Archive of Our Own ^beta

Bridges and train tracks hem in a town

Law dumped his bag. Didn't need to change. The school didn't have a dress policy. Good. He'd take up a scholarship at another school next year that also didn't have a dress policy. Good.

Cora snored his drunk off in the sleepout. Hot as fuck in there. Enclosing the verandah without thinking how it'd trap in the heat with the fibro panelling. Once-upon-a-time a larger family had lived here. Now it was them.

Law cracked a window open. Why couldn't Cora do that? Doffy wasn't around anymore. They were a hell of a lot poorer once they'd left Dressrosa, but safe. The dull kick of a soccer ball off brick wafted in.

Sawbones, Bones for short, their red heeler-bitzer, needed walking before Law swung the 7–10 shift at the local Mcfry. Five days a week. He bunched the front of his shirt up to his nose. It'd been washed but the oil clung even when he kept a change of clothes in the work lockers.

McFry's supplemented Cora's pension and helped Law stay in school. That scholarship would help too. But first he needed the bush and peace. To disappear into the trees and red dirt and magpie calls. Into the winter creeks that dried into pocked pebbles and boulders in summer.

Bones raced out the house, her chain hitting the screen door. The door's edge (no spring hinge) slammed into the sleepout wall, adding another gouge. Law twisted to pull the main behind him, the dog straining against the leash, her tail whapping his calves. The world was very, very big.

As they stepped off the verandah she heeled. He unleashed her along the deserted road and she stayed by his side, licked his extended finger, her nose pushing into his hand, eager for the track where she'd run free.

Thirteen had been young to nurse Cora, but Law hadn't wanted to go back into care, and whenever the dented hatchbacks pulled up in their drive, welfare officers scrabbling about for his file, Cora got it together enough so that they overlooked the child looking after the man.

Doflamingo had fucked him up. A shiny new sports car purchased with Family money. Cora had been easing Law out of Doflamingo's orbit for a while, and Law hadn't been against the idea.

And here he was. He'd made it.

Cora never drank so much that a few shirts and trousers and sturdy shoes from the thrift shop were out of reach, or less sturdy from the department store chains. They fit, covered Law's body, he was alive, and so was Cora. Existence alone was not enough, but he was glad to have it.

Cora was clumsy as it was without the compartments of his brain misaligning after the accident like lopsided and buckled vertical blinds. Taking care of his benefactor's injuries had been stressful.

He loved Law. That was good. But the ability to see the start of the week through to the end wasn't guaranteed. Cora had jerked the wheel from Doflamingo as the Family boss played chicken with an oncoming truck. Law didn't scream in the back, seatbelt tight across his chest. Couldn't. But had pulled the sides of his hat low over his face, nails digging into pelt, and rocked as the lights blared through the windscreen. When the glass cracked, the horn grew louder.

They had company. It happened once in a while. Time was limited. Bones glanced up at Law and then at the kid racing his bike ahead of them and back and then following. Silently. Front wheel wobbling as he tried to match their walking pace.

Once they were on the track, Bones ran into the scrub and snuffled out a lizard. She trotted back to Law, the kid was a few metres behind. The lizard's tail wiggling in her mouth matched the back and forth of her own.

Law used to dissect frogs, and would again. Doflamingo demonstrated the paring techniques he applied to customers with overdue bills. Law was expected to follow suit. The son of doctors, eh?

Cora had taken the knife from him and peeled and sliced a persimmon. Law stitched the gashes when the blade slipped. Doffy saved a bundle building on the skills that his charge retained after the fire that killed his family.

The fruit, picked from a wizened and twisted tree out the back, its branches full of fine eating, looked good once the drops of blood were washed off.

Now, though. The clever lizard had escaped. No harm in Bones eating the tail if she wanted to. Or was there?

"Drop."

She stared as if Law had commanded her to deface the Mona Lisa. The tail twitched like a curled moustache. Law laughed.

The kid came to his side.

"Thought you were stuck up."

Bones ate the tail.

Spiky red hair clamped under goggles, loose tank top and long shorts, who was this runt? Liked welding? Cuts and marks from rough and tumble, not rough and trouble, dotted his arm. Law knew the difference. He'd probably stacked his bike a few times.

