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Lami clapped the dusters and, even though she held them out, the chalk rose and smeared her arms and skirt. Sister would not be happy. "Like this," Law said, walking up beside her, taking them. He was waiting for her class to finish so they could go home together.
"Straight out." He positioned his arms. "Gotta make sure the wind's not blowing in." He tucked a duster under his arm, licked a finger and stuck it into the air as if he knew what he was doing. Now his uniform was streaked yellow. He turned left and jutted the dusters directly in front one more time. "And clap!"
The chalk cloud was impressive. So was Law's robot impersonation. He had such long arms. And the group of starlings deserting lunch scraps as they lifted into the sky. That was great too. A honey bee drifted on a late autumn current. Maybe its swarm was already overwintering, snuggling together in a shiver of collective heat. Lami hoped it found its way back to its hive.
The white of Flevance—lead ingested through the body and passed down generation after generation—was insidious. Its particles were fine like dust. The factories used it for their products and everyone marvelled at how Shiromachi sparkled like sunlight on snow, like its namesake, but the lead particles were indistinguishable against white brick and winter, and blended in with the chalk used in classrooms. Sure, sometimes a fine powder settled on the skin, but the winds also blew in pollen of the sugi pine across the land every year, and teachers used a lot of chalk, especially Father Bailey.
In contrast, a soot-filled sky was visible but blackened gradually. Granules like midges flitted through the air, like the refuse of a steam engine coating ledges and window sills, like factories spewing grime that never left clothes, like Teach's power sprinkling Law's skin—grit indistinguishable against his tattoos.
And then it was on him, crawling over every hidden elbow nook and collarbone cleft like a swarm of bees in pursuit of nectar, all lifting one sticky leg after the other, depositing scent trails. Blackbeard's fruit tamped the spaces around Law's own, loosened the muscles around his heart, and stretched his rib cage, searching, grabbing, searching, searching. Law's breath shortened.
Hachinosu. Beehive island, Pirate Island, Blackbeard's island. The inhabitants were not a solitary species, but the fruit hunted like one—aggressive only in its pursuit of finding a place to land and plant eggs that would hatch and eat the host or its offspring, taking over the powers and nutrients from those bodies. Sometimes dragging that paralysed body back to its underground lair.
The Hachinosu pirates worked together in a raggedy goosestep of resentment and distrust. Hachinosu. Fullalead. Shot up like honeycomb. Quicksilver, hair-trigger, Blackbeard's underlings were as likely to plug each other as they were to train their bullets on outside targets or tasks. Short fuses had helped Law pull their beating hearts from their panicked bodies at Rocky Port. Blackbeard's carelessness would fuck him over one day.
But not today. Law considered swapping the Ope Ope no mi out with the essence of another. He felt a surgeon's precision, a doctor's knowledge, was needed to extract his devil's fruit, especially considering its nebulous form while its user was alive. But swapping the fruit with someone like Bepo, or any of his crew, would put that person in danger. And, it took time to master. Any benefits of switching would be lost when the outcome of the battle with Blackbeard hinged on the slightest step or misstep along the slippery pebbled shore.
Law's haki flared and surged through his bone and marrow, and he launched the attacks he and Kid had used to drive Big Mom to defeat. He'd knocked Teach from the sky—the emperor free-falling, but withstanding Shock Wille. Now, though, Teach blocked Kikoku and nullified Law's assaults with a touch. Law's heart rate spiked. The air he raked towards him slipped between his fingers as if devoid of dust and water and gases, as if empty of spirits and souls. The grit warmed and gathered around him like a ball of bees defensively scorching and suffocating a hornet to death.
Instead of expanding and covering the domain in front of him, his Room burnt or froze inward. Heat smouldered through the layers of his curved hand. He dropped the Room quickly, the blue indistinguishable against the black of the Yami Yami no mi. Teach's power swirled like ink drawn from ash, soot, and animal fat. Law fought not to be a part of its creation process.
