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Chapter Text

The human skeleton was said to have over two hundred bones in it and each one within eleven-year-old (and a half) Trafalgar Law’s body was screaming with pain.

Law could expect to feel a little bit of pain even on a good day, and this was not a good day. Law’s participation ultimately was of no consequence. The machinations of the Donquixote Family ran apace. The latest of its raids had unfolded mostly without incident, though Law had witnessed it under the looming reminder (tasting like iron in his mouth, burning in his stomach) that he had done nothing to contribute to that victory.

He waited for the return of the crew from the safety of the Numancia Flamingo. Doflamingo was cutting a swath of destruction across the North Blue as he crept ever closer to the Grand Line, ransacking towns, shaking the ones that capitulated early of their protection money and the ones that defied him of their lives. Law was the hanger-on clinging to his underbelly.

While Law mostly remained alive and functional, the symptoms of his White Lead syndrome would strike suddenly and without warning, and when that happened, he was useless for the rest of the day. It had been a year and a half since he had joined the Donquixote Family. There were, according to his calculations, two and a half years of his projected lifespan left. His body had changed since then.

Law ate less and sometimes whatever he did manage to force down, his body inevitably rejected, ejected from his body either as puke or blood or urine he had to squeeze out of himself. The Family plied him with steroids to alleviate the temporary symptoms, propping up his weak scarecrow body with braces and a cane he did not always need, but these measures only made what was supposed to be his final few years more bearable.

Doctors like his father called that palliative care, but his dad didn’t like talking about the patients he couldn’t save.

Especially if they were his children.

A baby-pink halation was draped like a veil over the smoldering village when the crew marched in a procession to the ship, hauling the day’s plunder. Law felt Doflamingo's footsteps clomping heavily on the boardwalk like he was clambering up his bones and without thinking, Law withdrew from the porthole, his body hurting a little more, and pulled his hat over his eyes as he boiled in a blind and directionless hatred he inevitably turned inward.

Greeting Doflamingo as soon as he boarded the ship would be beneficial. He could tell him about his studies, which he didn't do because he was having trouble concentrating and therefore had learned nothing of import, or how his swordplay was improving, which he also couldn't do because Diamante had dismissed him for the day yesterday because the pain was too bad for him to hold a sword. He didn’t. He couldn’t.

He did not leave the cargo room. Not even as the celebration began, as was the Doflamingo Family's custom after each conquest, and their bacchanalian uproar raged into nightfall, the sun creeping lower and lower until the horizon dripped with blood. Law was dimly aware that every so often he was visited by a cabin boy or gunner in search of spirits, but they all gave him a wide berth, often stumbling over themselves to flee the room when their rewards were securely in hand. He wasn’t sure if he was still hurting or not. It was a feeling he had left behind in his body. His sights grew darker until he discerned a presence standing before him-

“Hey, kid. The young master’s looking for you.”

Law grabbed his cane and pulled it close to him. Senor Pink only ever addressed him like a worker stationed in a neighboring cubicle, perpetually the image of professional indifference.

Even at eleven (and a half) years old, Law was concerned with appearances. He quelled the maddened beating of his heart and (unconvincingly) feigned detachment as he transparently fished for any information as to Doflamingo’s temperament. The only way he could have been more obvious was if he swooned at Senor Pink’s feet, groveling and pleading.

“What’d he want?” Law posed that question like the beginning of an interrogation – he tried to sound annoyed, but his tone was fluctuating far too much for him to convincingly execute the charade. “Is he- is he alright? What happened? Tell me n-”

To Law's profound irritation, Senor Pink refused to rise to his anxious jabbering. He fished a cigarette and a pink lighter out of his suit pocket. “He didn’t tell me,” Senor Pink shrugged, “Just to get there and make it quick. Don’t keep him waiting. He’s in his quarters.”

Law left before he could truly embarrass himself in Senor Pink’s presence. Even with the cane to support his weight, he creaked and clattered during each step, dragging out a journey that would have been trivial for most people into a long insult. His heart was clenching and it clenched more as he approached – he told himself that it was White lead syndrome screwing up his body and nothing else.

He shambled through the passages of the Numancia Flamingo to its gilded heart. Doflamingo intermingled freely with the Executives, but to his subordinates he cultivated an unimpeachable mystique. They were nowhere to be seen in this part of the ship. This was forbidden territory. Not even the Executives were allowed here after nightfall without permission. Not unless they had received an invitation, as Law had.

Ahead of him he could see the open door yawning into the velveteen recesses of Doflamingo's inner sanctum, and framed by that opening were two silhouettes, one small and delicate, the other engulfing it. Two people locked in discussion, one a child, one a titan who was stooped at the knee to address her. Her face, cast in profile, was smiling and rapturous.

Law watched, outside his body, as Doflamingo’s hand drifted through the air and then came to roost on Baby 5’s shoulder and he was in his body again and he was he was he was--

Law flung himself into a nearby alcove, flattening himself against the wall, and tried to think through the rapid and violent palpitations hammering in his ears that drowned out their faraway conversation. He was in his body, he was out of his body, he was somehow everywhere at once.

Eventually Doflamingo departed, not acknowledging Law where he was crumpled like a dead cockroach with the wine and bread, his long shadow stretching far behind him. Law remained frozen until he saw Baby 5’s glowing face appear in the doorway, and he saw how happy she was, how bright her smile was, and he wanted to vomit.

He contemplated stabbing her like he had stabbed the Corazon. Her back was an inviting target. It was such a vibrant image in his head, but he didn’t. Law had other ways to make her bleed.

“Do you think you’re special?” His tone alone would have been enough to reduce her to tears and though he could already see her heart breaking, he pushed on, scenting blood in the water and ravenous for more. “You’re not. You’re useless,” Law snarled, “And when he realizes that he’ll throw you away like trash.”

She was a frog opened on his table and he was inside her, poking and prodding at her glittering guts. He knew how much she hated that word and now it had become a blade in his hand. She thought she could hide her secrets. She thought she was stronger than him. Better than him. Able to take so much more because she wasn’t born in a poisoned city.

Tears streamed from Baby 5’s eyes and they were dribbling down her cheeks and spewing from her reddening nose. Even with Law barely standing, she withered under his presence. As his cruel words wreaked their intended purpose in vivid detail, he expected the realization of his handiwork to bring him some relief; instead, it made him angrier. SHE THINKS SHE’S HAPPY? a voice screamed in his head, not at all resembling his own, SHE DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING.

(She didn’t know anything. He didn’t know anything. They were only children.)

Law was blind with his rage, red like blood in the snow, blood on white sheets, blood in a white city’s white streets. His mouth couldn’t form words anymore, it ran overfull with iron. He was torn between screaming at her more or throwing up.

Instead, he rounded on his heel and lurched out of the room.

Baby 5, technically, had a higher body count than Law. She was a quick study, followed instructions, had Devil Fruit powers that Law could begrudgingly admit were impressive (read: cool), and most importantly she was healthy and unhindered by Law’s flare-ups. Technically speaking, if there was anyone that deserved Doflamingo’s undivided attention and tutelage, it was her.

But Baby 5 didn’t have what Doflamingo wanted. The world had hurt her and she crawled on her hands and knees, desperate to lap up more. Loyalty and obedience were perhaps admirable qualities for an attack dog, but not the deputy of a criminal enterprise.

The Donquixote Family was dictated by a covenant to which every pirate was bound: you did not raise a hand against family. That did not mean they didn't have a hierarchy.

And that did not mean that they didn't devise other ways to hurt each other for frivolous reasons.

Law recalled a time where Baby 5 was being teased by the latest recruits, flash-in-the-pan newcomers with momentary promise who survived the initiation only to fizzle out not long after. Amid a backbiting, vicious attendance of criminals and scoundrels, the people at the bottom of the pecking order had to find entertainment however they could. So, somehow, the reprobates figured out Baby 5's trigger word.

Hey, hey girlie. Could you do me a favor? I'm really bored. I'm really really really bored. Could you just do me a favor? Pretty please. I need it. I neeeeed it.

If Law hadn't been there to wrestle the gun from her hand, Baby 5 would have died there, on the spot, with a smile on her face.

Baby 5 was ever the sacrificial lamb, casting herself onto an altar for slaughter and slitting her own stomach.

They were not unalike.

“DOFLAMINGO,” Law shrieked, and immediately he was staggered by another wave of pain that drove him to his knees. He buckled, knees striking the ground, and the reverberations from that impact rattled his entire body.

He struggled to collect himself, the world spinning on its axis, and he loathed his body, he loathed how restrictive it was and how all the strength easily left it, he can’t withstand what Doflamingo does (to him), that’s why Doflamingo is—

Somehow Law summoned the strength to raggedly scream again – “DOFLAMINGO!” – and what was envisioned as a primal screech that tore through his subconscious was actualized only as an anticlimactic and pitiful croak. That was all the effort he could scrounge up.

Law did not notice the weight of Doflamingo's gargantuan shadow as it fell over him. As he wheezed and struggled to maintain a firm grip on his cane, he never expected for his call to be answered. Doflamingo’s voice, rumbling from high above, was cold, distant, contemptuous. “Pull yourself together, Law.”

Law managed to unclench his jaw just enough to spit it out: “Why were you with her? What—what did you say to Baby?” His hand was shaking despite his best efforts to keep it still, rattling his cane back and forth, but he rose to his feet with a blistering fury in his eyes.

Doflamingo cocked back his head, leering. “What business is it of yours if I talk to someone from my family?”

"Don't bullshit me!" Law shouted. He was being belligerent, he knew this, and he knew that though Doflamingo was endeared by his temper - at times encouraging it, stoking the embers of his bottomless animosity - he did not tolerate blatant disrespect. That fact was not enough to keep Law from digging his own grave and whacking Doflamingo over the head with the shovel. “Just TELL ME! What were you doing with her?! Why-”

He heard the twanging of violin strings; a prickling in the air and on his skin, goosebumps bristling and the hairs on his body flickering. Doflamingo's face was impassive as Law's own crumpled with the realization that he had deeply fucked up.

Doflamingo flourished his wrist. The epidermal layer of Law's flesh erupted with pinpricks of pain like acid acupuncture, some lancing deep to the bone. Dozens of threads had pierced his body and stitched themselves to his cells and they were inexorably pulling taut, wrenching him in different directions while he was still anchored by an unseen force.

A brief excursion to Doflamingo's quarters was enough to topple Law to his knees. Now his arms and his legs were being manipulated, heedless of the objections of his aching bones, even as his body resisted the pull out of mindless self-preservation. He was drawn to the tips of his toes from the wrists up, and then he was lifted off of the ground so his feet were dangling under him. Law did not weigh much but it still hurt and before he could stop himself, he screamed in pain. His fingers clenched and convulsed spasmodically, spittle tasting like blood foamed from between his teeth, and when his bulging eyes pointed towards wrists that he expected to be gushing with blood, he saw nothing but his hands crossed in the air, not a cut in sight.

"Watch" - Doflamingo slithered closer, movements methodical and deliberate instead of his usual, swaggering gait; he could close the distance stretched between them with a single step, but he didn't - "your" - his face was hovering mere inches from Law's, lipless smile brimming wide in a scimitar's curve - "mouth."

And then, as if scaring him shitless and hurting him wasn't enough, before Law could brace himself, Doflamingo swiped his thumb and forefinger. There was a scratching pain in his esophagus, the feeling of delicate tissue being pulled and needled, and then suddenly Law registered that not air nor sound nor, most crucially, breath, was passing through his windpipe. It had all been snuffed out. It did not matter if he tried to suck through his nose or his mouth; they both led to the same source and that was sealed shut, stitched tight and crowned with a neat little bow.

- Law thought of how he dissected a frog in class. He'd peeled its chest cavity, prodded at the tiny pouch-like lungs where they were nestled behind the voluminous liver -

"I let you get away with a lot, Law, because I know what it's like to be you. I know you better than you know yourself." Doflamingo mused sedately, meandering, as casually as if he was discussing the day's events over the dinner table, as if Law was the steak laid out on his plate and he was carving him into little quarters.

