One of the scariest days of his life happened when he was only about ten years old and Luffy was, by reasoning, only about seven. It was a hot late-summer day...

"Ace! Ace, come play with me!" Luffy called, running up to him and crashing into Ace's back. He giggled and grinned, but he didn't apologize. Typical Luffy.

"No, thanks," Ace said, just a touch sarcastic. He was still annoyed about the last time Luffy had convinced him to play together and the two had ended up cold, wet, and hungry, barely making it home before dawn. Somehow, even though he was younger, that kid managed to lead them into all kinds of trouble. This time, for sure, Ace would avoid it at all costs.

His little brother deflated significantly and wrapped his arms around Ace's middle. "Come ooon~!" Luffy whined. "It'll be really fun, Ace, I swear! I found this great-"

"I already said no, Luffy. I'm not going to change my mind," Ace told him, attempting to pry the surprisingly strong child off of him. Luffy had a very convincing pout, and utterly compelling puppy dog eyes, but he was not going to give in. He always ended up taking the fall for Luffy and his little "adventures."

The younger D brother, persistent as always, clung to Ace like static. "But you didn't even hear what it is! I was trying to tell you I found an awesome-"

"No, Luffy! Let go already!" Ace grunted, losing his calm. "Last time I got in trouble and it wasn't even my fault!"

Luffy held tighter to Ace's midsection. "You aren't letting me finish, Ace! I want to play with you in the new- Whoa!" The elder brother managed to squirm out of Luffy's grip in just such a way as to cause the younger to trip. "Why'd you do that, Ace? I only want to play with you!" Luffy pouted.

"And I said no! I'm not going to get in trouble again because of your stupid adventures!" Ace snapped, planting his fists on his hips and giving Luffy a hard look.

From the ground, Luffy looked up at his older brother. He put up a tough exterior, a very serious frowning face, a huffy disposition, but he was pouting pitifully. Even as he stood up and dusted off his shorts with that frown in place, Luffy looked hurt. "Fine!" Luffy stuck his tongue out at Ace. "I'll go have fun all by myself! You can just be bored!" he shouted, running off down a slope and into the trees.

And Ace thought that was that. He went about his business, staying entirely out of the way of trouble. He had lunch, he went to the town, he had a nap, he did everything he wanted to do and had a right peaceful time doing it.

Then it got dark. And he hadn't seen hide nor hair of Luffy since that morning. That was good at noon when he just wanted to relax, but it had been somewhere in the vicinity of nine hours. He was caught between worrying and getting more upset at Luffy. He could be lying in a ditch somewhere or hiding out in the yard just to spite Ace. Although neither exactly fit Luffy's innocent but strong personality, Ace had convinced himself one of the two had to be right.

When dinner time rolled around and the bell was rung to make sure the boys knew what time it was, Ace was sure Luffy would come running. At which point he, as the dignified older brother he was, would act as if he never noticed Luffy was gone.

But Luffy did not show up for dinner. There was no tell-tale growling from a closet, no food mysteriously going missing, and absolutely no Luffy. That was when Ace really started to worry. His little brother never missed dinner for anything, so what could have happened?

The first thing his mind helpfully supplied was a familiar scenario in which Luffy encountered bandits and Ace had run out into the woods to find him before it could finish playing out in his head.

His heart was pounding painfully in his chest even as he told himself Luffy was just messing around or got distracted or lost. Nothing bad could have happened to him, Ace reassured his thundering pulse, but it did not take his word for it.

"Luffy! It's past dinner time, didn't you hear?" Ace called out, expecting a disappointed shriek but only hearing cicadas. "Stop messing around, Luffy! That's getting really old!"

The morbid imagination he never knew he had started to draw pictures in his mind that he doubted he would ever be brave enough to tolerate. Why didn't he just say he would play with Luffy, anyway? All the worrying could have been avoided that way. Luffy wouldn't be lost and they'd probably be arguing or talking about something stupid in their room, instead of one half of them being missing and the other half of them deluding himself into thinking things might be okay. He was the worst big brother that ever lived.

"AAAAAACE!"

He stopped. Why did he stop? He needed to go to where Luffy's voice was and chastise the heck out of him for running off without telling Ace where he was going, but his legs were stiff. It sounded like Luffy was crying.

Ace's insides became cold and restless. A little slowly at first, he stumbled towards the echoing sounds of his baby brother's sobs.

"LUFFY!" he called, as long and as loud as his lungs would allow. "Where are you?!" His heart was almost drowning him out. The crickets were laughing at him. Maybe he was just imagining it, but he thought he heard Luffy choking. "Luffy, say something!"

A sniffle from somewhere to his left had Ace tripping over his own feet to turn.

"A-Ace..." Another sob. "Help-" a hiccup, "help me...!"

Why wasn't the moon shining brighter? Ace could hardly see the hand in front of his face, let alone his distressed little brother. "Hold on, Luffy! I'm coming for you!"

