The world was dark when Law awoke, curled up beneath a white cotton blanket on a futon mattress that felt too hot against his skin despite the chill of the winter air coming in through the thin walls. His clothing had all been removed with a pair of snugly-fit, soft, black cotton boxers that didn't belong to him covering his more intimate parts from being completely indecent.
He wondered how long he had slept, but then again, it really didn't matter.
December 9, 1995 - Meguro-ku, Tokyo -
Pale light, presumably from the moon, filtered in from a crack in the board-covered shoji and painted a tiny crease over his body through the dim blue cast of the room graced by Marco asleep in phoenix form against the opposite wall. A soft, cooing trill would come from his beak now and then and a taloned foot twitched in the wake of some dream like a dog being scratched behind its ear. With Ace tucked securely and lovingly beneath his wing with human fingers tangling into the low-burning feathers on his chest against the faint, shimmering representation of his tattooed crest... if the moment were to be painted, it would have captured the perfect expression of their souls, contented and warmed by that simple intermingling.
They were painful to look at. Law was alone and yet not in the physical sense, watching as his own wings lay unfettered behind him, spread out in a pitch black current where the light from the phoenix fire collapsed back as though they were uncoiling some impassible fog into the air and trapping him into forever the dark.
But rather than thinking too much on it, Law wiped the sleep from his eyes and looked towards the errant little sliver of moonlight, brazen enough to touch him in his true form when little else would dare.
There was no questioning what had drawn him up from a dreamless sleep. The light wanted him - it was hungry for him.
He could feel it as before - a something calling to him, calling into him and twining into his spirit like a siren's gently, mysteriously bewitching song pulling him up from the bed and towards the garden like a sailor onto the jagged rocks of a rather dismal end. Or a dark angel hapless but to seek out a red dragon. Pale and wane and fragile and dissonant as the man perched upon the rooftop facing the courtyard with his face pointed up at the sky. The dirt and dust had been washed all away and his hair moved with the press of an icy wind, golden curls gleaming as they brushed against his cheeks, against his scarred face, and the fur collar of a thick, white winter coat that puffed about him like a cloud. The expression he wore was full of mirth, but the glow of his blue eyes seemed fiercely troubled, like there was so much wrong with him and wrong with the world he saw that he couldn't help but to laugh.
That changed as soon as Law crossed the ice-cold stone pathways with bare feet until he met the wooden balustrade beneath the dragon, angling his neck high to meet his wide-open, surprised and pained, ethereal gaze.
"Law... oh, damn you," Sabo's voice was so quiet that it was nearly mouthed more than said and the lower ridges of his eyes quivered and watered as though they meant to shut them tightly but he couldn't allow it - not then. Not with what they were tunnel visioning on for the first time as Law realized that he'd forgotten to hide his wings away as they swayed behind him, so large, so profuse, their uppermost curves stood taller than his own height and the ends of long, pointed flight feathers at the bottom trailed along the ground like the long train of an evening gown.
Black, black, blacker than a midnight when the refuse of the universe known as the moon and stars and distant planets were all blocked from the sky under the cover of dark clouds. Like the gaping maw in the back of a monster's throat when its mouth is opened to swallow up a nightmare dreamer in the ante meridian. But they were flowers, like many kinds with many names and many meanings. Stained black, that could mean dark intent... could be an absence of color... but was also what became of its spectrum when each and every shade overlapped into a swirling vortex. Everything, all things, and all flowers; the parts that made up artificial, yet still organic angel wings, a secret garden of black, black, black -
Nothingness, but sometimes... it was all things coalescing into obsolescence. So much like the singularity of a black hole, the pupil amidst a fiery, cerulean corona staring down at him from above with so much love, so much cruelty, so much devotion, and so much distance that Law didn't care anymore about the past or present or future as he reached out his hand for Sabo.
'Touch me,' his mind said when words his mouth was too dry to speak and his words were all still tinged too heavy with sleep to form upon his tongue, 'Sabo-ya.'
The
world
could
stop turning
here.
And he wouldn't notice.
"Baby, I can't. If I start now, it is all I will ever do," Sabo whispered, his tone soft and heartbroken, lost, and shaken. "While never believing that I've deserved it. You're too beautiful, Trafalgar Law. I've always thought so, but look at you now. You're perfect. You feel perfect. You even smell perfect. I was right all along... about the almond verbena. I can see them. I'm glad."
Placing the palms of his hands upon the tile, the dragon pushed himself onto to his feet and turned, walking away over the sloped and uneven roof with the same grace he would carry if it were level ground.
"Wait, don't leave again," Law said, pleading, his arm dropping uselessly back to his side, "I hate that you keep doing this."
"I know," the blond paused, sighing deeply, sadly, his breath fogging in the cold air, "But if I don't, I will lose myself and take you down with me - map out utopias on your skin and your flower-petal wings and wrap myself up in nothing but disorder. Be patient with me, angel."
A last small smile was offered over his shoulder, and then he vanished, just as before.
The only thing that mattered, the only thing that could feel entirely solid and real in the yokai's world had gone again, dissipated as if his presence had been no more than an illusion. Another eidolon. And Law's weight sagged tiredly down to the ground and he pressed his knees to his chest as his wings stretched and splayed out uselessly behind him. Gripping onto the railing supports, he let his head hang between his forearms, allowing himself to be overcome by his thoughts. Or lack thereof. Emotions filling up his empty places, frustration, pain, anger, hurt, and none of the above, or all of the above. Feelings that had no name, feelings with many names and descriptors in something that only Sabo (and his ability to speak all languages) could think of comparable words for. Or maybe there were none at all, nothing at all, only something that could come marginally close by way of metaphor.
... The way he felt was the cold seeping into his skin, the clouds slowly drifting over the illuminated rabbit of the moon, just as history began to overwhelm him, and the snow crept up on his heels as it began to lightly tumble through the air.
"Holy shit, Law, what the hell are you doing naked out here, you psychopath? - It's freezing out."
He lifted his head at the sound of Ace's voice coming across the garden from the open door, hugging himself as he padded the distance between them with white shavings of frozen condensation sticking prettily to his dark hair and thick eyelashes. A hand burning with warmth gripped his arm and half-dragged him to his feet as he gave little resistance, and a heavenly soft black bathrobe from off the younger man's back was draped over his shoulders.
"Thanks. It's good to see that you're well, Hiken-ya."
"Mmhm." They began to walk back inside the house together. "As hot as you look with those ridiculously hard nips while wearing my drawers, I prefer you not frozen to death. And not with such a depressed aura. Sabo's taken off again, I take it?"
"Yeah. You don't seem very surprised," Law replied as the fusuma was shut behind him and, following Ace, they moved back into the bedroom - or what was currently the bedroom when it served more of a multi-purpose function during daylight hours when the futons were rolled up and put away. On the account of the still-sleeping phoenix, he lowered the volume of his voice. "I understand, but I also can't agree with him. We have a problem, and we can either work it out separately or together. The difference is that only one of those things is going to make me more miserable... Anyway, how long have you been back?"
Ace yawned as he dropped back onto the bed next to his lover, stretching his arms with his mouth open wide. "A few hours. I'm pretty lagged," he said, then patted the space next to him. "You should come lay down over here with us where it's warm. Marco doesn't bite. Although I might, but only because I like you."
