Chapter 2: Two Surgeons, One Table
Things you have learned in three weeks aboard the Polar Tang, in no particular order:
Bepo sheds. There is no surface on this submarine, including the inside of your sealed instrument tray, that does not eventually acquire a single white hair. He apologizes for this daily. You have stopped telling him it's fine, because he only apologizes for apologizing.
Ikkaku, the only other woman aboard, can strip and rebuild the engine coolant pump in under an hour and will lend you socks without being asked. Jean Bart, who is the size of a small house and used to be a captain himself, has the gentlest hands on the ship and is the only one besides you who washes them properly. Penguin's stitches came out on day ten. He cried. He says he didn't.
The captain does not eat bread.
You learned that one the hard way. On your fourth night you found him in the infirmary at two in the morning, reading a book on regenerative tissue by the light of a single lamp, and because you'd been raised right you went to the galley and made him a sandwich. Ham, mustard, the good cheese Ikkaku had been hoarding. You set it beside his elbow.
He looked at it the way other men look at a dead rat.
"Get that away from me," said Trafalgar Law.
The next morning there was an onigiri on your pillow, wrapped in paper, still warm. Grilled salmon inside. Nobody claimed it. Shachi, when you asked, laughed so hard he had to sit down.
And the last thing, the important thing: the Surgeon of Death cannot suture.
That's not fair. He can. His father was a doctor, he told you once, in a voice that closed the subject like a slammed drawer, and his technique is textbook. But Law has spent the last decade with a Devil Fruit that lets him cut a man in half and put him back together without a scratch, and you can tell. His knots are correct and slow. He thinks about each throw. When he closes by hand his jaw goes tight and his shoulders creep up toward his ears, and the result is a neat, stiff, slightly crooked line that would pass any exam and would make Doctor Vane sigh.
Yours don't.
He knows it. You know he knows it, because on your second week you came into the infirmary and found a practice pad of pig skin pinned to the board, and on it a row of sutures so obsessively even they looked printed. Next to it lay a needle driver, a pile of snipped silk, and an empty coffee mug. When you looked closer, the last three knots were uneven, the way knots get when your hands are shaking from no sleep.
You didn't say anything. You took a fresh pad from the cabinet, pinned it next to his, and put in a running subcuticular line from end to end in four minutes flat. Then you went to breakfast.
When you came back, he'd taken his pad down. Yours was still there. Someone had written underneath it, in small, sharp handwriting, Show off.
Underneath that, in your own, you wrote: Sore loser.
It's been like that ever since. Small, petty, absurdly satisfying. He reorganizes the instrument drawer while you're asleep. You reorganize it back. He corrects your dosing math out loud in front of Bepo. You correct his handwriting on the dosing chart in front of Penguin. Shachi has started a betting pool. You found the ledger in the galley under the rice sack, with columns labeled Week, Kiss, Fistfight and Captain Admits It, and you very maturely put a hundred berries on Fistfight.
The Sea King hits the Polar Tang on a Thursday, during lunch.
There's no warning. One minute you're arguing with Ikkaku about whether pickled plums count as a vegetable, and the next the whole galley tilts thirty degrees to port and everything that isn't bolted down becomes a projectile. The lights go red. A horn starts blaring in long pulses. Bepo's voice comes over the speaker, high and frantic, something about the hull and a tail and diving.
You hit the wall hard enough to see white. When the floor levels out you're already moving, the way your body always moves, toward the noise.
The noise is in the engine room. A pipe has burst, venting steam in a white scream, and Jean Bart is pinned beneath a fallen section of the coolant housing with his left leg twisted underneath it in a direction legs aren't built to go. Ikkaku is trying to lever the housing off him with a crowbar. Her face is white.
"Don't," you shout. "Don't move it yet!"
"It's crushing him!"
"It's also holding the artery shut." You drop beside Jean Bart. He's conscious, gritting his teeth, sweat pouring down his huge face. His thigh is swollen tight under the boilersuit and a sharp end of bone has come through the fabric just above the knee. "If you lift it before I'm ready, he bleeds out on the floor in four minutes. Where's the captain?"
"Up top," Ikkaku says. "The Sea King's still out there. He's fighting it off the hull."
Of course he is.
You don't have four minutes, and you don't have the captain. You have a tourniquet in your belt kit and two hands and a man the size of a house. You get the tourniquet on high, crank it until Jean Bart roars, and look up at Ikkaku. "Now. Slowly. On my count."
