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Finding Baby 5 and Buffalo on Punk Hazard had been an unexpected and frankly unpleasant surprise. He probably should have expected ‘Joker’ to pull a stunt like this – sending the two members of the DonQuixote family Law’d spent the most time with as a child to rescue the mad scientist Caesar was no coincidence. Doflamingo likely hoped to inspire guilt through dredging up feelings better left dead and buried through the unexpected reunion, and it was working to an extent. Seeing the pair hauled out of the harbour alongside Caesar was an unexpectedly sombre affair, and looking at their battered forms shivering in their bonds made his ever-present scowl deepen minutely.
“Law.” Baby called, face serious even as she squinted against the ice formed in her lashes.
“Baby 5.” Law responded, tone even. Buffalo only watched the pair blearily, and the doctor in Law itched to check the annoying man for a concussion.
“How could you Law?!” she asks again, clearly hurt and confused. “You only just returned to us… the master was so proud to see what you’d become! Buffalo wasn’t exaggerating when he said that the young master had been saving the Heart Seat for you.” Her face was stoney, but her tone was hurt.
Law sighs heavily, unsure of where to begin, or if he even wanted to explain himself.
“Young Master missed you-dasuyan.”
Law remains quiet, staring the pair down levelly. “I’m going to treat your wounds now.” He states, raising his ‘Room’ and swapping them with the sheets on a pair of old cots in a nearby clinic room that he’d confirmed to be free of Caesar’s ‘S.M.I.L.E’ gas.
Baby 5 – predictably – shrieked at her sudden change of surroundings, and Buffalo rolled off the miniscule cot with a muffled grunt of surprise.
“Hey, what’s the big idea-dasuyan!”
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
They griped in unison, and Law pointedly ignores them as he gives the pair a brief scan assessing their individual damage. He uses his ‘Room’ to move Buffalo’s flailing bulk back on to the cot and it creaks ominously under his weight. He turns to the cart full of medical supplies -on loan from the Strawhat’s strange Zoan doctor- and begins loading a syringe with a hefty dose of tranquilizer. Buffalo begins to struggle again as Law uses his devil fruit to remove his bulky jacket without needing to remove his seastone and stalks closer with the needle.
“Uh, Law – what’s that? What are you doing?!” Law continues to ignore the pair even as he plunges the syringe into Buffalo’s Trapezius muscle.
The tranquilizer quickly takes effect, and buffalo’s indignant yowls quickly slur, and then stop completely, leaving only Baby to screech and squeal in offense on Buffalo’s behalf.
“Law what the hell do you think you’re doing! The young master will have your head for this! Does our past mean nothing to you? How could you kill poor Buffalo like that?!” She’s crying, big fat tears, and suddenly she doesn’t seem so different from that whiney little brat he knew before.
Law sighs. “He’s not dead. Just asleep.”
Baby stops her wailing, blinking owlishly at the doctor as he moves to the bowl of clean water and rag on his cart, and begins wiping the blood and debris out of the mans more serious wounds. “Huh?”
“It was just a sedative. I said I was going to treat your wounds, didn’t I?” He scoffs, still focused on his task as he unveils a couple more nasty slashes across Buffalo’s bicep. Baby’s brain seems to short circuit at that, and she remains in stunned silence long enough for Law to move on to stitching shut the larger wounds.
“Why?” She asks.
“I didn’t care to listen to his whining while I worked.” Law answers simply, watching the parted flesh come back together in a neat line of stitches. “Perhaps I should have sedated you while I was at it.”
Baby ignores the jab, asking again. “You know what I mean, don’t play dumb. Why are you treating us?”
Law pauses almost imperceptibly at her question. He had known what she meant the first time she asked and had hoped to distract her with his last statement; he supposes it makes sense for her not to take the bait, they’re both adults now after all. His honest answer is one even he doesn’t want to acknowledge; that he wanted to give one final act of comradery to the two DonQuixote pirates he may have once called friends. That he hadn’t forgotten their time together in the three most miserable years of his life and while they annoyed the crap out of him at the time, he appreciated their company. Instead, he says:
“Dead men make for poor messengers. At least, they do to send the kind of message I’m intending.”
Baby’s reaction was immediate, and considerably more intense than he expected.
“That’s bullshit!” She exclaims, trying to sit up against the seastone chains. “We’ve survived worse, Law! You’ve been the cause of worse! Remember the time you pushed me into the young master’s vat of electric eels?!”
