Pain Management

Chapter 5: Emergency Visit

There was a part of you—albeit one that was shrinking smaller and smaller with every passing day—that hated how Law's treatments legitimately did seem to be working. Degrading yourself on his exam room table every few days, lying awake in bed at night and grinding against the heel of your palm with thoughts of his strong hands running over you until you were breathless—all of it seemed to be working effectively to lessen your pain, to keep you feeling productive and useful again, just like you'd wanted.

Except for tonight.

You held a pillow tightly to your abdomen, body curled in on itself, and pressed your face into your other pillow, a growing pool of tears dampening your cheek. You had barely made it through your shift in the boiler room, holding things together by a thin shred of willpower, before practically crawling back to your room, skipping dinner to lay in darkness and grit your teeth and hope the searing hot spasms in your abdomen and shooting pains running down your legs would go away on their own. Unsurprisingly, they did not, and your condition deteriorated as the evening progressed; you napped feverishly, alternating between bouts of freezing cold that made your teeth chatter and your body tremble uncontrollably no matter how you buried yourself in blankets, and sweating so profusely that you soaked right through your pajamas.

As the evening trudged on, second by agonizing second, you finally gave in and rummaged through your bedside table, looking for the container of special tablets that Chopper made just for you, those special pills that managed to dull the pain without knocking you on your ass like everything else you had tried before. You grasped the bottle with shaking hands, and you heart sank as you realized there was nothing rattling around in the little glass jar.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. You gripped your sheets as another wave of white-hot pain threatened to drown you. You needed sleep. You needed to be able to present yourself for your next work shift without being doubled over, balancing on the precipice of tears.

You needed Law.

The painful throbbing somewhere in the depths of your pelvis was making you sick to your stomach, but the idea of having to stagger down the halls of the submarine, preparing to plead your case to your captain—to beg your doting doctor for relief at this ungodly hour—was making you feel far worse. You crawled out from under your stack of blankets and got to your feet, clinging to every piece of furniture within arm's length to steady yourself; you threw on whatever clothes you could find that weren't saturated with sweat, and carefully made your way out of your room. You stealthily padded down the halls, fuzzy socks doing the bulk of the hard work in masking each step; the ship was quiet, only a skeleton crew still active at the moment, but the last thing you needed was anyone questioning what you were doing wandering around doubled over, one arm held tightly over your abdomen as though you were trying to prevent your organs from escaping.

You tried Law's office first—the cluttered room was mostly dark, illuminated by the soft glow of a small desk light, abundant stacks of papers the only occupants of the space at the moment. You closed the door behind you and considered going to the infirmary next—there had to be pain medication there, you assumed. The idea of clanging around and rummaging through copious cabinets and drawers, however, seemed far too troublesome a task under the circumstance, and the last thing you needed was to end up taking some poorly labeled tablets that would do who-knows-what to you. Sure, you could ask one of your crewmates to point you in the right direction—certainly one of them had to know their way around the medical supplies—but having to admit your illness to anyone but Law was frightening. The whole point of this farce was to find a way to feel useful again, to not be a burden; the Strawhats never made you feel like one, never made you feel like anything but loved and cared for, but you had yourself thoroughly and completely convinced that they would have gotten sick of it eventually. At least here, you could pretend to be okay, pretend to be normal and productive like everyone else, and save all your weaknesses and imperfections for Law's exam table, keeping them between you and him and the hum of the fluorescent lights.