If there were anyone that could lift a sullen mood, Law was looking directly at him at that exact moment, with his freckled, boyish charms and devilish smile that suited the demon blood running through half-human veins and smouldering in his dark eyes. Dropping the younger man's robe onto his futon, he carefully shifted his wings out of their current dimension, folding them back into the drawer where the fabric of the universe kept all things of excess before kneeling down next to Ace. Where his movements were tentative, the half-demon was not in the least, grappling him amicably onto the futon to lay on his side, and then curled one of Marco's lax wings over them like a blanket of blue flame.
As before, the light shirked immediately back from his skin, but after a few moments, rolling just millimeters around his body, it began to experimentally reach out to him, bolder in this close proximity. It was softer than he'd expected - appearing as a low blaze but felt as soft as down feathers (softer than his own - the tiny verbena and their overpowering fragrance). They danced, they frolicked over his skin once deeming him a safe person, and were all so soft, so warm, Law had to bite his tongue to keep from moaning in a garish amount of contentment as he was enveloped around his shoulders and hips where the most contact was made.
"Anyway, I'm sorry, but... I'm going with Sabo on this one," Ace said once they were settled, not in the least concerned with waking the heavily-sleeping phoenix. "At least, looking at it from an outside perspective. Maybe in the short term it would be great to be together again... and I'm rooting for you two, I really am. But you have to admit, your relationship has never been healthy. Your communication isn't fabulous; you're a quiet one, and figuring out Sabo is like answering a sphinxes riddle half the time. And before he was the one running off, it was always you."
"I know. It's hypocritical, but that was never long term. A few weeks, a month, never more than that. Understand, I was very alone before I met Sabo-ya. I've watched everyone I've ever loved die. And going from over one-hundred years of purposeful solitude to having someone beside me every waking moment, and needing that presence as much as I did... was honestly terrifying. It was hard to even conceptualized, at times, that maybe it wasn't all some divine set up for what was left of my spirit to be broken."
Ace smiled to him, a touch sad at its edge for him, but reassuring. "I can see that... you two were peas in a pod for a long while. It's a nice feeling, but being independent matters too. Letting him be the largest part of your life while not centric to it is for the best. That is how I feel. Maybe I got lucky meeting Marco when I was still a kid. I still had my normal ambitions, things I wanted to do... y'know, all these dreams. If I didn't hold onto them, when Marco isn't... among us... I don't think I'd manage."
"Your strength is admirable, Hiken-ya. Still, I heard that Sabo-ya had-" he broke off here, clenched his eyes, re-opened them, and then tried again, "Wanted to divorce himself from our bond. Is this true?"
Ace's expression looked like he deeply wished he could say 'no', but couldn't, his arm draping across Law's waist and let an apology be his affirmation. "I'm sorry, Law."
"That's... too far. Too cruel. There have been many moments when I honestly can't help myself to believe 'this man is not in love with me at all, only compelled to be here by some fated obligation', and I'm not unjustified. But his other actions... they bewilder me completely."
(He could have spent the last century plucking the feathers of his wings-)
He loves me...
(-unto no actual result).
He loves me not.
"Yeah. Well. You're not entirely wrong," the half-demon replied, the tip of his thumb tracing Law's hipbone idly. "But it's not that he doesn't love you - everyone loves you - but it's more complicated than that. He'd do anything for you - literally anything. But more than that, he was worried that you'd give up. That if you felt bad enough, you might bring Sanji back using your own life. I don't think you even want to hear how far he's gone all these years to prevent that."
"Heh. I am not all that altruistic - he should give me a little more credit. But I've already figured it out, either way. Marco had the impression that he was leaving me for someone else, but he wouldn't do that. I know better. And as soon as he said the words 'female sea dragon' and 'nesting', I understood. He was, in a perverse way, doing what he could for Sanji's cause."
'Angel blood and phoenix feathers.'
And dragon blood. Sabo's blood.
But making something out of nothing was beyond the scope of Law's magic, and a dragon could never be born again without this one last essential component-
"He was trying to procure a dragon egg. A fertilized one," Law concluded, "And unfortunately, he succeeded. There was no way to resurrect Sanji without it - the cells of his own body were far too atrophied to return to it and his mind could have never been intact. I needed to start anew or find a host. I was going to give up, but... quite suddenly, a young woman delivered an unmarked box to me, and there it was."
"I'll bet it was her. Poor girl. It was a shitty thing to do when he didn't even think it would work. As soon as he found out that you'd done it, he rushed off to go see Sanji for himself... but Zoro's watching the area like a damn hawk - still wants to see you dead, and whether or not your abilities brought him back, he doesn't want anyone not in his corner anywhere near Sanji."
"Understandably. Now, what happened there, anyway?"
"Well. Heh. Zoro's strong - like Marco kind of strong." At the sound of his name, the phoenix shifted lightly in his sleep, brushing the heat of his feathers over the two bare-skinned men with a soft trill in the back of his throat as he dreamed on of some other happy place. Ace paused, glancing at his lover with a broad smile, affection full in his dark eyes. Once Marco re-settled, he continued to speak, quieter, "But either way, Zoro lost. Badly. He won't be actively harassing you anymore, I don't think."
"I guess one good thing has come of this," Law replied.
"I suppose..." Ace trailed there for a moment, "But if Sabo thinks he needs time, then he needs time. You didn't see how fucked up with guilt he was. Time may not mean so much to things that are born immortal, but it heals them just as much as you and me."
Another voice spoke, heavy like Summer descending upon the December air as the blue light dimmed somewhat, and the flames around him closed in tighter, solid and insufferably, deliciously, heavenly soft. "You'll be all right, yoi."
The reassurance was not necessary. But-
"Thank you, Bird-ya."
Law said it, anyway, and meant it.
March 31, 2005 - Nagano-shi-
There was no light anymore, only shapes. Shadows, desaturated outlines moved about in a shade or two less than black that would sometimes shudder throughout the darkness.
Something evil creeping up from the shadows, from out of the closet and from beneath the bed - how protective is that warm and familiar blanket thrown over a child's head in the night? What saves him from the notion that he was simply born to bleed? To be born only to be devoured away from the smiles and innocence of his youth until waking up one day, noticing in the mirror that the horror that he'd once hid himself away from in terror in its more puerile state is the tired and strung-out face that stares right back at him? What saves him? Where should he hide?
What keeps him going from day to day? What keeps him living? What drags him out of bed in the morning to the bathroom where he stares down his own worst enemy? A demon there of the worst kind - the inner kind - ten sharp claws versus two useless angel wings, and he was always in a state of loss, of losing. Waking up dead to a mo(u)rning of all of the things that could have been, like some war story of his life that could never tell, stringing his proud medals of old wounds alongside the suspended state of those questions that never had any solid answers, just illusive brush-offs for replies.
Behind the mirror was a breakfast of paracetamols. Use only as directed. Children should consult a doctor before consuming this product, and adults may take one or two every six hours while symptoms persist. If you're no longer human but resemble one enough to pass under the radar, twenty sometimes sufficed.
