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When he was a child, wrecked by disease and fever, Corazón had told him bedtime stories, one after the other. Every time, they had gone like this: a dreadful tragedy would unfold and hit an unsuspecting child, who stood alone against his odds. After it, a hero, as unlikely as he was powerful, would swoop in from the seas, and then victory would follow suit. Freedom.
Law had always scoffed at him, clicking his tongue in disappointment.
“I am not a child,” he’d kept saying. “Not anymore.”
Corazón had looked at him, immeasurable sadness trapped within his adorned eyes.
“You should be,” he’d answered him and he’d run a lonely, useless hand across the child’s hair.
Law thought of those stories later, smashing his small fists, impotent and raw, against the wood of the coffer Corazón had trapped him in. Outside, Doflamingo shot his gun again and again until there were no bullets – and then he kept shooting, empty air to empty air.
You’ll never have him, Corazón said, laughing and dying and Doflamingo roared. My brother, Corazón named him in death, my brother, you’ve lost.
Law had loathed them both in that moment, that singular instant of searing agony as his muscles faltered and his knuckles bled, Corazón for leaving him and Doflamingo for taking him away. And then he’d remembered those stories, those childish, stupid stories, curled up and wheezing through the acrid smell of gunpowder, through the rocking of the box that told him Corazón was getting further and excruciatingly further away from him.
He thought of the hero he’d been promised, unexpected and beautiful and brave, golden and bright. But the stories, Law thought – and his body failed him then as he doubled over in agony –, painted the hero as alive. There had always been a happy ever after waiting at the end, hidden between the careful lulling of Corazón’s voice that always faltered as the story ran out, as if he did not dare name it while he looked at Law’s sickly frame. As if he knew. As if he’d always known.
No story spoke of this: a brother murdering another and a kid, robbed of all that made him a kid, shaking as he tried to find amongst the thick snow a dead man — a man who had been taken away already to be buried at the feet of a lonely and older man, draped in the flag of the Marines, far away from the sea.
The second time Law thought of those stories, he was unrecognizable. His body had grown and shaped itself in contradictions, stunted by the disease – half-kid and half-man, half-human and half-beast. He spat on the ground, wiping the blood that covered his knuckles on his t-shirt. A mink stared up at him, round eyes blown wide, and in them Law recognized the faintest traces of adoration.
He found them nauseating.
“Captain,” the mink learned to say not long after. Never Law. Never again just Law.
“Yes, Bepo,” he told him, accepting the furred hand extended towards him.
And then the third time, Donquixote Doflamingo plunged from the skies of Dressrosa, shedding feathers and blood in a majestic descent – elegant, graceful enough that it seemed purposeful, powerful even in defeat. Trafalgar Law, teetering at the brink of death, followed him with unblinking eyes.
From the rubble of the city emerged a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of voices, ragged and tremulous, tinged with incredulity, with incommensurable relief. Luffy! they sang. Luffy! Luffy! Luffy!
A sob ripped through his chest violently and he doubled over himself in pain, feeling for the edges of his shattered ribs.
Doflamingo fell and fell and fell and then came a thud, short and unceremonious, and Monkey D. Luffy, beaten bloody and unconscious, lay sprawled before him.
There was a smile on his face, radiant, peaceful somehow, despite the unspeakable destruction of the city, of his own body, of Law himself who crawled, tattered, towards him.
“Straw-hat,” he murmured. His voice shook, uncontrollable. And then his name. Once. “ Luffy , answer me. Please.”
To his back, the hungry maws of Dressrosa swallowed Doflamingo, the ground rising up to welcome him. Somewhere, Admiral Fujitora stood unblemished among the carnage, and sent his men down into the darkness to retrieve him.
Impel Down awaited the Shichibukai; perhaps, if the wheels of justice turned just enough this time, even death. Oblivion laid just beyond the horizon for Doflamingo; oblivion from the seas, from the empty throne he had aimed to claim, from the grieving hearts of Dressrosa that turned, already, towards the future. Perhaps, even, from Law, although he did not think about it, not now, bent and bleeding over the body of Luffy, placing a shaking hand on his forehead.
Corazón’s words flooded his mind, his tender voice filled his chest with its warmth, his blood, every splintered bit bone in him. This story, the Donquixote youngster had told a skeptic Law often, does not have to be as fanciful as you claim. Miracles do exist, Law; good prevails if you have the heart to look for them.
Bruised almost beyond recognition, slowly bleeding out onto the pavement, Straw-hat Luffy smiled.
****
It wasn’t long until the distance swallowed the kingdom of Dressrosa, delivered now to gentler hands to guide its ruins forth. Trafalgar Law stood on the stern of an unfamiliar ship and glanced backwards, attempting to catch the last glimpses of the rocky cliffs over the horizon.
He heard a noise to his back and turned to see Nico Robin sitting cross-legged, leafing through a thick, hand-written book. The red leather cover was worn, appearing ragged and thin in the corners. It was old, evidently valuable if the utmost care with which Robin held it was any indication.
“What are you reading?” he asked. He did not care, really, and Robin’s face echoed that knowledge, but he found himself suddenly welcoming the conversation, the mundanity of it, the sheer irrelevance of its topic. She chose to indulge him.
“Folktales from the South Blue,” she replied, conversationally.
Silence fell between them – or, at least, what passed for silence here, in this crowded ship. He could hear Bartolomeo to his back, bickering and swooning in equal parts, hovering several feet away from Luffy but never too far. He scratched his temples, digging his fingers into the hollow of the bone, seeking some measure of relief.
“Headache?” Robin asked, her eyes still glued to the pages. Law waved a dismissive hand in her direction.
A sudden ruckus erupted in the background and some unnamable quality in it told him, before he turned to check, Straw-hat Luffy would be sitting proudly in the center of it.
“Luffy!” he heard as if on cue. Usopp’s voice, dripping with indignation.
Law sighed. He had begun to spend too much time amongst these people. Something within his brain tingled uncomfortably at the idea of recognizing them by breath alone, by footsteps, by their intermingled snoring on their crumpled quarters.
His skin itched on his temples and nape, a ghostly memory of the discolored scars that once covered him. He scratched them furiously, and remembered Corazón’s hands, painstakingly applying minted ointments on them.
“Where did you even get this?” Law had protested, wrinkling his nose at the smell and grumbling only to stop himself from sneezing.
