This is a continuation from the last oneshot, but it can be read as a standalone!
Pairing: Law/Arisa
Warning(s): Angst. Also the same spoiler warning for Chimayoi from Sleeping Season.
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She slept, eased once more into an uncertain tranquility. He lay still in the quiet and listened to her fitful breathing. Internalized the shallow rise and fall of her ribcage and the slow, rhythmic blooms of heat at the base of his throat, right below the spot she'd grazed her teeth hours earlier. The hand pressed against her back slowly unfurled, shifted. He felt the arch of her bones beneath his fingertips, noted how unbelievably fragile they seemed, and a cold helpless anger rose. It hissed and reared, straining against the floorboards of his heart, materializing like a living thing of its own.
He wondered how much more he could take. This waiting game, the infinite limbo. Her mortality, the question of it ever present, orbiting his own.
It was quickly becoming a problem.
His hand continued to skate over her skin, absent and feather-light. He touched one of her scars as he listened to the distant pings of the sonar. She shivered and curled against him, lips moving a fraction against his skin. It felt like an eternity since she'd started sneaking to his bed, since they'd discarded foreign motel rooms for the familiarity of the submarine hull enclosing them now. The days in transit seemed to pass quicker since that adjustment, piling behind them in rough accordance with the number of hearts kept cooling in the storage room below deck. The Log Pose resetting provided infrequent but welcome lulls to the routine.
They were careful enough. Nobody seemed to suspect, which suited them both very well. The secrecy would always remain a constant – that was the one thing he was certain she would never budge on. They had broken enough rules already.
He'd understood from the beginning.
This would never be love. Not in any conventional sense.
He wouldn't let it; he wasn't even sure if either one was capable of it, given the way they were now and the circumstances caging them. She seemed to agree.
But times like this, a part of him almost dared to challenge her tacit acceptance. To question why she continued to exist in this way. Why she tolerated it; why she continued to seek him out for comfort out of all people.
After all, dead men walking had nothing worthwhile to give.
Though perhaps that was the whole point, as grim as it may have seemed. These sorts of things mattered very little when neither of them had a future, realistically speaking.
She had her disease; he his suicide mission.
And even then.
Even then, at least Law still had a choice in the matter. (Or the illusion of one, at least.)
The anger only built the longer he stewed in his thoughts. He never quite knew what to do with it. Because for once, his rage was functionally useless. He couldn't direct it anywhere, mold it to serve a concrete purpose. There was nothing to counteract. No Joker, no Navy, no trace of an enemy. No comeuppance. Just an uncaring world and the unheeding passage of time.
Her death was completely outside his control and he hated that.
Arisa shifted in her sleep, drawing his attention once more. He peered down at her through the darkness. It occurred to him then that she smiled more easily these days. She was gradually growing weaker despite her attempts to hide it. Time was running out... and yet she still smiled.
He had wanted the world to burn.
Still did, more often than not of late. Looking at her, how could he not?
Truth was, he had never fully cast off the empty-eyed orphan he'd once been. He hadn't. Burrowed deep within was still that shitty brat who'd crawled forth from the womb of a dying city with ashes tainting his skin and threats of vengeance piled high atop his tongue. The hatred had been dormant but the tendrils had long taken root, quietly spreading to every nook and cranny, akin to a parasitic growth made inextricable even when taking his abilities into account. He had survived the fires and the death squads and the Amber Lead's taint, but this... this was a sickness of a whole different caliber. Left unsatiated, it would drive him insane. Pulsing and festering, it poisoned his mind, rotted his heart, and now it was much too late to rid himself of it.
That chance had died with Cora-san at Minion Island. Cora-san, who threw everything away to get him that Devil Fruit. Who willingly went to die for him with a smile on his face. And all these years afterwards, Law had made the utmost effort to live up to that foolish smile – wearing his fingers to the bone, carefully dissecting himself piece by piece, painstakingly threading together a version of himself deserving of the powers and subsequent life that had been bestowed to him. A version of himself who could have saved his benefactor then. Who now stood a chance at retribution.
But how could he hope to achieve such a thing, when he couldn't even save the person in front of him?
These were the moments he felt most like a child again, when all of his worst fears intertwined, looming closer and closer to reality, when the injustice of it all rose up to choke him and all he could do was to curse his own inadequacy in preventing it.
Arisa continued to slumber. She was in his arms, yet she couldn't be further out of reach.
His hand slowly curled against her spine.
Angry. What a cheap understatement.
He wanted to bend reality to his will. To force back the tides of time, to remold the bodies of the damned out of blood and clay. He wanted to force life back into their moldering lungs and drag them back clawing and screaming to this temporal plane where he could render to them the lengthy, gruesome deaths they so deserved.
Most of all, he wanted her.
He wanted her spread before him on the operating table, eyes soft and sedated, her flesh pliant to the spoken word. He wanted the tip of his scalpel tracing her skin, dragging through her insides, opening her up for him to reach. He wanted the lights above blazing, illuminating the innermost parts – her fears and her prayers, all of the guilt rotting in her marrow. He wanted the scalding heat of her blood, the color back in her cheeks, the fire that would kindle in her blue eyes when he caught her mouth with his. He wanted to bury his hands in her viscera, to coax the dying tissue back to function, to restore all the mangled bits.
He wanted her numb to the pain; he wanted her whole –
(He just wanted her to live.)
YOU ARE READING
SKELETON KEY
FanfictionHe was alive and she felt so weak. She wanted him, all of him, but it was selfish and futile to think she could keep him. She knew that. He wanted her the way she deserved to be ruined - heart in his hands, bones twisted against his, skin in his tee...
