Chapter Text
If you had told Law two years ago, back in Sabaody, that someday he would have his own bunk on the Thousand Sunny; he probably would have dismembered you without a second thought and left your head in the chaos behind him. Him, traveling with the Straw-Hat crew? Being anything but the Heart pirate’s captain?
Ridiculous, Law thinks, as he wraps his calloused hands around a cup of coffee. Steam rises and curls in the morning light, sunbeams falling across Law’s fingers and onto the desk below them—his desk, that he picked out to place his textbooks and his coffee, prepared just as he likes it to be. How ridiculous, that Franky made the desk and Sanji prepared the coffee, and that Law is spending his morning staring out a window on the Thousand Sunny.
He hears exasperated yelling in the distance, and knows that the accompanying clangs of silverware mean Straw-Hat is both awake and hungry. Other crewmates are stumbling out of their rooms toward the kitchen, either skipping and cheering in excitement or grumbling about the noise. When Law boarded the Thousand Sunny for the first time, way back before Dressrosa, the unrelenting commotion had irked him to no end. Every sudden touch, sound, and movement felt like sandpaper across open wounds. Now, after a month of falling into pace with the Straw-Hat crew, he was surprised by how much comfort could be found in constant chaos—in the undeniable evidence that his allies are within reach, okay, alive.
He has no such proof for his crew. The Polar Tang rests at the bottom of the sea, demolished by the Blackbeard pirates. Bepo had dragged the surviving members of his crew onto one of the submarine’s metal panels, practically clawing his way through the waves, swimming within sight of the Thousand Sunny by a stroke of extraordinary luck. As Law would find out when he woke in their infirmary, the end of an alliance meant nothing to the Straw-Hats; they’d treated his life-threatening injuries as though he were one of their own, and cared for his few crew members the same. Franky had rapidly constructed a make-shift living quarters for Bepo, Penguin, and Shachi—in that near-magical way of his—and Ikkaku had stayed with Nami. Sanji fed them three full meals a day plus snacks, and Chopper checked in on them regularly. For one week, the remaining Heart pirates learned what it meant to be a part of the Straw-Hat family.
Of course, the arrangement was only temporary. When seven days had gone and passed, his crew had ambushed him outside of the infirmary. He still remembers the guilt painted across their faces, the way Penguin’s hat was clutched in shaking hands instead of on his head. Law wonders, looking back, if watching the Straw-Hats operate from behind the curtain had influenced their decision—if they had seen the incomprehensible weapon that is the Straw-Hats, all individually powerful components somehow united into one dominant, iron-willed force, and felt such a dynamic was stronger than the one they knew. If they had felt weak.
If Law had asked them then, would things be different? Would they still be traveling together, collecting scattered pieces of the life they’d worked so hard to build? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to think about it. In the end, they had decided to mirror what the Straw-Hats had done two years ago, and take a period to grow stronger on their own. They would meet again on Winner Island in two years, and Penguin and Shachi would have procured a new submarine. As much as Law wishes he could be the one to do so, he understands his current position. Fate had willed Law to the Thousand Sunny.
Law throws back the last of his coffee and sets out toward the library. Unfortunately, this means he must pass by the dining hall, so he peeks his head around its doorframe to make sure the crew is sufficiently distracted before speed-walking across the opening. Robin catches him mid-step—because nothing goes unnoticed on this damn ship—and she makes no effort to conceal her amusement, even lowering her spoon mid-bite to gracefully cover her mouth as she giggles. It’s a quiet sound—one that, back on Punk Hazard, he’d had trouble reconciling with the character he’d expected of her. He’d expected a kindred spirit, emotions diluted by the blood on her hands, a heart left cold and calculating; but he supposes only the Straw-Hats could have unshackled such girlish mannerisms in someone once chained by the ghosts of her childhood. Quite regularly, the Demon Child Nico Robin giggles.
“How silly!” she lilts. “Traffy, would you care to join us for breakfast? Sanji has covered a plate for you.”
