Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

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Trafalgar Law had spent the last thirteen years of his life living in a submarine, and had come to understand that there were certain things that one became acclimated to when living on (or in his case, below) the sea. For example, as a young man, Law was unaware that submarines keep relatively low oxygen levels. Shachi and Law had been unfortunate enough to discover this during a mysteriously extended recovery time for the formers’ routine tonsillectomy. Law learned how to deploy and rig the main and spanker sails for the means of surface cruising when all four of the propulsion systems had simultaneously overheated in the shallows of an atoll in the Northern Vulcan Seamounts. The torpedo tubes had to be cleaned once a month, and before the Heart Pirates were fortunate enough to sail twenty strong, it was Law himself that crawled down the eighteen-foot tube for maintenance. 

The Polar Tang was a singular vessel and was indeed Law’s most valued possession; she demanded great precision to pilot, and he demanded the efficiency and respect of his crew to maintain her. He commanded his submarine with the pride of knowing that there was nothing else in the four seas quite like it. 

Prior to his engagement with piracy, he lived in a cave (Well, certainly not lived; rather, clung to life, albeit resentfully so), and before that, there were traces of a white city, shadows of his parents, and the echoes of their home on the edge of a wintergreen, boreal forest. 

The happier memories of his early childhood - however fleeting and increasingly obscured by time - were those of the bracing cold and knee-deep snow, and his sister (small, sweet, pale - she had always seemed pale, or perhaps he could only remember the creeping affectation of their communal disease) offering him a fallen icicle, melting in her chubby baby fist.

(Then, of course, came the Burning, and after that, the Escape. These were a blur of sound and color, of the wretched odors of humanity smoking hot and acrid in his nose, his mouth, his lungs, until there was nothing but the luminiferous ghost of Flevance curling omnipresent around his shoulders, tasking him with the burden of her memory. What he truly recalled was awakening with a black, bottomless Fury, a rage that drove him to seek the employ of the nearest morally ambiguous business that would sponsor the morbid vestiges of a dying child: Pirates.)

In many ways, the easiest thing he ever accomplished was becoming a pirate. All it took was a little imagination vis-a-vis debauchery, swashbuckling, and general disregard for the expectations of legal society. That, and the patience to sequester oneself in an airtight, nuclear powered underwater vessel. A pair of skills he had long since hewn to a sharp point, which he used shrewdly, and to great effect. 

One hundred still-beating pirate hearts, hand delivered in a veritable dead man’s chest, tossed at the feet of the largest Marine headquarters on the Grand Line was, perhaps, some of his greatest effect yet. 

“Captain?”

“What.”

“Do you need something? You’ve been still for about ninety seconds.” Uni murmured from behind his surgical mask. Law blinked absently, taking in the abdominal incision before him, the various monitors bleeping in concert, and the intolerable humidity in his armpits.

‘Need’, Law thought, was a strong word. He didn’t ‘need’ anything. He could hardly bring himself to ‘want’, let alone ‘need’. ‘Wanting’ or ‘needing’ felt like a vice grip in his belly, a consumptive reminder of his bleak childhood. He had long since learned how to avoid the pitfall of his extraneous desires, base or otherwise. 

The consistent hammer of his youth was a repetitive cycle of exorcising his ‘wants’; he ‘wanted’ vengeance for his murdered family, he ‘wanted’ everyone and everything in his pitiable sphere of influence to become utterly and completely obliterated, he ‘wanted’ the creeping figure of Death to fulfill its grim task instead of standing over his thin, feverish, weak body, laughing at his compounding suffering. 

Then, there was Rosinante Doflamingo. His Corazon. 

Law bifurcated his life into the times Before and After Cora-san. It was then that his ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ experienced a paradigm shift. He ‘wanted’ to see himself as Cora-san saw him, with bottomless compassion and endless fortitude. He ‘wanted’ to continue to exist as Cora-san wanted him to exist. He ‘wanted’ a chance at life with a man who was as much his father as his biological one had ever been. 

He ‘needed’ Cora-san’s peace to lull him to sleep, to hold his hand, to hear him say, “I love you”. 

Want?

Need?

“Maybe a cup of coffee,” He offered.

“As soon as we finish, Doctor.”

“Sponge.” He replied, resuming surgery. 

“Where?” Uni frantically peered into the surgical area. 

“Not inside the patient - my forehead. Perspiring into exposed abdominal viscera is typically frowned upon by the greater medical community.”

“Oh, right, sorry Captain.” Uni replied, taking a square of gauze and blotting the shine from Law’s temples. 

“Why is it so HOT IN HERE?!” He turned his head and shouted through the open hatch at his back.  

Across the gangway, through a hanging spray of elephant cilantro, he could see as Jean Bart leaned over to examine a panel of gauges. He tapped one with an enormous finger.  

“Says eighty-seven, Captain.” 

“Whore mother of Christ,” he huffed through his mask, “I’m sweating like two rats fucking in a wool sock.”

“That’s really funny, Doctor.” Uni said, which Law ignored. 

“Jean Bart, figure out what’s going on with the heat! We should be cruising at 500 meters, there’s absolutely no reason for the temperature to-”

At which point, an enormously loud sound shook the submarine, nearly causing him to rip out the hemostat with which he was pinching the appendicular branch of the ileocolic artery he was preparing to ligate. He didn’t, of course, because he wasn’t a fuckwit. The entire vessel shuddered with wire bright shrieking, almost as if they were scraping an iceberg.

Law, being a professional, threw his arm over the surgical table, wrapping his fingers round the restraints securing his anesthetized engineer. He whipped his head around to monitor the pulse-ox read out, breathless, listening for the telltale signs of rushing water.

He counted to five, and when the sub did not shake again, he reoriented himself. 

“Uni, give me some fucking light, we’re closing up in ten.” He hissed, turning back to the emergency appendectomy. The pirate-nee-surgical technician reached up and adjusted the saucer and held a kidney shaped basin at the ready. 

“Is the mic on?” Law breathed, judiciously severing the disaffected appendix from the colon.

“Uh,” Uni turned to the wall and toggled a switch. “Is now.”

“Bridge, status report.” He dumped the inflamed organ into the awaiting dish.

“Stand by, Captain.” His helmsman replied through the standard amount of interference. 

“The fuck I fucking will! Status report, NOW. Or has it been lost upon you that we are performing an emergency surgery?”

“Engine complication of some kind, sir. I’m trying to maintain depth!” Came Hakugan’s crackled reply. “Please stand by. I love you!”

Uni snickered. 

“Oh my god,” Law sighed. “Which engine?”

“That’s the million dollar question, Captain.” Penguin, this time, chimed in.

“Someone make sure the main condenser intake is shut.” Law dug through his instruments. “Uni, do you see any suture on this tray?”

“We’re working on it, and like, a hundred other things.” 

“It should be there. I specifically pulled an aught-eight packet!”

“Repeat: which engine is malfunctioning?” 

“The ship is, like, 80 percent engine, Captain.” 

“Penguin, so help me god-”

“I’m so sorry, Doctor, you’re right, it's not here, let me-”

“Hold on the suture, Uni. Penguin-”

“We’re all-hands below! Stand by, love y-”

Uni, a medical professional and service to general piracy, toggled the switch off. 

“Remind me to replace his testicles with boiled eggs.”

“Shell or no shell?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Yes sir.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Law summoned a Room. Around him, the operating theater flickered into brilliant awareness. The potential and kinetic expressions of matter and space hovered in his periphery, practically eager to jump into action at his command. He sharpened his focus, categorizing and compartmentalizing the Euclidean dimensions of his bounded three-dimensional continuum until just the necessary remained. Noted but ignored was a faint ripple of the rim, a telltale refraction of light, shimmering like heated air. A minute tremor of his control, nothing more.  

He likened it to exercising a muscle and the buildup of lactic acid that causes a burning sensation. Normal fatigue, familiar, expected. Unlike exercising a muscle, a Room could bleed energy from him like an anticoagulant. His Devil Fruit ability required extreme precision; using it was less like turning on a spigot and more like opening a floodgate.

He speculated that maybe it had something to do with thermodynamics, but he wasn’t that kind of doctor. 

He pressed his fingers around the appendiceal stump, obliterating the mucosa with a minute fluoresce of electrocautery, and immediately dropped the Room. 

“Are we in danger of losing pressure?” He asked, glaring at the heart monitor. “Fucking sponge.”

His assistant set the pan aside, then obligingly blotted his forehead again. He returned his gaze to the pulse-ox and paused.

Law eyed the hesitation in his posture and returned to his finger sweep inspection of the surrounding organ tissue. 

“Captain.” 

“Are we in danger of losing pressure?” He repeated, with what he assumed was the suitable amount of gravitas given the situation. 

“Not as such,” He breathed, “Stable heart rate and normal blood-oxygen level, we’re just a bit warm.”

“How warm?”

“Wobbly 100.”

Of course, Law reasoned to himself. Ambient temperature aside, Iruka had woken that morning  with severe intestinal pain. The infection had all night to set in, but the structure hadn’t ruptured, saving both Iruka and Law from the trouble of flushing the former’s abdominal cavity with saline which would have been an even bigger pain in the ass for the latter. 

“Fucking hell, can we wait to ice him until I close?”

“I mean, how fast can you operate? Sir.” Uni warbled. 

“How do you feel about eggs?”

“I prefer them on a plate, Captain.”

Law felt the small of his back grow damp as he examined the stump of un-infected intestine. He could hear his crew running around in the hallway beyond, could just see as more bodies moved toward the bow, could hear them tripping down the grate stairs. 

“What the fucking is HAPPENING out there?” Law tried again, not bothering to look up from his work. 

Uni toggled the switch.

“There’s no breach as far as we can tell, Captain,” Another voice - Ikkaku. “We’re working on it.”

“If my confidence were popcorn, it’d be grits, ma’am.” Law grated. 

“There’s no visible water as of yet. Stand by.” She clipped and went silent. 

“Endostapler.” Law spat.

“What, really? Overkill, don’t you think?”

“Unless you would like to attempt to suture in a possibly sinking submarine, give me the fucking endostapler.”

“Iruka, forgive us for our aggressive handling of your insides.” He intoned in mock prayer, retrieving the endostapler from a nearby drawer. 

“He will be grateful that they are his insides and not his outsides.” Law chewed through the grit of his teeth, and proceeded to staple his engineer’s guts back together. 

“Uh, Captain,” the panel mumbled. “This is Bepo.”

“Yes, Bepo, go ahead.” Law replied, tossing the stapler aside. 

“Well, uh, I’m supposed to deliver the status report you requested-”

“I’m listening.” Law said, releasing the retractor and dropping it in the instrument tray and taking up the stapler again.

“Yes, um, Hakugan reports minimal hydroplaning; and Penguin says the quarter, aft, and lower decks all appear fine from where he can see them through various portholes.”

“Great.”

“There are no icebergs, in case you were wondering-” Law hummed good naturedly, and began applying staples to the remaining fascial layer. “-as we are currently traversing a warm current island chain. So there are no readily apparent breaches due to… that.”