"Yeah?"

"Killer said."

Law considered this, and contemplated the blue sky and the black bird flying across it; shots of red in its tail-feathers, rain clouds trailing behind. He turned his wrist, his watch always slipping to the underside. Clicked his fingers for the dog to heel. There wasn't much time before he had to grab his raingear and cycle to work. He needed peace now.

The kid stared at the tense back of the boy striding along the path. Away from him. Killer was right.

This school was better than the last. Directly after the accident in the areas where Doflamingo was less than generous his name was mud. Rooms fell silent when Law entered, then rustled with whispers, and sometimes disrupted into name calling. It was what it was.

Law kept his own surname but Cora was a Donquixote, and Law's last place of residence was the Donquixote mansion. It was on the records. His adoptive father, Doflamingo, was the scion.

Putting Cora back together and finding a home took time, so the testing period came and went and he was a late entry to the school. They placed him in basic to be fair to the other kids.

It wasn't so bad, but he was going to be a doctor. The maths teacher let him work ahead in class and had lent him higher level texts when he saw him fill in the answers for the whole unit and the next and the one after that in the first lesson.

Law appealed to the head of school but the programme was set, and what was he trying to do? Throw weight around? Donquixote was gone. It wasn't going to work, especially not from some shit of a kid. Law watched the principal annotate his future.

He wished Cora was full bottle. He was calm and bright and sunny, and had a backhander that sent him sprawling and short of breath and bruised for a week, but also used to have this quiet manner that would've looked the director in the eye and said, Donquixote? What of it?

Law took what his maths teacher at the first school gave him, which was a lot, and completed homework at lunch, because he had to look after Cora and to do his shifts. McFry hired thirteen-year-olds so long as they were turning fourteen. And he had been.

Cora and Law were at the top of the waiting list for subsidised housing, and eventually moved into the small fibro cottage with the sleepout in another area. The house could've fit into the yard twice. A throwback to when space was to be had, even if you were poor, but building materials had been scarce and expensive. He kept his job but transferred to a new branch.

Nothing was a step down. Everything was survival. Law's maths teacher wrote a letter of recommendation, so even though his name went before him, so did the letter. He made copies because he didn't want creases in the original. He unfolded and read the words every night for two weeks before he turned off the light.

He shared a copy with Cora and the hug was suffocating. Cora lit a cig and forgot as he patted the spaces to his side for the coffee mug he kept nearby, a nip of gin swirling its base.

At the new school, Law was streamlined into classes whose graduates went on to teaching and nursing jobs. A step up. Their houses were brick and might have four bedrooms, from times of larger families, DIY extensions and faulty wiring.

Law's parents had been doctors, and he didn't care how much bad luck he had to fight to get there. He'd be one too.

For now. Killer. The blond. He was in his maths class. Law just didn't have time. Work, homework, preparation. It all had to be done in the periods allotted and breaks.

Who gave a fuck?

The dog, hungry, skinny, hiding out on the one part of the verandah not enclosed, had found Law and Cora one day. She'd had pups and they'd sucked her dry. She sat on the painted concrete. Panting.

Law stepped out and crouched in front of her. She thumped her tail, looked at him, then away, but didn't scamper or skitter. He ran a finger under her collar, tipped up the tag and noted a number.

Cora peered out the door and she quaked at the huge figure. Law rested a hand at the back of her head. She turned and licked it and lay down, full body. Crossed her paws and set her head on them, one furtive sweep of her tail across the floor.

The screen door slammed against the sleepout wall. The dog shot up. Cora stumbled out with an ice-cream container half-full of water. It mostly landed on Law and Bones, but there was enough left to place some in front of her.

She curled and backed against the wall, but when Cora retreated into the house and sat on the stoop, knee propping the screen open, cig hanging from his lip, she stood, cast a look his way, and drank. Greedily.

Law called the number.

Pots and pans and water running, a tv blaring, a baby crying, and someone bellowing for his socks crowded the conversation. The call ended when Law stated the situation.

He tried again but couldn't get through.

Bones settled after the water, and Law sat next to her, and Cora then squeezed next to him, only smelling a little of gin. It was kinda undetectable. Law worked harder to keep him in booze. But he was a considerate alcoholic. Rationed himself from cheque to cheque.