Law's voice had been stolen along with his breath and although he was sorrier than he had been at any point in his life he couldn't apologize just like he couldn't breathe. Law could feel his lungs beating against his rib cage and air spinning through his mouth and nose and hitting something that felt like a tiny pinched knot that would not loosen no matter how vigorously he gasped or flailed; accomplishing nothing but squandering the last remnants of valuable and precious oxygen that still lingered in his body.

"But don't push me. And don't ever disrespect me." Throughout it all, Doflamingo seemed calm. Perfectly calm. Calm while the edges of Law's vision darkened, as the faraway resonance of Doflamingo's voice crackled and echoed. "Just because you're our little brother doesn't mean I won't spank you like a misbehaving brat."

The human body could only survive without three minutes of oxygen, give or take, and Law likely had less than that. Doflamingo had wasted a minute of that time pontificating to his captive audience, indulging in the creation of each syllable. Law thought of the Heimlich maneuver, tracheostomies, all useless information that did not avail him. Drifting outside of his body like a phantom, he could imagine the process of lacerating his throat and wedging a tube in the incision. A silly little idea. Strange what the brain concocts when it is starved of ideas. His body was so numb and tingly, his thoughts felt like they were bouncing around in his skull.

"Nod if you understand," Doflamingo's voice was so distant it may as well have been a ripple in the air.

Law didn't recall moving, he felt displaced from his body and disconnected from his brain, but he must have given Doflamingo what he wanted like he always gave him what he wanted because the threads stitching together his esophagus dissipated, the abused tissue snapping into its rightful shape. Oxygen and thought alike were swept into his body as though through a vacuum and he was rendered apoplectic with agony, shoved back into his tangible form as though it was an ill-fitting costume and all his limbs were broken.

Doflamingo allowed Law a fleeting intermission to compose himself. It was not nearly long enough, because when he issued his next command, Law was still dizzy and insensate. Now that he was back inside his body he felt all of it, the burning in his throat, the wetness of tears clinging to his face and his nose, the wobbly frissons of pain emanating from the entirety of his skeleton. Doflamingo apparently grew bored of watching him cough and flail around in his trappings because he decided he had been afforded enough time.

“Now apologize," Doflamingo ordered him, languid and laconic. "And explain yourself."

Law wheezed. His voice was raspy, guttural, and his throat sparked each time he tried to carry some sort of sound through it. "I, I thought-" He was drawing blanks, shuddering uncontrollably. His memories were returning to him, refilling the space in his brain; they cramped strangely in his head. "Baby 5-"

"Yes?" The patronizing lilt in Doflamingo's voice did little to inspire him.

"I thought-- I, I was being -- I was-! I, I'm- childish. And stupid."

"I asked for reasons. Not for excuses." Doflamingo flicked his index finger, a string warbling in the air. Nothing happened but nothing needed to happen for Law to turn to jelly with terror.

The words flowed, babbling, frantic, "I, I, I thought you were mad at me." It sounded so ridiculous when he said it out loud. "I thought- I thought-" He fought through the hitching of his chest and his breath. Being throttled had whittled down the last sliver of his dignity; all he could think about was how close he was to suffocating, and with that reminder lurking in the back of his head, bearing down on him, the tears and the words were clawed from him and they surged, arterial. "I thought- you wanted her to take my place. That you didn't need me anymore."

“Oh.” Doflamingo softened. After shriveling under the drought of his disapproval, his comfort was like an elixir. “My sweet little boy.”

Doflamingo snapped his fingers. The network of threads laced throughout the air were severed and like that, Law was dropped to the floor, the strings withdrawing into Doflamingo's hand with an audible vwip. Law clattered like a broken marionette when he hit the ground, but in the next moment, Doflamingo was scooping him off the floor and helping him back on his feet as he groped for his cane. He was barely capable of standing but compensated by slumping against his cane; thankfully Doflamingo determined that his current position, on his knees in supplication, was suitable for the occasion.

Law noticed that Doflamingo was hunched to his level, still towering over him by a substantial amount but no longer drowning Law in his shadow. “She’ll never replace you. You’re going to go on to do great things, Law.”

Logically, Law knew that this wasn’t true. He was going to die in a year or two. He had thought he accepted this fact, but somehow, Doflamingo had a talent of picking out the microscopic, loose-hanging edges of whatever illusion was keeping him together and unraveling it. Trafalgar D. Water Law, who loathed every tear that rolled down his face, sobbed and squealed as liquid relief hemorrhaged from his battered throat and bloodshot eyes and stuffed nose. The boy who had resigned himself to an inevitable early demise was so viscerally frightened by the thought of being strangled to death that he was brought to tears, and the reason for that was this: the fundamental difference between wearing grenades like a garland and having the life squeezed out of you was that the death you chose was less painful.

“I - I,” Law spit out between his heaving, hysterical sobs, hating himself for being so childish, hating himself for crying. “Thought-- That you’d - didn't- want me anymore.”

“I’ll always want you, my little boy,” said Doflamingo.

Doflamingo waited for Law’s hysterics to subside, and for the feeling of embarrassment to really sink in before he voiced his next concern. “But I can’t have you upsetting Baby 5 like that,” he said in a low, disapproving tone. “She’s family.”

You’re my family, Law thought bitterly. I had a little sister. They burned her to death. They shot her. They set the building on fire and let her choke to death in a closet because I told her to wait there for me.

In spite of all his complaints, Law knew that Doflamingo’s continued magnanimity was contingent on his next answer. He nodded. Doflamingo decreed that this was insufficient. “I need to hear you say it,” he prompted.

“Baby 5 is my family,” Law grumbled, disdain oozing through his recitation, swollen eyes trained on the middle distance. Despite the palpable displeasure emanating from his ward, Doflamingo didn't press him again.

“And we don’t hurt our family. Family takes care of each other.”

Law felt a twinge at the edge of his mouth and a strange buzzing in his head, not unlike the fuzziness that would accompany the surge of his blood pressure or an oncoming seizure. A memory of a family crystallized in his head. Years from now he would forget what made them a family but at this moment in time, his heart shrank at the recollection. How they died was excruciating enough, but it was pain that could be turned into hatred and then power. When he remembered their kindness, that couldn't be anything but sadness. Sadness was useless.

“Family takes care of each other,” Law echoed.

“Do you want me to show you?”

In reality, Law didn’t want Doflamingo to show him. He didn’t. He wanted to sit there, with Doflamingo at his side and the balance of his fragile half-life restored, to continue living out the remainder of his life in the understanding that he was irreplaceable in some way.

But he knew that Doflamingo’s moods were capricious.

Like how he knew that Doflamingo did not accept him in the family because he wanted a son.

Like how he knew that he had been so debilitated with pain he couldn’t hold a sword, which meant he couldn’t participate in the day’s battle, which meant he hadn’t made himself useful.

Like how he had already made Doflamingo very, very angry, and an apology was not nearly enough to soothe his temper.

“Yeah,” Law said, and what happened then was something that had happened a hundred times before.

“You’re still so small,” Doflaming said, and the meaning was clear: I have run out of ideas of what to do with your body as it is now and I am getting bored.

It was just a backhanded little reminder, but it was a gash that cut too deep, and one that seethed with hidden insinuation. I want to fuck you without worrying about cracking you in half. I can only fit two fingers inside of you at most and that’s only on a good day.

In his bed, surrounded by his favorite extravagances, Doflamingo resembled a dragon coiled around his hoard. Even if Law was an adult, Doflamingo nonetheless would have been a behemoth beside him. But in the present day, Law was eleven and a half years old and looking somehow much younger than he already was. His skin maintained a cadaverous pallor but for the bruises that bloomed rotten apple-green on his thighs, pulpy crimson-plum on his hip, and yellow on his back; phantoms of yesterday’s touches, most of which he could not trace to a particular memory. Paler were the white mottled stains that seemed to widen by the day. The residuum of Doflamingo's latest butchery would most likely not manifest on his surface, but Law imagined a lightning bolt stitch of gangrene-black inside his throat.

The deteriorating state of his vessel just reminded him of his impermanence. He knew that the Executives thought that he was superfluous, that Doflamingo was keeping him around as a pet. He was no use as a soldier, even with all his reckless rage, and no good as something to empty anger and pleasure into.

Law fought back tears and squared his jaw, tasting steel in the back of his mouth. He transmuted that despair into fury as he always did, his body the crucible. His teeth throbbed in his skull when he clenched them. “If I get the Devil Fruit, I’ll get better. And stronger." It was a plea more than it was a pledge, placating Doflamingo with a promise he did not actually believe.

Doflamingo’s eyes were on the sky outside the porthole. Jagged peaks of protruding rebar and buckling buildings gouged into the sky like knives in a pig’s belly. “What if you don’t?” Doflamingo mused aloud.

Law felt something cold take root inside of him. “What?”

“Say we find the Op-Op Fruit and I give it to you, but you’re still the same. What happens next?”

Logically, Law knew that this was a possibility, and not only that, but the likeliest outcome. Whether or not the Op-Op Fruit would cure his sickness was pure conjecture. He knew that he was picking the crumbs of borrowed time off the floor. What unsettled him was that this was the first time that he had heard Doflamingo entertain that possibility aloud, even though the conditions of his recruitment had come with an If in the fine print. If you live long enough, if you don’t prove to be a humongous waste of time.

Law sounded as cavalier as he always did when he considered his mortality. “I die, I guess.”

Doflamingo let the silence linger. Law would have left to clean himself up, because his thighs felt sticky and he felt in desperate need of a bath, but he didn’t have the strength to rise to his feet and his cane was too far away. He endured Doflamingo’s next line of questioning.

“You die. But before that?” Doflamingo questioned him, expectant.

“I do what you want." It was the only thing that Law could possibly do.

“Yes. And Law, would you do anything for me?”

After having brought Doflamingo to climax, the most obvious answer would have been, Haven’t I already? But Law knew that wasn’t the right answer. “Yeah.”

He didn’t see Doflamingo’s face, but he knew that he was smiling again.

“Even if it meant giving your life for mine?”

“My life’s not worth anything,” Law's response was easy, desultory, like he was reading from an old script. “I’m gonna die anyway.”

Law felt the bed shifting beneath him, movement behind him, the weight of a titanic hand resting on the back of his neck and moving to engulf his throat. Doflamingo’s fingers were tracing the mottled streak, the one that snaked from Law’s left eye down the column of his throat. The skin there felt dead, but Doflamingo’s fingers prickled, index and pinkie crooked, thumb caressing the leaden lump of his Adam’s apple, and even if his touch wasn't meant to hurt, Law felt the insides of his bruised esophagus bristle with the memory of strings and needles and stifled breath and swallowed apologies, a wild and animal breed of panic swelling inside of him.

Doflamingo’s voice was a satisfied purr. Law remembered hearing his mother’s cat making that same noise after she’d killed something.

“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” Doflamingo whispered into his ear.

When Law was finally allowed to return to the comfort of his bed (a shitty hammock in the corner of the cargo room), the sky outside the porthole had deepened to inky indigo. Baby 5’s back was to him, Buffalo cushioning her head and her body like a St. Bernard at her side. She had her own hammock but often found herself in Buffalo's. As Law gingerly climbed into his hammock, moving delicately, he noticed movement and big blue eyes peering at him.

“Where were you?” demanded Baby 5 – quietly, but not really a whisper; Buffalo was snoring at such a volume that it really didn’t matter how loudly she spoke.

“Studying,” Law said, a little more tactfully than the None of your business that he usually had primed for such invasive inquiries, especially if they came from Baby. Given how upset she was before, he didn’t think she'd want to talk to him for at least another day. It was one of her most infuriating traits. She'd weather all manner of derision and torment from everyone around her and then limp back like it'd never happened.

“At NIGHT? It’s almost morning.” Baby 5 blinked, replaying Law's voice in her head, and then cringed in sympathy. "You sound really bad."

“YOU should be sleeping,” Law bit back, deflecting her curiosity with a venomous tone guaranteed to make her regret asking. “If you stayed up late because of me, it’s your own fault.”

Baby 5’s lower lip quivered. “I didn’t…” she hissed, rubbing the tears that were beading on her cheek with the back of her hand. “I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t because of you.”