“That’s wonderful.” Law sighed. He loved this bear. “What about you?”

“Me? I’m fine. How are you?”

“Well, Bepo, I’m closing a surgical wound while my house might be sinking.” Law hissed while he applied dots of skin glue along the four inch length of the newly closed abdominal wall. “I’ve never fucking been better.”

“Shall we begin to ascend, Captain?”

“Not if you want to experience rapid onset decompression sickness.” Law huffed. “Almost done, Uni.”

“I’m ready whenever you are, Doctor.”

“Orders, sir?” Bepo tried again. 

“Yeah, get a someone to drop me a suit and fucking stand by.” 

“Yes, Captain.”

With a sigh, he tossed the glue into the tray of used instruments and stepped back from the table. 

“I’ll dress and get him into recovery, Captain.” Uni kicked the caster breaks free and wheeled Iruka into the ensuite.

“Make sure the monitor is hooked up to some kind of back up.” Law stripped his latex gloves into the tray.

Another metallic groan vibrated the vessel, suspiciously like the previously experienced nonspecific engine failure - a telltale jerk of thrust imbalance, the slow incline of yaw ever drooping starboard, the shift of his balance from both feet to one. He caught the IV pole as it tilted, and passed it to Uni. 

“Bepo, report!”

“Uh,” His reply came, through somewhat less than standard interference. “No, that was everything, Captain. Sorry.”

“If someone tells me to ‘Stand By’ again, I’m going to turn their corpse into a vase!”

“What would you like to hear, Captain?”

“Something good!”

“At surface, wind appears between 1 and 4 knots, with non-significant swell, high barometric pressure and ambient temperatures in the 80s.”

“Thank you for the weather report but I read the newspaper this morning.”

“Uh,”

“Anything else to add? My horoscope, perhaps? I’m a Libra.”

“...I’m not sure what that means, Captain.”

“Bepo, what is the condition of the goddamn structural integrity of my boat?”

“...Stand by?”

“For fuck’s sake.” Law toggled the switch and stormed for the door. There, he ripped off his boots and puddled his scrub pants in the corner. He mopped the sweat from his face and chest with the top and tossed it on the discarded bottoms. Across the way, he could just see the bimetal thermostat slowly expanding, reading at 92.  

Moments later, Shachi dashed by on the grate walkway, cheerfully shouted, “Looking good, Captain!” and tossed his black captains’ coverall through the portal. Law caught it, tugged the shitting suit on and stuffed his feet back into his rubber boots. 

Overhead, a klaxon began to blare as he hefted himself over the stairwell and down onto the Engine Deck rail. He counted the 3 second delay between the klaxon and the work lights abruptly shutting off. He paused for his sight to acclimate to the dull, orange glow of the emergency system before moving on. 

“Someone shut that damn alarm off.” He shouted into a nearby communication panel.

“We’re trying, Captain!” 

“Try harder!”

At this point, he turned his attention to the deafening noise of the engine room. Located at the bottom of the sub, the level shared space with the gun deck, ballasts, and one of the two holds. Stalking between the long banks of the twin turbo generators, a dozen gauges on either side reading no levels. Approaching the stern, the walkway came to a series of intersections and ended in a bulkhead separating the engine room from the rear hold. 

Half a dozen of his crew were shouting over the klaxon, dipping in and out between the machine blocks. He maneuvered through the foot traffic until he came upon a trio of figures huddled behind the hydraulic housing. 

“Ikkaku,” Law shouted over the din, “Please tell me you have come up with a decent fucking reason for the emergency system to go off.”

The lone woman on his crew, Ikkaku, squinted up at him from over her compatriot's shoulder. 

“Yes Captain,”

“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that I was performing surgery.”

“Yes, Captain,”

“I need to hear you say that you have this under control, ma’am.”

“Uh,” She grimaced. 

Law knew that the panel she was crouched before was the sealed partition containing the Nuclear Compartment. He knew it was responsible for the conversion of water into steam and electricity that powered and supported the entire submarine and crew. He knew that its accompanying monitoring panel, which measured for pressure, flow, temperature, quantity, load, strain, and other various outputs, could make noise but ideally, shouldn’t.

He peered at the most important gauge, the geiger counter; the tri-colored face indicated orange, which was better than red but not as good as green.

At this point, Law knew he had a narrow field in which to play, one that was growing ever slimmer by the second. 

“We’ve chased the problem down to the primary circuit compartment. Could be a hole somewhere in the coolant system, could be an electrical issue.” Ikkaku pressed her hand to the panel. “There’s no doubt - the chamber is being flooded. But to what capacity, we can’t know ‘til we get in there.”

“Have you shut down the turbo generators?”

“Yes.”

“Can we run on the diesel engine?”

She shook her head, “It relies on the steam generator.”

“Which is?”

“Offline.”

“But not compromised?” He clarified. 

“Not that we’re aware.”

“The electrical propulsion then,” Law shouted over the clangor. 

“No!” Ikakku shouted back. “The current is generated in the pressurizer and main pump.” 

“Which is where the problem is.” Law replied, realization weighing on his shoulders like an albatross. “Are you telling me the reactor compartment is possibly full of radioactive, electrified sea water?” 

“Possibly.”

“We need to hit the kill switch on the reactor.”

“If we do that, we’ll sink!”

“We’ll blow the ballasts!” Law leaned back to look down the line of the engine room. “Then, once on the surface, we’ll shut it down.”

“Do we have enough power to do it?” She turned to Clione, who was already on his feet.

“The air compressors all have manual overrides!” He replied, tugging his hood off and stuffing it into his back pocket. 

“There are release valves on either side of the tanks - you’ll have to coordinate with a second team to do it.” Law grabbed him shoulder and pointed down the way, past the turbine generators. “Once the intake valve is sealed, we’ll flush the system!”

“Aye, Captain!” Clione replied and dashed off. 

Law turned back to Ikkaku. She had wretched open the storage compartment in the floor and was digging through a cache of tools. 

“Do you know if the intake valve has been shut?”

She shook her head and popped back up with a pair of enormous monkey wrenches, one of which she pressed into his waiting hand. 

“Check in with Penguin, I think he was taking care of it. I’m going to help with the ballast.” 

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Sir.” She trotted down the gangway after Clione. Law kicked the floor panel back into position and raced back the way he had come. Once at the hatch, he leaned out and shouted up the center of the dim ship.   

“Bridge, prepare for Emergency Blow! All hands seal hatches! Stand by for angle!”

He gripped the handwheel of the hatch and listened to his crew work around him. He felt his heart galloping in his chest, felt the rich burn of adrenaline in his thighs, the fatigue of lactic acid coursing through him as he counted the precious seconds. 

“Operating Theatre secure! ” He looked up to see Uni’s masked face peeking at him from between the trellis that hung through the center of the sub. “Patient in recovery, ice packed and temperature stable. Backup is running to vitals, readouts are normal! ”

“Stay with him! Prepare for angle!” Uni nodded and disappeared from sight. The sub heaved again, this time listing port. Law looked around for a communication panel and toggled the switch. 

“Hakugan, start taking us up as you can. We’re blowing the ballasts.”

“Aye, sir,” The helmsman replied. “Already on it - we’re currently 300 meters and rising. Standing by for angle.”

“Good man.” Law knocked into the wall as the sub shuddered and rolled. Amid the tumult, something round and heavy suddenly dropped onto his head, followed by a second and third which toppled onto his shoulders. Then, a cold deluge of dirt rained down from above, straight into the neck of his boiler suit. 

“What the fuck-”

He turned wordlessly and witnessed a trio of cabbage heads roll down the gangway. Looking up, he watched the hydroladder swing violently and knock into the surrounding railings, dropping bits of herbs and various produce as it collided. 

“Jean Bart! Secure your goddamn vegetables!” He roared, and set off for the valve. 

Law raced up the gangway toward the front of the vessel, dodging various members racing back toward the ballasts. He spied the bright red of his watch officer’s pompom bobbing out from between the various pipes of a distribution tree.  

“Penguin!”

“Ah, Captain! Welcome to the exterior intake valve!” Penguin cheerfully replied. “I can’t get the son of a bitch to close.” He rattled the lever with both hands, demonstrating its immobility. 

“We can access the main condenser in the subfloor and check the trap.”

“Oh, I love when I get to access the main condenser in the subfloor and check the trap.”

“Keep talking like that and you just might get a promotion.”

The pair lifted a grated panel from its slot and dropped into the crawl space. Working in long practiced tandem, Law worked on releasing a series of pressurized locks while Penguin assembled the drain auger. 

“A promotion, huh?”

“We can discuss this at your quarterly review.” Law snorted. “Do you even remember how to do this?”

“After all these years of sailing under your esteemed submariner tutelage, I am shocked and offended at the accusation.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“I know what I’m doing.” The man assured him. Law slipped the final mesh back from the exposed pipe and gestured to the hole.

“I’m sure you do.”

The officer of the watch gripped the auger in a rude manner.

“You see Captain, you have to treat her like a woman.” 

Law fixed him with a look. 

“Go on.”

Penguin looked back. 

“...No.” 

“I’ll treat you like a woman.” Law huffed.

“Like you know how to treat a woman.” He laughed.

“Do the fucking thing before I do it myself.”

“That’s what she said.”

It was a wet job, but intake trap maintenance was a common task that every crew member learned to perform. Penguin and Shachi were the most practiced hands at the assignment, and Law observed as he fed the cable down the open section of pipe and quickly spun the hand reel to deliver the terminal to the trap near the valve on the ship’s hull. 

“I’m not feeling anything.” He sighed, working the cable back and forth. Law bit his tongue in a Herculean effort to not fling his joke back at him.

“Tap the valve shutter, maybe there’s something there.”

“Aye.” He complied and spun the reel until it jolted in his hand. “Oh.”

“The fuck?” Law hissed and reached up and wretched the lever - which, with little resistance it had shown before, closed. 

“The fuck?” Penguin parroted.  

“Forget it. Close it up and let’s head to the ballasts.”

Once reeled in, they peered at the head piece - no damage. Penguin stowed the tool with one hand and worked the zipper of his suit down with the other. 

“Not that I would ever complain, Captain-”

“You? Never.” Law felt a muscle in his cheek twitch as he replaced the covers in the subfloor. 

“Under absolutely no circumstances.” Penguin agreed. “But, uh, it’s a bit warm, wouldn’t you say?”

“Do you think?” Law sighed and held his hand out to pull Penguin back onto the gangway.

“Well, it’s not the heat, per say. It’s the humidity.”

“No, it's the stupidity,” Law shoved him into the wall and started off towards the ballasts. “Stupid.” 

Back down at the aft end of the room, he spied Ikkaku and Clione working at their ballast tank. He maneuvered into position at the opposite tank and turned to see Penguin at his end of the handwheel. 

“Do we have a mic?” He shouted, sweat dripping into his eyes. 

