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The problem with travelling - not this journey specifically, but any at all that last longer than a day or two - is that supplies often go bad quickly. While still edible for an extra day or two, fresh food should be kept easily accessible to stave off sickness. Nonperishables are alright in the short-term, but the lack of adequate nutrition they provide for any extended period of time is enough to be actively harmful. This, all of this, Law is very familiar with, intimately so, and has no plans to experience again.
Hence, he insists on a supply run. Strawhat gripes about it for a total of three minutes, quickly placated with a promise of fresh meat when Law decides that listening to any more of the whining is more likely just to give him a headache. His patience has never exactly been something he’s known for, given that he’s short-tempered most of the time, although people who spend any extended period of time around him have grown used to it and all of their teasing is in good faith. He thinks.
Law goes on the supply run, as it was his idea in the first place, and Strawhat insists on it on the basis that everything is an adventure, Torao! which Law decides to largely ignore because it’s truly just asking for trouble. Bepo volunteers himself too, stating that he’s there to navigate the small dinghy to land and wait by it while they pick up the supplies themselves. It’s a small group, but still larger than Law would like, when his original plan had been to go alone, but he won’t complain about Bepo’s presence. As for Strawhat… well, Law supposes it’s his turn to be in the man’s debt. He can hardly complain about his presence, especially when the two of them are equals. He leaves Bepo and Kikoku at the dinghy and says he’ll be transferring the supplies there after they get them, and that they’ll sort it properly when they’re all back. Bepo nods, salutes in the joking way the Heart Pirates have picked up over time and, with a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth, Law walks into town with a companion by his side.
Strawhat is… enthusiastic, to say the least. Exploring towns is something he evidently enjoys, and a luxury neither of them often have anymore, thanks to their high bounties and memorable appearances. So close to Wano, though, and it matters less - bounty hunters rarely come out so far, and the government wouldn’t touch these lands with a three-hundred-foot pole. The residents are hardly stupid, though, and Law is fully aware that they know who the two of them are, but there are no calls out for their heads, or to have their blood spilt in the square, so he keeps his head down as best he can. Supplies, and getting the hell back to the boat. That’s the plan, that’s the entirety of their agenda, and he can drag Strawhat away from other shops and market stalls easily enough by sticking to it.
“Strawhat,” he says, a hand hooked into the back of the other man’s shirt collar, “I can promise you won’t need to buy that and take it anywhere, ever. I’m not even sure you know what it is.”
Strawhat gives the blade - because that’s about all Law can say for it too, but nobody needs to know that - another considering glance, craning his neck around in a turn that would be physically impossible for anyone else to give Law a look. “But it’s cool,” he says insistently. “You can never have too many cool things.”
“Maybe you need to leave some cool things for the town, in case they’re running low on… coolness,” Law says. He pinches the bridge of his nose - give me strength, he thinks - as Strawhat makes a noise somewhere between appreciative and thoughtful, turning on his heel to go and look at something else that Law will have to inevitably talk him out of taking home.
He may be losing his mind, or have already lost it, but it’s nice. Having some time where the two of them can feel as though they’re getting the opportunity to be people instead of well-known pirates for even a few hours is a blessing, one that Law won’t admit he’s grateful for.
It isn’t a big town. His decision had been careful, finding the balance between a village that would have a grand total of none of what they need and a bustling city where opportunists might see them without their crews and view it as an easy opportunity to snap up bounty money. Law had settled on the town they’re in after hushed conversation with Bepo, Luffy distracted by staring out at the sea around them. Medium sized, busy enough to get regular imports but not enough to be of any interest to most travellers. Enough of a mix of people live there that their accents - the Northern he’d never managed to shake and the Eastern that Strawhat had never bothered trying to - don’t stick out as the only people around to sound like they don’t belong. Still, they are noticeable outsiders, and Law can’t shake the feeling of eyes on them both as they walk around.