“You’re really pathetic sometimes." Law wasn't even trying to upset her. It was just something he felt like saying, a thought that popped into his brain.

Baby 5 blinked. Tears had sprung in her eyes faster than she could wipe away and they were glittering in the moonlight. “Why?” she whimpered, wounded. Her grip tightened on Buffalo’s arm like she was wringing comfort out of a stuffed doll.

“You’re so nice to someone that hates you.”

Baby 5 pulled away like Law had tried to strike her, and this time she appeared more taken aback than hurt. Still very hurt. “Do you- do you really hate me?” She sounded like she couldn't believe it.

No, was the answer rotting at Law’s heart, I hate myself. But it was buried under a hundred different mutations of the same Yes – I hate you for getting beaten and spit on and still getting up and asking for more. I hate how emotional you are over nothing because you don’t know what real pain is like. I hate that you get hurt over and over again and you act like it’s the first time you were hurt every time. I hate you for being better than me at pirate stuff. I hate you for the fact you’ll live longer than me but I hate you because I hate everyone because everyone is living while my family my sister my friends aren’t and I hate you I hate you I hate you.

There was too much weight in the way of uncovering that No, too many bodies to move, but he never got the chance to even try and even if he tried he never would’ve been strong enough anyway; Baby 5 turned her face away before he could answer. Though she was sniffling and spoke as if she could burst into tears at the slightest nudge, there was a certain hardness calcifying behind her downturned fluttering mouth and tear-glassy baby doll eyes.

“I don’t care if you hate me,” she said, “I don’t care if anyone hates me. I just-” she squeezed her knees to her chest and breathed in hard and deep, and when she looked back at Law, the tears were gone. “I just don’t want to be useless.”

That time, it was Law who looked away, hurting all over but especially inside. It was Baby 5 who fell asleep holding tight to Buffalo while Law slept alone, in their presence but utterly alone. And it was only when he was certain that she had fallen asleep that he wept.

Law couldn’t remember a time, at least not recently, where he did not have nightmares. They were not simply nightmares. They were vivid ones, some so real he could taste and smell and hear them, some so all-consuming that they’d hold him in their throes even as his body kicked and screamed and grunted like he was possessed. Doflamingo had admitted to him that he was the same way – not unprovoked, of course; Law had dozed off while in bed with Doflamingo and had awoken screaming for his mother. Doflamingo stroked his back while Law hiccuped and sniffled.

Doflamingo asked him, like he actually cared, What do you dream about?

Law had answered, Stuff about Flevance. How my sister died.

What he did not tell Doflamingo was, yes, he dreamt of Flevance, there was so much that happened there he couldn't bear to describe it, he was still finding out just how much had been stolen from him. But that was not the only subject of his nightmares. He also dreamt of a crack forming in his body and growing wider and wider until it broke in half. He dreamt of the taste of flesh and even if he brushed his teeth over and over and over again until his gums were sore nothing could erase it.

He dreamt of unbearable pain and blood on white sheets. He dreamt of dead animals watching him with blank and judgmental eyes as he slit their stomachs, deconstructing their organs piece by piece just to feel what it was like to be the cock that was ripping him open. He dreamt of being suffocated under a giant’s body. He dreamt of screaming NO and no one listening.

Eleven and a half years and Law felt like little shards of his fragile eggshell body were flaking off with each day. Two and a half years left. If the world had a single throat with which to breathe, he would have cut it in two.

He wondered if, when he finally died, it would be with Doflamingo on top of him.

Chapter Text

Rosinante took Law in the midst of a navy siege and he left behind a note. In one world it said, I'm leaving to go cure Law's disease.

This note says the same, but had Rosinante known sooner, he would have lacerated the paper with furious pen strokes, plunging the tip into the parchment again and again as viciously as if he was wielding a knife. It would have said, I know what you’ve done. You won’t lay your fucking hands on him ever again.

But Rosinante doesn’t know. He doesn’t harbor the slightest inkling of a suspicion. Doflamingo was a bastard, a monster, a terrible wannabe god. But Rosinante did not make the necessary connections between Law’s prolonged absences and what Law endured in private. He never once believed that Doflamingo was that terrible. Terrible enough to murder their father and countless other people. Terrible enough to recruit children and subject them to torture if they annoyed him. Not terrible enough to rape a child.

So the note remains the same: I'm leaving to go cure Law's disease.

Doflamingo reads it. In one world, he doesn't know what the hell Rosinante is thinking, and is bewildered by the timing. He remembers his brother huddling on the pier, head down like he'd lost the strength to walk, and wonders if that's the reason why. He is otherwise calm and he suspects nothing.

In this world, he is still calm. He is paranoid at first, but the feeling passes. Law is loyal. Rosinante is his brother.

Rosinante took him to some doctors. Even though Law had screamed, caterwauled, and told him over and over again it wasn’t going to work. Hospital after hospital burned. There were doctors after doctors after doctors.

This doctor will know, one Donquixote brother said.

This will fit, the other had said.

Two lessons in futility.

“I’ve really gotta get you some better clothes,” Rosinante said one day, fingers worrying thoughtfully at the threadbare sleeve of Law’s old t-shirt.

The shirt was sopping wet and dangling off the end of a stick, suspending it over the campfire. As Rosinante rummaged through their few shared possessions, Law observed with deep apprehension as the precarious vortex of embers swirled in knuckle-biting proximity to the shirt's flammable edges. Given how prone Rosinante was to fucking up even the simplest of tasks, a momentary lapse in concentration was all it would take for one of Law's shirts to go up in flames.

Law was dressed in nothing but his underwear. He was wrapped in a blanket that Rosinante had provided, but even with this added modesty, he was very conscious of his state of undress.

Yet not once Rosinante had looked at him and not once had he touched him. Not even to strike him. He hadn’t raised a fist against him since he abducted Law.

I never should’ve thrown you out of the window. I was trying to scare you away from him, Rosinante had said. Law thought that was stupid.

As if that’s the worst thing that’s happened to me. Law rolled his eyes, and neither of them knew exactly what he’d meant.

Presently, Law was more concerned about his shirt because it was one of the few items he had to his name, and secondarily about Rosinante’s mantle catching aflame for the umpteenth time, because it would be extremely inconvenient for Rosinante to die in such a moronic way. Rosinante wasn’t a complete idiot because he remembered to bring Law’s cane, which he didn't always need, or medication, but their supply was dwindling as they zigzagged over the North Blue.

They could get more, since that kind of medicine could be obtained at any hospital – nothing guaranteed to cure White Lead Disease because of course not, but tablets to manage symptoms. ACE inhibitors for his blood pressure, diuretics to help him relieve himself which would then in theory purge the lead from his body, iron supplements for the anemia, calcium and vitamin D to promote bone health, and painkillers upon painkillers.

Law needed those pills because they (theoretically) kept his broken-down sloop of a body afloat and functional until it inevitably capsized, although new leaks were springing as soon as he plugged up one. He couldn’t get those pills if everyone thought that they could get sick just being around him. Entering cities by himself was out of the question. Thus Rosinante became captor and caretaker both.

“Don’t burn it. It’s the only one I have that really fits,” Law admonished him. His weight often fluctuated, and he was still shorter than most children his age. He had other clothes but the fabric weighed heavy, billowing around his stomach and sunken chest.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why we need to get you some new ones.”

Law scoffed. “What’s the point? I’ll probably be dead in less than a year.”

This was his answer to all of Rosinante's suggestions to improve his living conditions. There was no need to spend money on a dying man (boy) unless you wanted to furnish his casket.

Rosinante's answer to that answer was always the same: “No, you won’t,” uttered with the grit of someone who hadn't been rejected by at least ten hospitals before. “We’re gonna find a doctor that’ll fix you. There’s somebody out there.”

If Law really wanted to, he could have drawn out that argument for another ten minutes, but he didn't want to waste precious seconds pursuing a debate that would reap no benefits. Lurking behind his tongue was the obvious retort – what’ll make the next doctor different from all the other ones? – but next in the chamber was the more insidious, Oh, like Doflamingo’s doctor helped me? He decided on neither option, drawing his knees to his chest, frowning, and casting his gaze on and through Rosinante’s back.

Rosinante did not look at him. He was solely focused on drying Law’s shirt during a process that was taking far too long. The crackling of the flame crowded the silence that prevailed between them.

Law, who disliked almost everyone, most especially did not like doctors. He had once wanted to be one. That changed. The Doflamingo Family’s doctor – a willowy woman whose gas mask did little to hide her revolted grimace – was no different.

The supposedly transmissible nature of White Lead Disease, and the disgust it inspired in everyone around Law, provided enough ambiguity for him to shield himself from uncomfortable – incriminating - questions. Like all the other bygone incidents where Law had pushed Doflamingo too far, when Doflamingo sewed up Law's windpipe, he left no visible traces. The only remnant was a persistent hoarseness to his voice that required an explanation.

When Baby 5 asked about it, he said he had vomited until his throat felt raw, and if she noticed a contradiction she didn't point it out to his face. She, much like everyone else, didn't understand his illness well enough to debunk him.

On bad days he couldn’t pass anything, regardless of how hard he struggled. He could excuse bloody stool and strained muscles, but perhaps not superficial rectal tearing. None of these were necessarily wholesale fabrications but distortions of preexisting truths. Law would have been more than happy to convalesce in secret - that changed when he pulled down his underwear and saw the speckling of red, shocking against white fabric. It wasn't the first time and it usually went away on its own, but it never failed to unsettle him. He'd have to drink a lot more water. Eat less, avoid solid food. Bathing in warm water - well, that wasn't going to happen on a pirate ship.

He wasted more time than he wanted to admit stressing about it. All he could think about was the anemia returning, which he hadn't dealt with since his infusions and a new regimen of medication, but the image in his head was inescapable: him steadily dripping blood, leak after leak after leak in his body appearing until every piece of himself had drained out, his insides rupturing.

The doctor could barely look at Law when he was fully clothed; once the trousers were off and she was inspecting the aching space between his legs, she used every reason to glance at her clipboard. As the examination crept on in uncomfortable silence, she started noticing.

The only advantage of being in this horribly repulsive, violating position was that Law couldn’t see her expression change- but he saw weight settle in her brow. Quick glances between the hurting place and the clipboard she kept rustling in her arms like she was puzzling through an inconsistency and now that she had bumped into it, she couldn’t pretend it wasn't there.

Her eyes wandered, as they normally did, to the mercury-white splotches curdling his skin, and the lingering violescence of the bruises on his thigh. He expected more questions.

If it was his father between his legs, inspecting the diameter of the fissure, what would he have asked?

Maybe something like, why did this happen?

Didn’t it hurt?

Where’s my son?

You’re not my—

No questions came. The doctor shuddered like she couldn’t bear to be around him. She gave him more painkillers and more laxatives, and it felt like bribery – take this and never come back here again.

The expression seared on the face of the Donquixote Family's doctor was echoed between every doctor he encountered, like a reverberation that was carried across every island of the North Blue. No matter how pretty the hospital or how nice the town; under the artifice laid the same contempt, the disgust, the rage they had for the fact he hadn't died with the rest of the Flevance plague rats. They always shrieked the same message. You are diseased. You should have died. You are not even human. It was all stuff that Law already knew, and yet this did not make the message less painful.

If only they knew. You are dirty and broken on the inside, they'd say, You're filled to the brim with sickness. They already did know, without them having seen him without his clothes off.

At first, Law fought the hospitals. He had screamed every obscenity he’d memorized, weaponizing the full breadth of his precocious vocabulary. He bit Rosinante hard enough to draw blood. He'd hollered at passersby about how he had been abducted and the majority of them had passed him a cursory glance, assumed through his diminutive stature that he was a much younger child throwing a tantrum, and written him off - and that was not mentioning the people that recoiled when they noticed the irregularities in his skin tone. None of it made a difference. Not ever.

The only real difference was that when Law accepted it, when they inevitably limped back to camp, he’d be less tired and feel less filthy and dead inside at the end of the day. The outcome was otherwise the same: Rosinante receiving a hopeless answer he would then disregard, Rosinante reassuring him that the next time would have answers, for sure, and a hospital burning. Sometimes Law would be in tears afterward and sometimes he wouldn't be.