The air scalded. On a metric scale, water boiled at 100 degrees, bees suffocated enemies at about half that, and warmed their queen and swarm in a huddled shiver at about half of that again. Bushfires could burn at 800 degrees, and fires that ravaged bodies and buildings, crackling through towns, villages and bones, could generate a quarter more heat than that again.
Law utilised gravity displacement methods on the Polar Tang to sterilise medical equipment, steam descending at temperatures beyond boiling, expelling ambient air. Things had improved in the field, but the Hearts' plundering and looting wasn't the most profitable of their activities. Accounting aside, could, would, similar methods work here? He attempted to lift his hand again, but dots like midges, like pinpricks of light smudged his eyes. Pinpricks of darkness.
The night Law's parents and sister were massacred had burnt orange with a similar heat. The town had lit up like day, not sparing him from the splatter covering and leaking from his classmates, nor from the shock scoured onto Sister's dead face. She'd been warm, but it might've been the fire. Law hadn't known what to do but run.
He'd inhaled enough charcoal and dust to imagine his heart was already corked and charred by the time he'd joined Doflamingo, except, as the son of doctors, he knew it never really could be. The chances of black carbon particles penetrating his lungs were high, but sailing with Cora and the Straw Hats' cook had probably tarred them up worse.
Spider Miles wore a junkyard desolation that Wano had also dragged along a catwalk of despair. Law exercised to keep healthy, even when he'd been dying, and removed what he could when no longer at death's door, but some particles were so small that even his fruit had trouble locating them. And damage to the lungs affected the cardiovascular system, so maybe his ten-year old diagnosis hadn't been so wrong. Inhaling smoke affects the heart. Law knew this firsthand. He carried it with him.
Flakes smouldering in the sky are the blackest thing the sky can see, or maybe the human eye. The sky eases into the black of space at a point. The sky seen from the bottom of a well in daylight hours lights up with stars. Night skies in Spider Miles and Wano were pretty too, when clear of pollutants. All the electricity was channelled to where the rich folk played.
In Flevance, a bridge opened its darkened recesses to hide a ten-year old boy from the light, from the soldiers' footsteps above. Law's hands—wet and slick with blood from his parents' bodies, and from jumping through a closed window to escape—covered his mouth. He hiccoughed into the salty flesh and hint of his mother's perfume. Legs shaky, he couldn't shout, couldn't pass out. Didn't even notice the embedded shards of glass.
Law had briefly hugged his parents' warm bodies before he'd fled the hospital, but cooling corpses surrounded and hid him as he left Flevance. His mother and father's chests and lungs had failed to rise in a reassurance that he wasn't alone, that he was safe. The stiff corpses in the cart he'd squirmed his way into granted him life through their motionless embrace.
Light had filtered through the bodies, or through gaps in the cart itself, and unless he'd wanted to join them permanently, he'd had to remain quiet. So quiet. At least he had somewhere to lie, because he couldn't stand. He recognised his trembling hands, and some of those surrounding him. A golden wedding band encircled the ring finger of their next-door-neighbour. Her nail polish was usually chipped, but had been a solid rust brown. He'd run away before he sighted his parents sporting nail varnish for the first time in their lives. At least there was that.
Inside the trunk that Cora had pushed Law into, there'd been no stars to gaze at on the night of his benefactor's death. No illumination. Cora's body took the bullets that would've, should've splintered the wood. The sky had been bright with the fall of snow. Law was cold, but couldn't see his hands or breath in front of him, and no-one heard them pounding against the panelling of the trunk, or the snot-filled cries that had no end.
He had immediately grieved when death ripped him apart. Again. He hadn't been able to help and hadn't been able to help the cries only his ears heard. He carried a welt from his fingers and wrists and hands catching on an uneven hinge inside the trunk. Even he'd lost the reason why he rubbed a thumb across the pad of his palm, following the scar's impression, when talking or thinking over an idea.
