A/N: Okay, so I wasn't going to post this until it was all complete, but at the same time Law's birthday came up and it's too perfect not to start now lol.
3878 words to start, with at least 20k more to come; while definitely not trying to copy these fics by any means, I do have to shout out AO3 peeps DamianFinch for doing something along these lines for Sanji in the fic Obelisk and HyperbolicReverie for Losing Time (You Can't Go Home Again), two other excellent fics; if you're in the One Piece fandom and can guess where I took the general premise from then you get one (1) internet cookie; lots of weird shit is on the way you have been warned lol
ghosts speak in whispers and lies; can't know what's real 'til you're the one who's died
One
Sleep was something that often eluded Law. He long-knew why: the moment soldiers began to descend upon Flevance was when he stopped being able to sleep well. Sometimes it manifested in being unable to sleep for days, other times he could sleep but only for an hour or two at a time, and sometimes… when things were really bad… there were nightmares. Full-body shakes and screams only led to his navigator bringing him herbal tea and…
"Maybe you should see a doctor," Shachi shrugged one day. They were docked in a small port on their way to their next island, Wano not far behind them and the Pose still pointing out to sea. Law looked at his crewmate, deadpan. It was not the first time it had been suggested and it still ruffled him like it was the first time.
"Sach, I am a doctor."
"Well, yeah, but can't you—I dunno—get a second opinion? From someone very much not yourself?"
"He's right," Penguin chimed in traitorously. Almost like bloodhounds, the pair had hunted Law down in the marketplace, nagging him more like a pair of aunties than men barely older than him."The only part of you that should look like death is your knuckles."
"Ha, ha; very funny," Law scowled. He glanced over his shoulder to look across the market as he felt outwards with his Haki; nothing nor no one was tracking them. Good. "I'm fine; always have been."
"You're not," Shachi noted. "We've known you long enough to be able to tell that much."
"I'm fine," he reiterated. Penguin and Shachi both looked at one another and shrugged. "That's mutiny."
"It's not and you know it," Penguin scoffed. He looked at his captain and a thought came to mind. "Listen—let's give each other about half an hour. This port's quiet, so we meet back here in thirty minutes and then Sach and I get to bring you back to the Polar Tang and you can figure out how to sleep while everyone else is out. How does that sound?"
Law grunted in response; he didn't need to be babied. It was a good thing that Penguin and Shachi had both been looking out for him for over a decade at that point, or else they would already be Shambled into pieces across the market for even the thought. The pair took that for as close as they were going to get to a positive reaction and left him alone for the time being, promising to find him once the half hour was complete.
He didn't need their pity, Law thought as he wandered through the market. It was a good place to wander in, to get momentarily lost, to forget for a while. There weren't many places he could do that; not many places he wanted to do that. He was only walking about aimlessly for a short while when he felt something bump into his legs—a child?
"Oh, sorry mister!" the kid said quickly. He looked at her blankly, though the little girl mistook his regular face for being irritated. "I didn't mean to run into you!"
"You're fine," he grunted. It was only superficial, but the girl looked too much Lami for him to really be angry. "Just be careful, okay?"
"O-okay…?" the girl seemed to be frozen in place, that was, until a young boy appeared from the crowd and ran up to her, putting himself between the girl and Law. After a careful few seconds, he pulled the girl away, leaving Law alone in the market.
"Law-nii, why are you so sad?"
It was a question that Lami had asked him not too long before everything went to shit; a question that had been replaying in his dreams since leaving Wano. How in the hell had he supposed to answer that back then? All he could have asked for was some way for Lami to recover and leave Flevance with him and he couldn't even manage that. Those last days in Wano, watching Momonosuke and Hiyori interact, seeing the kids running through the Flower Capitol having been rescued from danger… there was a reason he had chosen mostly to retreat to the shipyard in Tokage instead of wander around the city—around Wano—and it was a bit more personal than he wanted to let on. It was fucking embarrassing, what it was, and all he needed to do was wait it out. He had before and he could do it again.
Not that he necessarily wanted to do it alone, mind. He knew that Penguin and Shachi meant well, and that Bepo was easily one of the top stress-reducing members of his crew with how fluffy he was, but at the same time, he wondered what sort of effect Strawhat-ya's archaeologist would have on him. Part of Law wanted Robin there so that she could wander around with him, holding hands as they enjoyed getting lost together, while another part of him imagined his sleep deprivation could be solved by using her ample chest as a pillow as she played with his hair…
"Son, what's the matter?" Law looked and saw a middle-aged woman sitting next to a booth that seemed to specialize in odd-looking trinkets. If he thought about it for long enough, she could have even been around his mother's age…
"None of your business," he said. Which was the truth; what did he owe a random woman on a random island? Not necessarily any of his attention, and certainly not an answer.