He splashed at evil's face with water, brushed its teeth, dressed it up in an expensive suit and white coat before sending it off upon humanity in the well put-together disguise of saving lives. But he did have healing hands, it was true. There was human skin that crawled with varicose lines, and calculus-riddled, dragged open, punctured arteries. Clotting atria, cut with scalpels and lasers and fibrillated into some semblance of stability/sanity. Cauterizing bad conduits, ill-responding nodes, and feedback loops.
There was a script made of comforting words memorized somewhere in his head that guided him, more than his patients, through every pre-op else he fall back on the improvisation of blunt truth, 'i'm going to thread your veins and heart with wires and shock you, feel out your circuitry, then burn congenital defect from out of your body.' And that never made anyone feel good about a routine EP study, did it?
Ablation. Ablation. Cardiac ablation.
All the while, the arrhythmia he cured from others with the irony of his cardiology having long ago arrested itself was not lost on him.
The blood vessels under Dr. Trafalgar Law's eyes were in perpetual hemorrhage.
He was well-dressed, handsome, a half-life, half-thing, a magical being playing pretend at being the kind of human he might have had the potential to once become, had he the ability to grow up as one. What his family might have wanted for him, Corazon too, and where their hopes (as best as he could imagine) might have hung as he closed his eyes and remembered his biological father's kind face and thorough, patient teachings. However archaic, the man had been brilliant, and his lessons stood the test of time. And Law was trying to be that long ago boy who'd listened to his words so intently, avid to learn everything - trying to be the surgeon he remembered he'd once dreamt of becoming. He really was. And he was mostly okay, mostly satisfied with his career path, mostly all right with making a move up north to Nagano after beginning his fellowship under his made-up, lofty credentials, and the drastic need in that city for cardiologists, and specifically electrophysiologists, had galvanized him. He was fine. He had adjusted.
And the distraction was welcome. Making an honest attempt of beginning his days with the cheerful greetings of 'ohayou gozaimasu' and ending them with the tired, obligatory 'otsukaresama deshita'. Supposedly he was underpaid, but the numbers in his bank account were constantly rising, and the woman who did his accounting wanted in his pants just badly enough (she looked so much like his younger sister might have, that it could make him feel ill sometimes - Nami, wasn't that the woman's name? - well, whatever) that he was probably doing quite well for himself. It was one of many offers, but all of them were let off with characteristic demur.
At home, when he was alone in his apartment at night, a handful of benzodiazepines with a bloody mary chaser (or straight vodka when feeling less ambitious) helped him sleep, usually with some late night NHK program blaring from the television as his body would fall limp onto the sofa cushions as his central nervous system underwent collapse. The noise blocked out the repetition in his head, made him forget the sound of his (screaming, crying, breaking down?) confusing poetry murmured in his ear in a dragon's low, purring cadence. While his bed, pristine and well made, remained unslept in. Anything otherwise, and wouldn't be able to stop himself from remembering a long ago time when the smell of Sabo's hair would always be there on the pillow next to his own.
Maybe it hadn't been real.
Or maybe he'd killed it.
What was one relationship amongst so many other casualties?
Would it ever mean anything to all of the families he'd destroyed?
His apartment was close to the hospital and his walk home from work was a part of his ritual, pacing the brisk elements like some faceless, nameless no-one in a fancy suit and wool overcoat, wingtip oxfords and visible tattoos, looking more or less like a posterchild for Alexander McQueen stepping down the runway of the cracked, cruddy Nagano sidewalks. Always the same route, the same stop at the nearby conbini along the way with the same purchases - a bottle of vodka, a can of tomato juice, one lime, and three bonito-filled onigiri.
As a doctor, this was not what he would call a recommended diet.
Spring was happening in the midst of this routine, and holding up an umbrella in his right hand as he paced the downstreets was a sight more common than ever. The rain was cumbersome that night, pelleting from the sky, splashed back from tire tread, unphased by the canopy of tree branches growing fuller and thicker with white and pink blossoms and almost ready for their yearly debacle. The only difference it made to him was the necessity of that one extra accessory, while his expensive briefcase and cheap plastic shop bag were forced to share his left side, bobbing at his thigh.
Eventually, he became aware of his phone buzzing, but his hands were full, and a little bit of struggling and juggling worked it from his pocket only to see a Tokyo number with no name affixed flash up on the screen. He wasn't going to answer, and if it really fucking mattered at all, they would leave a message. If it wasn't the hospital paging him, then it could wait until morning, business hours, 6AM-8PM or Get The Fuck Out, because his long days afforded everyone time enough to reach him. The caller was no one he knew personally, in any event, as the few friends he kept would have politely notified him of a change of number. Or in case of a handsome, half-demon flame-thrower, SMS'd one of Marco's (quite glorious) dick pics (Ace was a lucky man).
He could tell it was Marco for the same reason that, when he reciprocated the sentiment, Ace had replied amicably that one could assume that dark blue was not Law's natural hair color.
(For the record, it was naturally blue-black as Marco's was blond - it only happened to grow in darker elsewhere).
Regardless, as he pressed 'ignore' to stop the buzzing and dropped his phone back into his coat, he was alerted to another sound, less digital. A sad whimpering like a starved or sick puppy came from a rain-soaked topiary that he vehemently decided to ignore, just as he had his phone call. It was none of his business, really. Unwanting of distractions, his only intent was to collapse into his lofty, high-rise apartment, turn on the news, mix his drink and stare into it with its stalk of celery poking jauntily up at him. And wonder, if he said the drink's name three times into the hazy red rendition of himself reflected at the bottom of the glass, if some girl with long hair and bleeding eyes would crawl out of it and down his throat and introduce him to some semblance of actual inebriation for once.
Bloody mary, bloody mary, bloody-
- hell. There was blood in the air. Definitely blood.
It gave him pause, stopped him on the sidewalk. That familiar, rank copper, sticking into his sinuses like a bad perfume commingling in the air with the smell of oily cooking and wet pavement. The busybody, inner physician in him sighed as it made appeal towards his inner misanthrope and won the argument quickly as the latter much preferred to do whatever it needed to just keep the noise level in his head at a low. At least the booze and pills weren't going anywhere anytime soon. Setting down his umbrella, Law crouched back on his heels and shoved his hands into the greens of the decorative shrub... where a tiny bakemono was tangled amidst the sharp twigs at its center, just a little baby, all scratched up and dirty, cold, and wet, with streaks of blood matted in its white fur.
It was a bear yokai, practically newborn, so small it could fit into the cup of his palms and staring at him with disproportionately large, sad eyes. There was no mother in sight, and a stretch of his senses into the larger area came up inconclusive. Swearing, he tore the skin on the backs of his own hands in wrenching it free from its prison and tucked it under his coat. These things were usually omens... and maybe it was meant for him, or maybe it wasn't - but with his apartment close by, if anything supernatural in nature occurred or appeared in the area, he'd know about it, and patching the thing up and giving it shelter for the night wasn't a lot for the universe to ask of him.
While his building didn't allow pets, he was fortunate that the bear was quiet and well-behaved as he (Law decided it was a 'he' for now - not inclined to get so attached to take a closer look) was secreted into the shopping bag with a vague hope it didn't suffocate on the plastic to pass through the lobby and elevator unnoticed. And in the meanwhile, someone else wasn't as well-learned at taking hints and his phone was driving him insane and
wouldn't
stop
fucking
buzzing.
(Fuck off).
