#cyan ficstuff

[ccyans]

Concerning Rocinante

So something I've been realizing, (after rereading Law's flashback for like the 20th time) is that fanon vs canon interpretation of Rocinante is very... different. Like occasionally, are we even talking about the same person kind of different. I feel like a lot of people overplay him as sweet and gentle and clumsy, while at the same time downgrading his competence. Like, yes, Roci can be sweet and gentle (and the clumsiness is ingrained) but 92% of the time he's not.

Canon Rosi is harsh. He curses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney. He has the strength to toss grown men around like toys and he uses it. The first few months of the Find-Law-a-Cure Roadtrip he basically lugged Law around like a sack of misbehaving rice with a exasperated look, through screaming protests and 10 different assassination/escape attempts. If we're talking about competence: this is the guy who fooled Donquixote Doflamingo for four years. That's not  even counting Minion island, where Rocinante both outwitted AND out-gambitted his older brother, while half dead and with the entire Donquixote Family on his ass. He would have gotten away too, if it weren't for the extremely inopportune coincidence with Vergo. 

So give me this Rocinante. Give me Rocinante who has a mind like a steel trap and a look that can freeze a grown-man cold at thirty paces. Give me Rocinante who was Heart Executive for four years and Doflamingo's right hand; an executive who more than lived up to his title. Give me Rocinante who is Doflamingo's younger brother, with that same incendiary temper. That same capacity for whip-crack violence if you shove fast and hard enough at his few (present, specific) triggers. Remember: burning hospitals, the staff cowering in the aftermath. Give me Donquixote Rocinante. 

And, despite this, inspite of this, because of this, give me Rocinante who has a moral compass that points unshakeably north; give me Rocinante with a conviction of bedrock, a patience deep and steely and unshakable as a seabed. (there is no room for anything less, see, when you grow up with Doffy at two points and have Garp as one of three primary adult figures in the interim.) Give me Rocinante who gives up his career, his mission, his loyalties, his life for the sake of one angry dying boy. Give me the Roci who crawled from the wreck and ruin of his childhood with his empathy burning, even when the rest of him was nothing but skin and bones and heartache. 

(Give me the Roci who loves too much. He does not know how to forget, even when he should, even when it would have been a kindness. This is a truth: he never could have pulled that trigger, on Minion. Roci can learn to hate his older brother but he can never unlearn what it means to love him, and he definitely does not know how to bury him. So give me Roci who cries for the caustic little boy who's done nothing but give him grief over the past months and months, the Roci who's last actions are used to oversee that Law will be safe and free and beholden to no one.)

And they're the same person. And that's the point. That's what makes him such a powerful character. Roci is harsh edges and whip-smarts and military training, the smoke to his brother's fire. He can be brutally cold; he can be explosively irritated; he can out-stubborn a D. That's why his overwhelming empathy and compassion is so powerful. It's the juxtaposition: between both his exterior countenance and his inner capacity for kindness, between him and Doflamingo, whom he both mirrors and diametrically counters. 

TLDR: give me DONQUIXOTE ROCINANTE YOU COWARDS. Oda gifted this guy eighty layers in eight chapters and NO ONE'S USING HIM TO HIS CANON POTENTIAL WHY??

[ccyans]

In which the Narrative is determined to make Midoriya Inko an Anime mom, a headcanon list:

Midoriya Izuku is a shounen protagonist; shounen protagonists have several universalities between them, one of these being absentee or dead parents. It is not a very nice universality, but that’s not the point of this AU.

The point of this AU is that the narrative keeps on trying to kill Midoriya Inko. (It doesn’t succeed)

Since Izuku turns four a series of Progressively Escalating incidents keep occurring in the Midoriya household. At first, no one makes the connection between the Midoriyas and the incidents, by dint of said incidents being so huge in scale, as befitting of An Appropriately Tragic backstory. Like that mass villain attack that occurred at the mall on Inko’s birthday. And that hostage situation at Tokyo-Disneyland. And that bank robbery after Tokyo Disneyland. The narrative works very hard but Midoriya Inko Does Not Die, because she has common sense and BNHA has things like actually competent law enforcement.

(remember this guys? I... didn’t lol. Now cleaned up and put on ao3 for archiving purposes.)

[ccyans]

Concerning the Cage:

Among other things I am displeased about when it comes to Spn angel lore: Lucifer's cage as a fucking physical C A G E I mean come on guys have a little more imagination. 

This is how I imagine Lucifer's Cage. 

Lucifer's Cage is made of silence and void and nothingness. Its purpose is punishment, and isolation, and the latter translates into the former. It mimics conditions prior to Creation, when the Darkness still roamed and the edges of space were speckled with the bombshell carcasses of broken realities. 

The Cage is cold, although simply cold is a drastic understatement. In empty, interstellar space the average temperature is 3 kelvins, -270 Celsius. Absolute zero, where atoms sigh and halt in their motion, is three degrees lower. The Cage is colder than that. The Cage mimics conditions at the Beginning, where matter did not yet exist and Time was nothing but a facsimile and the dimensions that make up current reality was swallowed continuously by the Darkness even as they were spun into being. It is a void and it is a black hole singularity: existence is possible in its confines, cessation is not. 

And above all, it is ruinously, achingly lonely. Standstill time and flat dimensional existence and negative absolute zero temperature are all things Lucifer has withstood before and not as a punishment, for Lucifer too predates time and space, and the void was the cradle he was born in. But even in the empty ether of the Beginning there was always the constant of his Father's Presence. Father, and Michael (who is the fire to Lucifer's Ice, the supernova to Lucifer's cool bright starlight, Michael, the first face Lucifer ever saw just as God's was the first voice he ever heard) and afterwards, Gabriel and Raphael. When the Darkness was locked away all the choirs of creation sprung into being: galactic star song and the sigh of nebulae coalescing: the humm of matter, the murmurs of the newly created Host, past and present and the coalition of a thousand senses in synthesia born on the input of wings. 

Angels are not solitary creatures. They were created for service, and in hivemind, and even during the earliest emptiest days of the Beginning Lucifer had God, had Michael (hadMichaelhadMichael). But in the nothingness of the Cage he is cut off from the voice of the Host, from the brightness of souls, from starlight and starsong, a thousand eyes and a thousand senses giving negative feedback. In humans extreme sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations short term, identity loss long term. Lucifer is far more resilient by nature, but the Cage is still the most isolated place Creation, and he is so lonely and so bitter and so furious he burns. 

The Cage is isolation and punishment and his holding cell until the end of times, punishment for not bowing and scraping to lesser creatures, and Lucifer despises it. When the last seal is broken it will be a triumph: because that is when humanity will face their rightful retribution upon his wrath, when all of Heaven and Hell and Creation will see them as the wretched creatures they are. 

(And when the last seal is broken it will be a tragedy, because it will cost him Michael. Because to get to humanity the cost will be Michael, So It Is Written, and in the void nothingness of his Cage, during the moments when his frigid freezing rage temporarily recedes, all Lucifer can feel at the thought of the lock finally breaking is overwhelming trepidation. Because the cost will be either himself or Michael, and so in those moments when the future stands in crystal clarity, he hopes, very quietly, in a small and subconscious part of himself, that the day the Cage opens never comes.)

[ccyans]

Kfjdjdnndndjdj what were you acually gonna do in flowers in my footsteps. I was very surprised at first that you were the one who wrote it bec I read it a few years ago,,,, and,,, bec my girl rin o' course needs some love y'all and i was so into fics with alive!rin back then haha! And god, you really did evolve as a writer. Howd you do that? I am completely junk at being descriptive/creative in writing, and I might not do any justice when I get to write characters + their interactions

OH MY GOD. FLOWERS. FLOWERS.

I always MEAN to come back to that fic. It’s not like In The Company Of (another naruto fic) which needs a complete rewrite – I only have 2k up for Flowers and though it was written so long ago I’m pretty okay with it, barring some descriptionary fixes. I have 3 drafts for Chapter 2 in my drives but it just keeps on getting derailed because I can’t figure out Konoha’s STUPID ASS ninja infrastructure system.

SPOILERS!!

Some Kakashi POV written in my notes. Not sure if this was supposed to make it into the actual story, but the background knowledge is necessary.(was Flowers dual POV? Single POV? it’s been so long.)

*

So there are a lot of places Kakashi should be on February tenth but aren’t, and there are a lot places he shouldn’t be but still is. Namely, for the former, his hospital room. He limped back from an A-rank two days ago (tracking and destroying another one of Orochimaru’s hidden laboratories at the edge of Grass) and he’s spent the time after sleeping off chakra exhaustion, a case of black manba poisoning, and getting the blown out nerves in his hand fixed again. Technically, he hasn’t been discharged (and his regular attending is getting so fucking sick of seeing his stupid masked face, why the fuck are you here again, Hatake) but February 10th is Obito’s birthday. Kakashi has a duty. Kakashi has been grimly terrible at most of of his assigned duties so far, all the important ones at least but they do exist. On bad days he imagines the little boxed dates on the calender (ObitoRinSenseiKushina) so small and so heavy with all that unrealized potential, and Kakashi is hit with a wave of terror strong enough to make him want to drag himself back to ANBU Barracks and get another misison, any mission, but–

Birthdays are important. Death dates are important. Some days Kakashi feels like his blood is boiling in the hours leading up to the morning, but he goes. He always goes. February tenth is Obito’s birthday, and Kakashi owes him that at least.

Which brings us to where Kakashi isn’t supposed to be: the Memorial stone.There is a tiny, tiny little girl at the Memorial stone.

Her hair is very pink, tugged up into pigtails, and she’s swaddled in a scarf and a woolen coat and boots. She doesn’t look older than five. The memorial is a public monument–a public ninja monument, but still public–so it’s not exactly strange to see her there. She might have dead relatives on the stone. Most people do.

What is strange is the lack of parents. He thinks maybe there should be an adult figure nearby. That is likely the normal expectation. Kakashi does not know anything about kids, not even when he was a kid, and these days the closest interaction he has with people under ten are when he’s in the middle of killing them (Rebelling Lord’s children for examples and dead-eyed experiments for mercy) but he thinks, normally, parents are involved.

There aren’t any

The kid is just sitting there, seiza. Incense smoke curls off the bright red sticks. There’s food laid out, untouched. It smells of oolong and fruit and hamburger steak and crisp winter. The girl smells a little of trepidition and a little grief and a lot of pomegranate. 

Um. Children. No.

Kakashi waits in a tree. It’s a cold day. She’ll have to leave, preferably sometime soon.

His ankle throbs. Dodgy joint. 

Except the little girl does not leave. The little girl does not even move. She sits there, after the tea has long cooled and the food is probably frozen, head bowed and chakra a loose, tiny curl and Kakashi is beginning to think she’s fallen asleep with how uniformly even her breaths have been coming. 

He doesn’t know if that’s a normal thing. He really doesn’t. 

He finally gets off his tree (in like, an hour) because, you know, it’s been an hour and Obito is probably rolling his other eye at him from beyond the grave. It’s just a little girl Bakashi. Genius my ass. He makes sure to make noise as he moves. Withered brown leaves crunch under the heel of his sandals. Kakashi is not very sure about children, but generally, all living things have decent enough survival instincts (which didn’t apparently apply to any if Kakashi’s Genin team, but well), and he’s a ninja still wearing the remainders of his bloodied and burned ANBU uniform.

The girl shakes her head out from her scarf. She sneezes, then stands up, and her legs wobble, likely because she’s been sitting there for an hour. She blinks huge green eyes at him. 

They stare at one another for a while.

Then, contrary to expectation, she doesn’t shriek or apologize or leave or even continue with the silence. She smiles at him, one edge hiked just a little higher than the other. She has an expression on her face that makes Kakashi automatically tense up, alarms blaring: it is familliar and nostalgic and she looks at him the way people look at soft, precious, delicate things. People looked at him like that once. Not many–but. They’re dead now.

All of them are dead now. She has no reason or right to look at him like that.Then she says: “Hello, Kakashi,” in a tone that is tired and all too relieved, and Kakashi’s first thought, two days fresh from burning another one of the Snake’s base is: Orochimaru. 

But that’s quickly discarded; it makes no sense, Orochimaru has no reason to sound like that, even if he is the foremost enemy that would take over a little girl’s body, and his second is: infiltrator, but he can’t think of any village that would call him Kakashi, they would call him Hatake or Sharingan or White Fang’s hier. 

Unless this is a psyche tactic. Very likely it is.

He grips the hilt of the kunai in his pocket. 

He wonders if it’s even a little girl. He’s been sitting on that tree for an awfully long time, and his reflexes are not in that great shape after the hospital. Subtly, he weaves a quick genjutsu, a tiny one, (which wouldn’t work against Orochimaru, but nothing Kakashi does is likely to work against Orochimaru, so) and opens Obito’s eye. 

The world lights up in colour. Hazy chakra. The tendrils of the earth, green gold. The little girl, pine-lit in earthern shades. The oil green of summer leaves. The bottle green of a wine glass. Her chakra is calm, no insidious threads wrapped around in a henge or genjutsu or some other obscure technique. He can read the tremble of her muscles, every micro-expression in beautiful, perfect stillness. No apprehension, but tension, something fine and delicate in her shoulders. 

The little girl tilts her head. Kakashi catches every strand of pink hair that goes into her eyes, past and present and almost-future.

Then she bends down, turns her back towards him, and begins to tidy her lunch boxes. She slings everything into a violently yellow knapsack, puts it over her shoulder, and then turns back at him. She smiles that same strange smile.

“Walk with me, Kakashi” she says. 

His eyes narrow, and then physically relaxes, a thin veneer of uncaring. “Mah, why I should I?”

The girl’s eyebrow raises; the smile doesn’t go away. It itches like hives down his back, another warning of danger. “Because we’re going to the place you’re already probably thinking of sending me.” Her child voice is fond. “Come on. I have an appointment with a Yamanaka at Interrogation.”

*

The confirmation of Rin’s identity is something she already set up (she knows a) Kakashi, and b) ninjas well enough to know they’ll want like, a BRAIN SCOUR to make sure she’s not a hidden plant.) So there’s the Yamanaka, and then the Hokage, and then Kakashi who comes up of Sarutobi’s office with the completely..????? knowledge of: yes that tiny child out there IS the dead team-mate/best-friend whom he promised (his other dead best friend) to protect and then killed and have had nightmares about for the past 5 years because the sharingan gives you beautiful photographic memory. ;)

ANYWAYS: The plot of Flowers is basically soft and focuses a lot on recovery (Kakashi’s). It goes into deph about Kakashi and Rin’s former friendship, which I think both canon and fanon glosses over a lot, (I explored it in the platonic soulmate AU, this is the longer version) and their current… ??? friendship, because currently Rin is a 4 year old from a civilian family who has no idea about her previous incarnation and Kakashi is this giant mess of issues dressed in ANBU armour. 

