Archive of Our Own

The first time Luffy told Law that he loved him, it was a bright and brilliant day, and Law, very eloquently, had tucked his arms protectively over his stomach, and said, “Don’t say stupid shit that’ll get you killed,” in a flinty tone far sharper than his typical repartee.

He and Straw Hat communicated almost strictly through banter and bickering, perhaps perplexing to eavesdroppers but to the pair an exchange that never betrayed true animosity. They were two land masses united through happenstance. It had started on the day they forged their incompetent, miraculous alliance and transpired over months of traveling, of weeks of being attached at the hip, and terminating in the present day, with Luffy blinking owlishly and stupidly at him and Law acutely aware that he had snuffed out the indefatigable light behind Luffy’s smile.

And Straw Hat, being Straw Hat, didn’t react with hurt feelings but rather bewilderment and bluster, yelling, “Hey, what’s the big deal? I’m just saying that I love y-”

It left Law’s mouth before he could think about reconsidering: “STOP.”

Straw Hat froze. His face went slack, like Law had slapped him, but he seemed confused more than hurt. But there was still just a little bit too much hurt in those eyes than Law could stand to look at. His hand twitched at his side; his mouth formed the shape of an apology that was never given voice. Instead, like a coward – like a scum-sucking, vile, ungrateful coward - Law whirled on his heel and retreated. Luffy did not follow.

When Flevance burned, Law had burned with it, and from the ashes emerged not a phoenix but a wretched little bird of prey, rotten bones straining under the weight of the memories and the sorrows he carried with him. Before Flevance – his memory was uncertain of that time and it became more uncertain with every passing year, but he didn’t remember being so goddamned sad all the time.

Was his mother ever as sad? His father? He remembered little of what made his parents people and yet he remembered everything about how they died.

A child starved of affection will eventually turn to hate. It was thirteen years since he left behind the ruins of Flevance and yet Law still remembered being so infected with hatred that it destroyed his ability to feel anything else.

Hatred was easy to embrace because at least it did not mean he felt empty. Memories of a loving family turned to hate as the memory of what they were became inseparable from the memory of how they were ripped from the world. As his physical form wasted away, helpless to the inescapable advance of his illness, the hatred inside of him spread, gangrenous. If White Lead disease had been allowed to claim his young life as it was supposed to, when they opened him up on the autopsy table, the heart inside would have undoubtedly been shriveled and black.

It was the opposite of what he felt whenever he looked at Luffy. That was how he knew that he –

Couldn’t think about it.

Law felt the sting of bile crawling up his throat, but he managed not to retch – at least not until he reached the relative sanctuary of the Polar Tang. He always carried himself with a certain presence, but today he stalked through the hallway like a phantom, a living stormcloud portentous and crackling with the promise of catastrophe. Law kept his attention centered on his destination, trying to force the worried faces of his crew out of his head.

Thankfully no one was occupying the latrine when he found it and wrenched the door open, and no one was around to witness him slipping all too eagerly inside and crumpling to his knees. He remembered to lock the door just before the last vestiges of his control disintegrated. Law vomited, gushing puke like a geyser until he couldn’t and after he was done his body was still scraping up remnants of yesterday’s lunch to hack into the bowl.

Law was sweaty and shaky when he finished, hunched over the toilet, eyes teary and nose oozing and throat burning and mouth flooded with the taste of acid. He pressed a tremulous hand to his forehead and focused on breathing. “God damn it,” he muttered to himself.

Even armed with the medical knowledge (and the commonsense knowledge) that this affliction was chronic, Law had been arrogant enough to believe that he had outgrown certain embarrassing compulsions. Time’s march had numbed him to occasions that had once debilitated him – on the eve of Flevance’s destruction he was beset by night terrors, of the image of his parents’ faces frozen in agony, of being entombed in the suffocating, pestilent reek of corpses, of a hospital in flames, of him screaming helplessly inside a treasure chest until the insides of his lungs frayed, of a birdcage towering in the sky, of the first crack forming in a veil of silence and the sobs of a little boy filling the air.

The antidote was simple: he’d shove a cloth in his mouth to keep himself from waking up the crew with his uncontrollable caterwauling (sometimes incoherent nonsense, sometimes his sister’s name, sometimes Cora, Cora, Cora-) and he’d keep a pot by his bedside for him to spit up his sick.

Not that it completely prevented the inevitable result, which was that a half-scream was still a scream and it still cut through the silence of the submarine, whether it lasted for five seconds or fifteen. The innumerable consequences of his inability to escape the past were an open secret among the crew. He could tell that they knew. He could tell that they worried about him.

(Of course they were worried, they l-)

Law’s hand slapped the edge of the toilet’s basin and the noise that echoed in the confines of the latrine drowned out that line of thought. He was going to vomit again if he kept thinking. All these years and he couldn’t figure out a way to get his damn brain to stop. It always pulled the rest of him in unwanted directions.

Hey Traffy, I think I love you!

I love you, kid!

It would have been much more bearable had Luffy been angry.

Law pried himself from the toilet, relinquishing the ironclad grip he’d fastened around the edges, and curled against the wall of the latrine, pulling his knees closer to his chest. Overhead he heard the sluicing of waste sluggishly rumbling through the pipes and could take some satisfaction in knowing the physical evidence of his meltdown had been obliterated.

Law knew by the shudders wracking his body that he was too weak and too unprepared to face his crew, and judging by the relative silence outside the latrine, he could surmise his uproarious retching hadn’t attracted an audience. It took him an embarrassingly long time to collect himself and even as the worst of the episode had passed, he did not feel completely safe.

There was a light and tentative drumming on the door over his shoulder. He twisted around to scrutinize it. From the weight of the footsteps, his assumption was that it was Bepo. Law knew this was going to happen. He sighed, undid the lock, and pushed the door open, fully expecting to see the mink standing there, the dictionary definition of puppy-dog pathetic. Instead, Law was taken aback by the sight of someone unexpected.

Jean Bart was a mountain of a man taller and broader than the hardiest members of Law’s crew, his musculature barely contained by his boiler suit. If he willed it, he could take Law in one colossal hand and break him in half. Yet presently, the former pirate captain had compressed himself into a less offensive shape, once-bloodied hands cleaned and declawed and poised for another knock on the latrine door.

Jean Bart’s eyes zipped to Law, pinpricked in disbelief as though he didn’t expect for him to answer the knock, and he snapped to attention. “Captain!” he gasped, straightening himself.

Law gave one last scrub of the back of his hand against his mouth. “What do you need?”

“You look—uh…” The ellipsis stretched into infinity. Based on the very heavy pause, Law assumed that Jean Bart had a starter rehearsed that he had completely forgotten. “…Like shit.”

“I know. What do you want?”

Law could see Jean Bart was tiptoeing through his next sentence as delicately as possible, which he did not entirely appreciate, but elected not to remark on it. Law was never the type of leader to unleash his frustrations on his crew, and his pitiable state was not Jean Bart’s fault. “I figured you needed some help. Captain.”