Ikkaku’s hand shot out and pointed at the nearest communication panel. The light blipped green. Law heaved out of the top half of the suit and tied the sleeves around his waist. 

“Hakugan, status!”

“200, Captain. I’ve brought us to a still - there’s a weird sound in the water.” 

“Bepo, keep your eye on it. Hakugan, on my signal.”

“Aye.” The pair replied in unison. 

Law worked the monkey wrench onto the central bolt of the enormous hand wheel and pulled until it gave way. The rich burn of work in his shoulders and biceps paled to the thunder in his heart, and seemed insignificant to the precipitous incline of the hull and the furious, quiet focus of his crew. Law dropped the wrench to the floor and positioned himself on the opposite side of the wheel. 

“Ikkaku!”

“Ready!” She shouted back, mirroring his position at her wheel. 

“Heave!”

He jumped and threw his entire body weight onto the massive hand wheel, locking one ankle over the other. At the same time, Penguin at the other side pulled up with a great shout; the wheel jerked, but did not give way. 

“Carefully!” Law shouted. “They have to go at the same time! Ikkaku, on three!” 

“Again, Captain!” She replied, working the wheel bolt once more and climbing back into position. 

“One!”

The vessel groaned again, and another enormous clattering battered the exterior of the sub. Undoubtedly the ‘weird sound’ that Hakugan had mentioned on the sonar. 

“Captain!” Bepo called through the panel.

“Two!”

“Here we go!”

“THREE!” In concert, Ikkaku and Law jumped, while their partners pulled. The ballast wheels shrieked in agony until at last, they gave way. Law fell on his ass and gripped the wheel for his life as the valve released the entirety of the sub’s pressurized air into the tanks, forcing the water through the open valve at the bottom, and rocketing the submarine several hundred meters toward the ocean surface. 

All around, the ship was filled with a chorus of screams, of wailing metal, and the howling release of air. The nose of the Tang pitched, and Law reached out and grabbed Penguin’s ankle as he slid past on the gangway. His teeth rattled in his skull, chin pressed to his chest at the sudden acceleration and onslaught of pressure. 

The submarine shook with sound, heat and color until, at last, it broke through to the surface with a massive displacement of water. He felt himself come up off the walkway, a brief moment of weightlessness blossoming in his belly, and then dropped back down head first onto the grate. He cursed and clapped a hand over the back of his head, it came away warm and wet. 

He felt the vessel rock beneath him, achieving a horizontal plane, and then, at last, stillness. 

After a long moment of impossible silence, a shout issued from the bridge. 

“Woo!”

Law rolled his eyes. 

“All hands to the Fin House,” He shouted. “Now!” 

-

Law watched Bepo release the seal on the Fin House door and trot back down the stairs to the mess. 

A pleasant breeze drifted down into the sweltering room. Before him, his crew jumbled together - in various states of undress, some unlatching the portholes, others tending to minor wounds, but all alive and accounted for. He looked across to the central shaft of the sub, at the hydroladder hastily tied to the wall, at the various dangles scattered across the floor that did not survive the angle of the emergency blow. 

He collapsed on a stool and allowed Penguin to apply glue to the cut on the back of his head. At his side, Shachi coughed, preparing space for their Captain to speak. 

“Alright,” He sighed. “Options.” 

“We need to figure out how close we are to Winner Island.” His helmsman announced. “We should start by calibrating our heading and creating a timeline.”

“I’m more concerned about the loss of power.” Ikkaku argued. “We should start by ensuring that the ship isn’t going into meltdown and killing everything in a three mile radius.”

“I think we should start with lunch.” Penguin muttered. 

“It’s, like, ten in the morning.” Shachi muttered back, kicking his foot. 

“Yeah, and I can’t think on an empty stomach.”

“Then be awake for breakfast!”

“Shut up.” Law huffed. “Let’s hear something actionable, people.”

“Captain,” Uni stood, hands shoved into the pockets of his boilersuit. “We need to continue to track Iruka’s condition. His monitor is still hooked up to the back up power.”

“Yes, how is his temperature?”

“It’s… back up.”

“Shit.” Law grimaced. “Okay. Priority one is the patient. Then the engine, and then our heading.”

As Uni and Hakugan made for the central gangway, Bepo took a step forward and balled his paws into fists at his side. 

“Captain?”

“Yes, Bepo.” Law turned to the mink. The polar bear shuffled from one foot and then the other. To Law, it looked as if he were equally uncomfortable on each. 

“Well,” He replied and glanced to the side. 

“There are no dumb suggestions,” Law offered kindly. 

“We are in an alliance with the Strawhats.” The mink all but whispered. 

“That,” Law hissed, “Is subjective.”

“It’s really… not.”

“Hey, the Strawhats have a shipwright. Maybe he could help.” Shachi chipped in. 

“Yeah! One time I saw him transform into a robot!” Penguin replied. 

“Stupid, he’s already a robot.”

“A bigger robot!”

“He’s not a robot, he’s a cyborg.” Law sighed. 

“What’s the difference?” Penguin turned to Shachi.

“His heart .” 

“Oh my god.” Law whispered under his breath. 

“No, I agree, the Strawhats are reliable. It hasn’t been so long since we parted, so I think we should attempt to hail them.” Hakugan said from the back of the room. 

A chorus of others resounded the motion.

“They might not be close enough to help,” Ikkaku argued, sweeping her hair into a pineapple on top of her head. “It’s an absolute crapshoot.”

“One we have to take. We’re literally sitting ducks! What if a Marine vessel happens by?”

“What, it’s not like we couldn’t take them.”

“The strategic disadvantage isn’t nearly as embarrassing as the mechanical one, Shachi.”

“Oh. True.”

“And Captain,” the bear said, louder this time. Law watched him pull a transponder snail out of his pocket and place it on the table before him. “Those noises we were hearing haven’t gone away. There’s more of them.”

That was it then, wasn’t it? 

Law took the receiver in his hand and looked back up to his crew. He worked his tongue against the back of teeth, chasing the ghosts of conversations unspoken. 

“Captain?”

“This is… distressing.” Law sighed. 

“We are distressed.” He shrugged. 

Law leaned over the table, clutching the receiver of the transponder snail against his forehead. He could consider any calculation, balance any cost-benefit ratio, or issue any plea bargain he liked; they were caught between Scylla and Caribdes. 

“All hands for mayday?” 

His men resounded. 

“All opposed?”

After a moment’s silence, he adjusted the frequency and depressed the thumb trigger, placing the call. Around him, his crew sat listening to the buzz of the dial tone.  

A gut wrenching eternity later, the line flickered to life. The connection took a moment to stabilize, but when it did, Law realized he was hearing the sounds of laughter.

“Guys, be quiet, there’s a call!” a woman’s voice called out and then, closer to the receiver, “Hello?”

“Nami-ya-”

“Sorry, what? Guys, I said be quiet! Who is this? Hey, stop it-”

“Hello? This is Monkey D. Luffy. I’m the man who's going to be the Pirate King!”

Law bit the corner of his mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Penguin elbow his cousin, who then seemed to place something in his hand. Law decided he didn’t see it. 

“Strawhat-ya, it’s Law.”

The snail’s receiver was barely able to translate the sudden onslaught of noise. The audio clipped in and out, until it leveled out and he heard the other captain shouting. 

“Torao! Nami, it’s Torao!”

“Yeah, I heard him. Ask him what he wants.”

“Torao! What do you want!” Luffy cheered into the receiver. 

“I want your location,” He replied. After a moment, he added. “Please.”

“Oh, he asked so nicely.” Another woman’s voice came in faintly, undoubtedly the archeologist. 

“Why does he need it?” Nami said from a point just as far away. “Luffy, ask him-”

“Oh? Who's calling us? It’s not those weird guys again, is it? I can’t believe we agreed to- ” Another voice, and at this point, Law resolved to wait until he was spoken to directly.

“Usopp, Torao wants to know where we are!”

“Well, I don’t know. Ask the navigator.”

“He didn’t call to talk to me! Why should I tell him where we are?”

“Nami, where are we?”

“You know where we are, I told you this morning!”

“But that was this morning and this is now!”

“Haha, stupid.”

“Torao, are you okay?” Luffy asked over the argument in the background. 

Law allowed his train of thought to circle this question. The boy wasn’t stupid, but it was genuinely surprising when he displayed the liquid clarity of his understanding. After all, Law wouldn’t have called without a reason. They had no current allied objectives, and it wasn’t as if Law made a habit of shooting the breeze; the only reasonable assumption was an emergency signal. Despite this, Law’s first instinct was to deflect; to distract the young captain from the less than flattering situation with something he’d find agreeable. 

(Jumping straight to manipulation perhaps wasn’t the greatest look, despite the tenuous allyship the crews may or may not share. Law knew first hand just how easy a thing it was to please him. Something as simple as an offhand comment could bring the sun into the young man’s face. And if Law tended to show deference to his less temerarious inclinations just to be on the receiving end of his delighted grin, then that was his prerogative. Although, upon reflection, perhaps it was more of an indication of how easily Strawhat could sway him rather than the other way around.)

He swallowed sharply, dismissing the thought. After all, the train set in motion was one full of explosives; a line of shuttered inclinations that ran from dusk to dawn, cutting a rectilinear path through his dreams, driving a hot spike of lust in his belly. Needs and wants, base or otherwise - pitfalls, distractions, non-necessities. Lying was surely safer. It was an old habit, well earned and easy to wield.

And yet. 

This train of thought was dangerous. Due for derailment. 

“Captain?” Bepo whispered. 

The ugly truth had never seemed so attractive. 

“We’ve had a mechanical issue and are without power.”

The chorus of voices started again, and over them, Luffy replied like a mouth at his ear, “Where are you?” 

“Somewhere between Mont Haven and Porto Secco.” Law glanced at his navigator, who nodded very seriously which was incredibly cute. “I can have Bepo give your navigator the exact coordinates.”

“Okay.” A weight in his voice drove Law to stillness, a sharpness like the closing of an aperture. He felt the focal point of the boy’s attention with the darkening intensity of a vignette closing around him on all sides. 

He had experienced this before, on an island in their not so distant past. In that instant, Law recalled the parching heat of the Dressrosan summer, the midday sun hanging overhead with the brutality of a magnifying lens, the wicked laugh of Doflamingo rattling his bones, threading a noose, caging his spirit, an enormous shoe rushing toward his face-- 

Then, Luffy. 

He supposed he could divide his life into the times Before Luffy and After Luffy. 

“-orao. Oi, Torao!”

“Captain.” 

Law turned to Bepo, then to his crew watching him intently. 

“What.” He replied breathlessly into the receiver. 

“Nami said we’ll be there in a few hours. What do you need?”

There it was, that ‘need’ again, his personal albatross. Law bit the inside of his cheek, considering what he could possibly ‘need’ that Strawhat could give him. 