It hurt. Law knew it did. The damage from the accident. He didn't blame Cora for taking the edge off, but wished there was a way that didn't blunt Law from his vision.

The kid's name was Kid and he rode ahead of Law. As long as he didn't engage, Law didn't mind. He had his work, his schedule, his time to run over the future and to smooth down the past. Or release it into the easterlies that whipped through the marri and ghost gums, trunks uneven and ragged and smooth and stark against the sky.

Puffs of dust rose as the kid slammed the brakes of his mountain bike so it skidded across the red gravel, one brogie after the other. He didn't fall.

Law guessed it was meant to impress. There was skill to it. At night, cars squealed around corners, circled their neighbourhood like guards rattling batons along bars. Doughnuts streaked the roads. Same thing. They had wheels and that was all they did with them.

Another haze of dust as the kid pedalled back fast, twisted his bike in the dirt right near Law, red speckling the cuff of his jeans. Bones was off sniffing out lizards. She didn't mind this boy, although Law had to call her back from chasing the bike.

"D'ja see it?"

Law looked down. "What?"

"My brogie."

"Mmm," Law said.

Kid raised his eyebrows, defensive and eager. Law thought about being stuck in basic his first years with Cora. The kids were cool. There were a few like him, just slipped between the cracks. But those outside of basic didn't want much to do with him.

Donquixote. That was good. Worked in his favour. They thought he was dumb and violent and left him alone.

But he copped a lot too. Teachers didn't trust the kid from basic, didn't believe the Donquixote foundling when he said he had nothing to do with petty schoolyard shit. Everyone had a grudge against Doffy.

Detention ate into looking after Cora and his work time. He just couldn't afford it. Couldn't afford to lose that job. Or Cora. Thank christ he'd left that school.

"Awesome." He meant it.

Kid wasn't sure. He tilted his head, then back, then slammed a forearm over the crook of his elbow, jerking a fisted arm into an Italian salute. The raised finger was the icing on the fuck-you-cake. That older kid. He grabbed his bike and pedalled away.

A bob-tailed lizard sat in the middle of the track like a pile of mottled blue granite. Law leashed Bones. The lizard moved a few tiny steps as they passed. Not enough blood flowing to get out of harm's way.

Everything tumbled away when he was here. Their first night had been one of many drunken nights, not Cora's. He was quiet or sentimental. But outside was this brokenbottlecunt yelling at that brokenbottlecunt, and Law didn't know if he'd ever get enough sleep, but like when hadn't that been a problem?

The Donquixotes knew how to brawl too. Doffy knew how to contain it. The mansion was possibly bigger than this whole neighbourhood.

Cora and he planted out some flowers. Or Cora did and Law chose a few. The woman across the street ordered fifty pink plastic flamingos for her husband's sixtieth birthday. It gave both Law and Cora the shudders to see them decorate her yard, but once the garden lost its Dressrosan sheen, which it had to—they were miles from anywhere anyone wanted to be—they saw it for what it was. An act of love.

Plasters patterned with characters to make boo-boos better hid Dressrosan mishaps. Sores in this part of the world ran just as much, but the seep was all on show.

Their neighbour's gardening skill and experience was superior and she was generous with tips and knowledge, and sometimes Cora and Law had the time to listen.

The new school. Killer. He didn't live in this area. The school took the kids from the surrounding suburbs and Law's was the one they ragged on. The houses all looked the same. Could guarantee you'd lose your tyre rims if you parked there. Anyone even own a car? How could they stand living there?

But it was a treeline away from suburbs pulling in a higher pay-packet, and two treelines from the ones higher yet.

He was safe. He and Cora were. And one day-off when Cora was functioning, Law had set out to explore. And one block from the sameness—from the glass smashed like mica in the road (you went barefoot but you shouldn't)—a track led into the bush. For anyone.

By sixteen, Law had lived with three families, four if he counted the time in care. Two accidents had taken those he'd loved or had looked after him, in their own way, even if it was self-serving. Lost a sister. Recovered from bad health, and he'd been happy for the chance to breathe without interference.

