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The words, “What have you done,” desperate and soft, are a bad way to begin a story.
These words, along with their answer, “Saved us both,” are the best place to begin this one.
The last time Koala had seen him, Sabo’s mods were largely cosmetic — shifting, glowing tattoos, mostly, a silly implant to make his front incisors sharper, plus a very small biometal tune-up to his left hand, to fix a snapped tendon from a job gone wrong. She’d done that one herself, in Dragon’s garage, with Sabo biting down on Iva’s belt and pretending to be brave about it.
The last time Koala had seen Sabo was almost 3 months ago, before he and Ace vanished into thin fucking air.
There is nothing cosmetic about what Sabo’s done to himself, now. They are standing in the ruins of an improvised lab. Anyone who used to be alive here isn't anymore, except for Sabo.
She takes a slow, cautious step towards him, and feels her companion reach out to grab onto her wrist and stop her. She’s been working with the Whitebeard’s Marco for the past two months, trying to find both Sabo and Ace. He is, in her opinion, far too sensible to be working for Newgate; he seems to feel the same about her working with the RA. They share a rapport as street-level cyber modders (he’s something closer to a real doctor, she’s something closer to a field medic; there’s not much of a difference, if you’re not in with the corporate doctors) and as the person who most often wrangles their respective Goan force of nature.
She shakes Marco’s hand off without even pausing.
“Sabo?” Koala asks.
She barely recognizes him.
He has just as many biomechanics embedded into him as he does exposed patches of skin, maybe more. It looks like his whole left arm, at least up to the elbow, has been replaced. There are raised bumps on his cheeks, which she recognizes as inputs to brain-embedded reader chips, which are very illegal and nauseatingly dangerous. A wire runs curls out of the flesh of his neck and runs flush around his ear, embedded in the muscle.
His hair has been shorn down short in patches. One eye glows hazy red, glazed over with a screen. The other is his original blue, but the sclera is stained red like blood, like someone spilled dye around a bead.
Both of those eyes are staring at her without blinking. He opens his mouth.
“Hello, Koala,” he says. Something is strange about his voice. It almost sounds like it’s echoing.
Koala tosses a glance over her shoulder to Marco. He is staring at Sabo, his lips pressed into a thin, hard line.
“Where have you been, Sabo?” she says, taking another cautious step forward.
Sabo takes a fumbling step back. He laughs, high and strange and vaguely inhuman. “Oh, you know!” He sounds mildly hysterical in a way that is deeply unfamiliar to Koala, which is terrifying, because two months ago she would have said that Sabo couldn’t be unfamiliar to her if he tried. “Around!”
“You’ve been gone for almost three months.”
He tilts his head, like a dog listening to something far away. He still hasn’t blinked. It makes the hairs on Koala’s arm stand on end. “Has it been that long already?” he says. “Guess that makes sense. R-Recovery time, and all that. H-Ha.”
He doesn’t laugh. He says the word Ha, flat and blunt.
Koala does not know what to do about this. Her heart is thudding so hard in her ears that she can’t think.
Marco snaps out of whatever stupor has had a hold on him and moves forward so he’s even with Koala. Koala does not look at him. Sabo shrinks back a little bit more.
“Where is Ace, Sabo?” says Marco. His voice walks the thin balance between a well-practiced bedside manner, someone used to talking to people not at their best, and something flinty and dangerous. “Was he with you?”
Sabo’s face does something complex — a movement between a grin and the intake of air before a scream.
“Of course he was with me,” he says. His hand moves up slowly to clutch at the front of his tattered, bloody shirt. “He’s here right now, actually, if you can believe it.”
Koala goes cold. Next to her, she can feel Marco go still.
They are utterly alone in this place. They have a life sign scanner read to prove it.
Koala knows that Sabo has never been the most stable person, but if something happened to Ace in front of him — if Ace died — would that be enough to —
The fear must show on her face. Sabo manages something that’s almost a grin.
“Don’t worry,” he says, which does not make her less worried. “I know — I know you can’t see him, but he’s here.” Sabo taps the side of his head, right above the shaved hair and uneven skin that speaks of something embedded beneath the it. A choked laugh bubbles from his mouth, resonating as if not all his vocal chords are flesh.
He doesn’t sound entirely sane, and Koala doesn’t feel particularly sane while looking at him. From the way Marco’s hands twitch, he’s thinking something similar.
Sabo continues, with his eyes locked on something in the middle-distance. “Couldn’t save his body, we were both too far gone,” Marco makes a choked sound in the back of his throat, but Sabo doesn’t seem to notice, “but they could save the parts of him that are really important. For a p-price, h-ha.”
Once again, he just says the word ha, blank and flat. Koala wants to throw up. She hasn't thrown up since Dragon cleared her for the field — working with street-level mods cures you of any squeamishness pretty fast.
But then Sabo rasps, “He’s all in my…my wires.” His hand floats down to touch his own cheek, as if he’s surprised that it’s there. “Now he really can stop me from ever doing anything too dumb, just like he’s always said, haha.”
The implications of that statement slam into Koala with the force of a train. She almost stumbles forward, but Marco grabs the back of her shirt and yanks her back. She can feel him trembling against her arm.
Over the past months, she’s seen Marco look at a full-body rejection of cybermods without blinking.
They are in over their heads. Koala stares at her best friend, and doesn’t know what to do.
She watches Sabo open his delicate metal palm, the light of his own biomechanics glowing and dancing in the absence of blood. “Ace says hi,” he says, hoarsely, looking up and directly at Marco. “He can see you. He says to say hello.”
Marco flinches, his breath catching in his throat.
“Did you say we've been gone for three months?” Sabo asks, and he cocks his head again. Like he’s hearing something. Like he’s hearing Ace.
His eyes snap back to Koala. “Is Luffy okay?” he asks her.
The words “He’s fine” are out of her mouth before she thinks about it. Nothing will make Sabo — and Ace — panic faster than a slow answer to that question. Koala does not know what a panicking Sabo in this state would mean.
Like magic, Sabo’s whole body goes slack with her answer.
“Good,” he says, the strange reverberation in his voice even stronger now. “That’s good. That’s — ”
His knees buckle and, this time, nothing in the world could stop Koala from running to his side.
She braces him as he slumps to the group. His skin is the wrong temperature. He’s heavier than he should be. Touching him makes something animal in the back of her head start screaming.
Marco falls to one knee on the other side of them. Sabo clutches at her hand, eyes unfocused, his breathing becoming more and more shallow.
“Sabo,” says Koala, squeezing back on his hand as tightly as she can manage, “What have you done?”
Sabo says, “I already told you. Saved us both, ” before his one flesh eye rolls back in his head and he pitches into Marco’s arms.