Epilogue
Time on Raftel moves at its own pace: too slow for some, and too fast for others. For those who are happy, every moment is worth living, no matter if its hot summer or frosty winter. Every period, every season sooner or later ends, but only to let the next start. In that regard, Raftel, the Island of the End and the Beginning, is just like every other.
It is the same in the Corazon Memorial Hospital: when one patient recovers, another comes to their place. Work in health care, despite the best efforts of the doctors, nurses and all assisting personnel, will never stop. Even the powerful Devil Fruit, although capable of curing every disease, cannot eradicate them once and for all, because there's much more factors affecting human health than anyone could ever count. Its user knows that he will fight for those who can be saved from dying until his last breath, but now he can understand he isn't responsible for all humanity.
This is Trafalgar Law: a man in early-forties who smiles rarely, but when he does, there is such warmth in his eyes that everyone seeing it is filled with joy. He is the greatest doctor that have ever lived, capable of performing miraculous surgeries and operations that no-one else can. He is considered to be one of the most influential people in the world, and there's hardly anyone who haven't heard his name, and yet honour and glory mean to him as little as a breath of wind that can't warm. He still works a lot, but he often takes days off, too, and every day he goes home, for this is where his heart and the very essence of his life is: his teenage foster son, who saved him from despair and wrestled him out of the hands of slow dying, and whose presence gives him not only sense but, above all, normal human happiness. And even though every day means fighting for the boy's health and every moment realises how fragile he is, for Law, he seems the strongest and the bravest man in the world, who decided to live for love instead of, at the first opportunity and without hesitation, dying for it. Rosapelo arouses his admiration and adoration... but, in the first place, is his beloved kid, not some unreachable ideal.
And every morning, when Law goes to work every morning and his eyes read the name of the hospital, he remembers another man he admired and adored... to such an extent that the pain of having lost him almost crushed him. Now, however, when he recalls Corazon - not from distant past, but from his own heart, as if Donquixote Rosinante were very close - he does it without suffering, only with acceptance: acceptance of love and sacrifice. Now Law finally is able forgive Corazon having saved him, for thanks to that he could, can and will be able to help Rosapelo. Now Law finally could forgive himself having been saved by Corazon... and he is almost amazed that light and the colours are so bright again, as if a quarter of century spent in grey didn't leave any mark. He isn't bitter about having waited so long, so maybe it really is true that new happiness makes the past simply move aside; no matter how difficult, painful or lifeless, it loses its meaning when compared with the present, and turns merely in its cause.
Trafalgar D. Water Law doesn't know the future, but he wishes that tomorrow doesn't differ much from today. He hopes that fate won't stop giving him those most ordinary days. If needed, he will fight for them.
He is well aware it's worth it.