I was walking along the beach one afternoon when I came across Ace in the midst of an attempt to escape by sea. I wondered how many times he’d tried by now.
Ace had created not a boat, but what I would sooner describe as a coffin—if the intent were to insult the dead rather than honor them. He cut a dashing figure as he rode it out into the water.
After a few moments, the entire vessel was sucked under the surface and did not reemerge. Soon after that, a soaking wet, boatless Ace returned to shore.
“I can’t stop now. I gotta get off this island!” Ace muttered to himself as he plodded away. He seemed desperate and despondent now, a far cry from the cheerful fellow I had met on the sand.
I plodded away myself, in the opposite direction. I still needed to acquire the water and food that would allow me to survive the day.
My stomach growled.
Without my awareness, my face and body had grown considerably withered and gaunt from the ordeal. But just then, something occurred to me: Ace certainly looked despondent, but he didn’t seem quite skeletal just now.
I spun around. Ace was already out of sight. I decided to trace his steps in the sand.
I had been working so hard to keep myself alive, but I had no idea what Ace was doing, other than trying to build his boat.
My legs felt heavy. They were so exhausted I could barely walk. I stumbled along, half-dazed, until at last I saw Ace up ahead. I hid behind a nearby tree to watch him.
The next moment, I nearly gasped and gave away my presence.
Ace stood facing the beach with his back to me. And to my shock—for I had no idea where he’d found it—he held a big, round fruit in his hand.
Even from a distance, I could see that it was boldly colored and ripe. I grunted, “Where did he find that? So he’s just been eating fruit this whole time?!”
Saliva was flooding my mouth. My empty stomach growled, commanding me to ease its hunger. My eyes could not move from the fruit in Ace’s hand.
Then a memory of the day we first met passed through my mind.
Ace nodded when I asked if his father was the King of the Pirates. Through his silence, he admitted that he was the son of a dastardly pirate. The descendent of a man executed for his reign of terror. Ace was the relic of a man judged guilty of the greatest of crimes. And he was alive now, suffering from neither hunger nor thirst. Should that happen? Was that right?
Already my mind was formulating a plan to steal the fruit from Ace, one way or another.
I clutched a thick branch nearby. In a haze, my brain worked in search of a reason, a rationale. Wasn’t it all Roger’s fault that both pirates and adventurers were treated the same back where I grew up, and mocked as if there were no difference? I wasn’t sure, but it had to be true. I needed it to be true.
It’s a deserted island. No one around other than the two of us. No use for sympathy. No need to feel guilty. If anyone deserves it, it’s Ace, son of the infamously evil Gold Roger…!
I crept closer to Ace, my feet unsteady, holding the heavy stick.
At last I was within range. I lifted my arm to strike… and my stomach gurgled.
“Ouhh,” I moaned. He spun around and saw me.
“Huh? Oh, hey, nice stick, man!”
Ace grabbed the stick. That was all it took for me to let go and fall on my butt. Forget about stealing the fruit, I couldn’t even stand on my own two feet.
There he stood, looming over me with the stick in his hand. All I could do was stare up at him, my face pale, my breathing hard. My weapon was gone. I didn’t have the willpower to run away. He was going to attack me instead, I knew it.
But Ace did not react the way I expected him to.
“You came to help me build a boat, yeah?” he said, grinning.
“Ah…uh…aaah…” I moaned, incapable of forming words. I felt deeply, astonishingly ashamed of myself. Tears sprang into my dried-out eyes. Thank goodness I had the mask on to hide them.
And just then, despite the situation—or perhaps because of it—my stomach growled again mightily.
Ace just smirked and held out the fruit in his hand.
“Here, eat up.”
Gurrrrgle.
Ace said, “Whoops!” As it happened, his stomach had answered mine with a growl of its own. Apparently he was just as hungry as I was. And yet he offered me the fruit willingly.
“Y-you’ve got a stockpile of them, don’t you? Where are they? Tell me!” I demanded.
“Nope, I just found this one. Think it might’ve washed up on shore, just like we did.”
I felt a shock as hard as if a blunt object had struck my skull. When people speak of a shame so great it prevents them from looking upon the person they have wronged, this is what they mean. My head hung, and I realized that I was crying. I had to stifle my sobs to keep Ace from hearing them.
What a terrible thing I’d been considering.
Simply for having the blood of Roger in his veins, I had assumed that Ace must be a bad person. I told myself that anything I did to him was justified because of that. But all I knew about Roger came from the papers and books. I’d never met him or spoken with him. I just accepted whatever society and other people said about him, and assumed it was all true.
What a shallow, ugly way of thinking.
I had a sudden realization: this was the exact way of thinking I saw in adults when I was a child. It was something I despised back then.
The adults made fun of Brag Men, and were biased against it.
I, too, was biased against Ace.
Since when had I become one of those nasty, cynical adults, always jumping to conclusions?
What was the real Ace like? He was the kind of person who shared his only food with a starving man, when he himself was already starving. That’s the kind of guy Ace was. That was the man who inherited the blood of Roger, King of the Pirates, as I had personally experienced him.
“What’s up? Aren’t you hungry? Eat up,” he said.
I sniffled and said, “I can’t…”
I was ashamed of myself. I wasn’t worthy of accepting food from Ace. I wasn’t worth it. I deserved to starve and suffer; that was the only way I’d make up for what I’d almost done.
“Eat it,” he said, slightly miffed, and shoved the fruit at me.
“I can’t!” I said stubbornly, shaking my head.
“Why not?! I know you’re hungry. Don’t hold back.”
“I can’t, because you’re hungry too.” I protested, my voice rising. He could probably tell I was crying by now. Ace looked a bit worried, and fell silent for a moment.
“Then let’s split it. How does that sound?” he suggested. Before I could give him an answer, he had pulled out his knife and cut the fruit into two pieces. “Here, I’ll eat too. But you need some fruit, man.”
He handed me one of the halves with a smile. With an offer like that, and the fruit right in front of me, I gave up refusing and took it gratefully.
Ace took a bite of his half of the fruit. “Mmm, not poisonous… Not very tasty, either,” he said, his mouth full.
I took a bite of the fruit, too. It was impossible to resist—juice oozing out, so fresh and moist.
“It’s so good… It’s so bad, but…it’s so good!”
Once I’d taken one bite, I couldn’t stop. I devoured the fruit, barely conscious of what I was doing. Without my realizing it, huge tears ran down my cheeks as I ate.
“It’s so good… It’s so good… Thank you, thank you…” I sobbed.
The truth was, you couldn’t even generously call the fruit tasty. I had never eaten such disgusting fruit before. And yet, in all my life, nothing had ever tasted as good as that fruit did in that moment.
Here on this desolate island where I was stranded, battling against hunger and thirst, I had at last come to experience what life truly tasted like.