One shopkeeper hears his accent and greets him in the language, which Law blinks at for only a second before he responds in kind, trading idle conversation for grains, bread, vegetables and meat wrapped in wax paper, more than he thinks necessary but that had been insisted as something he must get. He takes the advice, laughs off the disproportionate sizes of each product with the man he’s talking to, and is very aware of the fact that he’s knocking some numbers off the price. The novelty of a traveller who speaks his first language, he supposes, and he offers the man a careful, but warm, smile.
Memories crawl up Law’s back slowly, slipping from subconscious to conscious without his consent, superimposing buildings from his youth over the ones actually surrounding him. The small square is replaced by the benches he used to sit on with his sister, and the blurry memory of the image doesn’t clear until he blinks hard several times. The atmosphere is how he remembers the very beginning of his childhood being - calm, everyone going about their days and keeping to themselves, something warm about the willingness to offer a hand to someone who needs it. It’s irritating. He scratches at the back of his hand, absently, Strawhat circling back to his side and casting him a curious look.
“Torao’s even quieter than usual,” he says. Law isn’t certain how he worked that one out, given that they’ve hardly known each other for long, but Strawhat being more observant than he lets on is… unsurprising. He shrugs.
“We’ve been busy,” Law replies. “We haven’t had a lot of time to actually process things or unwind.”
“True!”
Strawhat’s grin is wide, when Law turns his head to look, and he lets out an exhale that he knows the other man recognises as a laugh. It is true, even if it isn’t the entirety of the truth. They’ve barely had time to take a rest after everything - his ribs still ache if he holds his breath for too long, and there’s a dull buzz in his fingertips that comes when he’s been using his powers more than he should to stave off exhaustion and push himself to keep going. He isn’t even thinking about the bruises that still cover a lot of his skin, although he took care to speed up the healing of those on his face and hands, largely out of necessity and only partially out of vanity.
“Do we need anything else?” Strawhat asks. “Did you get the meat?”
“I got your meat,” Law says. It comes out more consoling than he meant it to. “I got plenty of food, Strawhat.”
“What else?”
“Some basic medicinal supplies,” Law says, tapping one finger as he lists off. “Those, along with food, toiletries… a few things that might be needed for an emergency repair job, too.”
“Oh,” Strawhat says. Pouts. “That’s not very cool, Torao. It’s kind of boring.”
Law sniffs. “Sometimes life is boring,” he says. “Not everything can be cool all the time.”
“That doesn’t sound right to me,” Strawhat says, preoccupied by the notion that something could be not cool and people be okay with that until they meet with Bepo again.
He hadn’t been asleep, Law knows, because Bepo is incapable of sleeping without snoring. Instead he’d been taking in the early afternoon sun, content in the warmth despite the thick fur covering him all over. He lights up when he sees Law and Strawhat, waving, and Law cracks his knuckles in preparation for moving the supplies.
“Gross,” says Strawhat, appreciatively, picking an apple from the top of the fruit selection Law had just set down on the sand before them. He bites into it after a cursory polish on his shirt, and Law feels a slight satisfaction at the fact he’d chosen to eat a fruit without any prompting at all. He wonders if something similar had happened when Strawhat had eaten his Devil Fruit before deciding, quickly, that he didn’t really want to know. The fact it would be unsurprising is more than enough for that line of thought.
They had pulled the dinghy into what looked like a quiet side of the island, half-beach and mostly thin tree cover, the town just down a small footpath. It had looked isolated and Law had seen nobody make any sort of move to follow them in this direction when leaving, so the prickle of Observation Haki at the back of his mind comes as a shock.
Someone just beyond eyesight in the trees. Someone tall.
He turns in their direction, as does Strawhat and a confused Bepo a few moments later. There are only seconds of silence before a branch cracks, a rough voice says oh, shit, and a man steps into the first line of tree coverage.
“I’m here to see the surgeon… Law.” It’s rounded off by movement, the man taking a drag from the cigarette in one hand.
What Law can make out through the shadow is someone tall, wearing a long coat and covering his hair with something. What he can hear in the voice is something familiar, the resonance of the vowels residing somewhere in his memory.
