Nothing to your Everything

Drifting

The man is urged to calm down by frantic nurses near by, but he only truly stops attempting to attack Law when they threaten to kick him out of the hospital.

Law avoids the man for the rest of the night. It hurts him, to not be waiting for Luffy outside his door, but at the same time be knows his worrying would do no good.

He starts working again. Mindlessly drifts from patient to patient, avoiding any thought that might of lead him down the rabbit hole of Luffy.

It hurts, again, to walk by Luffy's door and see the man's glare. He doesn't know why it's there. He doesn't know what he did to offend him, but generally he doesn't know anything.

All he knows is that he needs to keep blocking off, keep himself in this daze, make any thought that wasn't work taboo.

Law was startled at the ease in which he had slipped into the familiar mindset.

He knew he used to do things like this. Shutting off his brain, emptying all thought besides what was necessary. He used to drift through life like he was watching it rather than experiencing it.

He knows that when he was younger and his life was filled only with the thought of pain and escape, of Lami's screams and the dead eyes of the grocer from down the street, of white splotches and the ticking of a clock counting down to the end, he used to behave like this.

He used to drift like a leaf in the wind. He used to exist but not experience, he used to be empty.

Eventually he grew out of it. The path to recovery was slow, but he had managed to crawl his way there. He thought he had made progress, thought that he had improved and didn't have to shut himself off when things got too stressful anymore.

He guessed he was wrong.

Days pass and Law hardly notices.

At some point he had asked the doctor in charge of Luffy what his condition was.

The man had told Law that he was in a stable condition for now. That he was in a coma and he could wake up within days or months.

Law had left before the man could ask why he was interested.

He was relieved deep down. In the part of him that was still conscious and aware of the world around him besides work. In the part of him that had the strength to care.

Sometimes when he would walk past Luffy's door he would see an assortment of people inside.

He noted absently that they all seemed as if outside of these walls, in a place different and not filled with the gloom that hung around the building, they would be as bright and crazy as Luffy himself.

He watched their interactions in silence.

He watched how Ace seemed to spend all of his free time outside of Luffy's door, his foot always tapping and tapping away as if it stopped the world would end.

He watched how one day a blond man had been there too, and he had approached Ace with a delicacy that screamed of his apprehension. He watched how they had simply looked at each other and then they were hugging each other in a moment that seemed far too intimate for Law to be witnessing, so he shuffled along to another patient.

Other times he would see the other employees from the cafe, and they would give Law tight lipped smiles as he passed. He supposes they were trying to be polite. He didn't smile back.

Sometimes he would see others he didn't recognize as well.

A green haired man.

A man with a long nose.