Flowers is basically Rin trying to address Kakashi’s giant ridiculous mess of issues and trying to help him through it. Even if he tries to basically shove everything into the closet. I think it’s important for it to be Rin, because she’s one of the… like… 3 people he was ever emotionally close AND transparent with, which means that unlike everyone currently alive she already has a way into his stupid spiky apathetic shell. 

Anyways a lot of this fic is conversation and Kakashi not saying things and Rin just READING INBETWEEN THE LINES DO YOU THINK THAT SINCE YOU GREW 5 INCHES I FORGOT HOW DO THAT?? And the the hilarious Outsider view (mainly Tenzo) of watching this tiny cheerful no-nonsense civilian pink haired girl hanging out in Kakashi’s space and bullying Kakashi into eating things that aren’t ration bars, and doing normal people things like decorating his apartment, and STAYING IN THE HOSPITAL KAKASHI I CAN SMELL THE DISNFECTANT. And Kakashi lets her, which is the STRANGEST THING to everyone who’s ever known Kakashi. They also have like 90 inside jokes and Kakashi-senpei can joke?????? Yeah. 

[ccyans]

Lionheart chapter 5

AO3

Giddiness drains into bewilderment into practiced calm in the span of two heartbeats.

"I'm sorry?" asks Rocinante.

The doctor doesn’t laugh again. Instead a small, sharp smile twists at the corners of his mouth, lifts it up. "This isn't real," he repeats. One inked hand rises, makes an short gesture towards Rocinante. "This — You. It's a dream."

Rocinante considers this. He thinks: okay now.

In the background, what he's beginning to recognize as the bear's voice gives a pitchy warble, followed half a second later by the distressed tones of the redhead.

"Caaaaaptaiiiin??”

The doctor — captain presumably —  makes no move to acknowledge them.

Rocinante is pretty sure he isn’t hearing them. His sightline is still fixed, in dazed sort of way, on Rocinante’s face, the small sharp smile on his lips. The thing’s too spindly thin to be called nice by any definition or form. A little cruel at the edges. And honestly, fragile in the way of the clinically unhinged. But despite all those things the underlying fondness of it is unmistakable,  directed very firmly in Rocinante’s direction to whatever face or flashback or distant warzone the doctor’s currently in the middle of.

He’d forgotten himself. He’d just been so glad. And, well —

The trauma flashback hypothesis that’d been stewing ever since Rocinante had first manhandled the guy and gotten exactly zero reaction is beginning to ground itself firmly as an actual diagnosis.

The first few minutes banging out of the door and then being pushed back into the theatre he’d been alternatively too frantic and too enraged to register whatever the fresh fuck was going on with the Doctor. Only that he wasn’t treating Law when he said he would, and that he wasn’t treating Law when Law needed treatment. He’d gotten both hands around the guy’s coat collar and started shaking him from the sheer frustration before the expression sitting blank on the his face had fully registered for the first time, and half the reason it’d registered at all had been because it hadn’t been fear or anger or shock or disgust — any of the normal reactions Rocinante got when starting violence with hospital personnel. It’d just been — blank. Shocky eyes focused in the middle distance between their faces. Almost-drugged looking.

Between PTSD seminars with the marines and Doffy, Rocinante knows when someone’s in flashback mode when he sees it, thanks.

There’d been a long beat of hesitation, half a flicker of worry, Rocinante careful then, and then the Doctor had opened his mouth again and… yeah.

Yeah he’d been gone.

And not treating Law, which as always, was the biggest problem.

So Rocinante, after a brief calculation, had leveraged himself. Whatever the doctor was seeing, whoever he thought Rocinante was, he was only focusing only on this one thing. And it'd worked, it’d worked beyond Rocinante’s expectations and wildest dreams, and for that heartbeat of a moment he’d been so delirious with the impossibility of it that —

Well, eyeing the Doctor now, in retrospect perhaps the impulse to wrench him into a hug had not been the best idea.

He looks liable to sway on his feet, even more than before.

His grip on Rocinante’s wrist grinds together the bones underneath.

“You’re not real,” he repeats.  The doctor’s eyes are unblinking on Rocinante’s face. Whether he says it to himself or Rocinante is difficult to pinpoint. Beneath the still and near accepting calm he’s regressed back to, the edge of hysteria lurks.

Whether the hysterics or the calm should be addressed first is also difficult to pinpoint.

Okay, thinks Rocinante.

Okay.

He looks left. The bear, and the redhead, and the silent woman with the tilted head and dark eyes stand inside the open door of the operating theatre, just a few meters away. The bear is making increasingly acrobatic faces of distress. Redhead has one hand half-outreached. The woman is standing tall, and calm.

Rocinante looks at them, gaze flickering sideways. “Addffffghsh,” mouths Redhead, catching the glance.  The bear’s face is entirely anxiety.

Rocinante reflects on how Bear and redhead both have been peripherally screaming for the last ten minutes without  garnering so much as a blink from their captain, and thinks, again and to himself, okay.

It’s probably good he remembers those PTSD seminars.

That the doctor acknowledges he’s in some sort of flashback is half the battle done, at least. And maybe if Rocinante hits that particular pre-made chink hard enough, he can crack the whole illusion.

He says, low and soothing and careful, "Why am I not real, Doctor?"

“You’re dead.”

“Ah.”

“You’re dead,” he confirms, “so this is a dream.”

A pause. So it’s that kind of flasback.

“You always die. I never — you always die. Not here but. There.”  

Some edge of hysteria has leaked back to his voice. “Doctor,” says Rocinante.

“You’re dead.”

“Doctor, Do you know where you are?”

“You died. ”

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Cora-san.”

“Doctor, I need you to calm —”

“Cora-san.”

Rocinante stops.

And gets no time to process that at all, because the doctor is laughing again, the tight hollow laugh from before, shoulders shaking a little with the motion. His smile is thin and too sharp by far, and his eyes despite the hysteric calm in them are too soft, and he’s saying, through the muffled huff of his laugh, fingers tight so tight around Rocinante’s wrist it’s a chokehold—

“Cora-san, you’re dead.”

 *

The only people who call Rocinante Cora-san are the children of the Donquixote Family.

Gold eyes. A devil fruit that can cure the Amber Lead.

De-age that face ten years; you know it well. Add a pinch of gauntness, papered skin, the white scars. There is no magic in this, no trickery, no devil fruit. Only your own sight and your own memory.

Watch, as it becomes your most precious thing.

 *

 This is how the pieces

Slot

Into

p l a c e.

 *

 “... Law?” says Rocinante.

The word is out of his mouth before the impossibility of this situation can connect with his brain. 

“Cora-san,”  the doctor says.

He does not say anything else. It is not quite an answer in the same way Rocinante did not, necessarily, ask a question.

Rocinante stares, blankly. The doctor-stranger-Law stares back. A beat. 

And then, almost of its own accord, his free hand rises, broad and scarred and IV-taped, to touch this older Law’s face.

Gold eyes do not blink, even as the entirety of older Law stills. Under the curve of the lower eyelids bruises and stress lines are smudged dark. There are no sickly white splotches on the his skin, but jos bone structure is definitely the same as the thirteen year old at Rocinante’s side, give or take a decade. It’s Law. It is… definitely Law. He is frozen marbled as Rocinante turns his face over in mute, careful examination. The edge of that sharp and very wan smile disappears, to be replaced again with  blankness.

Rocinante can relate.

"Law.” His voice comes out calm. A little distant. “How are old are you?"

The older Law doesn’t answer. Rocinante stares at him very hard until he does. "Twenty six."

“Ah.”

A pause, to digest.

“Law,  what’s the date?”

This time the pause occurs when Law tilts his head marginally. "The date." The phrase that isn't a question; it's still quite clear Law doesn't know the answer. 

“November 21st, 1524,” answers the woman standing by the door with the dark hair.

1....524?

Rocinante pauses.

That's...

He thinks he says, eventually: "That's… something." 

What the actual fuck.

The checklist is automatic. Training kicks in. It is probably very, very good right now that working with Doffy has one accustomed to wiping away any semblance of excess shock in the heat of the moment. Rocinante goes through the top three contenders that could have landed him in this situation in order.  His brother? No. This isn’t Doffy’s style, nevermind him getting and training some mystery devil fruit user in the three weeks since the Minion Call. The marines? No. Although stranger things have probably happened in the Grand line. Himself? No, Rocinante has no history of hallucinations of any kind. The family's clinical insanity, he figures, more or less landed all in his brother.

This is all very very real.

He glances down. There, Law is curled up and sleeping quiet, face smushed against the outside of Rocinante’s knee. No white patches anymore. The thought is like a jolt of relief. No Amber lead.

Kid’s going to live.

He glances up. The strange doctor who is somehow Trafalgar Law stares at him, still  drugged-looking and blank as Rocinante resets all of his prior assumptions.

He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know what. Period. 

The guy's not listening to anyone else.

"... You're not hallucinating, Law," Rocinante hazards, finally, slowly.

"You’re dead."

"I’m not sure how we got here, but —  look, you're not hallucinating. I — do you need to sit down?"

He doesn’t move.

“I… feel like you should really sit down. Okay Law? Come here — good. Right.”

This older Law still has his hand gripped around Rocinante’s wrist, and when Rocinante tugs, he follows the motion. The gurney table is not the model of cleanliness but it’s wide at least, and long, and even with Rocinante taking up space and Law sleeping curled up, there’s more than enough slightly blood crusted room to deposit this older Law, who seems still to be in the eminent stages of... Something.

Older Law sits. His jacket drags against the blood on the gurney table.

“Okay. That’s good. Do you want to relax a little and — Law?”

A shoulder hits the side of Rocinante’s ribs. A head the side of Rocinante’s shoulder. And then this older version of Law turns his head so that Rocinante can feel the narrow angle of his nose pressed against his bicep. He says, in a kind of muffled voice against the bandages, in a tone suspiciously similar to Rocinante’s thirteen year old when he completely forgets himself and his vicious and begins to whine, “Cora-saaan. ”

Rocinante stares at him. 

After a moment, he says: “I don’t — you know what. What did I even expect. I don’t know.”

He waits. Older Law makes no effort to move, or speak, or even glance up. And so, because clearly there’s no help or explanation coming from that front, Rocinante turns to the trio still standing by the edge of the door.

The bear’s eyes, have, if it’s possible, gone even wider. The redhead is making weird clawy motions in place.

“... Hi,” says Rocinante, wearily. He hopes none of them are about to collapse anytime soon. “Can any of you tell me where I am?”

The bear jumps a little. The redhead, looking unforunately on the verge of a breakdown himself, bursts out, “Who the hell are you?” in tones of plaintively distress.

“Rocinante.”

“Say what?”

“My name. It’s Rocinante.”

This seems to flummox the redhead for a moment, because he flounders. The bear, shifting heavily from foot to foot, picks up for him.

“He…The captain called you Cora-san.”

Almost in reflex, Rocinante glances down again. The older version of Law still hasn’t made any sort of attempt to move. Black hair feathers against the white bandages tied around Rocinante’s shoulder. There’s the hard press of a cheekbone. Distantly, in the same space that notes Vergo had probably dislocated his shoulder, Rocinante registers that the pressure kind of hurts.

“Yeah. It’s... a nickname.”

“Oh,” says the bear.

He inches forwards, a little.

The woman, previously silent, asks, “Is it short for Corazon?”

“... Yes.” says Rocinante, eying her.

Unlike the other two her face is a blanket of calm, and she’s not dressed in a boiler suit. She makes a very slight hmm-mm sound. Continues with, in smooth answer to his prior question: “I believe we’re currently in the New World section of the Grandline, Rocinante-san. Four days from... hmm the Raidou Archipaleigo." She allows him a moment to digest that. "May I ask what the date is for you?”

Rocinante reflects how of course it’s the Grand Line, it’s always the Grand Line, he’d been nowhere near the Grand Line, before answering, “... March. 1511.”

Redhead says: “What?” The Bear says, “Addgggsssh.” The woman nods slightly, expression thoughtful.

Rocinante waits. But she doesn’t pose another question. She seems quite content to stand there, observing current events.

… okay.

“What the actual fuck,” says the redhead, which is a very accurate summary of everything, Rocinante supposes.

Him and the bear both have been inching closer since the beginning of the conversation, and since the room itself is not very big, that means they’re only just hovering outside the boundary line of Rocinante’s personal space, now. The bear circles a little, goes to the side where Law the adult the freaky doppelganger is curled up, and then pauses. “Uh.” he says.

“Bepo?” that’s Redhead, frazzled.

“Captain’s. uh. Asleep.”

Redhead stares at him. Rocinante stares at him, and then down over his shoulder, where—

Yeah okay.

The slump Law the adult is in is boneless, and there’s the sound of even, if not necessarily deep breathing. Rocinante’s wrist has not been let go of. He considers extracting it from the deathgrip, and discards the idea.  

“Seriously?” asks Redhead.

“Um. Yeah,” says the bear.

Who, still staring, raises one paw. “I mean. It’s… not a bad thing? He needed the sleep anyway. Two naps in twenty minutes is kind of a record, although I guess…”  Shiny dark eyes trail to Rocinante. The bear pauses. “hi.”

“Hi,” says Rocinante.

“I’m... Bepo.”

“Roci.”

“And that’s, um, Shachi.” Bear gestures towards Redhead, not looking away from Rocinante though. Not until the gaze flickers, briefly to his other side, where Rocinante’s kid is curled up and dead to the world. “And… that’s…?”

“Law."

The bear pauses again. His paws, big and white with pink pads, flutter. “I — oh.” He makes an aborted motion towards the child — aborted, because Rocinante narrows his eyes.

Bear retreats. “Um. Sorry. It’s just that. Um.”

“It’s captain but smaller,” says Redhead, followed by, “Wow. I think I need a drink.”

A beat.

And then, kind of despairingly, “So now what?”

The bear’s swung back to staring at older Law again, and at the prompt from Redhead says, “I.. guess we just... leave him? Captain I mean. He’s asleep.” For some reason he looks to Rocinante then, all anxious, and than half a second later the anxiety transforms to something startled. “Oh shoot.”

“Bepo what,” says the redhead — Shachi? 

“Is there something wrong?” asks Rocinante.

“I— yes. Mister. Roci— your IVs. ”

Rocinante has half a second to wonder what is it with these people and their IVs, before  the bear is in his face, ears twitching and giant paws patting him down, which — ow. Redhead too seems spurred into action. Even as Rocinante blinks and jerks against the resistant— if gentle— prodding, the guy is gone from the immediate field of vision. His voice comes round from a corner of the room a second later, lobbing, “which packets?” and then, “oh hey I found his chart — you think captain did it by habit?” followed by, after the the sound of flipping paper, “holy fucking shit. ”

“Um.. the blood transfusion packets definitely,” says the bear. “The morphine one too, he’s gonna be feeling that soon. Does the chart say his blood-type?”

“Yeah. We have it.”

“I’ll start the line, then. Sachi, pass?”

Something plastic wrapped goes flying through the air. Rocinante finally kind of elbows the bear away once he moves to catch it. A large paw rips away the crinkling plastic top. A very big needle slides out.