The only perk, if Law could call it that, was that Rosinante set the hospitals on fire, and even then Law couldn't derive any lasting satisfaction because Rosinante never killed anyone in the blaze.

If it were up to Law, he would have had those doctors all shot and their cold carcasses stacked in a bloody pile. The stragglers could die in the street. The ones who couldn't escape in time could choke to death on the smoke that packed every corner and crevice of the hospital, growing until it had nowhere else to grow but inside their lungs -

( - why did they have to fucking live when his family died, it was like the government killed every decent person on the planet and now all that was left were these parasites - )

(Why are you always so mad? asked Lami in his dreams. She opened her mouth and smoke rose from her black throat. You were a nice person before I died.)

(What Law's dream-self wanted to say was, WHAT YOU THINK DOESN'T MATTER ANYMORE, YOU'RE DEAD, but even in an illusion, he didn't have the heart to rebuke his baby sister.)

However, Law did begrudge that it was at least a little funny that on their way out, Rosinante always ransacked the hospital medicine cabinets to replenish their supply. More amusing was that the first time he did it, he insisted on paying for it; apparently arson and assault were fine but larceny was a bridge too far. When he realized he was pissing away their berry, he abandoned all pretenses of chivalry.

The first time a doctor had confirmed what Law had been saying all along, Law had expected... he didn't know what to expect from Rosinante, and he'd stormed out of the room before he could witness his reaction firsthand.

Law ran from the office. The hospital staff fled as they saw him approach, like he was a foul omen. Someone pulled an alarm and the noise was pummeling his skull. Law made it as far as the stairwell before he succumbed to an agony that had started as a persistent, yet ultimately manageable gnaw in his bones and escalated until his knees locked up, Law buckling against the banister. He gasped and then he sobbed through the clenching in his chest, ribcage trapping his lungs in a stranglehold.

Law sucked the snot back into his nose and twisted his face, trying to keep himself from crying more tears than he already had. They just kept coming.

He heard Rosinante's voice and went cold.

If it was Doflamingo instead of Rosinante, he wouldn't have just left it at setting a single office ablaze. No one would have left that hospital alive other than the two of them. He would have used his powers to make the doctors bow at Law's feet and beg for forgiveness, and then he would have set them upon each other. That would have been what Law wanted, wouldn't it? They would have departed the hospital under the heavy weight of the knowledge that Doflamingo had wasted his precious time and energy on a fruitless endeavor, and Law would have fretted as Doflamingo stewed in resentment, and then-

Law, like always, would have to avert an imminent calamity the only way he knew how.

Rosinante picked him up, slinging him by the back of his shirt like he was a briefcase. The smell of smoke trailed them outside. "Forget that hospital," he'd growled. "Hope that didn't hit a sore spot on you, kid."

It would happen anyway. So he outgrew his performative, useless squalling. When Rosinante carried him through a new (old) town to a new (old) hospital he sagged against his shoulder like he was somehow spiting him with his weight. His body stoked the embers of a hatred just as poisonous and vengeful as it was the day he lost his family and his home.

It was going to happen whether he wanted to or not. It was just a difference of how painful he wanted it to be.

When Rosinante kidnapped him, the bruises on his body were flushed purple into yellow, most of them having faded. On his lower back, on his thighs, on everywhere a decent man would never look on a twelve-year-old boy. Elsewhere, as well, but those could be explained. Law participated in raids when he was physically able to and had incurred injuries that way. He was being trained by an accomplished martial artist and a swordsman and an expert marksman, none of whom harbored any compunctions about beating the shit out of him on a regular basis.

Rosinante noticed once, in the early phase of their ordeal. Law had removed his hat to wash his hair in the river and as he bowed his head, he saw it, the three yellow spots on the back of his neck that Law had forgotten about. “Wait, hold still,” Rosinante said, and Law froze. Rosinante stole closer, hands hovering for the nape of his neck and his eyes on his body itching and he was going to-

“Don’t touch me,” Law hissed, trying to remain calm but even if his voice was steady, his body betrayed his panic. He jerked away and his hand flew towards Rosinante’s, slapping him hard on the wrist.

Law hadn’t realized there was that much force behind it and maybe there wasn’t, but Rosinante withdrew, flashing his hands palms-up apologetically. Law was momentarily shocked by how easy that was, and somehow had room to feel more shocked by what he said next. “Okay. I’m sorry. I won’t touch you.”

Law stared at him and he no doubt looked like an idiot. Rosinante took a deep breath like he was carefully considering his next words. Like he was trying not to frighten him. He should’ve been insulted by the condescension. Rosinante insisted on treating someone who had killed on Doflamingo's behalf, same as any adult pledge, like a kid. Just out of his misguided sense of morality.

“You’ve got some nasty bruises there, kid,” Rosinante phrased gingerly.

“Diamante’s an asshole,” Law groused. He placed his hat back on his head, sweeping his unruly mop of black hair back into relative tidiness, and self-consciously drew the collar of his shirt a little higher over his neck. “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

He remembered a certain look flashing across Rosinante’s face as he turned that excuse over in his head, his mouth twitching like he wanted to say something. But Rosinante had let the matter rest, not knowing that many more once laid Law’s beneath shirt, on his chest, on his belly, lower, lower.

Whenever Law undressed himself, it was always when Rosinante was not present. He'd gotten as far as unbuckling his pants before Rosinante redirected him to some bushes. Rosinante afforded him as much space as possible even when Law did not explicitly request it, apparently not at all bothered by the idea he would try to escape. He was right. The both of them knew that there was no way in hell that Law could maintain a seaworthy vessel on his lonesome, especially not one capable of traversing the North Blue.

Between the hospitals, they had a routine; they conversed and ate and slept, always in the wilderness, and though Law remained recalcitrant they had established a rapport. It would have been trivial for Rosinante to enter town and obtain lodgings for himself, since he controlled the purse, but he never did. He said he couldn't just leave Law by himself, even if it meant sleeping on a bedroll in the cold nights, getting nipped by all manner of tropical pestilence, and cleaning himself in the river instead of showering like a normal person. He suffered the indignities without complaint nor consternation.

In the arctic climate, Rosinante piled every piece of clothing and every blanket he owned on top of Law. They slept by the fire, and Rosinante stayed awake to ensure that it kept burning throughout the cold. Rosinante still did not touch him.

Relevantly, Rosinante was currently hunched by a burbling stream, knobbly legs jutting outward as he splashed water on his armpits to temper the odor. In the process he nearly dashed his face against the rocks. Only this oaf could almost kill himself while sitting and barely moving. He appeared utterly idiotic, and yet-

When he had removed his shirt for the first time, Law waited, choking on his breath, for Rosinante to unzip his pants. For him to smirk, lackadaisical, and say, I think you should make it up to me. But no other articles of clothing followed.

Rosinante washed his face in the cool stream of the river, sloughing off the makeup in thick, greasy layers. He'd remove the makeup when it caked and tightened against the texture of his face, but then he'd reapply it later. If Law had to conjecture why, it was probably to keep up appearances in case Rosinante was accosted by unexpected visitors from the Family.

But for the brief period of time that Rosinante’s face was naked and devoid of the distortion of his makeup, Law felt a shudder rattle his bones like he was a wind chime.

Rosinante looked like Doflamingo; unsurprising, because they were brothers, but the face paint blurred the distinction, and without it the family resemblance was laid bare. Rosinante looked at Law with Doflamingo's eyes and from Doflamingo's chiseled face, though the wide-eyed expression he currently wore was one that Doflamingo would never make. His hair, which was dense and unkempt, was flattened by the weight of the water soaking it. Rosinante jerked his neck and the motion flipped his bangs off of his forehead and over his head, exposing a prominent brow and thin, slivery eyebrows.

Law's heartbeat quickened and his whole body gave a pulse of pain. He thought for a moment that he might faint.

Rosinante’s voice was gentle. Inquisitive. A little bit worried. “You okay?”

(Mentor and monster both.)

Law said what he'd say to Doflamingo, which was, "Yeah."

“Here’s your shirt, kid. Good as new.”

True to Rosinante’s word, the resulting garment was returned dry and devoid of any burns. Law was slightly impressed he had managed it, but only slightly, and it didn't quite warrant an outward expression of gratitude. Law was careful not to compliment Rosinante too much. Rosinante next chucked his clean pants at him.

“Alright, get outta here, take off your underwear, put these on, and then give me your underwear. I need to clean that too.”

Law stared at him, wide-eyed and stupid. Rosinante seemed to hesitate, or at least he noticed something in Law’s eyes that gave him pause.

“You okay, kid?” Rosinante asked, and Law did not leave the clearing.

Did Rosinante know?

That was hard to say. Doflamingo and Law spent a great deal of time together, though Law’s path rarely intersected with Rosinante’s. The Corazon hated children, after all, and it was only after Law revealed his full name that Rosinante took an interest in him.

When it happened, it was either in the privacy of the captain’s quarters or in the study, behind a locked door. Doflamingo was Law’s tutor, and Law scorned the company of his other crewmates. Whenever he went missing, the others were more than happy to dismiss it as Law being in one of his moods; the kid had been part of the crew for two years and despite this he had never embraced them as family.

Even if Law hadn’t been actively driving away everyone around him, the shadow of Flevance's legacy hung over Law’s every movement, and even members of Doflamingo’s crew scattered at the sight of it. There were the cabin boys and the gunners that believed that he was contagious and would retreat to the opposite side of whatever room they were in any time they saw him, never mind that if that were the case, Doflamingo would have dropped dead months ago -

The point was that people were more than happy to allow Law his space.

The walls of Doflamingo's chambers were impenetrable and practically soundproof, but some noise did escape. Doflamingo demanded discretion and for the most part, Law did his best to ensure this, but then there were outbursts. He couldn't help it sometimes. His teeth sank into pillows, the sheets, Doflamingo's handkerchief wadded in his mouth, his own underwear, if Doflamingo was especially displeased with him.

(The day after the throat-stitching incident, Law was late to rise, and he only remembered that he screamed during his ordeal when Diamante laughed and whooped. "Heard you last night," he'd leered, Law's blood running cold for a split second, "Doffy whooped your ass, huh? He get tired of your shit?")

But he remembered being in Doflamingo’s study, under a table- remembered Doflamingo in a bad mood that was worsening and worsening and Law was trying everything he could to keep him at bay. Doflamingo’s restless fingers traced patterns on the surface of his mottled skin, a spider-web, a birdcage, a noose.

Then there was a knock at the door. And then a knock followed by other knocks that Law realized was a message.

Doflamingo rose to his feet. His only feedback for that performance was the dismissive shove he used to separate them. He tucked himself back into his pants and drew his feathered cape tighter around himself. He ambled to the door with the confidence that Law would make himself presentable without his instruction.

Which he did. When Doflamingo opened the door, Law was in his seat at the desk, surrounded by books, one such tome placed in front of him. Rosinante’s eyes had flickered thoughtfully over the edge of his sunglasses, cresting over Doflamingo’s shoulder, assessing him.

Law had appeared normal. Pristine. Like a doll posed in a set, the objects in his environment meticulously selected, but with no sense of interaction.

When the door closed, he vomited, and Doflamingo's seed was mixed in it.

Law did not put his shirt on, and he did not leave the clearing. He shed the blanket like he was emerging from a cocoon and stripped himself of his underwear, making himself completely naked. Then, he turned away and presented himself braced on his hands and knees, ass-up and legs spread. Rosinante had watched this development unfold under a haze of dumbstruck confusion, his eyes bulging and his face growing wan and taut with agony. His hand was pale as he used it to shield his eyes.

“Kid,” Rosinante croaked, raggedly. “Put your clothes back on.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Law stated, flatly and perfunctorily. He pressed his forehead to the ground and lifted his hips.

Rosinante seemed to finally realize that this was not, in fact, a particularly disconcerting mirage. “No,” he rasped, and then again, louder, “No! No. You're-- we're not doing this. Put your clothes back on.”

Law did not look at him. He remained in position, holding as still as he possibly could, but even with all his experience and his dispassionate tone, his thighs were trembling. “Why?”

“Because this is wrong. I don’t want this.”

