Trafalgar Law sits around a table with three crew members in his submarine, shuffling a deck of cards. "Alright guys," he says. "Winner gets chore immunity for a week."
"Deal me in, would you? And is that wine? Pour me a glass. It helps with my poker face."
After dealing another hand Law does a double take. "Gallowcomb?" For lack of a better word, she looks a mess. Her hair has been tossed into a tight ponytail that frizzes at odd angles. She wears short black shorts, brown leather knee high boots, a munitions belt stocked with silver canisters, and the leather poisons harness on her wrist is clearly visible and half empty. All that is left of the dress he had seen her in on Sabaody is the torso which has frayed ends where the fabric had been ripped. She smells slightly of salt water, fruit, and… Law sniffs. Infection?
"Figured that out, have you? Whatever you're thinking you're wrong. She's dead. It's Valentine now." Karmen sits stone-faced, waving a glass of wine under her nose but not drinking it. "You helped Captain Luffy after he almost died at Marineford, right? Thanks for that." Her eyes glance up from her cards. "How is he?"
"He's fine, physically," Law says. He glances at a monitor on the wall. There are five, but he focuses on the one listing the position of the submarine in comparison to the surface. The number steadily increases. "We're 5,000 meters under. How long have you been on my sub?"
"Since before you left that last island. I've been following you for a while though. I had to make sure I wasn't interrupting anything and you weren't meeting with someone that I find… unpleasant."
"And why didn't my guards notice you?" He glares past her at select crew members who have taken precautionary martial arts stances around her. His piercing gaze doesn't reflect the false amusement playing on his lips. Or maybe he thinks a fight would be interesting. It's hard to tell.
"Don't blame them. I have ways of going unnoticed, even more than I had on Sabaody." She finally sets down the wine glass. "Do you know how much training it takes to sneak past Sea Kings with electro-sensors in their noses?"
Law scowls, but seems mildly interested in her small display of skill. "Well you obviously aren't here to steal from me, so what do you want?"
"Information, for starters." She sets the cards down. The Joker card is suddenly on the table, face up. "Sync. How is your Doffy hunt coming? He's been pretty adamant in recruiting me for his Trebol family."
"Takt." A rapidly emptied chair flings itself into the wall. The crew stares dumbfounded at the lack of a body. Law slides his gaze to his left where a metal quill is poised at his bicep.
"I said he'd tried to recruit me, not that I'd accepted. And before you try that again you should know that there is a Sea King stingray tailing this ship who will ensure that you never surface again if something should happen to me. Trust me, getting hit by her tail really sucks. It can crush rock and probably tear through metal. And I don't want to poison you or your crew but I will if I have to. Now can we stop with the ring toss? I need you to not be paralyzed." He sets his hands back down on the table and she holds her quill up non-threateningly before sliding it back into her belt. "Listen, I've been using Haki at an exhausting rate, so can we please set tricks aside and just talk like civil Northies?"
"Don't call me that ever again."
"Nobody likes my nicknames," she sighs and rests a hand on the table. He's not sure if it's for emphasis or if she's having trouble keeping herself upright. There's blood under her nails. "What do you say? We continue our little poker game, I win, you do me a favor and we trade a little info?"
"What are you really doing here, Karmen?"
"If I told you I brought you something cute and furry to treat, would you hold it against me?" She leans forward in an inviting gesture. He glares at her. She relents, biting her lip slightly as she straightens. "I don't have much time left. I need a doctor."
He glances over her once. "You look perfectly healthy, if a little tired."
"I'll pay." She digs out her gold Gallowcomb seal. It glints alluringly in the artificial light. "Please. I've tried everything." The weariness and sleepless nights show on her face as she shakes the seal in his direction. "You're from the North Blue. You know how much this is worth."
Law strokes his goatee, leaning his chair back onto two legs and putting a foot on the table. "And where do you expect me to sell something like that?"
"Look, I've had a rough few weeks. I've been warring for the respect of Sea Kings to leave an island, I atrophied my own ex-father's arms off, blew up my childhood home, had to cross the Calm Belt twice, was unable to help my captain as he watched his own brother die, and have been just under the radar of people who would rather see me dead for my now non-existent familial relationships. My doctor has given up and he's been getting weaker. Please. At least examine him. I can't lose him twice." She pauses and plays her trump card. "If you save him I'll tell you what I know about SMILE."
The chair is instantly on all fours and he makes a leisurely effort to stand. Law pockets the seal. For a moment two different types of desperation burn between them. "Where is he?"
