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Death has always laced the air around Trafalgar Law with its pungent, weirdly sweet flavour of rot for as long as Trafalgar Law can recall. It started early on, with his parents being doctors in a plague-ravaged Flevance, and grew stronger with the Amber Lead that seeped into everyone’s bones through the small town’s drinking water supply, the contagious destruction that spread like wildfire through a dry tundra, devouring everything in its path to leave burnt, black earth and the possibility of new, transformed life.
Only life hadn’t come to the white streets of heaven, nor had salvation; but in their stead painful, bloody red death at the hands of a government that would gladly wash their hands of the sins it committed against a peaceful people. Initially borne from unknowing ignorance, that rather quickly veered off the trodden path sharply and became a twisted kind of greedy malevolence that covered the white city in tooth enamel and yellowing bone.
Bodies left out in the streets, ballooning under the sun, with white-flecked flies buzzing around unseeing, milky eyes. Even their feeble attempt at life had been tainted already with the contagious poison, and no hope remained for those who tried to resist. Not even something as unimportant as an insect had remained untouched by the wrath of death upon her discovery of the heresy committed on her peaceful shores of a paradise now silenced and forgotten.
Not unlike Law himself. He’d wilted under Corazon’s hands, wrapped up tightly in black feathers that smelled like silent madness, cigarette smoke and a warm embrace that promised hope in the face of certain death. The stench of decay had already spread throughout Law’s young bones and infected his very core. A lost plant, even with the most sophisticated of medicines and treatments — the ones that hadn’t been available to him, even with the name of terror looming in the shadows. The promise of death lurking in the air, beneath red, red lips and a grotesquely wide smile. Oh but he had loved, and he had mourned, and he had lost. The grief had rushed through him like wildfire, and it had left him barren in the wake of raging, ravaging destruction. It had left him wide open and empty.
But emptiness had left him open for new feelings, new goals. The noose around his throat had never been tighter, and yet he’d never felt more free, more sure of what he needed to do. More sure of the life that awaited, of the freedom that lurked around the corner and flavoured the howling winter winds with hope and the metallic sting of ice. Suddenly the polar nights, with ice crystals dancing on biting winds and snow drifting between torn clouds and hidden stars, contained a modicum of comfort that previously not even the gentle, caring hands of his parents had managed to nurture in his small, frail body.
His breaths still fogs white before his eyes when the Polar Tang crests above the waves in the dark hours of the night, just before dawn sets her pale fingers on the corners of the world to lift the night from the horizon. White, like the colour of frost and snow, of bone and mourning.
And so every morning is an exercise in reverence for the life that still beats in him, sluggish and stubborn, gathering its bearings to survive and process the grief that ravaged him just like the sickness did. Every morning, every exhale is a memory of the white city and the Amber Lead that fed it, spread it and finally killed it. Every morning lived is a promise made to those who died. To the picked-off bones rotting away on frozen shores, dry feathers hanging onto dead, leathery skin, dancing with the wind but not quite ready to depart the memory of the creature they’d once held up in the air. The fish who couldn’t make their way back into the ocean, the children who were lost to the times and tides, washed up on distant, foreign shores where they now sleep, cold and alone, forever.
And when Law studies these rugged cliffs, wet from relentless ocean spray, the world sometimes shifts and he sees another shore, another place frozen in time, another abundance of life eviscerated by cold, hard metal and rotting illness. Suddenly crippled trees and broken-off branches turn into the limbs of the innocents whose blood spilled red out of the wounds torn into their sickly-pale skin, where it spread onto the contaminated grounds and soaked the earth. Perhaps there is a significance after all, he thinks grimly around the greyish smoke of his submarine’s engine, as they turn away and prepare to dive. The silence is warmer, and infinitely more comforting.
As a child, he had been expelled from paradise by means of violence and fear, he hadn’t been left to die but he’d also not been fostered to live. Instead, he’d been given the poison of dependency and fallen into a catatonic state of despondence, suckled a different kind of poison from the teat of treason and despair.
Doflamingo’s world had been rotten from the core, and the Ope Ope no Mi hadn’t been anything but the expression thereof. A foul pomegranate that had stunk to the high heavens, and Law had eaten it anyway just because it put that beautiful smile on Corazon’s silent face.
And in the end, none of it had been enough. His blood too had spilled across trampled white snow, had melted the ice as it still pumped hot and lively from the many holes torn into his body by bullet fragments and wooden shrapnel, and congealed into an unsightly mess around his limp body, as the cold winter air claimed the last dredges of life from Corazon’s body.
A life for a life had still tasted more foul than the rotten fruit from the bottom of the sea ever could.
Ironic, somehow, that it should be that very rot which decayed the power structures enough to weaken Doflamingo with hubris and presumption of incontestability enough that Law could finally sever the strings that held his limbs tight. The first breath of humid freedom, among the rotted and wind- and scavenger-torn corpses of dead marine wildlife had been just as nauseating as biting into the rotten core of a cursed pomegranate, and Doflamingo has, disappointingly, bled just as red and whimpering as every man and child before him.
A human, with aspirations, and dreams, and a final succumbing to death (only that death would have been far kinder than any reckoning offered to the man by the government officials — a fallen, disgraced Dragon, on an empire of petrified shit and mummified lies, humbly begging for some semblance of mercy had been oh-so-satisfying to witness, even through the forced distance of newspapers and scuttlebutt).
And once again Law finds himself empty, for his wrath has burned out and his mission is completed, and against all odds life still pumps through his veins, cherry-red and sweet, and most importantly ready to explore new shores, and rebuild the paradise he once left behind and lost on the white shores of Flevance.