Law turned his head enough to glower at Rosinante, raw anger throbbing behind his single visible eye. “Is it because you think you’re gonna catch something?” he demanded.

“No,” Rosinante snarled, and his face was so wrought with murderous anger that it made Law hesitate. “It’s because you’re a child!”

In reality, Law did not want to have sex with Rosinante. Not actually. It did not matter to him whether Rosinante rejected him, not in theory.

He was entangled in an entirely breed of rage stemming from an argument that was barely relevant to the matter at hand. Suddenly, someone cared about what a child his age was supposed to be doing. Children weren’t supposed to see the government massacre hundreds of thousands of people just to hide the evidence of their reckless avarice. Children weren’t supposed to stumble upon the freshly-killed bodies of everyone they had ever known, whether they were long-time friends or acquaintances they’d passed in the streets, and survive with the knowledge that a city's population had been exterminated like vermin. Children weren’t supposed to be birthed into the world with an expiration date.

Law was angry enough to stab Rosinante again. If he had a weapon in hand, he would’ve charged him, and he wouldn't have stopped at stabbing him in the back with a piddly little knife. He would've kept going and going. He wished he punctured something vital. He wished he went for his fucking neck. He wished he killed him, sold out his secrets, told Doflamingo to kill him, so that way these six months could have been erased and Law could die from White Lead disease like he was meant to.

“If I’m old enough to kill for the family, then I’m old enough for this-!” Law would have said more, but Rosinante stopped him.

“That’s ENOUGH.” Rosinante struck, but instead of making contact with Law's face, he'd grabbed him by the arm and used that grip to hoist him in the air like he was separating a pair of rabid dogs. Law squawked, clawing futilely at Rosinante’s hand and flailing and thrashing and trying everything he could to wrench himself free.

Law tried to sound like hatred incarnate, but when he howled at Rosinante, he just sounded like a wounded animal. “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” he screeched, “You won’t let me die, you won’t have sex with me- why’d you bring me out here, just to make me suffer? What am I supposed to do?”

Rosinante was thunderstruck but he still composed himself. The face behind the mask had softened, as much as it was tense with pain. “Not this,” he said, hoarse, before the snarl returned. “Never this. I don’t know what the HELL Doflamingo told you-”

“He didn’t tell me ANYTHING! YOU’RE-”

“—but you should’ve never had to do this. Now put your clothes back on.” He dropped Law on his feet, gentle despite his shaking hands, snatched up the discarded clothes, and thrust them against Law’s chest. “And never do this again. Got it?”

Law’s hand sought out the cap that was sandwiched between his other clothes. As he robotically fumbled through the motions of clothing himself, that hat was the first item to reclaim its rightful place, quaking clumsy fingers wringing tightly at the brim as he pulled it down over his eyes. A sniffle was wrenched from somewhere deep inside of him, and knowing that he was close to tears, he tucked his chin against his chest like he could fold himself up and disappear.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Law whimpered, sounding like the world’s most pathetic broken record, sounding small and lost as he clutched his clothes tight to his body. “I don’t know what to do.”

The anger in Rosinante’s face evaporated. There was only pity now, an unbearable softness there, and somehow that was worse. “I want you to live, kid,” said Rosinante, though his voice was unsteady, as if he himself was aware of just how useless that sentiment was.

Law scrunched his clothes to his face and made a choking and incoherent sucking noise, taking all his sorrows and forcing them down his throat. Filled himself back up with sickness and sorrow. When he looked back up at Rosinante, his eyes were hollowed-out, haunted, and red. “I didn’t ask for that.”

Before Doflamingo opened the door, he’d said, “You were better at this a year ago.”

After Law tried to have sex with Rosinante, Law went to bed late, but he did ultimately go to bed. When Rosinante was certain he had fallen asleep, he drank every bottle of alcohol he had, stood over Law’s bedroll, and sobbed, hugging himself like a child.

“Doffy,” he moaned, “What have you done?”

Law didn't only have nightmares, he had something that was even worse.

The distance between him and Doflamingo did not alleviate Law of that burden. In fact, the lack of proximity to his tormentor exacerbated it.

Law had dreams of Doflamingo being angry when he returned, especially frightening in his mind the image of him curled at Doflamingo's feet, nothing but bones and paper-thin skin. He was whittled down and broken into shards of himself. Where's the fruit, Law? Doflamingo pried, sounding the perfect mixture of disappointed and cruel, and Law dispersed into ashes on the wind.

In some of his dreams, a particular scenario played out. Law obtained the fruit. He devoured it. Even in his dream he could envision the taste: like bile and cock. Then, Doflamingo examined him and declared, Good. Much better. I can finally make use of you, and Law screamed and screamed and screamed and didn't wake up even with Rosinante's hands on his shoulder, flapping his head around like he's a doll, didn't wake up until Law heard his own voice in his head telling him to, didn't even remember having a nightmare until he saw Rosinante staring down at him from above and screamed-

"DON'T TOUCH ME!"

Rosinante recoiled like he'd grabbed an electric fence. He shrank back, watching cautiously as Law tried in vain to compose himself. He remembered none of what had transpired in his dreams. He was just scared. Law touched his face, pressed his hat to his eyes, doubled away from his bedroll and retched. When he looked up, he saw that Rosinante was trembling.

The next day, it was business as usual. Law had mentioned the incident in passing – “Are we just not gonna talk about how I tried to have sex with you and you wouldn't?” – but Rosinante rounded on him with a glare that almost made him worry that he had pushed him too far. He expected strings ensnaring him, a hand gripping the back of his neck, a voice in his ear rumbling-

Instead, Rosinante huffed, swatted away the tiny fire smoldering in his mantle, and rustled the map with a sharp and perfunctory snap, the crunching of paper audible between them. “We’re not.” He took a drag from his cigarette, apparently not caring how he had almost set his head on fire mere moments previously, and breathed a serpentine coil of smoke in the air. “But let me tell you something. It doesn’t matter if you get naked in front of me every night of every day I try to find you a cure. I’m not going to do it. Ever.”

Rosinante sighed. “It may not make any sense to you right now, but when you see what the world’s really like, you’ll know how—how wrong all of that was. I’m gonna get you away from him. I’m going to cure you. Tomorrow's the last hospital. That one'll have the cure.”

Law's anger turned cancerous. “I CAN’T be cured.”

“You. Will,” Rosinante grit out, and Law would have wondered how it was that he still had the energy to bleat the same damn thing over and over again if it were not so obvious – it wasn’t Rosinante that had to sit in front of doctor after doctor after doctor and it wasn’t Rosinante was subjected to the knowledge that he was seen as fucking dirty - as a fucking parasite - as something that should've died by the entire world.

“And then you’ll never—no one will ever make you do that again.”

The words bubbled out of Law like he was squeezing venom from a wound. “I hate you.”

Law couldn't imagine how Doflamingo would have reacted if he told him he hated him, because he would have never said it to him. But he could compare the way they extinguished their cigarettes. Rosinante didn’t sigh or frown or even seem hurt. He snuffed out his cigarette, but there was no real force behind it. If it was Doflamingo standing in his place instead he would have brought his heel down on it like he was crushing a cockroach. Rosinante knelt and smothered it in the dirt with a twist of his wrist, almost ceremonial, like he was burying an animal he'd found on the side of the road.

“I know." Rosinante's voice was soft, chastened. "I know it doesn’t mean anything coming from me, but I’m sorry. For everything."

And that was enough to shut Law up, because before Rosinante kidnapped him, he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had ever told him that they were sorry for anything.

In reality, it came down between two choices, and Law’s decision was an easy one, as long as he didn’t force himself to think too hard about it. If it came down between having sex with Rosinante and spending another few months bouncing between hospitals, then he would have pacified Rosinante with his body until he physically couldn’t anymore.

That was not because Law enjoyed either of those options. It was a choice between which pain was the most endurable. Which was it: the pain that was terrible and then it was over, or pain after pain after pain?

Except that Rosinante would not touch him. And the doctors would not cure him.

But they were his only two choices.

The last hospital was in an unknown stretch of the North Blue that Law did not bother committing to memory, because at that point all of the North Blue was the same. He saw the hospital on the horizon.

He walked toward it and he kept walking. A great roaring morass of static droned around him. He was aware of people, Rosinante walking behind him, then Rosinante stopping. Rosinante stopping did not register. Neither did Rosinante calling out to him, at first disbelievingly, then, with panic.

"Law."

Law's previously unfaltering focus on the hospital was broken, if only because Law remembered that when people called his name it was typically because they expected something from you. He shuffled around to face Rosinante and saw him standing in his shadow, the color excised from his face, his cigarette smoldering at his feet.

“Let’s go home, kid,” Rosinante muttered, stuffing the map in his pocket. He didn’t destroy it, but his fingers tugged anxiously at the edges like he was seriously considering it.

Law blinked, stared, numb. "Huh?"

"We're not going."

Law blinked. The words didn't penetrate the fog that had swarmed his skull. Rosinante's voice sounded further away than it actually was. He may have repeated himself, because he saw Rosinante's lips move, but even then he wasn't sure what he was saying or if it was directed to him or even really what language or words were. Rosinante crouched and proffered a hand. Not touching him.

"C'mon. I can carry you." There was movement, then Rosinante was standing in front of him with a hand extended. Law gaped at it for a solid minute before Rosinante sighed, not touching him. Not touching him. Not ever touching him.

Somewhere in the fog-choked recesses of Law's brain, a neuron sparked and sputtered. He reached out, laying his palm in Rosinante's; the contact was like a jolt to his body. Law went from feeling heavy to being light; Rosinante lifted him effortlessly and deposited him on his shoulder, amid the ticklish tangle of his feathered cowl. The texture was a caress that teased under the numbness that gripped his body. Rosinante's words, too, did not sink past this, not until the hospital was behind him and Law understood that they were going back into town.

"We're not?" Law asked.

"No."

If Law was completely himself, he would have wondered if this information should have made him happy. He could settle for relief, maybe. “Can you burn it down anyway?”

Rosinante laughed mirthlessly; a single Ha. "Not sure I wanna do that before they give me a reason to."

Law hummed. He nuzzled into the feathers as he linked his arms around Rosinante's neck. It was soft. "They always give you a reason."

Rosinante went to the local liquor store, and he bought every bottle he could afford.

Law didn't know what it was about that day that broke them. Everything was the same. The only difference was that Rosinante didn't have to carry him.

Ale trickled in moon-washed rivulets down Rosinante's throat as he downed bottle after bottle after bottle. Law slumbered in his bedroll behind him. Falling asleep was normally a long struggle for Law, but that night, he was so exhausted that he'd crumpled in and drifted off almost immediately, though not without some protest.

I'm gonna see him, Law grunted as the resistance drained from his body, blinking hard against the pull of sleep.

It was the first time that he'd ever said anything of that nature, but at this point no clarification was necessary. Rosinante told him, It's a nightmare, kid. I promise I'll make sure no one comes for you. Alright? And if you wake up, I'll wait with you 'till you fall back asleep.

"Just don't touch me," Law would have said, but he was gone not long after.

Rosinante kept drinking. All but one of the hospitals on Rosinante's crudely-drawn map had been struck out. A constellation of holes riddled the paper, charred black and crispy around their edges. He looked over the unblemished horizon, the monolith of the hospital. Rosinante's stubborn belief that the cure to Law's condition could lay behind those walls persisted, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That had not faltered.

Which was why he went on his own. Law waited in camp, recuperating from the bizarre numbing spell that had yet to lift, a white child draped in Rosinante's black mantle. Rosinante told the doctors about a young boy with White Lead Disease. The one with the most seniority had laughed derisively at this ridiculous thought experiment. There's no cure to White Lead Disease, and there's no one alive who has it.

Whether Law was there or wasn't, whether they were on an island glossy with hollow hospitality or one that drove them out with pitchforks and torches, it was the same. Rosinante chewed on that answer. He thanked the doctor for his time. He left. The hospital did not burn.

They always give you a reason. The reason was that they were godawful, disgusting people who betrayed the core tenets of their profession. The real reason wasn't that they failed to give him the desired answer, it was that they were cruel to Law. If Law wasn't present and the doctors hadn't reacted to him, the only one in this scenario who had inflicted any cruelty on him was Rosinante himself, for making him come to this town. Perhaps Rosinante should have immolated himself instead of the hospital.

