Warnings for some heavy content ahead - blood, guts, sex in every chapter to varying extents, harakiri, side-character temporary death, Law being an awful angel with existential issues, and Sabo being an awful dragon who speaks 70% of the time in a riddle or abstract. There's ZoSan and MarcoAce side pairings, Bepo being a cute fluff ball, and a happy ending (I like happy endings)! Basically, everything except a lack of consensual issues and the kitchen sink... surprisingly, as I'm quite fond of sinks. Either way, this is a very, very, very dramatic love story. It was meant to be a one-shot, but it went long, so I've cut it into three segments.
I hope you enjoy!
Sabo was a light in the darkness.
A light that 'I want to show you.' So a dragon had once said to an angel in a voice little more than a hushed, excited whisper, 'I want to show you, if you'll let me.' His eyes were closed but the night was dark and it would have mattered little - the clouds curtained the stars from window-view, the moon would only show the blackened side of its face and the world was pitch. This was okay. Sabo was vibrant. Exuberant. His emotions tingled across Law's searching fingers upon contact as they lay together in still moments of purposeless repose when the candle wicks that had accompanied them through the late hours had gone out, receded into pools of wax that spilled and spilled until they could take no more, the light swiftly dying away.
And though Law could see nothing, Sabo wanted to show him - the world, the light, everything.
There was a history inside of his head, absent of the cynicism that should have come with it, that he could never express. Years and years, thousands of them worth of an outpouring of sound and voice and prose had left the capacity to properly express all of the typical ones broken; something worth sharing yet in the full of things, it could only be completely his own and no one else's. His version of the world was all made up of confused poetry, abstracts and metaphors, and open to myriad interpretation.
A world where the stars in the sky swam with the visions in his eyes, masked by a perfect shade of cerulean irises where the sun would normally reside. A place where the moonlight trembled as if its face were reflected upon a gently lapping body of water that trickled along with the sound of Sabo's voice - a voice feeling along Law's skin and sliding into places in his body that no one else could hope to arouse.
A voice working deeply into him the same way that fingers parted his body, spread him open to make way for his cock, slippery sliding inside of him. And Law put Sabo's hand into his own, allowing himself to be guided towards ecstasy while the other man's poetry was whispered hotly into his ear-
You, he said, you're a darkness that gives way to the light. You, a siren's song that lures him onto jagged rocks and tears him asunder in the gentlest of all ways. You, like a blessing that comes in infinite ways, so innumerable that he couldn't even begin to know where, to know how to count every aspect that is Law unto Sabo - like a honeybee unto a flower, sifting the pollen of words from dainty feet and onto the stigma of an endless mental propagation.
You, Law then replied breathlessly, you are a near-personification of every fantastic and lustrous thought he'd ever harbored towards any other living being - a seeming proverbial white light in the distance drawn so much closer to find sparkle and snowfall and moonlit waters and prisms refracting these things into all of the shapes that make up this solid and warm entity that is you.
You, Sabo, no one else, he stuttered out as he came, twisting his body and spilling until he could take no more, like candles, like a dying light. A centuries-old dance, tried-and-true.
"Because it is our fate. Around you, around me, threads around our little fingers," Sabo groaned against the shell of his ear, breath puffing out, baring teeth as he resisted the urge to bite. To rip. To burn. So many urges kept in check. "So much that I wonder, if I pull back, how far will you drag? How much give is there? How much slack is there in the line between us?"
Too much, sometimes, that Law ran away just to see what would happen.
(You, you're the one that gives me reason to be alive).
Sometimes, the thought of knowing how easily the dragon could reel him in scared him.
Made him afraid.
Made him idiotic.
Made him test the line, daring fate to rend them both taut.
November 30, 1995 - Shiretoko-hanto, Hokkaido -
Pine needles crunched underfoot - dead, but ever as fragrant as all life gone lifeless - as a lone, tall and steady figure stepped through the woods, otherwise soundless. For but a moment's pause, Trafalgar Law looked up towards the sky, to a bright moon that dared cast light upon his path of calm darkness as beads of cold perspiration peppered his brow. The stars, his ever-present and silent companions, twinkled their delighted motes of light at him, so like small children taunting him in their school-yard games and sing-song, skip-rope tragedy-rhymes of black death, mass murderings, and broken heads.
Because Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
And everyone knew how well that worked out for them.
Still, celestial entities could do as they liked; they would, anyway, and it wasn't as if he ever really gave a damn. There were always those same stars, always that heatless moon, never different and always monotonous and boring despite what anyone else would have to say about them. There were cycles, a changeless pattern, always days and nights like these. Always an ethereal glow from thousands and thousands of kilometers away, though seeming so much closer as though he could cup the moon, as a delicate will-o-wisp of a celestial object, within his palm in eerie tranquility. If he could, he would crush it. Because it was useless. Waste. Garbage. Better off on a street corner waiting to be taken than up in the sky.
Better off incinerated. Better off in someone else's night.
It gave him a shadow and that, too, was uninspiring. Tranquil, maybe, even so as he blinked, it never did the same and stayed black beneath following footsteps, but not quite his protege so much as a silent stalker that liked watching him dress from the other side of a darkened window. Made his long legs even longer, alien, and lacking in finer detail. Made him look like nothing from afar. Nothing. Trash. Garbage. Broken, useless, like old television sets from bygone eras and static in the way it flickered rather than the nouveau, digitized blocks of pixels. Things with faces and antennas but no eyes.
Even still, he couldn't really deny that something was jostling through him to the core... feeling... just feeling. Even that was rare. The deeper meaning? A cutting silence, a voice that soothed, glittering in the night. Dark clouds full of responses trailing across the lower portion of the moon's pale face like some blushing young miss hiding her vapid, tittering affections behind a gloved hand. Like all stupid things that women had a tendency to say to him, he had no intention of listening, no ear for answerless insolence, and no patience for illuminations.
Lowering his eyes, he continued on his way, his path true though he was not fully aware of where exactly he was going - not fully aware of where he came from half the time, sometimes head-over-heels and tripped over an inarticulate life ill-lived (if it would be called life - some semblance thereof). Just as unintuitively, whichever, wherever, and whatever it was ahead of him, if it had ever mattered at all, was an unknown destination of a something that wordlessly called out to him. Or called him out. How did it matter? - it really didn't.
He walked the earth for eternities.
He walked the earth for minutes.
He skid down the hallway of time on his ass like a slip-and-slide.
They were all pretty much the same thing.
But this did eventuate in something - there were eventualities, eventu-fucking-alities at some point in time out of all undertakings, even when they seemed entirely unavailing.