“Uh,” says Rocinante. “No. I’m fine? No seriously, it’s fine.”

The bear looks at him with extremely gentle pity.

“Roci-san,  that’s definitely the morphine.”

In the end they hook him up.

Three IVs later and he thinks they’re done before the bear takes one look at his chart and flips out, after which Rocinante finds himself in a whirlwind of white fur and orange jumpsuit and Redhead running blood pressure levels. They get him fully outfitted in an oxygen mask and bits and pieces of wiring that are rigged to the monitors cloistered around the gurney table, flashing light. “Roci-san, how are you moving, ” says the bear, after that's done, in a kind of full-body despair. He is patting Rocinante very gently on the shoulders, as if in reassurance to his continued survival. “You should really lie down. Like, really.  I don’t think you want to know what your lungs looked like before Captain fixed them.”

“Cheese,” Shachi advises. “Really bloody cheese.”

Rocinante considers this, considers the not-exactly comfortable metal slab of a gurney table he’s sitting on, and considers also the 2.5 versions of Law currently using him as a neck rest.

He waves a heavily taped hand, pulling off the oxygen mask to answer. “No, it’s fine. I’ll just… “

The bear’s eyes narrow.

Law the adult makes a mrrrgh noise into Rocinante’s shoulder. He shifts, and the lack of any support apart from air collapses him the entire way so his head falls and hits Rocinante’s knee. Rocinante jolts a little, expecting him to wake up from the impact.

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t let loose on the wrist either. Rocinante is beginning to lose circulation in the thing.

“... captain?” probes Redhead, after a moment.

Nothing.

The bear looks at Law the elder, then Rocinante, and his narrow-eyed look of determination endemic to all nurses everywhere melts to a kind of exasperated anxiety. “I — ah. Nevermind.” He seems to register the potential problems of Rocinante sleeping on the gurney table at that exact same moment, because he sends it a dubious look. “I guess it wouldn’t be very nice to lie on anyway, and we probably shouldn’t move you until captain wakes up. Mini-captain too.” Another long curious glance at Law. “Unless…”

“Unless?” Rocinante echoes warily.

Five minutes later Redhead and Bear have trooped half a fort’s worth of throw pillows and blankets into the operating room, as well as as a giant slab of metal that looks like it came from a marine issue cafetaria table but with the legs chopped off. In this time Rocinante has also learned the woman from before has left, presumably in the whirlwind of medical supervision. “Robin-san went to tell the others we have guests!” The bear— whose name is Bepo, which Rocinante should really start addressing him by,  informs him, piling more blankets, even as Redhead stacks ginormous cushions.

The end result is Rocinante sitting in the middle of a couch made of two slabs of metal — gurney table for a seat, the cafe table for a backrest — and the most random and eclectic mix of bedding ever. Bepo has chosen a green paisley comforter to drape over Rocinante’s lap, which he fluffs enthusiastically. He slides Law the elder’s head up and wedges a fluffy pillow between his temple and Rocinante’s knee.

Then he steps back, regards them critically, and  claps his hands together. “There! All good!” He looks very pleased with himself.

“Thanks,” says Rocinante.

Redhead drapes one last blanket over Law the elder’s shoulders before stepping back as well.  Rocinante has a brief moment of reflection imagining what they’re seeing: three people now surrounded by an approximate version of a child’s pillow fort, in a operating room still bloodied and with stray scalpels strewn across the floor, before Redhead makes a spinny motion with one finger.

“Can you lean back?”

“Probably.”

He does so, after more prompting. Then he leans forwards again. Bear and redhead look at him. He looks back. Conversational topics and action alike have now been exhausted.

Awkward silence presides.

Bear’s extremely pleased expression slides off a little, before he rallies it. Rocinante will give him props for that; the bear’s been trying really hard through this whole thing.  Personally, Rocinante is too tired by now to rally much. Or maybe that’s just the drugs kicking in and the adrenaline kicking out.

“So… do you know how you got here?” asks Bear.

“Nope.”

“Ah.”

“We weren’t anywhere near the Grand Line though,” he adds. The unspoken: usually it's the Grandline is implied.

Either that or a devil fruit. One of the two. Sometimes in conjunction. That Rocinante had been nowhere near the Grandline means if it is Grandline crazy, the cause would have originated from something happening here.

“... Yeah. I don’t think we did anything that could have… this.” Bear gestures with a paw.

“Right.”

“So... Yeah."

Another pause. The bear makes Rocinante put back his oxygen mask, and now, actually bereft of anything to do, shuffles a little. Redhead taps a finger against the opposite bicep of his crossed arms, looking vaguely awkward.

Seconds pass.

Finally, the bear says, in a tone that implies he doesn’t really want to say the sentence at all: “So… I guess we should leave you guys to sleep now?”

Rocinante just looks at him kind of tiredly.

“Yeah.. I thought.. yeah," Bear shifts on unhappy toes, turning his dejected look to Redhead. "Shachi.... you wanna go help explain to the rest of the crew?”

“I could use the vodka,”  answers Redhead after a moment.

“You'll haveta to steal it from Unni you know. And -- I’ll stay here.”  He turns to Rocinante after in reassurance: “Outside the door though.”  

And then he smiles anxiously, a flash of sharp, glinting teeth. That there’s a guard is zero surprise. Rocinante nods, expressionless. The bear’s smile slips a little, and— okay, yeah, he’s been trying really hard to be nice and accommodating. And considering how no-one appears to have any idea what’s going on...  

Rocinante doesn’t have very much energy right now but he manages enough to dredge up a smile to reciprocate.

Bear perks up considerably.

He gives them one last wave before filtering out, Redhead at his heels, and then the heavy metal of the door, closes, very carefully, until it’s a bare inch from shut.

‘If you need anything just holler!” calls the bear, before there’s a thump like he’s settling down on the floor.  

Overhead the light flickers, banks.

A white negative of the operating room imprints itself over Rocinante’s eyes just as everything goes black.

He blinks to get rid of it, a few tight squeezes. When he re-opens his eyes the little light that hazes through is reddish orange like dim embers in a hearth, streaming in from the clouded glass of the door and the crack between the door and its frame. A square of light glides along the tiles. A fissure snakes along the walls. The contrast from before is jarring. So white, and now everything softened at the edges from the dark. Shapes and contours and the glint of edges. The vivid colours on the blankets and pillows dulled and blurring in their patterns.

Rocinante takes his oxygen mask off. The air tastes cleaner without it on, despite that it also tastes primarily of disinfectant and old blood. His fingers itch, sharply for a smoke. He ignores it.

Ignores it, and goes instead to brush the hair away from Law’s face, as gently as he can.

The boy is sleeping in the way of the dead or the absolutely exhausted. Unmoving, even through all the noise of the past half-hour, the way he sleeps only when he is very, very ill. There’s none of the shivering or coughing Rocinante had worried with so endlessly however. His breaths are even, and deep. The kind Rocinante had not heard from him in literal months.

He’s going to be okay.

The thought trembles the air. He’s going to be okay.

The relief; a gut punch. Again.  There’d been no time to focus and process it really,  apart from that brief sun-spun moment after Law had been cured, what with the entire mess of apparent time-travel . It still kind of is a mess. Thirteen years in the future and apparently. in the middle of the New World and with zero idea who else is company on this ship. But Law is cured. And Law is —

Like a magnet turning poles, his gaze draws to the other, older Law.

Dark hair invisible under the dim lights. Just the silver of a cheek, present against the pillow on Rocinante’s knee. Still falling asleep as if Rocinante is his personal portable mattress. The dumbass kid, all grown up.

He lifts a hand, some reflex of a habit, to brush the fringe from this Law's eyes. The eyelids flicker when he does so, briefly. And almost inexplicably Rocinante remembers: the look on his face, the little laugh. Cora-san, you died.

This Law has the Ope-ope fruit. Miracle cures, translocation of objects under a set area — so, yes. Probably it’d been Minion island, then. That’d been the plan. Not Rocinante’s best, but it would have gotten Law out, which had been the only thing that mattered, the only thing that matters still. As long as the boy lives Rocinante doesn’t particularly care about what it costs himself. He’ll pay the price. That’s that.

The look on his face, though.

A sigh. Fingers tucking the blanket up higher. “I hope you were okay, after,” he says, into the quiet dark.

I hope you didn’t do anything stupid,  lies unspoken, but the thought is there, prevailing. His fingers find the edge of the duvet, folds it down. 

And then, because this where his attention leads inevitable, Rocinante turns back to Law the boy.

He is curled up very tightly with Rocinante's hat still clutched to his chest. His face is calm in sleep, nothing more than the bump of a nose and some black mop of hair underneath a veritable mountain of blankets which Rocinante rearranges. Redhead had chosen a duvet with a sea-side pattern. Whirls and waves and shells. Rocinante tucks it up under Law's chin. Lets his gaze linger on the dark scruff of the boy's hair, the easy rise and fall of his breaths, like a reassurance, or some quiet relief, or both.

Afterwards he leans back against the mesh of stacked cushions and ignores the urge for a smoke. Light plays slow, strange patterns on the ceiling, shifting shades of dim apricot, amber. He runs a hand through his own hair. Finds in order, a gauze compress against his temple, and dried blood that flakes and dusts at his fingertips. There'll be no sleep for him tonight,  even with the fog of exhaustion. A migraine pounds, sharp and persistent, through the fatigue and the drugs, like a warning that rest is out of reach even if he'd been planning it in this unfamiliar place. 

Law does not stir; not the kid nor the stranger.

Rocinante settles in, and waits for the hours to pass.

[ccyans]

Lionheart chapter 1

AO3

"Sorry, Doffy."

Feathers press against Law's ears and Law's nose. They're all he can see and all he can feel, damp and smelling vaguely of charcoal and cigarette smoke over the sharply biting cold. Law claws at them, frantic, feeling fistfuls scrunch and snap between his fingers. Trying to get past the bulk of Cora-san's coat. Trying to get past the bulk of Cora-san in general, who's placed himself between Law and the Family like a bulwark.

Cora-san, who's a giant stupid apologizing liar that Doflamingo is going to kill if someone doesn't do something soon.

Law's fingers scrabble harder, catch fabric. Touches something sticky and hot that trickles down his wrist. He slams one fist against Cora-san's back and it's like slamming into a brick wall for how much Cora-san moves; the actual brick wall behind him might have yielded easier. "You dumbass!" Law screams. "You promised! You said we'd get out of here together!" Except it might as well have been screamed into the abyss with Silence on because there is no sound, nothing but the slow shudder of Cora-san's chest, the hiss of the wind through the feathered coat. "You said he wouldn't kill you absolute moron, you promised."

A flurry of blows, because if he can't hear Law he can at least feel that. And maybe he does, but it definitely doesn't give the reaction Law's hoping for. Cora-san's voice is a low, ragged exhale. "The kid's gone Doffy," he says, even as Law yells at him to shut up, Cora you stupidhead, we need a plan, he's going to shoot, please please please stop talking. "He's free alright? Let him go."

And Law can't hear himself, can't hear anything but the wind and the feathers and the silence from which there comes the click of a safety being drawn back as

Doflamingo

pulls the trigger.

The sound is thunder falling Law screaming Cora-san flinching back in a full body jerk and it isn't fair, this isn't fair, when has anything in Law's life ever been fair. But Cora-san had promised, and they'd been so so close to getting away before Doflamingo'd caught up and Cora-san had hid Law between himself and the crumbling brick of Minion's abandoned town and so Law had thought -- Law had dared to think -- and he hasn't prayed to anything in three years but God oh God if there's any kind of mercy in this world --

There isn't. There isn't ever any. Doflamingo shoots again and again and again and Law can feel the impact break flesh shatter bone send Cora gasping, Flevance for the second time, himself bawling and shrieking incomprehensible things like not again go away get us away Cora-san can't die CoRA-san PLEASE that do absolutely nothing to smother the incoming blow of the next --

GET US AWAY

-- gunshot.

 *

The world flashes blue.

* 

 And then they are

f

a

l

l

i

n

g

 *

One long heartbeat stretch spent in vertigo, in that blue-shimmer place. Upside down inside out no way to tell left from right. There's a scream still in Law's throat and feathers still clutched in Law's fists and that need to get away get Cora away echoing in Law's head. A fraction of a moment being squeezed through liminal space, and then only impact.

*

His forehead smacks something hard. His palms skitters on cold tile. He goes down banging knees and elbows that already ache, and for a second all he sees are stars. The second lasts only that though, and Law is scrambling up before his next breath, wheezing and gasping and feeling as if someone has just reached a hand into his chest and yanked out the system of his heart and lungs because "CORA-SAN!" he screams, and registers his voice actually making it to his ears with an extra windfall of terror he didn't  know he had. "CORA-SAN, CORA-SAN!"

no no no no no

So much blood and Law's hands are already red with it. When did that happen, he doesn't know. Blood congealing in a pool under the coat and Cora-san's slumped form, blood sliding from Cora-san's mouth. Law tears his way the half meter where Cora-san's head lolls, where of all things he's smiling. Why the fuck is he smiling. This isn't worth it; Law isn't worth it. And he can't be dead, he just can't be. Law needs to -- staunch blood flow. Get bandages. Find a pulse.

Find a pulse.

Law's hands flutter over Cora-san's neck. The pale skin under Cora-san's jaw is bruised and purpling, ugly mottled patterns. Law's hands shake and Law's heart hammers a drumroll in his ears and for what feels like the longest time there isn't anything at all before yes, there, pulse. The relief is immediate. It's also immediately gone. The thrum under Law's finger is nothing but a whisper. And how is Law gonna get the bullets out, how is Law gonna get the blood back in. He jerks around for something to help, anything to help, even if there's only snow and snow and more --

There's no snow. Law pauses.

The ground is tile.

The ground cannot possibly be tile.

Except somehow, it is. And the light overhead isn't from Minion island's overcast sky, but instead a steel plated ceiling shining down fluorescence, glass and plastic bottles rattling on shelves against the walls. Everywhere there's monitors and machinery and the distinct tang of antiseptic, sharp beyond the memory sense of blood and snow. An honest to goodness operating table sits in the middle of the room. It's fitted neatly with a white sheet. For half a second Law looks at it all very blankly and thinks, what the hell. Is he dreaming. Is he hallucinating. Is he just plain dead. His sight-line completes the rotation of this impossibility to fall upon speckled jeans and a long sweeping coat. And the man standing in front of Law has the blankest expression Law's ever seen. And the man standing in front of Law has Law's father's face.

Underneath Law's blood-slicked fingers, Cora-san's pulse shudders.

Just like that all other thoughts sublimate to nothing.

Once again the world narrows itself into liminal space. Cora-san still dying and Law still useless and where he is doesn't matter, only the klaxon panic of Cora and Nonono. Hysteria fractures everything into snapshots. Relevance to the current problem dictates their sequence. And this here is an operating room. And this man has Law's father's face. And Law's father had been a doctor. And this man has got to be a doctor. The grief and hope and incoherence are tangling together in Law's head when he throws himself across the gap and fists his hands into the hem of the man's jeans and screams, past the snot and tears and rasp in his throat, "HELP HIM."