In the dark, he could admit that he ‘wanted’; he ‘wanted’ the luxury of his easy intimacy, he ‘wanted’ the heliotrope of his smile to turn upon his face, to bring the swinging pendulum of the boy’s attention to a standstill, to feel the weight of his gaze like the frame of a yoke around his neck, standing shoulder to shoulder, driving one another into spurious action. He ‘wanted’ to feel the heady pulse of his heart beneath his lips. 

He ‘wanted’ to see the boy come irrevocably undone by the hands that had so painstakingly put him back together. 

Law knew how to shelve his ‘wants’.

But ‘needs’?

“A cup of coffee?” 

Luffy laughed. 

-

“Get him into the infirmary.” Law called from the fin deck of the Polar Tang, dropping the Room that placed Uni and the table-bound Iruka on the deck the Thousand Sunny. “Where’s Tony-ya?” 

“I’ll find him!” Long Nose shouted back and jogged out of sight.

“Bepo is currently on the bridge monitoring the area.” Penguin dragged a potted plant across the deck and squinted up at the sky. “We’ve had Kujira and Jack Dempsey do a few laps around the hull, there’s no exterior damage that we can find. Some scratches around the intake valve, but that’s it. They’ve not been able to ascertain the origin of the blips.”

“The ‘blips’, huh?” Law watched him rotate the pot and inspect its leaves. 

“We’re running single frequency on the sonar, in limited sweeps. There’s maybe 3 separate entities but they’re running on the edge of our range.”

Law squinted out over the calm ocean, searching for the unseen.

“Who’s going to tell their first mate that we’ve possibly lured them into a trap?”

“Forget the first mate, who’s going to tell their navigator?” Penguin sighed. 

Law hummed noncommittally. The watchman returned to the Fin House, presumably to obtain yet another of Jean Bart’s numerous experimental botanicals to drag out into the sunshine. He leaned down to inspect the coloring on his latest pepper cultivar, something he was calling a Tigerpaw.

“Once we get Robo-ya on the reactor, I’m going back into surgery.” He announced when Penguin reappeared, this time dragging a grow bag with one arm and a dwarf citrus of some variety in the other. 

“Ah, Torao! What happened?” The Straw Hat’s tiny reindeer doctor peeking out between the Sunny’s rails. He seemed to be wearing some sort of fleece onesie. Law bit the inside of his cheek. 

“Oh my god.”

“Is he dressed as a little shark?” Penguin whispered. 

“Torao?” The reindeer yelled louder, gesticulating with near-rabid concern. “Can you hear me? Torao!”

It was adorable.

“Oh my god .” Law growled. Penguin stifled a laugh behind his hand. 

“Be professional,” He snickered. “He is a doctor.”

With no difficulty whatsoever, Law cleared his throat. The watchman giggled madly and went back to his task.

“Emergency appendectomy that might’ve gone bad. Will you monitor his vitals until I get there?”

Chopper squeaked, then seemed to steel himself, and nodded gravely before waddling off in the direction of his treatment room. Penguin re-materialized at his side, dropping a basket of linens on the deck. 

“What are you doing?”

“Gonna draw a line and hang the bed linens.”

“Really?” Law sighed. 

“It’s a beautiful day! There’s a breeze! Being underwater is smelly!”

“There’s nothing more threatening than a bunch of stranded pirates airing out the dirty laundry.” He groused.

“As if you have any dirty laundry to air out.” Penguin scoffed.

“Excuse me.”

“You heard me.”

“No, I don’t think I did. Do you care to repeat yourself?”

“I said that you’re as chaste as olive oil in a monastery.”

“I would prefer if you didn’t speculate over the fallacious illusion of my ‘chastity’.”

“Y’know, I had a girlfriend named Chastity once.”

“Yes, and did her last name happen to be ‘Belt’?”

“It was actually ‘Saint-Hand' of the Left and Right Saint-Hands.” He laughed. Law bit the crown of a smile from his own face. 

“Such is the rime of the ancient submariner.” 

“Rime?”

“It’s an old word for epididymal hypertension.”

Penguin looked at him. 

Law looked back.

“I don’t know what that is and I won't respond to it.” 

“I’m leaving. Shachi is in charge.”

As Penguin crowed in disgust, the Strawhat’s cook passed by the rail. He held aloft a tray burdened with foodstuffs at, what Law presumed to be, a completely inadvisable height. 

“Oi, Doc, has your crew eaten yet?” 

“You’ll have to take it up with Shachi, I’m needed in your infirmary-”

“Regardless, I’ve moved dinner prep to the deck. I figured your crew would appreciate dining al fresco! Oh, and Captain wanted-”

“Ah, just who I was looking for!” The enormous mass of the Straw Hats shipwright appeared at the cook’s shoulder, voice booming across the space between their vessels. “Torao! I’m super pumped to get a look at your ship! Nuclear power is cutting edge stuff! What’s the half-life of your current fuel source? Do you have any manuals or blueprints with the origin of manufacture? How old is-”

“Yes, Robo-ya, Penguin will direct you to-”

“You said Shachi is in charge-”

“Ah, Torao.” Zoro called out downright cheerfully from the quarter deck. “Be careful of the Captain-”

“Jesus wept -” Law was certain the bulging vein in his forehead would rupture from the ceaseless barrage of inanity that passed for Strawhat Pirate hospitality. 

“Torao!” 

Fortunately, with both the progression of time and the brutal repetition of experience, the anticipation that Law had associated with the blunt force impact of Strawhat Luffy’s body slamming into his had dulled to a mere passive acceptance. There was no doubt that, as the rubber boy shot over the rail, he was possessed of complete confidence that his intended target was both prepared for this volley and would surely catch him. 

He looked up, squinting through the sunlight flashing off of the sea, with the heat of the sun bearing down on his naked back, the throng of intermingled crew chatting around them suddenly dipping into silence. He breathed in Luffy’s jewel-bright smile, felt a pleasing wickedness filling him with warm oil, and then, like a rising wind, the world came back into focus. 

Luffy crashed into him like a sack of rubbery potatoes launched from a goddamn trebuchet. Law felt his knees buckle at the sheer force of the boy’s elastic body physically wrapping around his. The recoil of his body resounded with an audible snap, knocking them both to the deck.

Law groaned as his head made impact for the second time today, willing the glue to hold on his newly acquired - and throbbing - cut to maintain integrity. Atop him, Luffy laughed. 

“Torao! Long time no see!” He cheered, resting his chin on Law’s chest.

“I swear to christ, don’t just do whatever you want-”

“How’s your ship! Where’s your bear?”

“Strawhat, It’s literally been less than two weeks-” He grumbled, wrestling his way out of the boy’s hold. “I need to speak with your shipwright about the engine, sooner rather than later, and Bepo is on the bridge.”

He managed to free an arm to grip the boy by the collar. Heaving them both upright, Law ran his hand over the back of his head. Satisfied that the wound would keep, he fixed the boy with a sour look.

“Why aren’t you at Egg Head Island already?” 

Nonplussed, the boy replied, “We were invited to a race!”

“You were… invited to a race?” He said incredulously. 

“You should come watch us win!”

 “Oi, Luffy!” Law glanced over to where the Straw Hat’s shipwright was strutting down the gangplank between their vessels, the sharpshooter close behind. “This is an emergency situation! You can play later, I’ve got serious business with the Heart submarine!”

“He’s not wrong.” Law confirmed. “Actually, I need to get to surgery.”

“I want to see Bepo!” He insisted.

“Bepo is busy!” 

“I want to see the rest of your ship!” He pouted.

“You’ve seen my ship!”

“Nuh-huh!”

“Oi, dumbass, dinner won’t catch itself!” Sanji hollered from over the railing. 

“He’s talking to you!” Usopp called from the fin house stairs, disappearing into the submarine with a smirk.

“Come on, Luffy! I bet I can catch a bigger fish than you!” Zoro jeered, appearing again, a pair of fishing rods slung over his shoulder. 

“No way!” Luffy shouted back. “I’m gonna catch a sea king with my bare hands!”

“You wish, idiot!”

“Torao,” Luffy turned to Law, and grabbed him by the elbow. Until this moment, Law had been entirely blindsided by the barrage of the Straw Hat crew. He realized belatedly that he hadn’t even gotten up off the deck, that the boy was still astride his lap, that the shade of his hat was near enough to fall across his face. 

“What,” He breathed, caught in his eyes so close. 

“Let’s eat together!” The boy grinned. Law carefully counted his bottom row of teeth with his tongue.

“...Sure?”

“Great!” He laughed again, and with another ridiculous snap of his rubbery arm, launched himself at the swordsman. Unlike Law, the man managed to maintain his footing, though complained loudly at his Captain’s antics. 

Law cleared his throat and brushed his palms down the length of his thighs, staring up at the deck until after they were out of sight. 

“Uh.” 

Halfway through the Fin House door and shuffling like a large, flightless bird, Penguin fidgeted with a pair of somewhat mangled elephant cilantro. As they stared at one another, Law tried not to focus on the little umbels of flowers by the watchman’s ear but rather a more comfortable middle distance. One that he hoped belied an air of indifference. 

Penguin jerked his chin and coughed. Law’s comfortable middle distance moved out of focus.

“What?” He growled. 

The gunner set the plants down and tugged at the bill of his cap. 

“Could you try to be less… embarrassing?”

“Excuse me?” He replied reasonably, entirely unshrill and decidedly calm. 

“You’re, like, the Surgeon of Death, y’know?” He shrugged. “Don’t be so obvious.”

Law breathed in and held it, for what felt like forever. 

“Obvious.” He breathed out, for what felt like an eternity still.

The watchman laughed.

“You’re doing great?” He offered. 

“Don’t patronize your captain.”

“You’re right - it would look bad on my performance review.”

Law jammed his hat back on his head and pushed himself back to his feet. 

“We’ll regroup with you once we have an idea on the reactor.”

“Captain.”

Before he could be interrupted further, he lifted his hand and drew up a Room, located the flimsy of an errant candy wrapper in the medical office, and stepped across the unseen threshold. Inside, Uni and Chopper were already deep in their work.

“We’re still wobbly, Captain.” Uni murmured without looking up from the chart he was writing in. Law turned to look at Chopper, who nodded at him with a determined moue. Up close, his shark onesie had a little green bow with a fish pattern. 

Uni handed him the nodachi, which he unsheathed a notch, and then imbued with a cool, blue aura. The scanning technique was just a pared down version of Room; with it, he could manipulate a narrow window to peer into the body, while tricking his brain into observing a seemingly flat plane instead of the masses of a three-dimensional sphere. Moving the winking blade perpendicular to the body, he peered at the various systems as they revealed themselves to him; the surgical site appeared stable and the staples all accounted for, vascular system was perhaps working a little hard but showing no signs of arrest - then he saw it. 

“Venous air embolism.” He sighed, pulling the sword out entirely and setting the scabbard against the wall. 

“Uh,” Uni paused.

“It’s decompression sickness, because of course it is.” Law laid the naked blade across the nearby desk and dug through the cabinet above for gloves. “I’ll need to create a chamber of compressed air around him and slowly collapse the bubbles until they dissolve.” 