He took his cigarette and brought its red-hot end to the unmarked point on his map, watching the flame nibble the paper.

All I've done is make this kid relive his childhood did not begin to describe the hurt he had caused. He had not been able to comprehend the enormity of it, the way all of those things had been connected. It was not as simple as cutting Law free from a web that had entrapped him for years. Rosinante had only realized it when he watched Law shamble towards the hospital, possessed with the resignation of a man walking to his execution.

It was seared in his head: Law looking back at him, shattered pilot-light eyes dead and cloudy, but blinking a message-

Is this what you want? Am I good yet?

Rosinante could disavow Doflamingo as much as he wanted, but they were identical in every aspect that mattered.

It didn't matter if Law hated him. He deserved it, just as he deserved the blade in his back. None of that hurt. Rosinante wept about that, about how much Law had dealt with, about how unfair the world was, just as he did in another world, but in this world there was still more to weep for.

"I'm so sorry," Rosinante cried, and it was the only thing he could think to say. I'm so sorry for being related to Doflamingo, for sharing his face, for not knowing, for hurting him over and over again. "You don't deserve it. You've never deserved any of this."

Law heard this and cried. He didn't know why. It was as if something inside of him was unplugged and he was emptied of all he'd kept contained. Months of touch without violation had piled up in his memory and he'd fractured under the pressure of it.

No one had ever been sorry for anything. The people who shot his parents were solemnized as heroes that contained an infestation. The doctors would never feel the slightest lick of guilt for turning him away, not even after Rosinante brutalized them. Doflamingo would never apologize, because to Law, he had never done wrong.

Why-

Doflamingo was irritated by the constraints of Law's illness. He provided medical care and accommodations, but with the air of someone maintaining an internal checklist of the minutes and days that he had been dumping into Law, always to diminishing returns. If Law was not in the right condition to fight or to study, then he would make himself useful with his body. It was debt that Doflamingo always remembered to collect.

The first time Law stumbled without his cane, he tensed up in anticipation for some expression of annoyance. After all, Law should have known that he needed it, but on that particular day, he didn't think his pain was going to worsen so dramatically. Instead, it was Rosinante who apologized. Oh, hell, I'm sorry, kid. I should've remembered to bring your cane. You want me to carry you?

It wasn't so much that Rosinante wanted to carry him that perplexed him, but the fact he offered it like a service that Law could refuse. He was perfectly capable of leaving him behind. He could ignore his stupid pride and drag him face-down to the next hospital and Law would not have been able to stop him. Why? What do you get out of it?

Rosinante's reply stayed with him. Nothing. I don't want anything.

Law didn't believe it. After the last hospital, he finally did.

The following morning, Law called him Cora for the first time.

Dying wasn't as awful as he thought. Law's sleep had become dreamless and heavy, and though it felt like he was suffocating, it killed the night terrors. It was in the week between the present and Cora’s final hours that Law looked at Rosinante, helplessly swaddled in his blanket and barely capable of movement, and stared up at the moon. Snow fluttered from the sky like shredded cumulonimbus.

According to Doflamingo's intelligence, the Op-Op Fruit was supposedly in the possession of the Barrels Pirates. Cora was surveilling the hall they occupied and was stockpiling what he needed to infiltrate their celebration. As he armed himself with grenades and bullets, Law was compiling a mental itinerary of all his unfinished business. The list was blank. He had no goals beyond killing as many people as he possibly could.

His aspirations were nonexistent as his regrets were innumerable. He regretted not killing more people. He regretted that was one of his regrets. Heaven, if it existed, was supposed to be the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, but its gates were closed to Law forever. Heaven was glowing, sterile white like a hospital and the angels pacing its halls looked exactly like the Doflamingo Family's doctor.

He could think of one wrong that could be corrected. It was the most important task.

“Hey, Cora,” croaked Law, his dry voice whistling through his windpipe. “I’m sorry for saying I hated you. I don't. I promise I don't.”

Rosinante set his glasses on his face and fumbled with the doorknob to their hideout. "You had a right to it. Give me a sec-"

"No, I-- can-- can you just listen?" Rosinante obliged, but he was clearly restless. Law's lungs creaked through an inhale, his ribs resisting him. "I'm... I'm sorry for that- I'm sorry you worked so hard for-- for me, for... for nuh. Nothing." Rosinante's pupils were small and his nostrils flared in an anger Law could not understand. "I'm not... I'm not worth it. I'm not-"

"Don't," Rosinante interrupted him, nervous and desperate and defiant. "Don't ever say that. You're worth more than all of them put together. You're worth more than I am." Law was silent and it wasn't only because the strength to speak had finally left him.

Rosinante's titanic hand engulfed Law's, and Law couldn't squeeze but he could feel the warmth seep through his skin. Rosinante released him with a vow; he exhaled like severing that contact was painful. "You're not gonna die here, Law. I promise."

Even if he didn't, Law would've been happy dying there. He closed his eyes, wholly prepared to never open them again.

He did. Rosinante returned with the Op-Op Fruit.

Doflamingo's eyes were on the sky when he quizzed Law. Say we find the Op-Op Fruit and I give it to you, but you’re still the same. Rosinante refused to entertain that likelihood. To him, any other outcome was impossible. Law was going to live.

Rosinante took the fruits of his labor and shoved it, quite literally, down Law's throat. It tasted worse than it did in his dreams. Like he'd eaten a stick of chalk, and the flavor was still gummed up behind his teeth so he kept tasting it long after he'd consumed the final crumb. First, he was stagnant, and then the beginning thrum of his withered black heart quaked the entirety of his body, his every cell palpitating.

Heartbeat, heartbeat, and then power flooding him, surging through the cracks and the leaks that had slowly accumulated. Law went from feeling dead and disconnected to feeling everything. He hurt, but he could breathe, he could stand, he could walk.

Doflamingo's purr was in his ear, as vibrant and real as if Law was still imprisoned in Doflamingo's bed, and the truth is that he was. What happens next?

"Tell me what to do!" Law begged him. Doflamingo would have told him what to do. Doflamingo-

Being hated by Law wasn't something that bothered Rosinante when they were looking for a cure. He knew that it was inevitable as much as it was deserved. Law was trapped in Doflamingo's web. Rosinante was just the bastard who uprooted him from his life, who reignited every scab and scar on Law's body. That was why when Law said that he hated him, even if it was an empty sentiment uttered out of pure childish frustration, Rosinante wasn't hurt. He didn't want anything from Law other than for him to live a free life, and he sure as hell did not feel entitled to his love. He got it anyway.

After receiving that love, Rosinante couldn't go back to hatred.

Enclosed in the missive that Vergo intercepted was Rosinante's final message. He warned the marines that Doflamingo was a monster. He had to be stopped at all costs. He wrote about Law and about what Doflamingo had done to him. Vergo read it. His expression was unchanging as he absorbed each word. He destroyed it, and then he punished Rosinante and Law for betraying his master.

Years later, Doflamingo was made a Warlord.

Rosinante's bloodied lips and busted teeth formed the shape of a harlequin's leer and that was the image that Law kept in his head for many years to come. "I love you, kid," was the message carved in his mind, Donquixote Rosinante's epitaph.

When Law's family perished, so did every person who would ever love him. That was the reality he had accepted. He didn't join the Donquixote Family for love. If anything, he became a pirate on behalf of hatred and vengeance. But while he accepted that he would never again be loved, he discovered that being useful occupied the same space.

Law had been made into something unlovable, and finding people that tolerated and enabled that was the closest substitute. He knew this. It wasn't just the White Lead Disease, it was the hatred he nursed for the entire world. It was everything he did at Doflamingo's behest. It was how, as much as he was terrified of Doflamingo, he wanted his approval.

Cora said he loved him. Law believed that. He didn't know why he loved him, but he believed that, and the feeling was mutual. The fact a disgusting and broken creature like him could drink up Cora's love despite knowing he didn't deserve it was testament to his wretchedness. So too was the fact that even with all that Law knew about himself he still inflicted his love on Cora.

Silence enveloped him like an embrace. Rosinante closed him in the chest. That was the last that Law ever saw him.

The sad truth was that even when Vergo attacked them, Law hadn't renounced Doflamingo. Not completely. It only happened that his love for Rosinante had outweighed his devotion to Doflamingo, and one did not cancel out the other. There was enough space in his heart for the both of those feelings. Law wanted what Rosinante wanted for him, for them to travel the world together. That didn't mean he hated Doflamingo.

The acts that Rosinante referred to as abuse, the violence inflicted upon his person, that could all be dismissed or rationalized. It was stuff that wouldn't have hurt if his body was normal, things that wouldn't have been said if he had done what Doflamingo wanted, things he deserved for being such a monstrous brat. It had all been done because he wasn't working hard enough, or hadn't listened, or for his own good. Law could overlook what was only done to himself.

Rosinante force-fed him a second chance and expected nothing in return. Doflamingo granted him a purpose and an opportunity and he needed something in return. Sometimes it was his body, but eventually it'd be his life. Rosinante could have Law's heart, while Doflamingo had been promised his life.

Law didn't hate Doflamingo. Not until Rosinante was dead. The leash was cut.

Gropin', gangly, unweave at your sleeve, fit your pasty face
And keep banging that fork on that plate, keep spitting down my spiral staircase
Your neckline is all mine, your jaw line, your lifeline has shortened some
And it's all mine, and it's all mine, good God almighty, look what you've done

...

Patience, my pet, the beast will lie and the ghost will flirt
And we're blanking on your bemoaning
The most important part of your body is the one that currently hurts

- The Paper Chase, The Most Important Part of Your Body

Chapter Text

Rosinante in the snow, Rosinante on his back. Rosinante's peaceful smile. Silence thicker than a swamp. The smoking pistol clutched in Doflamingo's hand. Law thought of the face that would be forever bound to the instrument of Rosinante's death, a rictus warped in a sneering mask of disgust, driven by a cold and terrible rage unlike any episode he'd ever before witnessed. The thunder of the pistol replayed in his head, the outward blossom of smoke and gore, deafening all other thoughts.

Law's scrabbling hands raked his nails along the unyielding wood of the treasure chest. He couldn't see the cracks in his fingernails or the streaks of blood his frenzied clawing left behind.

He killed him. Bang.

When fighting didn't work, he screamed like the power of his voice could somehow transcend the confines of the chest. The scream he couldn't hear shredded his throat. Law was overcome by a paroxysm of desperation and not one solitary ounce of strength he could muster would make a difference.

He killed him. Bang. HE KILLED HIM.

Rosinante, dead in the snow. Rosinante, smiling in death. Rosinante, dead. Dead. Dead.

The treasure chest held Law like a rotten womb.

Be silent, was the murmur of a greater hunger for survival. Keep moving, no matter how desperately you want to curl up beside his body.

The wail that Law's body refused to relinquish rang bright and clear in his head, an animal's screech: I CAN'T JUST LEAVE HIM THERE. Cries the orphaned fawn beside his slaughtered mother: my mother, my mother, my mother, and he stumbles back into the hunter's crosshairs, driven to blindness by his own grief.

The truth was, that part of Law was too small to make a difference because he knew it was too late the moment he saw Rosinante in the snow. He knew it was too late for him in the same way that he knew it was too late for his parents. It was what kept him from rushing into the burning hospital to save his sister. The half of him that was curled up beside Cora's carcass was a version of himself that he could fold up and tuck away in a treasure chest of its own.

The treasure chest was no longer rattling around him. As Law emerged from it he could see that they were still there, the Doflamingo Pirates, lingering around Rosinante's body, Doflamingo's silhouette turned mercifully to the crisp winter sky, pondering something beyond Law's comprehension. Perhaps not thinking at all about what he had done.

Law was grateful for his tears. It kept him from stealing a final glance at Cora. After all Cora had done to secure his future, Law should've put more effort into escaping. His blind, solemn trudge up the snowy hill was the best he could muster, the slush tugging at the edges of his blanket and resisting each step he took, and from there - had the Donquixote Pirates been slightly more alert, had Doflamingo had not been thinking about whatever he was thinking about, they would've been nipping at his heels. But other forces were at play.