“It’s something I’ve got to handle on my own, Jean,” Law dismissed him.

“I know that, Captain.” Jean Bart tended to interject Law’s title whenever he stumbled on a subject that made him uncomfortable, prostrating to Law’s authority like a preemptive apology. “But… if you’ve been throwing up, you’ll need something to drink, and I figured-” Jean Bart cricked his knuckles. An obvious nervous tic disguised in the affectations of masculine detachment. “You didn’t want to go to the mess hall.”

Law saw the tension draw Jean Bart’s muscles violin string taut. He was bracing himself for an explosion. It had been two years since he was liberated from Marie Jois and even with all the tangible progress that he had made, old habits borne from years of subjugation surfaced during unexpected moments. Behind the veneer of a seasoned seaman laid someone who had endured horrors unimaginable.

Or at least somewhat imaginable. Law supposed they had that in common.

Sometimes it was outbursts of inexplicable and tempestuous rage and other times it was complete silence, where Jean Bart would be so tightly wound with tension that the slightest prodding would undo him. Jean Bart still expected that their hospitality could be revoked for the cruelest and most frivolous whims, and Law knew that he was compelled, through these grand gestures, to justify his presence among the crew.

If it was Bepo, Shachi, or Penguin hectoring him, Law would have waved them off but ultimately relented to their demands, concealing that admission through their usual wisecracks - fine, if it’ll keep you from bitching me out, get me some water – right away, princess, and do you want a backrub too? - the guy becomes a Warlord and thinks he can treat us like the hired help -

Because it was Jean Bart, Law breathed outward through his nose and groaned, begrudgingly, “Sure.”

The anxiety palpably leaked out of Jean Bart’s titanic frame. “I’ll be in my room. I just need some water. That’s it,” Law was careful to emphasize.

A drink was a reasonable compromise. It involved the bare minimum of labor, kept Jean Bart from feeling miserable and useless, and Law could rationalize this moment of weakness by recontextualizing it in the form of an ailment in need of a remedy. The other pirate bolted in the direction of the mess hall with single-minded determination and the grace of a bull careening through a hall lined with porcelain, and though Law didn’t follow his trajectory to its end, he imagined that Jean Bart crashed into the cafeteria like a wrecking ball. Law rose to his feet, a little unsteady, and began his unhappy trek to the captain’s quarters.

The Polar Tang was of a larger and more ambitious design than the average submarine or any other amphibious craft, which meant greater accommodations for the crew. However, for the private quarters of the ship’s captain, Law’s personal bedchamber was relatively unostentatious and a touch claustrophobic. Filling every available inch of space were the following: a cot, two bamboo plants (one named Lucky D. Bamboo and the other named Why Do I Need To Name A Plant, Bepo, It’s Going to Die Anyway), shelves bursting with books (and his coin collection), and his stalwart companion, the Vomit Pot. As Law settled on the edge of the cot, Jean Bart returned (read: exploded through the door) with a canteen filled with water, which he enthusiastically thrust into Law’s line of sight.

“Thanks,” Law said. He took a ginger sip, pointedly to show that Law had accepted his charity and there was no need for further worrying.

Not pointed enough, apparently, because Jean Bart asked him anyway. “D’you need anything else, Captain?”

“No,” Law murmured. He was starting to bottom out. After an episode he would go from experiencing too much at once to feeling nothing at all. “Thanks. You should get something to eat.”

“You don’t want anything?”

“I’ll have breakfast tomorrow. Close the door behind you.” Meaning that nothing more could be negotiated.

“Okay.” Jean Bart awkwardly rotated his behemothic body until he was able to shove his arm out of the exit, though he almost clubbed his head against the top of the door. Such embarrassing personal injury might have been avoided if Jean Bart had not kept his eyes trained on Law for the entire process. “G’night, Captain.”

The door shut. Like that, without the voice of another person to fill the silence, Law returned to his thoughts and then himself.

Law sat on his bed and felt nothing. If he wanted anything it was to return to how he felt before all of this happened and he knew from experience that was never going to happen, but he wasn’t going to tell Jean Bart that.

If he could erase any singular mistake from existence, what then? He could have not overreacted when Straw Hat said I love you, but what could he have said instead? He had told Luffy a thousand times, we’re not friends, we’re allies, but that had never once made a difference. Even if the thousandth and first time somehow stuck, the reality was that to just be allies was an outcome that Law did not want. It was easier to recognize what he didn’t want more than what he wanted.

This – this moment of him sitting on his bed, quiet, alone - was inevitable. He could not leech off Luffy’s warmth forever.

Law wasn’t tired enough to sleep. He simply thought and thought and thought until somehow, he slept.

Of course Luffy told him that he loved him. Up until that day they had spent months at each other’s side, chattering about strategy and future destinations and where to go but also about mundane, boring nonsense that Law never would have imagined discussing with Straw Hat before this whirlwind of a season. It was a whirlwind that had unfolded in spectacular fashion, whisking Law up in the rambunctious and exhilarating dysfunction perpetually raging among Luffy’s crew, but Dressrosa, too, had been a whirlwind.

Luffy vexed, confused, and flabbergasted him on a regular basis, just as much as he did in the beginning, but Law was also drawn to him.

Luffy was a head shorter than him and yet once, when overcome with excitement, he had wrapped his arms around Law, swept him off his feet like he weighed nothing, and embraced him in an inescapable crush of limbs. When he was finally released, either because the inclination had passed or out of mercy for Law’s spine, he felt so delirious he needed a full hour to collect himself. It had reminded him of the helpless coughing fits he was prone to when he was young, when his chest would swell with pain and death but instead it was butterflies and breathlessness. That pain had dragged him through the ground; this lifted him into the sky.

Law, ever intelligent, calculating, the strategist, instead chose to brush it aside and leave it unaddressed, because if he disappeared into the minutiae of comparing and contrasting the symptoms then he would come to the conclusion that he –

Luffy doled out affection indiscriminately, whether it was among acquaintances or his crew. He draped himself over Franky’s shoulders, wedged himself in Sanji’s personal space as he toiled in the kitchens, would poke and prod at Nami whenever she was too transfixed in her mapmaking, and yes, he hugged all of them, usually to differing reactions.

But when he hugged Law, the embrace lingered longer than anyone else’s.

(He knew this because he counted the seconds between the moment Luffy’s hands landed on Zoro’s shoulders and when they departed, he compared the way Luffy’s eyes softened when they picked him out in a crowded room, he contrasted the symptoms and the conclusion was--)

And Law had been content to ignore the obvious for as long as he could soak up Luffy’s warmth, Luffy warm and glowing beside him while he was cold and dead.

Of course he loved him.

Law was so fucking stupid.