"Aaaaaace..." He was whining. Luffy only whined for three reasons that Ace knew of, and that did not sound like the "I'm Hungry" or the "Play With Me" whine. He was really unhappy. The elder D brother would even go so far as to say Luffy sounded miserable. Ace felt his chest constrict. Just find him. Don't think about it.

Tree branches looked like thugs, leaves shifting sounded like a scuffle, something squawking sounded like a cry of pain. Ace had never had a heart attack before, but he felt like he was having one then. He couldn't feel his arms or legs, but he could feel the sweat dripping down his back and the pounding in his ribcage.

"Luffy, where are you?" Ace shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. "I don't see you anywhere!"

"Over he-here!" Closer. He was closer, now, but to which side, Ace couldn't tell. He looked every which way, but he couldn't see Luffy through the darkness and the vegetation. It was just like hide-and-seek, he told himself, in an attempt to quell his bubbling panic. Only, Luffy was good at hiding this time. "Ace! Please!"

Straight ahead and to the right, that's what it sounded like. "Keep talking, Luffy! I can't tell where you are if you don't!" His legs started to feel sore when he slowed down, so he tried to run faster.

"Whoa! Hey, Ace! I-I saw you!" Luffy's voice was really close and very suddenly hopeful-sounding, but Ace had not seen him in return. "Wrong way! Ace, no, come back!"

He stood still. "I'm not going anywhere, Lu, just tell me where you are and I'll come get you," Ace told him, looking under and around everything and not seeing a single crazy black hair.

"Hi, Ace! I'm- AH! Up here! Hurry, please, please, hurry!"

…Up? Ace tilted his head back a little bit at a time, very slowly. He ignored the machine-gun thump of his heart and the sweaty hair sticking to his neck, looking up more and more until finally he saw two sandal feet hanging at least a dozen branches above the ground. Luffy's face was barely visible over the edge of a thick, dead-looking branch. "How… how did you get up there?!" Ace shouted, his worry drowning in relief and astonishment and rage.

"Don't be mad!" Luffy called down with a get-out-of-trouble pout in his voice, even as his legs swung freely and something cracked very near his branch.

Ace wanted to yell and scream at his little brother about all the times he's said not to climb so high up when he and Luffy both knew Luffy couldn't climb down again, and maybe he did yell a little bit, but his focus was on his baby brother, so high up in a tree, unable to get down. "Just hold on, okay? I'll come up and get-" Ace was interrupted by a hollow, dry snapping sound.

Luffy was just a bit closer, his legs swinging out a lot farther than seemed possible to Ace from way below. "Ace! Ace, I think I'm slipping!" Luffy's voice was a little shriek, scared, but not as much as it should've been considering where he was.

And then the branch snapped.

His little brother, his baby brother, was falling from way up in a tree, and Ace wasn't sure he was moving at all to do anything about it. He thought he said Luffy's name as he fell miraculously between the branches of the mangled old tree. He put his arms out to help or catch or something and thought that maybe he wasn't close enough or he raised his arms too late because Luffy was falling really fast and-

Impact. Loud, heavy, sharp, hard impact. Right in front of his eyes and even a little closer, Luffy landed with a shout and a thud. Ace wrapped his arms around his little brother as tight as he could, crushing him with the mixed intentions of strangling him for getting into trouble and just making sure he was okay by hugging him. It was about when Luffy started to move away that Ace noticed his little brother had landed in the middle of his chest and Ace couldn't actually breathe.

Ace rolled onto his side slowly as Luffy sat coughing and crying beside him, and Ace tried to catch his breath. "A-are you okay?" Luffy asked him. Ace noticed a string of snot dripping down onto Luffy's shirt. "Ace?"

"Yeah," Ace wheezed, sucking in a thin breath of air that he thought was almost worse than no air at all. Luffy patted his back in the sweetest, most unhelpful gesture Ace had ever been a party to. "Are you?" he asked with a cough.

Luffy nodded emphatically, slinging tears everywhere. "Mm-hmm! S-sorry, A-Ace!" His next few attempts at speech were incoherent and nearly impossible to understand. Ace gathered, though, between sobs and sniffs, that Luffy had wanted to show him a hollow section in the tree he'd just fallen from and, when Ace turned him down, he thought he'd just go hide out and wait for Ace to get curious and come find him. But, when he got to the tree in question, Luffy had seen a cool-looking bug crawling up the trunk and decided to follow it, and the rest was history. Ace wondered how long Luffy had been up there crying for him, but he didn't ask. He didn't really want to know, he decided.

"Don't do that again, Luffy. Not ever," Ace ordered on the way home, carrying his exhausted baby brother on his back. He felt Luffy nod, but that wasn't good enough for Ace. He felt like he was going to throw up. He had been so worried about Luffy and he wasn't entirely sure he'd stopped worrying yet. "You have to promise, Lu."

Luffy snuggled his wet cheek into Ace's shoulder. "I promise."