The white of the snow as he escaped the trunk after Cora's death, not caring who heard as he stumbled and sobbed into a blizzard, saved him as much as it had exposed him. The light and air filtering through the holes in the cart that let him breathe as it dipped and tripped over the rutted paths out of Flevance saved him as much as it scarred him. The white of the monster nearby as broken shells and black pebbles indented Law's useless, almost lifeless, body; all that white and the black it hid, protected and saved him. The slight off-white and dark warmth of Cora's smile and his feathered coat.
White monsters were good for plenty, even if their hides and paw pads were black, even when they inspected their own hearts and searched for contaminants, but were never able to locate them. Law's fruit just hadn't pinpointed the darkness within him yet. But it was there. Red, blue and yellow; blood, sky and gold, created and were absorbed by black. And like the sky before dawn, and the sky before that—the night ate all gradations and hues.
Bepo's sulong had saved the teenaged Hearts and inhabitants of Swallow Island years before. At the time, Law's right hand man had struggled to control the savage energy of the full moon. But without his transformation Law and his friends wouldn't have defeated Wolf's pirate-trash, shit-of-a-son; human garbage threatening both the island and his father in a brutal ambush. Wolf had taken the Hearts in. They owed him.
A full white moon was nothing without the dark of the sky, and it had lit up everything, but the stars and moon were absent now, although both somewhere above. Law didn't dwell on it as Bepo scooped him up, Law's body pumping too much adrenaline to feel pain.
His mass and muscle followed Bepo's grab and grip like a jellyfish pulsing with the water currents. Blackbeard had reached for the fruit and had been outlining torture methods unique to one hundred pirates missing their hearts on Hachinosu—one hundred pirates still cursing Law's name on a daily basis, and the way he wielded his powers—just before Bepo and his captain plunged into the sea, Law on Bepo's back.
Bepo cut through the ocean and its depths, Law's crew seeing and feeling the salt and press and brine that now teased their captain's eyes. Penguin and Shachi were with them, with the crew. Bepo was right. They'd be okay. They'd be okay. Water drenched every part of Law's being and he wasn't sure if Blackbeard had kept the power of the Ope Ope no mi. Law didn't have his hat.
Some honey bees fireball great hornets before the invaders' pheromones reach their nestmates, calling on them to feast on the sweetness gathered and stored in honey bee hives. If successful, the hornets decimate the hive and fly away with the headless bodies of its inhabitants for their larvae to feed on.
Foundress wasps forage and gather nutrition for their young, and defend their nests from outside threats, before turning on and expelling the competition from their sisters inside.
Guard ants on windy plains seal away their coworkers, queen and larvae into the colony for the night, and the breeze blows them far from their posts. Another group of guard ants does the same the following night, and the night after that.
A horde's survival is in hierarchy and sacrifice. After vibrating hornets to death, worker bees—lifespan shortened—rush to do the same again. And again. Attacks on hives are common in summer.
Some shorebirds limp and feign broken wings to lure hunters from their young. Calling loudly, they face death once the pursuit is on. Great owls intimidate in an arc of feathers and steely glares; talons and beaks not just for show.
Threaten, attack, deploy, repel, distract, retreat. The Hearts fought, and also healed. The leader protected the whole, rather than the whole protecting the leader, but they worked together and nurtured each other. Law didn't seek the attention other pirates craved, and he abhorred its focus on his home. Some solitary species excelled at camouflage, and great art developed in dark rooms. However, Law used all elements at hand. If he needed to, he'd lay down his life, but not uselessly. Old cells need to die off for the body to renew.
As he grew and gained strength, Law ran into fire. Holy men walked on coals. He didn't believe in pain for its own sake, but fighting through and mastering it was necessary; to gain knowledge, to survive. And apart from when he was a boy and death should've taken rather than spared him, he didn't always wait for growth or strength. But it wasn't enough.