Law forgot more and more of his family with each passing year, but he remembered almost everything about Cora. It was impossible not to. The Jolly Roger of the Heart Pirates was a mirror image of his crooked smile, the doppelganger of Doflamingo’s insignia. Law wore his name emblazoned on his jacket and his face over his heart. He had transformed his body into a tableau in Cora’s memory because Law himself, and every breath he drew for every day that he lived, was a gift thrust upon him by Cora. Most of the time, he could find solace in that. Other times, it was a chain shackling him to a world – a life – he didn’t want to be a part of.

(He thought of what Doflamingo had said once: The weak don’t get to decide when they die. Apparently, they didn’t get to decide when they lived, either.)

When Law was twelve years old, every bone aching in his body, barely able to move some days, unable to eat, pissing blood, tired for no reason, counting down the days until he croaked, he had violently rejected Cora’s vain efforts to find him treatment. He had long dismissed any hope of survival, and having seen the world for what it was, he would never have wanted to have kept living in it anyway.

Before he l—

(Fuck, not this again.)

-before he became indebted to Cora, he had hated him for making him suffer again and again for something that was impossible, for shattering him against the Via Dolorosa of hospitals and doctors. A very small, very dark part of him resented Cora for denying him the choice to just give up – because the borrowed time that propped him up was built from the ruins of Cora’s sacrifices, and Law couldn’t squander that.

Logically, he did not want to die. But sometimes living was a real bitch.

Each day he spent feeling miserable and wanting to die was an insult to Cora’s memory. Cora had wanted him to live. Cora had wanted him to prosper.

Well, Cora probably didn’t want him to piss away his second chance on a revenge scheme that almost got all of them killed either.

Law was visited by Cora’s specter in his dreams. Sometimes, Cora was there, alive and smiling and everything was as it used to be between them, and then suddenly he’d get struck with the notion that their time was rapidly dwindling, and then Cora would say, I’ve gotta go, kid, and Law would hold onto him, sometimes a child and sometimes an adult, and cry, NO, PLEASE, JUST A LITTLE BIT LONGER-

And wake up in his bed, alone, cold, always with tears on his face and a sob knotted in his throat. He cried in his sleep because if he had control over his body, he would never cry, or at least never cry where there were any witnesses. He didn’t cry when Doflamingo had shrugged off his most desperate assault like it was nothing and he had barely managed to keep it together during his meeting with Sengoku, at least until he found a corner to hide in, but he cried over some make-believe dream cobbled from his insecurities.

That night it was Cora in the position of his mother, face melting in the snow. Blood and wax trickled, his sneering rictus bubbling at the edges. It was an expression he never would have made, but this moment was an approximation of another moment that Law never witnessed, a vision assembled from the fragments of other moments of other bodies.

Sometimes, Cora would be lying face-down in bloodied streets. Sometimes, he’d be burning in a hospital. Sometimes, he’d be hanging by the neck in a birdcage made of fluorescent pink thread, and sometimes, he was staring down the barrel of a gun clutched in Law’s hand. This time, Law was clear-eyed and meeting Cora’s contemptuous glare, standing on the shores of Minion Island. Behind Cora was a treasure chest and Law could see something staring at him from inside of it, but he didn’t want to lock eyes with it, he didn’t.

“What the hell are you doing with yourself, Law?” Cora said.

“Why’d you have to kill me? I gave you an out and you blew it. If you didn’t fuck it up I would’ve lived,” he said.

“You’re just like him. You’re just like Doffy,” he said.

“If I knew how badly you were gonna fuck up your life, I never would’ve wasted my time on you,” he said.

Even if Cora never would have said it, even if it was just imaginary bullshit, that didn’t make it any less true. Law was a black hole, devouring sacrifices, devouring light, devouring love, and delivering nothing but crushing emptiness.

There was a reason why Doflamingo had seen himself in Law. They were both wrought from the same wretched weave. Doflamingo had recognized that in him. For all of Law’s hatred towards Doflamingo, he knew this.

His face turned to the sky and towards the sun. Luffy’s face burned in his dreams, luminous, but dwindled and dwindled and dwindled until he was standing, alone and in the dark. In the dark he remained until he awoke.

If Law had been left to his own devices, then he would have spent the next week wallowing. Ever the inveterate overthinker, condemned by his very design. He knew this because he had adhered to that same pattern before under almost identical circumstances, and he knew that he was a creature of habit.

(A creature of design. Of being puppeteered into old patterns by hands reaching from the past. The same wretched weave. The same. The same-)

The difference between the past and the present was that Law shared a submersible vessel with twenty other people, many of whom were snooping assholes overly concerned with his well-being.

Speaking of, Penguin was hammering on the door to his quarters, too loudly and too repeatedly for him to ignore. Law should have been grateful for the profound vexation he felt. It was different from feeling nothing.

“Hey captain!” came the bellow from behind the door, which despite being made from impregnable steel, did absolutely nothing to muffle it.

“Fuck off, Penguin,” were the words with which Law christened the new day.

Penguin continued with undaunted cheer, not acknowledging that greeting: “It’s morning! Come on, we need you out here on deck.”

“For what reason,” the question fell from Law’s mouth with so much weight it could have crashed through the floor of the submarine.

“Because it’s we’ve got a gluten-free meal with your name on it. You love pancakes.”

“Do I.” He didn’t.

“Okay, brat, you weren’t there for dinner last night and that means you didn’t eat yesterday.” Penguin had clearly decided that lathering the trap with honey wasn’t working; out came the piss and vinegar. “Get out here or I’ll get Bepo to tear the door down.”

The hours of sleep Law clawed from the previous night were disproportionate to the time he spent languishing in bed. After a few long minutes of rubbing his face, grumbling, and replacing the clothes he had fallen asleep in, Law cranked open the door. Penguin was grinning a grin that brimmed with smug satisfaction. Law extended his middle finger skyward, the ‘A’ for Asshole winking on his knuckle.

“Next time you wake me up too early, I’ll take back your arm,” Law said, too impassively to constitute a threat worth considering.

Penguin’s grin widened. He flexed the aforementioned arm. Securely reattached so seamlessly that it looked like it was never blown off his body, were it not for the ring of old scar tissue hidden under his boiler suit. When Penguin saw Law’s matching scar when they reconvened on Zou, he had held his arm up to Law’s and said with far too much excitement, We’re twins!

“No, you won’t,” Penguin replied nonchalantly, popping his shoulder in a wordless boast.

They walked together to the mess hall, talked a little among themselves in a light, easy way that did not make Law feel defensive about his questionable sense of self care. Law wasn’t particularly chatty in the morning, even on days where he was only a manageable level of morose, and the rest of the crew knew that. Law occasionally needed people to keep him from wallowing too indulgently, but he didn’t need three mother hens squawking and squabbling over him. When he entered the mess hall, he felt twenty pairs of eyes alight on him like a flock of birds.