His mental inquiry into his own mind is cut off completely when the stranger takes another step forwards, into the light, and Law gets a good look at his face. So good a look, really, that he thinks his heart might have briefly stopped, that he’s died, that he’s left Bepo and Strawhat to deal with his corpse as it begins to rot.
The man in front of him cannot be real. His hallucinations are back - and worse than they have been in ten years, the last time he’d had them - except for the fact that Bepo and Strawhat are both staring at the man as though they can see him perfectly well, flesh-and-blood.
Law doesn’t remember picking up Kikoku. Most likely it was muscle memory, the familiar weight over his shoulder, the texture of it in his hand. He doesn’t remember picking up his sword, or how quickly his blood had turned to ice in his veins - nor does he remember casting his hand out, palm down.
Room, says Law from through a thick fog. He doesn’t even entirely register he’s done it, besides the sting of it in his fingertips. The blond man seems not to have noticed - until Law draws Kikoku and switches himself with a falling leaf, leaving him with the blade of his sword under an inch from his throat.
He doesn’t feel entirely present in his body. His faculties are - well, frankly, Law thinks he’s finally gone insane. He exists in a fugue state, now, the only direction he can take to be to threaten the life of this man with a sword almost as tall as he is himself.
“Captain?” Bepo asks, fear woven through the single word.
“Torao?” and, somehow, Strawhat saying it stings. Feels worse. Law wonders if Luffy would accept that his brain doesn’t work anymore as a good reason.
“Who are you,” Law spits, ignoring the two of them and turning to the man who pales under the newly-imminent threat from the blade, “who are you and why do you have his face?”
This is, he realises somewhere far-off, going to take a hell of a lot of explaining to Strawhat and Bepo. He can’t entirely bring himself to care, or even bring the thought to full completion, focused on the heaving of his own chest and the anger he can feel etched into his features, or the shock he can see from the person using a dead man’s face that’s mingling with begrudging respect.
“How dare you use the face of the man who saved me to approach me?” Law spits. He ignores the very soft oh fuck he can hear over the drumming of his own heartbeat in his ears. He curls his grip tighter around the hilt of Kikoku in an attempt to pretend his hands aren’t shaking, that he isn’t trying to commit every detail of the face to memory even though he knows it cannot possibly be real. There is no way the man standing before him is the one who saved his life as a child.
There is no way that Donquixote Rosinante survived and wound up on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, only to come and visit Law. Not when he felt every impact of the bullets against the chest he was huddled and screaming in, when he could smell blood as he dragged himself through the snow in silence, not when he met with Sengoku in one of the few times he was ever civil to a Marine and they bonded over the loss of the same loved one. Rosinante died thirteen and a half years ago but, somehow, someone stands before him with an almost perfect match for his face, save for extra scarring.
There are Devil Fruits with this power, he knows. He knows of Bon Kurei, as Nico Robin has told him stories of history on sleepless nights in the Thousand Sunny’s library. There are others that allow a user to change their features, to take on the mask of a corpse - he couldn’t name any of them for shit, in truth - and whatever ideas above his station this man before him has conjured up, Law will make certain he never tries it again.
The man blinks, slowly, before he smiles. It’s crooked and wide. “Sorry, kid,” not-Rosinante says, lifting one hand to wrap around the blade, uncaring of how the sharp edge cuts into the skin of his palm, “this is the only face I’ve got.”
It’s such a shitty joke. It’s delivered exactly how he used to, grin afterwards and all, eyes bright with mirth even as Law groaned and told him to stop. It’s a shitty joke and it’s - impossible. Everything about this is an impossibility.
“Cora-san,” Law says, softly. In truth it’s hardly more than a breath, Kikoku wavering as he attempts to hold it steady. Not-Rosinante’s breath catches in his throat as Law shakes his head, shakes the consideration away. “No. No, I watched him die.”
“Well,” says Not-Rosinante, drawing it out, “no. You heard me get shot.”
And that is - true. Admittedly.
