Chapter 3: Hold Still
He tries to leave you on an island called Tamsin.
You don't find out until you've already docked. It's a pretty place, warm and green and quiet, with a hospital on the hill run by an old surgeon who owes Law a favor of some unspecified, unpleasant kind. The captain walks you up there himself on the second morning, Kikoku on his shoulder and his hands in his pockets, and stops outside the gate.
"Doctor Hollis needs a second pair of hands," he says. "Your poster won't reach this far for months. By then you'll have a new name and a quiet practice and nobody will care that you once stitched up a pirate."
You stare at him. Behind you, a gull screams on the hospital roof.
"You're firing me."
"I'm putting you somewhere safe."
"You didn't ask."
"I'm the captain." He says it like it settles things. It does not settle things. "It's my decision who sails on my ship, and I've decided it's too dangerous for you. Forty-two million is just the start. They'll raise it every time you're seen with me. Bounty hunters will come for you specifically, because they'll think you're the soft target."
"I am the soft target. I can't fight."
"Exactly." His voice cracks on it, just slightly, a hairline fracture in all that flat calm. "Exactly my point."
You take a breath. Then another. You think about Hesper Cay, about the clinic going up at a quarter past four. About Penguin narrating his own near-death to anyone who'll hold still. About Bepo's hair in your instrument tray, and Ikkaku's socks, and Jean Bart's enormous gentle hands. About a line of stitches on a pig skin pad and the words Show off underneath.
"No," you say.
Law's jaw tightens. "It wasn't a question."
"Then here's an answer anyway." You step close enough that he has to look down at you from under the spotted brim. "You don't get to decide I'm worth keeping alive and then send me away so you don't have to watch me do it. That's not protection, Captain. That's cowardice with a nice bedside manner."
For a second you think he's going to Shambles you into the sea.
Instead he says, very quietly, "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Then tell me."
He doesn't. He turns on his heel and walks back down the hill without another word, and you stand outside the hospital gate with your kit bag on your shoulder, furious and shaking. Then you follow him, because you'll be damned if you stay.
That's how you end up a few steps behind him in the market when the bounty hunters find you.
There are six of them. They aren't subtle. They come out of an alley with nets and a harpoon gun and a man in front holding your poster, and he says "That's her," and smiles. Then everything happens very fast.
Law's Room snaps open so hard your ears ring. Kikoku comes out of its sheath in one clean arc and two of the hunters fall in halves, stunned and screaming and very much alive, their torsos rolling one way and their legs running the other. The net comes at you and turns into a pile of fruit from a stall six feet away. You stumble back into a doorway. You've never seen him fight before, not up close. It's precise and ugly and graceful all at once, a surgeon's economy turned into violence.
But there are six of them, and he is putting himself between you and every single one.
The harpoon gun fires. You see it coming, a blur of steel heading for your chest, and then Law is there, the Room flickering as he swaps himself into its path. He twists. Not fast enough. The barbed tip punches through his side just above the hip, and he makes no sound at all.
He finishes it anyway. He cuts the gun into ribbons, cuts the last hunter's arms off and sticks them back on backward, drops a word in a voice so cold it frosts the air. Then the Room collapses, and so does he.
You get to him before he hits the ground.
He won't let you take him to Doctor Hollis.
"Ship," he says through his teeth, leaning his whole weight on you, Bepo on his other side whimpering apologies to no one. "Infirmary. You."
"You could fix this yourself in thirty seconds."
"I'm out of stamina." He stumbles. Bepo catches him. "Room takes energy. Fixing myself takes more. I used too much."
"Showing off," you say, and your voice wobbles.
"Shut up."
Back aboard, Bepo and Jean Bart, still limping and refusing to stay in bed, lay him on the steel table. Then Law says, "Out," in a voice that makes even Penguin go, and it's just the two of you in the white light of the infirmary with the hum of the engines underneath.
The harpoon went through clean, thank the sea. You cut his shirt away. The tattoo across his chest is stark against skin gone pale with blood loss, the heart-shaped design, the ink running down his arms. You've seen it before in glimpses. You've never seen it like this, close and still, rising and falling under your hands.
There's a pale, mottled patch on his ribs, just under the tattoo, that the ink doesn't quite cover. You touch it before you think.
"Flevance," he says.
You go still.