“Should I… prep an area?”

Law grunted noncommittally.

“Does he still have a cath?”

“No, I removed it for emergency blow.”

“I suppose it’s for the best. Swab the other arm, place another.”

“Thank goodness the bubble hadn’t traveled to one of his arteries!” Chopper sighed. “But embolism wouldn’t cause fever, would it?”

“Correct, I suspect it’s secondary to the initial infection.”

“When did you start IV antibiotics?” Chopper looked up from the notes he was thoroughly investigating. 

Law paused. 

“Uni, when did you start IV antibiotics?”

Uni paused. 

“I was going to, then we had to surface, so-”

“So, no.”

“So, no.” He agreed. 

Law sighed and pulled on a glove with a decisive snap. 

“Doctor Tony, you are a credit to the medical profession. Would you do the honors?”

The reindeer squeaked, obviously delighted through his nude pallor of embarrassment.

“R-Right away,” He paused, then said, “Doctor Trafalgar.” And, as he crossed the room, he was suddenly the size of a very fully grown man, rifling through a small pharmacy for the aforementioned medicine.  

“Uh,” Law swallowed. The costume had shrunk, now a snug bowtie at his throat. 

“Standing by, Sir.” Uni intoned, coming to a stand still on the opposite side of the bed. Law glanced at the port hole of the rear door of the room, trying to judge the time by the color of the sky. He then plucked his sword from the desk and considered the situation in cubic detail. 

Atomic degradation among a significant number of identical atoms could express an identifiable rate of isotopic half-life. Once a nuclear reactor is shut down, there is a limited amount of time before it cannot be restarted again. 

He had only ever shut the reactor off once before, to perform some routine test he’d long since forgotten. Those 32 minutes and 44 seconds had taxed his patience. 

This, however, was no routine test. 

His engineer needed him to focus. His crew needed him to maintain control. Uni needed instruction. Tony-ya needed practice. 

Law needed a cup of coffee.  

“Touch base with Shachi.” He murmured to Uni. “Come find me if there’s an emergency and absolutely no other reason.” 

Law watched him leave and only after the door swung close entirely did he begin to work. He  checked the drain line of the saline, glanced at the pulse-ox one last time, and, with a steadying sigh, called up another Room. 

The sphere spun to life in his palm and bloomed just large enough to contain Iruka and no larger. He suspended his hand over the incision, precepting the multifarious minutiae of the man’s bodily functions - the capacity of his lungs as they drew in oxygen, the alveoli ballooning to facilitate the gaseous exchange between red blood cells, the mechanical operation of his cardiac muscles in concert with the clap of the aortic valves, the rush of chemicals produced in his adrenal gland as his body worked hard to recover from it’s recent struggle with vestigial organ failure. And, as he removed these concerns from his focus, he began the gradual increase of the surrounding air pressure.

Chopper observed closely, obviously fascinated with the technique. 

“Keep your eye on the pulse-ox,” He breathed, hand clawed over the engineer’s body. “It’s crucial that we watch for even the most minor signs of complication.”

“Such as?” The reindeer asked very seriously.

“Respiratory or heart failure, low blood pressure, a blue hue of the skin, amongst others.” He listed, ignoring the violent urge to squeeze the reindeer until he passed out.

“...Oh.”

“Yes.”

A beat.

“You’re a very good doctor, Torao.”

Law looked across the supine form of his patient, his crew member, his friend, and felt a penumbra of doubt cast its shade over him. 

“That remains to be seen.”

-

An agonizing length of time passed, leaving Law to swallow around the dryness in his throat. He had managed to manipulate a hyperbaric field that didn’t crush the fluid bag to failure - or his engineer - which as far as he was concerned, was a win. 

His hands did not tremble, because he was a consummate professional goddamnit, although he could feel the burn of fatigue across his shoulders like a hot iron bar. A signal of the limitation of his endurance, which he would gladly push past for any one of his crew. 

“Temperature.” He breathed into the silent room. 

“Ah,” The reindeer gasped. “98.”

“Excellent. I’m going to begin a slow depressurization over the course of the next twenty minutes. Please let me know the moment something changes, if it changes.” 

To his infinite credit, the reindeer nodded earnestly. 

“Yes, Doctor.” 

So, really, when the ship suddenly rocked to one side, Law supposed he shouldn’t have been caught off guard. He did, however, feel the membranous liminality of the Room fluctuate, almost slipping entirely from his control. Chopper fell off his stool with a squeak. 

“What was that?” 

“Fuck me running.” Law growled and, for the second time that day, Law threw himself over the surgical table. 

Chopper lunged into action, once again an entire foot taller than Law, and leaning over the gurney. They locked eyes. Law had several questions about this ability of his - how it affected his bone structure, if there was a change in blood pressure between forms, what other forms he could assume and how those individual modes affected his physiology.

Between them, Iruka’s heart monitor beeped regularly, without error or knowledge of the situation. Law swallowed, torn between his desire to fucking finish operating on his engineer and the bloodlust he was developing for the subaquatic assault blips. 

Chopper seemed to somehow divine this from his forehead. 

“I’ll continue to monitor him.” He nodded seriously.

Bloodlust it was. 

Law spun on his heel and ran out onto the deck. Below, the tangled crews weaved across the lawn, shouting over the roar of the turbulent sea. He braced a hand on the rail as the brigantine was tossed in an unnatural fury of white caps. 

“Report!” Law shouted, looking around for his crew. From the lawn, Shachi tried to shout up at him, arm gesticulating at the ocean, but was completely lost to the tumult. Pivoting, he looked around for the other captain.

“Luffy-ya!” He didn’t have to search for long, as a pair of hands clamped down onto the rail before his, and then the rest of the boy rocketed toward him. With a traitorous thrum of gratification, he raised his arms and prepared to catch.

Don’t be so obvious.  

Upon impact, Luffy’s rubbery legs coiled around his hips and his hands clapped down on his bare shoulders. Law in turn braced his waist, and managed to only stagger back a half step. He pressed his fingertips into his rubbery flesh, wickedly relishing in the soft give and beneath, the solidity of his core. 

Don’t be so obvious. 

He resolutely chose to not think about the way those hands felt on his body, about the pleasant buoy of his weight around him, or the fierce focus in his eyes and face so close. 

Or the deep rend of scar tissue across his chest, laid there by Law’s own hands; or his roaring heart beneath, its sonorous drumbeat practically in rhythm with Law’s own. 

Or his comatose state in Amazon Lily; his awakening, and deep despair. A howling, terrible pain that clung to Law like a vapor of smoke. 

He did not think of these things, because if he wasn’t one thing, it was obvious.

Obviously. 

“Torao!” Luffy shouted, his dark eyes shining with battle-bright focus. “Bear says there’s something in the water!”

Oh, right. 

“It attacked us a few hours ago. I guess it followed us up.” Law confirmed. “Sorry.”

Over the boy’s shoulder, Law looked across at the expanse of the ocean surface. In a great circle around the boat, nearly stretching from horizon to horizon, churned a great ring of water. Whatever these ‘blips’ were, they had finally surrounded both vessels. What they were capable of, Law could not be sure. 

“What is it?” Luffy asked, his face a serious mask that rendered him bafflingly incapable of anything but the truth. 

“I don’t know.”

“Why was it attacking you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did it break your ship?” He growled, eyes darkening, sharpening, clearing. 

Law swallowed. 

“Yes.” 

In a breath, a black expression spread across his face. Law shivered at the sensation of his thighs trembling in anticipation. 

Law squared his shoulders and dropped both Luffy and the Room at his back; then, with a smooth switch, proceeded to raise a new one. The pull of his power burned with titanium brightness, a fine razor wire gripping every muscle in his body. From his palm, a cool blue bubble surged forth, expanding rapidly to encompass the area within Law’s command.

Calling forth a Room was effortless; the real trick was maintaining it. He could feel the tenebrous limit of his stamina curling over him with a steel hand. Exhaling through his nose, he allowed it to close over him; as he breathed in, he focused on the heat of the sun on his bare back, the sound of rushing water in his ears, the sway of the vessel beneath his body. The emergent, panicked call of his crew all around him. The peel of thunder from his own heart, crashing in his ears. 

There was still strength in him yet. 

Then, at his side, Luffy dropped into a low horse stance.

The effects of Room were as such that Law, as the manipulator of all space and matter contained therein, was brutally aware of everything, everywhere, all at once. Without Room, Luffy had the astonishing ability to take up all of Law’s focus. Within it, he was blinding. 

A cloud of steam surrounded him, then, caught by a gust of wind, cast off like a sail torn from its rigging. Luffy, pink, warm, chest heaving, blood pumping faster than it should, the catalyst of chemical reactions in his body turning every available nutrient into explosive energy, heat, power, all at once glowing like the sun at his side. 

Law pushed the sphere down, reaching past and beneath the hull of the Sunny, out to encompass the Tang. The sharp pinion of his fatigue may as well have been a figment of his imagination. He pushed it, just a little farther, stretching, reaching, grasping - then he felt it. The Blips.

Above this, Law fought to maintain control over the molecular noise of nearly 30 individuals moving in frenetic concert. It was easy, familiar, to pinpoint the particles that made up Penguin and Shachi, back to back, weapons drawn for an even radius fight; there, at the base of the main mast, the jumble of calcium and curious soul of Bone-ya; behind him, the steady pulse of Iruka’s heart, boiling with a choke of fever that Law felt in his own skin.

Luffy - warmth, strength, ridiculous tenacity - an astonishing enigma of effervescent flesh and blood, blazing at his side, drowning out the roar of the sea and the light of the sun. A human solar eclipse.

With a ripple of reality and a quirk of his left hand, he re-compressed the air around his engineer; lifting his right, he re-oriented his focus into the space beyond. A ‘blips’ in the water had broken formation, one having peeled off and was driving erratically toward the pair of ships, spinning, metallic and lacking any organic components. He felt it slip in and out of the barrier of the Room with incredible speed, like a swarm of fish distracting a predator. 

“I think I’ve got one.” He hissed. “Get ready.”

“Sanji!” Luffy called out in response. 

Law opened his eyes at the drifting odor of tobacco. The chef in question stepped up to his captain’s side, hands busy shrugging out of a suit jacket and draping it over an arm. 

“Things are getting quite exciting around here,” The blond man smirked. 

“Don’t get too worked up,” Zoro appeared on Law’s other side. “Might trip on your inflated ego.”

“You wanna run that by me again, grass stain?”

“Everyone shut the fuck up,” Law hissed, disinterested in using any willpower he had left in filtering out their trite arguments. His brain felt like it was trickling out of his ears trying to think around the ‘blip’ as it wobbled erratically from his grasp. “It’s doing something weird.” He warned the boy.  

“What’s for lunch?” Luffy asked, hands balled into fists, eyes on the horizon. 

“I’m thinking of a nice Alley-Oop, three ways, served with a side of bernaise sauce.” Sanji huffed, stubbing out his cigarette on the heel of his boot. 