Jean Bart himself dominated a space in the cafeteria bench that could have been occupied by three crewmen. Whether or not it was intentional, Law always noticed him, and there he was, towering head and shoulders over everyone in the mess hall, head perked. A cascade of voices rose from the crowd and meshed to form a controlled pandemonium, and from it Law could pick out different people yelling:

“Captain!”

“Good morning, Captain!”

“Good morning!”

A cascade of words rushing together, overlapping, harmonizing sometimes. Law took his place at his usual seat beside Bepo and Shachi, Penguin sitting across from him. There was coffee already made for him, though there was no longer steam rising from it. At first, he lingered on the sidelines – the crew was content to let him listen silently as long as he was present. But the more he listened the more he spoke, making jokes (always deadpan) when appropriate, answering questions and comments that were directed at him; clumsily, but an infectious momentum, like someone on the fringes of a party swaying along to their favorite song.

The least glamorous way to phrase it was that after a certain point, Law did not expect to come back from Dressrosa alive. He’d said as much to Luffy.

As Law surrounded himself in the familiar – undeserved – comforts of his crew, it wasn’t lost on Law that in preparation for that fateful confrontation in Dressrosa, he had dispatched them to a location many miles away from the island that almost became his gravesite. They wouldn’t realize he had pulled the wool over their eyes until they received word of his death.

What were they thinking, as they watched his Vivre card turn crisp at the edges, replenish, and diminish again to a speck of smoldering paper, for each time he was pulled and pushed over the brink of death?

Law was by no means a mathematician, and he was not full of himself in the same way as wannabe puppet-masters such as Kuro of a Thousand Plans. When he calculated the possible outcome, it was through the lens of a doctor analyzing graphs and results. There was a projected likelihood but that was not a guarantee; the body could respond to treatment but you had to allow for the possibility that it would not be enough. Pitting Kaido and Doflamingo against one another was the only way he could think of to dispose of Doflamingo without laying his head on the chopping block, and there was a margin of error wider than the Red Line.

All of that may as well have been flushed down the shitter when his plan transcended its original design. Each iteration was sloughed off as it grew into a newer and more hideous form, and as Law struggled to meet Luffy’s spontaneity, the chances of living became ever more remote.

His initial proposition to the Straw Hats came with a disclaimer, mostly to assuage his conscience – to unburden himself of the notion that he had roped them into a suicide mission – but that seemed to make no difference regarding their cooperation.

Another unglamorous truth was that if any of the Straw Hats had perished on behalf of his vengeance, Law could have lived with that. Especially if their plan had succeeded. If it came down between sacrificing his crew or sacrificing the Straw Hats, he would have picked the Straw Hats any time. It was a cruel deception but the superior alternative.

When freedom was just a single point of light hovering in the distance, Law resigned himself to what he thought was inevitable. He was going to die. It was not what he had planned. But eventually, you become too exhausted to swim against the current. He succumbed to the undertow all too easily. It was a terrible waste of Cora’s mercy, but death was almost never expected and especially never meaningful. It was the ultimate anticlimax.

Law didn’t want to die. But if he did, that was the likeliest outcome of a suicidal, idiotic gambit.

But he’d survived. And what came after Doflamingo? Killing Kaido, but Kaido was an afterthought.

Now what? Nico Robin had asked him as they watched the horizon together, and it was a question he had avoided for a reason. Law knew in his bones that even thousands of miles from Dressrosa, even if you stranded him in the darkest and most treacherous seas halfway across the world, he could still point in its direction.

Law was ultimately left with himself. Doflamingo couldn’t hurt anyone else, although he was not dead. He was supposed to find comfort in that. He had, for a moment in time that was all too temporary. Then the fog cleared. Then the nightmares started again as though they had never been interrupted, with the same cast of characters, acting out new scenarios with the prompts they were given.

But here he was. Still the same Law that had existed before Doflamingo.

The coffee was burning through him. He had made a mistake.

The weak don’t get to decide when they die was one of Doflamingo’s many throwaway monologues – Law heard enough of them to last him a lifetime – and yet every word of it was carved into Law’s bones.

He remembered seeing Doflamingo fashion a garrote wire from his string. He remembered a man, a pirate, one of Doflamingo’s many North Blue competitors, but not his name. He remembered the throbbing of the man’s neck as Doflamingo wound his thread around it. He sawed into the carotid arteries, and they painted his smile. He twisted the man’s head off his neck in the kind of display you’d see in fairytales, like Noland before the guillotine.

The legends never told of how decapitating someone took so much work.

Baby 5, who had shot three other people beforehand without flinching, had gasped but not looked away, her mouth pinching like she wanted to cry but somehow, she’d forced it down. Law, eleven years old, watched the pirate blubber and sob and wail and give Doflamingo everything he wanted before he died anyway in a puddle of his own piss and blood.

He hadn’t been disgusted or sickened or saddened, not even when he thought of his friend from Flevance – the one who had screamed his determination that he would live and then died anyway. Looking at the pirate’s headless corpse, Law felt none of the desperation and hope he kept burning for his friend. He was only irritated. The man had utterly embarrassed himself. All because he wanted to live. Imagine doing all that just to live in this world.

Doflamingo smiled his sanguine smile. Doflamingo smiled from the flag that fluttered atop the Narancia Flamingo.

Corazon had wanted Law to reject hatred for love and freedom. He chose to hate instead. Law hated and hated and hated and he had no idea what it was like to feel anything else.

Doflamingo was a spider that had woven a web in his guts and everything Law thought and felt was connected to him, thread after thread after thread, and he was still tangled in them. The Jolly Roger of the Heart Pirates was Cora’s smile, but it was also the Donquixote Pirates’ smile uncaged, opposite halves of a single coin. Law’s plan for vengeance might well have been a leash leading back into Doflamingo’s clenched fist.

You’re just like Doffy. You’re just like Doffy. You’re just like Doffy, echoed Cora in his nightmares, the steady thumping of a heart encased in ice.

Law spent another day in relative solitude, which was more time afforded to him than he expected, and he had to speculate that one of the wiser members of Luffy’s crew was the mastermind engineering this needed reprieve. Probably Nico Robin. She appeared to be the most sensible. Maybe the Cat Burglar, or Sniper God.

Out of all of them, Nico Robin appeared to understand him the most. It’s only a bad memory now, didn’t have the same hollow ring of an empty platitude. There was something behind it beyond the need to comfort him.

During his time in isolation, Law remained ambulatory and spoke full sentences with his crew, ate delicate snatches of food, filled the emptiness of his belly with lukewarm coffee and water, stared at the walls when he wasn’t sleeping, and otherwise accomplished nothing. That hollow reverie was interrupted by a faraway commotion that managed to penetrate the steel walls of the Polar Tang. If he was in a real pirate ship, he would have heard the thundering of footsteps, punctuated by the springy, lively clapping of sandals against wooden floorboards. Luffy preceded himself in a different fashion, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Law’s name was bellowed. Screamed, actually, Luffy’s voice turning ragged at the edges. “HEY, TRAFFY! I NEED TO TALK TO YOU!”