Corazón had replied only with the flash of a smile – quick, almost imperceptible but wolfish nevertheless, cheeky and almost mocking in a way that startled him. Corazón’s features, he’d come to think, had been chiseled to wear kindness like some sort of silk; glibness felt almost forbidden.
“Don’t worry, dearest,” the older man said. “The doctors that will miss these did not deserve them in the first place.”
Nico Robin turned her head towards the sun, pleased at the timid breeze that twirled around her. Law remembered reading about her – the demon child, sole survivor of the Ohara massacre. The Government had deemed them dangerous, monstrous, as far removed from humanity as a necrotizing limb might be; and thus their cleansing had been a relief, their death had fallen onto the world like feathers, soft and comfortable. Oh, the people muttered over their breakfast, if it wasn’t for the Marines!
But Law, if nothing else, was quite familiar with the mercy of the world. When he thought of Flevance, his memories of it were rusty, dream-like. He had, often throughout the years, attempted to peek into his childhood once more – to glimpse, if for a moment, his sister’s face and discover, deep within his subconscious, that she had never left him. But he couldn’t. He had never been able to.
He remembered very little before the fever, very little before the shack in which he saw Doflamingo for the first time, majestic like a vision among the unbearable stench.
With a jolt, Robin’s voice ripped him from his musings.
“What now?” she asked casually, as if replying to something.
Law blinked. “Sorry?”
“With Doflamingo gone, what now? What awaits the Heart Pirates? What awaits Trafalgar Law?”
“I don’t see how it is any of your business.”
It was automatic, the defense, the steel in his voice. It poured out of him like blood.
“You’re right,” she shrugged. She was unfazed by his cutting tone, as if they had done nothing but exchange pleasantries. “It is not. But perhaps you might forgive my indiscretion and accept my advice.”
Gritting his teeth, he nodded.
“When Luffy found me I was in Arabasta at the service of Crocodile – which of course I don’t expect you to know,” she said. Law looked up sharply at that, barely reacting in time to conceal his surprise. “I hitched a ride with his crew soon afterwards, expecting to disappear on any port, expecting them to leave me stranded in any port, but they never did. I never did. I’m still not quite sure why.”
She trailed off for a while. Law found himself holding his breath.
There was something out of place in Nico Robin, a certain softness at her center where there should be something else, something ugly and gnarly that recoiled to the touch. A smile fluttered on her lips when she spoke, distracted.
Law looked at her, and he wondered.
“And then came Water 7. And when things went wrong, Luffy-” she shook her head, overcome for the briefest of moments. “They came for me.”
Her eyes burned when she turned towards him, wordless, and Law understood. Somewhere within his aching chest, he understood.
He thought of Corazón as he always did, as he suspected he always would.
“A surgeon’s duty is to heal, you fucking asshole,” Corazón would scream at the doctors when they turned their condemnatory eyes towards Law, their professional detachment crumbling into frenzied fear.
“Cariño,” he’d tell him, later, pacing angrily and choking on his cigarette as several wings of the hospitals burned to their back. Law would look up at him, wet with feverish sweat and tears, tired beyond his years. “Don’t worry. Generosity exists, I have seen it; we must only find it.”
Nico Robin immersed herself once more in her book. Perhaps she kept an eye on him, on his reaction, perhaps she didn’t. Law wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t turn towards her.
Donquixote Doflamingo had fallen from the skies of Dressrosa. To his back, Straw-hat Luffy laughed at something Franky said, louder than the world.
Trafalgar Law tilted his head and listened.
****
It was only through sheer stubbornness that he stopped himself from grunting in pain when he attempted to stretch.
His power had flickered back to him almost shyly after Doflamingo had almost entirely depleted it and he’d spent the night painstakingly mending his insides – untangling torn sinews and smoothing out mangled muscles, repositioning ribs and reconstructing bone after splintered bone until he’d slowly nursed himself back into some measure of health.
It did, however, still hurt like hell.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, cracking his fingers.
Roronoa Zoro looked up at the noise from where he lifted heavy weights, planted firmly in the corner he had made himself owner of. Sitting cross-legged beside him was Luffy, absent-mindedly alternating between napping and munching on the tray of gyozas Bartolomeo had — blushing crimson — brought him.
“These are good, Zoro,” the idle Captain informed from the ground. The pirate hunter craned his neck towards him, bent under the massive weights he carried. “Do you want one?”
Before handing the last gyoza towards the other man, Luffy stole a bite, big and blatant, and then stretched his arm towards Zoro. The pirate hunter made a face that remained stuck firmly between affectionate and annoyed before swallowing the rest of the gyoza in one big bite.
Law found himself staring at Luffy’s jolly chewing that soon dissolved into a cheeky green. His bright eyes looked up at Roronoa in expectation, hanging onto his expression as if his verdict on the gyozas was the single most important thing in the world.
Transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away, Law watched the captain lick his fingers clean, chasing the remaining flavor, one by one.
Zoro nodded when he tasted his gyoza and Luffy chuckled, laying back once more, undeterred in his absolute, almost stubborn contentment with the world. The captain’s body showed immense signs of wear and tear – bruises and slashes, long and ugly, some stitched and some not, covered his naked torso, barely hidden by sparse jet black hair. Beneath it, stretching with his every breath, laid his massive scar.
Law remembered the desperate flight from Marineford, from the zealous chase of the then-Admiral Akainu. He remembered Jinbe, tall and majestic and tremendously powerful, holding Straw-hat’s mangled body in his hands and begging; without reserve, without contemplation, just begging. Save the boy, save the boy, save the boy. And so, Law had.
Luffy had never asked about it, about his reasons for saving him. Not then, not now. When Law’s crew had left him in Amazon Lily, he’d been more beast than man, unthinking in grief, in despair, tearing at his bandages and at his skin.
“Let me wake up,” Luffy had bellowed through tears as Jinbe struggled to pin him down. “Let me wake up, let me wake up, let me wake up.”
Law felt almost nauseous at the memory of Luffy’s screams, so reminiscent of his own, thirteen years back, dragging his shaking knees through freezing snow, following uphill an uneven trail of blood.
But now-
“You’re staring,” Roronoa Zoro called, voice like stainless steel, from the other side of the room.
To his credit, Law did not jump. Luffy looked up from his spot, curious, and then his face parted into a wide grin, radiant, when he looked at him.
Something within Law’s chest itched.
“Torao!” he called, cheerful. “Do you want to join us? We finished the gyozas but you can go ask for more.”