It was a blessing. But there was more. Doflamingo, for all his dealings and training of Law to take over as some kind of peddler or toecutter for his Family, had stoked his intelligence and curiosity.

Cora tugged at the idea that his snarling, voice-cracking, pain-wracked self could be loved. That someone could. Beyond these four blocks. Doffy's goals. His own health.

When Sawbones joined Cora and Law, escaping into the bush morphed into responsibility and he was glad for the company.

"Hoi!" Kid was ahead of them. Hanging out. Maybe had been for a while. Looked like Law was in the good books again.

Kid had strewn his bike, and any passing cyclist or horse rider could trample it, but it wasn't Law's job to tell him that. Treating broken limbs would be practice. Whether Kid's or those of the people tripped up, didn't matter.

When Law joined him, Kid scrambled up the quartz face of a path, a few rocks crumbling, bull ants boring into loose dirt. Law learnt quickly, anyone did, to step quickly over the nests and tracks.

He started after Kid and didn't know why. Bones raced ahead. "I gotta work," he said. "My shift starts at five."

Kid looked back. Lots of kids in the area had part-time jobs. He'd seen Law pedal away, uniform must have been in his backpack.

"Won't take long."

Kid sat on a low outcrop. Law stretched and Bones circled and Kid gestured for Law to join him, and he leant his head over the shadowed, indented hollow below. It was cooler there. Moist. Water fed up from the ground near the tiny fly-catcher, the pitcher plant.

"Animals like bees and other insects crawl into it and it eats 'em up."

Bones sniffed the undergrowth and Law reached for her collar.

"They're fine with dogs brushing against them. The wind, that kinda thing, but don't open them with a stick or like the tip of your finger."

Law looked across. No?

Kid shook his head. His top had a few holes towards the bottom.

"Killer said."

Law nodded, and Kid wondered if the guy ever spoke. Law wondered if Kid would accept a few new shirts from his next thrift shop run. They lasted longer.

"Go on."

"He said there's only a few chances to snack. Takes heaps of energy to catch bugs and digest, and look—"

Law glanced down.

"—smaller than a bike hub wheel axle nut."

"That small, huh?" Law didn't know exactly what a wheel axle nut was, but the plant could be squashed underfoot.

"Like, who would want to eat you? But even if it did, can't, but all this spit builds up, and it can only close four or five times before the flower drops off." Kid sat up, cross-legged on the rock. "So shutting for no reason, getting nothing for nothing—" Kid so wanted to stick a twig in the mouth.

"Gonna weaken it." Law also straightened and drew his knees up, a bit disappointed but also relieved that he wasn't deemed good eating. Bones couldn't climb the rock's surface and worried below. "'s alright, girl."

"You speak?"

Law turned to the kid, now scrambling from the outcrop and heading back to the main path. Did he want an answer or not? Hadn't he strung a few words together just before?

"Your shift starts in a few, right?" Kid threw across his shoulder.

Right, Law thought, and followed.

The burnt-out car body, rusted against the dry grass and sky, merged into the red soil.

Law often passed it and imagined its journey and why it was set alight. But Kid saw it with fresh eyes, and raced over to point out the components he could distinguish from the shell.

"You'll get tetanus."

Kid shook his head. "I'm gonna be a mechanic. Mechanics gotta know stuff." The way things worked. It fired his mind.

"I'm gonna be a doctor, and you'll get tetanus if one of those bits of metal slices you. Rust."

Kid looked over, surprised. He wasn't sure whether it was the goal or that Law uttered a sentence longer than a few words to someone who wasn't his dog.

"I'm careful."

Law nodded. Whistled for Bones, and made his way home.

On a rare weekend when he wasn't scheduled to work, Law set out and Kid joined him halfway, jumping off his bike to step beside him along the bituminised road.

Bones wandered behind Law, and he stuck out the finger of his other hand. She nosed it, and the back of Kid's leg, and trotted between them.

"Longer walk today. Got a bit of time."

Kid didn't know an invitation had been sent and Law didn't know he'd sent it. As they went off-trail, Kid dropped the bike in a small clearing and locked it up. All the bike-thieving shitheads stayed in the bike-thievery den of their own neighbourhood, so it'd be alright.