The man's gaze jerks down.

His eyes are gold ringed -- just like Father's, exactly like Fathers, exactly like Law's, down to their cold and hard and almost startled slant. For half a heartbeat Law stares and the man stares back. The moment passes. Unimportant. Law's fingers scrabble bloody furrows down the fabric of the man's pantleg. His words trip and spill to the hammering desperation in his ears.

"Please I'm begging you you've got help him he's dying he's everything I can't again not again please please please --"

The man's gaze lifts, settles on Cora-san.

Two heartbeats pass.

And then he wrenches past in a movement that sends Law sprawling, explosive even without bearing to mind his previous utter stillness, sweeping coat and clattering footsteps and the snap of fingers in the silence. Law comes up from his wheezing fall just in time to see that spectral blue from before coat the operating theatre. A sharp flick of the man's wrist, a pop displacement of air, and Cora-san's not crumpled on the ground but on the operating table. The man's sword clatters gracelessly to the floor even as his hand curls, midair, around the hilt of a scalpel instead.

Law scrambles next to him, to the steel leg of the operating table. Tries to peer over but it's too high and he can't see. The man has one hand around the vicinity of Cora-san's chest, the scalpel in his other hand glinting light. He doesn't seem to register Law's presence at all.  

That's fine. Everything is fine as long as Cora-san lives. Concentration is important -- the man had better be concentrating. Law keeps very quiet even as he feels like he's about to jitter out of his skin. His throat is hoarse. The tears haven't stopped coming yet. He digs his nails into the meat of his palms hard enough to draw blood.

Please.

Something clicks dully on the tile of the floor, tossed aside. Law looks down on reflex. Bullets, red stained. His next breath hisses out between his teeth.

The man works. Law watches him.

He ditches the scalpel shortly after the bullets. Gets forceps instead, then suturing tools, medical equipment appearing and disappearing from his hands like cards from a magician's show. He whisks an IV pole from across the room with that same strange pop. Finds saline. Finds morphine. Finds blood packets for transfusion. The monitors in the room turn on to show heart-rate and oxygen saturation and blood pressure as the man slides needles under Cora-san's skin, and it's been three years since Law's been in a fully kitted theatre but he can still read vitals fine, their uneven jumps and stutters.

The man works.

Sutures. Bandages. The fitting of an oxygen mask over Cora-san's face.

Law doesn't know for how long the man works, only that Cora-san's vitals have stabilized to something vaguely passable when he finally stops and sets his hands on the edge of the operating table. His fingers clutch the metal hard enough for it to creak, red up to his wrists with Cora-san's blood. His back is one curved stoop.

The man exhales, shakily. He stares at Cora-san. Law stares at Cora-san.

And then abruptly he turns, and makes a beeline for the door.

Law catches one brief glimpse of the man's expression before he's gone, white-pallored and lips pressed thin, Law's gold eyes in Law's father's face. He nearly trips on the crumpled pile of Cora-san's coat on his way out. A brief stagger, not quite a fall, and then a pause as he just stares down. He wrenches the door open with one hand. The walls shudder as he slams it back shut.

Law watches him go through the same distant, molasses haze that's been his attention span concerning pretty much everything after the initial landing. Who the man is, where here is, how they conceivably got to wherever here is --that's all unimportant and peripheral. Even though it might be important. He can't really tell at the moment. Cora-san, Law thinks, and only then does the world sharpen briefly. Law bites down on his chattering teeth and forces his shaky limbs to climb onto the operating table, panting with effort by the time he finally collapses on top of the IV lines.

It's hard to think. He feels dizzy and weightless. His head is pounding. With relief. With exhaustion. With the vestige of overwhelming terror and overwhelming grief, the desperate, shot-punch hope. He tucks himself into the crook of Cora-san's side and listens for the thunder of Cora-san's heart, ignores the way his vision statics at the edges. It's fine. It's just the adrenaline wearing off, the stupid Amber Lead. In his ears Cora-san's heartbeat is a familiar drum-roll, and Law chases after the reassurance of it, the steady ba-dump, a lulling comfort after all the nights tucked snug in Cora-san's coat against the wind and North Blue's cold winter.

Law closes his eyes. He clutches at the tassels of Cora-san's dumb hat. To himself he thinks, fervent and fierce, he's alive he's alive he's alive.

The monitors sound and Cora-san breathes.

Law listens, and doesn't know when he falls asleep.

[ccyans]

Something tells me that there have been a few occasions in the "The Narrative is trying to kill Inko AU" where Izuku has been so jumpy that when Katsuki have tried to give Izuku a scare or just bully him with an explosion, he's instead gotten a taser to his stomach, or a frying pan that Izuku whipped out of nowhere to his head.

This ask is… so old. I’m sorry. It’s been sitting in my inbox since summer, wow, but now it’s answered!

I’m glad you reminded me of Bakugou, because one of the key earlier dynamic changes among the kids is actually the relationship he has with Izuku. The bullying just… doesn’t exist in this universe. For multiple reasons, amongst them being quite frankly, Bakugou is the least scary thing Izuku deals with on a weekly basis, and also if you piss off Midoriya Inko here, the chances of escaping unscathed is small. Miniscule. Tiny.

So without further ado, concerning the circumstances of Bakugou Katsuki within the Anime Mom Inko Universe.

The Bakugous and the Midoriyas have been neighbours since their respective children were very very young. They live three houses apart on opposite sides of the street. Izuku and Katsuki are childhood friends based on firstly proximity, and secondly on their mothers’ old highschool friendship, which has lasted to present day. At four, Katsuki is a precocious brat and Izuku is a sweetheart. At four, Midoriya Izuku discovers he doesn’t have a quirk.

Katsuki denounces him very promptly.  Izuku is hurt and sad and very crestfallen over this for a while, but look, in this AU Izuku has bigger things to worry about.

The Narrative’s assisination attempts on Midoriya Inko’s person begin when Izuku is four. With his mother constantly hostaged by natural disasters and villain organizations alike, and every walk around the neighbourhood a hazard waiting to happen, rejection from his childhood friend, while still important for tiny Izuku, kind of becomes a backburner problem.

It also becomes a backburner problem for Katsuki, very promptly, because as I mentioned before, he lives 3 houses down from the Midoriyas.

And the narrative really quickly stops caring about things like plausibility and collateral when Inko’s tragic death keeps not panning out.

He’s there for so many burglar events. He’s there for the grade-school trip to the museum that Went to Hell when Inko volunteered as an extra supervisory adult, and he’s there for that one month when Izuku is eight and universal probability and possibility just kind of stops working. Inko comes to have tea with his mom and the kitchen fucking goes up in fire and lightning. A day later half the street dissapears into this eye-itching blackness of a void. He’s the one who, along with Mitsuki, points the extremely bedraggled (and extremely first-name basis) response team of heroes and police to the shitshow.

“So you do have a quirk,” he says, when Izuku and Inko come out of that debrief two days later, Inko with a trembling mouth and determined eyes, Izuku with an uncharacteristic extremely hangdog expression. Izuku eyes him tiredly and twitchily. He looks a lot like he wants to taze Katsuki, which Katsuki knows he can in fact manage, but that’s not the point. “Stop looking so sorry for yourself and go comfort your mom, dumbass.”

Their dynamic is… different. Katsuki is there for enough Incidents that he knows Izuku can be strong and respected, and also there’s forced trauma bonding of just going through so much shit in the first place. He doesn’t like Izuku, he’s tired and twitchy and mumbly ALL the time, and he has weird mood swings like fuck, but he understands Izuku well. Izuku, once again, has a lot on his plate. Mom is #1 priority. He thinks he’s friends with Kacchan at least? They don’t talk about it but he knows if a Burglar tries to crawl through the Bakugou’s window while Inko is there they’ll either get a vacuum cleaner to the head (Mitsuki) or blasted to the nearest police station.

Being near Midoriya Inko really does wonders for one’s reflexes.

They go to U.A. and Bakugou has all his priorities in order, which is to say his aim is Inko, not All Might and certainly not Deku. Everyone in-district knows there’s a new number 1 hero and he’s gotta work hard to catch up to that track record.

[ccyans]

I have an incredible fondness for agrarian-setting fix-it fanfics. The ones where those characters-- whom have gone through so much pain and turmoil and absolute bullshit canonically-- just kind of settle down at the edges of some small peaceful middle-of-nowhere town. The kind of fics where the greatest decision the writer has to make staring at that word-document is the debate between giving their traumatized protagonist the obligatory farm or the obligatory flower-shop. Where the road to healing is slow but present, marked by poetic scenery waxing and slow domestic activity, long sunsets and friendly neighbors that never bother locking their doors because it's that kind of community. There is just something indescribably comforting about these stories-- and the tropes they have in hand. The slow and gentle erosion of trauma. Integration into a healthy community. And, of course, the inevitable accidental-kid acquisition, where the protagonist either adopts the local feral child or finds themselves adopted by the town kids and everyone else. 

Rural agrarian fix-it fics are just good okay.

[ccyans]

Lionheart chapter 3

 AO3

 ".... Captain. Captain?"

Bepo's voice wakes Law up from his doze, along with the smell of coffee. It hangs thick the air, distinct and sharply rich, and Law barely opens his eyes before sticking out a hand. A mug is inserted. The ceramic handle goes first. Law doesn't bother to check the temperature of the coffee itself before chugging.

The jolt that comes with the heat is a needed one. Liquid warmth piles down his throat and into his joints and insides, to pry them from their frost-edged stiffness. It's a familiar cold. Too many hours spent with Room activated, too little time for his stamina to come back. Except Law hasn't operated on anything within the last two days, so this time the cold’s just the result of the placebo effect. The decade long ache.  A sense-memory of the snow.

Ironic, considering the dream hadn’t even put him on Minion this time.

And usually he’s the screaming, bawling thirteen year old.

“Captain, refill?” asks Bepo, the presence of him a spark alongside several others in Law’s mind’s eye, and Law blinks open with a grunt that passes for a yes.

The coffee pours. Bepo sharpens from a blob of white and orange, and the two auras accompanying him morph into that of Sachi and Straw-hat’s Nico Robin. Law is halfway through pouring his second cup of industrial-strength paint thinner down his throat before he realizes, abruptly, belatedly, that — “this isn’t my operating room.”

Bepo’s normal look of “Captain you shouldn’t drink that fast,” takes on a slightly worried edge. “Uhhh… it’s not?”

This looks, actually, like the hallway right outside of Law’s operating room. Distinctly like it. Just like in the dream distinctly, where he’d fled after the operation and collapsed against the door.

It's also where Law shouldn’t be, considering he must have fallen asleep in the theatre. Unless, between Zou and now, he's suddenly developed a sleepwalking inclination.

Law has zero idea what expression he makes. The  next moment however, Sachi is popping in front of Bepo, hat hovering inches from Law’s face. “Captain?”

He says — other words too. Probably. Law doesn't hear him. His attention is occupied elsewhere.

Dreams or not —- half-nightmare and half-memory renditions of dreams or not — he’s never had sleepwalking issues before. Unless — No. Not sleepwalking exactly. But if he remembers correctly, the first year after Cora-san died —  he’d had something similar to right now. When it wasn’t so much sleepwalking so much as waking up in utter terror, or waking up in utter hope, still two-thirds of himself stuck in the dream, limbs moving, clawing without conscious permission or higher thought. Trying to get through that stupid fucking treasure chest, trying to get to Cora-san, the no rasping through his throat. Then, later, actually waking up to find himself somewhere elsewhere, fingernails torn blunt and raw.

He hasn’t had an episode like that in ages, he thinks blankly. Not after the first year. He hasn’t had a dream like this in an age too, but, unsurprisingly, between Punk Hazard and Doflamingo both they’d become frequent again, thirteen years and coming back. He’d been trying not to sleep, avoiding it. Going on thirty hours then, reading by the light of the operating theatre to pass time. It must have been a mix of all those things.  No respite from his subconscious, but as Doflamingo’s still not fucking dead and in World Government custody of all things, it is not as if Law expected any.

The dream is still superimposed onto his eyelids, technicolour.

“Captain? Captain. How many fingers, ” Sachi is saying urgently.

Law bats his hand aside, rising on stiff legs. His knees feel absurdly shaky. He reaches out to lean on Kikou on reflex, the remainder of the coffee sloshing in its mug, and finds his sword… not there.

The dream, again.

He must have left it in the operating room, whether he had shambled himself out or just plain staggered. His hat too, and Law is suddenly aware of the empty space on his head. In the dream he had — tossed it aside almost in a frenzy, because it’d been obstructing his view of the surgery. The dream. And Law has never had one like that before. He’s been an observer, yes, but never one able to intervene. It's always Minion island looking from the outside in, his imagination filling in the blanks of Cora’s last moments, not thirteen anymore but still screaming with no voice, unable to even wrench ghastly limbs into enough motion to staunch the bullet wounds. And he hadn’t thought he could this time either. And he’d stood there under the invisible pressure with his heart in his mouth and his blood in his ears, until the mirage of his thirteen year old counterpart hurled itself to Law’s feet, screaming, crying, snot and tears tracking down its face, and then Law’s dream conscious had jerked itself to motion as if hit with an electric shock,  the pressure disappearing to non-existence, and he’d shambled Cora-san onto that operating table and dug out those bullets and stitched up all his bleeding edges and saved him, the first time, the only time —

He hadn’t trusted it. He wouldn’t trust it. Law never, ever saves Cora.

So he’d staggered out of that operating room and out of that dream before it could melt into winter and blood or the fire and gunpowder that had been Flevance burning, Lami dying. Left before Doflamingo fucking showed up and sawed off Cora-san’s arm, because that’s a thing that’s happened, before.  

Fucking Doflamingo.

“... Captain?” Bepo ventures hesitantly.

Law blinks twice and finds himself staring very hard at his coffee. The coffee is shaking. No, Law’s hand is shaking. He frowns at it. A white paw hastily pries the mug away.

“Bepo.” Law’s voice is more like a rasp.

“Captain how many hours of sleep did you get ?” and that’s Sachi, not quite at a wail, moving forwards again. “Come on, we’ll get you to your room. Not that this isn’t a great place to sleep, but — Actually it’s a terrible place to sleep. But you conked and no one wanted to wake you up after the operation. Until like, now.”

Law’s fingers twitch for the coffee mug. Bepo shoves it under one arm together with the kettle, out of physical reach. The rest of Sachi’s sentence registers.

Operation?

He doesn’t get to dwell on it, because to the side, Nico Robin tilts her head very slightly.

“That would be on my request,” she says. “My apologies, but I wanted to consult you on a reading I was told could only be found in your personal library.”

“Sorry captain,” says Bepo, looking quite downtrodden.

“It’s fine,” says Law.

“And you were finally sleeping again too!" he laments guiltily.

