shit about him leaving, even if only as a practicality. Figured he'd at least know the fucking day. Law, who follows rules and schedules and does everything by the book and doesn't estimate time and scrubbed a goddamn boulder because he thought it could be—
Fuck it. He's done. He's leaving anyway. Law's hardly paid any attention to him for weeks. Why should Ace leaving make any difference? Law already wrote him out of his task lists. He's not in the shift log anymore. He doesn't matter here. He isn't needed here. He can go back to his actual life, and stop worrying about all this shit from the past four weeks.
Ace kicks at the stupid ridge, stands up and slings his bag over his shoulder. There's no reason for him to wait here. He walks out to the southern shore, plants himself on the edge of the sand. He doesn't look back at the lighthouse. His eyes instinctively search for rocks in the sand. He closes them, rests his head on his hands.
Sometime later, the ferry arrives. Ace stands up when the ferryman pulls it into the sand. He throws his bag onto his shoulder and shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket.
His fingers touch something hard, and smooth.
Ace's feet slow and he pulls out the bottle, spinning it in his fingers and watching the way it catches the sky and sea in its reflection. He drags his thumb over Law's name, spelling out the letters underneath his skin. He never did find out what it meant.
He considers keeping it, as some kind of cursed souvenir. He considers throwing it out to sea. That's what Law wanted with it, anyway. Or maybe he should just smash it on the rocks. Break it into a thousand tiny pieces to mix in with the sand.
He can't do it.
He curses under his breath, dropping his bag in the sand. "I forgot something," he says to the ferryman, who throws him a sour expression. Whatever, Ace is immune to sour expressions at this point. He has to give back the bottle. It survived a shipwreck, years at the bottom of the ocean, being nearly smashed along the rocks at the island, getting put in Ace's pocket, which, turns out, is a pretty hazardous place to be. He jogs back to the lighthouse. Maybe he'll just place it somewhere and leave, but the shock of it may actually kill Law at this point.
So, he goes into the house, finds Law in the same spot he left him, over an hour ago.
"I lied about the crate," Ace announces as he walks in.
Law furrows his brow. "You what?"
"I lied," Ace says. "I said I'd leave the crate and I didn't. So," he holds out the bottle, "Here. You should have it."
Law stands, making his way over to Ace. His fingers reach out slowly. Like he’s sticking his hand into a snake pit, waiting for one to strike. Ace is half ready for him to smack it out of his hand, maybe stomp it into pieces or throw it out a window. It's not Ace's place to stop him. Law can do what he wants with it.
He doesn't seem unhappy to see it. He takes it carefully, holding onto it by both ends, and staring into the glass. He stares at it for what feels like minutes. Ace isn't sure what he's waiting for. Is he hanging around to be scolded? Does he want some sort of thank you? Why should he care about Law's reaction, at this point? He's supposed to be leaving.
Ace sighs, putting his hand on the door handle to open it.
Law notices. "Ace, I—"
"I know," Ace says, turning, "You told me to leave it, and I went and got it anyway. But it's already—"
"I don't want you to leave." Law says, looking up from the bottle. His full, grey-eyed attention settling onto Ace like a crisp morning fog.
It's steady. It's familiar. It feels like Law again. Ace doesn't understand it. Why now? Why not any other time during the past four weeks? He's been lonely, concussed, feeling like absolute shit this whole time and now— Ace isn't sure if he wants to hug him or strangle him. "What's wrong with you?"
"I don't want you to leave," he repeats, voice a bit hollow, looking down again. It's like he's repeating as much for himself as he is for Ace. Like his words are sinking in for him, as much as they are for Ace. He drags a hand through his hair.
The ferryman yell from outside. They both look toward the window.
"Law, I— I can't—" Ace sputters. "The ferry's already here, and I—, I can't, Law"
Law traces his name on the bottle with his finger, the same way Ace did. He nods, almost imperceptibly. "Okay," he says in a near whisper.
"Okay," Ace says, opening the door. "Bye, Law."
"Yeah," Law answers, staring down at his feet. "Bye."
Ace walks out and shuts the door behind him.