Full frontal, he came upon a clearing where a small, dilapidated cabin stood slightly out of place, bygone, bygone and falling apart. The entire building seemed half-sunken and uneven with the forest floor and shutters that had once been painted a bright, cheerful color of grass-green's close relative were blistered, peeling, falling off of the rusted hinges along a window that flickered an orange glow of firelight from within. As much as he would have liked, it was pointless to wonder at its existence; he knew that he was meant to be there, a feeling... intangible (he didn't like that; he was a very hands-on kind of man), indescribable, ineffable, with a draw that had pulled him through the forest on foot. Whatever it was, it was in there.
Overgrown grass brushed at his calves and dampened the hem of his jeans with dew and the smell of morning-wet and pine as he approached the ancient remains of what was once probably a comfortable, small place to be. The brittle, chipped glass doorknob was grasped with a slender hand and turned slowly, as if he meant to keep to the silence, as if not to startle the night. But actually, he didn't care one way or another.
It was locked.
Not that it really mattered.
Standing upon the shattered stoop, he placed a hand over the half-rotted wood and conjured a tiny bubble of his power to more-or-less obliterate the surroundings of the rusted old mechanism for it to drop to the ground. Door swinging open for him, welcoming a stranger into its mysteries kept within its shadowed hollow... probably wasn't the smartest thing that it could do, but he never left anything in his wake with much of a choice, did he? That was the way that food chains tended to work out.
Doors were typically pretty low on that.
He was pretty low on that, too, not that he'd ever say it aloud.
Humans were still lower.
One or two steps below doors, maybe, but he liked to open up both.
Liked to pick at what he could find inside.
For this one, for this instance of an inside, looked no better than its outside, but at least it offered some protection from the elements, albeit incredibly slight, drafty, damp - it was spartan (whatever that meant; were the Spartans very spartan at all?) but a fire burned within and provided a bit of warmth, nonetheless.
Still, it wasn't quite warm enough. Not for the figure that lay in front of the hearth in a violently shivering heap on the dirty floors, huddling close to the blaze to steal heat into his thin, weary body. A squatter, he appeared to be, but it mattered little in the why while Law was more intent on the who and a familiar feeling that shook, shook, shook into him as though he were the one all filthy down to the bone - as if the fire inside him were close to being extinguished if he did nothing to save this flickering little star (ashes, ashes, we all fall down) of a soul.
He stepped closer to the man, who likely sensed his presence despite that he made not a single sound, perhaps the fire-backdropped quiver of his restless shadow spoke for him enough as it flopped about like some peter-pan-esque monstrosity attempting to escape. From beside his feet, a pair of pale blue eyes bleared open at him, stared simply, windows to the soul on any other man, perhaps, he likened these to the strained echo of a stone cast into black pit (see how deep it goes? But there wasn't a single sounding reply). They were not afraid of him. But, to his surprise, there was a hidden little grain of sadness sucken down deep within, somewhere in ground coated for centuries in the fragrance of pine needles and... wildflowers. He could smell them in the air here, spicy and fresh and unsweetened.
With bated breath, he said nothing.
This was very unrewarding as the other man said nothing, as well.
But a cough broke the ice, a heave and shudder and closing of eyes - he, as well, shookshookshook but only inwardly as he shed his trepidations away from him like a bad suit and knelt beside the man, touching his hand against the skeletal frame of his face. So thin and fragile against his seemingly too-large hand. So hideous, so wane, and so lovely like all stars and moons and equally useless... it was almost painful to touch, electrically charged and an uproar surged through his blood like copper wires jump-starting his heart. His shadow, then, went far too still.
Who was he? He should know this.
(You are all dry, all insolent pens, all inkless feathers.)
What was he? He should know this.
(You are empty; to the brink of extinction and made whole by my half.)
And this feeling? He should know this.
(Don't kill anymore, Law. Please.)
There was something wholly surreal in the air that stirred about the slight, quivering form as they touched. Openly, he continued to stare as the man returned to his senses from his fit and stared back, clearly feverish, but so clear and unclouded for miles in his gaze. Warm, but so, so very cold. So unreal, horrible to look upon as he was too flawless, just so empty and painted-on despite an obvious burn scar running across his right eye and down his cheek. Skin, lips, eyes, cheeks, hair - ah, underneath the clotted earth and dust, that must have been silk. Humans were never this perfect, but...
Frayed strings, they were strewn across the floor, lying underfoot. They wound everywhere, tangled around limbs while others knotted and piled like some rotted-away rope bondage. Or a little like a marionette. Delicately, he plucked one frayed end between his fingers and traced its path back to where it wound around a thin wrist and a gentle tug lifted it, awkwardly flopping a hand all puppet-like.
Interesting.
Letting the string fall back onto the filthy floor once again, Law straightened his posture, tranquility once again washing over him, his long black coat settling back neatly as though it hadn't the gall to ever let its wearer withstand an imperfection, its color absorbing all light from the fire that spat angry cinders from its hovel, clearly not so impressed.
But that wasn't his intent, anyway. Not as such.
With one hand gesturing outward over the man's body, Law paused and heaved energy throughout his body, the power of healing, warm and dripping through the latticework of his veins and down, down, down through his fingertips in rings of burning blue-purple light. It wasn't quite his area of expertise; healing, yes, but not in a generalization to simply 'heal' so much as amputating out the ill, sometimes replacing it with the healthy, if need be; but it didn't hurt to try and the power was his own to spare. Even death wasn't so far beyond him - however caused more than cured, five letters etched twice over ten fingers as tattoos - H - and this one looked to be quite well on its way. Not then, but eventually. Because everything dies.
The man watched him curiously, winced as the power touched him, violated itself through him and wormed through his eyes and ears and guts and toes, twinkling stars going in and out of miniature lives. Supernovas, dwarves, neutron stars and - purple? blue? - Black holes pulling all gravity to its breaking point in the cores and ins-and-outs of him. And when it was over, he shivered.
All of those strings were once again becoming whole. It was something, at least, even if it couldn't mean anything good. They turned on him like snakes striking with lightning-precision and bound his life as much as they did his body like some external cardiovascular system. All over, neck to ankle, intricately wound up in thick red patterns that twisted in some places into knots of sakura blossoms and braided rings about his fingers, delicate leaves up his arms beneath his coat-sleeves and criss-cross netting down his chest that disappeared beneath the only other clothing he wore - a simple pair of pale blue jeans - and out their bottoms to curl around his ankles. Bound him, tied him down, down, winding his body over and over by parallels of the knotted patterns decorating the other man's slender wrists. There was meaning in this, wasn't there? It felt familiar.
Once again, those blue eyes were staring, wide open this time, breathing steady.
Perhaps he'd done some good after all.
Even if he'd just found himself completely fucked.
"What?" he finally spoke, "What did you just do to me?"