"Already in the medical ward." Law leads the way, followed by Bepo and a few members of the crew. They find a heavily bandaged man wrapped in a thick cloak on a surgical table. The patient is unconscious but he shakes and sweats in clear distress. Karmen notes that he doesn't have the strength left to groan like he had a few days before. Law creates an operating circle and removes the soiled bandages with a flick of his fingers, frowning at what's underneath. What visible skin that hasn't been destroyed is deathly pale. The smell has gotten worse, if that was possible. Karmen's nails dig into her arms. Law goes to lift the hood off his face and she reaches forward to gently stop his hand. "Try not to freak out about his…" She waves a hand around her face before releasing him. Her hand is clammy and calloused. She steps back, biting her lip, feet threatening to break out into nervous tap dance as the surgeon lifts the cloak off Pierce completely. His eyes narrow, especially when he sees the two black horns sprouting from his head. Karmen sits on a different table and pulls her knees to her chest while Law begins his examination in earnest. "Can you help him?"
His eyes scan his patient quickly. "These stitches are very neat. You did a good job."
"I had a good butler." She bites her lip harder to keep from asking her question again.
"I thought you said he was furry," he inquires as he prods a few hairless places on Pierce's chest and abdomen, frown deepening.
"Every time I think he's getting better he starts… changing. I don't know what Ikaika did to him, but it's got Doffy written all over it." She watches Law's fingers shift to prodding his wounds, careful but precise, learning much while inflicting minimal discomfort. "He was always off-kilter, but if he doesn't have a good explanation for this I might set him on fire. I have a little Super Sunblade left over from fusing the Gallowcomb manor gate."
Law's fingers still over a particularly purple area on Pierce's left side. His face grows gravely serious. "Your friend's spleen is ruptured and he's septic. I'll have to operate right away." He gives orders to a few of his men and they begin prepping. "At best he'll need skin grafts and have a long recovery ahead of him. He'll have scarring on over forty-five percent of his body for the rest of his life. If you're going to cry or puke then wait outside."
"I'm staying." Her voice is soft but certain. She stares at Pierce intently. "This may seem like an odd request, but can I have one of his hands? I've heard that's something you can do. You don't need those for surgery, right?"
Making another operating circle, Law draws his sword and removes Pierce's right hand above the sores left by the chain shackles and tosses it to her. "Don't lose it. He might want it back." She interlocks her fingers with his and holds it tightly. It's feverish and warm. She can feel the blood still pumping through his fingers even though his body sits several feet away. What an odd devil fruit power. "Who is this guy, anyway?"
"Do you want the Gallowcomb answer or the one I'm still piecing together?" she asks with an exhausted, half-sarcastic tone.
"You're choice."
"His name is Pierce. He's my best friend and once personal servant, but Ikaika called him K-… my friend's spy. I don't know the full story. I was hoping to talk to that person on Sabaody, but…" She holds the hand tighter. "Do you know anything about Vegapunk?"
"Doesn't everybody?" Law is about to say something more when Pierce starts undergoing a strange transformation. Pale and brown fur begins welling up and disappearing on his body. Strange growths sprout all over his exposed skin and sink back into nonexistence. Parts of his body stretch and shrink, making him look unstable and liquid. The hand inside Karmen's grows gray fur, then sprouts an ear, then turns into a leathery claw. "I can't operate on him like this," Law says, lifting his sword to slice Pierce into manageable chunks. Before he can swing his blade the transformations stop and disappear abruptly. The patient's breathing becomes shallow and weak. Law lowers his arm and looks back to Karmen. She's holding Pierce's hand around her quill, shushing it and petting it like a cat. Law frowns curiously at her. "I thought that pen of yours had an unpleasant energy."
"I hate using sea prism on him, but it's the only thing that keeps… that… from getting out of control. I think he'd be able to control it if he was awake, but he's been trying to die on me after I spent two years figuring out how to save him. You have some experience working on animals too, right?" She glances over at the bear in a jumpsuit. "There's one other thing. I noticed something strange in his... eye."
Law lowers the surgical lamp towards Pierce's face and pulls open one of his lids. He curses. "You said your father did this to him?"
"Ex-father." She nods. "There was some agreement between him and someone with a lot of power. He wasn't able to lay a single hand on me, no matter what. So he tortured people in front of me and tried to marry me off to someone who had no qualms about beating women and then does this to Pierce when I left my fiancé standing at the altar twice. Pierce was kept alive to draw me back. That plan kind of backfired on Ikaika. Like I said, I disarmed him."
His team signals they're read. They wash Pierce's chest and stick needles and tubes into his arms. "We're going to start now. If you want him to live then keep that pen in his hand." He begins cutting. She taps her foot on the edge of the table. "What did you use on Gallowcomb?" he asks, indicating her earlier comment.
"An extinct toxin called Plucharon that was denatured using a method I stumbled on while in the sky islands. I saved my last two drops of it for him. I barely gave him the antidote in time to save his miserable life. He's lucky I made an instant one after my fight with that goat man. His hands were falling apart when I left. I'm not sure they'll be able to save his shoulders either. I sure hope not."