Law groans, but takes a seat at the table anyway. As promised, Sanji places a covered plate in front of him. When he first arrived, Law had stressed that he was only gluten-intolerant, and that he didn’t care about cross-contamination; Sanji had the gall to look offended, saying, “Just because you don’t care what happens to your body doesn’t mean we can’t. It’s my job as a chef to accommodate you, and I’m gonna do it right. That means no shortcuts." So every meal-time, Law gets a special dish prepared with no shortcuts, because Sanji cares. They all do, all of the Straw-hats; they all care so much.
He doesn’t understand how they do it. How they feel so openly, unafraid to announce when something is important to them. How ready they are to challenge monsters and topple governments for the sake of a friend. How they would sooner give up their lives than abandon their ideals. Hell, he watched Luffy wreak havoc in Wano and shamelessly abandon months of elaborate planning over a bowl of rice. Independently, they’re strong-willed and selfish over all the right things, and because they’re also stubborn and selfish about each other, their dynamic works fucking miracles. Because caring to an irrational degree is simply who they are.
⭘⭘⭘
Law spends the majority of his first weeks on the Sunny madly, unrelentingly alone. This is mostly of his own accord; of his accursed reflex to bite the hand that feeds him, to snap and snarl like a wounded animal. He finds it all too easy to slip into the old habits that were etched into his bones as he grew—warped, ingrown scars that left him settled just a little bit wrong, a little bit less stable than he should be—that he could never break from without breaking a fundamental part of himself. Habits that exist as much in memory and identity as they do action. He’d fractured them open again, and there is comfort in the familiarity of leaning on broken bones, for a little while.
He isn’t sure what he hopes to accomplish by doing so, or if he’s truly in control of his behavior at all, and this frightens him more than he is willing to admit. The Straw-Hats are instinctively accommodating, and their frustratingly prodigious emotional intelligence is the only reason no limbs are lost. Sanji learns to place his coffee far enough that they both can reach the cup, yet neither can reach each other, because Law startles when he gets too close. Robin places books under his bunk when the men’s dorm is empty, because she knows Law is in no mood for conversation, or anyone telling him what to do, even in the form of kind-hearted reading recommendations. Even Zoro jumps into a spar, no questions asked, when Law spontaneously draws Kikoku in a rage-driven outburst and swings directly at his neck. It would be considered attempted murder on anyone else, but Zoro is too damn strong, and the most Law can do is burn in his frustration until it darkens the blade of his cursed sword.
Law knows not how to live, beyond how to burn. He burns in his anger, his sadness, spite and satisfaction, until the flames lick over his skin and indiscriminately unto that which is near. For so long he’d been fueled by revenge, the opponent ahead of him; planning meticulously to stoke the fire. None of this remains.
He is a creature of embers, with nothing left to burn but himself, so he hides away.
The Thousand Sunny’s library is extraordinary, its floor-to-ceiling shelves a myriad of colored spines, so diverse and so extensive in its collection that the books overflow onto the furniture and floor. The range of literature—from medical textbooks and fine-print classic novels, to wire-bound recipes and hardcover children’s picture books—has an illusion of organization, in the sense that each Straw-Hat uses a system of their choice, which overlap and intertwine until there’s hardly any systemization left at all. On particularly uneventful days at sea, Luffy and Usopp stack books into castles and pretend to be at war with each other, dramatically peering over the towers to throw cannonballs made of crumpled notebook paper. The following morning, random sections of the library are always color-coded, making clear exactly which books had been borrowed for battle.
There are small strips of paper sticking out between pages, or slipped under the spines, and Law spends many afternoons drifting between the shelves to read them. He soaks in the eccentricities of the handwritings and imagines the transfer of mannerisms from person to paper, traces his eyes along the letters and imagines the cells shed and left behind in the ink.
More of the time, though, he merely sits on the tile floor and stares, wondering how the wooden shelves before him project an image so vividly human, reading the scratches and scuffs that say here there is life and love.
It feels foreign.