Law looked into the space between space, felt along the depth, width and volume of the Room for the lurking sensations of the ‘Blips’. The weight of their bodies felt like missing words just beyond the reach of his tongue; if he tilted his head just right, he could manage to coax it into his control. And yet, they danced curiously at the edges of his entanglement, as if unsure of themselves.

Why hadn’t they attacked yet? Were they waiting for a signal? Were they performing some unseen coordination? And why couldn’t he ‘see’ them? Every passing second compounded like white noise in his ears, numbness in his tongue, and static in his brain. There was just so much matter in the way - he couldn’t very well move the ocean. 

But perhaps he didn’t have to. Perhaps, it was far more simple than he was making it out to be.

“Takt.” He breathed, and with a flick of the wrist, he reached out with a telekinetic sense that was both like a hand and not a hand in the slightest, and lifted the Polar Tang up out the sea. An enormous spray of water rained down upon the deck of the Sunny-Go until Law raised the submarine high enough to block out the sun.

“Oho,” The swordsman smirked. 

At once, the ‘blip’s’ hesitation disappeared. 

“Ah.” He breathed, consumed in its unambiguous shift of vector, like an arrow accelerating ever faster toward its target, up, up, up - 

“Change of plans - on your left!” 

At which point, the ‘blip’ shot out of the sea and arced over the lawn, aimed straight for the heart of the Polar Tang.

Chest heaving, a stitch forming in his side, Law forced it into stillness and lifted his eyes to witness the ‘Blip’ firsthand.

In the shadow cast by the Tang, he could make out a series of cylinders, each with a propeller at one end. Large, but not large enough to carry a crew. At the tail end, in stark contrast to the dark paint color, the vibrant white of a seagull. 

“Let’s go.” Law glanced back to his side just in time to witness the cook, balancing on one foot, with his captain perched on his lifted leg like a large, demented bird. 

Then, with a slink of his hip, he drew his heel back in an arc and launched Strawhat into the sky. Luffy rippled through the atmosphere of the Room, hot and fast, faster than Law could see - then, like an explosion, he was recoiling in midair, and the ‘blip’ - what he now knew to be a strange Naval device - groaned under the pressurized palm strike and began to fall back into the sea. 

With a kick of his smoldering foot, the cook launched himself from the deck and delivered to it a powerful kick, volleying the device back over the other side of the Sunny. 

“Alley!” He heard Straw Hat cheer from somewhere near the helm, at which point the swordsman unsheathed a single blade in a smooth motion. Then, upon the elegant re-sheathing of the blade, the body of the ‘blip’ slipped apart, silently cleft in two.  

“Oop!”

“What about the sauce?” Zoro shouted back up at his captain. Law glanced down at the lawn in shock, not having realized the swordsman had even moved until the hissing undulation of his cursed katana was no longer at his side.  

Then, in an alarming move, Straw Hat disappeared entirely from his sphere of influence. 

Law felt a rush of endorphins like a bullet to the chest. Among the sheer chaos of bodies and movement, the sudden disappearance of the single composition he knew like his own flesh, vanished. 

He grit his teeth and steeled the resolution of his Room. 

The boy shouted wordlessly and somehow moved again, beyond sensation that Law could understand with Room. The cool slipstream billowing behind him and a great wave of pressure exploding from that body, the craft writhed and dropped into the sea. 

“Sauce!” Luffy screamed joyfully as he landed on the bow of the ship. 

“There’s still two more,” Law heaved, struggling to maintain cognizance over the noisy constellation of the people below, blending into the water-cold hull of the Tang, phasing into the steady drip of the saline fluids into Iruka’s vein. Sanji muttered something in response, which Law did not hear, as he gestured with the claw of his hand and plucked a second writhing ‘Blip’ out of the sea. 

The Room held steady despite Law’s flagging stamina. He bore down into his feet, pressing all four corners into the deck, vibrantly aware of the calliope of sound and energy which vibrated down to his very bones. 

The second ‘Blip’ was whole, and then not - crushed like a can at the bottom of the ocean under Law’s control, then swiftly compromised by the cook and swordsman. Both felt, but unseen, somewhere in the vicinity, the latter not even having left the deck to land the attack. Law allowed the strange corpse to drop back into the sea with barely a flicker of a tattooed finger. 

“No fair!” Their captain cried out from the helm. 

“You can have the last one!” 

“Thank christ,” Law breathed, reaching for the last ‘blip’. “Eyes up, Strawhat.”

“Right!”

Law was beginning to consider that perhaps this sort of exhaustion wasn’t merely due to his skeletal system’s overtaxation of glycogenolysis - his lack of exaggerated cardiorespiratory response was clear enough. He peered up through his sweat drenched hair and tried to parse the living edge of the Room. Cast far too large, he struggled to differentiate it from even the clouds. Closer yet, he then considered the Tang, dark, looming, familiar - wrong.

Carding like a fish through his sensorium, he could feel the final ‘blip’ skirting around the Sunny-Go. Above, there was the Polar Tang. Cold, but hot. Dark, but bright. He glowered at the phantom adumbration of light around her hull - the faintest of curious blues, a meager aureole which could not be contributed to the radial light of the sun. Law could taste the fading bitterness of pickled plum on the back of his tongue. 

He snatched the ‘blip’ as it passed beneath. Instantaneously, it appeared overhead, positioned perfectly for dispatchment. 

Luffy eyed the craft without hesitation.

“Don’t bother Torao again!” He shouted, rearing back to punch.

At which point, almost comically, his little flimsy of flip-flop slipped across the wet lawn, toppling the boy face first into the grass. 

Law, half blind, half mad from within the halo of his enervation, watched as he landed on his chin with a wail. The Room went out. The ‘blip’, no longer bound to his will, dropped.  

If there was a sudden frenzy of bodies, Law no longer knew it. If the sun had gone out, he wouldn’t have noticed the world cast into darkness. There was only the Marine device as it plunged toward the deck, above the remarkable idiot laying face down, ass up. 

Then, there was simply the infinite space of time between one second and the next. 

Law extended a leg and took, in a single step, the nearly forty between the aft deck and the fore. On the other side of the ship, Luffy groaned from where he landed, crumpled in the space where Law had been. He ground down into his heel with a pivot, arm extending up and out with fluid ease, cutting through the supernatural density of atmosphere. The submarine high above, the marine device, and there between, the devil and the deep blue sea. 

There was simply space between space. 

It was instantaneous the way Room coiled into being like a cat in the supplicant dish of his hand. It was immediate the utter violence that showered on his parietal lobe. The world was simply too vibrant within the sphere, his every sense occluded by the warping of color, pressure, flow, temperature, quantity, load, strain, and every imaginable and unimaginable noise, raging, sparking, exploding.

In lieu of Kikoku, he thrust out the convenient haki-hardened edge of his hand.

“Radio knife.” 

Incandescence and decoherence, mutualities spinning down into diaphanous clarity.

With an explosion of electricity, an ultra-violet corona eruption, one moment deafening, and nonexistent the next. The cylindrical body of the ‘blip’ hung in the air, as if struggling with indecision, then, with a shivering cascade, rained thousands of disassembled cubes across the deck.

Law gripped the taffrail before him. A cramp burned a hole in his side. The haze of sensation was beginning to blur to nearly unintelligible proportions - dangerous, and yet - but eventually he realized the dull roar was not in his ears but was rather a collective of celebratory screaming. 

“Are you serious?” The swordsman scoffed, suddenly at his side. Law looked up. The screaming was not in celebration. Rather, rapidly rising from the sea, a deep ocean mass of raw muscle began to crest at their starboard side. 

With all that commotion, perhaps it was only natural to have attracted the attention of a hungry sea king. 

“Who’s up for some fishing?” The chef chuckled as the sea king peered down at the Polar Tang. 

Law grimaced at his giant, stupid, fish-shaped boat.

“For fuck’s sake-”

“Sanji!” Luffy shouted. “Let’s have a barbecue!” 

Law bore down against the dry wellspring of his strength; he felt raw and tacky, ill with exhaustion. He lifted a hand, commanding space to organize itself at his command. He could feel the prickly molecules of matter sluggishly slip into the axiom of his grasp. 

“Luffy, pay attention!” The chef shouted somewhere beyond comprehension. 

“Shambles.” His brain felt like it was melting. There was surely something different, something wrong. 

In an instantaneous triangulation, the Polar Tang dematerialized from where Law stuck it up in the sky. In its place, he positioned Luffy, eye to eye with the megafauna. The Tang, now returned to its origin, sent a wave of displaced water between the Sunny and the serpent. More shouting, as the boat rocked for the umteenth time that day. 

Law sighed and squinted up at the captain. Infallibly, his cheer pierced the air as a bullet-speed fist landed right in the monster’s eye. 

He watched as the boy’s hat, caught in a gust of wind, slipped off his neck and tumbled through the air. It was a thoughtless gesture to Shamble it into his upturned hand and tip it onto his head.

The shade of the brim across his face felt nice.

“All hands - who’s dead?” Law shouted across the deck. When a series of grumbles, curses, and a sprinkle of choppy laughter came as a reply, he turned away, deciding the lot could manage their own triage. 

He stalked back to the medical office, the tumult of the sea king fight deeply beyond his capacity for concern. He turned his thoughts to Iruka’s condition and walked faster. 

“Ah, Nami!” Law jerked around at Nose-ya’s cry, and found him on his knees, the navigator in his arms. 

Law immediately altered his vector, dropping the Room at long last. The navigator was visibly trembling, though from what appeared to be adrenaline rather than shock, cradling her arm to her chest. To her credit, the swim top she was wearing made for an easy diagnosis. 

“I’m f-f-fine-” 

“Take it easy, you’ve dislocated your shoulder.” He smoothing his hand across the egg-shaped bump of the humeral head. “Anterior displacement, clavicle and scapula are intact, no readily apparent muscle tearing.”

“W-w-w-what do we do?” Nose-ya chattered. 

“I’m going to relocate it.” Law replied, unable to keep a frown from his face. “You’re going to help.”

“Help?!”

“Yes.” He sighed, hand on the redhead’s uninjured shoulder and pressed her down into the deck. She went without a struggle, eyes brimming with unshed tears. 

“It’s going to hurt and then it's going to feel better.” The navigator grimaced and nodded. “It’ll be quick, so keep breathing. Nose-ya, help brace her.”

“Hold my hand.” She muttered and closed her eyes.  

“No, hold mine.” The sniper muttered back. “Don’t complain if I throw up on you.”

“If you throw up on me, you’ll never see the inside of a hundred-beri-shop for the remainder of your short, ugly little life.” She hissed, clasping his hand firmly.

Ignoring this for the rage of fatigue in his body, Law shifted to his knee and tugged off his rubber boot.

“I’m going to put my foot in your armpit.” He warned. 

“You’re going to what?!” Nose-ya hissed.

“On three-” He rotated her arm into position, then brought it down so it laid perpendicular with the deck.

“Do it.” The red head shuddered, tears streaking down the sides of her face and into her hair. Law pressed the sole of his foot into her side, and locked his hands firmly around her wrist. 