They hiked across and up a higher hill, turning back to see the water-catchment plant and the slow build of houses through the bush.

"Dad used to take me gilgieing."

"Gilgieing?"

Kid ran ahead with Bones. Sometimes this tall silent boy knew fuck-all. "Gilgies. Like yabbies, marron, local crays."

Law liked fish and especially crays. He'd had them when he was with the Family. Once with his parents, that he could remember. "How d'ya catch them?"

Kid launched into a tale of nets and lights and nights, and raw meat on nylon strings and how, when they returned home, his mother cooked the gilgies in a butter sauce with a sprinkling of salt and black pepper .

Unlike the pitcher plant that wasted energy trying to eat the air, Law was too single-minded to feel jealous. Had too many students and teachers and doctors and police and carers tell him just who he was to presume to know about others.

Their hearts sped up with the ascent, but neither boy was fully out of breath, and the dog not at all. "They still here? Your mum and dad?" Kid seemed to be pretty free for someone with a tight family.

"Alive, you mean?"

Law guessed he did mean that. "Mmm."

"Yeah. But Dad lives over east. They split up. Mum's gotta work all the time. I see him once a year."

"Do you go gilgieing? Over east?"

Kid looked at him as if he was truly stupid. "I told you they were local."

Law took that in. Surely there was some form of edible crustacean on the other side of the country.

.

.

The quarry was something else. Law called out Bones' name and it echoed off the sheared and gutted face of the earth. She barked.

Kid hadn't been here. He knew the land better than Law, but Law was older and roamed further. Kid whooped and ran a few circuits, the dog yipping after him.

Another burnt-out car body then held his attention, and Law surveyed the graffiti painted on the rocks—the pentagrams, and distant pop bands, and Fords Rule and JJ♥CS 4eva.

In the future, they'd fence off the cliffs when rock climbing became one of those pastimes and, when Law revisited, he had to share the quarry and his morning walk with crampons and four wheel drives and all the blow-ins, like he'd once been.

But now it was accessible. He clambered up and over boulders and stone, and Bones was agile but could follow only so far, so he didn't go too far. Kid ran through slips of dirt like a mountain goat and plopped beside Law staring out at the red-streaked escarpment across from them.

"A doctor hey?"

Killer said it wasn't likely knowing the school they went to, but Kid knew Killer was sending off those scholarship things too, and Killer said there was a way. That you had to keep focused, but a mechanic's shop in a bigger city near a hospital where maybe specialists worked and had time for grease monkeys like them wasn't such a bad idea. Doctors had cars that needed tuning and the cash to pay for it.

Law lay back, hands under his head and viewed the sky, the wisps of white, the wing-flap of birds, and the streaming of planes.

"My parents were doctors."

"You don't live with them?"

"They're dead." And Kid paused and then drove a stick into the soil and kicked grains into the air in the way he couldn't harass the fly-catchers. Bones raced over and stuck her nose then tongue in Law's ear and he groaned and smiled and she flattened out beside him and rested her head on his chest, tongue lolling. Dog saliva all over his t-shirt.

"You can get a moped, right?"

"Can I?" Law moved his arm across his eyes against the sun and the dog.

Kid bet Law knew. He knew everything. Except about gilgies.

"When you're sixteen, you can get a moped licence and ride to school and your job and all."

Kid watched Law's other hand work Bones' fur and skin. The black tattoos he'd rewarded himself with for passing the scholarship exam almost rippling. His mentor, that tall guy, had his face inked, so Kid supposed a friend of the family had done Law's, cos the two didn't have much in the way of cash.

"They're not gonna take you at the top places with DEATH on your fingers."

"Too bad for them," Law said, remembering receptionists and nurses and doctors swarming. Cora couldn't get even a toehold into brightly-lit hospital foyers as he carried a much smaller version of Law, in need of treatment, or at least pain relief.

"What's that mean?" This guy only spoke some of the time, and only ten percent of it made any sense to Kid's thirteen-year-old mind.

"What's good about mopeds?"

Kid knew he'd been fobbed off, but was always happy to talk about engines. Even mopeds.

"Can get you to work quicker. You can cover the whole city."

