The tibia, the fibula, the regions in between

The quiet between them rocks with a calm ocean's ease. Oh, Zoro's always ready for adventure, but he never sees the Heart Captain running from it despite the outbursts. He's sure he'd like his chaos more ordered at times, but then he rolls with the fallout when it invariably falls out. With a truckload of bitching, but none of them are immune to that, except Luffy. The instigator.

That nodachi packs some power. Luffy wields a sword like smashing display cases in a jewellery store heist, and Zoro's no stranger to his captain's unconventional methods, but it pleases him to see Law handle Kikoku. As a fruit user and warrior the Heart knows how to protect and attack. Just ask the Curly Hat crew. He knows the difference between a scabbard and a carapace too, never discarding the former like extraneous skin.

Zoro lies behind Law on the bed, Heart captain's quarters, and watches the doctor on the edge of the mattress unravelling bandages around his shot-up torso, his back to him. The sheets are all lived-in stench and sweat of a laundry roster a few agitations shy of a washday. Seeped with the sting of ointments and antiseptic.

Zoro's learnt not to clasp that arm Leo sewed up. A samurai, a warrior, an elite, a sportsman, is in constant pain. Effort, success, defeat all attract pain, pain is the lure for success and defeat. But Zoro doesn't have to add to it. Leaving Dressrosa, at Luffy's booze-up, it wasn't his intention to inflame Law's injuries. He'd only wanted to toast a job well done. Another nation freed.

He watches Law splay lettered-fingers, connecting a dot-to-dot of bullet holes. He's seen him do it before. Zoro does the same with entry points scattered over the Heart captain's back like chicken feed in the sand. Wherever there's flesh, he's been plugged.

"Hurt?"

Sitting, Zoro pulls his legs up, places them on the floor and rests beside him, an arm against Law's back, still worrying the wounds.

Law glances across as he works on bandages, Zoro's arm's not in the way. "How'd you get to be so short?"

Zoro presses one not-yet scar a little harder. "How'd you get to be so shot?"

Law laughs and inhales, a sharp cough of amusement. He deserved that.

"Only when you apply pressure, Roronoa-ya," he says with a grimace Zoro recognises as a smile, an acceptance of another's breath and being interspersing his own. "Only hurts then." Go figure.

Zoro leans back and dips his head behind the wing bones. "Can't see them in the tattoos." But he feels them. Traces the circle of the huge design on Law's back as it's revealed under the bloody gauze. Minimal now, the blood. He doesn't recognize the ink as an identifying mark from his years as a bounty hunter, testament to Law's ability to lay low. It bears strong resemblance to Bellamy's tattoo, Doflamingo's Jolly Roger. Zoro remembers that beating. It bears witness to Doflamingo's brother, Law would tell him if he asked, might tell him.

Law's hoops, gold against his skin and eyes, are also reminiscent of Mingo's. Everything Doflamingo does, Law has to do better? Zoro wonders at the double-up, but likes it. He doesn't throw the weight of his ink around the way those Mock Town guys did—true Donquixote underlings, clambering to be branded when Law did all he could to extinguish past connections.

Zoro's flattened palm sweeps across the ruptured skin like a cloth applied to the tongue of Sandai Kitetsu. And still there's a ripple, a flinch, just as quickly passed. If Law had just kept going—bypassed Punk Hazard, Dressrosa, Marineford even, though Zoro doesn't want to think about that—where would he be? He drove Kikoku's blade into a hornet's nest and sliced it into fury. What secrets does he seek? Already know?

"Quite an entrance you made at the colosseum."

Law places the bloodied clump of dressing on a towel to the side away from Zoro. He catches sight of the back of the swordsman's head, his thick muscled neck, as he drops his hand against Law's vertebrae, his sacrum, and pulls himself forward.

"Damnatio ad bestias. All that sacrifice and the factory remained standing."

He'd lived on borrowed time while buying time. Recalls the trajectory of speed and hurt, his body loose against the bricks and spires of buildings as Doflamingo dislodged the cobbles of the piazza with Law's rebellion, with the bones of the rebel. Being debris in a maelstrom surpassed pain, as pierced as he was with clusters of strings keen enough to penetrate steel; weak without his fruit, without his ability. Pain brought success, failure, defeat. He'd been audacious. Maybe Joker taught him that. Always the damn hunted.