“What the fuck-”

“Three.” Law intoned and firmly jerked. Predictably, the navigator shouted, which prompted the sniper to shout, which prompted further shouting from others whom Law couldn’t be bothered to place. He quickly brought his arm around her shoulders and drew her into a seated position. 

“Breathe,” He commanded again, folding the presently relocated arm into a recovery position. He could feel the thunder of her heart in her chest and she struggled around her shocked tears. The sniper, to his credit, was already on his feet, ready to get her off deck. 

“Oh, my god,” She huffed, aggressively pulling herself together. “Okay, okay, okay-”

“Yes, you did okay. Just keep breathing.”

She giggled nervously in reply and wobbled to her feet with the sniper’s assistance.

“Oi, you shitty doctor, what did you do to our beautiful Nami-swan?” 

Because, of course, Law thought to himself, the cook would jump to some obscene conclusion. He tugged his boot back on and lurched to his feet, thrusting a hand out at the approaching idiot. 

“Give me your shirt.” Law demanded. 

“What?” The man grumbled but unbuttoned his shirt compliantly. Beneath, Law was somewhat surprised to see, the man wore an undershirt shirt which was tucked into his slacks, and a gold chain around his neck with a little unidentifiable bauble. Something flickered over his face, and he turned around before undoing his buckle and fly, and slipped the shirtwaist free from his trousers. 

Law did not volunteer an explanation to the Strawhat cook, instead opting to observe the man as he meticulously undressed. Only after a moment’s confusion, did Law realize the man was extending some courtesy to his female crew member, choosing to offer the woman a view of his back and not his undone fly. 

Or, perhaps, he held some degree of contempt toward Law - most people did - and offered no quarter even here - again, a valid reaction, given Law’s track record with, well, pick a thing. 

Only after ensuring the tidiness of his trousers, did the cook turn around his slip the shirt from his shoulders, handing it over by the collar. The delicate handling of the shirt was not lost upon Law. The whole of the operation was not lost upon him. There was something weird here, he was sure of it, even through the miasma of his exhaustion. He just wasn’t sure what. 

“Elbow in the armscye,” Law instructed, wrapping the garment over her shoulders. The navigator complied, and allowed him to do up the buttons along the front, leaving her hand peeking out of the neck, in the vicinity of her opposite shoulder. He turned to the sniper. “Take her to the lounge for triage. Get Shachi or Penguin on it. I’m going back to surgery.”

He arrived to find the suite empty, save for Iruka, whose vitals were average and temperature - thank the bleeding heart of Christ - normal. His chart lay open on the desk, the surgical report having been left half complete by Uni, who no doubt had been pulled away for post-nonsensical-sea-battle wound care. He considered finishing it, but the thought of lifting his arm to action, composing a single sentence, let alone a detailed report of any usefulness or accuracy was excruciating. 

Instead, Law braced his shoulders against the wall opposite the patient bed and closed his eyes, listening to the steady beep of the pulse-ox. 

He slipped down the wall, nearly toppling to the floor from exhaustion. From beyond the closed door, he half-mindedly listened to the crews’ chatter as Luffy made quick work of the giant sea king.  

Satisfied that no one was going to die in the next ten minutes, he slipped the strawhat down over his face and let his eyes come to perfect rest in comfortable, boneless darkness. 

-

Night had fallen; Law knew this from the vague light coming through the porthole, the ambient room temperature having dropped nearly 10 degrees, from the gradual shifting of floating voices from organized work to cheerful play, and the smells of burning charcoal and grilled fish coming from the deck. 

An indeterminate amount of time had passed. Having personally beared witness to (and begrudgingly taken part in) the Strawhat’s propensity to party well into the night, there was little else with which to judge the hour. Save for a clock. This ship lacked clocks.

He blinked the sleep from his eyes and swallowed around the dry, sour quality of his mouth.  

If someone had entered the suite for any reason, he would not have known it. Before him, Iruka remained unconscious - perhaps a little worrying, perhaps not. Surely Uni or Penguin, or even Chopper - and, knowing the Strawhat’s doctor, possibly all three - had been by to observe the man’s vitals at least once. 

Having finally rolled to a Sysiphean stop, Law contemplated his next course of action. 

There were the things he Could Do; get up and check on Iruka, finish his surgical notes, and find Penguin or Shachi or even Ikkaku and get a status report on his crew’s wellbeing. As he had been left to sleep (albeit on the floor, christ, his ass was numb), he assumed that his medical assistance had not been needed. 

Then, there were the things he Should Do; find and debrief with the Strawhat’s shipwright, and develop a plan regarding the state of the nuclear reactor. This had been the pressing issue hours ago, then everything went to hell in a handbasket.   

Which left the least compelling list, Sidequests: namely, find a shower, something with at least halfway decent pharmacological properties for his screaming headache, and, with what seemed like delusional resolve, locate and drink a cup of coffee.

Actually, that last one was on the Want List. But his Wants, despite wanting them, could always be done without. 

As Law proceeded to summon up the will to shift his wretched corpse, the door swung open. 

“Torao!”

He turned his head askance, hands jerking up in a grim pantomime, ready to catch the boy should he throw himself at him within melee range. 

Thankfully, he did not launch himself at Law. Rather, he tripped through the door (as if he had kicked it open) and came to stillness carrying an enormous platter in both hands.

Law watched his eyes go from the sleeping engineer to the desk and then finally to Law. The platter was piled with an exorbitant amount of food, which smelled incredible. He then turned and set the dish on the floor with a flourish. 

“Food!”

Law looked at it. In his time of knowing him, he had never known the Strawhat cook to be capable of restraint: among the variety there was a fragrant soup of some kind with clear, flat noodles, a row of perfect, grilled onigiri, some kind of salad which contained vegetables of shapes and colors he’d never seen, and an elegant spread of steaming grilled fish, skewered, beautifully scored and crispy, sprinkled with elephant cilantro and thinly sliced orange peppers - Jean Bart’s Tigerpaws. 

He looked up at Luffy.

“I need to speak to your shipwright.”

Luffy laughed.

“Franky won’t stop talking about your ship. He and Usopp said they didn’t even notice when it was in the air!”

Law leaned back, shoving his fingers so hard into his eyes that he half-hoped to touch the back  of his skull. He hadn’t even realized there were people inside the sub - he should have felt them with his Room. Yet another strange noncompliance to file under the day's miserable proceedings. 

His back ached, his face felt numb, and he probably smelled terrible. He could feel the irritable pull of dried sweat what felt like everywhere. He could certainly do with a change of clothes, seeing as he was still half-wearing the now-filthy jumpsuit he changed into shortly before the emergency blow. 

Across the room, the monitor steadily beeped. 

Some doctor he made, he contemplated bitterly. 

“Actually, I’m going to go speak with my crew. We need to discuss our heading.” He sighed, leaning forward and running hand through his hair. It was predictably disgusting. 

“Hey, Torao.”

He grunted in reply. 

“Barbeque!” He gestured at the fish.

“Yeah yeah.”

“It’s the sea king! I caught it with my bare hands!” He gestured again, more aggressively, clearly quite proud of his feat. 

“Mm.”

“Torao!” He whined. His continued gesticulation, having reached a sort of zenith, resembled a strange jig. Law blinked blithely.

“What.”

“Eat it!” The captain insisted. “You said we’d eat together! So eat!”

With irritating finality, the boy plunked down beside him and stared expectantly. 

Law reviewed his Do To Lists. Food had not been on any of them. The line item did, however, slot in nicely where the summarily deleted, however perpetuitous, Cup of Coffee had been.

“Don’t tell me what to do," he replied, taking a skewer regardless. Luffy laughed, picked up a skewer from the pile, and downed the filet in a single bite.

“How is it?” He asked, around a mouthful of fish.

Being the first meal he’d had all day, it was magnificent. 

“It’s good.”

“It is good,” the boy agreed readily. “Sanji is the best. Oh, and he told me to tell you that there’s no… uh, gloop.. glup.. mm, in the sauce.”

“Gluten.” He corrected absently, starting on a rice ball. It was filled with spicy mayonnaise and fish. His fucking loved spicy mayonnaise and fish. 

“Mmmhmm.” Luffy hummed happily, deaf to Law’s semantics. 

They ate in relative silence, for which Law was grateful. It wasn't so much that he was disinterested in talking, but that he had nothing to say. The last twenty-four hours had been a blur and he was thankful to simply sit and stuff a series of culinary neurotoxins into his mouth. Speaking of which, his stomach was feeling considerably less like a bottomless trench, which was an improvement that he hadn’t been aware was needed.

As far as priorities went, this may have needed to be higher on the list. 

Uncharacteristically quiet (save for the very in-character sounds of enthusiastic eating) Luffy looked across the dim room at the sleeping form of Iruka. 

“I’m glad you called for us,” he said around a mouthful of fish.

Law hummed noncommittally, picking at the salad to see if there were any vegetables he could identify.  

“You’re a really good captain, Torao.”

Law huffed.

“And you’re cool.” 

“Oh?” he snorted, feeling a sardonic melancholy settle over his shoulders. The boy seemed to perceive this, and knocked a shoulder against his, as if physically attempting to beat it away.  

“You are! You’re super cool. And! You picked up your submarine! It was just there, in the sky! You were also doing doctoring at the same time!? Torao, my brain would explode!”

“I think mine very nearly did.” He admitted. 

The boy laughed again, then handed him another skewer of fish. Law took it and savored the large slice of pickled pepper on top. 

“I don’t think this is how pirate alliances are supposed to work.” He mused wryly.  

“I think you’re tired and hungry, which makes you dumb.” The boy replied. 

“I am tired and hungry. And maybe a little dumb.” he conceded.

“When I’m tired and hungry, I eat and I take a nap.” 

“What sage wisdom. I seemed to have followed it out of prescribed order.”

Luffy shook his head. 

“Then take another nap.”

Law grimaced and looked upon the sleeping form of his crewmate once more, and said nothing. 

Despite his innumerable shortcomings, which in any other circumstance would make this interaction strange and terrible, there was a companionable ease in this. This rare, solitary moment between the two of them. Perhaps it was an ingrained chemistry of their standings. But Law had met dozens of ship captains, of various repute, and none held a candle to that of one Monkey D. Luffy. 

Perhaps it was the Will of D, an eternal mystery, always just beyond the reach of his understanding. 

Perhaps it was just late.  

“Thanks for finding my hat.”

“Yeah, I borrowed it.”  

“That’s okay. Hats are great for naps.” 

“I’ve been hearing a lot about those recently. Maybe I’ll try one.”

“They’re great. We can nap together later, Torao.” He laughed, polishing off the last of the skewers.

Law had nothing to say to that, at least, nothing non-incriminating. There it was again, he knew, that satisfaction like a fat cat, to have Luffy close. That no one else knew him like this. Incapable of stopping himself, his hand fanned out, landing on Luffy's ankle, feeling the hard roll of his lateral malleolus, the action of his synovial joint, the celebration of tendons that terminated at the talus. 