Shachi, Penguin, and Bepo had grown tense at his side and their expectant faces were now triangulated on him with rapt attention.
Like Law’s condition, his blossoming closeness with the Captain sitting at the head of their newborn fleet was also an open secret. Enough that when the future King of the Pirates stormed up to his doorstep shrieking his name, no one questioned the absurdity of it. What they awaited was not an explanation, but a command. If Law had decreed it of them, they would have thrown themselves in the path of Straw Hat’s rampage.

It twisted Law’s stomach. Not the imminent prospect of speaking to Luffy. He knew that eventually they would have to tie up the thread he had left dangling in the wind.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Law said calmly. He put down his catalog and his coffee and proceeded to the upper deck.

Luffy looked the same. It had only been two days since their last meeting, but Law arrived with the expectation that the weight of those days would have been expressed on the canvas that was Straw Hat in the same way it had his own image. Sleeplessness made Law more haggard. Instead, Luffy’s face illuminated at the sight of him before it settled into (relative) seriousness once he was assured that Law was the same.

“You’re alright!” breathed Luffy, sounding awestruck as much as he was relieved.

“Obviously. I was on my own ship. Nothing could’ve possibly happened to me there.”

“Yeah, but—you ran off the last time we talked.” Luffy was frowning, but there was no anger in it. “I didn’t get the chance to ask you what I said that was wrong or see if you were okay. I tried coming back yesterday, but the bear told me you were busy-”

Bepo had neglected to mention that.

“I figured you needed some more time, but I really needed to talk to you!”

The tenor of their reunion had not once swayed toward anything other than confusion and concern thus far. It helped Law find his footing, to banish the imaginary version of Luffy he had been keeping in his head. Despite it, Law did not yet relax. That was a feeling he constantly had to fight for.

Law sighed. “I’m here now. So talk.”

“You’re not gonna run away if I say something dumb again?”

Law scowled. At first, from the tension in Luffy’s voice, he thought that it was intended as a passive-aggressive barb – but then he reconsidered: if there was any party that Luffy harbored any blame towards, it was himself. After all, Luffy had said something which had upset Law. The irrationality behind Law’s overreaction hadn’t been factored into it. That tasted like ashes in Law’s mouth, but it did not soften his demeanor.

“That depends on what you want to say,” Law said.

Luffy’s brows knitted in concentration. It was the same expression that seared on his face whenever he prepared for an attack powerful enough to level a city. “Okay,” he announced, loud, no hesitation. “I love you. A lot.” And then he laughed. He laughed because it brought him immeasurable joy just to say it, even if Law wasn’t giving him anything in return.

Law’s eyes closed and his face tightened like Luffy had whacked him in the chest. It hurt, but he had been expecting it, and like any physical pain, it was followed with a spike of… something he likened to an adrenaline rush.

“You said that.”

A smile was beginning to tease at the edges of Luffy’s mouth, despite the chilly reception. It was like he had been unburdened, though not by revelation; it was him rediscovering his breath after surmounting an obstacle. Law wondered what it was that transpired while he was preoccupied with his own misery. Luffy at times seemed like a simple creature, abiding by pure instinct and oblivious to mortal constraints, but he remembered pain.

When a thought passed through his head, he chased after it. The proclamation, I love you! had been one of many such thoughts flitting in and out of his head and the instant it had revealed itself he’d seized it and held it up to the light. Law would have stewed in such a feeling for days-weeks-months without doing anything about it, picking apart the viscera of his emotions. Luffy saw it and recognized it.

Luffy didn’t hold onto anything. He didn’t hold himself back from anything that was good.

Law could only wonder what it was like to experience happiness as it was supposed to be, in its purest form - not happiness buckling under the weight of melancholy, not happiness with the bitterness of knowing he didn’t deserve it, not happiness that was fleeting and ephemeral and left him feeling hollowed out and broken afterward. Maybe it was something he had felt before and forgotten about, maybe he was delusional and this was how it was meant to be, maybe some people were born miserable just like they were born with slow-acting poison baked in their bones.

Luffy’s lips maintained the shape of that smile, even as he asked his next question. “Why’d you run away?”

Law sighed. “It’s not easy to explain,” he muttered.

“Can’t you just try? I know I’m dumb but I can get it if you just explain it to me.”

“It’s not that easy-” Law should have known just what a foolish thing that was to say. Luffy had a talent for flattening and simplifying the most esoteric of concepts into something that fit his reality.

“Is it because you don’t love me?” Luffy asked.

“No!” The swiftness of Law’s rebuke startled himself, and it came as hurriedly as the reaction that had created this mess. If that question had come from anyone else, he would have brushed it off as an attempt to manipulate him. Law held fast to uncomfortable truths learned in his childhood- that most people were selfish, conniving, and duplicitous, and this was something that shone through the cracks of the most outwardly altruistic of individuals.

Luffy, however, was clear plastic and see-through glass more than rubber. Anything he gave voice was something he believed wholeheartedly. Luffy was the personification of good faith. Duplicitous was a word that wasn’t in Luffy’s vocabulary, not solely because he probably had no idea what it meant.

“It’s okay if you don’t,” Luffy prattled on, no hint of resentment or sadness or even disappointment in his voice. Somehow that hurt - Law felt something in his stomach like a knife sinking into his gut. “You’re still my crew. And that’s not gonna change even if-”

Law advanced quicker than Luffy could react, clamping his hand over Luffy’s jaw in a desperate attempt to keep him from spewing more bullshit. “Can you just shut up for a minute?” he snarled. “Just give me a second.”

Luffy’s eyes were big and round over his hand and he gave a quick, enthusiastic nod. From there he must have seen it – Law’s eyes darkening, his brow creasing, the slightest tension culminating in the corners of his mouth, a storm brewing behind his eyes and brewing in his throat. Luffy’s gaze softened as his eyes darted back and forth over Law’s face. Law was quiet for longer than most would consider appropriate and as he spiraled through the recesses of his subconscious, the threads of his thoughts fluttered out of his reach. All that thinking and despairing and speculating had not yielded anything but two days of misery. Just swamp water and sadness.

Once again, Law was failed by the inadequacy of words alone, of the futility of conjuring the irrational into the rational. The fruits of his miserable labor were rotten and bruised and he hated it (himself) the minute he spit it out, “Things just haven’t worked out for people who say that to me.”

Luffy was quiet, not out of newly learned patience but because Law forgot to remove his hand from his mouth. He released Luffy’s flapping jaw. “You can talk now,” he allowed him.

Luffy’s eyes lit up in the way they always did when he blundered into a staggeringly inaccurate conclusion. “Oh, ‘cause they broke up with you?”

Holy shit he was so stupid. “No, you idiot,” Law barked. “It’s because he died!”

Luffy’s face lit up again - “Oh!” – and then darkened as the impact of what Law said finally dawned on him. “Oh.”