"If you don't get some sleep soon, you're likely to fall over and die," the woman said, "and that's not going to do those demons of yours any good."
"You know nothing about my demons."
"I know enough to see you're not well, Flevench child." He tried not to react, yet she could hear the way he sharply inhaled. "Surprised someone knows that accent all the way out here? It's been a bit, but it's unmistakable."
"So you know where I'm from—it's not that difficult if you know a few key facts," he scoffed, trying to play it off as no big deal. Except it was a big deal. In fact, he would even call it a huge deal. "Maybe I should kill you to keep you quiet."
"Hmm, I doubt that."
"…and why not…?"
"…because I have something that can finally let you have a good rest. You're worth three billion beri; a man like that can't be tired and weigh down his crew. Are they able to protect you should a three billion beri threat come knocking on your door?"
Law did not answer, instead keeping eye contact while reaching out with his Haki. Nothing seemed dangerous, she wasn't concealing a weapon, and no one was ready to ambush him or snipe him from the other side of the market. What was her game…?
"If you want to calm your mind and be able to get some sleep, then look inside that jar on the end; the blue one. You do that and all your worries will melt away."
It seemed too good to be true. Law stared at the jar at the end of the cart, deep blue with golden circles and swirls for a pattern. He stepped towards it, feeling almost a pull, something in the back of his mind telling him it was alright…
…before he could come to his senses, his hand was resting atop the lid of the jar. He opened it up and looked in; something was in there, clicking angrily at being disturbed.
"Hey, what the hell is thi—!"
Suddenly, the world went black and Trafalgar D. Water Law went to sleep.
"Fuck, I can't believe we lost the captain," Shachi groaned as he and Penguin searched the market for Law. It was well past the half hour mark and they were beginning to get worried. "Do you think he went back to the Tang without us?"
"Unlikely," Penguin frowned. "At least we know he can't go too far. Island's not big enough for him to run away."
"Yeah, as though he'd run away and leave Bepo to cry. That bear sniffles once and it's like the world is ending."
"He's protective of us to a fault, I'll give you that." Penguin stopped in the middle of the street and put his hands on his hips as he tried to think. "Now if I were the captain, then where would I go?"
"Comic book store? Coin shop? Get his sword professionally cleaned?"
"I'm serious."
"So am I." Shachi looked around the market, though with no one even remotely matching the description of their cranky baby of a captain, he decided that it was time to break out the big guns: asshole needed to be perceived. "Oi! Captain! Where in the hell are you?!"
"That's not gonna work," Penguin groaned.
"You're just jealous because you didn't shout first."
"That is literally the last thing anyone should be jealous about."
"You've always been jealous of me since we were kids: admit it."
"Jealous of what? The way babes avoid you? Not a chance."
Shachi rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses and pouted—this was truly getting them nowhere. He kept looking around the market, his eyes catching something crumpled on the ground a ways away. "Hey, doesn't that look like the Captain's coat?" Penguin turned and looked where he was pointing, only to hiss.
"Fuck! It's not just his coat! It's the Captain!"
The pair rushed over to where their captain was laid out on the ground near an empty stall. No one was around or seemed to be paying attention to them, which was more unsettling than they would have liked to admit. Penguin knelt down and began to shake Law by the shoulder, his captain refusing to respond.
"Hey, come on Cap, we gotta go," he said. No response. "Listen, I know we all agreed that you needed to get more sleep, but I don't think you should really be doing it in the street."
"His sword's still here, so at least we know it's not a robbery," Shachi noticed. Penguin looked and yeah, he was right: Kikoku was laying in the dirt next to Law. He took the chance and felt the pants pocket where he knew Law kept his wallet and sure as shit that was still there as well.
"Law, this isn't funny anymore," Penguin said. He took his captain and friend and rolled him over so that he could take a good look at him and see if he had hit his head or anything, only to jerk back at what met him.
There, right where Law's face should have been, sat some sort of gross, slimy blob. It was a pinkish-grey and pulsing and had tentacles that wrapped around his face in order to keep it in place over his eyes, nose, and mouth. Whatever the fuck it was, it was keeping Law from answering him, as though the captain was trapped in a deep sleep.
"Fucking seas!" Shachi gasped. He and Penguin looked at one another, then at Law, and they knew that they were in deep, deep shit.