Luffy dipped his chin and peered at him, face unreadable. Law, unused to scrutiny from Luffy of all people, dropped his gaze to his hand where he draped it over his ankle. 

He played back the memory of his slip on the wet grass, the sudden tension of adductor hallucis, the numerous accessory tendons and structures. He slid his palm over his shin, feeling along the lengths of his tibia and fibula, feeling for the telltale swell of inflammation or a hint of stiffness or instability. There was none.  

Because Luffy feared nothing - Law didn’t fear anything either, he was just capable of a level of patience that would test a dead sloth - he pushed the tray across the floor and brazenly threw a leg over Law’s lap.  

“Do you want to nap together later, Torao?” He asked, clarifying, searching, leaning in ever so slightly, playing with the string of his hat where it laid across Law’s collar bone. 

A dreadfully warm feeling he refused to identify bubbled up in Law’s stomach. And also his traitorous dick. He slowly curled his hands around Luffy’s hips, thumbs pressing into the crest of the bones he found there, because he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Law’s hands did not tremble. He wondered how much pressure he would need to apply before they, too, gave way beneath his skin. 

“Yeah,” He manages around the grit in his throat. “Whatever you want.”

Luffy threw his head back and laughed. Law’s eyes flew to the pulse-ox, to the body of his sleeping engineer, and the room is suddenly claustrophobic. 

“Be quiet,” He admonished without heat, “This is a medical suite.” 

In his lap, Luffy squirmed.

A dangerous pastime, Law considers vaguely, and adjusts his grip. Beneath his thumb he could feel the trembling of an internal oblique, below, the soft weave of salt-burnt denim. 

“That tickles.” Luffy whispered, trying to twist out of his grip. Law held on. 

“Does rubber bruise?” He ruminated. For that matter, what - if any - issue did that slip cause him? Surely he was rubber through and through? Bones, muscles, sinew, veins - and what of his blood? Did the individual cells possess the elastic qualities as the rest of him? Did they expand and contract in scale, were they capable of carrying higher loads of oxygen enriched blood to hyperextended alveoli and compensate for appropriate pressure needed in the various extra-hydraulic systems? The medical mysteries of Devil Fruit users were fugitive at best and entirely unsupervised at worst. 

The boy tilted his head in thought, and after a spell replied, "No."

“It certainly seems to take a lot to scar it. How did you manage this one.” Law nodded at the poorly stitched halfmoon under his left eye, ignoring the glaringly obvious one on his chest. 

“Oh, that was before,” He said, unconcerned with the cryptic nature of this admission. Law wondered how young he was when it happened. Eleven? Twelve? Old enough to know better? Law hummed, to show he was listening, and rubbed the pad of his thumb back and forth over that ticklish hip bone. 

“I wanted to prove to Shanks that I was tough enough to be a pirate.”

The part of Law’s brain that was currently engrossed with the possibilities of atrophic or even striae pathophysiology of hypermobile skin suddenly tripped. 

“Shanks?”

“-because he wouldn’t take me with him and I didn’t like being told no-”

“You still don’t like being told no. I’m looking for clarification here, do you mean the Emperor? Red Hair Shanks?”

“-So I climbed up on the bow, told him how I felt, and stabbed myself!”

“In the face?” He replied incredulously.

“Yep!” He grinned, and Law watched the scar pull blithely over the zygomatic crest.  

“How old were you?” He can’t help but ask. 

“Oh. Uhh...six.”

“Why.” He heaved a sigh, resting his head on the wall and peering at him through his eyelashes.

“I wanted to be just like him, and he had a cool scar over his eye.” he shrugged. 

“You stabbed yourself in the face… because you wanted a cool scar.” Law grimaced, his brain trying to piece together the nightmarishly fallacious logic. 

“I thought all cool pirates had cool scars! Oh, but then later that day, I ate the devil fruit - which was an accident, I swear - and also got kidnapped by mountain bandits. Then I almost got eaten by a sea king. Shanks had to save me, but he lost his arm-”

“No.”

“Huh?” 

“Are you telling me that you are the reason Red Hair Shanks, Emperor of the Sea, has one arm?”

“I didn’t eat it!” He frowned, “A sea king did!”

“Jesus.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” He said, sliding his hands down to rest on his shifting legs, trying to bring him to stillness. 

“Tell me about when you were six.”

It was easy to reach for himself at ten. Where there should be a backdrop of memories, there was a cathedral of fire and smoke over the ruins of a white city. With the dilation of time and distance, those flames seemed to dim, the burning bodies and cries of the fallen reduced. There, but less. Diminished. 

But six? Law considered what was before. It was harder to frame the memories of family, his childhood home, his sister. Before, there was always a time crunch. A disease needing research, therapy, resolution. Had death and dying had always been at the forefront of his very existence? 

He tried to imagine Luffy at that age. Had he always been possessed of this carefree attitude? This un-usurpable joy? And had Law ever possessed these qualities in himself? 

“When I was six,” he started and closed his eyes, trying to turn his thoughts away from the heat and haze of a burning island. “I received a demerit for attempting a frog dissection without permission.”

“What’s a demerit?”

“And I didn’t attempt shit, I dissected that frog! 'Anatomical studies don’t begin until secondary form’.” he mocked, "Stupid." he muttered. Sister Analisa's warm but disapproving face flashing brightly in the fire. He squeezed Luffy’s ankle again.

Luffy’s hand dropped from the dangle of cord that he’d been idly fiddling with and let his hands fall still, in the proximity of Law’s belly. The warm, bubbling feeling Law had been steadfastly ignoring roiled brightly at the proximity.  

“Torao, you’re funny.” 

Law hummed noncommittally, running his thumb up the anterior crest of the tibia, allowing his eyes to rest. Just rest. 

“I saw what you did.” Luffy said quietly.  

“What do you mean.” He swallowed around the sudden thickness in his throat. 

“With Nami. She was hurt.”

Law scoffed.

“She’ll be fine. It was nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“I would have done the same for my crew.”

“But she isnt your crew.” He insisted, tugging on the cord again. 

“What are you trying to make out of this?” He hissed, suddenly tense with this sudden investigation.  

At which point, Luffy smashed his fucking forehead against Law’s. 

“Fuck!”

“Torao!”

“Goddamnit, Luffy-”

“Torao, it’s not nothing,” He breathed, face so close, breathing into his humid mouth, his eyelashes practically cleaving with Law’s.

“You know it isn’t-” And something dangerously close to a tense, wet emotion curled around him, drawing his strong shoulders in a soft curve. He pressed closer, arms coming up and around Law’s neck.

 “Okay, it’s not nothing-” Law conceded, spreading his hands around and back, sweeping around Luffy’s narrow waist until the tips touched his spine. Luffy melted against him, turning his head to slide his cheek against Law’s. Following, lips sweeping dangerously over his ear, Law pressed his nose square against that cheek and breathed in, greedily cherishing his weight in his lap, the quivering strength of his arms around him.

A gesture of affection from his childhood, dredged up from the arctic depths. Law resolutely ignored the fondness smoldering like charcoal in his chest, like a half dozen opposing arguments, struggling for appeal.  

He opted for distracting himself, following the knobs of third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae down until his pinkie finger met the hard edge of Luffy’s jeans. Apparently ticklish here too, Luffy twisted impotently, clearly not trying to escape Law’s hold. 

“You’re no good at kissing, Torao.” He huffed.

It was ridiculous how Luffy knew exactly which buttons to press to tease Law into action.   

“It’s not- it’s-” He growled, mortified by his own rotting embarrassment. 

“Do you not want to kiss me?” Luffy challenged, cocking his head to the side with a bratty moue.  

“Oh my god-” 

“I want to kiss you, Torao.”

“Shut up-” he hissed and dipped their mouths together. 

Kissing Luffy felt like crawling under a heavy comforter in the winter, or the warm, welcome, delicious relief of the autumn sun on his face. He felt Luffy’s hands knock his hat off his head and card through his hair, sigh loudly into his mouth, and murmur something he couldn’t hear over the blood roaring in his ears. It also didn’t matter because having Luffy’s tongue in his mouth wiped every other thought clean away. 

“Okay-” Luffy tried, anchoring himself, his fist pulling tight at his own pant leg, “You’re pretty good-”

Talking was antithetical to kissing. Law bullied him back into place, hand on his jaw and licking into his mouth with abandon. Undeterred, Luffy hummed and shivered and pulled away, eager to babble some more.

“Torao-”

“Stop talking-”

He changed his mind. Kissing Luffy was on par with fist-fighting Luffy - a constant struggle that only a fool would undertake. 

Foolishness that only compounded by the second as the steady hum of the pulse-ox came back to him in startling clarity, along with the unconscious body of his engineer attached to said pulse-ox, not to mention the thirty some-odd individuals which were gathered somewhere beyond the door. Law was less concerned about being caught in the act than with a situationally-awkward boner.  

“Your face is scratchy,” Luffy mumbled, in the proximity of Law’s nose. 

“Can’t remember the last time I shaved.” 

“You could take a bath.” Luffy suggested, with a sluggishness that Law hoped was due to kissing-induced brain rot. 

“I think I need a chemical peel by this point.” 

“Torao,” Luffy started, and scrambled off his lap, “Let’s take a bath.”

Law was suddenly hauled upright by the wrist. Kissing-induced brain rot was perhaps too much to hope for. The blood vessel in his forehead throbbed like a bee sting.  

“Alright, cowboy, put a hitch in your giddy up.” Law grumbled, managing to get a foot around his ankle. He caught him around his elbow when he tripped and pressed him against the wall, next to the door. 

“But Torao-” He whined.

“No but Torao.” Law hissed without malice. “There is an order of operations which you are completely sidestepping, and I need my order of operations to function.” 

“I need to speak to your shipwright. My boat’s engine could be going into iodine pit at this very second - no, I won’t explain it to you.” He punctuated this statement by trussing Luffy’s hat back upon his head, and working the wooden bead up to his chin. 

“I need to see that arrangements have been made to house my crew, that all injuries accrued over the course of this abysmal day have been handled appropriately, that Uni has charted everything correctly because he’s a machinist first and medical technician second.”

“That’s…” Luffy heaved a petulant horse sigh. “A lot.”

“This is an alliance. I need to ensure that my livelihood is maintained so that this alliance,” He gripped Luffy’s shoulders in an attempt to ensure he understood the emphasis of this omission, " is maintained.”

“Fine.” He pouted, which was cute, which was the worst thing of all. Law could work with that. 

“Don’t you want me to see you become the Pirate King?” 

Another unreadable look dropped across Luffy’s face like a mask. 

“Yes.” He breathed. 

“Good. Tomorrow we’ll work on that.”

“And a cup of coffee.” Luffy added, looking over his right shoulder, his non-existent poker face showing blatant disappointment that his grand scheme to see Law naked had been foiled by something as dull as propriety. 

“Come hell or high water, yes, a cup of coffee.”