The other man writhed against the floor like an earthworm ripped from the ground until they were pressed side-to-side, face-to-face, but with a face not that of an enemy, but a harmless little thing drying out on the sunlit pavement. Yet, more divine than that, awe-inspiring in his nerve, the audacity of his cheshire smile, this creature with his disheveled golden blond curls and pale blue eyes that could be so ever-dark in their color, suddenly gleaming with the light of life, of an immense intellect, commanding a presence like the sky itself could split apart at his will (and the sun come tumbling after). But not tonight... not tonight.
Law was rather beside himself. Anger. Thrall. Strange feeling, not-quite-anxiety, but unsettled still. He didn't care for being tricked.
"I do what you do," the man replied, his voice dry and parched but simple, and laughter somewhere in there but bitter, "But not do, when one wearies of the ephemerid descents of never-marrying, antimicrobial angels. Flit flit. Can I be warmed by this enfolding, holding you down? Or will you stray outward until I am warmed by nothing?"
His heart thumped, a slip-shod remindment of feeling.
Palpitation.
Tension.
Quivering in visceral memory.
(He speaks in abstracts).
"Sabo-ya... damn it, if you wanted to see me, you could have just called."
Sabo.
Vermillion dragon.
The element of fire.
Harbinger of fortune.
(The highest being on any given food chain).
Traveler.
Savior.
Madman.
(Lover).
A relic of a time long-lost when serpents ruled the seas and the skies and rode the clouds at their whim. When Natsu no hi no ryuu was a name that heralded more in the land of the rising sun than ringing bells at shrines and twirling, dancing, paper-mache pantomimes of glory, praising the gifts of the summer flames.
Had Law been any lesser man, the sound - the thought of that name alone might have torn him asunder. And even still, it held far too much power over him to be good. Buried memories peeled through his skull and down his spine, shuddering through his skin like being flayed alive by years and years of longing for this faux young thing who had him all tied up on a dirty floor. And this was to be entirely his fault. This wasn't what he'd meant to happen. Running. Forgetting. Regressing.
He knew now why he had been drawn here. It was a trap. Sabo's trap. But why like this? Everything with the dragon came as a riddle and the angel was only sometimes patient enough to look for their answers.
With some loss of will, Law reached across the floor, bound fingers touching Sabo's skin, frantically rubbing at smudges of soot and dirt and all that perfection as if he could find underneath a face that he thought he'd never forget, but regretfully, nearly had. After all, how many years had it been? Eighty? Give or take, with no photographs to remember his startlingly, handsome face. Sabo simply shivered, but seemed to understand that something of Law was afraid of this, afraid to too-deeply look at him; nothing he could do here would satisfy his inner turmoil.
Even still, the dragon leaned into him with a gentle smile, nostrils flaring and prickling to draw in his scent as he spoke more lucidly, more prosaically. "Call you. You mean with a phone? I do have one. I can talk to my brothers anywhere and I don't understand how it works; its all quite mysterious, but clever. I missed you, Law. I even brought you primroses, but they died long ago while I waited here for you. It's fitting, isn't it?"
Sabo did always love flowers - like all poetry, he was fascinated by the language of them (hana kotoba) and their meanings. There were many days - happy days - long ago spent dragging Law at his side for walks in gardens worldwide, naming each one, telling their story, often in repeats. Such as as primroses, petals of soft heart-shapes and the deeper sentiment of them, I can't live without you.
"I've been busy. You know that I-"
"Angel blood and phoenix feathers," Sabo interrupted, "Atonement mothered your child years ago; I know what you've accomplished already. I've met with Roronoa Zoro. He told me. I know. I know, Law. Your work is already complete, and yet you forgot your promise to me. To not move on without me. Festivals have come and gone, but not you with them." Coiling his wrist, he jerked back his arm, and pulled by the connections of the red cords that wove about them, Law could do nothing to stop himself from tumbling against him, onto him. "I'll fill your rooms with primroses. How many rooms do you own now? How many do you need before you begin to understand?"
But Law did understand. Or at least thought that he did. After years of sighting too many worthless moons and stars and empty constellations, the universe's refuse of rocks and gasses caught lamely in orbits, he should get it by now -
Words that would sound like pointless prose to anyone else were all facts. Histories. Intimations of people they knew. Of things that had once been said. Calendar page variations fluttered by with the blink of an eye, and by the time he noticed the changing of the dates, time had long expired. So caught up in everything. Eighty years of vacillations.
And the thing that actually, truly mattered - the rhyme and the reason - had been pushed to the back of his mind.
He stretched out straight against the other man, all six foot two of him, only slightly taller than him in his elongated spine. Sabo was larger if he took on his dragon form, and Law's angelic wingspan probably more than made up for it if they were to ever compare, but that was neither here nor there and Law did well to hide his true form. A dusty white cravat brushed against his bare collarbone and rope fibers bit their teeth into his skin as he let himself be manipulated as a marionette. Let himself be adjusted, pieces sliding into place. Let their lips touch together. Let his decision be made for him.
It was too much after too long.
Nothing else could compare to this -
everything he'd been lacking - awakening feelings he'd been missing,
entropy inside of him giving way to vertigo-spun reminders of a warmth they'd once shared,
desires they'd once shared.
Tethered together, string-to-string, mouth-to-mouth,
heartbeat-to-heartbeat,
it's what it felt like to be pulled by all of his invisible threads,
still, after so much time had passed, too much.
Much too much. Beneath the dirt and the grime and the remnants of a low-grade fever, Sabo always smelled like wildflowers, not sweet but clean and subtly piquant. He knew the tingling taste of their stamens on his tongue.
"You are the only thing good I could ever see in this world," Law softly admitted, pausing to let his teeth catch on a plush bottom lip for a moment - a slight nip. "You've always blinded me."
(And there was only light - the curve of your smile and your every expression, the ferocity of your eyes in the way that you looked at me, and the way you speak in narrow metaphors and careful lines in a firestorm mind... but have never - not ever - once said that you loved me. Why?)
Reaching towards the hearth, Sabo grasped a hold of something propped beside its flickering light and pressed its cold length against his side, pressed it until he took it into his hands. His sword. Kikoku. The meaning wasn't lost on him - the dragon had stolen it from him long ago and (even if he didn't like it) with good reason.
"Law... do what makes you happy," whispered a low tone of intermixed emotion before he turned his head away.
And then, quite suddenly, he was gone, and Law collapsed against the floor, unravelling, strings and all from their intricate weave of symbols. Frayed and broken once more, lifeless shadows on the uneven wooden slats and he was left wishing, wishing for nothing more than that fledgling, simple reciprocity.
But he made his own bed,
(he'd already fled)
so he should lay in it unfettered. Severed. Ephemerid descents.
But how it felt to suddenly not have hands pulling at him, dragging him along by all of his strings, was incredibly lonely.