Once inside the sanctity of his home - though not so much 'home' as it was the impersonal safe space he used for going unconscious every night - he dropped his things on the kitchen island and stripped off his coat and sports jacket, and gave his attention to the bear cub's wounds with unbuttoned and rolled up shirt-cuffs. Skin and fur was carefully inspected where it folded back like a collapsed accordion, looked worse than it actually was, and took all of ten seconds after cleaning them for the smallest bubble of his power to move those malleable little wounds back into flawless, unmarred solidity as though they were never there at all. The mud was washed from small paws before it could be tracked everywhere and the rest of him was given a brisk rubdown with a wet cloth. He was healthy beneath the dirt, ears perked, eyes clear and could follow the movement of his hand without drifting, belly round and thick, and his fur downy and soft... and totally not cute, dammit.
His phone was going off again urgently, and he still didn't care. Instead, he unpackaged one of the conbini onigiri from its plastic wrap, grabbed a plate from a cupboard to set it on, and dropped it onto the kitchen floor. Whatever animal yokai ate - he imagined they should like fish, and if not, it would eat it anyway if it became hungry enough - sustenance was sustenance. It was all he had, anyway, aside from beer in the fridge, uncooked rice in the pantry, coffee, and so many empty bottles in the garbage bin that any given group at a Hollywood Alcoholics Anonymous meeting could scoff at him and say 'well, now that's just excessive.'
Satisfied enough that his guest had everything it needed for the time being, Law put his things away in their more rightful place and resumed his nightly ritual, this time to hit the shower and wash the day away from his skin with nearly scalding hot water. Quick, methodical, with non-descript smelling shampoo; shampoo-scented shampoo, he supposed, ironically called 'Spring Rain'; and moisturizing soap-scented soap, 'Mountain Fresh', washing his hair and body with all of its nooks and crannys, ridding himself of that clinical, antimicrobial, antibacterial, anti-everything sanitation that made him feel dried up and cracked all over. The bathroom was a sauna when he finished and his reflection escaped the fogged-up mirror; he didn't need to see the plum-colored circles beneath his eyes to know they were still there, as always, nor look deeper in to see that in the pale yellows of his irises, lightning sometimes struck in jagged lines of white against the backdrop of that jaundice-like shade.
His power was growing. But not just that. It was searching, calling out of him, clawing out of him sometimes, looking for something else it could sink its teeth into. Someone else. It wanted to hurt, to shock, to caress, and to kill. To find a heartbeat and drag it into the rhythm of his own rapid pulse, and move through it with its invasive, electric incisions - precisions - lascivisions.
Move through it. Move with it. Let me move you...
... Is what it wanted.
Throwing a towel around his waist, Law swept through the black and white numbness of his apartment, absent of all color save for a bright yellow accent wall in the living area decorated with colorless old maritime photographs that had no meaning to him that he hadn't even taken himself, nor had he ever really looked at closely. Someone else had been paid to fill this place and make it look somewhat inhabited. Kikoku, propped in the corner of his bedroom, was the only thing of meaning to him in this luxurious place. It was comfortable, but very unnecessary. And on a normal basis, clothing was much the same when at home, but as he wasn't too keen on being naked around an unfamiliar yokai, baby or not, those things were typically intelligent enough that he desired a bit of modesty. He managed a pair of dark blue, slim, drawstring joggers (after removing a still-attached price tag) from the drawers in his bedroom and a black cotton tee. Once dressed, he checked on his guest in the kitchen and spared a glance at his phone again.
Five missed calls total, all the same number. And a voicemail, just one.
If it wasn't someone trying to sell him something, it was likely going to be someone from work trying to set him up on a fucking omiai - yet another blind marriage arrangement.
He flopped down onto his sofa and turned on the TV as he pressed his phone to his ear, feeling something strange come over him that had nothing to do with some entertainment industry press conference for the latest scandal (an underage kid drinking a beer, or whatever it was today, was always super important) making the news. Nor the Docomo woman's too-cheerful electronic words rattling off the usual non-revelations of date and time and 'you have one message'.
Something in him... was coiling, like lightning summoning up the will to strike.
'You told me to call you, lover.'
(Palpitation).
'But I don't think there's such a thing-.'
(Sabo's voice).
'As being this simplistic between us.'
(End of message).
The world felt too quiet suddenly, all of it going into a white noise - absent of the sound of a bear cub snarfing dinner, the TV announcements, and his own heavy breathing - only the static of the rain pelting the windows and the sliding glass doors that led onto the balcony as he hit the button to replay the message. Replay the voice. Again. Again. Again.
'You told me to call you, lover.'
Again. Again. Again.
Before his mind began working for him again and he attempted to call the number back, his thumb bashing at the screen of his phone as if it could make this all happen and connect them so much quicker.
Kochira wa NTT Docomo desu. Okake ni natta denwa wa denpa no todokanai basho ni- He ended the call there.
Out of service, she says. Or turned off, she says. Law gripped his phone tight so as to keep himself from throwing it; grit his teeth to keep himself from screaming out of frustration into a self-misdiagnosis of tourette's syndrome of 'FUCK' with tireless reprise.
And his shadow shook
And the darkness crept.
Something in it sparkled.
And sparkled.
And sparkled.
When thunder began to tremble above Nagano's cloud-covered ceiling, the bear cub in the kitchen hid itself beneath the table while Law stood up on trembling legs and squared his shoulders as he opened the sliding door to the balcony. And out there, he waited, waited, and waited out in the rain with his eyes on the horizon for lightning to finally strike.
But before it could, fire found him first. That feeling wrapped around him from behind in a crushing embrace, hot and dripping wet. And there were lips nuzzling against the small hoops in his ear, trailing a searing line down his neck of tiny nips and bites that withheld an innate urge to sink in and tear, smoothed over with a lap of tongue drinking up rain water from his skin, and blond hair dipped into his peripheral vision. Blond hair that begged to be pulled, gripped, pale and golden and gorgeous in his fist.
"Tadaima," Sabo murmured into his skin, and Law spun around, all of his strength thrown into the other man's body, shoving him against the glass door with force enough that his head cracked a violence of spider-web patterns beneath it - the dragon didn't care and neither did he. And he gave into that urge, fingers gripping into Sabo's waves of hair and used that leverage to pull his head back, guiding his mouth against his own, and he tasted him - sweet and spicy over the roof of his mouth - tasted the pull of his own depravity sucking at the tip of his tongue and this, this, this hot glow of light burning invisible, new tattoos over the topography of his skin. Hands slid over his hips and down, grappling dragon-claw puncture wounds into his thighs. It was all that was necessary. Nothing else needed. No words, no explanations, no apologies, no poetry. Not even the tangential outbursts of thunder as lightning responded in jolts from his fingertips.
"I missed you," Law said as he gasped open-mouthed, the words sounding extraordinarily redundant as they came out. And over-simplified. But he didn't want to describe it - the urge to tie the man up in rope and imprison him into their fate, tear up the world, engulf it into the rooms of his power and collapse each and every threshold until there wasn't a single place of existence where the dragon could ever hope to hide. Nothing, nowhere, no place - each and every path undivided from the line of each other's sight.
It needed to be permanent this time. it needed to be for keeps. It needed to be for real. No more playing dead to what it was that he'd really wanted across the span of over one-hundred years. He'd decided to give up that old habit and abandon the pretending in a ditch about ten of those ago.