"Damna ad besti what?"

"Colosseums. Mauled to death. Condemned to die from the attacks of wild animals. Spectators jeering them on. Never thought it'd be by flamingo."

Law's grunt acknowledges the ridiculous as a way of his life. But he knew it would be death by flamingo, the jesters and survivors of the animal world. Joker would be able to stomach water he'd deliberately pissed in. He counts himself lucky to have Zoro by his side.

"In the old days they trained eagles to pick out the livers of the condemned, trained lions, bears and tigers to want to kill, but they had to train them. Rarely the animal's fault."

"You felt like that? Outside the colosseum?"

"Didn't feel much of anything, but the factory still stood and Doffy's plebs . . ."

Law really doesn't feel much of anything. The fucking plebs looked on. It's all okay now. You can go back to your idyll. Sorry to upset you. This unfree radical. His fault. Stopped the cancer, shot the fuck out of it . . . caught it before it metastasised. Their fucking relief.

". . . It worked out. Not their fault." So easy to incite a crowd, a country, into a mob, to feed them what they wanted to hear.

Zoro tips his head. "Seastone. Whaddya gonna do?" It worked in their favour eventually, the factory helping them resist the death sentence creep of Doflamingo's birdcage spun over the land.

Law shrugged. Knew the drag of that mineral all too well.

Zoro pulls his hand away and rests it behind him. "All that masochism wasted."

"Didn't set out to be a shooting range target."

oOOo

Law sits at his desk in the late afternoon, still shirtless, wounds fetching air. He prepares fresh bandages for himself and his crew, still marked up from battle, for the Strawhats travelling with them, for the samurai.

Jack the Drought.

Having seen the wounds Bepo wears, he's gouged another name into his tablet of revenge. Zoro's formidable of course and has hardly a scratch. Masochism, machismo, maybe they're the same thing. Türk kahvesi. Dark strong coffee. Could do with some now. Roronoa's meditating but is the chattiest practitioner Law's ever met. He took a wrong turn one night, though he'll deny it, and hasn't quite figured his way back to the other rooms of the Polar Tang. Usopp hasn't scrabbled at the door with accusations of kidnapping and torture, so Law guesses Roronoa being here has some form of tacit okay. Maybe it's a first mate code, though Penguin is in no way replaced.

"Who taught you your swordplay?"

Law continues to roll the bandages. Zoro applied antiseptic to his back, and the room's acrid. Some things you want to blossom, others not. Harmful bacteria can well leave its buds unfurled beneath his skin.

"Diamante."

"The sword guy?"

"Um, yeah."

Zoro wonders why he fought a moving brick building rather than the Donquixote's Family's best blade. Pica's sword was gargantuan. Overcompensation. The man must have been lacking in some areas, given that voice. Big package, small product. It wasn't an easy fight. But then, not battling Diamante gave Kyros his chance, and Rebecca, he was told, if she hadn't collapsed into a typical girlish heap. Nami rarely crumples. Panics, yes. Runs, yes. But she turns around and comes out blazing.

Not all girls sob, he supposes, thinks of Wado Ichimonji. Earrings lilting, he rubs at the lumps on his head that have stacked up over time. One potential concussion after the next with Nami. Bepo's easygoing nature is a relief though Zoro's verbal sparring skills are rusting. Cook isn't around either. Maybe that's why he's drawn to Law.

At the desk, Law lifts his shirt from the back of the chair and slips it over his patterned body. The bruises will adjust to contact with hard cold surfaces, but unsutured skin might not. The inorganic packs a shitload of microscopic organic. He rises and runs an eye over the neatly ordered supplies that he'll soon bundle together and administer to all ailing and sailing with him, whether they care for him to do so or not.

Thank god Luffy hadn't insisted that spring-coiled ape from Dressrosa come with them. As much as Law is intimate with Joker's cruelty, and not with Mugiwara's brand of compassion, Bellamy, lackiest of the lackeys onboard? It would've been hard to take. Blond prick hadn't wanted help anyway.

Law slides down the wall beside Roronoa, the man not opening his eye.

Law is shoulder-close and tips his head onto those green spikes, soft against his cheek, unlike his own coarse hair. "Your practice, discipline, is sleeping, right? All these times of focusing your strength and tying into a higher power?"