The struggle between the marine ships and the Numancia Flamingo unfolded on the seas and Law was oblivious to it all, even as the combined barrage traded between them assailed the fields, uprooting him from the earth. Whether it was two galleons locked in combat, whether it was Flevance burning behind him or Corazon bleeding out in the snow, survival was the same.

A prayer was whispered on the wind. You're free. Trafalgar Law would never hear it. You're free now.

Law's sobbing shattered the sky. He knew from that Rosinante was truly gone.

I didn't want you to hate me. Just a week before the day Corazon died, Law had hated him, and that was for a myriad of reasons completely irrelevant to the fact he was a Marine. Law did everything he could to erase those words.

What moment could he redo to change everything?

Law thought back to what was supposed to be his final moments. The coldness of death bearing down on him, staved away only by the warmth of Corazon's hands around his own. A promise burned behind Cora's eyes as he said, You're worth more than all of them put together.

Perhaps it should have been there. If only Law had argued more, worked harder to convince Corazon of the truth. If only Corazon knew that he wasn't worth sacrificing himself for.

Long after he leaves the treasure chest, he's still in the treasure chest.

Law spent the first day crying. Uncontrollable, mindless with it. It was the one release his body allowed. He was a faucet that poured endless grief that was too enormous for him to comprehend or contain, too slippery for any thought to stick to it. He was crushed in the mire of it. Day one became day two became day three. His body moved, without his input, to keep him pissing and drinking water, providing the bare minimum of necessary fuel. Law was worse than useless. Something else had the controls. Probably the stupid voice that kept him from dying next to the only person who made his miserable existence worth it all.

The steely focus once driving his escape was devoured by blind, frenzied despair. Law was dredged from the seabed, bobbing on the surface of his delirium like a piece of carrion. Cried more. Pushed forward, rabid, in a frenzy; underwater again, screaming, the sound of his sobbing. A flash, a vision of his hands tensed in the snow, seizing handfuls of it. Above water again. He's cold, drawing the tatters of his blanket around himself. Snow crystallized on his face, his tears prickling, his entire face is numb, his heart is the only thing alive and that's because it hurts so bad.

Corazon had found them temporary shelter inside of a disused wine cellar. Another treasure chest to hide inside. Logic dictated that Law couldn't remain there forever. Eventually he'd hear the stairs creaking as they struggled under the weight of the owner's descent, and it was only a matter of time before they happened upon Law.

Fresh color tentatively bloomed under his skin, but he still looked like someone that was suffering from White Lead syndrome, even if the Op-Op Fruit had supposedly cured him. If he was in the mood to make a wager, he theorized that this hypothetical somebody who discovered his unlikely guest would react the way virtually everyone else had.

(No Corazon to yell at them or burn down the estate. No one to defend him, or cry for him, or lament how unfair the world was where Law had just given up on it.)

Law awoke, performed some tasks he couldn't remember and was barely invested in, was reminded of Cora's absence and wracked anew by the horror of it. He remembered it in the form of his smile before the treasure chest closed, and in the form of the little mementos scattered about their hideout. Non-possessions that Law would be forced to leave behind.

There was no end to it, even after he rendered himself incapable of shedding tears. He was simply empty. Empty, and yet somehow so heavy he could fall through the world. The last time Law had cried like that, it was with the heat of the burning hospital licking his face, after he realized his family was gone. But something about that was different.

He could not afford to linger at Flevance's ruins. He'd carried the rot of his grief with him all the way over Flevance's borders and onto Doflamingo's doorstep, limping under its weight. Like a wound left untreated, his despair metamorphosed into black and venomous hatred. It became who he was until Corazon excised the gangrenous flesh, exposing the shape of something Law did not remember being.

Law could never be who he was before he met Doflamingo, or before he lost everything. Too much had changed.

He was tired. He couldn't fathom how he would be able to sleep, but being asleep would mean he could stop thinking about what to do next, or about Cora being gone.

His stomach felt strange and tender. Wouldn't it have been something if the Op-Op Fruit hadn't actually done anything? Then Cora's sacrifice would have been even more useless.

Law closed his eyes again. He'd become an expert at distancing himself from the pains of his body. He closed himself up in the treasure chest, blocking out the world, and untethered himself once more.

The thunder of the pistol and the thunder of Law's fists hammering helplessly against the inside of the chest.

Another scenario, another crossroad, another might-have-been: the treasure chest crumbles under his feeble pounding. He stands between Doflamingo and Rosinante, staring down the barrel of his pistol. He falls to his knees. He crawls to Doflamingo's feet. He begs and he pleads, leveraging what little quarter he has to rearrange fate itself. I'll do anything you want. I'll suck your cock. I'll let you kill me. I'll do that stupid ritual. I'll let you rape me over and over again. Just let him live. Just let him live.

He imagined coiling himself around Doflamingo's feet, he could imagine himself begging, he could imagine himself as a body crushed by a great and hateful shadow - but the moment he thought of looking into Doflamingo's face -

He couldn't. He couldn't. He couldn't.

All Law could think of was that gunshot - the gunshot, the despair and the grief that washed over him, and a white-hot spark of rage throbbing beneath it.

The persistent gnawing feeling behind his abdomen had grown into something greater. It was not like dying.

He had gone so long without being hungry that he barely recognized it.

In spite of himself, Law was annoyed by the interruption, like he'd been roused from a nap. "Shut up," he croaked, and was punished for his stupidity with the silence of the room around him.

He couldn't remember the last time he ate, either. It had to have happened before Cora - not long after Cora made him eat the Op-Op Fruit. Up until that moment, all he could consume were crumbs of bread and, because it was less demanding on his body, warm broth. The Op-Op Fruit having freshly settled in his stomach, flooding Law with vigor, Cora fed him whatever he had available. Law ate it, gingerly, anticipating the moment he'd be overtaken with the same uncontrollable, violent nausea that had made eating an impossible task. He expected to be doubled over, retching into the snow like he had innumerable times before, spitting up bile and hollow apologies that Cora wasted his time and energy securing food that he was too broken to eat.

It never happened. He ate. His stomach churned, treacherous, almost like his body had forgotten what to do. He waited for it to come back up. It never did.

That was his first indicator that the Op-Op Fruit hadn't exactly cured him, but had changed him.

Cora had left behind rations in his abandoned knapsack, he realized. What would happen if he didn't eat it? It'd presumably rot. Maybe freeze. The cold would preserve it for longer, but it wouldn't remain that way forever. All the food that Cora had collected for him would have gone to waste.

Wasted effort.

And what would happen if Law didn't eat?

He'd rot too, but he would have to wait for much, much longer for that to happen. There were ways to cut that short. His heart wasn't in it. All Law could think of was the effort it'd require. What the hell would he leave behind? A note that no one would ever find, saying I would have taken you all with me if I could?

He wasn't sure if he felt that way. It was difficult to salvage his thoughts from before Cora died. It was like it all belonged to another person. Rage had given away to resentment; sore like a fading bruise. It was hard to not resent the world that held Cora's imprint.

When his stomach gurgled, it spread to the rest of his body, palpable enough for him to feel in his bones. It was like the Op-Op Fruit was murmuring to him, reminding him of its presence. Another gift that Cora had fought tooth and nail for, and here he was, tangled up in his own guilt and despair.

And so Law encountered - and then crossed - his first impasse. It was not without a struggle. Rising to his feet required simultaneously more and less effort than he expected, and as he trundled to the knapsack, it was like he was walking for the first time. There was a newfound lightness to his steps that he hadn't realized had returned to him, not when wading through the snow. A weight had been relieved.

Inside the knapsack and now clutched in his hands was a rudimentary tuna sandwich, swaddled in a protective layer of wrapping. Somehow as he gazed upon it, he was overcome with an irrepressible wave of sadness as he thought of how Cora had chosen it -

We're not gonna stay here for much longer, but take this. Sorry if you don't like tuna. It's all I've got for now.

He felt tears prickle behind his dry eyes and, fuck, he was exhausted simply from the prospect of crying again, he was so fucking tired of it. He was tired of feeling sorry for himself. He was tired of being alive.

How am I supposed to stay alive now, knowing you died because of me?

How am I supposed to die, knowing you died so I can live?

Law forced it down with a shuddering breath, deadening himself. He pecked away at the sandwich, and bite by bite, it was as though he was remembering what it was like to be alive.

"I know what you did to him, Doffy."

He couldn't see them, but he imagined them in his head: Law imagined Doflamingo's permanent smile pulling tighter, becoming a snarl, perfect white teeth gleaming brighter than the moon. Rosinante's last cigarette smoldering between his teeth. He sounded like he was speaking through a smirk.

"I knew you were sick, but if I knew you were sick enough to do that to a kid- I would've put you down a long time ago." Law imagined Rosinante's shoulders bobbing as he issued a short, jeering bark of a laugh. "I should've known. But I thought - even after everything you did - there was a line you wouldn't cross. God. I was such an idiot."

Uncomfortable shuffling and silence from the surrounding retinue, an attendance of Doflamingo's loyalest soldiers. Nobody reacted. No one was surprised. Or perhaps they were, and they knew any spontaneous utterances would paint a target on themselves. Rosinante continued, taking advantage of the stunned silence, and with each passing second Law thought of the rage eating at Doflamingo's mask. "He was a child, Doffy. I don't know how you can live with yourself. I should've stopped you, but-- it doesn't matter. I got him away from you. You're never getting him back. He's free, and you'll never hurt him again. Whatever control you had over him is gone.

"You. Didn't. Win."

A millisecond was all that Doflamingo needed to erase Corazon like he was nothing. And then he had left him behind.

Who would go back for the body? Was he still there? Would he even get a proper burial? Or would someone just throw him on a wagon with another heap of corpses, to dump him in an unmarked festering midden somewhere?

Doflamingo could have done anything to Law. It didn't matter that he never intended to keep him as his apprentice. It didn't matter if he planned for Law to sacrifice himself. As his mouth extolled Law's virtues, like his cunning, his hatred for the world, his quickness to learn and quickness to please, Doflamingo's body was the chisel that transcribed into Law's flesh his worthlessness. It made sense that Law was disposable. He knew that. Doflamingo didn't have to remind him. The speech was not the grand unmasking that it should have been.

Law's heart swelled bigger and bigger inside his chest until he could taste it in his throat. Cora's face chased him in his dreams. His brain rang with the echo of his unfulfilled final promise. The last words he ever uttered: I lied to you. Sorry. I didn't want you to hate me.

It wasn't Cora that he hated.

It wasn't Law's first time cutting open an animal.

Before Flevance was burned to the ground, he had performed such operations within sterile environments, strictly under the supervision of his father.

Afterwards, he did so recreationally. He butchered rabbits, squirrels, lizards and frogs when they were available to him, whatever he could catch, it didn't matter because even if their outsides were different their insides were always the same; the same sickly squelch of meat, the cascade of entrails, the flash of adrenaline he felt as he seized upon them, and how always - every fucking time - it faded, and as the glow died down, he was bathed in his shame, as ephemeral as an orgasm. It was a sliver of power he had to carve out for himself, and it never lingered past the precious few seconds where he felt alive and in control. It made him wonder what Doflamingo found so appealing about raping him.

Baby 5 had killed her share of humans but she was disgusted by Law's experiments - if she was distressed by them, she had learned enough ruthlessness to disguise it. The first and only time Buffalo had glimpsed Law toying with a rat's cadaver, he had chuckled, gormless and absent of any judgment, like it was a little joke between them. "Sheesh, you've got some problems," and didn't Law know it.

The most Law could offer in his defense was that when he dispatched his subjects, he executed them quickly and painlessly. Or, well, at least keep them from suffering. Doflamingo was never quick or painless.

All the effort gone to make them feel comfortable and still their glossy, dead eyes glowered with an imagined sense of judgment. Law met the assembly unflinchingly, almost daring them to rise from the grave.

Law would have continued using dead subjects for his tests, but he had outgrown that. He couldn't take out his own kidney without first ensuring that it was possible.

Somehow he knew that even with the Op-Op Fruit's powers, he was not completely rid of the poison in his body. Not completely, though this was still the closest to normal he'd felt in years.

