The Reze arc, Ace as Denji. Oh and, it’s that one pool scene.

I’m sorry y’all. Ace brainrot won over.

Ace Trappola’s life, by any reasonable standard, is a statistical error that keeps moving.

He was born into debt. Not the poetic kind people romanticize later, but real debt with papers, signatures, and adults who looked at a child and saw numbers instead of a person. Before Ace learned long division, he learned what interest was, mostly because men with bad breath and worse tempers kept explaining it to him very loudly. School existed somewhere in the background of the world, like a rumor. Food was inconsistent. Rest was optional. Childhood, as a concept, never really applied to him.

Living meant scraping by. Running errands. Selling things that shouldn’t have been sold. Learning early how to smile, lie, and keep moving. Stability was something other kids had, the way some people had parents who showed up on time.

Then came the zombie devil incident, which marked the point where Ace learned two very important lessons. One, the person he owed money to could be very suddenly, very permanently removed from the equation. Two, the universe would not reward him for that with peace. It would escalate instead.

That was when Riddle entered his life. Calm. Controlled. Smiling in a way that felt like standing in front of a judge who had already decided the verdict. Ace was offered survival with strings attached, and having never known a life without strings, he took it. From that point on, his days were measured in missions, injuries, and near-death experiences that blurred together into something resembling routine.

He met Jack, quiet and severe, someone who carried grief like a second spine and taught Ace what it meant to live with purpose even when everything hurt. He met Epel, loud, feral, dangerous, who laughed in the face of fear and blood alike, and somehow made the chaos feel survivable. He met Cater, bright and reckless, who treated death like a joke until it wasn’t funny anymore. Cater’s loss lingered longer than Ace expected, a phantom ache he never quite learned how to name.

Ace almost died more times than he could count. He learned how to kill before he learned how to dream. Hunger stopped being scary and started being familiar. Pain became background noise. Normalcy warped until three meals and a bed felt like luxury instead of the bare minimum.

And then, on a rainy day that didn’t feel important at the time, he ducked into a phone booth to avoid getting soaked.

That’s when he met you.

There was nothing dramatic about it. No blood. No devils. Just rain, cramped space, and a moment of quiet that stuck to him in a way nothing else ever had. A laugh. Tears. A flower passed hand to hand like it mattered.

Ace didn’t realize it then, but that was the moment his life split cleanly in two.

Everything before was survival.

Everything after was something dangerously close to hope.

Oh, and a bonus, did you understand the way I just immediately zeroed in his waist wtf is wrong with me—