Laws lips almost twitch into a smirk at the memory in spite of himself. It had been an accident of course, though he’d never made any effort to convince anyone otherwise. He’d only wanted to get a closer look at Doffy’s new toys and Baby had been knocked in in the process. Doflamingo had to pull her out of the frenzied pool with his strings, and her tiny body was convulsing on the ground as the executives shouted to one another and she was rushed to the infirmary. He was terrified at the time. Not of Doflamingo and the promised punishment, but at the thought that he might’ve killed her. He refused to acknowledge why that thought had been so terrifying. In the end though, Baby had woken up not three days later and burst into tears over how her bow had been ruined in the ‘stinky fish water’, completely unconcerned with the fact she’d been so close to death.
“Even back then you were like this.” She continues, voice still tinged with anger and indignation. “You think I never put two and two together over who replaced my hair ribbon that day? It would have taken a generous amount of your allowance to find such high-quality silk, yet you never said a thing. You’d rather die than let anyone see that you care!”
Law can’t deny the truth of that statement. It was different then of course; he was so incredibly sick and fresh from losing his first family - freshly nihilistic and awakened to the true harshness of reality. Back then, he didn’t avoid forging relationships necessarily, but certainly didn’t do anything to encourage them. He hadn’t yet begun actively pushing people away – that habit had only developed after the death of Corazon; a fact that had driven Shachi and Penguin nuts in their early days - and though he’d gotten a little better over the years - likely still bothered them even now.
Without saying a word, Law ties off Buffalo’s last bandage and moves to begin prepping an IV to get some warm fluids into her and hopefully bring her temperature up - she was shivering fiercely and that could be anything from her low body temperature to the singing of her confused nerves as they reeled from the direct hit from a bolt of the Strawhat navigator’s artificial lightning.
Baby laughs humorlessly. “You can’t even admit it now! Unbelievable. Don’t want to be reminded of our history together, huh?”
Law moves to stand next to her, alcohol swab in one hand and canula in the other. “It’s best not to think about shared history.” He says blandly, and he thinks absently how hypocritical he is. After a moment of assessment, he sets up the line in her interior jugular vein -not quite ideal, but it does keep him from having to remove her seastone. He hangs the bag, adjust the drip and watches with a spark of amusement as the sudden burst of warmth makes her shudder involuntarily.
He basks in the continued silence and begins assessing the burns running up and down her arms and legs. He cleans the gashes where her skin had split and is surprised by her lack of reaction beyond minor twitches. Law knows this is the result of their shared ‘pain and torture resistance classes’ but its still unsettling to see the results firsthand.
He’d almost thought Baby had fallen asleep, relieved to avoid the conversation yet somehow also disappointed but when he looks up to check on her, he finds her oddly focused on a water-stained ceiling tile.
“Can you at least tell me why?”
Law thinks back to what he’s seen of Baby so far and his immediate response is no. The young woman seems just as devoted to Doflamingo as she had been when they were children, seemingly unable to fathom why somebody would turn on her captain. It would probably be a long time before Baby could even begin to free herself from the Heavenly Demons grasp, and unless someone forcibly cut her ties she likely never would. He remembers when Cora-San had first pulled him aside and revealed his hand, how he had frantically tried to convince Law to run from Doffy and revealed the first glimpse of truth behind the secret name of “D”.
“We were always meant to be enemies…” Law mutters suddenly, and Baby scoffs, turning her head to face the other direction completely.
“I don’t know what I expected. Thirteen years and you really haven’t changed all that much.” There is a long stretch of quiet before Baby speaks again. “I hope its worth it Law, whatever it is you’re after.”
Law dithers on whether or not he should extrapolate on his unexpected revelation for far too long – a running theme for today, it seems – before deciding that sharing this particular line of thought can’t do much harm. He flushes the deep gash with saline to assess the damage, and the tentative clotting her body had managed was washed away, causing blood to well sluggishly to fill the wound. He tears open his second field stitch kit of the day.
“Do you remember, back when we shared our real names?” He asks, steadying Baby’s leg where he moved to suture the slash. This one was the largest, running the length of her thigh. It was likely the result of the barrage of shrapnel and debris the sniper had hurled at them, and Baby was lucky it hadn’t severed the femoral artery. It had been close.
Baby blinks in surprise. “Ha! You mean when Buffalo and I bared our souls, and you went on a pretentious rant about your ‘super secret lineage’?” Law glares as he ‘accidentally’ pulls a stitch too tight, making Baby yelp at the unexpected shock of pain. “Yes, asshole I remember! What happened to not wanting to bring up the past, huh?!”