Sabo was a light in the darkness.
A light to his darkness, that's what he was, and had the stereotype of blond curls and baby-blues to go with it, contrasting against Law's yellow eyes and black hair that gleamed blue under the sunlight. Sabo wasn't quick to take offense or quick to give defense; though wickedly formidable, what lay roaring under his skin, beneath the contours of lithe muscle, was a passionate inner-fire that wasn't violent in any sense, nor did it cause him to curse at everything the way that Law sometimes did when his buttons were pressed in the right order. About the only thing that could really get under the man's thick skin was his protectiveness over his two brothers, and even then, he mostly trusted them to look after themselves.
But when times were tough, when that protective streak reared its ugly head, no kind of God could save anyone's soul from the wrath of those flames.
Even despite that, Sabo didn't view the world through dim-colored specs as Law did - as though it were a roller-coaster missing spaces from its track and spiraling towards a certain inevitable doom. Which made no sense to him, because that really was the way things were working out and the metaphor stuck rather well, he thought. While people were always screaming, exhilarated and scared, the planet was rotting out from underneath them and they were going to give not a single fuck about it, all vacuously caught up in themselves, until the moment that they were all free-falling down, uselessly praying as they went, until very, very suddenly dead... and the dead didn't care about much of anything.
In that, he liked the dead a great deal as he could often relate.
The planet was rotting out, and people were more butthurt when someone didn't agree with their talking points or when their vanity in generous words was insulted by others taking genuine action.
Entire species faced extinction and human kind was too caught up in arguing nuances and semantics and what the fuck things meant when they were misused so often to death that the wrong definition became the correct one (literally, literally, literally - a decades-old pet peeve argument, one of many). More interested in the intricacies of higher language than the defenseless who couldn't use it to speak up for themselves to express their pain to those who wore the print of their pelts just the same.
Children were starving (look at the top 1% - look at them. Look.. at.. them), polar ice caps were melting (Law always did prefer warm climates), religious nut-jobs were cannibalising each other while fucked up on cocaine and gunpowder (holy motherfuck), and where does one even start with North Korea? (Well. At least they aren't cannibals. He hoped).
Yadda yadda, blah blah...
And one could sometimes wonder what kind of monster it took to come up with the relative privation fallacy to justify themselves ignoring world problems, but it was probably the kind of asshole that was after Law's own heart.
First world problems were still a thing, regardless.
After all, the world - first, second, and third - was about to be thrown off its track no matter how anyone tried to change. It would be too little, too late. And when it fell, where it burned, all that self-centered, cynical narcissism would finally shut the (literal) fuck up. And he knew from experience, watching civilization immolate itself at the world's end, or what looked a lot like it, that saying 'i told you so' to a bunch of corpses didn't quite have the appeal that he'd once hoped for.
Sabo could attest to that; he'd been there as Law had laughed until his sides felt like they were going to split, both of them in tears, but never for the same reasons. And when he'd finally noticed them, looked up to see them glimmering in those beautiful blue eyes, the moment hadn't lost its mirth, but he at least tried a little to somewhat stifle it.
He hated people. Humans.
Sabo loved them.
And it was one of the reasons he loved Sabo.
"I am not crying," Sabo insisted as the back of his wrist scrubbed at his face, jaw tightening, lower lip pursing out above the upper in an quivering, incensed pout.
"Right."
Because Sabo was his light in the dark.
Sabo reminded him that compassion was real.
And whenever he cried, though Law was always the one to pick up his broken pieces, it felt like he was the one being mended and comforted and made whole again, never the other way around.
It might have had something to do with the play of their shadows and the way they connected as they embraced under the light of day. So bright. They looked as one, climbing up along the ground. One perfect soul. One perfect time when the world ended and the sky was burning down around them... and though crying, Sabo would be ever as faultless - scarred, yet flawless. Law's own lack of scars were yet more proof of the darkness blotting out his soul because he, unlike the dragon, had a penchant for picking away at his scabs rather than letting them heal. He couldn't help it; it was just the way that they itched.
They were salty.
Sabo's tears, that was, not scabs. Those were copper.
"Let's stop this now. Don't kill anymore, Law. Please. I'll sing these words to you, if need be, in hopes of absolution."
Drip. Over eyes, over scars. Glimmer. Shine. Glisten. Drip, drop, drip.
He was addicted to them, kissing at them, warming his mouth and throat and belly and soul. He was addicted to watching them fall, feeling the other man's fingers splay and curl into his skin, seeking his comfort. Addicted to drinking up the saline across the red scar-tissue of his right eye and following their trail down his cheek, down his throat, letting the thrum of his heartbeat ride the tip of his tongue. Addicted to everything. Addicted to emotions he didn't otherwise feel. To the whole of him, all of his parts, pressed warm against him and caring for him, and only something in him could understand -
"I won't. I promise, Sabo-ya."
- nothing, not even the sun shining down on the first world war, could feel this hot and light.
Sabo was the one who had found him.
Brought him out of the darkness as no one else had before. As no one else had even tried.
And he forgave him for being a killer. A murderer.
As if he understood his reasons, even if he didn't agree.
But it had never been intentional on Law's part.
It was difficult to explain how it'd all started, though it was true what they say - men will forget their last, but never forget their first. Well, the first that actually matters, in any event, killing and sex alike - just the same as Sabo had fucked the virginity clean out of him as his actual first, he had fucked the world as a whole over and over again with the same amount of zeal.
He had a type. A signature. A modus operandi. Always males between the age of 25-35, pale blond hair, blue eyes preferable, above average height and muscular in build. Always the same, always electrocuted before their hearts were cleanly cut with surgical precision from the body without damaging the ribcage or any surrounding tissue. Always, the organ placed into their hands and tucked against their stomach. Always, a careful, almost peaceful, reverent placement of their limbs, corpse turned onto its side as though asleep.
Modern criminal profilers might have thought of Trafalgar D. Water Law as the man of their psychologically analytical dreams. Or nightmares, case dependant.
(Who or what, exactly, did he see when he looked into the eyes of his victims?)
The first time he had taken a life, it had been in revenge for the death of another first - his first love, juvenile and chaste - but it didn't really matter what the purpose was so much as the end result. When he could recall every one of his firsts vividly - the first kind embrace of a friend, the first feeling of a lover's sharp claws tearing his skin away avidly in red lines down his back as he gasped into his ear, the first twisted expression of a victim's death throes - the second and third and fourth and the following thousands were lost to him, faceless and nameless victims one could liken to the vice of a cancerous, nicotine-stained way of living. But unlike cigarettes staining his hands yellow, his were completely red.
While his pseudo-angelic wings turned from a pure white to a befitting black.