“I said it's fine.”

He moves for the coffee. Bepo moves it away. That of all things seems to give him reassurance, because he perks up considerably. “Though, I mean, we were going to have to wake you up eventually.” he admits. “To check on the patients!”

Law pauses mid- shambles for the kettle.

What.

“What.” he says.

And Sachi takes it the entirely wrong way, because the next moment Law is being enthusiastically steamrolled by a status report, field medic style.

“It was very generous of you to save them captain!” Sachi flicks a cheery thumb over to the theatre. “Especially considering their condition and how long you worked. It’s been around five hours since the end of the surgery though, give or take half an hour, so we should really be replacing their IV lines and doing a vitals assessment by now. And you know, cleaning the blood off the gurney table. That’s just unsanitary. Unless...”  

He pauses. “What.” says Law, again, but the word is barely out of his mouth before Sachi continues.

“... Unless we’re using them for spare body parts?” he wonders aloud. “I think we have enough in storage, though. Which reminds me, captain. We’re like thirty leagues below sea level, where’d you find these guys?”

“Maybe they’re fishmen,” offers Bepo.

“Are they mermaids?” says Sachi with much glee.

“What patients.” snarls Law, and the silence is immediate and gratifying.

Sachi blinks at him, taken aback. Nico Robin stares at him. Bepo stares at him, expression shifting to worried alarm.

“The… patients?”

“The patients you just… spent an eight hour surgery on,” echoes Sachi slowly.

Law’s voice is flat as an Alabastan desert. “I don’t remember any patients.”

And logically, there can't be any. Certainty not any Law just operated on, because Law has operated on exactly nothing since Zou. The dream is just that: a dream, and beyond it there are no patients.

Cold tingles through the collar of Law's coat. Sense-memory.The pounding of the blood in Law's ears and the buzzing in Law's head, clinically familiar. All of a sudden the hallway is too tight, too small. Minion island hidden away in that treasure chest.

There are no patients. There can’t be any.

It's an impossibility.

Law tells this to himself, through the fog, and finds everything has receded to a distance anyway. Bepo's voice filters through like radio static, distorted and anxious.

“I… captain...The man?” he's saying. “And the little boy. I don’t know— you were sleeping in front of the door and I didn’t want to wake you up, but the lights were all on and you — Captain you forgot your sword in there. So I thought it was better not to—  Captain? Captain.”

He registers only parts of what Bepo's saying. He registers them very dimly.

A man. A boy.

the dream the dream the dream

It's still impossible. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous and stupid, and Law is sharply, suddenly furious. What kind of desecration is this-- some ill-thought of prank, some insidious joke, some enemy devil fruit user? He'll slice open their entrails and feed it to the sea kings. It's either that or Law actually zoning out to an extent previous unknown and unheard of. Operating on actual patients and superimposing those long-dead faces. Operating on actual patients and forgetting the patients altogehter. It’s never happened before. Sleepwalking hasn't happened before either. Doflamingo is barely two weeks jailed and still fucking alive however, so in terms of stress levels he supposes anything is possible. Law has never had an exhaustion hangover so severe in his life

His mind wanders back to the dream despite himself. The blood. The operating table. His younger self.

Cora, whom he never ever saves.

“Captain? Captain.”

Sachi this time, reaching out. Bepo, bracing a worried paw on Law’s shoulder. Law drags a hand down his face, trying to reorient himself. It's impossible. There’s a logical explanation for all this, he’s just too off-balance to reach for it right now.

“Just — Give me a moment.” he says. “I —”

Law has trained his Observation Haki to work under strain, under duress, until he’s halfway to unconsciousness. This is his ship; every single presence on board is accounted for, at least peripherally. His body is thus moving before his mind even registers, pulling Bepo’s paw off his shoulders, sweeping Sachi back.

He’s awake, the Haki whispers, he’s awake he's coming he’s here.

Half a second later the door to the operating theatre slams open.

And Law

spins

on his heel

to

face

The ruffled blonde hair and brick-dust eyes of his impossibility.

[ccyans]

Lionheart Chapter 2

Rocinante wakes up in slowly, in increments. And then all together at once.

Something bright is beyond the film of his eyelids. A hazy, cotton-cloistered feeling's set up shop inside of his skull. Everything is groggy and wavering at the edges even in the not-quite conscious grey-black, thoughts floating by and dissipating like pale mist. It's... hard to think. He doesn't want to think. He has to, though. Because he'd been in the middle something important. The most important --

Law.

Rocinante's eyes snap open. The light is hideous.

He thinks he squawks but all that comes out is a wheezing noise, eyes squeezing back shut on reflex. It takes some frantic blinking before the rest of the world sharpens into focus. A blue tiled ceiling. IV lines criss-crossing over his head. White, clinical light. The beeping sound of medical equipment crashes down half a second after, and at its heels the memory of Minion: rattling wind and Rocinante gritting his teeth against the gunshots. Doffy's thunderous face.

Law.

And this is evidently not Minion island.

Someone must have found him. Not his brother. For numerous reasons, but also: Doffy's med bay is never this scrupulous. The marines? Best case scenario, but it doesn't really matter at this point. Whoever found him would have found his kid too. It's the train end of that thought that sends Rocinante moving, sitting up, IV lines straining with the motion, hands coming up to touch the cool plastic taped to his face. He's halfway in ripping off the oxygen mask when something stirs at his side.

He looks down.

A bundle that can only be described as eighty percent battered blanket and twenty percent fluffy, fluffy hat mumbles something blearily incomprehensible under its breath, burrowing closer. Rocinante's hat is clenched tightly between its fingers.

The oxygen mask clatters onto the gurney. The world melts, reorientates. It's like someone just sucker punched the wind out of Rocinante's gut, the relief is so tremendous. "Shit kid," he says, feeling everything spun taunt in him relax three fractions. His hand reaches out, automatically, to smooth down the hat from where it'd gotten skewed sideways, brushing dark bangs aside from the pale thin face. His fingers rest against the crown of the boy's head.

He pauses.

"Shit, kid."  And this time it's not in relief at all but as a swear. He knocks the hat aside to put his full hand on Law's forehead, feeling it burn underneath his palm, turns Law's face up carefully but with urgent quickness, noting with alarm the flushed cheeks, the flickering movement behind Law's paper-thin eyelids.

Without thought, Rocinante's hand goes to his pocket. Someone's cut off his shirt in lieu of gauze and bandages and he has no idea where his coat is and doesn't really care, but he if he remembers correctly -- yes, there. The ope-ope fruit is fished out of his jeans, clutched by the green stem, and there's half a bite taken out of it just as there should be.  

Okay. Okay. This is fine.

Rocinante's jaw clenches.

This is really not fine. But it's -- doable.

The fever, in itself, is nothing new. It'd settled in sometime during the fifth month as the kid's immune system degraded and never really went away, lent itself to sleepless nights and endless coughing and the occasional bouts of delirium that had Rocinante worrying ceaselessly. In the end though, it's a symptom, not a cause. Rocinante had -- well, maybe he'd hoped, but he'd not actually thought that eating the Ope-ope would make it go away just like that. The thing's a miracle surgery fruit, not a miracle healing fruit.

Law can use it, though. Get rid of the Amber Lead himself. There is no way he's going to go down to a symptom of a fever. There is no way Rocinante's going to let him go down to a symptom of a fever, especially when the cure is literally at hand.

He takes Law's shoulders and gently, fiercely, shakes.

"Kid. Kid. Law. Come on, come on, just for a little bit okay? Wake up."

The boy mumbles something again, incomprehensible. Rocinante shakes a little harder, and then, with sharp relief, watches one golden eye slit open with bleary slowness.

"Cora... san?" Law murmurs.

"Oh thank God." Tension spills like water from marginlines. Rocinante's shoulders drop, and his grip on Law eases.

Just in time for one small pale fist to smack him straight in the nose.

Rocinante squawks, recoils, and just barely doesn't overbalance onto the floor. "Kid!"

"You shithead!" shouts Law, and smacks him again. "You stupid, stupid, stupid shithead of an aaaargh! " Rocinante clutches at his poor nose. The kid does not relent in the slightest. "I cannot believe you. I actually cannot believe you."  His entire expression is scrunched in fury, eyes blazing, chest heaving and tiny fist still clenched and raised like a battering ram. "What kind of bullshit were you thinking, you--"

He doesn't get to finish.

Rocinante snatches at that tiny hand, crusted with what looks distressingly like dried blood, in full-body alarm. "Shit. Kid you're not injured right? The bullets didn't --"

"Arrrrrgh !" Screams Law, and smacks him again.

Rocinante wheezes. His clavicle's already tender, mainly, and oh, Blues, was that a creak? "I'm asking a serious question!" he protests.

"No, you're asking a stupid question. The blood's not mine. It's yours! All the blood is yours!" One outraged hand thumps against the gurney table. This is when Rocinante realizes the sheet he's been laid out on looks like something from a charnel house.

He blinks at it dumbly.

"Oh. That's good."

The kid makes strangled wheezing noises.

"No it's not you dumbass clown. Blood is supposed to be inside the human body. " His hands flex, claw-like. "You can't survive otherwise! You don't survive otherwise. And --" The glare slits, narrows, in what Rocinante recognizes as Law having a Sudden Realization. The voice narrows too, dangerously. "Cora-san, Where the is your oxygen mask ?"

"Er," says Rocinante, right before the kid collapses.

Shit.

He barely manages to slump, before Rocinante catches him. One hand supporting the kid's chest, another cradling his head. He weighs absolutely nothing. The ribs, fragile and prominent even through the shirt and blanket, tremble under Rocinante's hand.

In the silence of the room, the shallow rasp of the kid's breathing is too loud. His face, under the white-wash of the overhead lights, is yellowed  beneath the flush of exertion. Panic sinks like seastone down Rocincnate's throat even as the kid's eyes flutter, briefly. He must have worn himself out with the shouting. He shouldn't have been shouting in the first place. And then he attempts to sit back up again, which Rocinante counters in expedience by scooping him up because, kid, Law, no, one arm needed only, the other closing a cool palm over Law's forehead to check his temperature, the fever in it.

Law's lips purse. "No. Save your breath." Rocinante closes his hand over the kid's mouth to emphasize the point and -- gets bitten. Of course. The kid's expression is mutinous. His glare is broken only by how rapidly he's blinking. How absolutely pale his face has gone. The rattle of his small chest underneath Rocinante's hand, the too-quick thrum of his heart.

He's been wasting time.

Law needs a doctor, immediately. 

The thought swims in and then spins a circle. Because Law has been needing a doctor for a long, long time. It's just that the doctors are half the problem, two thirds of the problem, the entire problem. The thought spins, and it lands on the fact that Rocinante is sitting on a gurney with IV lines taped to the inside of his forearms. There's a doctor here.

And what kind of shitty fucking doctor doesn't treat the sick and feverish thirteen year old boy before the grown man. What kind of doctor.

By now the enroaching fury is grim and familiar and so very tired. It feels like something is closing up in Rocinante's throat, hot and aching, exhausted and furious, before Law shivers, makes a wet hacking noise, and worry steals his attention away in an override.

Shitty doctors or not, Law does need some kind of help. Rocinante swings his legs over the edge of the gurney table, before realizing his IV lines need to go. He rips them out and away, the needles and tape, tangling the transparent cords. Then he scoops the kid up again. The kid, hacking wet and sharp, into the bandages at Rocinante's collarbone, hands curled into the fabric of Rocinante's hat.

Rocinante rubs soothing circles into his back. "You're gonna be okay," he says, quietly, quietly. "You hear me? You're gonna be just fine Law."

And he is. He will be. 

Because the doctors don't matter at this point in time. Not them, and not any of the opinions from the rest of the world. Law has the Ope-Ope no mi now. Law can save himself. Law will be free of this: the doctors and the jeers and the shackles of the Amber Lead, very very soon.

And he'll get to grow up, to grow old. He's the brightest kid Rocinante has ever met. He's almost there; his future so close Rocinante can almost touch it, a watercolour superimposed onto the snow.

So Rocinante doesn't really need a doctor. Good riddance, at this point. The Amber Lead, Law can manage by himself. All Rocinante needs is a little bit of help. A saline drip, fever medicine, and this place has all that. Just half a beri of kindness. And by the Blues, if whoever running this place can't find it in themselves to give the kid that small and simplest thing, Rocinante will shake it out of them.

Law's eyes flutter closed. The coughing, still incessant. 

Rocinante tucks him close, and then for the first time since awakening takes in the rest of the room.

Medicine bottles and complicated machinery, the floor an absolute mess. Instruments bloodied and scattered. Rocinante's coat crumpled in a bloody corner. And -- is that a sword? The door comes into view half a second later though; the sword is forgotten. Rocinante's feet hit the floor. The gurney table screeches backwards. He doesn't trip and fall by virtue of grabbing the IV stand and clutching, hand white-knuckled, the boy held right in the crook of his elbow.

It takes five long strides before he's at the door, past all the equipment and bottle-lined shelves. A rectangle of hazed glass set at chest-level streams dim, warm light from beyond. He can make out shapes moving. People. Something orange.

Law's forehead presses, fever hot, against Rocinante’s collarbone. He's slumped and quiet now.

The handle turns, and Rocinante doesn't think twice before pushing it open.

[ccyans]

Lionheart chapter 4

AO3

There’s no other plausible explanation for it, Law decides, very abruptly. Clearly, evidently, he's still stuck in the dream.

Or the hallucination. Or... the mental breakdown. Whichever it is, whatever this is. Law had not thought he'd been anywhere near a psychotic snap, especially now, safe again amongst his crew, but the past two months had been very stressful. Doflamingo as a trigger point makes sense. Nothing else does.

There is literally no other plausible explanation.

Because Cora-san’s eyes are on him. Cora-san, one hand braced against the metal frame of the doorway, all giant limbs and ruffled hair and motion, wide-eyed, expression frozen in some rictus of surprised upset. His eyes catch Law’s, very briefly. They’re  dark amber under the crimson glare of the hallway lights. His eyes catch Law’s, and then they flicker past him.

Sweeps left.

Sweeps from Sachi to Nico  Robin to Bepo, where it lands, finally, and hesitates, but only for half a heartbeat of a moment.

The next liquid second has him moving. The shhk of his fingertips leaving the metal of the doorframe, the brisk clack of his heel hitting the metal of the hallway floor. The near invisible breath of his passage, rustling Law's hair, as he brushes past Law altogether.

And says, voice raspy and urgent to a very startled Bepo, “I need the doctor on board. Is there a doctor on board?”

“Um?”

“My kid — he’s — here — he’s got a really bad fever and he needs medical attentio n right now—”

“Uh mister please calm—”

“Please he’s burning up too much I just need some medecine I’ll pay you back —”

“Mister please I—uh — Captain?”