Hips ground against his own - hard - his cock was already filling up blood-thick against the soft knit of his pants, and his neck arched his jaw towards the downpour in the sky as he felt how much Sabo wanted him right back, straining in his own clothing. The cool of the rain was nothing - nothing that could save him now.
"Law..." the other man whispered, lips moving, pressing just under his chin, "We need." ? Yes, they did.
We Need
to fuck
to make love
to move.
And purify themselves from that ugly gaping divide of time between them and baptize themselves in sweat and spit and cum as he bathed the dragon in utmost love.
He took ahold of Sabo's wrist, intent on dragging him to the couch, but stumbled at the door only a few feet in as the dragon went still and immobile. Law's gaze followed, making some miracle of not getting lost in that swirling, misting, cerulean as he looked towards the open arch of the kitchen's entryway where a small bear was parked up on its haunches, a fleck of rice stuck to its black nose, most of its body lost in a roll of bellyfat, and oh-
Oh, damn it. He'd forgotten about the (definitely not cute) bear.
"If you don't mind, we were having a moment," he snapped at it, resuming forward and redirecting towards his far more private bedroom. "Watch TV if you're bored."
The cub's head ducked down. "Sumimasen."
...
...
...
"Did that bear... just apologize to you?" Sabo asked.
"I... don't know, don't care," Law huffed as he pulled him into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him with the flat of his palm. He'd meant to pounce straight into Sabo immediately, throw him to the bed or to the floor and show him how he meant to break him to pieces into, but didn't.
There was a sparse, slow moment before their lips reconnected where he had the dragon clasped by his forearms and they looked at each other. Just simply looked at each other. Sabo had not changed, the burn scar still over the right side of his face, looking like he'd gotten lost in the pages of a Jules Verne novel of a lofty journey up high on a balloon, or lost in Shinjuku and found himself in a boutique of EGA couture, either or both. Healthier than the last time they'd met, his cheeks fuller, thicker, and his lips smiling with his mysteries and abstracts. His skin held color and flushed at the apples from the cold, hair darkened and wet from the rain, turned it the color of spun straw back-lit by an Autumn golden hour, and his eyes were bright, shining, burning blue perfection.
Sabo was a light in the darkness.
Always had been, always would be.
A body of prose and a white-hot taunting language of movements, tugged into the curve of Law's own where they fit together, puzzle pieces that snapped into perfect place, lock and key. Pressing up against him with hands curling over the back of his neck, taking him down into a stumbling, trembling, sensory overload of rain-wet-cold but over-heated skin. Wildflowers scents overpowered a Chanel cologne, spicy and warm greens breathed into tunnel vision when his eyes fell shut. And Law had meant to speak, but there were lips in his way, garbling his sentences and his thoughts. Teeth scraping, upper-lip licked, biting ravenous bits of him. A tongue curled about his own almost daintily by comparison, tasting his own hunger running back through the center of him. The beast's belly growled, but Law, patient in Sabo's impatience, had long ago come to terms with being starved of this touch, AND THUS-
Held his meal tightly, violently close, but intended to savor it all to the last drop. drip. drop.
Like his mouth was full of venom and the tongue sharing space against his own was the one and only antidote - they'd both die without it. Like there was fever in his veins and working into his epithelium, and the dopamine rush was the ice water to bring down the temperature from its dangerous high - they'd both burn up without it. Like this was a cliffside and these hands pushing Sabo's jacket off his shoulders to his elbows and the ones skittering beneath his shirt were the ropes of their supports - they'd both fall without them.
Tangle of clothes going to the floor, stumble of shoes kicked off, intertwine, twining, and fallfallfall fallingdowndow n
Down they fell. There was no coordination to the way they mutually dragged each other onto the pristine, unscathed and unused (virgin) bed, Law somehow ending up above the other man, pulling and shoving alike while clothes were shed, a cravat worked loose, and buttons picked apart and some torn more than others. He worked his t-shirt over his head and tossed it off somewhere into the abyss outside of that tunnel-vision gaze, peripheral gone away to black, and there were fingernails immediately scratching at his shoulderblades and raking down the hard muscles of his chest. Hips moved in a generous rut against his last remaining clothing, rubbing at him just so, hot and hard. So painfully, ravenously hard, and Sabo, galvanized, then reached down between them to palm at his cock beneath that hellish fabric, fingers pressing exactly where Law needed it most.
And Law moaned, God did he ever moan, saliva painting his lips a glossy and shining red ruin. Shudders ran up and down his entire body, heat between his thighs as Sabo's hand around his cock gripped, cradled the head when it seeped pre-cum for him and smeared it around with his thumb while his spine arched up, lumbar separating from the vertebrae, his eyes shut tight and shifting beneath their lids. And he tensed, hissed through grit teeth as though struggling not to come apart at the seams from just touching Law. As though it was all he needed - and yet it was still not quite enough as he breathed out and back in. If it were within Law's capability to make the man come undone so easily-
Come to pieces
Come uncontrolled
Come away
and come
First, they needed to come completely undressed.
Hands pulled at Sabo's belt, zipper unzipped, and softer hands were at a softer waistbands in tandem, toyed with and pulled down and down and down, and Law's hips lifted until his cock bounced free, hard and thick and straight. He sat back, watched himself be watched with deep, dark blue intent as he removed that last layer of clothing entirely from his ankles, tossing his pants aside, and left Sabo to do the same for himself. No preliminaries, all instant gratification and greed and that desire to feel bare skin against bare skin, and the wet remnants of rain falling across Law's cheek from where his hair stuck flatly around his face.
Escaping down his jaw, across the scratch-lines down his chest- and Sabo's hands planted on the bed as he shifted himself on his knees and crawled, languid movements as he crept in after that single drop and caught it like a snowflake disintegrating on the tip of his tongue, wet and hot and locking against rippling abdominals and softsoft skin. He trailed upwards and licked around a pale, pert nipple, grazed it with his teeth, and Law's stomach fluttered, sensitive. Moaning, trembling beneath that mouth, he lunged himself forward and pinned the dragon's perfect body back down to the bed and slid between his inner thighs.
He kissed with a fury like there wasn't going to be a tomorrow.
Like that ending wouldn't come with a comforting afterlife.
And this moment was all there was, all he had (because you never really know, do you?), thrusting his cock next to the perfect curve of Sabo's own laying beautifully full and erect on his belly, and listened to the sweetsweet music of his moans reverberating against his tongue. Splayed fingers lifted beneath him, gripped his thigh and used it to spread him open from one side as his other arm mindlessly reached out with his power to summon lubricant to his free hand. It took a few tries to get it right, tossing aside irrelevant, similarly-shaped bottles with his focus and center all broken up and shaken, frustrated, famished.
"You wanted to tell me what love feels like..." Sabo laughed softly, his low voice breathless against Law's mouth, "I remember it. I heard everything, your every thought. If you can fill me up with all of them, then do so - I've always wanted this. More than you know."
Finally, finally. Yes. "I will. Move you. Sabo-ya."
