Well... this is a story I've been working on for quite some time. Marco-centric, as most of my stories tend to be. While it is a very clear AU, I've also included quite a lot of my personal headcanons.

The updates will be slow because I don't want to catch up with myself, but I'll try to keep them monthly at the very least.

I hope you like my weird little kid :)

Chapter 1

The Red Horn Pirates weren't the best pirate crew Marco had ever traveled with. Then again, they weren't the worst one either. After the fiasco that had been the pirate crew with which Marco had entered the Grand Line through Reverse Mountain for the first time (a crew that, incidentally, had fled said sea in under a week and had been missing three quarters of their members by then), Marco had made a point of trying to discover if a pirate crew had the habit of torturing their own members before approaching the captain of said crew with his request. While not the torture-for-fun sort, the Red Horn Pirates had many of the faults of an up and coming pirate crew that had been labeled as super rookies in Paradise: they were arrogant, overconfident in their own skills, and too eager to prove themselves in the New World.

They weren't the type of group Marco would ordinarily join for a trip into the New World of all places. He had already traveled with three such crews in the past and they had all gotten themselves destroyed in a matter of a few weeks after passing through Fishman Island. However, after two months stranded at Sabaody Archipelago without finding a single acceptable crew that was willing to brave the New World, Marco had decided to lower his standards and try his luck with the first pirates he encountered that he thought he wouldn't want to murder halfway to Fishman Island.

Those had been the Red Horn Pirates.

Convincing them to let him tag along had been the same old routine as ever. Pirates were leery of him when Marco said that he didn't want to join their crew, just travel with them for a while, but a few well-chosen tales of the more colorful areas he had sailed in the New World overwhelmed the average navigator, and Marco just so happened to be a navigator himself; one with experience sailing the New World that could help the crew's navigator learn the ropes quickly and without mishaps.

Unfortunately, Marco had been right in thinking this wasn't a crew he would have chosen to travel with if he hadn't been so fed up with Sabaody. Yesterday, they had reached an island that was under the protection of the Whitebeard Pirates, and the captain —cocky, arrogant, and conceited man that he was— had loudly declared the place was now theirs. Immediately afterwards, he had ordered the citizens to call the Whitebeard Pirates here, claiming that he would take Whitebeard's head himself.

In the past, whenever a crew he had been traveling with had decided to challenge one of the Yonko, Marco had left the island before said Yonko arrived, not wanting to be caught in the crossfire. But in the past, those Yonko had been Kaido and Big Mom, both of them known for their unreasonable dispositions when challenged and a tendency towards cruelty, sadism, and razing islands to the ground when angered.

Whitebeard was a different story, and Marco was curious to see a Yonko's crew in action. It had been a long time since he had last seen a truly powerful crew firsthand. He intended to stay well away from the fight, of course, but he had remained on the island.

Two days after the Red Horn Pîrates' arrival at the island, the Moby Dick appeared on the horizon.

Marco settled himself comfortably against a chimney on the rooftop of a tall house three streets away from the port, and observed as the Red Horn Pirates assembled there and tried to appear dignified and confident while their opponents approached.

Ideally, Marco would have stayed out of the citizens' sight for the past two days and then remained hidden until the Whitebeard Pirates left, but there were bound to be a number of haki users on board that ship, so Marco hadn't bothered to hide himself. He would simply fly away if the situation called for it. He did have a log pose aiming to three possible destinations, after all. Haki; that was another reason the Red Horn Pirates were in way over their heads. While they had some promising fighters amongst their numbers, none of them were haki users. Marco wasn't sure they even knew what haki was.

There was a long silence after the Red Horn Pirates' captain issued his challenge, tense on that crew's side and eager on the Whitebeard Pirates'. The citizens had long since vacated the port town. Finally, men started to jump down from the Moby Dick. Only around a fourth of them, Marco estimated, and Whitebeard remained standing on the figurehead. He didn't appear to have any intention to fight, despite the Red Horn's captain attempts to draw him out (until he was attacked by Diamond Jozu, that was; then he was too busy trying to stay alive to pay attention to anything else). It was disappointing. Marco had stayed behind hoping to see Whitebeard in action.

After twenty minutes of battle, in which it became clear that the Red Horn Pirates were only still standing because the Whitebeard Pirates were drawing things out intentionally, Marco decided he had seen enough. He let himself fall down the side of the house farthest from the port, fully intending to run to an area of the island where he could take flight without being stopped by anyone.