A sideways glance  Law neither sees nor registers, up until Cora-san’s attention redirects to spin him around, and the full force of his worried desperation lands onto Law. His bare, vivid eyes. His pale, bloodless face. He looks the same. He looks exactly the same. And his lip is still split. And his cheek is still bruised. And his throat is still mottled purple where Vergo had fucking smashed it in, the outline of a palm strike drawn in off-yellow and rupture purple where white gauze ends, and Law --

-- is flinching before he can help himself, even as Cora-san says,  “I’m sorry, are you—?” reaching out, Law twitching sharp and near-imperceptible to Sachi’s warning snarl of, “Hey, don’t touch— "

Law isn’t aware Sachi moves. Law isn’t aware Law moves.

He doesn’t blink but the next moment his hand is braced around Sachi’s wrist, and Cora-san’s hand is on Law’s sleeve, and someone, in the distance, is saying, “.... captain?”

Cora-san is saying, “You’re a doctor?”

“... Yes,” says Law, through the haze that’s this dream or hallucination or mental breakdown.

His voice comes out remarkably clear. Actual control of his bodily functions seems nebulous at the current moment, so it is very, very remarkable. “Yes,” he repeats, “I’m a doctor.”

And then he looks down from Cora-san’s face, and registers, for the first time, the ragged little bundle of blankets and dried blood that’s his younger self.

Dirtied winter coat. Skewed hat.  A scatter of white spots on sickly skin. One hand curving upwards to clutch at a loose leaflet of bandages near Cora-san’s collar. Cora-san, who’s holding it very gingerly in the crook of his arm.

“He has a —”

“Fever,” says Law, staring at it. The result of auto immune responses failing in the latter stages of the Amber Lead. He remembers it well, both in himself and Lami, small and shaking in the curtained shade of the hospital bed.

For half a second Cora-san pauses. “That’s— Right. I already said that.” Law’s head lifts. He finds Cora-san’s gaze zoomed, very intently, on his face . “So can you — give him some medicine? Or a saline drip? It’s just temporary. Look, if afterwards you don’t want us here we’ll be outta your hair as soon as you want,  and I’ll pay you back of course.”

Cora-san’s eyes are on him. Law wonders kind of blankly if he should mention that neither saline nor fever medicine would help. The fever a symptom; it won’t go away as long as the metallic buildup is present. But this is a dream. And Cora-san is asking.

“Yes. That can be done.” He hears himself say. Hears himself add, inanely, “We… have the equipment.”

“I swear to -- ”

Cora-san stops. He blinks twice.

“Oh. That’s -- thank you.”

He sounds almost surprised. Startled. To what, Law can’t imagine. The number of things Law can imagine or process clearly at the moment is somewhere in the negatives though, so he doesn’t think too much about it.

Cora-san’s gaze lingers on Law for a moment longer. The grip on Law’s sleeve loosens, falls away.

Then he looks down, abruptly, and takes two hasty backwards. Perfunctory distance, so that he’s no longer hovering close enough for Law to smell the antiseptic in his hair, see the strain of the stitches on his cheek. His heel goes sliding underneath him on the second step, of course. It always does. He nearly bangs his head on the metal door frame of the operating theatre before Law’s hand snaps out, catches his wrist, yanks him straight.

Law is almost surprised when it works. He’s never been big enough to act as a counter weight before.

Cora-san gets both feet under him and one shoulder against the doorframe before he regards Law again, a touch sheepish this time.

“Right. Sorry about that.”

“Your balance is still shit,” says Law, without reflection, almost half reflex, through the haze.

“No it’s —” A beat “ ... Right,” says Cora-san very slowly.

Law isn’t listening to him either by then though, because he’s finally caught a glimpse of the operating theatre.

It looks like something Law would normally never allow, not in a thousand years. What’s supposed to be meticulous is, right here and now, definitely not. Blood trails tacky on the floor, feathers scattered across the room along with emptied syringes, half bloodied scalpels, and finished IV packets. Cora-san’s coat in the corner, next to gloves crusted with enough dried blood that the blue latex underneath isn’t even showing.

“Right—” Cora-san says, “you know what. Nevermind right now. can we just get saline? For the kid?”

Law doesn’t answer. Law barely hears him. Or Bepo. Or Sachi. Both of whom are possibly saying something in the whitenoise of the background. He doesn’t pay attention to it.

The operating room has him narrowed to tunnel-vision.

Blood, and the smell of antiseptic, and Cora-san's shirt a shredded heap on the tiles. The operating table, with the IV lines all tangled up among a dark spread of blood. Details of the operation filter back as if through a sieve, in sutures and scalpel light. The red-stained sight of shattered bone. The dim blue glow of Room .

A half turn of his head allows him to face Cora-san again.  

Cora-san, whose face is still pallourless. And whose blood Law can smell, underneath the disinfecting agents.  

A muscle in Law’s eye twitches.

Distantly, he remembers the frustration rolling over him to be the kind endemic at thirteen, a sort of flashback in itself, at least concerning this giant dumbass.  “Oi.” He says. Hears himself say. Voice low and ominous.

“ Where is your oxygen mask ?”

Cora-san blinks and —

Law does not wait for an answer. He already knows the where and what of the answer . He’s planting one shoulder against Cora-san’s side and shoving before he can think beyond the why are you like this , and that— that’s familiar too, some age old habit returning— expect he’s a hundred pounds heavier and Cora-san’s shaky enough that he actually moves, this time, instead of just standing around like some obliviously annoying wall.

He squawks. Law shoves harder, herding him inside, pushing him back into the theatre. “Why are you standing ,” he hears himself say, between gritted teeth, followed by Cora-san's bewildered, “um."  The soles of his shoes hit tile instead of the chink of the hallway metal. White light filters down in lieu of the Polar Tang’s crimson night glare. And it's coming back now, all of it, through the haze and the banking of the shocked incredulity. The details of the surgery, unspooling like film from a reel, crashing over Law and pulling taunt.

The clink of the bullets on the floor. The latex of his surgery gloves wet with blood. Slicing open Cora-san’s chest underneath the blue glow of Room , and finding the damage beneath his scalpel a broken ruin. Remembering: The subclavian artery, shredded. The pulmonary artery, shredded. One lung collapsed from lacerations, from both bullet and shattered bone fragments alike. A rupture in the gastrointestinal tract that spilled fluid, and made Law pull up, autopilot, the fatality rates from peritonitis, from bacteria infection. And he’d been lucky still, Cora-san, or perhaps Law had been, because a bullet had grazed so close to the heart it’d nicked the muscle of the lower left ventricle, but thank God not the aorta, thank God not the vena cava, a miracle perhaps of Law’s imagination, that made it so this Corazon did not bleed out and die on his operating table.

Five hours ago and Law had just barely had him stabilized. If it’d been any other surgeon’s, they would have managed not even that. He shouldn’t be moving. He definitely shouldn’t be walking. He should be dead to the world with the intravenous antibiotics hooked up and the blood transfusion packets hooked up and the oxygen mask on, and not — standing around protesting like a stupid.

“What? Wait. Hold a minute. I'm fine it’s my kid that— aaak!” and Law pushes harder, because no he’s not. He's not fine at all. He's a dumbass, that's what he is.

“That's the morphine, you moron,” Law snaps, and gives a final shove to sit Cora-san back onto the operating table.

Metal legs screech backwards with the weight. Cora-san screeches backwards too, as the additional momentum takes both the natural and completely ridiculous course of events to send him windmilling over onto the floor. And that’s — that’s familiar too. Just this scene, Cora tripping  over absolutely everything. And Law is reaching out again, thirteen year old instincts coming back on a wave of alarmed exasperation, both hands on Cora-san’s wrist to pull him up straight. A flicker of surprise when he actually manages it — again, at thirteen Law didn’t weigh enough to counterbalance— but then there are more important things to tend to.

“Sit,” he says, and  goes rooting through the IV lines.

He finds them mostly empty, and thus in need of replacement even disregarding how they’d been torn out. A quick shambles gives him new packets which he hooks up to a promptly stripped IV pole. He ties a tourniquet to Cora-san’s arm, already sliding a needle out of its packaging as he does so. He ignores what Cora-san's saying irrelevantly in the distance.

“Look. Doctor. Doctor? I appreciate this, I do, but if you can look here at the kid—”

Law takes his hand and slides the needle in in one practiced motion

“— This kid. Right here. The little boy? — “

Tapes it down and screws on the extensionIV  tubing

“—He has a fever? He’s ill. He just needs a saline drip, for rehydration and exhaustion. He— I've already explained this. Are you listening to me?”

Starts a new line immediately after: tourniquet, needle, IV, vein

“You're not listening to me. Okay. look—  ow no stop.”

And doesn't get any further than the vein.

The hand squeezing Law's wrist is cool and calloused. Long fingers, broad palm, a fresh IV needle pushed into the back and taped down. It leads up a bandaged arm to a half-bandaged throat to Cora-san’s grey-pallored face, eyes staring out red as emergency lights, lips pressed thin and brows furrowed, thrusting the bundle that is Law's younger self — whom Law had completely forgotten about — up  aggressively with his other hand.

“The child.” he emphasizes. “Right here? Should be your first priority.”

He sounds halfway beyond himself with frustration. He sounds exactly as Law feels. The glance Law sends down is wholly perfunctory and completely devoid of his attention. His younger self, yes, whatever, but more importantly: how much blood Cora-san’s still lost, how delicate the stitches holding together his insides are. How and why the fuck is he still moving .  

How many IV lines still need inserting.

Law registers the important thing, and says: “I'm going to need that arm later.”

The noise Cora-san makes is like a strangled wheeze.

Law moves his free hand to reach for the adapter end of the IV tubing, touches cool plastic. Only makes it that far, before he’s suddenly being reeled in, yanked down, the hand not used to grip Law’s wrist hard enough to bruise clenched in the front of Law’s coat collar.

“Listen to me, ” Cora-san says lowly.

In the background, Sachi and Bepo make alarmed noises.

“I am this close to punching you in the face right now, okay?” Law gives a long, slow, blink. “The kid’s— you’re still not listening to me.”

Of course he’s not.

This close Law can count the minute cross-crossing of the stitches on Cora’s cheek. See the black mix with the arterial red in the ring of his sclera. His pupils have constricted to pinpoints. Constricted pupils can be, in order, a symptom of the narcotics: morphine, codeine, oxycodone. Pupillary reflex against harsh lighting.

Emotional distress, such as anger, or pain.

White-clenched jaw. Wide-blown eyes. The look on his face is familiar as hospitals burning. Familiar as Minion island, that brief-flash moment before he’d smiled, broad and laughing, and looked at Law saying, it’ll be okay, kid, I’ll be okay, pressing their foreheads together, saying, bruises at his throat and the bleeding cut on his cheek. That brief-flash moment Law had not thought anything of when he should have, beyond anything else in the world. Because afterwards he’d put Law in that treasure chest and stood up and let himself be fucking s hot .

He still smells of the snow. He’s close enough Law can nearly taste it. The cold and the musk of age-old wood, the devil fruit like battery acid on his tongue.

Gunshots in the dark.

Law registers, kind of distantly, that he’s being shaken by the collar. Bepo and Sachi, equally distantly, are hollering and scrambling forwards. Cora-san is swearing. He registers that . “Fucking Blues, and after I thought you were a decent—”

His eyes catch Law’s.

The pause in both shaking and swearing is abrupt. Hesitation flickers across his face.

Cora’s brow furrows, sharply.

His grip — one hand on the collar, the other on Law’s wrist — slackens a margin.

He stares. Law stares back. After a long, slow beat, Cora-san says, expression still flickering, “Hey, are you… alright?”

His voice is slow and very careful. Law blinks, again. A reflection of his own face stares back at him from black pupils. An arrangement of mouth, and eyes, and nose. Precise expression: unknown.

His mouth is very dry. Familiar voices taper off in the distance. A close distance.

And then the grip on his collar disappears entirely, which is when Law realizes that’s all keeping him upright. He nearly buckles, but there’s still a hand on his wrist and half a second later one steadying him on his shoulder. A beat. The strength in his legs return.

“Okay,” says Cora-san. “You okay?”

Law opens his mouth and says: “Your IVs—“

The expression on Cora-san’s face flattens.

“-- need replacement.”  

“Captain, what the fuck,” says Sachi.

Law does not hear him at all or in particular. The IVs are the only tangible thought he can hold on to at the moment.

Very briefly, Cora-san’s eyes close.

The ridge of his brow doesn’t lose its tension when he re-opens them. His mouth is tugged down at the corners into a frown, blood still flaking at the corner of his lip. “Okay.” He gives a little shake of his head.

“Okay,” he repeats, before once again he looks at Law.

“So you… want to replace my IVs.”

His voice has taken that careful, soothing tone again, as if Law is some kind of wild animal that needs to be calmed. Which he isn’t. Law doesn’t need to be calmed. He needs Cora to stop moving and get a proper blood transfusion.

“Yes,” Law hears himself say.

“Nice to get that outta the way. Alright… doctor? Doctor. Let me tell you, I’m... perfectly willing to let you do that, provided--”  His hand leaves Law’s shoulder, gestures in the direction of his lap. It leaves a void of heat near-immediately. “You treat the kid first. You see the kid?”

Heat: the indication of active metabolic processes; life.

Law looks though, dutifully. His younger counterpart is curled up at one dirt and blood splattered knee. Law had forgotten about him. He likely would have even if this were real and the boy not some sort of hallucinatory placebo. As it stands, he just feels vaguely detached.

“Yes.”

“Oh, good.” A very brief pause, before he continues, voice like a metronome and gaze like a spotlight. “Now, this kid is very important to me, alright? And he needs a saline drip. You…. have saline right there. I can see you holding a packet. Can you give it to him?”

Law looks at his hand. He is, indeed, holding a saline packet.

But it's not for —

“I’ll let you do my IVs right after,” adds Cora-san.

In the end the procedure barely takes half a minute. Law strips the boy out of the blanket and his winter coat, finds the vein in one thin, knobbly Amber-Lead ridden arm, and slides the needle in. At thirteen and as a hallucination the boy is papered skin and the gauntness of dying things. He looks surreal. He is surreal. His hat, Cora-san takes, and puts to the side. It’s matted a little with blood at the rim but otherwise untouched.

“Wait.” Sachi says in the distance. “Wait. Wait a minute. Isn’t that —?”

Bepo makes a weird, short, squeaking noise.

“Someone punch me.” Sachi again, even as Law shakes out the adapter end of the saline and screws it in. “Bepo — ow, okay thanks. Annnnd…. Nope. Everything’s still happening.”

“Mmmmrgh,” says Bepo.

The hallucination of Law’s younger self takes thin breaths, head lolling. Cora-san rubs its back while murmuring soothing things. Law Shambles a separate IV pole from across the room. He hangs the saline solution onto a metal hook.

“Thank you,” says Cora-san, when it’s done. He settles the hallucination more comfortably by his side, in a nest of half-ripped cloth and a coat Law dimly remembers having been swiped from one of a myriad of ports when the autumn was still settling thirteen years ago: dark green, heavy wool, too big at the shoulders.