“You get it now?” Law sniped, “Bad stuff happens to people that love me.”

Luffy puzzled through what Law had told him. “So you’re scared I’m gonna die?”

“Yes- no.” Almost the instant Law was able to settle on a true explanation, he was struck dumb yet again. Law's gaze drifted to the floorboards, and he mumbled in resignation, “I don’t know. It’s about a lot of things.”

“But you said it’ll get me killed,” Luffy said.

“What?” Law stared at him.

“When you freaked out, you said ‘don’t say stupid shit or it’ll get you killed.’”

Law could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “How is it that you can forget everything about a plan where if anything goes wrong it will kill you, but you remember that?” If a bystander strained to listen, they might have detected the slightest perk in his otherwise dry monotone.

“I dunno, I guess ‘cause you seemed really upset and that made me wanna listen,” Luffy mumbled sheepishly, “And your plans are good but sometimes they’re really long.”

“It’s still not that simple,” Law stressed, but he did concede some ground: “But yeah. I guess that’s part of it.”

In lieu of a figurehead to use as an impromptu throne, Luffy made the railing into his substitute. It seemed to help him think. “The guy that died” – another thing Law hadn’t expected Luffy to remember, given the only time Law had ever mentioned Cora by name was when Doflamingo had cornered them in Dressrosa – “was it that guy you told me about? Mingo’s brother?”

Law felt something twitch in his cheek. “Yeah.”

“Didn’t Mingo kill him?”

“Yeah,” Law said, and that divulgence came with the resignation of someone who had long ago molded to a painful reality.

Perhaps it was not what one would have expected, given all that Cora’s death represented, but Law was unafraid to speak Cora’s name or admit the obvious. Bepo, Shachi, and Penguin all knew, because Law had told them when they were only children, and they retold this genesis to every newcomer in the Heart Pirates. The legendary Corazon, whose compassion and mercy changed the course of Law’s life, had become an inextricable part of the Hearts Pirates’ mythology. In the present day, Law immortalized Cora through symbolism and ineffective actions, a facsimile of the kindness that seemed to spring from Cora infinitely.

Despite his maladaptive attachment to bygone times and people, Law accepted that Cora was dead. The sky was blue. Cora was dead.

“Why does that have anything to do with something you did?” Luffy asked. Leave it to him to cut to the chase.

Because it happened because of me. Because he sacrificed himself for me. Because I’m fucking broken. Because I’m –

“He died so I could get away from Doflamingo,” Law said, “That’s why.”

“Did he say he loved you or something?”

“Yeah. The last time I’d heard that was before-” This, however, was something Law tripped over, though most would not notice it as his tone remained perfectly clinical: “before my parents and my sister died. Before they were killed.”

Luffy was going to find out eventually. He had already talked about how Doflamingo had executed Cora, and he knew that he was once a part of Doflamingo’s crew. This should have been said just as easily. Law was outwardly cold and factual, but a part of him was weeping like a child.

Luffy’s face was solemn. From the uncharacteristic look of seriousness that he wore, one would expect him to say something profound but as someone who was already very familiar with Luffy, Law had a vague suspicion of what his consolation would sound like.

“That really sucks,” Luffy uttered with the same weight and sincerity as if he was announcing someone’s death. That very much lined up with Law’s expectations, and it suited him. For the time being, he didn’t want to dwell on this topic longer than necessary.

“I’m not asking you to pity me, Luffy-ya,” Law said, “I’m just telling you why.”

“I guess I’d be scared too,” Luffy hummed. It was hard to imagine Luffy being scared of anything, but Law knew what he was like when he was scared. He saw that two years ago. If there was any sad moral that could be tacked onto the end of Law’s horrendous childhood, it was that you did not come back from seeing the people you l—(NOT AGAIN)—from seeing important (precious) people die without being fundamentally changed.

Perhaps if Luffy exercised that level of caution in his day-to-day life, Law would be less concerned about him meeting the same fate as his brother.

“It’s a lot of things,” Law stressed that reminder, somewhat pedantically, but he did allow Luffy that, if only because he presented unexpected evidence he could not ignore. “But that’s part of it.”

Luffy filled the silence with more wild fidgeting; fingers wringing at the banister, toes clenching in his sandals. When his head swiveled towards Law, that ear-to-ear grin had reappeared. “I’m not gonna die,” Luffy intoned, “I need to be King of the Pirates.”

Law had heard that refrain for what felt like a thousand times before. It was Luffy’s answer to every inconvenience. I have a billion-berry bounty instead of a trillion-berry bounty? I’m gonna be King of the Pirates. I can’t have seconds at dinner? I’m gonna be King of the Pirates. It wasn’t that Law didn’t believe that – Luffy had a talent not only for drawing people into his orbit, but for making people believe the unbelievable. Luffy’s gift for serendipity had carried him further than any New World wash-out. Deep down, Law did believe Luffy was special. If he didn’t, he never would have bothered with Luffy.

It was not with malice or skepticism that Law refuted him. “You can’t promise me that,” he replied.

“You’re right, I can’t!” Luffy was grinning as he said that. “I should’ve died TONS of times! I’m always doing stupid stuff!”

Obviously, but it was a little peculiar to hear the man admit it himself.

“But if I let myself be scared, then I’d never be King of the Pirates. I would’ve just given up after – after the War in Marineford. And I never would’ve beaten Mingo and stopped him from killing everyone in Dressrosa,” Luffy said, “I do all this stupid stuff and it kinda seems like I don’t care, because I kinda don’t, but I still know I could die. I just fight as hard as I can and get as strong as I can so I don’t.”

Luffy puffed out his chest, indisputable pride glinting in his eyes, as if that rambling preface of magical reasoning was all the explanation he needed. “So it’s not gonna happen,” he declared. “I’m not gonna let it.”

Law found himself wishing that Luffy resorted to the expected route of reassuring him that it wasn’t going to happen, but perhaps he didn’t credit Luffy with enough common sense. Not for the first time, Law was reminded of the weakness in his thinking – when engrossed in his suffering, it distorted his view of everything. He worried about Luffy’s feelings constantly but he didn't even know what those feelings were.

“It’s not a matter of letting,” Law stated, “It might not be enough one day.”

“Yeah, maybe. But I’m not scared to die.” Luffy beamed. “And I’m not scared to love you!”

Law found himself breaking eye contact with Luffy and looking away. His trembling fingers grabbed the brim of his hat and tugged it lower over his eyes.

I’m not scared to love you. I’m not scared to love you.

(An image shimmering in his head, a mirage, the memory of Law turning away quickly so the wizened marine wouldn’t see the reddening of his eyes and his face.)

“Hey, Traffy, are you okay?” Luffy asked. “You got all quiet.”

“I’m fine,” Law responded, a little hurriedly. Was he? He was trying to figure out what it was, exactly, that he was feeling. Luffy didn’t appear convinced, which was not surprising. Law wouldn’t have been either.