Before he could start running, however, he had to jump back because the building he had just been perched on went up in flames.

Well, fuck, he thought in annoyance, turning to face the fire that had just unnaturally extinguished itself.

"Going somewhere?" asked a voice from the other side of the column of smoke. A column of smoke that, Marco noticed, came from the smoldering remains of the wooden houses in the three streets that had separated him from the port.

"Ace, damnit! We're supposed to protect this place, not burn it down!" someone else yelled.

Marco would have run again, except that he could sense people surrounding him now, just out of sight from the street, and he figured he had a better chance to get out of this mess without a huge fight if he didn't kill any of Whitebeard's men. He had heard the stories.

"Oh, come on! He was trying to run!" the first voice yelled back, and the smoke had now cleared enough that Marco could make out the form of Fire Fist Ace. Portgas D. Ace had joined the Whitebeard Pirates three weeks ago, after months of no news of him appearing on the newspaper. That absence had brought on a lot of speculation about Fire Fist's possible death in a freak accident at sea or something, given how often he had made it to the first few pages of the newspaper before his sudden disappearance.

Marco raised his hands when the first of the men appeared around the smoke. Fire Fist was still being yelled at by whoever the other voice belonged to.

"I'm not fighting," Marco told the men that had surrounded him. He was surprised they hadn't attacked him right away, though their faces suggested they had expected to find a charred corpse instead of an uninjured living person. "I'm not part of the crew."

One of the men to his right snorted.

"Yeah, sure. Like we don't hear that shit from a lot of assholes when they see they've lost."

Marco shrugged, empty hands pointedly still up.

"I wouldn't know. But I haven't attacked anyone. And I'm not armed." It was not possible to keep unnoticed anything larger than a letter opener in his clothes. The men around him exchanged a few looks.

Marco had proof that these weren't the sort of pirates to kill for no reason when they didn't attack him in spite of his claims. It was clear from a few of their expressions that they didn't believe him and thought he was just a coward (Marco didn't give a fuck what a bunch of pirates thought of him), but that didn't stop the one closest to him from finally speaking.

"Okay, let's put him somewhere on sight." He grabbed Marco's arm and gestured for the rest to follow. Marco let himself be dragged off.

"You're not going to kill everybody?" he asked curiously, grateful that they hadn't resorted to just knocking him out. Marco was good at feigning unconsciousness, but he didn't want to test if he could fool some of the people here, and the last thing he wanted was for someone to think he was trying to pull a fast one on them and decide to kill him. That would be a problem.

He didn't receive a response. He hadn't expected one.

"If you move," one of the men told him once they reached a corner in the port area, away from alleyways and in sight of most of the battlefield, "you're dead. Nobody in the crew will attack you if you stay quiet."

Marco nodded, biting back a dubious comment and the observation that this corner would leave most people completely defenseless against an attack.

He plopped down on the floor, brought his knees up to his chest in an attempt not to look too relaxed, and settled to play the coward who didn't dare attack the Whitebeard Pirates. The Red Horn Pirates would get their asses handed over to them, they would all be dragged off to an island that wasn't part of Whitebeard's territory (it was, according to the rumors, the standard procedure the Whitebeard Pirates followed for the crews that weren't annihilated, and the Red Horn Pirates had done nothing to warrant annihilation so far), and Marco would look for a new crew. He didn't think he would be allowed to stay after refusing to fight, not that he would want to anyway after this stupid mess.

Only the strongest members of the crew remained standing at this point, and Marco still maintained that it was because the Whitebeard Pirates were holding back. Everyone else was unconscious, maybe dead, or just sprawled pitifully on the ground, and most of the Whitebeard Pirates were simply cheering on their crewmates by now. Aside from Jozu, there were two other commanders present: Vista and Thatch.

Marco would later blame it on the attack being no real threat to him, but whatever the reason, he had been too distracted analyzing Vista's impressive sword techniques to pay any attention to the bullet shot in his direction.

Ace wasn't in a good mood. He had been kicked out of the fight.

All right, he could admit that burning those houses down had been kind of a dick move to the owners, but at the moment he had only thought that the guy on the roof was getting away and could decide to attack the citizens as some sort of twisted revenge for their defeat. According to a handful of stories he had heard, it wouldn't be the first time someone tried to do that. Except that the guy on the roof didn't even have the guts to fight them, and had let himself be captured without putting up any kind of a fight. Whenever Ace encountered someone like that, he wondered why the hell they were even in the New World in the first place.