Lami in a closet eaten by flames, his crew ripped apart by Teach. Law absent and responsible for throwing them to a pit of monsters indifferently, ham-fistedly, shearing through their connective tissue and umbilical hoses, unravelling all that was their life. The closet. The hospital. They were meant to be safe. The Polar Tang.
Chalk dust rose in the wind and blew back into Law's face, dotting his blazer (he'd known how to lick his finger to test the breeze, but not which direction to turn), striping it with a warning of hurt. But his sister had ingested lead anyway, or their ancestors had, and the earth had rumbled under Law when Teach split the sub in two.
He'd cast a Room around the Polar Tang, but the sea was dense and draining, and Teach had extracted all that he'd had to give. Yellow panels patterned with the Hearts' Jolly Roger and slogan warned literate sea kings of toxicity and doom as the metal sank. His crew tumbled alongside them. Blackness absorbs all.
Black against black, Law had hoped to shed light on the void, or to at least witness a shadowed blur of all that had gone before him—like sand drifting through waters from the tail flick of a deep-sea eel. He'd hoped to illuminate all that kept them ignorant, still.
The submarine sometimes navigated deep waters on sonar. At those fathoms, orcas and narwhals relied on echolocation. Leopard seals, not Law's family, sang to each other. They toyed with avian and mammal prey, the only pinnipeds to eat other seals, and sang a song of courtship. Bepo assured him that Penguin and Shachi and Ikkaku, Clione and Uni too, were attuned to the ballads of the seas. The deep fostered communication rather than restricted it for them.
The black of the ocean, the Polar Tang's second skin, was something Law claimed, something that he'd reclaimed. The spaces of the trunk or of the cart or even the seas were out of his control, but he was more visible in the water than he had been escaping Flevance and Minion. He chose to submerge. For protection, for power, but it was safe to surface when they did. Usually. When he was a boy, if not for the dark, for the light, he wouldn't have survived.
Law couldn't release Bepo's translucent fur because Bepo would blame himself, and Law's sword—once back in his grasp—would blacken with payback. Marco had failed against Blackbeard, and maybe he would too, but Kaidou and Big Mom were now gone after a collective effort. A harvesting of hearts was sure to engage and enrage the loyalty of those willing to protect their core; a shimmering, buzzing horde that Teach couldn't outrun or scatter.
The flimsy nests of birds playing victim to protect their young were vulnerable to the winds. And who endured? The great white eating its unborn siblings? The cuckoo's egg left in a magpie's home? Hornets annihilating hives? The bees protecting them?
Caesar was a master of genocidal weapons, but had worked with Tony-ya on rumble balls to enhance the tanuki's fighting powers and stamina. Tony-ya had then used the scientist's knowledge to save hundreds at Wano, and to then help Bepo save Law. Corpses kill the grass they rot into, but carrion eaters cycle nutrients back into the ground and air.
Cora would've run back into the building if he'd known Lami, probably even if he hadn't. Law was sure of it. Even when he was a kid, against the guns and falling beams and puddles of blood, Cora would've run back to protect his own. Even against the loss of his mother and father. Sure, he'd slip in the smeared blood and guts, but he would not waver.
Law fled the first time. If he'd stayed, he told himself, the soldiers would've killed him. If he'd offered himself to Doflamingo the second time round, popped out of that trunk like a Jack-in-the-box, would Cora be here still? Bepo removed him the third time, ignoring pleas to return to their crew, urging him to have faith in the born fighters, now fighting to live.
Once all the eggs have hatched, the larvae have grown, and new colonies formed, hives are weakened and not guarded as fiercely. Invaders make them home, destroy the walls, eat inhabitants. Ants gain territories from attacking other ants. Once the queens die, the colonies die. Bit by bit. Workers only lay male eggs. A leader is needed for new leaders to emerge.
Lami was gone. The Trafalgars were gone. Cora-san was gone. Law had a chance. His family had a chance. If there was one thing medicos were good at it was reassembling broken parts into a functioning whole. Law held his breath as Bepo submerged again.