Cora-san considers it, and then sighs. Gives Law a sideways glance, just a touch wry. “Hey, I don’t suppose you have any extra blankets around here?”

Law looks at him.

Cora-san looks back.

A beat.

Room expands. Blankets appear, somewhere from a storage closet or maybe Unni’s room. Law doesn’t particularly care. Law just needs Cora to lie down and get his antibiotics lines back in.

Cora-san, who blinks, brightens, and says, “Oh! Thanks.” And then, after a significant pause, “Hey, can you do that for a thermometer too? And ibuprofen. And — “

The noise that erupts from Law’s throat is something unholy.

“No,” it comes out as a bite. Patience snapping. The buzz in Law’s head reaching crescendo. And then his hands are on Cora-san’s shoulders, pressing down. “Lie down sit back you’re going to reopen all your stitches none of this is going to fucking help anyways. It’s not a simple fever it’s the fucking Amber Lead it’s —”

Me me me

Eyes flash arterial red. The glint of humour is gone like a tide wash from a beach. Cora’s face is white and sharp with fury when he says, “well if you waste of medical licenses had a single shred of empathy and actually tried to cure it— ”

He doesn’t lie down. He doesn’t fucking budge.

Of course he fucking doesn’t because he never ever ever does.

To have forgotten that Cora-san was like this: an impossibility.  Except for how Law had, somehow, and Cora-san is always like this. He won’t change and he doesn’t change  and he won’t ever change even after it got him killed, got him dead, and why the fuck had Law expected otherwise. The futile effort of screaming at him to just stop caring, you stupid dumb clown, SToP, coming back flash-moment, thirteen years old and getting dragged from one North Blue hospital to another, Cora-san not listening because Cora-san never listens. Like Law banging his own head against a goddamned brick wall. Cora-san on the other side grimly deciding that Law’s going to live, Cora-san deciding that if tries and hopes and refuses death for Law hard enough the impossibility of it will become reality. And the stupid fucking thing is that it’d worked, he’d done it, he’d died to do it, and he’s going to die here and again to some hallucinatory hallucination because he’s too worried about the Amber fucking Lead —  

“Scan. Shambles.”

— to worry about himself.

The boy floats to Law’s snarl. Every single iota of Amber Lead dissolved in his bloodstream and   clogged in his arteries

dumps

itself

at Law’s feet.

The boy’s barely thumping back onto the operating table half a second later before Law’s pushing Cora down by the shoulders again, snapping, “There. It’s done, he’s cured, the buildup is gone, now lie down and get your IVs in and your oxygen mask on,” through the rage and frustration and the incoherent buzzing in his own head. Cora-san, of course, does none of these things and instead seizes Law's collar in a way that definitely strains something .

“What the fuck did you— what ?”

“Lie down.”

“You said — you did what ?”

“Your IVs.”

“What do you mean cured him ? Do you know how many hospitals we went to said there wasn’t a cure?”

“There isn’t . It was a toxic metal buildup and I have a devil fruit. Now lie down. ”

Cora-san doesn’t.

The IV pole screeches across the tile. He whips around with enough force  to snap a line and puts a hand to the boy’s forehead and regards him very closely for one long slow beat, very still and crumpled yet but with the white spots gone from his skin, now. The rest of the symptoms, Law knows, will recede as well;  the fever and the coughing at speed, recovery of the immune system and liver more gradually.

Cora-san brushes long fingers over the fringe of his counterpart’s bangs. Presses a hand over the boy’s ribcage, the boy’s heart.

Lets it rest there, for a beat, before

He

wheels around

again

and it’s

yet another whiplash. To Law, this time. Cora-san’s face like the edge of a new dawn, the sun rising through the grey and the mottled purple and the red-edged stitches on his cheek, mouth opening, a broad flash of white, and Law doesn't realize what’s going on until his knees smack the edge of the operating table from being reeled in and his arms are squeezed limp at his sides from being hugged tight and his vision is gold, all gold, tickling his nose and in his eyes, and he can hear the rumble of Cora-san’s laugh through his chest, half delirious relief and half delirious delight and a third delirious gratitude, saying, “thank you, thank you thank you.”

*

He smells of cigarette smoke.

Cigarette smoke and the lingering afterbite of the snow; the nearby scents of the operating room: antiseptic, disinfectant, plastics mixed with the blooming copper of iron in the blood. But above that or beneath that or perhaps intertwined, still smoke, sharp and sticking acrid, and something of the salt of the sea. Cora-san’s golden hair in Law’s eyes and pressing against the bridge of Law’s nose. Cora-san’s arms thrown tight around his neck and squeezing, very fiercely, very tightly, a  sense-memory of heat, safety, and for the long elastic stretch of that moment Law is thirteen years old again hearing the rustle of invisible feathers mingling with the laugh in Cora-san’s chest.

Before he is, just as abruptly, wrenched away.

“Shit, sorry, I'm. I’m just so glad. Thankyou thankyou, I didn't even get your name, please —”

Heat, and then the absence of. Law neither cares for nor particularly enjoys being touched, but this time the deprivation is a vacuum. He sways.

Cora-san babbling.

“I can’t even begin to express my gratitude. You won’t believe how many stupid-ass hospitals refused the kid, seriously, just — thank you  — “

Cora’s hand still on Law’s shoulder though. Cora-san’s hand leaving Law’s shoulder as he motions in a short arc.

Law’s hand snapping up and closing around a gauze-wrapped wrist, trapping the IV line before it can snap.

Heat: an indication of life.

Cora-san’s gaze follows, lands on the wrist. “Oh, frick, I should really stop moving around shouldn’t I? Just undid all your hard work.” He gives a little shake of his head, grinning, looking up at Law. Sitting down on the gurney table which makes Law taller, for the first time in memory. The reflection of light in his eyes; the edge of a sunrise smile.

The wrist trapped in Law’s hand, gauze and scar and skin and bone and heat, so very solid.

All of him is, Law thinks abruptly, to the point of suspension of belief. The texture of the bandages underneath Law’s hand, the hard yield of the wrist bone. Like a repentance, or an impossibility, or perhaps a respite. What Law wishes to be true more than anything else right now, so real he can deceive himself in the emotion of the moment.

Except Law, thirteen years ago, hadn’t saved his Corazon. Except it is very hard for Law to deceive himself.

Except —

*

“Except you're not real are you?” says very abruptly the strange doctor with the gold eyes, grip still hard enough on Rocinante's wrist to creak.

He gives a little laugh.

[ccyans]

All that is Gold and Wonder

Shimura Tenko, when the social worker leads him out, is basically all of Gran Torino's regrets bundled into one.

He looks four, not six, or maybe that's just because Gran Torino's forgotten how small six year olds actually are. Black shirt, grey pants, white skin and hair, a kid in Asahi's monochrome. His hands are stuffed into a pair of bright red gloves but that's the only colour on him.  Scraggly, overgrown hair falls over dead eyes, over the rictus of scar and shadow.  On the the kid's lip a cut, newly healed, is red and bold on his ashy face. 

He looks like he hasn't slept in a week. He looks,vaguely, like a horror story, complete with raccoon eyes and hunched shoulders. The expression on the kid's face is nothing but solid mutiny though, mouth curved down in a frown that’s more like a pout with the baby fat. He's too small. Skinny as a rake. He looks like Asahi, four years old the last time Torino saw him. He looks like Nana.

The social worker -- a woman with bright blue hair and feathers at the side of her eyes -- introduces them. Which is good, because Torino has no idea how to introduce himself.  "Tenko-kun, this is your father's godfather."

"Your grandma-ma's accomplice in crime," he says. 

The kid just looks at him. 

He doesn't say a word. That's something they'd warned Gran Torino about. The kid hasn't said  a word since they brought him in.

He doesn't say a word when they go out for ice-cream, the social worker steering him around gently with a hand between his shoulders. Distrust shadows his body language, the way his eyes dart, the curl in his shoulders, the way he seems to restrain himself from baring his teeth when they get close to crowds. What happened to you, kid, Torino wants to ask.  When they get back to the office Gran Torino fills out three hours of paperwork while the social worker reaffirms his successful background check and his home visit, and then does something magical with a filing cabinet and five online registries that, compounded with his reputation as a pro hero and the kid's no show fosters and dangerous quirk, ends up to be all that's needed to get Gran Torino listed as temporary guardian, number whatever. There should've at least been a parenting 101 seminar.

This is how, in the long mess of things, Gran Torino ends up with Nana's grand-kid.

[ccyans]

The one where Todoroki Rei gets out of dodge with children in tow Pt. 1

Prequel  AO3

A concept:

In which Todoroki Rei gets the heck out of dodge with all four Todoroki kids in tow before her mental state deteriorates. What sparks the action: perhaps one of baby Shouto’s training sessions go too far. Perhaps her eldest (coughDabicough) gets a little too snappy and lands himself in the burn ward again. Perhaps it’s just a culimination: the realization that sometimes she can’t even look at her five-year old without flinching, without the superimposition of Enji’s lightning eyes and rumbling disapproval. Her sweet, shy, five-year old boy, not even her eldest, who holds his father’s fire in more ways than one.

Perhaps one day on the streets she meets an old college friend who asks, very gently, “Rei-chan, are you okay?” and Rei gets an overdue stress breakdown right there and then.

Any of these things. All of these things. The end result is that Todoroki Rei realizes she needs out. She can’t do this anymore. Neither can her children. She and her college friend have a long conversation, and afterwards, Rei goes to Enji with divorce papers in shaking hands. There’s a messy custody battle that ends in bitter tears and a lot of shouting on several fronts, the loudest of which comes from Rei’s college friends, intersparsed with threats of media exposure and long nights of Fuyumi hovering, and then end result – the end result is that she’s out.

They’re out of Enji’s house.

see the rest under the cut

The days after the custody battle are so busy that Rei has exactly no time to think about Enji. The move is – easier than expected. Rei thinks first about going to her parent’s house, out in the country, with its rice paddies and cicida-song summers, filtered through a soft sieve of cozy memory, but Endevour’s family, even divorced, is still Endevour’s family in the ways that matter. Rei remembers the kidnapping attempts and has no desire to repeat them. The city has better security, faster police response, and more heroes, so in the end Rei chooses to move into a three-bedroom apartment on the opposite side of the city.

It is not the best apartment. There’s a faucet that needs a bit of fixing, the wall paper is tacky, and no one likes the view from the balcony view which shows only a back alley, but it’s a good, safe part of town, with a kindly land lady, and Rei is conscious of her sudden financial position as a single mother. Money, at least, had never been an issue before. Now Rei’s relying on the support of her parents, as well as what child support the government and Enji are paying. She’ll need to get herself a job soon. Rei has a college degree but it’s been a long, long time since she worked, not since her first pregnancy, and it makes her anxious. She shelves these worries for the mean time, although they simmer, quietly, in the background. She has four children and a house to move.

Her friends help her with the furniture and Rei jumps when someone accidentally shatters a glass. All of them do – her eldest with his fists clenched, Fuyumi and Natsuo frozen and quiet, Shouto hidden with ice creeping up his cheek. They clean up, carefully. They don’t talk about it.

The children divide the three rooms. Her eldest gets one for himself. He’s fourteen – he needs it. Natuso and Fuyumi bunk together. Shouto is six and still burrows into her bed at night, so they share. They go shopping for plates and utensils and all the little important everyday things they left behind. Grocery runs with Shouto sitting in the front of the shopping cart.

Things get better.

*

Since we still haven’t been graced with Dabi’s actual name, for the sake of this narrative we’re just going to call him Dabi. Dabi is fourteen and, for evident reasons, strives to be as opposite from his father as possible. Between his colouring and his quirk this is often difficult. He does his best though: drawls more often than he talks, slouches constantly, wears punk jewlery, and hones his face into a practiced visage of bored apathy. Endeavor barks, never slouches and is extremely passionate about all the wrong things, the fuckng asshole, so Dabi does his best to counter. He moves with a deliberate laziness, dresses like the cross between a goth and a delinquant, and talks with the air of someone possibly high for the dual purposes of a) pissing off dad, and b) making it so that mom doesn’t have a panic attack looking at him.

Rei nearly had a panic attack looking at Shouto. Dabi is older, spikier red hair, two flash-blue eyes instead of one. Sometimes she can’t look at him. Sometimes she can’t be in the same room as him. Dabi gets nose piercings and wears distressed jeans and band T-shirts with sparkly pink slogans, keeps his voice, quiet, uninterested, because there’s a mental disconnect there – him, his father, him, his father. 

The first thing Dabi does when they move out of his father’s house is dye his hair black.

*

A week into the new apartment and they are in the neighbourhood park on a summer morning. There is a book, half opened, in Fuyumi’s lap, dapple in sunlight and the dark shade of the oak trees. Dabi is eating the last of an ice-pop, and on the playground Natsuo is pushing the Shouto on the swings. Higher and higher.

“I don’t think he’s ever been on a swing before,” Fuyumi says.

“The old man’s a shit,” grunts Dabi.

The ice pop dribbles over his knuckles. Fuyumi eyes it, reaches over, and re-freezes it. It’s All Might themed, which is to say that Dabi was in charge of ice-cream runs, so right now all of their ice-pops and freezies are All-might themed. It’s his own brand of vengeance. Not something that would have happened in their old house, although Fuyumi doubts Father would have checked the freezer anyway.  

“Let’s not talk about that,” Fuymi says, after a moment. She peeks over at mother, who’s sitting with one of her college friends, laughing into her hand. Then Shouto, eyes squeezed shut and laughing with Natsuo. “He’ll get to play all that he wants now.”

“He should,” says Dabi, and crunches his ice pop. He inspects the playground scene. “You think Natsuo’s gonna teach him the monkey bar flip?”

“Not in mom’s line of sight, no.”

*

What i want is a Todoroki family protection squad by the Todoroki for the Todoroki, which is to say a) now that Dad’s not trying to cleave a division line between Shouto and everyone else, all three elder Todoroki siblings try to engage their tiny and somewhat badly socially adjusted younger brother in sibling things. And b) mom is important. All the Todorokis have a trained in aversion for direct conflict, but try anything with Rei and all your houseplants will be mysteriously frozen and your apartment may smell like burning. Mom is not allowed to carry the groceries. Mom is also not allowed to cook, because they have a gas stove, not an electric one. The kids insist on making dinner, or rather Fuyumi does, because the others are too small to be allowed near the stove and Dabi can’t look sideways at a pot without the contents going char boiled.

*

No one hears hair or hide or face from Endeavor in a month, and eventually the underlying is he going to show up tension in the house dissipates. The kids get used to their new neighbourhood, dogs mom whenever she goes out like a trail of four ducklings, and integrate Shouto into their group. Natuso is the best influence – he’s the closest in age, for one. And he’s loud and brash and genuine and exited, and never really had a younger brother to teach things to, so he’s super dedicated. Rei signs the kids up for school and Shouto is going to attend elementary instead of homeschooling that Endeavor originally planned. All the kids need new uniforms. Dabi changes his paperwork so his last name is his mother’s maiden one.