Law made a face, somewhere between apologetic and irreverent.
Luffy’s hair had gotten quite long in comparison to the last time he’d seen him, shattered half to pieces in Amazon Lily, and it had begun to curl ever so slightly behind his ears. Law watched it, captivated by the unruly strands, as Luffy shrugged, unbothered.
He reclined once more, placating the merciless sun with his straw hat, obscuring his face so he could fall back asleep. His left hand reached outwards, limp in absolute relaxation, towards Zoro’s ankle like an anchor. The pirate hunter accepted the touch, seemed to lean into it even.
Monkey D. Luffy, Law had learned quickly, was a very strange man. His touch was given thoughtlessly, shamelessly, as if there were no boundaries to separate him from the outside world.
It had irritated Law quickly—his physicality, the unnatural ease with which he touched and was touched, the constant affection lavished onto him. He was so sure it would have driven him to madness and now—now he didn’t know.
He didn’t move for a very long time. He sat, lulled almost into relaxation by the swaying ship, watching as Luffy’s sleeping thumb drew idle circles on Roronoa Zoro’s ankles over and over and over underneath the warm evening light.
****
Rocked by the quiet waves of an unfamiliar sea, he slept uneasily, turning and turning. Quick steps sounded to his back and he turned just in time to see Straw-hat Luffy hovering over him, the hem of his hat obscuring what little moonlight entered the room.
“Torao,” the younger man murmured, testing his wakefulness.
“What do you want, Straw-hat?”
“You’re sweating. And you’re pale.”
Before Law could even begin to reply, a hand came up to his forehead. The touch was short-lived and warm and unimaginably soft and it left him gasping for air, reeling as it’d wounded him.
“What are you doing?” he spat and his voice sounded raw, as if something had bursted it open. It left a bitter aftertaste in his throat.
“I thought you might have a fever, that’s all,” Luffy said. “I’m pretty sure you don’t, though.”
“No, I don’t. Let me sleep.”
“Alright,” Luffy replied.
They had been given a room for themselves as the only Captains present—although Bartolomeo had grumbled long over the choice of granting Law the honor of placing him with Straw-hat. The rest of the crew had been divided evenly among the rest of the ship. From his hammock, Law could hear the ruckus from several rooms over, where sake flowed freely among the Barto Pirates and Roronoa Zoro.
“Did I wake you?” Law asked as Luffy returned to his corner self-appointed, throwing himself upon the mattress he’d been given.
His voice was gentler than he intended, fleeing him like a sigh. Straw-hat didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah,” he replied, “I thought you might be having a nightmare because you were turning so much.”
“Don’t worry about it, Straw-hat,” Law said, attempting to pour as much finality into his voice as he could.
There was no answer so he turned towards the other man. His outline was stark against the darkness, sharp even in the dead of night, as if something shone from within. He lay sprawled in all directions, already snoring and fast asleep. His mouth hung half-open and a thin trail of saliva slipped out of it, dripping onto his shoulder.
Luffy looked young like this, younger even than his years. Law studied his face. He looked unburdened, unmoored from the knowledge of all grief as if his heart was an untrodden, unpolluted thing. As if he’d never held his dying brother within his arms, never begged Law through slurred speech, tied to his operation table, to let him die.
Everything seemed to flow out of Luffy. Or perhaps he absorbed it all, holding it against his chest until his strange heart grew around it, stretching to fit the gnarly shape of love and to accommodate it, to settle comfortably within it.
Law found his hands itching to touch him, to ascertain his solidity. A man like this, he’d figured long ago, could not survive; not in these oceans, not in these waters, not in a world where brothers slayed one another, where little sick girls with uneven pigtails could be buried under rubble.
Laughter erupted from the impromptu party, boisterous and joyful, and he focused on it, head spinning, and let it carry him off into sleep.
****
“You know,” Robin said, submerging her tea bag in the boiling water. “In the West Blue we drank this with lemon and honey. I’ve tried to find decent honey in the Grand Line for years now.”
Law looked at her quizzically.
“Honey?” Robin asked. At Law’s blank face, she sighed to herself in disappointment. “Amber liquid like sweet nectar? Made by bees? No?”
Nico Robin, it had turned out, was highly pleasant to talk to. Law had, albeit reluctantly, even begun to enjoy the company of the cyborg Franky, who was always attached at Robin’s hip in all of his ostentatious extravagance.
The cyborg leaned forwards when Robin offered her cup, taking a small, surprisingly elegant sip out of it. His massive hands engulfed the porcelain almost completely and yet his grip was gentle, careful. Robin smiled up at him.
He smiled back, regaling her with an exaggerated wink.
“It’s super ,” he said, pointing at the tea with his chin.
Before Robin had the chance to respond, a shrill scream pierced through the air.
“Robin!”
Luffy trotted over from the spot where he’d been half-hanging over the railing looking down at the ocean, watched closely by Usopp and Zoro.
“Robin! Robin! Oh, hi, Torao. Robin!”
“Luffy,” she greeted. Her eyes shone brightly when she turned them upon her captain.
Law observed them both: the demon of Ohara who had emerged alive from the Doors of Justice and Luffy, her savior, wet from head to toe with strange-looking algae hanging from his hat and a mischievous grin on his face.
“Guess what we found?”
Franky turned around, his movements ever so slightly odd, unnatural. It was fascinating to watch him. Law thought about asking for his permission to carve him open and rummage around his chest and study it; he was reasonably sure the mechanic would let him too.
He wondered if Luffy would like to watch him work. The thrill that shook him at the thought was a dangerous thing.
“What?” the cyborg asked, his level of excitement immediately matching Luffy’s where one second before he’d been a tame, massive thing, a purring predator lying idly by Robin’s side.
“The fish!” Luffy cried, exultantly. At his audience’s blank stares, he explained himself. “The fish with the colors, from Sanji’s book! The one that’s supposed to have the best flavor in a stew!”
“You found it?”
“We found it! Zoro wanted to catch it but Usopp won’t let him chop it up. It spoils the eggs or something, I don’t know.”
And then Luffy looked at him and his smile grew impossibly larger.
“Torao!” he said. “Wanna come? You could do that room thing, it'd be useful.”
Straw-hat's smile was wide and blinding and Law saw, shyly forming at the corner of the pirate's lips, the slightest shadow of dimples. His chest ached dully, distantly, like a bruise.
“I’m having tea now,” he replied.