And he lifted himself back with the remnants of a shuddering gasp on his tongue and spread Sabo's thighs further apart and pushed them up, up, against his chest, revealing the pucker of his asshole, so tiny and pink and clean that Law couldn't resist. He couldn't. He dove in hungrily, tracing that small clench with his tongue, laved him with saliva, slipping just the tip of his middle finger inside. He licked beside it and all around, brushed soft caresses of lip-skin just underneath that shallow penetration, listening to Sabo's salient moans go desperate and incoherent.
The way he wanted. Because the more desperate Sabo became, maybe-
Just maybe.
He couldn't ever leave again.
He couldn't - he couldn't. Law wouldn't allow it this time. He growled at the thought as he licked and kissed higher, muffled into the junction between thigh and groin where Law's teeth sank into the tender skin there and made his mark. No words, just inhaling his male scent, biting at his mate with animal sounds laced with the deepest want and need that no amount of nights could possibly fulfill. Not after so many years had been spent longing for the dragon's touch, for his kisses, for their bodies that moved as a shadow of one, useless and spent of all words.
(But Law did love Sabo's poetry, loved how he always whispered his pretty words in that certain way as he guided Law through orgasm after orgasm before painting his insides hot and white. It never mattered what was ever actually said; so lost, he could never understand, anyway).
He allowed his finger to slide out before he drenched the smooth skin between the man's ass over-abundantly with lube, letting it drool down, cold and slick. Coating his fingers, he then delved back inside, pressing as far in as he could this time - smoothing in and out, in and out, in and out, sliding a second into that hot, silky tightness as he listened to Sabo cry out for him with his pitch gone lower and softer, lust-filled, and disgustingly needy. In another place, another time, Law might have done the same, moaned and whimpered like he couldn't live without this. Like it was all he needed, all he wanted. Just to feel a little more alive and whole.
He might have moaned then, too, were his mouth not already busied, lips kneading into an especially sensitive point just beneath the tightening skin of Sabo's balls, hairless and smooth and heavy. He took one into his mouth, mindful of his teeth, gently rolling it over the soft of his tongue, bathing it wet with french-kissed flourish, saliva shimmering as that silky skin tightened even further. Fingers shifted, massaged, finding just that perfect place-
And his name was torn from Sabo's clenched throat
as though the yokai were something sacrosanct.
clenched like it wanted to climb up into his body.
clenched his thighs, his stomach
clenched around fingers, wet and rubbing and stretching
clenched that tight, hot, perfect little pucker of muscle-
"Law.. Law Law... oh, God-"
And broke apart with his cock untouched as he reached cloud nine. Coming in hot and wet spurts of white all over his chest and stomach, back arching like it was about to snap, and his eyes going metallic blue under their cracked, heavy-lids with their golden lashes shrouding vertical-slits of pupils.
"Keep going. Keep going. I can keep going," Sabo whispered (begged) passionately towards the pillow as his head tossed against it, blond curls covering his folded brow. His breath hitching and panting, chest collapsing more than it had the chance to rise, "Do it now. I will tangle in all of your threads, your thoughts."
Where Sabo pulled, Law would always drag - that was the way of things, always had been, always would be. But Law wasn't thinking of these things, thinking of nothing at all as his fingers withdrew from slick, twitching muscles that continued to pulse in the aftermath of orgasm that teetered on the brink of going multiple. He wanted to feel it around him when he came undone with more than just his hands; he wanted to feel himself tied up in those trembling limbs and soft exhalations.
Knees shifted against the bed cover, hand running through the mess of sweat and cum pooled on Sabo's stomach before he encircled his blood-engorged dick and gave it few slow strokes, coating himself in the other man's fluids. Lowering himself down again, his lips touched the blonde's cheek simply and gently as his palms slid under pale, muscular thighs, spreading them up and apart as his cock pressed against the crevice of Sabo's ass, up and down, then he began to press his way into his hot, slick insides, and felt that heat - God, that heat - that inner dragon fire burning him up like the sun lighting up his every nerve.
(Yes, yesyesyes, yes - I can feel you-
and all of it belonged to Law. You are m i n e.).
A broken cry was muffled as one of Sabo's hands flew to his mouth, bit into the backs of his knuckles as Law plunged his hips deeply, splitting him inch by inch by inch all of the way in, not allowing a moment for adjustment as he drew back. Unable to deny an animal instinct to plunge straight back in. No matter how much it could hurt, it wouldn't matter. There was no such thing pain, there was only the movement. He moved, moved him and moved into him. Move move move. Sabo's body open and prone beneath him felt like a hot, writhing, tight, crush of heaven around his cock. Tightening, constricting, as though he meant to drag Law down with him into a serpent's coil of suffocation, so tight tight tight and tighter still...
No more waiting. No more pain. No more.
"Sabo-ya..." I've needed you so much, for so long, he'd wanted to say, but couldn't.
It was lost in nearly a whimper, helpless, as Law dropped his head into the dragon's shoulder and licked the sweat from his clavicle, salt glistening all over his lips. Hips grinding, rocking in and out and in, immersing himself in kisses, moans, pleasure-ridden sighs, and pure incoherence. Spread legs were clutching his flanks while dragon claws sank into the skin of his back, puncturing bleeding holes of stinging crimson running red-hot down his skin - all crocodile eyes and crocodile mind. All base and primitive instincts taking him over as Law deepened his movements, aggressively pounding into his lover with rough slaps of skin against skin, so much louder than the muffled cries of the man beneath him.
"You-You feel so-" the dragon moaned, tossing his head back, arching, his lips falling into black-blue hair drenched with rain and sweat, kissing him mindlessly where his voice failed. The words he couldn't bring himself say were all echoing inside of Law's head - the language of his body flowing through him, prickling through their fragile bond and into his skin like an electrical storm raging somewhere outside his window. It called to him, spoke to him-
(Harder, faster, moremoremore m o r e)
You feel so like love, you feel so like forever, it said, You are made whole by my halves - what is it that behooves you to tangle as you do?
(You - when I can't stand myself anymore, all I want is you).
And Law moaned, just moaned and moaned, mouthed Sabo's name into that brutal rhythm because he felt so good, back and forth, back and forth, and in and out. Fucking him with a harsh, percussive, unsteady and broken pace - losing himself in Sabo's squeezing, tight ass, drawing him in a seemingly deeper darkness with every downwards grind of his hips. It felt so good that it ached and burned, and when the burn became too much, the pleasure would reprise with an intensity that shook him into more of a trembling, swearing mess, sinking his teeth into Sabo's neck violently because he was going to give. Going to cum so hard, so fast, so deep-
" - Nnn..."
But so was Sabo - again. The sense of urgency present in the erratic quality of his breath, puffing against Law's temple, distressing wisps of dark hair. His insides were twitching, hips writhing as though trying to push himself down on Law's cock deeper and harder, clenching, clenching up tight. It took no more than Law's hand intervening, thumb brushing over the flushed head of his dripping erection before Sabo was spasming around him and he felt so pure and perfect, clawing at his skin and drawing more blood, back arching away from the bed. Wave after wave, wet, hot, pulsing and dripping down Law's hand before he planted it on the bed cover and rode out his own last few reckless thrusts.
And only then did he go completely silent, oxygen asphyxiated from him with the remains of his voice caught in the back of his throat - unable to breathe. He shook and shook and shook, burying his cum deep into Sabo's ass in sharp jerks of his hips as his arms wrapped around him and clung. The arrhythmia of his heart restarted, pulsing up just as he pulsed down, and he could see the stars at the backs of his eyes. He could see his own self falling down from them.