Law hadn’t been able to see a thing besides parts of his own body, thin slivers of light through gaps in the wood providing just enough light to see the discolouration on his skin that perseveres even now. He hadn’t truly seen any of the events happen, only blood in the snow afterwards, and blood staining the black feathered coat. All he had seen was blood, everywhere, black under the light of the moon.
“I…” Law tightens his grip on Kikoku again, if only to stop himself dropping the sword. “That- but- but- the news…”
Not-Rosinante - Maybe-Rosinante - shrugs, now seemingly unbothered by the blade at his throat and by the audience they have, stunned into silence as they are. “A marine dying to a pirate is better publicity than a marine getting shot and then thrown in prison after feeding a child a Devil Fruit,” he says. He eyes Law, too, looks him up and down, gaze lingering on the skin of his face and forearms, where he can see it. “You clearly got away and cured yourself, though, so it’s fine!”
His grin is wide.
His grin is identical to the last time Law ever saw Rosinante’s face when he was a child. His grin is identical to Cora-san’s in every single minute way, down to the slight lopsidedness and the way his left eye has always creased slightly more than the other.
This is impossible, Law thinks, taking a staggering half-step backwards and dropping Kikoku. The sword isn’t quiet when it hits the floor, he assumes. He doesn’t know. He isn’t certain he knows anything, anymore.
“Cora-san,” he breathes. He isn’t certain what else there is to say, what he could say.
What he does instead is - it would be generous to describe it as anything other than crumple, falling forwards to plant his face in Cora-san’s chest as the man’s arms come up to wrap around him even through his surprise. Law feels his hat fall to the ground and can’t even bring himself to care as he clutches at Cora-san’s shirt, inhaling through the start of tears, face already sodden with them and nose blocked too.
“Oh,” Cora-san said as soon as Law fell into him, following it with a quiet, “oh, holy shit, kid…” as he feels the heaving of Law’s shoulders, pulling him even closer into the embrace.
Donquixote Rosinante still smells like cigarettes and sea air, and is still perfectly capable of enveloping Law in a hug like he had been when he was much younger. Law is grateful, at least, that he had taught himself to be quiet when crying, because he doesn’t think he could stop himself even if he wanted to at that moment.
He clings to Cora-san’s shirt and sobs, a heaving thing that has his shoulders shaking even under the weight of his arm, that has him feeling as though he were thirteen again and saying goodbye in the snow rather than standing, watched, on the shore of an island.
Unsurprisingly it’s Strawhat who breaks the silence they’ve fallen into, although his usual volume is reduced almost entirely, and his voice is deeply serious. “Torao,” he says, almost gently. “Is this… who raised you? The one you said was killed when you were a kid?”
Law nods once before he remembers that, actually, nobody’s going to be able to see that. He stands upright again, back straight, ignoring the tears still clinging to his face as he looks between Strawhat and Bepo. One of them, who he knows well, watching the scene with wide eyes; the other is unreadable.
It’s strange. Strawhat seems to go through much of life with his emotions on display while Law does his best to hide them - but here, but now, their roles have been reversed. Law is the one of them standing with his breaths heaving and tears silently falling from his eyes, while Strawhat is carefully neutral, his face blank.
“Yes,” Law says. “Yes, this- this is Cora-san. Ah. Donquixote Rosinante.”
Bepo doesn’t manage to keep his oh quiet, shrinking in on himself when attention is turned on him. “Don’t stare at me,” he says weakly, “I just - the captain used to dream about you a lot. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologise for speaking,” Law sighs while Cora-san blinks, turning towards the mink to say “he did?”
Bepo nods. “Most nights. For… a while.”
It’s true - at least, Law is fairly certain it’s true.
More of his memories from that time than he cares to think about are slightly blurry, tinted with fever-delirium even after he’d shakily used the Ope-Ope No Mi to scrape every piece of lead he could out of his arteries. Even years later he isn’t entirely certain how much of what he remembers are the bare facts, but… he remembers dreaming a lot while trying to sleep off the fever. He remembers hallucinations, vaguely, images of Cora-san standing over him that had seemed so real, until he realised the hand he was clutching at was made of nothing but air all along.