“Oh, worry not, I’ll save some for you,” Robin replied.
Her face was perfectly still, and yet Law could read the amusement in it; Franky’s eyes darted towards her, full of a meaning that escaped Law.
“You know,” Straw-hat said, laying with his hips against the table and making Law’s teacup rattle. “A fish like that one ate me once. I wanted to learn how to catch them and I fell into the river but luckily before I could drown it ate me.”
“Luckily?” Law asked, amused against his will.
“Ace and Sabo cut it up and rescued me, so here I am. Could you imagine if I’d drowned so soon?”
Law’s stomach twisted at the thought.
“Anyway,” he barrelled on. “Are you coming, Torao?”
He would have said no. He thought of it, later, somewhat angry at himself, at the recurring thought, at the fact that this had mattered at all. A resounding no dangled on the tip of his tongue, and then he thought of chasing Straw-hat around the ship, of his laughter resounding in his ear, his cheerful face when the fish emerged from the ocean. He thought of his hand, congratulatory, rubbing merry circles on Law’s shoulder.
“Torao?”
“Let me finish the tea and I'll go,” he sighed.
He could swear he saw the cyborg smirk, quick as lightning, through the corner of his eyes.
“Alright,” Luffy called over his shoulder, already running back. “Don't be long or there will be no stew later!”
It took a moment for Law to remember to wipe off the smile that had begun to peek through the corner of his lips. He drank the rest of his tea away in one sip, annoyed.
“He amuses you,” Robin said then, and her voice was loaded with a meaning that Law, pinned under the weight of the feathers around his shoulder, could not duck away from.
“He amuses most everyone.”
She hummed. Then, finally, as if she had been pointedly choosing not to do so until then, she smiled.
“If you say so,” she replied.
****
“Torao.”
“I’m trying to sleep.”
“Torao.”
“What?”
“Did you like Mingo?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You looked at him strangely in Dressrosa. I thought, perhaps-”
“Well, don’t.”
“Alright.”
“I hated him.”
“Alright.”
“He took something very important from me.”
“Can you take it back?”
“No.”
“Alright.”
“Good night, Strawhat-ya.”
“I just thought, you know, perhaps you loved him. Perhaps I hurt him and you loved him, so I wanted to apologize.”
Silence.
“Torao?”
“You're strange, Straw-hat. You're-”
“What?”
“No, nothing. Do not apologize. Not for this.”
“Are you smiling, Torao?”
“No.”
“Alright.”
****
Straw-hat laid on his back, legs sprawled against the wall, letting his head fall from the edge of the bed and looking at Law as soon as he opened the door.
“Your hair looks really good upside down,” the younger man observed conversationally. “Sort of messy.”
Law blinked. Oh . Perhaps he was too drunk for that. He leaned against the door.
The other man was half-asleep, his shoes and hat discarded—one with the utmost care, the other without a second thought. Drowsy and dizzy, Law’s eyes traveled to his belly, exposed by his unbuttoned shirt.
There was sparse hair on Luffy’s chair, splattered here and there, interrupted by the thick scar. Law remembered that day with acute clarity, even now—the pirate’s blood over his clothes, over his gloves, over his shoes; the deathly pallor of his skin. His chest, gaping and horrid, the smell putrid after its cauterization. Some of his men had retched during the surgery, Law remembered, watching Luffy stretch an arm towards him to keep him upright.
“You’re sweet,” he said and then he froze, startled. He hadn’t meant to say that.
Luffy smiled broadly, brightly. “You’re not too bad yourself, Torao.”
The man before him grinned, perfectly happy in a stranger's ship, surrounded by strange people – at ease with the world and with himself in a way that Law didn’t think he would ever understand; a way that irritated him, fascinated him, that he could not look away from.
“You’re such a strange man,” he murmured against the palm that led him, stumbling, to his hammock.
The look of surprise on the other man’s face was as genuine as it was charming.
“Am I? How so?”
“You’re-” a sudden wave of nausea interrupted him.
“Torao! Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he murmured, laying with his eyes closed and feeling his unease dissolve. He was too tired for this, way too tired for this.
Luffy’s hand brushed his hair back from his forehead.
“You don’t smell all that good right now,” he complained.
Law laughed at that, a quickly barked chuckle that made his head spin. Luffy opened his eyes widely, and then he laughed as well.
“I’d never heard your laughter before!” he said. His voice was strangely jolly, as if Law had given him something; as if he’d reached out into Law’s chest and, unannounced, had uncovered something and then had stolen it for himself.
“You won’t hear it again,” he replied, petulant and drunk and childish with it all, turning in his hammock to glare at the wall.
The movement reawakened the nausea and he steadied himself against the thin, rubbery arm offered to him.
“Pity,” Luffy murmured. “It suits you.”
His face looked so beautiful, shining brightly like that. Law closed his eyes.
“I’m drunk, Straw-hat.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m going to sleep.”
“Right,” the pirate replied. A bit of silence, and then- “oh, have you seen Zoro?”
“Why do you think I’m drunk?”
Luffy smiled softly at that. Law’s heart did something strange and painful in his chest before steadying.
“Crow’s nest, then?”
“Crow’s nest.”
“Thanks, Torao,” Straw-hat said.
Law didn’t turn to look at him; he would wear an expression of gratitude in his face or something equally as endearing and then Law would do something embarrassing, something he couldn’t quite take back like reach out to touch him.
The room was silent after Luffy’s steps through the hall receded, peaceful. Silence had often brought him solace, relief. He waited for it.
It didn't come.
*****
“I think you should join my crew.”
Law looked up from his steaming plate of turbot soup. It was delicious, all of its flavors perfectly balanced, orderly, none too loud, none too eager to drown the expensive fish.
He took another sip, blinking. Luffy only ever sat halfway on the table despite the cook’s incessant prodding in various levels of violence to sit up straight. He hung his bowl precariously on one hand, only letting a single drop of precious liquid spill down his finger and onto his wrist, which he licked clean.
Law’s throat went dry.
“Did you say something, Straw-hat?”
“Yes,” he replied, happily. “I think you should join my crew.”
The silence that followed was no silence at all. The dining hall was just as boisterous, just as glowing and full of steam and scents and almost too much noise, almost too much laughter. Their table was just as full, dozens of eyes were just as trained into his face. But Law heard and saw none of it.
His ears rang, a deafening and crackling noise superseding everything and everyone but Luffy’s voice and Luffy’s question, echoing in his mind.