Law woke up with a gasp and a shudder, realizing that he was soaked in sweat. Fuck… it was just a dream. A nightmare. Not real. He looked around his room and felt himself grow calmer. It was the bedroom he had been inhabiting since he was a child, not a… submarine…? Shit, his imagination was getting wild lately.
"Wake up, Weenis," Lami demanded as she pounded her fist on the door. Law went to the door and opened it, seeing his younger sister standing there still in her pajamas. "You promised to let my class watch you in the theater today and I'm not letting you skip out."
"Aren't you bossy this morning?" he fired back. "Moer and Vaor get back from work yet?"
"No—they had some senior staff meetings called last-minute and won't be back until lunch." Lami then began to walk away. "You better hurry up if you're going to do the surgery in more than your underwear. Plus you stink."
Law grabbed the nearest thing he could—a stuffed seagull toy from Sora, Warrior of the Sea—and threw it at her.
"Ack! Pick on somebody your own size!" Lami threw the stuffed toy back, with Law ducking out of the way easily.
"You're not even three centimeters shorter than me; shut up," he laughed. "Be ready in fifteen, okay?"
"Yeah, yeah," Lami said, brushing it off as she went down the stairs. Law rolled his eyes and shut the door to his bedroom before pausing.
Huh… that was kind of an intense nightmare he'd just woken up from, if he thought about it for long enough. He dreamt of a jumbled-up world that was completely different than this one, where he was alone in the world and a pirate, of all things. Although he unfortunately knew his favorite comic was mostly just government propaganda, he'd never really go as far as to turn pirate? To be in league with a notorious pirate crew from the North Blue? Start his own crew? Take down bigger and bigger threats to his existence? Defeating Yonkou in the Grand Line?! He never met one of the Pirate Emperors, let alone wanted to provoke one, and yet he had helped to take down two. All because in the dream, the epidemic had instead been a slaughter and his Devil Fruit had been how he lived.
Law was neither a psychologist nor psychiatrist by any means, but he sure as hell knew something was wrong when he woke up sweaty after dreaming that he carried the charred memories of Flevance on his back. He looked at himself in the mirror—no tattoos, no scars from a reattached arm and varied bullet wounds, just him.
Dreams weren't real, thank fuck.
"What the fuck are we going to do?!" Ikkaku snapped. She gestured at their captain's prone body laying on a table in the mess hall while Penguin and Shachi looked like they were little kids who just got caught playing with a stray cat. "How in the hell did he even end up like this?!"
"We were just walking around in the market and we literally turned away for two minutes before he was on the ground!" Penguin fired back. "Neither of us saw where this thing came from!"
"What is it…?" Clione wondered. He poked at the thing covering the captain's face carefully and it clicked in irritation. "Is it alive?"
"I think so," Shachi replied. "It seems to shift its position every once and a while."
"What is it doing?" Uni asked. Hakugan just shrugged.
"Shit like this is why I wear a mask."
"Thanks for the input, but does this mean you know what this is?" Ikkaku sniped, pointing at the… thing. "If you do, I'd love if you'd say something useful for once."
The entire mess hall was about to erupt into argument when Jean Bart finally came back with his share of the shopping, dropping the crate of potatoes with a gasp. Everyone looked to see an expression that their newest member had never displayed before then.
Jean Bart was terrified.
"Where did this come from?!" he gasped. He ignored the potatoes and instead went to Law's side, inspecting the creature latched onto his face. "Penguin? Shachi? You were the ones who went with him!"
"We don't know!" Penguin insisted. "One moment he was normal and the next he was laid out on the street like that. Neither of us saw anything." Dread settled in his stomach as he realized that Jean Bart was truly and completely unnerved by this. "What is it?"
"This is something that Celestial Dragons use to punish and torture slaves," the large man replied gravely. "It latches onto the face and injects a powerful hallucinogen into the bloodstream that causes the victim to dream of their dream world. When it gets taken off, the victim is weak from lack of food and the lasting effects of the poison… not to mention the trauma from how they've been ripped from their freedom."
"What is it though?" Shachi asked. "How do we get it off?"
"I've seen it done three ways," Jean Bart said. He poked the creature and it chittered again. "The first way is that there is a device that the Celestial Dragons use to remove it. We can't consider that an option because there's only a few of them in existence and they are all in Mary Geoise. Same goes for the second, because it involves the woman whose Devil Fruit ability makes these things."
"…and the third…?" Ikkaku asked. Jean Bart shook his head.
"There was one person I saw that must have done something to kill the creature from inside of the dream, but I don't know what exactly."
"…why not…?"
"He was shot to death soon after waking up, since it was before schedule." A chill settled over the mess hall—this was not looking good. "We need help; I doubt this is something we have more information on than what I just told you."