"So instead of killing him you made him live in ridicule and humiliation with the possibility of modification?"
"Don't go giving him someone else's arms now, Law," she says. "I suppose he could always run to that genius dog and get new ones." Dark thoughts form in her raging eyes. "I need more sunblade."
"So who is this mystery man who made this deal?"
"He's a man who protected my home island with some kind of relationship with my real parents. He would come visit the manor when he was off duty. We would sit in the vineyard drinking tea and he would tell me government secrets and things. I guess it makes sense that Pierce was reporting to him. He's the one who assigned Pierce to me, after all. Ikaika worked closely with the reigning powers and government, so there must have been a lot of information exchanged. He stopped torturing people in front of me so often after that but the shipwrecks increased. I'm not sure if witnessing suffering is better than knowing people died because of redirected anger, but I appreciated the distance. I dislike death, and I'm not a murderer. I couldn't even kill Ikaika." She speaks matter-of-factly, too tired to care what comes out of her mouth. Would he even be surprised if she told him this friend is Kuma? She doesn't want to risk an adverse reaction while he's elbow deep in chunks of Pierce.
"That's an odd outcome," he notes.
"Our friend believes children should stay innocent as long as possible."
"But he gave you top secret government information that could have gotten you killed."
"Pretty much." Law keeps Karmen talking like this while he works. She makes sure not to give away anything important, but it's nice to hold a conversation with someone who can reply. Eventually she relaxes her legs and stops squeezing the blood flow from Pierce's hand. His team throws out several medical terms and numbers that she feels are serious but doesn't quite understand. All the numbers sound abnormally high, but Pierce's face remains passive with only the slightest flickers of his scarred eyelids. The remaining tension in her hands slowly goes away as they work. She watches as pieces of Pierce are piled and rearranged until they are reassembled better than before. Law talks about first meeting Doflamingo and she tells him about her spotty encounters growing up with him. "Willow wanted nothing to do with him. She even tried to shoot him on a few occasions, but Ikaika felt he could make beneficial business deals with him. He used to try to entertain me by using birds as kites," she says, tapping Morse code with her feet. "By the end of his visits he would be putting on puppet shows with slaves. Ikaika loved it and Willow always complained that they were being taken away from their work, especially when he had them cut each other down with gardening tools." She sees Law get to Pierce's eyes but can't see what he's doing. She squeezes the hand in hers again.
Law and his team finish the surgery after several hours and put everything back into its proper place, including the hand. "Whatever they did to your friend, it changed his biology immensely."
"What do you mean?" Karmen had known this, observed it, stopped it with sea prism, but the confirmation from a medical expert still left a hollow chill in the pit of her stomach.
"His heart rate was up to a thousand beats per minute without putting him in excess distress and seems stable around 600 beats per minute, his hemoglobin level is elevated, and his spleen is twice as large as it should be. On top of that, his physical form is extremely malleable, as you've seen."
"Can he live like that?" she asks. "And don't you usually remove a ruptured spleen?"
"I have a theory," Law says, "and if I'm right, removing his spleen could kill him. We'll give him heavy antibiotics to clear what's left of the infections and keep him immobilized to prevent internal bleeding." His team straps heavy bands around Pierce and secure him to the table. Karmen pulls a feather from her quill and uses Usopp's rubber band to bind it to his wrist. Her fingers linger on his skin. Compared to her vibrant hue he looks like a corpse.
"What about his eyes?" she asks, stroking Pierce's damp hair. They look misshapen and swollen, even with the infection cleaned out.
Law takes a deep breath. "They're gone."
"You mean he's lost his sight?" she asks.
He exhales. "He didn't arrive with eyes."
Karmen's stomach lurches and her hand presses slightly deeper against Pierce's temple. "Doesn't have… Oh." The sub seems to tilt under her feet. She sits down and tries to convince her stomach not to empty. They're just a small piece of him, but she feels like one of the few stable things in her life has been wrenched from her. "And that cotton stuff you cleaned out of them?" she says airily. Some of the surgeons hover as if she may pass out. She feels like she could. She looks at Pierce's sleeping face and the world around her seems to stabilize some.
Law opens a cabinet and pulls out a small bottle. "White-nose syndrome. It's a fungus. There's not really a cure for it right now and getting rid of it in a human is tricky, but I can treat it and hope it goes away on its own." He drops the liquid into both of Pierce's eyes and wraps gauze around them. Before the bandages cover them completely Karmen is able to verify the truth with her own eyes. The sockets are completely hollow. "Has he eaten anything lately?"
She blinks her attention back to Law, fighting the new wave of nausea. "He hasn't been awake. I've been slipping him spoonfuls of broth, but it hasn't done much for him."