“You’re strong,” Luffy explained himself, his voice reaching Law through the fog. “And you’re fun! It would be great if you wanted to travel with us.”
He didn’t consider it. Of course he didn’t. Straw-hat Luffy was charming enough, dangerously so, but not over his crew. Not over his clumsy and ever-kind Bepo, over his loyal men who awaited him in distress. Not over his ambition, over the promise he’d voiced under the bright skies of Dressrosa to a stone-faced Sengoku, over the memory of Corazón’s terror when he had discovered his full name.
And still his mouth tasted like dirt when he replied.
“I have my own crew, Straw-hat. And we’re barely allies.”
Luffy shrugged, content, unruffled. He didn’t look up at him, all too busy fishing the remaining traces of broth out of his plate. Law found himself wishing that he would.
“Sure thing, Torao! I’ll ask again later.”
*****
It occurred to him one day that Corazón would have adored Luffy.
He slept among the barrels of sake that night, stored within the belly of the ship, clutching an empty bottle. His hands trembled when he brought them to his face.
*****
On the fifth day after Dressrosa, Law rose before the sunrise to a wide awake Luffy.
He had opened the window and swung his legs outside and he sat, looking at the horizon with deep, wide, penetrating eyes as if he glimpsed something beyond it.
The world awoke slowly around them. Teal and pink and pearlescent white clouds covered the sky and the water reflected them in loving and insufficient imitation, and it made him think of embroidery and oil painting and inked parchment, stacked up in the Donquixote family’s warehouses, wrapped and ready to be sold on the black market.
He’d taken glimpses of that stolen art as a child, preparing for a raid or acting as a bodyguard on Doflamingo’s meetings with the underworld providers. It had been thrilling to a dying child – that danger, that power. He had loved to go with Doflamingo on those business endeavors, as he’d called them. He had loved to get his hair ruffled by him later in smirking praise.
“Good job, little Law,” he would tell him and Law would melt in delight against his hand, big enough to cover all of his face. “You’re growing so strong.”
Doflamingo had found beauty in order. Law had not understood—he’d been too young, too hungry, too feverish to understand. And then Corazón had died for him and bled out over treasure, over art, and Doflamingo had called it beautiful, and beauty had become a vanity, a hollow pretense, a mirror image of power and of death.
And yet the sea was enrapturing under the blossoming day and its glistening silver sheen calmly reflected a myriad of colors, many of which Law could not name, on Monkey D. Luffy’s face.
He thought he understood, now—the paintings, the parchments, the preservation of fleeting images, the immortalization of a beauty that slipped through his fingers like sand. His chest ached desperately.
He made a noise, and Luffy smiled brightly when he turned and saw he was awake.
“Can you feel it?” he asked, and his eyes shone brighter than the nascent sun. “I don’t know why, but I think we’re near Zou.”
*****
“I’ll deal,” Luffy announced with a frown, reaching for the deck.
Usopp’s reflexes were quick as lighting in keeping the cards away from the captain’s reach.
“Luffy!” he protested. “If you don’t want to play, you don’t get to deal. Those are the rules.”
Rules , Luffy grumbled under his breath. He turned the word in his mouth with a frown of disgust, as if it tasted sour. He squirmed where he was squatting on top of his chair, annoyed.
“Torao!” he exclaimed, pointing a finger at him. “Win against him!”
It was an order. He had used his captain's voice, lowered it half an octave. Law found him terribly endearing.
Law had been lying on the deck, using the book in his lap as an excuse to bask in the warm sunlight when a card game had been sprung on him. It was pleasant and he had taken to slumber peacefully beneath it, letting it lick his skin gently, shedding the ghostly memory of Punk Hazard’s frostbite from his long limbs.
Usopp smirked. Law had come to like him – he had come to like all of them, but Usopp's quick-witted humor and intellect had been a pleasant surprise, underneath his carefree exterior. Luffy had sensed his growing affinity to his sniper days ago, to Law’s great dismay, and had become insufferably smug about it.
“You don’t have what it takes,” Usopp proclaimed. “You face the card champion of the Gecko Islands! The people there learned to cower from my mind, I’ll let you know.”
Law had spent days watching as Usopp cheated every single winning card out of Luffy’s maze. He believed himself sufficiently prepared.
Luffy’s eyes were fixed on his face when he put his hand forward, asking for cards.
He lost the first hand, and the second, and with each card Luffy screeched in discontent.
Usopp shot Law a complicit smile at their shared enjoyment in Luffy’s irritation and he found himself returning it – a quick movement of the lips, a flash upwards, charged with enough amusement to smooth the lines around his lips and make him look, for a moment, almost boyish.
What a strange thing, that camaraderie, the ease with which it came to them and with which they showed it to him. What incomprehensible lengths those to which Luffy had gone to snatch him from the smirking jaws of a salivating Doflamingo, drunk with victory. What bizarre and indescribable people he had found.
“Let me see your cards, Torao,” Luffy mumbled in discontent, and then he moved closer.
If he had endeavored to imagine Luffy’s scent before, he would have reckoned it overpowering, all-encompassing, and most likely strange. Instead it was gentle, soft, and he had to hold onto it to follow it, to tell it apart from the saltpetred breeze.
Salt, sweat, oil-based soap and Sanji’s stew. Law could detect all of this in the young pirate’s hair as it brushed against his nose in Luffy’s effort to glance at his cards. And something else, indescribable, unique, somewhat musky but subdued, tamed, and so entirely uncharacteristic Law could do nothing but smell him again.
Luffy noticed. He sniffed himself in confusion and, detecting nothing out of the ordinary, he shrugged.
And then the younger pirate moved, putting his leg over Law’s. His heart hammered in his throat, almost painfully, and his hands faltered enough that Luffy took hold of his cards, smiling triumphantly. But he didn’t move.
He didn’t move.
From the corner of his eyes he saw Nami’s head turn and raise an eyebrow towards Usopp, who raised two in return. Luffy shuffled Law’s cards, oblivious to the tumultuous halt in activity around him, uncaring about everyone’s eyes on them.
Law needed to do something, anything he could think of to break the standstill—anything but reaching towards the leg placidly crossed over his thigh, thin and hairy and still somewhat bruised from the aggression of Dressrosa. Anything but drawing circles with his thumb on Luffy’s ankles, or digging his fingers in sore spots, or eliciting treasured sounds of pleasure from-
When he looked up, he was met with the full force of Usopp’s more delicately cultivated smirk.