Now, the rest of the members of this crew were a different story. While nowhere approaching the power of the commanders, they had some very promising fighters, and aside from the stunt they had pulled to draw the Whitebeard Pirates here, they had fought without using any dirty tricks. Ace wouldn't be surprised if Pops offered them to become their allies once this fight was over. Provided that they hadn't hurt anyone on the island in the time it had taken the Moby Dick to arrive, of course.

Ace was now watching as the captain, barely on his feet by now, still tried to find a way past Jozu's defenses —he wouldn't find one, Ace had lost against Jozu a handful of times during his assassin days, and he was way stronger than this captain. Ace shook his head when, with a grimace of rage, the man pulled out a gun. Guns didn't work on Jozu, Ace thought that much had been established early on during the fight. Except that the man didn't fire at Jozu. He raised his arm to the side and shot, yelling something that Ace didn't hear because he was too busy following the trajectory of the bullet in shocked horror.

Straight to the man-no-longer-on-the-roof's forehead.

Nononono, Ace chanted frantically in his mind, horrified, because he had been the one to draw attention to the man, who wouldn't have been sitting exposed there otherwise, and it wasn't the same thing killing an enemy in a fight than causing the death of someone who hadn't attacked anyone.

The shot cut through the cheering and the few remaining sounds of battle, and Ace was vaguely aware that he wasn't the only one staring.

A trail of blood trickled down the man's face, but he did not fall. Before the eyes of the astonished audience, a bright blue light —fire— bloomed around the wound, and the man raised a steady hand to his forehead. By the time he touched it, there was no trace of the wound save for the blood still on his face.

"Fuck," the man swore, loud and clear amidst the stunned silence, and he focused annoyed eyes on the captain —his captain— who had just tried to kill him. "What the hell was that for?" he asked in a perfectly even tone, as if being shot at was a daily occurrence.

Ace shouldn't be so freaked out, he was a logia user unaffected by bullets himself, but there was blood and logia users did not bleed from attacks that didn't affect them. And they sure as hell didn't heal from wounds that had caused damage.

What the fuck is that power?

"Y-You're a devil fruit user?!" the captain yelled in outrage, the gun still aimed at the man. "Then why the hell aren't you helping?!"

"I told you," the man started, and his calm voice was still there, with just a touch of bored exasperation that made absolutely no sense, "that I am not part of your crew. And I also told you that this," he gestured vaguely around at the now halted battle with one arm, "was a stupid idea. I said I wouldn't participate."

Everybody just kind of stared for a moment. The still conscious Red Horn Pirates were so surprised that Ace would bet the captain hadn't been the only one who didn't know this man was a devil fruit user (but, Ace noted darkly, none of them appeared bothered about their captain shooting him), and the Whitebeard Pirates were mostly as disconcerted by the situation as Ace was.

"Did you shoot him because he didn't fight?" Jozu asked the captain, and by now Ace knew him well enough to realize he was pissed off even if it didn't really show in his voice or on his face. "Even though he said he wouldn't?"

"Of course!" the captain exclaimed. "I thought he couldn't fight, not that he was just a coward!"

That was the moment Jozu stopped holding back, because if there was something the Whitebeard Pirates didn't tolerate, it was those who attacked others for stupid reasons. Jozu punched the captain into the ground so hard the stone cracked a good five feet around the crater, and half of Jozu's fist disappeared into it.

The remaining Red Horn Pirates wisely dropped their weapons. The man in the corner raised his eyebrows, clearly impressed. He didn't look afraid.

The ground shook behind Ace, and he turned to see Pops had jumped down from the ship.

"And here I was thinking of offering you guys to become our allies," Pops said, confirming Ace's thoughts. "What do we do now?"

It was a good question, because while that action was enough to discard the Red Horn Pirates as potential allies, it wasn't reason enough to kill them all. And yet, after that show, Ace wouldn't put it past them to let their frustration out on innocent people.

Ace looked around at the others.

"Sink their ship and drop them off in some jungle island with some food?"

Snickers all around.

"That's not very different from killing them," Thatch pointed out.

"K-Kill us?" one of their nearby enemies stammered. Ace guessed the possibility of death in battle wasn't the same as being executed.

