Protectors [One Piece Fanfiction]

Old Adventures: Uncles?

Old Adventures: Uncles?

Warmth...

It was warm... Irin leaned closer and rubbed her cheeks on the warm surface. It was soft yet hard... The warm surface was firm but she paid no mind to what she was leaning against and continued to sleep.

Ace, on the other hand, burned up from the body contact. The two shared the same bed and he had initially fallen asleep but was woken up from a foreign contact on his skin. Irin laid extremely close to him, her face buried in his muscular chest and her cheeks squished against it. She was like a dog, a golden retriever, at least that's what he thought when he woke up to see her face against his chest.

He patted her head gently, not expecting a reaction, but she smiled gently, leaning into his hand. Sure, they slept together when they were younger but they've never slept this close before, Ace blushed at that thought and tried to fall asleep but he couldn't. She was too close to him and he was afraid that if he moved a single inch she would wake up.

Irin turned and laid on her back, removing her hand from Ace's body and swinging it above her head. Ace propped his head on his hand and looked at Irin. He stared at her with a confused expression, "Did I do something wrong?" he wondered out loud, thinking about the reasons for her abrupt actions.

No, he didn't do anything wrong, Irin just got too warm from Ace's body heat.

He lit a little fire with his finger and looked at Irin, checking if she had woken up. She was still asleep and he smiled a little at that. Something then caught Ace's eye.

Her hands were injured, there were crescent-like wounds on her palms and there was dried blood on her hand. He hadn't noticed this earlier but he guessed that this was caused earlier when she had her little outburst.

Ace traced his finger on her wounds, frowning. He got out of bed and went to fetch a bowl of water from the washroom to clean her wounds. Since she always treated his injuries when they were young, it was a little strange how he was doing it for her now. The freckled man smirked at the thought, he was definitely going to tease her about it when she woke up.

He soaked a cloth into the bowl of water then squeezed the excess water out and lightly tapped the damp cloth on her hands. Ace was being extremely careful, he didn't want to wake her up and he didn't want to hurt her so he was being as gentle as he could be.

Her hand flinched from the cold contact of the damp cloth and her body turned into water on instinct.

"Shit!" Ace whispered sharply as he watched her hand liquify.

'That's it, she's definitely waking up from this,' he thought, expecting her eyes to open.

What he didn't expect was to see her hand healing on its own. The wound healed on its own like an injury closing up in a time lapsed video.

Ace watched her hand with wonder.

It was mesmerizing how her hand healed on its own in her water form. Irin had instinctively switched to her Logia Devil Fruit's form from the sudden cold contact, she wasn't aware of it because she was asleep but it was just how her inner mechanics worked.

She continued to snooze away while Ace inspected her hand. He lifted her hand gently (with Haki because she was literally water) and looked at where her crescent-like wounds were. Her hands were spotless, it was almost like she was never injured in the first place.

Ace then gently placed her hand back at where it was, he decided that he should probably go back to sleep. The ravenette put pillows in between Irin and him so he could fall asleep without her clinging onto him because he knew that if she did he would never fall asleep.