Unto the extent where the copulation between life's dissolve and death's prevail had become somewhat mechanical from his outside perspective that he deliberated what it might be like to experience it himself. The possibility of ascension intrigued him; he wasn't a true kami, but not at all human, either. And there was a strange disconnect in his mind from death and its permanence after a century or so of raining it down upon the masses. An existential dissonance.
And that was how Sabo had found him, long ago, bathed in his own blood. Disgusting. Pathetic.
The night that he'd cried for the first time in nearly one-hundred years.
The night he realized that he didn't want to die.
March 31, 1895 - Tokyo-fu -
Harakiri worked well enough for other men, but not so much on him. Painful, certainly, and fascinating to him to know what it felt like from a less-impersonal perspective, but apparently even disembowelment wasn't enough to kill a yokai.
So he tried for his heart instead.
Laying on his back in a deep wooden basin inside an abandoned bathhouse, closed up and sealed tight so as to shut out the sun... just laying there, his own self-made darknothing, darknowhere, darkness, sucking it down inside with what was meant to be his last open-mouth gasp.
But he couldn't die.
This was immortality
at its absolute worst.
Pinned with his own blade, kikoku, through his heart like a butterfly stuck to felt and put up on display. Sliced up fingers and palms, deep ribbons along the lengths of lifelines from grasping the long and sharp nodachi to thrust it into his chest; into the husk of himself that he'd laid out from a red-washed moisture as he waited for it to dry out, waited for death to happen. A death he deserved, if justice meant anything at all to him (it didn't). Long gone from the fresh color of a snowy and cold variety of purity, gone from youthful and celestial designs of what it meant to be an angel, or a clever photo-copy of one, in any event. The original daitenshi would have been horrified, he thought, if he'd known how the white of him turned mottled, blackish dark, with bleach spots remaining on the edge of his flight-feathers when everything that he'd done and everything he had become awakened in his mind.
Yet he waited
and he waited...
Day and night, night and day, time with all of its ins and outs passed by without anything to note of transitions between them while pain and madness all settled in. Made a home inside of him in the same way that small animals, little mammals, rodents and carrion and even cicadas eventually found a way to squirm through his innards and made clever little burrows inside to feed and nest their young. It was a sign that as much as he tried, life refused to shirk away from him and found its own way to thrive away from the lights and sounds of the outside world. Even as the years withered and faded from his recollections of them, blood poured ceaselessly from a heart that continued to beat on and on and on. Electricity looping through conduits in the aortic valve, never failing to send messages to the correct ventricles, pumping out a warm, polluted lake of gore that filled the basin, inch by inch.
And it was funny to him - hilarious, even - how he couldn't die but his skin could pickle and prune in a pool of his own blood. It was funny even as he forgot why he was even there, forgot all about his original experiment with death, as though this was the way that things had always been and this what his existence came down to - all of his blood and an eventual bored disinterest with watching it spurt from his chest like the juice squeezed from an orange. Forgetting what had been and what could/would be, the wrongs of the past and those he'd likely commit in the future, lost in the slowly-slipping mind of a man who would have laughed aloud but could manage no more than a blood-slick gurgle. Smiling through unsleeping hours of insanity, a mess of copper-iron red flooding all orifices, a crippling inability to do anything about it, and a oneness with the dark that really didn't give a fuck anymore.
If there was a sense of something else, a sense outside his time spent trapped in that small world, it couldn't believe that light was more than merely a fever-dream. Beauty, love, kindness... no such things. No emotions, no senses. Lethargically napping under the sun on a warm, breezy summer day, basking in feel of heat on his bare skin and unfettered wings. The bitter, satisfying taste of fresh, hot black coffee scalding the back of his throat on a cool morning. A stray cat purring and looping about his ankle with a pleased twitch to its tail as his fingers scratched at the nape of its neck. Vague notions of joy remained intact, but he was lost on what it was about them that brought him feeling, out of rhyme, out of reason, out of meaning.
He knew that somewhere, outside of the darkness, flowers bloomed and rose to meet the sunlight. Young, smiling women ensconced themselves with boldly patterned silks and pinned their hair in intricate ways, alluring handsome men to their sides. Music would play, the sound of plucked koto strings, sheltered within rich manors and garden pavilions, mingling with the hollow clomp of a bamboo fountain striking against a stone basin. All of these things carried on, mindless to the stench of decay some doors away but felt more like worlds. The bath of his arterial excrement, floating with the refuse of muscle tissue, sinew, slow coagulation, pulmonaries and their embolisms.
Children played in the grass; cries rose up from the streets in nationalist song and glory in a language he'd always loved, no matter how reprehensibly the words used, while the corrupt inspired then fed themselves from these congregations. Famine starved the outward-most reaches of the population while the men and women who stood on their backs complained of a hunger pangs for power that they could never quite fulfill. Ah, civilization. He didn't know this at the time, but this was Tokyo Prefecture, formerly Edo, in the year 28 of the lunar calendar during the Meiji Restoration, an industrious era. Eventually, given a few decades, the rest of the planet would be in the thick of the first World War while this place would remain mostly untouched. Not that it mattered. They'd make their mark eventually. Make history. Feel tragedy. Those always came and went as some nations rose, while others fell. Wars. Territorial pissings. Conflicts. Comings and goings. Children played on as they always did and eventually grew up to be adults that no one cared about, even as they died young for various causes but never actually made much of an impact individually in the grand scheme of things.
Everything dies. Everyone dies. No one really remembers.
And somewhere out there in that great big world, a red dragon named Sabo liked to sit on rooftops amongst the ornaments and watch all of this all take place with his legs kicked off the side, swinging them to and fro with booted feet, never properly able to blend in with the times nor the masses.
He could feel his presence pass by him from time to time. Ancient power, serpentine in nature, sliding over him like a shadow in a lightless room. But not a shadow - more a brightness shining its way into the dark, if only he would believe in it - keep faith, keep strong, it told him. The first thing that had in years. 'I'm closer now, close to you,' it said, and 'you don't have to be alone.'
The eventual shape of the man that lifted him up out of that place was blinding and dazzling. Too bright, fire ripping through the gore-drenched room and turning it all to dust around him in a scorching blaze. Everything burned. Everything except him. When the nodachi was wrenched free from his chest and he was able to breathe in as though it were the first time, he could only manage to blink and squint, pupils struggling to unconstrict and remember what it meant to dilate. So weakened, he could only watch as his insides were rearranged back into their semi-rightful place, the folds of torn flesh were pressed together, and every wound of his was carefully, methodically, cauterized shut.
But he would not scar. He never did.
"My name is Sabo," the other man had said once he'd completed his work. A deep, yet kind voice, no malevolence to be found there, "A name that saved you from where you were born into captivity, yet you captivate only by the frailest means. I wish for you a happiness that only you may name."