Fallen angel.
Fallen long ago.
But only one of them had the burn-scars to prove their plummet through the atmosphere.
For a long time, they simply held each other, breathing each other in, pressing kisses here and there as the sweat cooled on their skin and cum drooled perversely satisfying out of Sabo's body and onto the bed. His arms were warm around Law's shoulders, and the moment was flawless- golden. Angel and dragon, exactly how they were never meant until fate decided something different, and they were tangled, tangled, twisted up in the strings in the forever of their immortality.
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. Or so went Blake's 'Auguries Of Innocence'.
"If I tell you that I love you now, would you give me poetry?" Sabo eventually asked, pulling Law closer still as he traced along the heart-shape of a tattoo on his shoulder.
"Mmm," he appeared to deliberate for a moment, rolling onto his side on the soaked bed-cover, nuzzling his lips at the bruise on the dragon's neck where his teeth had sunk in too deeply. That mark. That possessive mark. He wasn't sorry for it, nor for the one at his inner thigh. "Even if I don't have any to give you, would you still say it?"
"I would," he said.
(And yet he didn't actually say it).
Instead, "Let me stay here with you," Sabo continued, his voice soft as his fingers lifted up from Law's shoulder to brush up the nape of his neck and work into his hair, "Let me sleep here in this bed with you every night. Let me always see your wings. I've decided that I want to write a book about the world. So let me. It will have a good ending."
Like now - the world was already ending in a perfect way, and would end yet again in a few day's time as the sakura would soon begin to fall. When Law's eyes closed, and when they opened again; when people die and when people are born; when things are found and others are lost. In the rise of the sun and its fall unto the darkness given illumination by way of the moon and the rabbit trapped in that cycle...
Was how the world ended, and how it began.
Not with a flash of falling sky. Not with the burn of civilization. Not with its dying screams.
There are beginnings. And there are endings. And there were times when Law, going silent and hush, would only lean in to kiss Sabo's lips and trace the contour of his jaw with his fingertips to connect with him at the middles.
"Then stay."
Something outside of the room crashed, the sound of glass breaking, but he didn't care. There were two things in the world that held value enough to Trafalgar Law for him to so much as stir, and both were within this room. One, propped into the corner as a silent sentinel of a trusted blade, dormant in its sheathe. And the other... with a stretch of his body, a stretch of reality, was gently swept up and engulfed within the arms of soft, black wings with their exceptional shadows and living, moving feathers.
"I will."
Flower petals began to cascade down around them.
Lightning lit up the city skyline.
But neither of them so much as blinked.
April 4, 2015 - Taito-ku, Tokyo -
Law was a darkness in the light.
He knew what it meant to give things definition, to give them shadow and give them shape.
He'd learned over time that too much light could sometimes be blinding, that there needed to be that perfect balance of darks in it to be able to properly see anything at all. He'd learned from watching Sabo that joy had a deeper meaning to someone who knew what it meant to suffer. He knew from his own experiences that suffering had a deeper meaning to someone who knew what it meant to feel joy.
Behind every teardrop there is a smile. And behind every smile there is a likewise teardrop.
All things had their place.
Even Law had his own. Not as a yokai, but an angel - a daitenshi in his own right, however artificially made and fallen from a grace he'd never known as he'd not been born into it as his predecessor had been. But even Corazon, too, had black wings - angels are not meant to know the meaning of death, but once it is there, it cannot be erased. But that was very irrelevant. It didn't matter. The truth of Law's existence was an old argument against Sabo that the dragon had won long ago, and Marco, with senses sharper than anyone's, had confirmed it.
And it had not even really been much of an argument by definition, but it was, for lack of a better word, and the only term that lent him a bit of dignity when his lover had laughed at him so hard that he could have ruptured his spleen.
WHERE did you learn to be THIS self-deprecating?
'I know what you are and I know its meaning,' Sabo had eventually said, smiling at him broadly, 'I can feel you deep under my skin. The only one who is confused is yourself.'
You are not a monster. You are an archangel, Trafalgar D. Water Law.
Maybe that hadn't always been the case. Maybe there was a time when something dark and malevolent had conquered his spirit. But that time was no longer. That thing was no more.
There was, in that long ago history, a creature who wrought the pain of his own existence in a blight rained down upon humanity. All up until the point where he could no longer discern his existence from the life he lived and the death he brought upon so many doorsteps... And the pattern, the ritual of it - the hearts he'd cut from his victims. The victims he made out of men who were young, blond, blue-eyed and striking. Men who looked so much like Sabo, when he thought actually about it (but he tried not to).
There was, in that long ago history, a time where he'd ripped his stomach open and let its contents all fall out without a second glance, filleted his hands apart on his nodachi before gouging his heart straight through. There was a time where he had been something else. An other. Until Sabo found him, sensed him, the missing place for his own burgeoning soul that he descended upon, pulled down by all of their strings from his higher echelons upon the rooftops of the world he traversed, had explored far and wide. And when he blazed into the room with fire in his hands and with his volatile gaze, poetry on his tongue that his eyes refused to translate, and sifted through the ruin of Law's innards to push them back into place, scattered in the pool of his own gore... there was a change. There was a difference.
When Sabo looked at Law, when he could see deep into his bloody, unhinged mangle and could see the bottom of his lungs peeking through the prison bars of his ribcage slowly inflate and deflate and cling to his last frail breaths, what he saw was that of a devil's empty shell. An Oni. The demonic abominations that became of self-actualized beings who were overcome by the tragedy of living, torment twisting them into unrepentant, unfeeling creatures of destruction. But what Sabo pieced back together with his bare hands came into shape as something more startling and stunning. An angel in his arms, clinging to his limbs, taking shelter in his throat.
A celestial entity made whole and immaculate by Sabo's half.
But the dragon didn't like to remember these details; he had been manic deep down inside, he'd once sadly explained, but not by the sight of his gore nor the feel of his guts all slippery in his fingers (that, he said, was a beautiful moment. Had made him feel so close to Law. So intimate. So significant). The truth was that, since ancient history, Sabo had been alone. Fire dragons were overly-pompous, disgusting beings of conceit that - had they not gone largely extinct - he bore no association with beyond the blood. He'd run from that life, clinging instead to those he considered his true brothers, Ace and Luffy, a bit too much just for some semblance of companionship.
And when he finally met Law - Law, who belonged to him and to no other; Law, who called to his fire in a way that his own kind never could - after so many years of waiting to find that missing piece of himself... after thousands of years of loneliness. A year, a month, or maybe even days longer than that, then it might have been too late for them. Law could have destroyed himself, leaving Sabo forever alone in his own blinding light.
There had been times, he admitted, during the long stretch of absence between them, that thought made him feel as though he were going to lose his mind. There were nightmares of dead angels in his arms with shattered, grotesquely sagging wings. Sometimes he lost sight of himself... a fear stealing over him that fueled his desperation and his obsession, made him weak, made him do things that he'd forever regret.
But now?
Simply,
Sabo loved him.
Unafraid.
Out loud.
