trell (
passingbuzzards) wrote in
onepiece_ficathon2015-12-20 05:03 am
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winter 2015-2016 ficathon: take me with you to the sea

take me with you to the sea
A ONE PIECE FICATHON
→what's this?
Ficathons are for putting the readers and writers of a fandom in touch! Here you can leave a request for fic you want to see, which may then be filled by anyone; similarly, you can write fic for any existing request. It's low pressure, so you can leave prompts even if you don't write a fill, and fills can be of any length (so don't hesitate to fill a prompt even if all you've got in mind is a drabble!).
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→rules
♥ Any/all pairings, characters & genres are welcome!
♥ One prompt per comment. No limit on comments.
♥ Prompts should generally follow the following format:
(trigger, etc) warning(s), if applicable
character/pairing, prompt
♥ Fills should be posted (either as inline text or linking elsewhere) as a comment response to the prompt, not in new threads.character/pairing, prompt
♥ You can write a fill for a prompt even if it's already been filled by someone else.
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the (periodically updated) list of links to filled prompts can be found here!
no subject
no subject
Trafalgar Law doesn’t find himself scared of many things. His intimacy with an insatiable desire for death may lend to that, but giving it any thought means entertaining fear and weakness. Law is not weak. (Not even when he wakes up smothering hoarse screams in his throat, not even when his limbs tremor as he curls into himself to stop pain that isn’t there, not even when he keeps his eyes open yet all he can see is burnt flesh and little bodies and whitewhitewhite—)
With Strawhat Luffy before him, a cavernous hole in his stomach and dried blood on his lips, he is scared.
Strawhat is not important to him. The boy is interesting; compelling, passionate, refreshing, an impossible force of being he can't entirely wrap his head around. But not important. There is a thrum in Law’s chest, however; an off-key beat that pulsates in his ears, that makes his fingertips throb; a full bodied palpitation, one that tries to burst his veins, that screams at him to take action.
(To save Strawhat.)
Law doesn’t know where this compulsion stems from. A chance meeting on Sabaody, a spark of intrigue, a pull in his very marrow – these mean nothing in a pirate’s world. There are those who will benefit him and those who must be eliminated. But Strawhat, with his scraped fists and raw tenacity, his life, he etches himself into every corner of Law’s mind.
(Because life isn’t a concept the Surgeon of Death is familiar with, yet Strawhat teems with a burning desire to live. Inside him is a flame that blankets those who come near and is unleashed wherever he goes. He is an inferno, spreading himself as far as he can reach and setting the sky ablaze with his presence. Strawhat’s conflagration will spit out the passive embers who are not swept up in his fiery pace and they will be left to snuff out slowly on the sidelines of his assail.
Law refuses to be an ember.)
That impression drags him to Marineford in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war (Whitebeard’s death will shake the world to its very core) with a visceral need to make sure that Strawhat does not die. Not after this. Not after he rips his way through the forerunners of their generation and makes it out—makes it out barely alive, covered in blood that is only his, makes it out broken, shattered in a way Law sees in himself on the sparse occasions he forces himself to look in the mirror, but Strawhat—
He makes it out. For this, he must continue living. With magma having speared his stomach, though, there is slim chance of that. (Law pushes the words primum nil nocere out of his mind as he starts his work.)
As he makes more and more incisions, he realizes the bloody body before him is injured far beyond what Akainu has done. Twisted and burnt flesh sits at the base of Strawhat’s breast, but within his Room Law sees that each rubber muscle is tense and hypertrophied, pumped with fatal amounts of vasopressin, cortisol, and catecholamine hormones.
(Doesn’t he know that a body made of rubber is not a shield from the world?)
The damage Strawhat has accumulated is unbelievable. His body almost shuts down multiple times and Law doesn’t know if he will survive because he is mutilated, afflicted with so much inordinate physical trauma that there may be nothing that will resuscitate him. The procedure is demanding, each suture welling consternation in Law’s chest. But there is another emotion beside the fear; it brushes his skin as Strawhat lies beneath him on an operating table, it tells him that he’s the only one who can save the boy.
Six hours of work leave Strawhat connected to a myriad of IV tubes and a ventilator, nigh exsanguinated. The fact that the most Law can do is leave him lying shallow-breathed in bloodied sheets curdles astringency in his throat.
