Oceans

Sabo wasn't exactly sure how it all happened.

It all happened so fast and in quick succession of each other, the events blurred in his mind, becoming indistinguishable from one another and instead just settling in his memories in one huge mass of sensations, pain, and flashes.

He remembered sailing away from Dawn island, fighting himself physically in his mind, to the point it actually was giving him a migraine, from making the boat turn around. He had wanted to, so badly. But he was leaving to protect his brothers. Their bond. His treasure.

So he wouldn't let himself. No matter how much it hurt as the inches his boat gained, as it sailed away from dawn, turned to feet, and then to yards, and slowly making its way to miles.
He had to protect them.

Maybe-no he would see them sometime in the future, when they set sail. Maybe he'd be able to find Ace, since he'd leave first, and help him start his own crew, because he didn't doubt his brother would be a captain. And then later on he'd find Luffy and stick with him for a while until his baby brother goes to grand line. Then they'd split and fulfill their own dreams. Sabo would write his book of the Grand Line, Luffy would go on to become the Pirate King, and Ace would become a great remembered Pirate Captain, better than any of the Yonko.

Yea. He'd see them again.

At least that had been what he thought. His boat had been sailing away from Dawn. The island hadn't even become so small his fist would look bigger yet. He had seen the Celestial Dragon's ship and it took him a moment to recognize it but once he did his head snapped up to his flag. It wasn't a Pirate flag, despite what his brothers had said when he drew out the design before, when they were joking around in their tree house.

Even if he occasionally thought of it as his Pirate flag, he knew in the future it'd probably change and never be recognizable as what it was now. And that would have been when he was a real pirate. Right now it was just a symbol. A symbol of his part in the bond of the ASL.

But he knew how it looked to others. Like a pirate flag. And he knew how a Celestial Dragon would react.

His was going to be killed just because he was bold enough to show to the world for all to see that he was the S that made up the ASL.

He remembers scrambling to get up from where he had sat down on his small boat, to reach the flag and take it down before the Celestial Dragon's saw it. Before they saw his act of stupidity. 'Why were Celestial Dragon's even here in the first place?!'

He remembers running and feeling like everything was going in slow motion, the tip of his finger grazing the rope, and then blinding light. An ear-splitting sound shattering the air, strong enough that his ears started to ring and he couldn't hear anything else. A powerful force impacting his body like something rammed into him, so powerful it picked up his body, which promptly couldn't move, and threw him.

He remembers hitting a wooden wall of his boat hard. Hard enough that his vision blurred and he had to grit his teeth, to gain some semblance of control as his skull rattled.

He remembers forcing his eyes open and trying to avoid whatever inevitably came next. He had looked towards the Celestial Dragon's ship, seeing out of the corner of his eye that his own little boat was so torn and broken that he knew it was already sinking, and time seemed to slow again.

The blue waves reflecting the sky so perfectly, and the massive bazooka sailing over it, a blue tint on the bottom as it cuts through the waves, its black paint just as ominous as death's raven when the Soul stealer came to claim the souls she originally owns.

And then time seemed to snap back into place as the bazooka impacted, and Sabo was once again thrown back as his world exploded into nothing but burning, cutting pain.

He remembers going overboard and expecting to impact the water, even opening his eyes to see the approaching depths of blue, that could so easily kill his little brother, and him.

But just as he was about to hit the water a spiraling vortex of light opened starting from the size of a peanut and expanding rapidly into the size of a full grown man. The light it omitted blinded him and he screwed his eyes shut tight as he fell inside of it.

His whole body was already radiating pain from the bazooka blast, but he felt every nerve ending he had ignite in white hot boiling fire the moment he went into the orb of light.

It only lasted a couple seconds and then he impacted a hard cold floor, and a scream ripped through his throat as the fresh wounds on his back from the blast suddenly took on his whole weight and a hard landing. 'Wait landing? What..what's going....on?'

He suddenly couldn't move and his fingers and feet felt really cold from the inside, and he knew that wasn't good, but he couldn't move. It felt like his limbs weighed over thousands of pounds.

He could suddenly hear again and there were several voices buzzing around him and he suddenly felt hands on him and he yelled when their hands felt like hot irons.

And suddenly he felt himself be dragged down into blackness. The pain disappeared and he closed his eyes. He thought he was going to die.

But then he had woken up. To a strange looking ceiling and on a fluffy bed that reminded him too much of the ones his so called 'parents' made him use. He had tried to sit up only for a black cloth, rope like things to hold him down. One over each wrist and ankle and thin one across the top of his chest.

He had panicked and started thrashing only to yell and freeze when his back exploded in pain.

He stayed like that with grit teeth and tightly closed eyes waiting for the pain to lessen some. But it didn't and he started to breathe unsteadily and unwilling tears welled up in his eyes. His back felt like someone had taken a knife, a rusted knife, and shaved off several layers of skin, from his neck to his hips.