They lift. You hold pressure. The blood comes anyway, too much and too fast, and you lean your whole weight on the wound and start shouting for Shachi to bring the field kit and for someone to get Law down here now, right now, before you lose this man on the engine room floor.
The air goes blue.
You've never been so relieved to see a Room in your life.
Law drops through the ceiling hatch soaking wet, Kikoku in hand, a long scrape bleeding along his jaw. He takes in the scene in one sweep. Then he's on his knees beside you, and he doesn't say a word about the tourniquet or the bone or the blood up to your elbows. He just puts his free hand flat in the air above Jean Bart's thigh.
"Scan," he murmurs. His eyes go distant. "Femur's in three pieces. Femoral artery's nicked, not severed. You're on it?"
"I've got pressure, but I can't see the bleed through the swelling."
"You will." He flexes his fingers. "Shambles."
The fragments of bone move. You feel it under your palm, a strange impossible shifting inside the leg, as Law slides the broken femur back into alignment from the inside without making a single cut. Jean Bart's scream cuts off into a gasp. The swelling seems to sigh. And there, suddenly clear under your hands, you see the bright welling spot where the artery is torn.
"Clamp," you say, and Law's already handing it to you.
You've never worked with anyone like this. You've worked with Doctor Vane, who was patient and kind and slow, and you've worked alone, which is faster but terrifying. This is something else. Law holds the Room steady, holds the bone steady, peels back the layers of tissue with a twist of his fingers that leaves no cut behind, and you go in after the artery with your clamp and your silk and your stupid, beautiful, uneven stitches.
He doesn't comment on your spacing. You don't comment on how close his shoulder is to yours, or the water dripping off his hat onto your sleeve.
Nine minutes later the bleed is closed, the bone is set, and Jean Bart is unconscious and breathing on his own, his huge chest rising and falling under a blanket somebody found. The Room flickers and fades. You sit back against the wall of the engine room and let your hands shake.
Law sits down next to you. He's breathing hard. The cut on his jaw is still bleeding.
"You put the tourniquet high," he says after a while.
"He had a crush injury. I didn't know how far up it went."
"I know. It was right." He tips his head back against the pipes and closes his eyes. "You didn't move the housing until you had a plan. Most people would have."
You look at him sideways. His face is grey with exhaustion, the spotted hat crooked, a smear of Jean Bart's blood across one tattooed knuckle. He looks less like a Warlord than anyone you've ever seen.
"Was that a compliment, Captain?"
"No." He doesn't open his eyes. "It was an observation."
"Because it sounded a lot like a compliment."
"Then your hearing needs work."
You laugh. You can't help it; it comes out of you cracked and too loud, the way laughter does after you've been terrified. And Law, beside you, eyes still closed, makes a sound that might be a laugh too, very short, very quiet, almost entirely through his nose.
Ikkaku, mopping the floor on the other side of the engine room, drops her mop.
"Hold still," you tell him, reaching for the field kit. "Your face is bleeding."
"It's a scratch."
"It's a two-inch laceration along your mandible, and if you let it heal like that you'll have a scar that makes you look even more like a villain."
He opens one eye. "I like looking like a villain."
"I know you do. Hold still."
He holds still. You clean the cut and close it with four fine stitches, your fingers light along his jaw, his stubble rough under your gloves. He watches you the whole time from under the brim of his hat, very close, very quiet, and doesn't breathe much.
When you tie off the last knot, neither of you moves for a second.
Then Shachi skids into the engine room waving a newspaper, and the moment shatters like a dropped slide.
"Captain! The News Coo just came through the hatch, you have to see this, the Marines put out new posters!" He shoves a folded sheet into Law's hand, grinning so wide his sunglasses slip down his nose. "And it's not just you this time."
Law unfolds it. His face goes very still.
He turns the poster around so you can see.
It's you. A grainy photograph, clearly snapped through smoke on Hesper Cay, kneeling on the cobbles with a needle in your hand and your head bent over Penguin. Underneath, in heavy black print: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. And beneath that, an epithet you've never heard before in your life.
"Death's Assistant," Law reads aloud. His voice is very flat. "Forty-two million berries."
Penguin, from the doorway, starts to cheer. Shachi is already pulling out his ledger.
Law lowers the poster and looks at you, and there's an expression on his face you've never seen there before. It isn't anger. It's something worse. It looks like guilt.
"I told you you'd get a bounty eventually," he says quietly. "I didn't think it would be this soon. And I didn't think they'd make you mine."