It wasn't a typical thing for anyone to say, but these were not typical circumstances. And what was happiness, really, anyway? A step out of line in his pattern of life. An emotion that was once a part of him that had long, long ago carried on and left him behind. Empty of feeling. Perhaps he'd forgotten how to have them. But if that were true, the thought of feeling any sort of happiness again would not have made him ache so, so much.
"Water," he managed to choke out after some time had passed, barely remembering what it meant to speak. But before he could manage to finish what he'd wanted to say, Sabo gathered him tight and secure in the strength of his arms, somewhat bridal style, and ran through the wide streets to the nearest running faucet. It was nice, the splashing liquid cool on his face and in his throat, but in actuality, he'd been attempting to tell the other man his own name.
When Sabo asked him for it later, his reply was simpler than that - Trafalgar Law sufficed, didn't it? It always had before. Names tended to be a little bit fickle when they were the correct one; something to do with power and true names; it was only momentarily that he'd forgotten its need-to-know basis. If he wanted to be named - if he wanted to be named true - if he'd wanted to be recognized for what he actually was, a hybrid angel gone towards the grotesque, he only need find a mirror.
But he favored looking to this light over the dark.
Looking towards the fiercely smiling dragon.
Glad to be alive, for once.
And if he'd known that it meant that someday he would have to hear endless poetry and all about the language of flowers too many times over, he would have been okay with that.
He let himself be clutched into a pale white embrace as the tattered remnants of his clothes were discarded and all of the dried blood was washed from his hair, skin, from underneath his fingernails, in his ears, his gums and teeth, but more importantly his nodachi, before he was carried off somewhere warmer and safer, too weak from years of the ataxia of laying perfectly still and inert to move on his own. He didn't know where he was anymore, but the stuffed mattress and quilt beneath him was heavenly soft, and the blanket laid over him was silk. He didn't complain as his hair was brushed and stroked with soft hands well through all hours of the night, establishing a careful familiarity between them. He let his broken spirit be soothed by a man with all of the traits of his previous victims. This had meaning. He let Sabo's warmth be the shoulder for his painful sobs, his body a safety net of his weakness, bringing his fingers and toes back from the numb and his mind back to some semblance of sanity.
"I've done too many terrible things," he admitted as his hands desperately curled at the other man wherever they could find purchase. The bridge of his nose collided with the underside of a jaw as he attempted to pull himself up, nuzzling there, taking shelter in Sabo's throat. "Evil things. I don't know how to die, but I shouldn't be allowed to live."
He'd never thought so before. What made that moment so suddenly different?
It was late at night, almost morning, and probably Spring outside; flowers were still closed in on themselves, hiding away from the eerie light of the moon hanging high up in the sky, useless symbology as he'd always thought it was.
Law felt more than he could see the other man smile.
"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean. But you're very pretty. Like a crying baby." Sabo's head dipped, pressing a reassuring kiss to his temple. "That is what matters. You've taken your first breath and it is clean, as it is kept beneath the crocodile's second lids, and you can't feel the smog that will eventually be the air. If you cry, I will rock you, move you, move you - you're the curiosity of life."
Pushpulloverunder, move you, into you - like nothing else, like no one else...
Off guard, Law could think of no way to reply, unsure how, really, when he scarcely knew what to make the other man. Poignant, but strange in his way of speaking. And a tad erotic for a man who had literally had his hands full with his intestines only hours ago. But on the other hand... on the other hand, depending on how one looked at it, there was also nothing else he could think of more intimate than that. There was no reason to feel so demure. Or ashamed. Not in front of a man who'd seen all of him. And not before something - someone - as eternal and regal as a dragon, no. They couldn't fall as angels did. Like Law. Like tears. Drip, drop, drip, fighting for that right thing to say, but could only sniffle, shoulders shaking.
"Entanglement, too soon to breed, too deep to copulate," Sabo murmured sadly in the wake of his silence, fingers idly skimming his naked back. "You are empty; to the brink of extinction and made whole by my half. What is it that might behoove you to tangle as you do?"
Learning how to translate him was a thing that was going to take time and patience, but so long as Law was allowed to stay, time was a currency they certainly had without limitation.
"You smell like sweet almond verbena, Trafalgar Law... I don't know your meanings, only knowing that moves me so..." And from there, he drifted, settled down more comfortably with Law tucked against him and let his touch be his lullaby.
They slept for days, needlessly. It didn't take long for Law's strength to return to him, but there seemed little point to fully waking when lazing felt so good. Dreamless, careful sleep, and mornings came and went in their usual way, sifting hazy shadows through the bamboo supports of mulberry paper windows. Sabo too, as a long, drifting silhouette, but he always quickly returned. Sometimes the other man would drink bitter powder tea, sitting by his side like a watch dog. Sometimes he'd bathe his skin with a cool, wet cloth and rub ointment into his burns to lessen the pain. Sometimes he kissed his face, kissed his eyelids, his brows, his cheeks...
Sometimes he slid back the shoji and they'd watch together as the cherry blossoms began to fall with a slight, chill breeze carrying petals into the room from off the whitish-pink dusted streets. Sometimes feeling himself as meager as a tiny petal that swayed from its branch in a matter of days rather than a matter of eternities.
Sometimes Sabo spoke.
"By the way, that sword of yours, lovely as it is, couldn't kill neither you nor me in its current state. You focus your energy, and then you strike. That is how we die. But so long as I get my way - and I always do, by the way - you will never be as transient as sakura. You will stay beautiful, living a very long life."
Sometimes it made actual sense.
But he'd catch on quickly from there that Sabo was not immune to time and the madness that came from it, speaking typically with the tongue of a stark-raving, stark-illogical dementia or some sort of psychosis... dragon psychology had never been a field of study to anyone, had it? But as he listened to him speak more and more, he realized that he was actually still entirely lucid in his mind. A mind with senses as razor-sharp as dragon teeth, and as wise as every single one of his countless years.
Only the words themselves were fragmented. And memories, those also went hazy at times.
His words and actions were made up of poetry. Abstracts. Prose. Lyrics. Most, but not all of them, and some less than others were open to more than one interpretation. There were a lot of repeats in place, more as though he had invented a language through his own sense of idioms or drawn from the hundreds of languages he'd cycled through in time.
Sometimes Law wondered if there were just too many things to say in too many ways from all he had heard and seen over its course - too much to convey all at once, too many years spent trapped in his head without using his mouth to communicate. Sometimes he wondered if it were more like a disused muscle, that whatever it was that typically translated what his thoughts portrayed had weakened considerably over time, and unable to give the easy explanations of what went on his head. Sometimes he wondered that maybe the connection to the process had gone wrong, burnt out fuse, or all badly wired. Or perhaps Sabo merely found that metaphors moved so much more quickly, albeit imprecisely, but it was all he could manage without lapsing into pure dissonance.