Today's subject was a winter hare. Red eyes and white fur. It was huddled in a corner of the wine cellar, shivering, but more out of terror than pain. Law left it some food. He'd said, Sorry, like he was trying to assert some compassion, prove through this performance that he was still human, and was left with the impression that somehow the both of them knew it didn't matter.

As he discovered through indeterminate trials and experimentation, an incision wasn't necessary to remove an organ. He once jettisoned it from the ribcage and sent it hurtling for the wall, where it smacked there like a flapjack. He learned to conjure protective casing. Something transparent, so he could observe how it worked and ensured it remained functional.

It took a very long time for him to realize this. Organs popping in the air like balloons, bodies being turned inside-out, other parts simply blinking out of existence - for all knew they had materialized elsewhere, or maybe they were just gone. It was through that power that Law had procured - stolen - his equipment, and the book he consulted for reference. Law chewed through his stores of pilfered food, relearning taste and hunger and what it was like to have a body that needed to be fed.

Law realized he was making progress when he floated a heart outside of a fox's body; the body had shuddered before the connection was severed. Now he could levitate it, spin it, put it back. If it wasn't squealing in pain, he could assume that it wasn't feeling anything.

He tried it again, this time on the hare. He prodded at the heart, waiting for it to spasm. There was no reaction. The rabbit bounced for the food that Law had laid before it, nose twitching apprehensively but otherwise appearing uninjured.

There was a great deal of anatomical overlap between humans and mammals but no rabbit or rodent could serve as a perfect substitute. Still, they had the same organs connected by the same intestinal system. The differences were in the bodies that contained them.

Law needed command and concentration above all else. He found that it was easier to keep his thoughts steady when he imagined someone speaking in his ear, like he was in school. That was how he learned most of what he knew about the body and about medicine. He first tried Doflamingo's voice, cooing the approval he had labored for. The reaction was immediate: it was expelled from him like vomit. The supple heart he had lifted burst like a ripe fruit.

His father's voice, he struggled to beckon from the grave. His face became all the more elusive to him. He couldn't conjure his face without imagining it twisted in disgust and revulsion. He withered under it. Law's mother, who was in her own respects an accomplished doctor, was no different.

The first time he called Cora back to him, he became inconsolable. He couldn't continue the procedure. It took him hours to regain his composure.

Law could imagine Corazon speaking to him with little effort. Grief was the only obstacle preventing him from doing so.

It occurred to him that it was only a matter of time before Cora's face became like his father's - that in the afterlife, he would realize his sacrifices had been squandered on such an undeserving charge.

Law thought of Cora's departing smile - before he knew he had tricked him and before he knew Cora was about to die, just the moment where he was alone, in the chest, and giggling like a kid at how stupid he'd looked. A moment of euphoria he wanted to keep and remember forever. If none of this works, Law thought, If I still have White lead disease and it kills me, I just want to think of that. Even if it hurts.

Law turned the scalpel on himself. He carved the memory of it into his left forearm. Not deep enough to kill him, intentionally or accidentally. Wasted effort, remember? He knew where all his arteries were. He just picked the part of his arm that faced away from him; not for any particular reason other than there was less chance he'd accidentally nick something that would kill him.

(Though he surmised that there would be no better opportunity to demonstrate his new powers. Maybe he was the type that learned under pressure.)

Blood pooled on the table he was braced against. The pain was- not the worst thing he'd ever felt, but at least he was feeling something.

The rabbit's nose twitched, almost in pity. Law knew that was only him projecting a sense of forgiveness onto it. It hated him. He stole it from the forest. He was just another predator.

Crying meant that he couldn't see his work. He needed clear eyes. His hands were steady as he resumed, steady despite the pain. Law completed the procedure. He observed his patient. The hare nibbled at its food, scratched at the markless spot where its heart had been removed and replaced, but otherwise appeared unperturbed. He watched and watched and watched, waiting for it to collapse, for this last hope he had struggled for to be snuffed out before his eyes.

The hare was the first surviving specimen to be turned back into the wilds. Law watched it leave, studying the last remaining vestige of his handiwork - a circle, cut on the surface of his arm, and the curve of a smile. Between the hare and himself, Law was the only one left with scars.

In another dream, Law's hands were bunched up in the dark plumage of Corazon's coat - it was real enough for him to taste the reek of blood long after he'd awoken, though he would not discover until later that he'd chewed his tongue raw. He and Corazon were suspended in the moment of death forever, untouched, Doflamingo existing both outside of it and on the edges.

"Please," Law begged him, "I don't get it, Cora, please. You're making a mistake. Why are you doing this for me? Is it because -- is it because of my name? Because I'm part of that stupid family? Why won't you tell me? Please, Cora, you HAVE TO TELL ME-"

All that bubbled from between Cora's teeth was silence and blood. Every time, Corazon took the answer with him to his grave. Every time, he died with that smile.

"The people of the D. have been given another title: 'enemies of the Gods.'"

It was an idea that Law would come to entertain endlessly. Before his first life ended, it was nothing more than a secret kept between himself and his parents. Secrets meant everything to children, so he needed no further incentive. It was important enough for them to ensure that the "D." did not perish with their generation, and yet too secretive for them to divulge the dangerous mystery behind it. Not for the first time, Law wished he could summon his parents from the grave and ask them why. It was as though the world was aware of a great joke and they were all cackling behind his back.

Something about him was wrong, something that he carried in a place within him that was deeper and darker than the White Lead disease. At times, Law could fathom no reason for any of it - the rapes, the dark fate that befell his family, perhaps by extension what happened to Cora - other than that he was born under a bad star.

Just as there was no reason that Doflamingo would take in a dying child and nurture him and groom him in preparation for an ascension that would never come.

Just as there was no reason that placed Rosinante within proximity of the conversation he was having with Baby 5 on the day he chose to confide in her.

Nothing but a perfect slew of circumstances.

On some level, Law nurtured the memory of a religion that he no longer believed in. The sisters had told him that he was made in God's image, as were all humans - that every facet of the world around them was a deliberate act of creation and what he saw before him was a perfect coalescence.

Where did an aberration such as himself lie in this design? Surely he was a mutant.

His faith was supposed to have been something he left behind in Flevance's wreckage; after all, Law was reminded of God's indifference on a regular basis. Much like a battered puppy, however, he meandered a weathered path again and again to the contours of a God's comfort, if only for occasional succor. It was in private, silently, during quiet moments of desperation, with blood freshly on his hands and the memory of Doflamingo's manhood scraping between his legs. Sometimes it was a name he invoked as Doflamingo breached him with his fingers, Law sobbing through the radiating pain as he imagined his body breaking open.

On the night he was supposed to have died, he closed his eyes and whispered his final message to God, I know it doesn't matter, but I'm sorry for all of it. And then, when he received no answer, he pitched one more question into the dark- Is it because of my name? Can you just let me in so I can ask my mom and dad why?

He hadn't received an answer. It was to be expected. If there was a God in heaven, he was a cruel and indifferent one, or perhaps it was that curse which was hidden in his blood.

The God in the sky had left the world to tear itself apart in His absence. Law was visited by another God in his bed.

If God ever spoke to him, he imagined that His voice would sound like Doflamingo's. Strained by an unattainable pleasure, hissing commands as he struggled for climax. In this particular memory, Law was riveted to the bed by Doflamingo's weight. His eyes were rolled back in his head and it made Doflamingo's voice, quiet as it was, all the clearer in his head.

Say I'm God. Say I'm your God. Say it. SAY IT.

Law imagined his pain echoing through a cathedral as he sang Doflamingo's praises. Hallelujah.

Law kept one eye trained on the anatomical chart unfurled before him as he reached out to the sore, dead part inside of him, same as if he was flexing a finger or curling his toes.

No one knew how to cure White lead disease, but as the phenomenon grew throughout Flevance, its infected people utilized what little remained of their time to study the illness that ravaged their bodies. Flevance had perished in its entirety before they could find a cure, but before the hospital had been burnt down -

- before the Trafalgar family and every doctor in the land met their end -

- they had a theory.

The toxins in the blood attacked the kidney. The kidney was responsible for filtering waste from the body. Medication used to treat standard kidney failure relieved symptoms during the early stages of the disease, but it only made one comfortable until an inevitable demise.

The skin turned pale as the poison eroded their veins. As the poison spread outside, weakening the bones. The body would struggle against it, and shut down. It was painful. On the day of what was supposed to have been his death, Law had experienced what it was like when that poison reached the muscles beyond the bone. He was being unmade from the inside-out.

Law saw his first glimpse of it when he opened his arm. The blood flowing inside of it was crimson. The veins were white, chalky, like the roots of a dying tree. He followed them to his heart, assuring himself that it was still strong and beating, that there was still good blood pumping through his body, then to the kidney that had become swollen and saturated with poison.

Law swallowed the sick, nervous feeling welling up behind his tongue at seeing his own insides. Practicing it on an animal was one thing. This was another. But he knew that the moment he panicked, he'd lose focus, and then if he didn't die - he couldn't think of that.

He couldn't think of that, but he did allow himself the barest twinge of disbelief - of revulsion - that his insides weren't cold and dark and black like he had imagined, every time he'd swallowed and shared in the sickness that was inside Doflamingo.

He extracted his kidney.

In his dreams, Law's face was buried in Corazon's coat as he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

"Please," he begs him. "Don't leave me.

"Doflamingo would have told me what to do," Law cried. "I don't want to be alone again, Cora. There's nobody out there who'll want me or take me back. He's killed me. You wanted this to be my second chance but I'm still dead."

Doflamingo's shadow was eclipsing them, devouring the both of them.

"You should've just given me back."

Trafalgar Law's commitment to staying alive was not a promise made, but the law of something in motion remaining in motion. And, underneath that, a glorified sunk cost fallacy.

He couldn't entertain that. If there was ever a chance to reverse course, it would have been when he had his kidney in front of him. It could be his heart instead. He could plunge his scalpel like a dagger. End his tragic, wretched, cosmic mistake of a life in a final flash of steel and red.

Law closed his eyes. Wasted effort, he reminded himself. It had become his mantra. It rang like an echo again and again in his head until there was silence, and when there was silence, he filled it with the sound of Cora's voice.

It was warm and kind. Nothing like the version of Cora that haunted his nightmares. He looked upon his new scar and thought of his smile.

His kidney was unrecognizable compared with the healthy specimen in his tomes. It was all at once shriveled and swollen, its surface bulging with pustulent pearls the color of rotten milk. He speared one with the tip of his knife. The glomeruli were clogged with scar tissue that was hard and pebbly as he attempted to excise it, carving out small patches from the networks of blood vessels. When he felt a twinge in his rib cage he dropped it and concentrated harder until the pain was driven out of his body.

That's it, kid. You're doing great.

That sounded like something his father would have said, but he didn't say things like kid like Cora did.

He nicked the kidney. Not hard. Just enough to send chills throughout his body. Once he had crossed over the threshold of fear, a part of him found it entrancing. Like he was playing a board game.

One by one he carved the sickness from himself. White motes of disease dotted the air as he separated them from the host organ and let them fall. Hours snailed by. It was like he was rebuilding himself.

The animals that Law had killed received a proper burial. They weren't dumped in a pile like the people of Flevance. They didn't get names, or headstones, but they were disposed of with care and gentleness and at least they had meant something. It was a hollow little lie that Law told himself, to relieve himself of the guilt of the cruelty they had suffered, but they had meant something. He was alive because of them.

He didn't know what that meant, just yet.

The little mounds of snow that contained their bodies encircled the entrance to Law's hideout, leaving a curious landmark for the homeowner to find when he returned from vacation.

Law waited for a few days before departing. It was an observation period to ensure that the transplant was successful, and even with all the prior experimentation, he was not wholly confident that it would work. He expected to be in crippling pain, to be pissing blood, for his body to be too crippled and fucked-up to recognize the healthy kidney inside of him.

Color returned to his skin. The white splotches disappeared. They would not, ever, return.

As Law left the wine cellar, he was greeted with the breath of winter. He would have to get a winter coat. He was going to gain weight, and none of his old stuff would fit him.