Work Text:
one
For as long as Law could remember, his family had always consisted of four people.
His father. His mother. Himself. Lami.
They weren’t an especially grand family, even with his parents as locally-renowned doctors. In Spider Miles, they were just a bit more well-off than average.
His younger days were spent caring for his sister and getting affectionate hugs and kisses on the cheek from his mother. But that was when Law realised that his father had never glanced his way.
It was only when he picked up his first anatomy book that his father had turned to look at him and gave Law his first smile.
“Look Law, this is the anatomy of the human body.” He says, as he tucks Law into bed for the first time. He points to an interlocked network of blue lines. “These are veins. They carry the blood throughout your body.”
He touches Law’s arm, and then points to his own.
“The blood that runs through you is the same as the one that runs in mine.”
Later at night when his family is long asleep, Law will keep his bedside lamp lit and run his fingers along his veins in awe.
He’ll think about the beauty of his blood pumping and breathing life into two completely independent beings.
He’ll want to wake up early the next morning to grab the next book, and the next and then learn learn learn more more more about how his body moves and how blood would colour the body in healthy flushes of red. But now, he sleeps blissfully.
Years later, he’ll see that same blood pool on the hospital floor as his world burns down around him in an anguished cry.
two
Doflamingo was unlike any other man Law had ever seen.
He was brutal and unyielding, and he constantly seemed to treat everything like a game. Even lives were nothing but a tool for amusement for him.
Law was brought into a room entrapped by metal. There were no windows and the only exit was guarded by a slouching, snotty old man. Another man, middle-aged, tied up, blindfolded and gagged, sat before him.
Law could see the tear tracks running down his cheeks as the man shook in blatant fear.
If Law was back at Spider Miles he would be rushing to untie the man and ask if he was okay. Back then, everyone at Spider Miles had cared for each other no matter how little the issue was. But this was not Flevance. This could never be Flevance.
“Shoot him Law.”
It was almost a kindness to not give him a choice in taking his first life. The man gasps and struggles in desperation before falling limp in a pained sob.
Law observes distantly as the man’s blood spills from the gaping bullet wound in his chest- watches it steal his colour away. Law couldn’t help but compare it to his own skin tone.
His own skin looked whiter, yet Law was still alive.
That was the day Law knew, he could no longer go back.
three
Life in the DonQuixote family was never easy but Law had never been looking for easy.
He had been looking for lethal.
It was to no one’s surprise that he was not liked by Corazon, especially after the stabbing incident.
Corazon had never cared about Law.
Law’s belief wasn’t shaken even when he was kidnapped onto a small sailboat and carted off to numerous hospitals to get prodded and poked at.
The clown was a fool, thinking that there was any chance for Law to live past his expiry date.
A stubborn, disaster-creating idiot that should not be allowed to run around alone in case he died even before Law did.
Corazon had never cared about Law.
But as Law listens wide-eyed to Corazon’s drunken cries, he wonders when even that simple fact had changed.
After that night, Cora-san didn’t change how he treated Law but Law could tell that something was different.
In the future, Law would look back and realise that it was Cora-san’s apprehension, tension and fear as his final days approached closer, but younger Law only thought that the man had finally gone insane.
In the weeks that followed, Cora-san stuck to him like glue. Every little cough or scrape he had, the other man would already be on him, asking him if he was alright how he was feeling would he like to go and steal some pain medication-
Law didn’t like doctors.
Law didn’t like marines.
Cora-san was a liar.
He was everything Law hated in a person, too bright, too loud, too annoying and relentlessly persistent. Law hated how stubborn the other man was in making him happy.
He hated how Cora-san refused to stop loving him.
As blood soaks into snow on a remote and forgettable island, it shatters the hopes of a manipulated king and his innocent kingdom with it.
But from it, Law rises out of its remains in a silent hollow despair, of too many people lost for someone too young.
And
.
.
.
.
.
.
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four
Four.
Four four four four.
It had always been four.
Four was the unlucky number. The black sheep of the number line. Always surrounded by death and disease, and, to be avoided at all costs.
But Law had always grown around death. He kept himself alive by hiding under corpses leaving Flevance- he has killed people without batting the other eye- and a man died so that he could take another breath today.
Instead, he became the Surgeon of Death. A man of phenomena who could take apart a person as easily as he could save them. And because of that, he could now stand on the grounds of a ruined kingdom and face a demon that held no care for heaven’s wrath.
This man had taught him many things.
How to hold a gun.
How to take a life.
How to be cruel.
There are parts of Law today that are still all things Doflamingo guided him in. Tips and tricks he used that were the DonQuixote Family’s specialities.
As he faces down this man who had seen him at his worst and watched him grow into the person he is today, Law wonders if the result could have been anything different.
“Why do you carry his name?”
There’s a word stuck in his throat that Law hadn’t uttered or even given a thought to since he was 10.
It’s a title that had fluttered between three different people, regardless of the D in his name, but only one got to hear Law call him by it.
However Law doesn’t say anything. He knew that it was all useless at this point. Instead he draws his sword and points it towards a man that could’ve been family.
Now that the curtains have finally been drawn up, after the day is over, Law is certain that both he and Doflamingo will bleed over this stage he prepared.
Let their blood run into the cracks of the land Cora-san once lived on, and bring him comfort as he rests.
Blood will fall like rain over the land that has just lost a king:
one
With fear,
two
With anger,
three
With sorrow,
and
four
With a vicious smile that promises the return of a decade-old karma.