He’s heard that he used to talk in his sleep before. Not just from Bepo, but Shachi and Penguin had mentioned it too, confirming that while it’s a hell of a lot rarer now and comes only from bone-deep exhaustion, he’d done it almost every time he slept as a kid. It’s not as though it’s particularly surprising, exactly. His delirium hadn’t been so kind as to keep itself only to his waking hours.
“It was… it was only a few months after everything happened,” Law says quietly, voice faltering. “Some part of me still thought I was losing my mind from the fever and that when it cleared, you’d… be there.”
Cora-san is… pale. He looks slightly horrified by what he’s just heard - you don’t know the half of it, Law thinks, this is me playing it off, Law thinks - and reaches to pull him into another embrace. Law goes easily, unwilling to admit out loud that he hasn’t felt a warmth so deep into his bones for years, unwilling to admit that the memory of stale cigarette smoke has been keeping him company and comforted for years.
He tucks his face against whatever part of Cora-san’s chest he’s pressed against, because the man is a tall goddamn freak, and feels a hand running through his hair, combing it out of whatever horrific state it must be in from his hat. It makes him feel younger, years younger, sends him straight back to being barely thirteen and feeling his body dying cell by cell, clinging to Cora-san in moments when he couldn’t find it in himself to keep up his halfhearted unaffected persona.
His chest aches, he realises numbly, the way it does when he’s pushing himself, and Law realises he never dropped the room, extricating one arm from the hug to do so, a weight lifting from him that he hadn’t noticed until it was gone. God - he’s tired. He’s exhausted.
“Cora-san,” he hears. Strawhat. Still flat, still serious. It’s not something he’s used to hearing from the other captain. “Torao loves you, y’know? He spent years avenging you. He’d have done it a thousand times over.”
An accurate, if embarrassing, summary of his feelings and thought processes.
“I love him,” he hears Cora-san say. “I made sure it was the last thing I ever told him.”
Law thinks of a man of fire, a man with a hole in his chest that smouldered around the edges. Law thinks of a smile and the horrific, chilling scream that had come from Strawhat. If he remembers what Strawhat said - and Strawhat’s recollection is admittedly spotty at best, given he had almost died shortly after - his brother’s last words had been similar. Thank you for the love, he thinks. Shit.
“Okay,” and now, Strawhat sounds more like himself, lighter. Law imagines his grin, pictures the man with one hand on the back of his hat as he laughs. “My name is Monkey D. Luffy! I’m gonna be king of the pirates! This is Bepo, he’s one of Torao’s crew!”
His cheer, his enthusiasm, is contagious. Intoxicating, maybe, is one word for it too - Law sniffs, feeling the beginning of a smile on his face even as another sob cuts through his body. Of course Strawhat would warm up quickly. Of course he would use that damned nickname for him. Of course, of course, he would stake his claim on his destiny on his first introduction to someone.
“Ambitious,” Cora-san says amusedly, before he makes a more intrigued noise. “Your name… you wouldn’t happen to be some relative of Garp’s, would you?”
Law doesn’t remember Cora-san speaking so carefully before, musing on it even as Strawhat laughs behind him. Thirteen years is a not-insignificant amount of time, he supposes, and the fact he’s currently clinging to the man as though he were a child again might have something to do with it.
“Gramps!” Strawhat says cheerfully. “You know him? How? Are you a pirate? Did he arrest you?”
“He just said he was a marine,” Law says, mostly muffled.
“Oh, yeah,” Strawhat says. “Oops.”
Law extracts himself from the embrace eventually, although it takes effort not unlike that of him clawing his way back to his feet while facing Doflamingo, and Bepo wraps an arm around his shoulders once he’s by his side. On any other day he might have complained about the open affection where anyone could see it - he has a reputation as cold and aloof to hold up, never mind how much more free he is with physical contact when alone with his crew - but in the moment all he can manage to do is be grateful for it. Everything feels off-kilter, like the world is shifting beneath his feet, and Law can let his weight half-collapse into Bepo’s side unashamedly.
