Disclaimer: If I owned One Piece, I'd add in a cockroach cockroach fruit which will result in Zoro, Luffy and Sanji wondering how the hell they aren't able to kill the damn thing.

A/N: I wanted to try my hand at something darker, in this AU (sorry I can't come up with a decent plot for canon pieces as Oda is maneuvering the story at such high speeds I doubt I'd keep up), it's up to you if Law and Nami are assassins/hitmen/mafia/contract killers, etc. This is either a oneshot or headcanon, I'm really just experimenting for now.

Vicious:

It gives him a sick thrill the way her hands get tainted with blood. She wasn't the type to kill in cold blood, yet for some viciously perverse reason, she was. It amazes him every time her hands do not shake after the pull of the trigger or trust of the blade. Her eyes remain focused and burning, simmering with a silent rage. Their filthy line of work didn't suit her but the blood looked damn good dirtying her skin. What he likes better is the way she holds herself together and bites down on her lip hard enough to draw blood so as not to cry out in her sleep at night whenever she knows he is in the vicinity. She never gives him the satisfaction of seeing her broken and weak if she can help it.

He had never thought he would meet another with as vicious a streak as himself. She was never openly cruel or coldly ruthless. But he sees the smoldering, angry heat behind her eyes beneath her composed, slightly trembling façade. There is a vicious streak in her whenever she is backed up against the wall and there is no room left for flight. She will kill, take up any job given enough incentive or what he suspected was a deeper, darker motive of untold vengeance. She wasn't the vengeful type, yet somehow life had forced her down that road to hell.

Her secrets intrigue him, but her contradictory, unpredictable reactions excite him more. He likes to prod and peel away her scabs to see her bleed. Just when he thinks she will break, she hardens, and whenever he thinks he's got the upper hand, she manages to one-up him with her manipulative ways. He knows that she is intimidated, distrustful, and wary of him and enjoys unsettling her with his uncomfortable presence. He likes how she would snap back, smile deviously at him, pretend to ignore him, or threaten to shoot his brains out the next time his back is turned. She says she will kill him one day too, and he laughs.

She tells him she hates him and he likes the way she spits it out like it's a dirty word prescribed only to him alone. He didn't care for love but hate was absolute, hate was certain. So long as she hated him, he was the sole center of her focus and nobody else except their common enemy.

She goes out of her way to rebel against him, yet she reluctantly shares a jaded kind of trust with him. He enjoys their heated arguments and how only he knows what buttons to push to fire her up. What he doesn't expect but pleases him more is how she retaliates with equal, if not double, the ferocity.

The first time he tried to kiss her he had to pin her down bodily on the operating table while she kicked and snarled at him despite still bleeding from her bullet wound. She bit him hard right then and threatened to bite his face off next if he tried anything else in that soft, deadly tone of hers. The sight of his blood on her lip does nothing but incite him further.

It amuses him how she is all fierce heat and wild scratches at night and coldly ignorant of him the next morning. Despite her open declarations of her hatred of him, they find each risking life and limb for the other's neck. They trust each other for mutual survival, nothing else, both having a non-spoken agreement of watching each other's backs.

This wasn't about love, it was about survival and an unavoidable trust, and to survive long enough to end their mission both had to be alive. What is never once mentioned is how they will only ever trust one another with their lives.

They balance each other out well, she the fire to his ice, and over time both had thawed into a strange, twisted sort of partnership. In their vicious line of work, that was as good as it would ever get. They were like ships passing in the night, until the inevitable crash.

Their paths had crossed with a common goal and had ended with a single gunshot and the impossible fall of a dreaded empire. He recognizes the fleeting look of long suffering relief and the crushing light of satisfaction in her eyes to be the same mirrored in his. Whoever said revenge isn't sweet was right. It is downright bitter but it hits all the right bruised and scabbed over spots.

As they lay in the moment of mutual silence and unspoken words, amongst fallen rubble and half drawn breaths, they share two sides of a broken, twisted grin at the finality of it all.

"Where will you be headed to after this?" He finds himself asking.

"I don't know. Anywhere but here, preferably someplace far, far away from this wreckage." She says and looks at him with her utterly exhausted, but first genuine smile. "Why? You thinking of joining? I'm officially retiring from this line of work."

He can only laugh at her words as they get up together to walk out of the dark, crumpled ruins and into the fresh morning sunlight of a new day reborn.