Enough.
He’d had enough. He was twenty-seven years old, for fuck’s sake. This was ridiculous.
“Finish the game yourself, Straw-hat. I’m bored.”
He got up, hoping against hope that his legs would seem reasonably steady. Luffy looked at him and, to Law’s surprise, there was a measure of dejection simmering in his eyes.
Law looked away.
“Alright, Torao. See you later?”
Law clicked his tongue and, without a word, turned to go.
*****
His dreams were elusive, slippery; they spilled through his beseeching fingers and left nothing but a sense of disorientation behind. Fragments of them hung, treacherous, on the corners of his mind – mere illusions, fake mirrors. Dancing lights.
He chased them all around and around and around and around.
*****
Luffy laid staring at the ceiling in uncharacteristic concentration, lightly tracing the hem of his hat with his fingers. It had been six days since they had left Dressrosa and they could feel Zou, both of them, like a thrumming presence lying ever just beyond the horizon, beating like a heartbeat in their subconscious.
Thud, thud, thud.
Law extended his haki outwards attempting to get a real sense of it, but his grasp on it slipped after a few seconds, before he could sense anything much beyond the turmoil within the man he shared a room with. Observation haki, he could admit, had never been his forte.
He gritted his teeth. Somewhere, beyond his ability to control it, the island of Zou approached and ever-approached.
“Torao?”
Something in the younger man’s voice gave Law pause. It sounded pensive, submerged in some deeper contemplation. He turned towards its source, and his heart skipped a bit.
Luffy had crept all the way to the bed as Law had grappled with his Haki, distracted and irritated. There was something off kilter to the younger pirate underneath the waning light of the day; something unnamable, delicate, almost tender.
He looked beautiful, unusually quiet, unusually sorrowful. Restless, as if he’d siphoned Law’s discontent into his unruly heart. Before Law could think about it, he had raised a hand towards the other man’s ruffled raven locks. Breathless, he felt him melt against the touch.
“Luffy,” he whispered. Not Straw-hat, but Luffy. The air crackled, charged, electrical, and the other man looked at him strangely.
Law teetered, hanging precariously to the edge of a precipice, cut clean through by the uneven line of the other man’s teeth.
“I want you to stay,” Luffy told him, honest, open, unguarded, impossible, cherished.
Law kissed him.
He wound wonder at this moment of stillness later, at the vertiginous lurch in his stomach as he became untethered, unmoored from himself, and he plummeted. Through years of solitude, through want both met and spurned, he fell.
Luffy’s lips were chapped underneath his and they tasted, strongly, of salt, as if the ocean rolled within the other man in all of its capricious strength. It was awkward, and sudden, and bitterly unsatisfactory and he wanted more, more, more.
When Law moved to bury his hands on the other man’s hair, Straw-hat broke apart, mouth agape. Law looked at him for a moment, lost in the thin thread of glistening saliva that connected them, before remembering to startle.
“That was weird,” Luffy said, good-natured and amicable and so blindly sincere Law felt possessed by a rolling wave of nausea.
“Weird,” he repeated, cringing at the translucent shame in his own voice, at the fragility that thrummed at his core.
He was a fool. Doflamingo had often said so, and he had seldom listened. He was a terrible fool—pitiful, lonely, embittered and enamored of his own solitude, drunk on the promise of touch alone, on the sunshine falling like liquid gold out of Monkey D. Luffy’s eyes.
It hurt to look at him too much, too long; especially like this—wide-eyed, confused, and utterly ravishing.
He needed to leave.
“I’ve never done this before,” Luffy said before he could even begin to move.
“This?” Law asked, clinging to the strange normalcy of talking like a lifetime.
His hands shook at his sides.
“You know,” the other man replied, pointing at himself and then, almost accusatory, at Law. “Any of this.”
Reeling, Law reached for his voice, arranging his thoughts into a semblance of coherence.
“Why not?” he asked. “You’re – huh. You're very attractive.”
Luffy grinned at that, evidently self-satisfied, and regaled him with an unaffected shrug.
“I guess I never thought about it before,” he said. Then he thought for a moment, the bridge of his nose wrinkling in concentration, and said: “I think we should have sex.”
What? Law thought.
“What?” he asked.
“I think we should have sex,” Luffy said, again, weightless. “You want to, I believe, and I am curious to try.”
There was no embarrassment in his voice, no shyness, only disconcerting honesty. Straw-hat held himself with a straight back and an open sleeve, holding no cards, turned upwards for the world to see in impossible and courageous defiance.
Law loved him. He accepted this all of a sudden, with a sense of foreboding finality that he nevertheless found himself clinging to. He loved him dearly, recklessly, with abandon. He wanted nothing but, for a blinding moment of peace, to sit and watch as Luffy sank his claws onto the world and devoured its twisted roots, only to spit it out morphed, unrecognizable. Better.
Everything was easy for Straw-hat Luffy, Law had learned quickly. Everything made sense for him. The world arranged itself around his will to fit the immensity of it. Within his chest resounded the heartbeat of the seas, like tidal waves against his ribcage.
He was enthralling. He was bewitching. He was utterly impossible. Law reached out with trembling hands and Luffy met him halfway, letting Law's hands sink into his hair, tangled and silky and falling over his forehead in a wild mess.
“Kiss me,” Law begged before he could stop himself.
Luffy approached kissing like an unexplored terrain, mapping out every inch, every stolen gasp, with the wide-eyed determination with which he approached everything new. He kissed him deeply, then chastely, then deeply again; he kissed his mouth, his neck, his ears—and here Law made a choked-off moan and Luffy stopped, taking his time, reining himself in with a patience that Law hadn’t known him to possess.
The younger man looked up from Law’s, all flesh and bones and solidity. Law caressed his cheek in a daze, incredulous that he would be allowed this.
“You are very beautiful,” he murmured, voice trembling as he laid back, as he allowed the other man to crawl over him, to cover him entirely with his nimble body.
Something flashed through Luffy’s eyes, quick as lightning; something light and pleasant that infused Law with warmth all the way down to his marrow.
He was hard already, desperately so, and Luffy noticed, placing a curious hand on his growing bulge and applying light pressure.
Law whimpered.
“Did that feel good?” Luffy asked.
He nodded and the other man chuckled to himself, excited and amused and looking at Law strangely, almost in calculation.