He opened his eyes and mentally felt his own body. He had bandages wrapped around his entire torso, including his neck, they were wrapped around his head and one of his eyes as well. His left thigh and ankle were bound along with his right calf and knee. His entire right arm was wrapped and his left forearm had bandages from his elbow halfway to his hand.

And all of it hurt.

And then a strange man entered the room and started asking him a bunch of questions while stabbing him in the neck with a needle and injecting something that started to make the pain lessen just a little. And then the man started to explain everything.

He was in a completely different world. Not like the New World, but like a different dimension world.

He had read in books how some scientists had explored the theory of dimensions, but it never went past that because it was supposed to be just that. Theory. Evidently not.

The man explained how his name was Howard Stark, and that he had built a machine that pulled him from East Blue into this world called America, or was it called Earth-he honestly wasn't sure, and that he wanted to run tests on him.

He had protested at that and the man had said it wasn't up for argument before turning around and walking out.

He hadn't seen the man since then, Howard, or Stark or whatever the man wanted to be called, had at least decided to wait until his wounds had healed. Thankfully. He also had to go through a rehabilitation, that's what the doctors here called it- he still didn't really believe the dimensional travel thing, but it was getting harder and harder to disprove every day and there were so many things here that was different, especially technology- or whatever, things that were similar yet not in any way alike, denden-mushis.

When he had finally been able to stand on his own again and the bandages had been removed, the doctor had given him a mirror and walked out of the room.

He had looked at his face and gasped. Over his left eye was a jagged scar starting at his forehead and ended at his cheek.

He had a scar running from the left side of his neck, over his chest, down his side and stopped just before his hip. It looked like flames curling on his skin. He looked at his arms then. His left arm had a scar running from the inside of his elbow and halfway down to his wrist. His right arm was disfigured completely. His left thigh had a scar wrapping around the outside of his leg, his left ankle had a scar over the ankle bone and the top of his foot. His right leg had a scar over his knee that wrapped around his calf in a chaotic disorderly spiral that ended at his ankle.

He had swallowed hard and knew there was one more place he had to look. He slowly stood and walked over to the mirror propped up against the wall, before turning around.
He froze as his breath was stolen from his lungs and he felt the blood in his veins turn cold.

Now he understood why his back had hurt so much. His whole back was covered in scars, ugly, angry red scars. But right in the middle, a little below his shoulders was a big scar that seemed to make his skin look indented. It stretched from the bottom of his shoulders to down a little below where his ribs would be.

Just looking at it made him hurt.

His head snapped to the door when he hear it open and he quickly backed away from the mirror, as Howard walked back into the room, wearing a black suit under a white lab coat with a look of annoyance on his face.

"Ok ND-SS16 Since you are now fully healed and rehabilitated we can start the tests." Howard spoke with no sense of sympathy or kindness. Only cold hard annoyance and something Sabo had trouble identifying.

It took a minute for Sabo to realize the man was talking to him. "My name is Sabo, not NDSS16 or whatever. And I don't want to do any tests."

Howard's expression turned darker. "I don't care what you want to be called, you are now ND-SS16. And as I said before the tests are not up for debate."

"But you can't do that! I-"

Howard's cut off his slightly panicked desperate shout. "Yes I can. I brought you here. I made them save your life. I have control over the machine I can just as easily destroy it, cutting off you chance of ever going home, or I can just as easily reach in and take another person and get rid of you. May be messy but I don't care."

Sabo's mouth snapped shut and he swallowed hard. Howard spoke as if he put a lot of thought into each of his answers, they sounded well rehearsed. But the threats the man was making made every muscle in his body seize up. If Howard destroyed the machine, he was right, he probably would never get home. And he knew that Howard had no way of knowing about his brothers, but just the thought of them being experimented on, if the man followed through with his words and killed him before taking another person from his home, made him feel paralyzed.

After all the vortex of light that brought him here opened not far from Dawn what if he opened it again and the vortex opened ON Dawn?

He swallowed hard. Howard's say it and an arrogant smirk crossed his face. "Ah. So you realize the situation you're in now. Good. Then I'll be blunt. You will do as I say when I say it, and you will not fight me on the tests. If all goes well, who knows, maybe I'll let you go home. It all depends. So you answer? Though I don't really need it, I do want to hear it."

Sabo's mouth suddenly felt dry. He mumbled. "Yes sir."

"What was that, ND-SS16?"

Sabo's head snapped out and he grit out. "Yes sir." 'My name is SABO!'

Howard smiled, pleased before turning toward the door only to stop when his new test subject decided to speak up again. "What will you be doing to me?" His voice was hesitant and a little worried but in no way scared. 'That'll change soon!' The scientist thought gleefully.

"Well, I'll give you a hint," Howard smiled widely and to Sabo it just made a pit of dread welled up in his gut.

"I want to make the perfect soldier."

The door slammed hard as he walked out.

Sabo's arms wrapped around himself, he suddenly felt cold, alone, and somewhere deep in his mind scared like he had never been before.