When Law was still young, before the bounties and the bodies and the amber lead, his family had a membership to Flevance’s medical museum. He would tug his parents through the exhibits, enamored in the way that only children can be, only looking forward as he strung them along by their hands. He doesn’t remember exactly what age he’d been—because everything from before seems to exist in sand, slipping over itself and through his grasping fingers—but he had gotten separated, once. Law remembers the room he’d stayed in, waiting, testing the extent of his ordinarily juvenile patience (because you’re supposed to stay where you are, when you get lost, when you have people to come look for you).
It had been a branch of the anatomy and pathology section, just one turn from their usual path, where the museum was featuring a temporary exhibit on the brain. At the center of the room stood a cylindrical display case. When his parents had found him, Law was standing by this case, wide-eyed in reverence—staring through the glass only a few centimeters taller than he was at the time. The contents housed inside were right at his eye-level, and maybe this was what drew him in. Perhaps it was the shared height that demanded his attention, that made the following perfectly clear; the fully preserved brain and its dangling spinal cord propped before him had once stood in flesh and bone, just as he. There used to be life there, standing in that case, just as Law was standing then.
There was life there, on the other side of that glass, and it was not his. He feels this in the shelves of the Thousand Sunny library.
Nevertheless, time carries Law forward when he cannot. He curses the human body's stubborn refusal to fully self-destruct, and all the failsafes coded into his genes that snap him back to attention when he brushes against death.
He floats through the days, and doesn’t notice when they turn into weeks. He drags his fingers just a little too long across the paperbacks, watching detachedly as pearls of red blood darken into stained bronze fingerprints between words he won’t remember, the only proof that he exists as more than the amalgamation of guilt and grief he feels churning through his insides. His very being feels artificial, and he faces this with an impulsively suicidal indifference; fleeting behaviors sparked by the nascent desire to cut open his abdomen and spill his organs on the table, if only to prove they weren’t synthetic.
He dares his stomach to hunger, testing the limits of his apathy, and he chokes on rice and cold coffee when the pains become too distracting. This abates them to a dull ache, at most, before acid burns at his throat and resentment threatens to spill over.
Law is prodding at an open callus on his palm when he hears the door open. He doesn’t bother to turn around, and they make no effort to acknowledge him either, only setting a cup of coffee on the floor near Law’s thigh and quietly strolling over to the shelves. He recognizes Nami by the click of her heels.
“They’re playing four-square on the deck,” she says, “in case you want to join.” Her voice is uncharacteristically quiet, as though she speaks not for her words to reach Law, but simply to place them in the air. It doesn’t pierce his ears like he expects it to, in the way nearly all sounds have since he woke in their infirmary weeks ago. Her tone is soft, hardly above a whisper. She flips open one of her journals as she takes her time between thoughts. “The weather is beautiful. It's not too hot or too cold, so if you want, you could just watch. Bet on Robin for me, since I’ve been banned from the betting pool.
“Did you know she cheats with her devil fruit? All the time. Usopp made the squares bigger to help even the playing field, but she and Luffy still win ninety percent of the games. It's easy to bet on, so I can’t complain.
“Oh, and I’d meant to tell you; you can sit under the mikan trees if the crew is too much. I trust you enough, and Bellemere would approve. She used to walk me and Nojiko through the rows of trees back at my home island, and it hits me—those memories—every time I smell tangerines and cigarettes. Sometimes, when I’m by the trees and Sanji walks by, it’s like Bellemere’s sitting there next to me. But don’t tell Sanji I said that, because it would go straight to his head and I will make your life just as miserable as he would make mine.”
She would absolutely make good on that promise, Law knows, but her tone has grown far too reminiscent for the threat to sound anything but jest. He hopes that Nami recognizes his silence as an invitation to keep speaking—an olive branch, of sorts—and she does. She closes a journal with one hand and reaches for another.