Zoro glances up, grins a crooked path. "Heh. it's an art form. You should try it."

And Law does. He often works on the floor when his bones ache from sitting at the desk, or standing on the deck or in surgery, for too long. Understands that the shift in perspective from being close to the ground goes beyond physical. A sub is metal floating on and cutting through the buoyancy of the ocean's currents, propelled by a nature adapted by the human. Steel protects him from the water and allows immersion. The floor of his quarters brings him a few metres closer.

Roronoa's hand is like the nuguigami paper either of them use to wipe their blades. Textured, tough, yielding. Pain brings success. If a threat knocks against the soldered plates of the sub, either man will fight it. For now, sleep licks and curls into the corners of torn flesh.

Zoro is cross-legged and Law knows he'll snooze or slough off the pins and needles that'll prickle his shins like the laurel of thorns scarred into his ankles. His hand slips from Zoro's as either man draws slack and still into the drooled mouth of slumber. Ready though. Always ready.

He's held that foot in his lap, a doctor's eye wondering how? and why? and healed? and a fighter's eye wondering how? and why? and healed? and weak point? A survivor's eye. At that time, sitting at the end of the bed, Zoro had pulled him back to lie beside him, not giving a fuck—giving him the respect of a battle fought—as his hold puckered and stung the marks on Law's own body. Still healing, but they would heal.

Law's fingers had ached for the smoothness of skin disrupted, before his mouth was taken with Zoro's direct, subversive, cracked and oh so practical lips. Practiced in the discipline of supply and demand. Want. Desire. The enemies of a calm mind. Need.

Sought and fulfilled in and by either man.

Law had positioned himself over the quiet. It was a spring he knew well, drew from often. His elbows, flattened either side of Roronoa's unflustered and hungry face, prevented him from crushing it below him in a porous acceptance of the scrape and tumble of breath and skin and pause.

The decline of Law's bridge, the bend of his toes, ironed the concave dips in Zoro's shin, and both men hit pay dirt as the first mate flexed and brought Law closer to the gaps and cuts and nicks that led inwards and out. Villages hidden by waterfalls, powder fine-tuned like the tapping of an uchiko ball on a blade.

Law's books were marked with notes and observances along the margins; corridors of his own way, his own wandering. It wasn't lost on him that the paper used to wipe the katana and nodachi was derived from the same vegetation used to repair manuscripts, mend bindings, fix art, reinforce maps. Reformation. Restoration.

Law's toes compressed the skin, and there was so very little skin to grab of the lean, sinewy man below him, and Zoro was flooded with the sweet pain that brings success, the stupidity that shepherds pain. What would he have done without his feet?

The surgeon liked his chest, his peacock quill of a bandolier scarring his pectorals diagonally from right to left, ready for attention and adulation—grooming—from the rough-tongued bastard.

And as for his eye. Trust was required. He closed the working one and let Law's fingers follow the seared-shut-skin of the other, as if he could isolate all of Fujitora's mysteries. Zoro, immobile. Law's hand on his chest could promise extraction, excavation. Zoro tuned in to the wash of respiration to determine, friend or foe?

The younger pirate, the brasher pirate, had drawn Law to the bed and Law had sucked the air back over his teeth as Zoro pressed his fingers into his back, too insistent. He eased his touch. "Say something, Surgeon." The swordsman's words tapered off as Law dove into the red heat of fire to loosen the grip of tension and muscle around its centre, not missing a beat of breath as his appetite matched Zoro's own along that torso of imperfect beauty.

The Strawhat cook knew—the rogue element, imbalance, incited a meal to excel.

Pins and needles be damned, Zoro stretches out and leans away from the surgeon, slips parallel to the wall, arms crossed, snores unholy. Law sits awake, lifts a barnacled foot to his lap. The scars on his shins, Law guesses, are the least of Zoro's stories, lesser of his worries, testament to lessons learned.

A/N: Thank you for reading. I know that Law swapped himself out with a body double in Dressrosa before Doflamingo pumped him too full of bullets, and that his ability probably could have fixed him up pretty quickly. However, he was still sporting bandages when Luffy departed to WCI, so I'll head canon that everyone pushed on through while still being all cut and bruised up, including the Hearts who fought Jack the Drought.