"Get help from who?" Uni scoffed. "I don't think there's a lot of people that the captain would trust with something like this, let alone someone who knows about Celestial Dragon torture devices."
"Then maybe…" Penguin mused aloud, "…we should start with someone who he trusts in general and work from there."
"Not exactly a lot of those wandering around, and even fewer who are doctors," Clione reminded them. "Who in the hell would you recruit who wouldn't get us all murdered when the captain wakes up?"
There was little argument that the list was extremely short, and that the only doctor on it was… well… presented his own problems, or at least his captain did. Not like they had any choice in the matter, did they?
After tidying himself up and getting dressed, Law went with Lami over to the hospital. There was always an odd sense of nostalgia as he walked into the building—he'd spent so much time there between it being where his parents worked and the time that Amber Lead poisoning nearly killed Lami… if there was any other place that felt like home, it was this place.
Once he was sure that Lami was off towards her class in the teaching portion of the hospital, it was time to get caught up on what had happened overnight. Law took a look at the charts that were sitting in his tray and scowled.
"Glaring at them won't change the fact they're there," Bepo said. Law glanced over at the polar bear sitting at the nurse's desk—how dare he. "You need to at least do some evals to make sure that surgery is the answer before you take them on."
"With this kind of schedule you're going to ruin my weekend by making me work straight through it."
"Sorry, but it can't be helped." Law tried to glare at the Mink, but Bepo went on the offensive with the cutest teddy bear look he could muster—he'd been doomed from the start. "You could be a fucking mascot character."
"I could be in Pedes, and then who would help you?" Ah, yes, he had a very good point.
"Oh, there you are," said a voice. Both Law and Bepo looked to see Law's mother coming down the corridor, looking absolutely exhausted. "Lami get here okay?"
"I still don't know if medicine is really the right field for her if I need to keep making sure she gets to class," Law replied as he gave his mother a one-armed hug full of awkwardness and regret for working in the same hospital as her. "Maybe she really should just take general courses and see what sticks."
"Nonsense," she replied. "Both of you have been interested in medicine since you were little, and look at you! Best in your class! Several years ahead!"
"Moer… I was interested in medicine. Lami was interested in how she was staying alive. Those are different."
"It's the same thing and you know it. She should just be glad we're not judging her on your scales." She then turned towards Bepo and gave him a sweet, tired smile. "Bepo, be a dear and make sure my son eats something at lunch today."
"Moer…!"
"Yes, ma'am, Dr. Mrs. Trafalgar, ma'am!" the bear said with a salute. Law's mother laughed.
"Bepo, you're my son's friend. I've told you that you can call me Angela."
"Your name is Dr. Mrs. Trafalgar, ma'am." Law's mother shook her head before pulling her son down to kiss his forehead.
"See you at dinner," she said, "and don't be late this time. I don't want it to dry out in the oven waiting for you again."
"Yes, Moer," he whined. His mother smiled as she walked away and waved, seemingly all too pleased with herself. "She does realize it's not very professional to have one's mother pop in at work and talk about family dinner, right?"
"I don't think she cares, nor does anyone else." Bepo watched as Law tried to ignore him. "You wouldn't be so upset if it was Miss Robin."
"Spouses and significant others show up at workplaces all the time," Law argued. "I don't want people to think I'm only here because my moetje checks in on me." He emphasized the Flevench children's word for mom with derision, making his lack of approval clear.
"You were the one who chose to work here," Bepo reminded him. "You could run the entire hospital in Whiteland if you wanted."
"That would involve being in Whiteland—thanks but no thanks."
"Who knows? Maybe Miss Robin would like to go?"
"Why she stays here is a mystery." Except, he knew why she stayed—she had already re-upped her contract with the university and there were few reasons as to why someone from a warm part of the West Blue would voluntarily stay in a place that snowed. "Do you at least have anything that doesn't involve a pre-existing condition? I at least want to exercise my brain a little bit here."
Bepo shook his head and chuckled, handing over a specific chart. "You still thinking about having her meet your parents next week?"
"She should have met them ages ago; I can't back out now." Law let his vision slip out of focus as he thought about the very terrifying concept of Robin meeting his parents. All sorts of terrifying prospects crossed his mind—it was bad enough that Lami had hunted her down on campus, but his parents…? He didn't want to go down that train of thought because then he'd never get any work done.
Giving his head a small shake, he came back to his senses and focused on the chart in front of him. He tried to pretend to not notice Bepo's smirk—at least his friends were as mutinous as pirates. Maybe that's where his brain was getting it from.
'Not the time, Law; there's patients to care for.'