Whatever it was, he did it without realizing that anything was at all different about the way he spoke
And after a while, it was easier and easier to understand.
When Sabo was simply asking him if he felt okay.
But more often softly telling him how he'd like to move him.
And when he said moving, what he actually meant always had to do with fucking.
There were other times when he behaved completely normal - or relative to what was statistically normal and he could laugh at himself and the things he confused on a regular basis. As time moved forward, he could express more and more of who and what he was than on previous days, and whenever he relapsed back into the thick of nonsense and prose, Law thought that it was probably for the better. That time ticking away in foreign stares and incomprehensible babble kept enough of him back that Sabo didn't become the mainframe of his being. Didn't turn him into a teeth-chattering, shaking little creature underneath the wake of the blinding light that he gave off. Didn't always have to consume him, only sometimes, but never entirely.
Only when he thought too much on it - then, he could find himself utterly arrested by the mere notion that such a powerful man was contented merely by laying beside him, speaking to him, focusing his attention upon him so wholly. And he'd forget that he himself was probably someone special, too.
September 30, 1905 - Yugawara-machi, Kanagawa -
"When I was younger, I used to think that I could use my power to change the world," Sabo softly spoke into the quiet as he and Law sprawled together across the edge of indecency and abeyance, drunk on thoughts and words and curiosity cast in voices and eyes alike raised towards a darkened ceiling. The night - or morning, depending on perspective - was thick and black in the early A.M. hours and though the candlelight had long since died away, Law's sinuses were still stuck with their pungent wax scent along with the flowery incense hazy in the air. Heady and aromatic, mystifying his mind with fragrance alone, like a youth held in thrall by opiates and a simple light navigating a blurry path of shadows across a wall.
"Do good, right? But then as time passed, I began to realize-" He knew that Sabo's head had turned to face him, so close was he that Law could feel the stirrings of the air as blond locks tumbled across the tatami that they, two, lay upon. He could hear it. He could envision it in his mind, the motion. " - how important it could mean to reach but one person."
Sabo found Law's silent deliberation to be of comfort, and he conveyed this in the most gentle of ways as their fingertips brushed together as they had so many times before, as witnessed by both candlelight and the dark face of the new moon. The tip of his index finger lightly caressed from the back of a hand, over the Roman aqueducts of his veins and down to the nail of his thumb - such a simple and tiny gesture becoming so large of a thing - something more than any deeper contact in the way that it made Law's chest feel heavy and constricted with special meaning. His hand coiled about a smaller, daintier one and laced them together. Bound. Binding. The world spun and collapsed upon itself, yet all surrounding him was inert - he was quite sober, yet drunken and lethargic by presence alone.
Blindly, he was dazzled.
"A person such as myself, you mean? - To what end? What purpose does that serve?"
"None whatsoever." Sabo's voice came upon his tactile senses like velvet rubbing against his skin, heated by a soft exhalation of breath. "I'm satisfied by being self-indulgent, though you may assume whatever you like. I don't mind."
It was then Law's turn his head aside, feeling his cheek sink into the worn, thick mat covering the floor of their rented room in a comfortable ryokan; upon learning that Law had never visited an onsen before, Sabo had insisted this be remedied by visiting as many as possible with little to no regard given to what it did to their power. Despite a significant racial difference, serpent and avian, fire and lightning, a draining effect brought on by standing water was mutual. And though his skin had long-since cooled from hours spent soaking in hot springs until dizzy from the heat, the relaxation lingered bone-deep.
He focused all of his energies on attempting to discern the older - yet definitely younger somehow, and infinitely more fragile man's face in the darkness. To see that of a powerful dragon or angel or demon there, not one of a tender young male. He wished to find the smile or frown that didn't quite touch the neutrality in the shiver of his voice or the shortness of his breath, sweeping close and humid and warm against his lips with the most unbearable gap that separated them from touching together. Just a tilt, his mind spoke, and it might have almost been an accident of the moment, but he knew that the timing was all wrong. He understood enough of Sabo to know that he would never allow a kiss until the moment was both awe-inspiring and breath-taking, poetic, else it be spoiled by being too mundane. Ten years had gone by living mostly on actions, fled of words that possessed any amount of sense.
"Assumptions can be dangerous, you know," he whispered, "I don't want to make the wrong ones."
"I'm aware of this..."
Law realized that in the current of Sabo's small exhalations of breath drifting across his skin that he was the one surreptitiously poised to lean in for a kiss, not himself. Yet, he was waiting - perhaps for Law to merely say the right thing at the right time to make it the right course of action.
"But what if I choose to assume that you don't love me at all? What if I assume this has only ever been a game? Or that I've been misinterpreting you all along? If you allowed me to believe that, then it would de-elevate you in my mind to my level. I would think a lot less of you."
That was definitely not it.
"If thinking something that stupid is what you'd like to do, then I won't argue." The other man sat up, the outline of his body losing its cohesion in the dark, "The evidence to the contrary is all around you. Still, I'd have to ask why it is that any emotion I may or may not possess towards you would bring me down - make you think worse of me than better of yourself."
"Can't I do both? I can be better, and you can be worse. Anyway, I was only speaking hypothetically. I should be able to do that. You of all people know better than to take words by their face value." A hand waved into the dark until it found Sabo there, and tugged him back by twined fingers and down again onto the tatami. He placed his lips to the backs of curled knuckles, soothing and placating the man to take comfort once more at his side.
"But to be honest, I know how you feel," he continued, "I remember what it was like after I was 'made'... having so much sudden ability and feeling like I was supposed to do something magnanimous with it. Sometimes, I still do struggle with that."
But all he had known was death, and death was the only thing he had wrought... until shown something otherwise. A better way, however modest and inelaborate.
"Some might say that you did. Some might say that existing is enough. My name is already sung and praised, and you thread to me, filament by filament, rings on my fingers and chains around my neck, perfect circles stabbed needle in, needle out-"
"Sabo-ya, stay with me," he murmured, amused, "Think simply, else you drift."
The other man laughed quietly, eyes sparkling at him in the dark with soft blue shimmerings. "I am well over five millennia in age. I can't be expected to be simple about everything."
"You're also egotistical, megalomaniacal, senile, and look and behave like a teenager - I'm going to tease you for at least one of those things, so pick your poison," Law replied, though it didn't actually matter. Sabo would always choose the poison itself, and they both knew that, because he could be very predictable at times, and if there was such a thing as an 'other' in any given multiple choice question, he would probably take it.
But if there were truly a one and only constant between them, it was that Sabo would select 'all of the above' when it came to his reasons for being with Law no matter what the answers were - a constant that he would choose him for every moment of all of his vast history of experiences, from a time beginning long before his birth and its ending that would come long after his death, but more poignantly at the latter.