The sakura were falling again, this time over Ueno park on a brilliant, warm Sunday afternoon. There were crowds of people spread out over blankets everywhere for hanami, the smell of barbequed meat delicious in the air, voices rising up in animated chatter over the sound of some distant traditional music, and there were pink petals trickling softly down through the umbrellas of blossomed branches. There were petals in Law's hair, brushing his face, and decorating his shoulders as he reclined with his back against one of many tree trunks and watched as a colorful butterfly alighted upon Bepo's nose and made the bear cub go cross-eyed.
He was a handful sometimes, Bepo. That was the bear cub's name, in any event (it sounded like a heartbeat, Law thought, bepo, bepo, bepo). After several mishaps, broken glasses, chewed-up documents, and a penchant for crashing into the main bedroom and heaving himself up on the bed at ungodly hours of the morning, Law had insisted for a while that his name should be 'Asshole'.
Sabo, infinitely more patient, hadn't agreed.
Until, that was, nearly the same event had taken place, only in this instance, they'd been naked together beneath the sheets, lost in the throes of each other, and Sabo had been mere seconds from balls deep inside of Law... when suddenly they had a lap full of energetic white fur between them. And a very heady mood thoroughly spoiled.
It began some debate over whether 'Asshole' was more appropriate than the dragon's suggestion of 'cockblock'. If the tiny bear weren't so damned (adorable) pathetic most of the time, Law would have punted him back out on the streets, but as it was, bakemono were slow to come into their full power. And he couldn't bring himself to do that to a largely helpless creature.
Maybe there was some of that angelic benevolence in him, after all. So he asserted.
A few photographs Sabo had taken that were now hanging on his apartment's yellow wall that depicted them curled up together, napping on the sofa, spoke a bit different.
A pair of paws closed over a black nose, but the butterfly was faster than Bepo, fluttering off and compelling the bear to give chase across the grass. Law sighed (not fondly, no), and looked up as Sabo approached, dark sunglasses over his blue eyes, out of breath from a too-competitive-to-be-normal game of frisbee between himself, his two brothers, and a few other friends of theirs who were all still off roughhousing with each other in the grass, attempting to drag a righteously ruffled phoenix down with them in their foray.
"He's here! Have you seen him yet?" Sabo asked as he dropped down beside the angel, grabbing a water bottle from their belongings and drinking from it deeply.
Law knew who he meant.
As inconspicuously as possible, he pointed across the grass and through the trees, towards the direction of a picnic blanket where a young man sat with his arm draped about a beautiful woman's shoulders, mouth open wide, exuberant, laughing at something that she'd said. The purity of the warm sun was glinting off of his pale blonde hair, glowing on his skin, and he was shining, handsome, full of life, full of youth.
Kuroashi no Sanji, alive and well... for the time being. Their only incentive for visiting Ueno that day was because they knew that Sanji would be there and it was a rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of him candidly, without arousing suspicion or appearing as stalkers. Law wondered if it was fate or coincidence that the man had come back to Tokyo after all of this time. It was convenient, in any case, even if Zoro was still off watching him morosely from the sidelines. And from what Law could gather from his incensed shouts rising up above the sounds of the festivities, along with the sounds of Luffy's raucous laughter, was in the midst of being pulled into a frisbee session that was likely going to escalate into violence before long.
"He's just as gorgeous as before. Are you sure he's not mine, after all?" Sabo asked as he slid his shades up into his hair, "I think I'd make a good father; I'd teach him to be a fine young dragon."
Law shook his head. "Spiritually, if you must. Biologically, no. But I don't think that he'll actually ever become that mature to see scales again - I never thought he'd live this long to begin with... even still, I thought it better that he be given a chance to live, be human. But he's a ticking time bomb, and at any point he could begin to lose cohesion. I may be able to remedy that now. In the meantime, though..."
"He seems happy," Sabo said, sliding himself closer beside Law and smiled as a tattooed arm came around his waist. He relaxed at the angel's side, let his head rest against the strength of his shoulder comfortably. "If I were you, I would feel the same. I wouldn't want to take him away from all of this until its absolutely necessary."
Law replied with a soft sound of agreement as he pressed his cheek into Sabo's hair. The cherry blossoms fell in the dawning Spring air, lively, spirited, twirling about in the breeze with the gentle, white-pink memories of yet another season falling down to the earth. Together, they listened to the sounds of men and women drunk on too much sake and well-wishes alike, scattered in the breaks of all those tiny, heart-shape petals. In all of that symbology, the beauty of life in its transience.
Life, for them, was no such fleeting thing. As Law's fingers sought out Sabo's own to lace, intertwine, and clasp together, there was a literal 'forever' connotation somewhere behind it. Less simple than descriptor alone, but special, surprising and complex by the weight of how powerful his emotions could resound whenever they touched. Like sakura, Law sometimes felt like he was blossoming. Sometimes he felt like he was dying. And sometimes he felt like he was being reborn.
But whatever it was - ".. This... feels right."
"It does, doesn't it? It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop," Sabo murmured, then turned his head to capture Law's mouth in a long, slow, heady kiss that lingered on and on and on, nuzzling brushes of soft, pink skin. The barest hint of tongue, gentle, flowed between one press of lips into the next. He could taste ash and it was sweet in his mouth, the mark of a life engulfed in curling flames as electricity was called forth to crackle through his veins. He should have been used to this by now, but even after so many years, the fingertips that reached out to comb through golden blond hair couldn't help their trembling, overeager.
"If we start this now, we probably aren't going to be able to stop."
Sabo was thinking it, but Law possessed enough voice of rationale to actually say it.
"Later then, my love," the dragon replied in a quick hush, eyes flashing and glowing fiercely cerulean - a sky darkening over with many promises Law knew he would keep, "Just wait. I will bend you, play you, breathe you, clutch you, and take you. I would burn the world for you, if that's what you want... but your body should suffice, I think."
For the last 120 years, this had always been the bottom line between them.
The corner of Law's mouth lifted in a cocky, lazy smirk that pressed into a kiss on Sabo's forehead.
"Your poetry moves me as always, Sabo-ya."
First off, I want to thank opscifiandfantasy / lunarshores for hosting the event. People should have seen me go frantic the last week to complete this. My eye-circles, I can assume, would have made even Law concerned. XD But it was a fun challenge to write for! This is actually my first attempt at a fantasy type of story. Even if I feel like this is more a horror/tragedy with fantasy elements than vice-versa... I get my 'E' for Effort. :P I spent a lot of time freaking out over the fic, worrying about the time-lapse and hoping that it all made sense and that I wasn't just rambling words out incoherently (well, that happened too... a lot... much editing took place). XD I also want to thank my friends darksinokaru for listening to me fret, and meghan for looking this over for me and assuring me that the story made sense. :D
Also, I make no excuses for the choice of my pairing here... I just don't do the OTP thing (my closest is probably LawZo). The great thing about pairings that have little or no interaction in canon is that I can go all the way with my imagination without preconceived notions of how they should be and I can just have a lot of fun with it. Poetic!Sabo was just a random thing, but I enjoyed writing all of his dialogue so much. :3
Anyway, there are going to be two more fics coming up in this 'verse. This fic itself is more of a backstory to another that its ending is hinting and it - it'll be a SanZo set in modern day, Sanji-centric, with a whole lot of Zoro raging at Law. XD Either way, if you like this fic and want to see more similar to it and/or wish to help my motivation along, please let me know what you think!