“Bellemere wasn’t my biological mother. I gave her a lot of shit for that, actually, that she didn’t deserve. I was young, and so angry at the world, and she simply had the misfortune of being close enough to hurt. Still, no matter how much I cursed at the people around me, the distance didn’t save me. It just made me alone. I wish I knew that while she was still around.
“She took me in to protect me from pirates, and then she died protecting me from pirates. Arlong shot her through the forehead.”
Law tries not to react. He feels like he’s been found out, somehow. As though she’d stolen from his thoughts while he wasn’t paying attention. Still, she can’t have known. There’s no way she would’ve known, but his stomach drops reflexively. He can’t help it—he is intimately familiar with this story. This is his story.
Nami twirls a pencil in her hand, still flipping through the journal as her words hang in the air, and her quiet voice doesn’t waver even once. If anything, she looks at peace. He would envy her, but the room is spinning and the floor is falling, and he can’t focus on much more than swallowing down the bile at the back of his throat.
There’s a cruelty to being known. One must ask another, are you bruised where I am? When I push here, do you hurt like I do?
Nami takes a slow, measured breath, as though the right words were hidden in the depths of her lungs; “Even after everything, I know she would still approve of me being a pirate. Being here on Luffy’s crew taught me that I could grow out of my anger—that it’s okay to move on and build around it, and that it's not a betrayal to do so. It doesn’t have to be a part of everything or follow me everywhere to still mean something. And for the first time I can remember, I’m not angry anymore, and I’m not alone. I know that’s all she would have wanted.”
Nami taps her pencil against the notebook. She hasn’t written anything. Law doesn't think she’s going to. “Do you want any tangerines?” She asks, like the room isn’t tilted forty-five degrees to the left and the air isn’t thinning.
“We could sneak them back here. It’s really beautiful outside today. I know the last few days were awful, but it's clear now. The storms have passed,” she says.
The storms have passed.
The storms have passed, she’d said. The storms have passed. The storms have passed.
It’s so simple. It’s a slap in the face, and it stings like everything he’s ever known and nothing he’s ever experienced. It stings like it means something. The phrase unlocks his chest like a key, and he’s tumbling out, more of himself than he knows how to hold, because—
Law is six years old, and everything is white. Everything is too bright, and everything is the streets of Flevance and his sister’s smile.
He’s burning. The streets are burning and the bodies are so cold, she’s so cold, Law is so, so cold.
Law is wired, raging, standing before a puppeteer with bombs around his neck and ghosts on his shoulders. The ghosts are screaming, screeching at his ears, clawing at his eyes until everything he sees is stained with blood.
The blood is in the snow, and it's freezing at his feet, and everything hurts and he is so, so scared, and the crunch, crunch, crunch of his boots are muffled by the sounds of a child’s cry. He is crying.
He is falling. There are led bullets in his shoulder, thrown back against the warm bricks of sun-kissed Dressrosa streets. Someone is yelling, and Law thinks it's him. Or maybe it's Bepo, begging him to live, to trust that all is not yet lost. He isn’t sure; it's hard to hear over the crashing waves.
He gasps, just slightly—a quick and desperate sound that barely echoes through the library—like he’s forgotten how to breathe and it catches in his throat. He raises his coffee to his lips without thinking, and the hot liquid burns his tongue. He jolts reflexively, frowning at the drops that spill over his fingers and onto his jeans; because he feels it, how it burns, how it stings his skin and sears down his esophagus. He feels.
He is suddenly, startlingly aware that there is breath in his lungs, and a steady thrum of a heart beating in his chest and humming in his ears. There are hands around the coffee mug and they are his hands—moving, feeling, alive—they’re his, because Law is alive. It’s jarring, and it's terrifying, and it's crashing back into alignment as he is thrown to the front of himself, meeting his eyes and ears.
Law is. His coffee burns his tongue.
From her place across the room, Nami stares at him expectantly. Her expression is soft as she waits, studying him patiently as though she’s looking for something in particular. He’s not sure what exactly she’s looking for, but he nods his head anyway. She smiles gently, then, and Law thinks she understands.
The storms have passed.