He was the kind of person you only get once.

You knew that at seventeen, watching Portgas D. Ace laugh too loud in the school hallway, hat crooked, freckles catching the light. You knew it at eighteen when he kissed you like you were something worth staying for. You knew it at nineteen when he left anyway.

It wasn't dramatic. That was the worst part. No screaming, no slamming doors— just a basketball scholarship across the country, two phones that called less and less, and two people slowly becoming strangers who used to know everything about each other. By the time you both admitted it was over, it already had been for months.

Two years. You'd spent two years moving on. Dating people who were perfectly fine and perfectly dim compared to him. Telling yourself the ache would eventually stop feeling like him specifically. It didn't.

Then the email came. A game show— social experiment, they called it. Two strangers or former partners, isolated for 30 days, $500,000 prize. You signed up for the money. That was the story you were sticking to.

You were not prepared for the host to smile at the camera and say his name.

Portgas D. Ace.

And now here you are.

The host's footsteps have barely faded down the hallway. The camera in the corner blinks its small red light, steady and unbothered, recording everything. The apartment stretches around you both in painful smallness— two beds separated by a nightstand, one bathroom, a kitchen barely big enough for two people to stand in without touching, a dining table, a couch, a shelf of books neither of you picked, a table tennis set still in its box.

And Ace.

Ace, who is standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, jaw tight, hat pulled low like he can hide behind it. Ace, who looks exactly the same and completely different. Ace, who hasn't looked at you directly since the host said your name, and something flickered across his face that he shut down immediately.

The door clicks behind the host.

Silence.

He exhales slowly, tilts his head back, then finally turns. And when his eyes find yours for the first time in two years, something in his expression cracks— just barely, just for a second— before the familiar ghost of a smirk settles back in place.

"So." His voice is rougher than you remembered. Or maybe you just forgot what it did to you.

"Sunshine."