And then there would be no room for any assumptions at all. No questions, no multiple choices, and no mistake as to who Law belonged, who it was that bathed him in light. Made him sane. Made him feel real. Made him feel whole.
Sabo made him
everything.
Alive.
"You're the butterfly out from a chrysalis," the dragon answered, taking Law by surprise (not the poison then, after all) as his blue eyes lilted as though growing too weary to carry on conversing. Attention span wavering, hands drawn to cover Law's eyes in the dark by way of something he couldn't actually understand. "I mean flowers. I'm sorry. Meanings... I mean that I want to explore you as you grow. You..." he huffed frustratedly, "You, we... we do. From... Whatever else you want to make of it all... the trivial." And his voice broke into a soft sound of alarm, expression crumpling, fingers skittering to cup the sides of Law's face with the struggle of making the words come out just right, as if what he had to say was too important to be lost into the chaotic stumblings of his beautiful, crowded mind.
"I understand you. It's all right-"
It really was. It was only three words, but somehow, Sabo could never bring himself to say them.
He leaned in to kiss gently at his blond hair, and deeming the moment the correct one for it, let his breath be stolen away as he lowered further to take his lips.
Actions were so much easier to interpret.
"- I'll be with you forever, also, no matter what, Sabo-ya."
Idly, Sabo's fingers brushed at the nape of his neck before slipping down, picking at away at his clothing as though it were a casual, completely usual and normal thing to do, much the same way that he might help straighten the lines of his clothing as he dressed in the morning. As though it were something that simply needed fixing - just that slightest bit of adjusting.
His sash came apart in a soft whisper of cloth against cloth and his summer yukata was spread open, and his skin was given generous exploration as Sabo began to tell him a story - their story - throughout gestures caught between romantic and indecent. Touching his throat, collarbones, the dip of his sternum, and teasing at a pink nipple with the slightest bite of a fingernail...
Nnn...
"I remember that first night in Tokyo. You were as childlike as stars, back then... older, still, more stunning than before. Beyond birthdays that come and go like names and faces, thumbing through the pages of endless youth."
And Law moaned simply, adoringly, stomach quivering as the other man's index finger trailed down beneath his navel and deviated along the v-shape shadow of his hips, "Sabo-ya..."
Blood heating up, thoughts distorted on the fine-line between dragon and yokai, diversified and lust-drunk, Law gave a sensual roll of his hips to press the abundant prize that Sabo claimed firmly as he delved his hand lower. Pushing aside the folds of the fundoshi he wore, palm pressuring against the shape of his cock, conforming around it, beginning to stroke him languidly as he continued to speak on-
"There was so much I'd wanted to convey, and your hands were so pale and statuesque. And the secrets they withheld, in time, we drank together off of a village water fountain. There was so much to drink, but so few hours of the night."
The other man yanked the white strip away entirely, kind enough to get straight to the point as it unraveled free from smooth, curving hips that assisted in lifting for it to be pulled away. When and where he could, Law mouthed gratuitously at Sabo's throat, nibbling and nipping and leaving a glistening trail of saliva in his wake as he worked down his collar. Inhaling his scent, wildflowers and whatever it was dragons were made of - scales, he supposed - or a snakeskin he only shed in the metaphorical sense, and whatever cologne oil it was that he liked to wear mixing with a faint tinge of common male sweat.
It was thick in his senses, settling there as his hips rocked fluidly against Sabo's grip, breath going shallow as he felt lips and teeth and tongue slide down to trace the lines of his heart-shape tattoos before he found himself pushed onto his back. Settling between his thighs, the dragon's hands lifted his body and it moved with him accordingly. Fingers tangled through blond hair before splaying down and down and down his spine, vertebrae to vertebrae, bump bump bump. Coming to a rest at where the other man's ass had a tendency to dimple adorably beneath his kimono.
His neck tilted his head back to direct his gaze towards the cracked fissures of the ceiling - little spots there in the wooden slats like dark stars that twinkled in silent mirth, sing-songing at the way Law faltered every time beneath the power of the dragon's insatiable appetite. Even if he'd wanted to, he couldn't reply in any way or interject into Sabo's poetry - words stolen with the remains of a quickened breath, lips cracked with a groan loosed to the only visible barrier between a quasi-angel and its home up in heaven.
"I studied your eyes in feigned deliberations, dialogues between indecision and conclusion - half sour, half sweet, beneath the guise of self-assurance, twitching hidden nervous gestures. I'd seen too much, for too long, to be so coy," Sabo murmured before licking at his fingers - it was probably not the best idea; they had soft paraffin somewhere in their meager belongings, but after years and months of nothing more than the clothes on their backs in their possession and the night sky serving as the roof over their heads, there had only been spit slicking the way between them and this had become purely habitual. Too dry, though. Sometimes painful. But never bad. Law had to admit that it was nice, in a way, the burning, the stretching, the dull aches of being filled to the brink - he liked to feel it long after Sabo was finished with him, remnants of cum leaking out his ass when he sat up, dripping over the inners of his thighs. It reminded him of what they were in these dark hours, what they represented, what he had been reduced to, and where he had always belonged. It reminded him-
You are beautiful.
You are beloved.
You are bright.
You are necessary.
You are wanted.
You are needed.
You are, above all things, Sabo's mate.
And you are always bound to him.
Completely.
Completely.
Completely.
(You complete me).
You can't run from this. You can't hide. Where he pulls, the threads that bind your fate will always drag you with him.
Breathless, gasping, whimpering while slick finger pushed inside, he pushed right back with pawing hands urging the other man to divest of his clothing. And when they went loose and were discarded in the dark as he was stretched open, naked bodies wrapped around each other tightly, sweat-damp senses overloading and stuttering out-
"A month passes by in the space of a few seconds. The 30th of every month turns its page to the 1st, and the sun rises just as I wish it never would. I didn't need you then as much as I'd let on..." Teeth grazed over the shell of Law's ear, mouth touching hotly down his jaw as the weight of his body pinned the yokai to the floor as he met Law's yellow gaze with own, sparkling blue.
And under that weight, Law gave up, gave it all up, eyes shutting tight and squeezing, thighs opening and tensing, dragging Sabo in and in and in between. No one and nothing could fill him the way Sabo did, feeling the insides of his ass conform the shape of his thick cock. Movements gratifying yet never quite enough; pleasurable and painful and intense; touches, thrusts, drops of kisses placed whenever and wherever he could.
(push pull give take I will move you like no one else)
"... Do you still hear me, lover? Are you still listening?" Sabo moaned as much as he questioned while his body rocked gently, weight propped near Law's shoulders by the heels of his palms as he slid in and out, moving moving...
"I would burn the entire world for you, nonetheless."