Luffy’s shirt was gone by then, and Law’s, and before he could understand it they were naked and he was rubbing himself against Luffy’s hip, mindless, chasing a pleasure that was slow to mount and that remained ever-so-slightly beyond his reach.
Then Luffy’s hand closed around his cock, firm and determined, and Law’s mind went blank.
“You’re- you’re good at this,” he wondered, gritting his teeth against the acute, almost uncomfortable pleasure of the other man’s touch.
Luffy chuckled proudly, unfathomably dear.
“I spent a lot of time around Shanks and his crew,” he explained, cheerful. “You pick up a thing or two.”
What a strange path, that which had brought the both of them here, to a not-quite-stranger’s ship, to a comfortable cot in a wide room, to each other.
He ran a pair of unbelieving hands through Luffy’s hair, ruffling it, watching it fall messily over his nape and forehead. His chest swam with affection and it felt, strangely, not unlike grief.
Luffy’s hand was relentless on him and his toes curled, helpless against the building pleasure. It’d been so long since he’d been touched with this youthful vigor, this unexpected and unexplainable tenderness, this aching warmth—not since, he recalled, Corazón’s wide hands had washed his hair, rubbing his scalp in gentle circles with scented soap when he’d been too sick to do it himself.
“Luffy,” he moaned without thinking.
The pirate’s name felt almost forbidden on his rebellious tongue and he was stricken with a sudden, profound shame, a vulnerability that staggered him.
Luffy smiled, oblivious, beautiful and bright.
“This is fun,” he replied and, wide-eyed, Law noticed something in the other man’s voice—an edge of reciprocated heat, of arousal, alien and unnatural to the man and as surprising for Law as for Luffy himself.
Desire overcame Law at the sound. His ears buzzed as he extricated himself from Luffy’s content grasp, lunging towards the other man until his back sank on the mattress.
“Torao?” he asked, confused.
Wordless, Law slithered downwards, edging where Luffy’s cock hung ever-so-slightly on the right side of hard, twitching with curiosity. He salivated, overcome by primal hunger.
The feeling of the other man’s cock in his mouth was a glad one. Law moved, and felt the twitchy, wire-thin body beneath him react to every hitch of his breath, every one of his caresses so thoughtlessly given. It felt exhilarating, this suddenly regained control, previously stripped from him by Straw-hat Luffy’s relentless and serendipitous brightness.
“Oh,” Luffy gasped.
Law looked up and almost immediately regretted doing so. His neglected cock twitched, trapped beneath his hips, when he saw the other man blushing in wide-eye wonder. His tongue ran circles around Luffy’s head, which was completely hard now, and he heard him moan with the exact same tone of intoxicating surprise.
The northern dialect of Flevence came to him unbidden, rusty with disuse, and in it he cursed Luffy for his staggering presence and himself for his weakness. The sound of it was harsh and throaty and it filled with him a sudden blast of acute, sinking nostalgia.
“What was that? Your speech turned weird,” Luffy asked, still coherent enough to prod at his insides, which Law took as a personal affront.
Law sucked more intensely, hollowing his cheeks, chasing Luffy’s pleasure, Luffy’s distraction.
He thought of telling him about Flevence – here, naked, swallowing his rival and his ally and perhaps even his friend; here, devouring the lively young man before him, all dimples and dark eyes, with gluttonous hunger. For an instant, he even considered extricating himself from Luffy’s deadly grip and talking, letting the pirate listen to him in rapt attention, pouring the ghostly memory of his sister into the room, and of Corazón, and of Sengoku’s tears in the devastated harbor of Dressrosa calling his true purpose into focus.
Who knew, Luffy may even endeavor to help him, damn him. Before he could say anything, the other man spoke.
“Do you want me to fuck you?”
Law stilled, thoughts screeching to a halt.
“Hm,” Luffy hummed, observing his silence with a confused frown. “I thought you’d want that. Nami said you would.”
Straw-hat craned his neck slightly in strangely patient incomprehension.
“Nami?” Law asked in a daze.
Luffy shrugged in response, evidently not considering an explanation to be required.
He looked the very essence of temptation, sprawled like this before Law, his for the taking—if he would only reach out. If he could only ever reach out.
He nodded, a wordless plea that Luffy nevertheless heard. His smile grew crooked, almost playful as he leaned forwards, placing a thumb on Law’s lower lip.
“I think she might have been right,” he murmured in observation, content and quiet, as if to himself.
Fuck . Law kissed him again, biting, cutting himself on sharp teeth.
He laid back, flat on his back as Luffy held his knees firmly around his hips and studied him, moonlight glistening in his eyes. He felt the pirate’s gaze like a massive weight, pinning him into the mattress, cracking and crushing his ribs inwards. Luffy looked like a deep sea creature like this, wild beyond description, transformed into a bright-eyed grinning shadow, a humble behemoth of unnerving and immutable freedom. And Law felt every bit the naive fisherman, doomed, unknowingly casting his fishing rod overboard.
What now? Luffy asked, and Law’s limbs felt weightless as he showed him how to stretch him: one finger, then another, then working the muscles carefully, slowly, always careful to be slick.
Law was no stranger to the motions. He touched himself sometimes in his captain quarters, ever lonely, gritting his teeth against the deceitful memory of golden hair that flashed underneath his eyelids, and then he ordered his ship anchored on an island and disappeared into a tavern to get fucked by strangers until he couldn’t think— all of them calloused and smelling of sweat, still clad in their workwear, drinking themselves into a daze. All of them older and all of them nameless and all of them vertiginously sad.
This was different. It ached, somewhere between his ribs, like an untreated bruise. Almost too much.
Luffy watched as Law touched himself, his face unreadable, cloaked in the shadow of the room.
“Touch me,” he asked – he begged –, letting go of his wit. “Come on, please.”
A finger intermingled with his own, entering him with a single victorious motion. Straw-hat Luffy bent to touch him finally, finally, and Law whimpered.
An infernal heat radiated from the pirate. Law felt feverish, profoundly diseased. All of those months , he thought wretchedly, all of those hospitals, Corazón, and still-
When Luffy began to fuck him, he made a small, breathy sound, stopping completely before even entering him all the way. Then he kept going, forward, forward, until he sank into Law completely, claiming him with the same aplomb with which he marched towards the heart of the world.
“This feels really good,” he murmured against Law’s shoulder, somewhat dazed.
Law kissed him again, wordless, and dug his heels onto Luffy’s hips, urging, commanding, begging, giving himself over with an abandon that he thought forbidden to him, carved out of his soul a lifetime ago.