Law's turn of lips might have been a smile or grimace. By the time he'd saved ten or twenty dollars or so a week, he'd be old enough to get a car. But the new school was a bus and train ride away, and he'd be late getting back to Cora, and could only work the McFry's on the weekends.

"Worth thinking about," he said.

.

.

Boring. Law had fallen asleep. Kid dashed about with Sawbones, Sore Bones, but she refused to jump all over her owner while he was sleeping, though he'd seen her do it a gazillion times before. And Law worked hard. Always had a shift or homework or was chasing after Cora.

Kid made a small pile, a pyre, Heat, a friend of his and Killer's, would've said. A cairn, some kind of offering, some kind of prey, on Law's chest as it rose and fell.

Law didn't stir. Not much of a gang member and not very bright. Falling asleep where the ants scurried across any object, taking pieces of it as they went.

Kid waited for him to wake and knock the lot to the ground, or grab his wrist like the pitcher plant closing in on the insect, making him pay for breathing his air. How many items could he add before he reacted?

Kid broke a leaf from a salmon gum and inhaled the eucalyptus and let it rest against the olive green of Law's t-shirt.

An unpolished piece of rose quartz. There were so many around here. The hippies hadn't found them yet to polish them into pendants to heal the heart. It fit well in the dip of Law's chest and collarbone. The best place to aim for in a fight.

He wafted a magpie feather, probably lost during a run-in with a whistling kite, under Law's nose—no reaction—before placing it on the other side of the quartz.

A honky nut. They dropped from the Marri after the twenty-eight parrots had rooted through the fruit of the tree and taken their fill, then flew away and deposited the seeds for the tree to grow again.

The nuts fell in marble-slippery clusters on the path, and Bones loved racing after them as Law or Kid kicked them for her. Sometimes five or six at a time, so she dashed and twisted after one and another and another. Finally holding one between her teeth to drop in front of Law for him to kick again.

A twig. Kid couldn't poke the carnivorous plant with a twig but Law was hardly likely to wither on the vine and die from a little aggravation.

Killer was surprised they talked, though he admitted Law had helped him with the last part of a gnarly equation. Kid didn't go to the school for kids who were gonna be nurses and teachers, but Killer told him Law sometimes tutored the redhead first-year student who drew maps in her downtime. Maybe Law had some space to spare.

With a puff of air, Law opened his eyes and grumbled at the bed of gravel pricking into his jeans and light t-shirt. It was cold. He'd pull his jumper from the backpack soon. He froze at Kid gawking at him, then raised his head and upper body slightly and stared down at his chest.

He leant back, and knew he'd be applying salve to bites and sunburn, but was rested. He cupped his hands and lay them on his belly, below Kid's offering, and wondered if he himself was some kind of sacrifice.

"Which one?"

Kid moved closer. Startled. The big kid wasn't angry or even annoyed. Bones' ears flapped as she shook herself out.

"Huh?"

"Which one is special?" Law tipped his head down again, forming a double chin, to view Kid's work.

Special? They were just rocks and feathers and nuts and twigs and leaves.

"Why?" Suspicious. Remembered the girl he thought liked him and he'd made a sketch and she took it, but later it sat crumpled up in the bin. She and her friends giggled as he walked by.

"I can't take all of them."

Kid coloured and stared at Law's hands, scrubbed and clean, but nicked from practice in biology labs and marked with burns from grills. And then the tatts. He picked up the feather and pressed it into the right one, and the quartz into the other.

Law almost protested that two pieces weren't the same as one, but he closed his mouth and curled his fingers around the offerings and as he sat up the twig, leaf and nut fell to the ground.

Bones pushed him back down, licking his face all over and he laughed. "All right, girl. Let me get up. Then we can go."

Kid grabbed her collar, squatting on the stone so Law could sit then stand, and he watched him slip the quartz into his side pocket and the feather into his bag.

It's a bus and train and late journey home when Law starts at the new school. The tatts on the back of his hands are the four points of his mother, father, sister and Cora. The feather's too fragile to carry, but he rests his head on the bus window against the creep of night, trying to finish his homework, and turns the quartz in his pocket and thinks of Kid and Sawbones walking the hills. Each step and push of pen and sneaker edges him one day closer to flight.