He did not operate on Strawhat Luffy out of obligation, but a reason he doesn’t yet know. Two weeks pass by in anxious waiting and acrid doubt. (What if he doesn’t make it?) Skipped heartbeats, mild seizures, bloody coughs: they’re all hell.
And then, in the way it seems only Strawhat can make happen, the tides shift.
He awakens in a fit of hazy delusion looking for his dead brother and something twisted unfurls in Law’s chest (eats him out from the inside and says, ‘he is broken just like you are’ and hurts so much). Strawhat runs into the forest of Amazon Lily and gambles his life with every step. The aid Law has provided is first rate, but those wounds are more severe than bandages and two weeks of intensive rest can mitigate. They are likely to open up, and he is likely to die.
Strawhat’s screams boom across the island. Law knows that Monkey D. Luffy might shatter into irreparable pieces, might become a person so far away from himself that the name rings hollow, might die both inside and out—
The thought knocks the breath out of him in a way just shy of debilitating.
The Knight of the Sea treads after him and Law waits. That infamous straw hat sits on the ground near his feet and he picks it up. He knows that this hat is significant, anyone who sails the ocean does, but having it in his grasp is another experience entirely. It’s worn. Flimsy between his fingers and bleached by the sun. Stitched up in a few areas. He tries not to think about what he’s done to Strawhat. Tries not to think about the scent of corpses in a dead city far away, clinging to his nose for days (weeks months years) afterward. Tries so hard to block the feeling of shame that comes with knowing that Strawhat will have to live with a ubiquitous void behind him. Will constantly be reminded that he was the one who survived.
Strawhat's screams quiet.
He exits the forest riding on the excommunicated Warlord’s back and Law meets his eyes. They are black like pitch, resonant with a mix of emotion he can’t readily discern, but they are Strawhat Luffy's. Brightly, his resolution and the Will shine. The relief that swims through Law is welcomed as he gives back the straw hat. Their fingers connect for a moment (they're warm) and Strawhat beams.
The radiance of his smile makes Law feel a little less like death.
no subject
damn near everyone gets them wrong honestly but you get them really right and this is FANTASTIC, thank you you so much!! what a wonderful thing to find
i love that you touch on law feeling guilty for keeping luffy alive when his brother didn't make it (I FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT THIS) and i love the connections you make between what's happened to them both, as well as how raw your descriptions of law's memories of the white city are. god. and the paragraphs describing luffy's physical state as a result of everything he's put himself through and law's reaction are just stunning, undoubtedly my very favorite part
and "Law refuses to be an ember."! i love
you even used the latin for 'first, do no harm,' my HERO, thank you again for such a great fill :')))
no subject
i don't usually work with pairings (romantic, platonic, or otherwise) but i got to thinking about character analysis and figured, if oda really gave his characters in-depth psychological exploration, the relationship between law and luffy could be something incredibly dynamic and deep? especially since they lived such vastly different lives and their paths still converged at pivotal moments (which i chalk up to the D). there's so much possibility!
i'm glad i took the opportunity to fill this prompt and i'm so happy that you enjoyed it
(/w honestly, the "outlived my sibling in awful circumstances" parallel was what stapled this entire thing together)
no subject
Ryuichi
no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-12-29 09:35 pm (UTC)(link)I didn't see that this had been filled before I started writing so, please have this one as well. Hopefully it's in a similar vein to what you were looking for.
He’d been waiting. His back to the dock, face facing the fresh air rolling off the turquoise tinted waves. He awkwardly had to decide which way to face at first- was it normal to greet a person face to face? Or would that seem too forward? In the end (and because he decided he needed something to do to pass the time) he’d decided to look out over the ocean and think about everything the waves had tossed in his way.
Loss, tragedy, burning, hatred, loss, a hundred pairs of shackles and a thousand strings tying him down, family, loss, a storm-tossed boy wearing a straw-hat, a certain brand of retribution with a smattering of redemption.
Meeting up again was a test of fate – or was it a twist of fate? He’d said his goodbyes long ago; some more permanent than the rest, some with a lack of finality, and some he’d had to take back entirely. So it was a surprise to learn they’d see each other again, but also a promise meant to be fulfilled. He wasn’t in the habit of making promises, unlike another captain he knew. They were too easy to break, and with a past like his what honor did he have to fall back on? In his world of kill or be killed (once upon a time for him it was kill and be killed but those times had passed now, mostly) who would ever trust a promise?