Luffy’s lip was protruding in a slight pout. Law thought for a moment that he was somehow displeased with Law’s silence, but he realized this was just what he looked like when he was deep in thought. Then, his face brightened with the beginning of an audacious new idea, and he slapped the railing with his palm.

“Hey, open one of those Room things of yours.”

Law blinked. “Why?” It was not an outrageous request. They sparred on a regular basis. It was the timing that stunned him.

“I wanna fight you. And this time, it’ll be for real. I want you to try and kill me!” Luffy flashed another dazzling grin like he didn’t just casually propose the wildest bug-fuckery Law had heard since Hey Traffy, I think I love you. “If you don’t believe that I’m gonna fight to stay alive for you, then I wanna prove it to you!”

Law blinked. “Straw Hat, you must be kidding.”

“I’m not. I wanna prove it to you. Come on.”

“How’s that going to prove anything?”

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Don’t all my ideas work out?”

“They DON’T,” Law countered, “That’s your entire problem.”

“I don’t mean that they go how they’re supposed to, I mean they work out.”

“Even though they shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, but they do.”

Law went silent in unspoken surrender, knowing this conversation was going to lead him in circles. Luffy smiled, like he always did, and a laugh bubbled from behind his teeth. The longer Law looked at him the less inclined he felt to argue.

As always, Law found himself acquiescing to the living oxymoron that was Luffy. He took a hard breath through the knot that had formed in his throat and felt the tension in his body melt away as his hand formed a familiar old shape; D, E, A, T, H in reverse, bubble blooming in his palm and spreading outward until its circumference encompassed every corner of the deck. A ripple of ozone crackled along the back of Law’s neck and tingled in the air, tasting like lightning on his tongue.

Luffy launched himself off the railing, rolled, and bounced to his feet, panther-languorous and bristling with muscle. Luffy twisted his head left and right as if to confirm that the Room had been created and it wasn’t just some complex show of prestidigitation, never mind that he never would have been able to tell with his eyes alone. He bounced from one foot to the next as he took his position across from Law.

“You’ve gotta use your sword,” Luffy rattled off instructions. “Okay? Not just fists. If you don’t, I’ll knock your lights out.”

Even as he was questioning his choices, Law arched his eyebrow. “You’re assuming I’ll just let you do that,” he smirked, unable to keep the hint of a challenge from coloring his voice.

Luffy giggled. “Yeah! And that I’ll knock you out with one hit, too!” He pounded his knuckles together.

“That easy, huh,” Law deadpanned.

“I didn’t say it was gonna be easy,” Luffy shot back, smirk positively shit-eating. “But I AM stronger.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. The strongest.”

Law snorted. Index and middle finger pointed upwards, thumb to the side. Law let himself ease into the motions of every ordinary sparring session, disregarding Luffy’s insistence that this be indistinguishable from a battle to the death. Kikoku was drawn from her sheath but for a simple cut. “Amputate.”

Luffy bolted for him, one outstretched arm starting to burst at the seams. Law knew Luffy was going to counteract that with his Haki but if he didn’t, he just wanted to screw with him. The beginning of a bloodless incision fizzled out as Luffy crackled obsidian black from the neck-down, his Haki blocking the pull of Law’s Room. Law twisted out of the way as Luffy’s fist crashed through the floorboards.

“You fucked up the deck, Straw Hat,” Law sneered.

Luffy was after him again before the first syllable left his mouth, chasing him across the deck with a flurry of punches. The pursuit was relentless enough that Law had to switch himself with a barrel; with a flash, Luffy was showered with splinters and termite dust while Law was crouched on the opposite side of the deck. Luffy reacted immediately- he torqued his hips and his leg wound up like a corkscrew, launching at Law with the force of a bazooka.

Law whipped Kikoku in front of him to deflect the oncoming attack, but the blade did not leave the scabbard. Luffy’s foot cracked off it and ricocheted, his stretching leg zigzagging through the air before it blasted another smoking crater through the floorboards.

“Ikkaku’s gonna kill me,” Law said, dispassionately but a little peeved.

Luffy assessed the hole as his leg snapped back into human proportions and shrugged it off – easy for him to do when it wasn’t his ship getting banged up. “Franky’ll fix it.”

“You think I’m swimming in berry, Straw Hat?”

“Nah, if I tell him you’re my boyfriend he’ll do it for free!”

Law blanched. “Who says I’m your boyfriend?” he blurted, fighting to keep the exclamation mark out.

Luffy laughed a loud and triumphant belly laugh. “Do you not wanna be?” Again, one of those loaded questions that should have seemed more dangerous than it was, especially when it came before Luffy aiming another blow for his head.

Law ducked; as Luffy’s punch sailed overhead, he jerked Kikoku’s handle up for a hard blow into his elbow, but Luffy saw that coming, crooked his arm, and tumbled away. “No-”

“Wait. You mean you don’t want to?” Luffy frowned, but his momentary disappointment didn’t stay his hand. He was spinning around to face Law and cocking back his fist. “That’s ok-”

“No, I meant no as in-” Thoroughly embarrassed by his inability to get his shit together, Law grit his teeth. “Focus on not getting killed. This was your idea.”

“So you DO wanna be my boyfriend?”

Law clenched his jaw and thought carefully through his next answer as he shuffled away from the next barrage of punches. His stomach flipped upside down and that wasn’t because he used Shambles again to displace himself; Luffy was a quick little bastard and if he lowered his guard for even a moment, he’d take advantage. “I’m not saying no to it,” he said, and had deliberately blinded himself to how evasive of a non-answer it was.

Luffy, frustratingly, didn’t take the opportunity to swoop in and make another inexplicably accurate assumption that would have then saved Law from his turmoil. The ceaseless assault halted for a second before Luffy was throwing punches again. “That’s not a yes though,” Luffy said bluntly. He wasn’t smiling.

The question lobbed back in Luffy’s face was said without the slightest inflection: “Don’t you already know?” Because everything with Luffy always fell into place, and deep down, Law had been hoping that Luffy would make this easier.

“No! That’s the problem! I can’t MAKE you do something!” Luffy shouted back at him, and this was the first spark of raw frustration Law felt from him. “Even if it’s something that I think you wanna do. I can’t TELL you how to feel! Just like I can’t tell you-”

“Don’t,” Law snarled, stone cold, and the Room pulsed once in an ineffective warning, as if that ever would have been enough. It was never in Luffy’s nature to back down.

“I can’t tell you I’m not gonna die,” Luffy continued, “I can’t make you stop being scared, either.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” This time Law felt for the throbbing of Luffy’s heart and pushed, and he wasn’t too proud to admit he’d done that because he was pissed as hell. He couldn’t make contact through the Haki, otherwise he would've done it - jettisoned Luffy's heart from his body, safely contained in a glass cube, and brought this ridiculous exercise to an end. Law thought he could hear the palpitations, as he always did when he readied his Scalpel ability, before it registered that what he was hearing was his own.

