Chapter Text
Law was a boy who knew he was going to die and was therefore not afraid of anything. He had lost his home village to a terrible curse that was slowly destroying him as well.
With nothing to lose, and no fear of demons or evil, he sought out the powerful sorcerer Doflamingo and demanded a position. The sorcerer was amused by his audacity and took him on as a page in his court. Unbeknownst to Law, the sorcerer was planning to cure him, but only when he was sure the boy would be loyal. And so Law learned many things in Doflamingo’s court: the secret names of spirits, and the ways of sword and spear, and of the taking of hearts. The taking of hearts was a special skill of Doflamingo’s, and he had a room in his castle specifically set aside for them, and a special guard in the form of his younger brother Rocinante.
Rocinante, disapproving of his brother’s greed for power, spirited Law away to seek a cure. They traveled together for many months, and though Law’s curse was growing worse, came to regard each other as close as brothers.
The two travelers followed tales of an alatyr stone until they came to a wild, lawless land on the border of the kingdom of birds. The stone was guarded by a vicious serpent, and when the wind whispered that Doflamingo was just behind them, Rocinante set out to face it alone and ill-prepared. Law, who had been made weak by the curse, was left hidden in a safe place near the road.
When he heard Doflamingo arrive, he was too weak to call out, and this was what saved him.
“My stupid brother has robbed me!” the sorcerer said to his servants. “He has taken my servant and now he is trying to take a treasure that should be mine. If he is not sorry for it, I will kill him, so I can bring Law back to serve me. The boy will be powerful enough to challenge me one day one day, and I have to make sure he is my slave before that happens.”
Knowing fear again, Law went to warn Rocinante of the danger approaching them. By the time he struggled his way to Rocinante’s side, the man had already faced the dragon, and come away gravely wounded. He refused to use the stone to cure himself, forcing Law to swallow it instead.
“I won’t be strong enough to run from my brother,” he said. "You have to escape and keep it hidden from him. You have to be free now.”
Law, desperate to help the man who had saved his life, tried to use the sorcery he had seen Doflamingo use to take Rocinante’s heart and keep it safe. But he had never done it before, and without Doflamingo’s skill, the man’s heart turned black and vanished from Law's hands.
With Doflamingo right behind him, Law honored Rocinante’s last wish and fled, weeping, into the kingdom of birds.
Slowly healing from his curse, and sick from grief, Law tried to cut his own heart from his chest in a fit of repenting. He broke it in half and threw both parts into the sea. When even that did not kill him, he foreswore weeping, and vowed to live and grow until he was as powerful as Doflamingo feared he would become.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Law said, pointedly not looking at the strange man dragging logs into his pile of building material.
“Not really,” Shachi said, cheerfully. “I can’t exactly go swimming like this.”
“I said I’m sorry,” Law said. “And I said I’d change you back if you want.”
“Don’t be sorry, this is great!” Penguin said. He’d gone to the ocean and come back with a basket of clams, but he paused in shelling them to hold up his hands and waggled them. “Look! Thumbs!”
“Thumbs!” Shachi agreed.
“Thumbs are pretty cool,” Bepo the polar bear agreed. Unlike the other two, he had opposable thumbs and a voicebox before Law showed up, and therefore he was Law’s favorite for not being a reminder of his own screwups.
“They’re overrated,” Law grumbled.
“You’re not impressed by much, are you?” Shachi asked.
“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe,” Law told him. Doflamingo’s court had collected works of magic and all kinds of treasures from across the known world.
“Oh yeah?” Penguin said. “Well I’ve seen fish that were thiiiiiiiis big.” He threw his arms out to their full extent, sending his freshly halved clam flying. Bepo snapped it out of the air and crunched it down, shell and all.
Law hadn’t meant for this to happen when he threw part of his own heart into the sea. He honestly hadn’t known it could happen. His only thought that if he could just put his heart into something like a killer whale, or one of the many penguins that roamed the beaches of the northern shore of the kingdom of birds, he could make sure that Doflamingo would never get his hands on it and use it to control him. It had been a complete surprise when the penguin he had chosen for his experiments grew into a full-sized man and started following him around. It had been only slightly less surprising when the orca he had summoned for the other part shrank and grew legs and splashed out of the sea yelling about the cold. He had no memory of anything like this happening to Doflamingo, though of course, he was fairly certain Doflamingo had never in his life dared to let his own heart go anywhere beyond his grasp. And if it had turned out like this, with people who hadn’t existed before and didn’t seem to think of leaving him, he probably would have taken it as his due.
“You know you can leave, right?” Law demanded, suddenly deeply uncomfortable as he realized how close this came to following in the controlling footsteps of the power-hungry sorcerer. “I don’t want anything from you. You can go now.”
“Well, yeah,” Shachi said, and started arranging the pile of wood. “Of course we know.”
“We like it here,” Penguin said. “Clam?”
Jean Bart had heard rumors of a strange, undying magician with a palace in the middle of snowy wastes who had done something mysterious and convoluted with his heart to defend it, but he had not initially connected them to the tattooed young man who recognized him where he was chained in the courtyard of a cruel boyar and broke him free. He couldn’t say for sure whether, if he had known, he would have declined the offer Trafalgar Law made for him to take up arms in his household.
Despite the lack of particular knowledge, he knew when he agreed to serve that the lord he worked under was some kind of sorcerer. Jean Bart’s mother had been a giant, and she had told him many stories of the fantastical, commonplace things in her homeland even before he took up his own adventures at the head of a band of warriors. He had heard of and seen enough magic in his time to know when his chains shattered in one swing of Law’s long sword that the cause was something supernatural.
The first clue Jean Bart received of the exact nature of his new liege was the woman who was waiting on the road with horses, including one large enough Jean Bart could ride as well. Her smile was large and her eyes were shining with life but pure black from side to side.
She introduced herself as Ikkaku, and didn’t seem inclined to devour his soul, so Jean Bart kept his mouth shut and his eyes open as he accompanied them back to Law's castle.
Many of the other armsmen sworn to the sorcerer walked about with hidden eyes, but the ones Jean Bart could see followed the same pattern: lively and inhuman. Their names adhered to a pattern as well.
After a week of watching, with no better ideas than he’d started with, Jean Bart attempted to broach the topic subtly over tea.
“Should I plan to change my name?” He glanced around at Ikkaku, Clione, Shachi, Hakugan, and Uni.
Law coughed on his tea. “It’s—that won’t be necessary.”
“So you did start as a person!” Shachi said, delighted. “Penguin owes me money.”
“What else would I have started as?” Jean Bart asked, not sure if he should be offended.
“Captain has a way with animals,” Uni said, a laugh audible in his voice. “In case you hadn’t noticed. That’s how he got all of us.”
“…Is that so,” Jean Bart said. Suddenly the rumors that couldn’t agree what kind of animal the great immortal sorcerer had hidden his heart in made more sense.
“For the record,” Law said, wiping tea off his shirt. “I’m not forcing them to stay. I’ve told them they can leave.”
“He has,” Clione agreed. “But we like it here.”
“Besides, if we left him alone, he’d walk into the sea,” Ikkaku said, and Hakugan snickered.
“You know, some people are afraid of me,” Law said. “Lots of people, actually.”
“That’s because they haven’t had to listen to you fuss in their brains while you’re getting resurrected,” Shachi said.
“You don’t need to change your name,” Law said to Jean Bart, clearly having decided ignoring his crew was the better part of valor. “It’s fine.”
Jean Bart was now more curious about the mention of resurrection than about names, but he decided to save that for another day.
But I ask: did Law not dream all this? No, I am told it is the whole truth, so we have to believe it.