Every doctor knows that name. The White City. The amber lead in the mines that crept into the citizens' bodies over generations and turned their skin white in patches, and the World Government knowing, and keeping quiet, and then, when the sickness was everywhere, sealing the borders and burning the city with everyone still inside it.
"You were there," you say.
"I was ten." His eyes are on the ceiling. "My father was a doctor. My mother was a nurse. My sister was in the hospital when they set it on fire." He says it in the same voice he uses for drug dosages. "I hid under the bodies. I had it too. The amber lead. I was supposed to be dead in three years."
"What happened?"
"Somebody saved me." A long pause. "It cost him everything. He made me eat the Op-Op Fruit and he died for it and the last thing he did was smile at me and say he loved me." Law swallows. "I spent thirteen years planning how to kill the man who killed him. I got close enough. It didn't fix anything."
You realize you're still holding the needle driver. You put it down.
"I don't send people away because I don't want them," he says, and finally looks at you. His grey eyes are bloodshot and furious and very, very tired. "I send them away because everybody who decides I'm worth keeping alive ends up dead for it. You saw the poster. You saw the hunters. They came for you because you stood next to me. That's what I am. I'm the thing that happens to people."
Your hands are shaking again. You make them stop.
"Hold still," you say.
He blinks. "What?"
"I'm going to close this wound, and you're going to hold still, and you're going to listen." You pick up the needle driver. You thread it. Your fingers know the work even when your heart is going wild. "You think I came on this ship because you offered me a ride. I came because you watched me stitch your crewman in a burning street and didn't tell me to run. You told me my spacing was uneven."
The needle goes in. He hisses through his teeth.
"Doctor Vane used to say a wound doesn't have a flag." In, out. A square knot, three throws. "He was wrong. Mine does. It's a smiley face with a heart on it, painted on the side of a yellow submarine, and I chose it. You don't get to un-choose it for me."
In, out. Another knot. He's staring at you.
"You're the thing that happens to people," you say. "Fine. You happened to me. My clinic burned down and I lost everything I owned and a pirate in a stupid hat put me on a boat full of idiots who make me onigiri and steal my socks, and it's the first time since Doctor Vane died that anyone has needed me for anything other than a bandage."
Last stitch. You tie it off. Your vision has gone blurry and you blink until it clears.
"So no," you say. "I'm not staying on Tamsin. You'll have to cut me into pieces and mail me there."
Law doesn't say anything for a long time.
Then he reaches up with his good arm, the one with the DEATH tattoo across the knuckles, and catches your wrist. Gently. The way he holds a scalpel. His thumb rests on your pulse point, and you know he can feel how fast it's going.
"Your spacing's uneven," he murmurs, looking down at his own side.
"Your abdomen's uneven."
"It's not."
"It is. You've got a slight curvature on the left from favoring your sword arm. If I spaced it pretty you'd tear the bottom three the next time you did something reckless."
"Which will be soon," he admits.
"Which will be soon."
His mouth does that unpracticed thing again, the almost-smile. Except this time it doesn't stop at almost.
He pulls, very lightly, on your wrist. You lean down. You know exactly what's about to happen and you let it, and when his mouth meets yours it's careful, almost clinical at first, as though he's checking for something. Then your fingers find the back of his neck, under the edge of that ridiculous hat, and he breathes out against your lips, slow and unsteady, like a man finally setting down his sword, and the kiss stops being careful at all.
You break apart when you have to. He's flushed. You've never seen Trafalgar Law flushed. You file it away like a rare specimen.
"Stay," he says, low and rough. "On my ship. As my doctor. As whatever you want."
"I wasn't asking permission."
"I know." His thumb strokes once over your pulse. "I'm asking anyway."
Outside the infirmary door, very faintly, you hear Shachi hiss, "Pay up, Penguin, it was Kiss, I told you it'd be Kiss," and Penguin wailing that it doesn't count because the captain was technically sedated.
Law closes his eyes. "I'm going to cut them both in half."
"Not with those stitches, you're not."
The Den Den Mushi on the wall starts to ring.
Not the crew's snail. The other one, the black one Law keeps in a locked box for calls that come from nowhere good. You both turn your heads. Its eyes snap open, and the voice that comes out of it is clipped and smug and horribly familiar from a burning harbor three weeks ago.
"Trafalgar Law," says the Marine captain from Hesper Cay. "I believe you took something off my island. I'd like to discuss your new assistant."