“The only thing I can do is help you! But you need to stop running away from me! I can’t do everything for you! You think you don’t deserve it, but your crew loves you-”

“Stop.”

“Loads of people love you, not just me! You think you’re no good, but you are, you are good and that’s why I-”

“STOP,” Law snapped, and he was breathing much harder than before, it was harder to control his swinging as he whipped Kikoku back and forward to intercept each punch and kick.

He had been inching across the deck and he only realized it when he felt his back hit the mast. The most obvious maneuver would have been to use Shambles again, but Law wasn’t thinking much at all anymore, just struggling against something that was pulling him lower and lower.

(A point of light in the distance and the water was up to his neck and it was deep and dark and he was stuck in a spiderweb, he was -)

“I love you!”

I love you, kid. Don’t look for reasons for another man’s love. I love you. You’re going to regret it. I’m a walking dead man. I love you too. I take and I take and I give nothing. I should’ve died. I love you so much it scares me. You’re going to be King of the Pirates and I -

Law felt something like a noose tighten around his neck. I- I – I- a single vowel stuttering in his head ad infinitum over the simmering drone of static. Too many thoughts crowded his skull, blotted in his veins, bleeding from his black heart, trying to force its way out however it could- however it could -

(Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t-)

He opened his mouth to suck the breath back into his lungs and instead all of it came pouring out in the form of a scream powerful enough to rattle the ship; this, the only coherent thought surfacing from the morass of his thoughts and his doubts and his memories. He lashed out on instinct because everything that centered around Luffy was powered by instinct, never thought, Kikoku scything through the air as the momentum carried him.

“YES!” he roared, pushing forward because he had to GET OUT OF THAT CORNER, he couldn’t breathe, he was so tired of stagnating and wasting his life- “I want that!”

Law watched it play out in Luffy’s face in milliseconds: anger into shock into joy into the realization that there was an incoming blade ready to cut him in half, and thankfully before Law could make the worst mistake of his life in the stupidest possible way, he ducked, and he rolled, and he launched himself at Law. Luffy collided with his midsection and the impact slammed him against the mast like Law had been smashed with a battering ram, pulverizing his ribs and probably bruising his lungs for the foreseeable future. The epilogue to that earth-shattering declaration – an anticlimactic wheeze that started high and tapered low for the seconds it took for Law to slump to the deck, pinned there by Luffy’s dead weight.

He was given a generous thirty seconds to recuperate, then Luffy leaned back on his knees and he loomed over Law, drawing a dark shadow over his vision. It brought him back into focus. He was blind and then he was not and he peered dazedly into Luffy’s face, and he was stricken by the sight of it in a way he could not attribute to his damaged lungs. Luffy, his pleased face eclipsing the sun, the light behind him forming a halo around the tousled ringlets of his hair.

“Hey, look! I’m still alive!” Luffy laughed.

I wasn’t actually trying to kill you, Law wanted to say. I hesitated. I never would’ve tried to kill you. It’s you. I- but he was out of breath and his heart was beating with such furor his entire body was quivering. It didn’t matter if it was a struggle to the death or a game of make-believe. Luffy smiled in the sky and smiled in his dreams.

“You okay, Traffy?” Luffy asked.

“I-” Before Law could even attempt to summarize the cataclysmic odyssey that had unfolded in his head, Luffy cut him off mid-sentence. His eyes bulged out of his face and for the first time he looked genuinely panicked.

“Are—hey!! HEY! Are you crying!?” Luffy exclaimed, “I was supposed to make you feel better, not make you feel even worse!”

“I’m fine,” Law breathed deep. Steeled himself. Grabbed Luffy by the front of his shirt and pulled him in closer so the sunlight was hitting his face again and soaking the back of Luffy’s head. Said it again, a little softer. “I’m fine.”

Luffy, for once, was the one who yielded to his direction. His protestations ebbed away. A jolt flickered through his body like he couldn’t comprehend that Law’s arms had moved of their own volition and that they were wrapped around his shoulders. He didn’t see Luffy’s face, but he imagined that he was smiling again, and then he knew that he was because he flung his own arms around Law’s neck and squeezed him tight. Not as tightly as the time Law thought he couldn’t breathe, which was good because of the dented rib, but secure.

“Does this mean you’re my boyfriend now?” Luffy inquired, good-naturedly but primed as a serious query.

“Yeah,” said Law, and there was that clench in there, the stubborn tightness in his body that came attached to any spark of happiness, but saying it again was easier than the first. Luffy erupted with glee, his victorious cackle ringing in the sky loudly enough that Law knew the people below deck would hear it, given that the idiots were likely eavesdropping.

As always with Luffy, it took a nudge before the dominoes fell.

Law never saw Cora’s face when he died.

But the image was still enshrined in his mind’s eye:

Cora dying with a smile on his face. Cora, on his back in the snow with his arms apart like he was making a snow angel and maybe he was.

The day that Law read about the botched execution at Loguetown, the first time he saw Luffy’s name in print, his eyes locked on that single letter, D.

Luffy was said to have smiled too before the blade was supposed to pierce his throat. He should have died, then. Even Luffy had accepted it. Were it not for one last stroke of fate, his head would have rolled.

Cora smiled in his dreams.

Luffy smiled in the sky.

As always, everything conformed to Luffy’s will. Logic, fate, history, Law himself. That was not such a horrible thing.

Law woke up staring at the wall of his room and knew from the fact that his room was still dark that he hadn’t slept for long. He and Luffy were still crammed together on his cot in a manner that should have been more uncomfortable than it was, Luffy with arms and legs sprawled out save for one locked around Law’s midsection, head resting on his collarbone, his face hidden by his dark tangle of hair. Outside it was silent. He could hear the burbling of the ocean, the sibilant rasp of air passing in and out of the ventilator. The rumbling of Luffy’s chest.

Law slept without nightmares, and he awoke with the knowledge that Luffy was there, they were a couple now, and that this night was peaceful but eventually they’d return like they always did.

“I’m not fixed,” Law said, in a voice quiet enough to pretend it was only in his head.

There was a pause, and then a slight rustling of the bed before Law heard his answer. “Yeah, I know.” Luffy had been awake this entire time, and perhaps Law already knew that.

“It’s not going to go away. I’m going to weigh you down,” Law murmured, staring at the ceiling. “That’s why.”

He felt Luffy’s breath tickle the skin at the center of his chest in a silent snicker, the mischievous little Shishishishi whistling between his teeth, and then the whisper of his lips curving into a smile, just over the one that was inked over Law’s heart.

“You won’t,” was Luffy's rebuttal, spoken with the clearest confidence, and he seemed to forget everything he had said before, abandoning his willingness to entertain Law’s most pessimistic fantasies just to comfort him in that moment. He was alive and Law was alive and that was enough, that was more than enough. “I’m the strongest, remember?”

It really was that simple.