“Do you know the meaning of your name?” Law ignores her last comment and continues with the neat line of stitches; 15 so far and only a quarter of the slash closed. It was a miracle she hadn’t bled out and he marveled at her low, but all things considered stable blood pressure. Doffy really had made them into monsters.
She shakes her head mutely and Law nods in return, having thought as much. He ties off another stitch, bringing the tally up to 21.
“Your name has roots in the South Blue, ironically, and actually began as a diminutive of other names such as ‘Elizabeth’ or ‘Barbara’.” He starts, steely eyes still laser focused on his work. “In modern times though, it has become a name in and of itself and means something along the lines of ‘fealty to god’ or ‘gods promise’.”
If Baby is startled by this information, she doesn’t show it, quietly watching Law work with apparent fascination. Law smirks down at his sutures, 30 in total now. Almost there. “I’d say Doffy was feeling quite full of himself when he chose your name, Babette.” Baby prickles angrily at the jab and the irreverence with which Law speaks his name, and Law presses onwards before she could respond. “But then again, my ‘secret’ name isn’t much better.”
She falls silent again, and Law can feel her eyes boring into him like a physical pressure.
“My parents only ever told me it was secret, that I had to be careful who I shared it with. It wasn’t until that day that I knew there was anything more to it.” Law ties off his final stitch, wiping the mess of blood and iodine off her leg before turning to his cart to retrieve some gauze and the antibacterial ointment. “When you and Buffalo stumbled across Cora-San and I in the Alley he was trying to convince me to leave the family.”
Baby tensed, and Law knew it wasn’t because of the cool touch of the salve on her fresh stitches.
“Do you want to know what he and Doffy grew up knowing to be the meaning of ‘D’?” He asks, and though Law knew she was likely dying to ask a million questions about his time with Cora now that he’d opened that can of worms, she wisely kept them to herself. Baby nods in answer to his question, vibrating lightly with excitement.
Law however remained oddly calm in the face of his revelation.
“Where Cora-San and Doffy came from, people with the name of ‘D’ were used to frighten little children into behaving. They were told that the ‘D’ would ‘gobble them up’. That the name of ‘D’ marked one as the natural enemy of the Gods.” Law binds her wound tightly, knowing that she would be hard pressed to stay off her healing leg in the coming days. Work now complete he looks her in the eye, and smirks lightly at the shock he finds. Her excitement had notably dimmed. “Interesting, isn’t it? The difference between our ‘secret’ names.”
Baby is staring at him, seemingly lost for words and Law frowns as the obvious occurred to him. The knowledge of Laws secret name was old news to Baby, and she had sworn to keep it secret back then – before she had any clue of its weight. Now that she knew that ‘The young master’ may want to know, she may feel obligated to tell him. Law could kick himself for the stupid oversight. This whole day has left him feeling very unlike himself.
And then he remembers a quirk he had taken advantage of once or twice as a child.
“Hey Baby, can I ask you to do one final thing for me?”
Her eyes ignite immediately with that familiar shine, and guilt pangs through his chest. As a child he’d rationalized his abuse of her weakness as the way of the world, besides its not bad if she doesn’t mind, is it? But as an adult, years more medical knowledge under his belt and hundreds of psychology books read to understand his own broken mind allow him to see her ‘weakness’ for what it really is. The fierce need to be wanted. The traumatized little girl that jumped at any request in response to a crippling fear of abandonment.
But he pushed past it.
“I’m trusting you to keep this between us, okay? It’s terribly important to me.” He asks, and see’s a moment of hesitation cross her face before that terrified little girl won out.
“Of course!” she assures, and Law hears a small murmur of ‘he needs me!’ that sounds all the more upsetting with age.
Shaking the lingering slimy feeling off his back, Law measures a dose of sedative that he’s quick to administer via that central line.
Baby looks confused and unfocused at sudden drowsiness that overcomes her. “Law?” she questions, and her brown eyes can’t seem to focus on him.
“Its just a sedative Baby, just like what I gave Buffalo.” He assures as her brows are drawn together and her eyelids droop. “You don’t want to be awake for what I have to do next.”
This makes alarm flash across her features, but she’s already drifting off.
Doflamingo’s plan had worked better than he originally thought. He’d forgotten how adept Baby was at getting him to speak his mind, and Law was desperately trying to patch the cracks this encounter had made in his mental walls when he raised his ‘Room’ one more time and drew Kikoku.
Using his abilities to cut off his enemy’s heads had never been less enjoyable.