Law calls for a bag of nutrition with extra protein. "I can't give you free range of the ship, but you can go to the kitchen and cook yourself something."
"That's not something you want to offer." She looks at him sheepishly. "I can't cook. At all. Last I checked small yellow submersibles and spontaneous combustion don't mix."
"Fine. I'll make you some rice balls."
"Hear that, Pierce?" Karmen asks happily. "I run into such nice Captains."
Law sighs and leads the way. They sit across from each other while they eat. He stares thoughtfully while she stuffs her face. "You haven't eaten well either, have you?"
She swallows a large mouthful and thumbs a spare grain of rice from her lip into her mouth. "I told you, I can't cook. And there were smaller people who needed to be fed, so what food we did come across went to them." Maybe her lack of food has contributed to why the hall to the kitchen had still been swimming slightly. The captain slaps a newspaper down on the table. Right above a story about a foreign king being stabbed to death at a party is a bold headline that reads "Vengeful Ghost takes Noble's Arms to the Underworld." She grins. "Vengeful Ghost. That's Usopp worthy." She frowns. "I wonder where he is."
"What are you going to do now?" he asks.
"I'd like to find everyone again, but I have a few things to do before that and I have to wait until Pierce is better. When we can, I want to ruin Ikaika's company, DavenGallow Co., to make sure he can't come after us or my crew." She wonders if it would be better for Law if she called them Gallowcomb but she'd known them for far too long to use their surname multiple times in one conversation. She hadn't eaten enough to use three syllable names.
Law taps the table. "I held up my end of the bargain. Your friend in there will pull through. Tell me about SMILE."
Karmen swallows another mouthful of rice. "You know that Doffy's been operating out of Dressrosa for about eight years now, right? The SMILE factory is somewhere in the city. I was always under heavy observation when I was there, so I could never follow anyone to it, but Viola told me what she could. I was going to investigate it on a different matter but those stupid admirals went and wrecked the island with the lab I needed to get to."
"You mean Punk Hazard, right?" Law asks. It wasn't any secret that Aokiji and Akainu had destroyed the natural ecosystem of the island in their all-out duel for control of the navy.
"Yeah," she responds, dismantling a feather dart and adding its spider venom capsule to her drink. "My rays have trouble regulating their body heat with such extreme temperatures. I can survive any lingering toxins there, but Kudra would never forgive me if one of the children got hurt. She's the Sea King tailing us. My sources tell me that's where SMILE is being produced, even though the island is considered uninhabitable. So far they've only figured out how to duplicate Zoan types and as you've seen, they have strange effects on the body."
"So the horns and transformations on your friend…?" Law asks.
"Among other things," she says. "One of the four Emperors calls these power holders Gifters. He only has a few of them right now, but his army is growing. They gave one of the artificial devil fruits to Gallowcomb's head bounty hunter, Antwan Geraldo. I wouldn't be upset if you wanted to kidnap him and study it further."
"What if I told you that I could infiltrate the island for you?" Law says. "I wouldn't mind keeping in contact and exchanging information in the future."
Karmen eyes him for a few seconds. "I can see how that could be beneficial. While you're in that lab, I want every scrap of information on Gallowcomb and Vegapunk you can dig up. In exchange I'll keep you informed on Doflamingo's movements as best I can."
Law raises an eyebrow. "Why Vegapunk?"
"My friend's in trouble," she says in a tone that indicates he won't be getting any more information on the subject.
"I'll get you what I can, but I can't make you any promises. Word is they cleaned that place out pretty good."
They talk a while longer before Karmen says she needs to get back to Pierce. She washes the dishes quickly and leads the way back to the medical bay, drying her hands on her shorts. Law leans against the doorway and watches her push a gurney over to her friend's side and sit on it. "You're going to sleep here, aren't you?" She gives him a fearful doe-eyed expression and her hand grasps the edge of Pierce's bed. He sighs. "Fine. Just don't go touching the equipment."
She waves the pirate off and holds the patient's hand. "Can you hear me, Pierce? I'm going to assume you can. I seem to have developed a habit of rambling to unconscious people. Anyways, I know how much you like poetry. I hate it myself, but I'll put up with it for you. Remember how you used to read to me? I guess it's my turn." She taps her foot while picking something she remembers. It takes her so long that Law truly believes that she had done her best to block out all forms of lyrical expression. Finally she seems to remember a bit of verse. She takes a deep breath and begins a beautiful recitation. The crew standing in the hallway listening would never know that she detested every word. "I traveled 'cross these burning lands/ And journeyed past these desert sands/ To stop the aching of my heart/ To see this flight, a once caged spark." Law leaves her reciting poetry to her sleeping friend.