"We're considering it," Thatch said, nowhere near his usual cheerful self. "Your captain looks kinda unstable; we don't want him anywhere near our territories."

"We'll stay away!" someone promised hurriedly.

Marco observed the scene, not caring much what the Whitebeard Pirates chose to do with their enemies. If nothing else, that shot had confirmed that Marco wasn't one of the Red Horn Pirates, and he was hoping he could just get away from here on his own now. He hadn't attacked anyone, after all.

With his senses much more alert now, he noticed the moment someone approached him, and he was surprised to see the one ignoring the loud argument and walking up to him was none other than Whitebeard himself. By the time Whitebeard was crouching (still towering) before Marco, the port had fallen silent again. If Marco couldn't fly, he would have been trapped in that corner.

"So, what is that fruit of yours?" Whitebeard asked, curious.

Marco could see some people trying to peer around Whitebeard with varying degrees of success.

"A regenerative one," Marco replied vaguely. Not a lie, but not the truth. Marco wasn't very keen on putting all his cards on the table.

"One hell of a regenerative power," Whitebeard commented, amusement plain in his voice. That was a good sign, Marco hoped. "That was a mortal wound."

Marco moved for the first time in a while, pushing his legs slightly away from his chest, and shrugged.

"Your definition of mortal and mine are not the same."

There was a comment that might have been a snorted 'no shit' in the background, but any responses were mostly drowned by Whitebeard's booming laughter.

"I saw," Whitebeard said, a huge grin on his face.

A yell came from behind him, followed by running and a short scuffle, but Whitebeard didn't pay it any attention and Marco didn't move his eyes away from him.

"Not that I'm complaining," Marco started, and he really struggled to keep his voice civil and devoid of the sarcasm or annoyance that would usually have accompanied such words, "but is there any particular reason you're talking to me? I'm not even part of the crew."

"That's exactly why," Whitebeard said. "Why are you traveling with a pirate crew if you're not a pirate yourself? And why didn't you get the hell away from this island if you didn't want to fight us?"

"I was curious. I've never seen a Yonko before," Marco said, ignoring the first question because that was no one's business and absolutely irrelevant to the conversation. His words weren't technically a lie: the only Yonko Marco had met in the past had been far from that level of power at the time.

Whitebeard laughed again, and Marco guessed many people would be offended (or terrified), but he didn't mind that Whitebeard found him amusing. A good number of members of both crews were unashamedly staring by now. Marco didn't know if it was normal for Whitebeard to be interested in random people, but he would say no, or at least the Whitebeard Pirates wouldn't be paying so much attention to them.

"Dangerous, don't you think?" Whitebeard asked.

Marco just shrugged again.

"I wasn't counting on someone throwing a column of fire at me."

"It was a fireball!" Fire Fist yelled from somewhere behind Whitebeard, to general snickers and some comments Marco didn't bother listening to.

"If that's all," Marco said, when Whitebeard didn't do more than look far too piercingly at him, "may I go?" He stood up slowly, mostly to avoid any other trigger-happy pirates reacting than anything else.

"No," said Whitebeard, and the joking behind him stopped suddenly.

"Huh? You think he's dangerous, Pops?" asked incredulously someone whose voice Marco recognized as the one who had scolded Fire Fist earlier. From this angle, he could identify the person as Third Division Commander Thatch. Marco would bet Thatch didn't think him strong past his regenerative abilities, judging by his tone. Some whispered comments agreed with his assessment.

"Yes," said Whitebeard with certainty, and the silence came right back.

Marco cursed in his mind, but didn't let it show on his face.

"What?! But he didn't even want to fight!" This voice Marco recognized as well, this time as the man who had said they would kill him earlier if he moved.

Whitebeard smiled. It was not a threatening expression, but Marco didn't trust it one bit.

"I don't think he's a threat to anyone here, but he's certainly dangerous." Whitebeard looked him up and down again, and Marco was sure now he saw much more in him than Marco was comfortable with.

"I think you're exaggerating a little," Marco said, keeping his voice calm because he had never been good at faking incredulity, and much less humility. "I'm not particularly strong."

"Really?" Whitebeard asked, and Marco nodded. "Let's see about that."

And, with no further warning, in one fluid movement Whitebeard rose to his feet, raised his bisento, and struck.

To be continued

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