i cannot stop thinking about baby ace and the roger pirates so i’m laying my thoughts out to everyone and dragging you all down with me

i want to know why roger left ace to garp. did he know rouge wasn’t going to survive having him? why did they decide to have ace if he knew neither of them were going to make it? and why leave ace to garp and not to like... one of his actual crew mates?

it’s implied in one of the recent chapters that rayleigh and him raised shanks and buggy as babies, so it’s not like he has any doubts his friends would be capable.

did they just not want to? they seem just as close as the strawhats, so i can’t imagine they’d just leave their captain’s kid high and dry like that. especially not a kid this fucking vulnerable.

which makes me wonder... did he not even tell them? if not, why wouldn’t he? roger says once that his son would be the next pirate king, and rayleigh tells him “you don’t have a son!” so it’s very possible they just don’t know. did roger not want them to be, like... stuck with a piece of him or something? think it’d interfere with their ability to move on? rayleigh cries when he gets just a little bit of his captain back by seeing Luffy off at sabaody. did roger just not know how much he meant to them or something? or did he just like... forget to mention it?

if he didn’t tell the crew, did they... know about rouge? it seems like she didn’t sail with them or anything, so they might not have. i wonder how it felt, then, to one day open the paper and find out your captain had a son, and he’s dead before you even had a chance to know who he was. after all, his death was reported in the same paper as his heritage. if the rest of the crew didn’t know about ace, they would never learn until it was too late.

if the crew did know about roger and rouge, i wonder if any of them every thought to seek out “portgas d ace” when his name became famous. they’d have to know who he is, right? did he ever get to meet any of his father’s crew?

or maybe ace hated them, just like he hated roger. i wonder if maybe he avoided as much of roger’s crew as he could (except shanks, of course, since he was Luffy’s friend before anything else, and he had to thank the man). i wonder what sitting down and talking to someone who loved roger more than anything could have done for ace’s self worth. i feel like even just an hour over drinks with rayleigh could have changed ace’s life. i can’t imagine a primary source on who his father really was would be anything but life changing. or maybe that’s why ace might have avoided them.

but that leads me back to my original question: why did roger leave ace with garp instead of one of his crew mates? or, i guess, what would have happened if he didn’t? ace hated himself up until moments before he died. would being raised by, say, rayleigh, have answered his ultimate question? would he have known it was good he was born if he was raised by someone who loved his father enough to love him, too? would ace have even thought of his question at all?