But strawhat was a man of his word and his word was worth trusting. A strange subject: trust. He’d never had enough of it in his life and here was a physical embodiment of the word. So here, Law was waiting.
Time slipped by him as it always did – he was never quite in the present and never truly out of the past. One foot in the door and one foot in the grave. A hat poking into his back surprised him, he always forgot how small strawhat was in real life when his spirit was so overbearing.
“Torao! You’re here! I’m glad, I thought I’d lost you!”
He didn’t mean those words, not really. What he’d probably meant what that he’d missed Law, or been worried that Law would have gotten lost on his way to the meet-up, or possibly he’d been thinking that they would never have been able to meet at this point in time. Something simple and asinine, it had to be.
Law can’t help but think of what those words, in that order, meant to him.
I thought I’d lost you.
I thought I’d lost you.
Because it’s not fair. It’s not fair that one man is capable of dredging up the past with a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eyes. It’s not fair that Law is connected to one person who is capable of making him feel but not hurt. Or, alleviating some of the pain from the past. It’s not fair that Law lives with this burden only to have one person capable of shouldering it as well.
(That’s probably what Law liked best about strawhat – he could shoulder almost anything you threw at him, and he’d do it with a grin. If only Law had wider shoulders).
Because strawhat was worried about him. And Law stood simultaneously in wonder at the thought that someone was worried about him in particular, and in shocked horror that he would be the cause of someone else’s pain that didn’t deserve it. If there was anything… he couldn’t... no, wouldn’t burden strawhat with endless worrying about someone as hopeless as him. There was relief there as well, another person who could care for him; broken, tortured, insecure Law, the man who would just as gladly rip someone’s heart out than admit that he had something to live for. The relief shifts sharply into pain when he remembers the one other person in the world who had bothered to care.
It’s a testament to Law’s inability to see things clearly, his tendency to ruminate over the unspoken words and things left undone that causes him to shut down. He pushes every thought out of his head (his damned head that screams in moments of silence and puts a thick white fog over everything before him). He wants to run, he wills the earth to swallow him so that he won’t have to face the void in front of him. everything you love turns to dust
“Smile, Law.”
“I thought I’d lost you.”
It’s the word ‘lost’ that leaves him pausing.
Lost implies not physically knowing where he is. Lost implies something far more personal.
Law thought he was lost when the white town was destroyed and he was left among the burning embers. Law thought he was lost when his rescuer had been shot and left for dead on the side of a mountain. Law briefly thought he was lost when he was lying broken amongst the ruins of Doflamingo’s palace. But here, Luffy thought he had lost him?
It’s not fair because the situation was completely reversed in Law’s head. He thought he had lost strawhat after Marineford, when the body of a small and broken boy lay tethered with wires in the sickbay. He thought he’d forever lost the bright eyes that had singled him out and said ‘fuck it’ to every rule and convention Law had ever had time to consider. And then Law was sure he’d lost him for good when they said good-bye at the island of women – but then at least he’d left with a memory of a smile that was brighter than it had any right to be.
He’d found him once more on an island where he wasn’t expecting it, of course. And then at the end, more broken than whole but still standing, Law had said good-bye again with no hope of seeing him again. He yearned for it, but it was a matter of heart and promises; the two things Law could carry but never own.
What hurt worse, was knowing that Law thought he’d lost part of the person he was when strawhat was around. The kid (because he was certainly younger than Law, but maybe not all the less worldly or wiser… if anything it was because Law felt aged beyond his toil filled years on earth) had made a mark on him. It wasn’t the kind that could be seen easily, like his tattoos that covered up more sinister spots, but something deeper and longer lasting. With distance, space, and time Law had found himself slipping back, back to when he could feel the warmth of the sun on the ocean, back to when he remembered what the sound of his laugh sounded like, back to when there was something on this goddamned ocean that was worth living for.
Law sighs in resignation, because with strawhat there is only acquiescence, there is no swimming against the stream only floating along. He doesn’t say the words because he doesn’t have to.
I thought I’d lost me too.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-12-30 11:54 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-12-30 06:57 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
Ryuichi