It didn’t take long for either of them. Luffy lost himself in the novelty of the feeling, in the rhythm and the physicality as he took him over and over, gasping like an animal over Law, devouring him thoroughly, and Law could do little but try to breathe and sink his fist into Luffy’s sweaty hair, touching himself with reckless desperation.
Zou was close. Ever so slightly out of reach, it awaited. Law could feel its presence like a hand on his throat, icy cold, sinking its claws into him, snatching him away. He wanted to resist it. Madness, it was madness that took hold of him as he held onto Straw-hat Luffy’s tensing back, a bout of pure foolishness. A lifetime of loneliness creeped up on him, pushing him to his knees.
Luffy, sweet thing, felt nothing of his turmoil as he chased his own pleasure and followed his own rhythm. Law parted the other man’s hair with one hand, attempting to get a good look at his face. He caught a glimpse of it, unnervingly pale under the silvery moonlight. If he could pierce through the darkness, Law pictured, he would see the bronze of his cheeks swallowed by a blush of pleasure and effort, and the subtle traces of sweat pooling beneath his eyes, dripping down the crooked bridge of his nose.
Luffy turned towards him and, seized by a sudden impulse, placed a small, almost gentle kiss on the bridge of his nose. A harmless, small gesture lost within the ocean of pleasure, which nevertheless broke Law’s heart.
With tears in his eyes, he came and, through muffled ringing in his ears, he felt more than heard Luffy following suit.
Straw-hat let himself drop at his side, lulled into an utter calming state by the physical exertion and the rocking of the waves. He sighed, content.
“That was fun,” Luffy half-mumbled, plummeting already into a quickly approaching sleep.
The silence that followed was long. Throughout it, Trafalgar Law—rather remarkably, he thought— did not ask him whether he’d want to do it again.
The audible heartbeats beneath Luffy’s ribcage had already settled into a peaceful rhythm by the time the older pirate decided to risk taking a look at the man beside him.
Luffy’s head had slipped on the pillow and it rested precariously on Law’s shoulder, slipping further with every breath. He snored quietly and Law felt a thin line of saliva fall on his skin, dripping down his arm. He frowned, trapped between annoyance and fondness, brushing sweaty strands of hair out of the younger man’s face.
He felt, in that moment, as if he would never sleep again. As if time itself had malfunctioned around them and splintered into a million shards that cut, now, into his skin, ripping him away from the fleeting peace he’d been granted, back into the devouring waters of the New World.
And he, cursed fool, so dreadfully wanted to stay and dodge the beseeching claws of destiny.
****
Morning came fitfully and brought with it a terrible ruckus. Trafalgar Law heard three things in quick suggestion as he was ripped from slumber: shouting voices, oblivious snoring and an insistent fist thundering on the door to his chambers. All around him, the floorboards of the ship creaked with hysteric activity, a hundred feet stomping against the sullen wood.
“What?” he barked at the insistent knocking, ill-tempered.
“There’s a shadow on the horizon,” a voice shouted from outside the door. One of Bartolomeo’s people, unknown to him. “Wake the Commander, we think we’ve found Zou.”
Law sat on the deck, looking up at the incomprehensible behemoth upon which the nation of Zou rested, swallowing the sky in its entirety. Bepo had, at times, told him of his homeland—how his city was so far up that one could not hear the waves breaking against the island. How they could feel each and every one of Zunesha steps like a thunderbolt, reverberating all the way from the oceanic bed towards their feet.
The elephant, Bepo claimed, never stopped or wavered. It pushed forwards, in resigned determination, onto an unseen purpose, and harbored the minks with zeal. It raised them, fed them, clothed them and, when they died, it accepted their remains into the loving embrace of its body. When Law had asked whether he missed Zunesha, Bepo had smiled and, through sad and distant eyes, he’d told him the unnatural stillness of the ocean was—truly, he said, if you think about it—not so bad.
He missed Bepo. He missed them all like a bruise on the chest.
Straw-hat Luffy sat, cross-legged, at his side, his eyes looking hungrily up towards the elephant. Long were the shadows gone from his face after Dressrosa, and the exhaustion with which he had struggled against Doflamingo, hanging from the skies. The pirate’s face burned now in curious impatience, with a relentless need to go further and up, perpetually pulled forth by something deep and innate that Law could only puzzle at.
“Look at it,” he murmured, pointing his chin at the elephant. “What are you going to do once you’re up?”
“Eat, probably,” Straw-hat replied placidly. “You?”
“I’m going to find my crew. It’s been too long.”
“Oh, yeah. Two years, right?”
Law glanced at the younger man, failing to glimpse something in his face.
“I’m surprised you remembered this.”
Luffy shrugged, then turned towards him, meeting his eyes with the entire strength of his conviction behind. Law, for the briefest of moments, almost wavered.
“Won’t you stay with my crew?” the pirate asked. “Once this is over?”
Law sighed. He wondered at how easy it would be to extend his hand and dig his fingers into the other man’s hair, as he’d done mere hours before. His skin itched with the memory.
“Why?” he asked. “What for?”
“To see the end of the world,” Luffy replied. His voice burned with conviction and Law knew, somewhere between his ribs, that it would not be long before the very world bowed. “To find the one piece.”
“I have a different purpose, Straw-hat.”
Luffy nodded. He seemed to accept this, somehow, even though he’d take little else. He then got up and turned towards where Bartolomeo’s crew had started setting up scaffolds around the elephant’s leg.
“I’ll convince you yet,” he said before taking off.
“Will you stop asking?” Law asked his retreating back. His voice, he would tell himself later, had not sounded imploring. It had not sounded hopeful, and perhaps more than a little lonely, and terribly sad.
“Will you say yes?” Luffy replied, turning back only to grin at him for a moment, impossibly bright, impossibly dear.
The sun set, plunging into the ocean, and it shone for a few moments between the unfathomably long legs of Zunesha, drowning the ocean in gold before disappearing. Somewhere at his back, Nico Robin stood by the cyborg Franky.
“How old is it, do you reckon?” he asked, looking up at Zunesha.
“Too much, perhaps,” Robin replied. “It was old already when our world emerged from the ashes of the past. Can you imagine that, Franky? It has walked our oceans more ages than I could name. Oh, I wish I could just talk to it.”
“To ask what it’s seen?”
“To ask what it thinks it will yet see.”