Bepo is warm, as always, and holds him tight against his side in silent understanding. He won’t be pushed to explain how he’s feeling, not yet, not until he’s fully settled into his body again, when his hands have stopped trembling and he can stand to tear his eyes away from Cora-san for more than three seconds at a time. Part of him, the part that still balks at the cold and the sound of gunfire, is whispering that as soon as he looks away, the man will disappear, despite how solid he is, how present.
It’s the part of him that still remembers fever-delirium clearly, thin broth all he could stomach, the chill of the island settling deep into his bones and residing in there until the day he dies. Over the years Law has quieted it but, here, faced with a dead man walking, it’s hard to silence.
“What happened to you?” he asks, not entirely noticing he’d spoken at all. Bepo tightens his grip around his shoulders a little while Strawhat moves slightly closer, distracted from his scanning of the area. Cora-san smiles, something small, and scratched at the bottom of the most noticeable scar on his cheek.
“The marines took me into their custody,” he says. “It was touch-and-go for a long time, apparently. After that… talks on what to do. They could martyr me, or have the news report that I was going to turn out fine, except for the fact I was in prison for the theft of a coveted Devil Fruit, as well as… a count of arson or two.”
“I think it was more than two,” Law points out. Strawhat hums a laugh.
“More like five,” Cora-san agrees. “They deserved it, though. They deserved worse. But, Law… I’m sorry.”
The apology is unexpected and unwarranted. What does he have to apologise for, Law wonders, blinking at him. The cigarette has long since burned out, dropped to the floor when he’d been holding Kikoku to his throat, although blood has stained Cora-san’s long fingers, all the way down to the fingertip. He suspects there might be some in his hair, now, dried tacky amidst the strands, and can’t find it in himself to care.
“What are you sorry for, you clown?” he scoffs. “It’s not like you decided to pretend to be dead.”
“Little brat,” Cora-san snorts. “I’m glad you used the Ope-Ope fruit. I worried it might be too late, but once I broke out, I saw a bounty poster for Trafalgar Law and I knew you’d done it.”
Strawhat blinks. “You broke out of prison?”
It would be the part that he gets stuck on. Law remembers the chaos the breakout of Impel Down had caused, the war, the death, being wrist-deep in his chest while putting him back together. His fingers itch at the memory.
“It was hardly Impel Down,” Cora-san says, waving it off. “It wasn’t that hard, when the guards thought I was just a clumsy idiot.”
“You are a clumsy idiot,” Law says.
“Who raised you, shitty little brat?” Cora-san says, glaring at him.
“You did.”
“Not always.”
Strawhat laughs again, loud, bright, and clear; Bepo joins him in slightly quieter, but Law can feel it where he’s leaning against his side. It feels comfortable, surprisingly so, even if slipping back into how he always used to talk to Cora-san feels slightly insane after so many years. He feels out of his depth and, simultaneously, as though something has settled into place, that something is right.
It is surreal, though, he has to admit. He has more questions than he can put into words at the moment, mostly surrounding why the fuck did you do that and why did you lie to me and pretend you weren’t even though you can’t lie for shit, which highlight that his speech patterns haven’t changed that much over the years. There’s a lot to catch up on, more to question him about - especially the parts of things that Law has managed to put together over time - but, for now, he can let something like relief sink into him. He can fight to ignore the parts of him that cry that it’s one of his more convoluted dreams, by merit of exposure to Strawhat’s particular brand of insanity for too long.
“Cora-san,” he says, ducking out from under Bepo’s arm with a grateful pat, “are you coming back with us?”
“Where else would I be going?” the man asks with a raised eyebrow before he looks down. “Just let me light one of these, I’ll be right there.”
Law counts thirty-six seconds after the click of the lighter before Bepo, panicked, starts trying to point out the fire on Cora-san’s sleeve while Strawhat laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen, and he turns his face into the feathered collar of his jacket to hide his smile.