And then they meet the neighbours.

*

“Mom,” says Natsuo. “Mom is that a dead body?”

It is seven p.m. Rei just came back from her lawyer’s office, and there is, in fact, a body in the hallway. Scraggly, messy hair. Dirty jumpsuit, although it’s hard to see with the black fabric. Face down in front of her door.

She hopes it’s not a dead body.

“No, honey.” she says, although there’s an uncertain questionmark in her voice. She reaches into her purse for her phone. Does she call the police? Hero? She has both on speedial nowadays. If it’s just a homeless person man though, which… is not out of the question, either would be a overreaction.

Her eldest toes the body, and Rei gives him a look. “You alive?”

Nothing.

“I think we should call the police,” says Fuyumi. She’s biting her lip nervously, which is how Rei feels right now – off balanced and a little skittish. “Or – maybe he drank too much?”

They stand there in indecision, staring at the body. Rei hovers a finger on the speed-dial of her phone, until Natsuo begins to wonder about zombies and gets loud enough the land lady exits her apartment from the noise. She is a slight, traditional old lady with her silvery hair snapped back into a clip, and she takes one look at the possible hobo face down in front of Rei’s door, heaves a sigh, and says in a truly put-upon tone, “Aizawa-san.”

 Her scowl is ferocious. She nudges the probably-not-a-hobo in the side with a tabied toe. No response. Bracingly, she mutters, “heroes.”

“Um,” says Rei.

“Aizawa-san, if you needed to go to the hospital, please go before you drag yourself home. I am retired from the medical profession.”

“Hospital?” Rei repeats, alarmed.

The land lady makes a vague hand gesture. Then she bends, rolls Aizawa-san over, and checks him over. “He’s just out cold,” she scowls. “I am going to whack Yamada over the head. Where is he?”

Rei has no idea who this Yamada, apart from that he seems responsible for this Aizawa’s actions.

The land lady is still tsking. “And his apartment’s not even on this floor. Honestly. I’ll call Yamada. For the meantime though…” she eyes the body. She pinches the bridge of her nose, as if to ward off a incoming headache.

After a moment, she turns and says: “Rei-chan, I’m terribly sorry to ask you this, but if you don’t mind…”

This is how the body ends up on Rei’s couch.

*

Aizawa Shouta is twenty-one years old and an underground hero. He also seems to have some sort of sleep disorder, paired with a tendency to overwork, which is why he was collapsed on Rei’s doorstep. He lives two floors above Rei with a room-mate, a fellow hero. There is a suspicious stain on his pant leg that Rei is not going to look too closely at.

The children, after fifteen minutes of treating him like some fascinating but venomous woodland creature, eventually cave and start the metamorphical poking. Rei quickly herds them away. She bribes them with chocolate fudge dessert, which captures their attention for the next fifteen minutes, upon which her doorbell rings.

“I believe that would be Yamada-san,” says the land lady, checking her phone.

The first thing the disleveled young man in Rei’s doorway says is: “"Heeeeey, I am so sorry.”

His smile is cheerful and his hair is long and pale, and he chatters in a continous stream between social niceties, complimenting her furniture, introducing himself in bits in pieces, apologizing again. Upon entering the living room, he blinks and then gives a laugh at the sight of all four of her children simutaneously attempting to unknot Shouto from where he’s cocooned in Aizawa-san’s scarf. “Oh hey, lemme help you with that.”

Rei’s eldest leans back against the couch arm and drawls. “And you are?”

“Yamada Hizashi,” Yamada-san says, not missing a beat.

Yamadas bears the scrutiny of the children with remarkable ease, untangles Shouta gently, and then bops him on the nose. “this ain’t somethin’ you should be playing ‘round with, yanno?” but he’s smiling as he says it, and adds, like an afterthought, “although since Eraser’s caused so much trouble with you guys I guess he kinda deserves it.”

He bundles the scarf up. The land-lady gives him a severe dressing down, which he weathers with a sheepish smile. Rei sets out a cup of tea, still steaming, but Yamada declines graciously. “It’s been a bit of a long night,” he explains. His eyes are very green behind the orange sunglasses. After another apology to Rei, and he hoists Aizawa-san over one shoulder to leave out the front door.

“You can probably get that one on free babysitting duty,” the land-lady tells Rei, after. “By that I mean Yamada, not Aizawa.”

*

Anyway, Rei meets Aizawa properly the next morning, at breakfast, when the doorbell rings and she opens to last night’s unexpected guests. Both Yamada and Aizawa have cleaned up some. Yamada’s hair is up and he’s wearing normal glasses instead of tinted ones, and Aizawa no longer looks, well. Dead. Still tired, but it’s normal functioning tired instead of pass-out tired. Both of them are carrying pie.

“My apologies for yesterday,” says Aizawa-san, bowing, before Rei can do more than blink at their presence. It is straight and formal and suprisingly graceful, considering – well yesterday.  "I should have better anticipated my state of health.“

He sounds sincered, a little raspy, like he’s got the edge of a cold, and very awkward. “It – oh, it wasn’t much trouble,” says Rei. They’re a couple of young boys, these two. It’s easier to see with Aizawa now that he’s gotten clean clothes and a shave on him. Twenty-one. Rei has a decade on them. When she was twenty-one Rei was –

She pauses.

Don’t

think about Enji.

“It wasn’t much trouble.” Rei repeats. Don’t think about Enji. Too late. She feels skittish, all of a sudden, uncomfortable in her own skin. She bites her lip. “Honestly, I think Masato-san (the land-lady) would have chewed you out enough.”

‘So much,“ agrees Yamada, slinging an arm companionably over Aizawa’s shoulder. "But Shouta crash landed on your doormat, so, apology pie! We have two flavours. Blueberry?”

“Mom,” comes Natsuo’s holler, followed by the patter of small feet. “The rice is –hey you’re the dead body!”

“What,” says Fuyumi.

Half a heartbeat later and the rest of Rei’s children crowd into the entranceway. Yamada salutes them. “Heya kiddos.”

“Hi,” says Dabi, flatly.

They look at one another.

Rei can see the future alceration.  Her eldest has his hands clenched, his shoulders deceptively slack, and for a moment the discomfort of Enji is pushed away by a slightly greater panic of conflict. Fuyumi is already stepping forward though, putting a hand on Dabi’s shoulder, another on Natuso’s wrist.

She doesn’t have a third hand, which is how Shouto marches right up to Aizawa-san and says, tone jutting, “I don’t like your scarf.”

 Aizawa blinks.

Yamada swoops in in an instant. He crouches down to Shouto’s eye level, wagging a finger. “That’s cuz you’re supposed to catch your enemies in them, not yourself." He spins the pie around, cheeky. “Hey, you like apple or blueberry?”

And the tension breaks. 

Or maybe there was never any tension at all, just Rei, panic like a second heartbeat in her breastbone. Dabi is sullen and frowning but not actively hostile. Natsuo has slipped his sister’s hand to inspect the pies with unprecedented interest. Yamada and Aizawa are her neighbours. They’re young heroes. Good people.

Rei breathes out.

“Blueberry, please." Her voice comes out suprisingly steady. She smiles, a little tiredly, but genuine. “Thank you.”

“No probs,” grins Yamada. 

*

That’s Tuesday. On Friday, Rei meets Midoriya Inko. 

Prequel  AO3

[ccyans]

When you try to write a silly little ficlet for a rarepair and then it ends up spiraling into a 6k+ character study of an entirely different character alllltogether.

[ccyans]

@sgri-sgri MADE ME A TODOFAM AESTHETIC BOARD! HOLY CRAP! AND IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL TOO! WE HAVE ALLL OUR FAVS RIGHT HERE! CHECK IT OUT GUYS!

[ccyans]

How would the kids react if rei divorced enji canonically and started dating another guy?

1.

“Uh,” said Shouto, and then rewound the past thirty seconds of conversation back through his head. “I. Uh. Are you sure?”

Next to him on the park bench, his mother beamed.

“Of course! He said he wanted to meet you,” she informed him. She looked splendidly happy, much more than Shouto had seen her in – well, actually, this would explain his mother’s sudden upturn in mood the past month.

Shouto’s icepop was beginning to drip onto his knuckles from the summer heat. He paid it no attention; there was a much more imminent problem currently staring at him in the face.

“He… did,” he said, very slowly.  

His mother’s smile was still blinding. Shouto wondered if this was a dream, or maybe a nightmare. “Yes! All of you. I already called Fuyumi, but you know Natsu, it’s his exam week. And your eldest brother…” she paused, and then sighed. “Well, as many of you as I can manage, anyway.”

keep reading under the cut

“That’s,” said Shouto. He stopped.

His brain felt, at the current moment, completely blank.

“Yes sweetie?”

Shouto stared at her, all of her, the way she was dressed in a powder blue blouse and a sequined skirt, the sunflower in her cheerful straw hat, the way she was smiling right now, all the worries wiped away. It’d only been a year since those divorce papers had been signed, between her and Endeavor, the separation finally officialized, since his mother had been allowed free from the hospital. It was so little time.

And now there was a…

“Are you,” he hesitated. “Are you sure?”

His mother blinked at him. Once, twice. Then her face softened, the smile in her expression curving into knowing. “Oh sweetie,” she said. Her touch refroze the icepop trying to melt over his fingers. “It’ll be okay, he’s a good man.” She squeezed his hand gently.“ You’ll love him.”

After a moment, Shouto said, “… Yes.”

This was followed by the thought, we’ll see.

2.

“She has. She has a boyfriend,” said Shouto, voicing the elephant now in his life. He looked at his hands. And then he looked to Fuyumi, whom he knew was much better at situations concerning social delicacy, and… romance. Because it was now a prevalent subject. “When? How.”

Fuyumi who grading 2nd grade math papers, said with extreme nonchalance: “You mean mom? Yeah.”

 Shouto stared at her. Her pen stalled.

“… You didn’t realize?”

“She told me this morning,” said Shouto dully.

“Didn’t she tell you she was going to La Champagne for dinner two weeks ago?”

Shouto paused, felt the realization kick in. “That was – I thought that was with Natsu.”

“She was wearing a Lafayette dress,” said Fuyumi. “And she spent an hour putting her hair up. You were there. You helped her with those braids. She asked you whether you thought it was nice.”

“It was nice,” said Shouto, and Fuyumi gave him an exasperated look.

“She’s been asking you about her bracelet and makeup choices for the past two months. She hasn’t touched even lipstick for five years before that! ”

That was… he thought back. Rewound nearly every single exchange he’d had with his mother for the last two… Ah.

Ahhhhh.

“He… wants to meet us,” he said, finally.

“Yeah.”

Shouto looked at her, and then, very grimly, said: “so, what do we do.”

3.

“What we do is get a background check,” declared Natsu, half an hour later on speaker phone. He sounded about the same as Shouto felt, which was to say, somewhat disturbed but grimly determined. “I have a friend in the station, but she’s only on archives so it might take a while.” He paused. “Hey Sho – “

“No,” said Fuyumi.

Shouto was already going through his list of police contacts. They were not as extensive as he had hoped, which was an oversight on his part.

“No,” Fuyumi repeated, with emphasis.

“Sis,” said Natsu.

“He’s perfectly nice and law abiding. No.”

“You don’t know that.”

Fuyumi’s sigh was audible. She rubbed her temple with her thumb and forefinger. “His name is Tanaka Hansuke,” she said. “He’s forty three, so four years younger than mom. They met at her therapy sessions – his dog is a registered therapy animal. He’s a dentist. The most law-edging thing in his file is maybe tax evasion. He donates to charity and helps out disabled children in his free time. Perfectly nice.”

There was a pause.

“Sis… Did you already do a background check?”

“No,” said Fuyumi, and then admitted. “But dad did.”

Shouto stared at her. Over the phone connection, there was silence.

“What,” Shouto said.

“What,” Natsu echoed.

Fuyumi shrugged, and then bent to fish something out of her desk. “I think he’s… trying. In his own way. He handed the file off to me.” She sighed. “I’m guessing you want to see it?”

“Please,” said Shouto, eying the white vanilla folder Fuyumi was fingering.

The connection crackled. “Okay,” said Natsu slowly. “Okay that’s… something. Good? I don’t know. That’s… you know, our old man wouldn’t show up in any police-sanctioned background check.”

“He’s a dentist,” said Fuyumi, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Exactly.”

They were at the point where Fuyumi was beginning to take deep breaths. Her eye roll was audible. “Oh my god Natsu. Look. Just. I’ve got it covered. No weird background checks.” She stared into the receiver. The receiver, lacking eyes, did not stare back, but perhaps beyond the link Natsu was doing the same and Shouto’s siblings were engaging in a special telepathic contest of wills. In the end, the receiver bowed and shuddered with Natsu’s grudging sigh.

“Fine. Okay. You do you. But what are we gonna do about the shovel talk.”

“What did I just say.”

“The shovel talk. Not the background check.”

“You do realize mom really really likes this guy right.”

“That’s my point sis. Sho, you with me?”

Shouto’s knowledge of shovel talks came from two episodes of a television show he’d watched in training camp and the romance novels Yaoyorozu pretended she didn’t read. He hoped it was adequate. On the other hand, Natsu was there for backup, so it was probably be adequate. Either way he would do his best. “Yes.”

“Great,” said Natsu.

“No, and no.” emphasized Fuyumi, toned aggrieved. “No. There’s already – look. Once he’s done, I think the message will already be communicated. And as long as Tanaka doesn’t go mysteriously missing we’re all clear. If he does go missing I… guess we’re still clear,” she paused. “Hopefully he doesn’t go mysteriously missing.”

Shouto squinted.

“…What?” asked Natsu.

4.

It was near eleven in the evening when Tanaka Hansuke arrived home. In the sky the moon was full; street lamps spilled dark shadows onto the roads. Normally, Tanaka didn’t work this late, but this month his determination to make a good impression went hand in hand with several expensive restaurant tours. He parked his car in the driveway, unlocked his front door, clicked on the lights and bent to take off his shoes.

“Hey,” came a soft, rasping voice.

The alarm bells were barely beginning to ring in Tanaka’s head before he looked up. 

And froze.

A man was sitting on top of Tanaka’s kitchen counter, casual as you please. Black coat, shoes on, one arm propped against the faucet. He smiled. It was a lazy smile, but not a kindly one. Tanaka recognized that smile from the news channel. It was a smile that pulled on the man’s stitches, stretching scarred purple skin under a fringe of dark hair. Tanaka recognized those stitches, and those scars, and that face.

There was a nationally wanted villain in his kitchen. A nationally wanted, serial killer of a villain.

What even.

Tanaka ‘s heart rate ricocheted. His hands inched for his phone. Call the police, call the heroes –

And a ball of blue fire flicked past his cheek to splutter against the door.

“None of that,” drawled the villain Dabi, sitting on Tanaka’s kitchen counter. “So you and me? We gotta talk.”

AN: Fuyumi already has everything sorted lmao. Natsu and Shouto are…. late. Tanaka Hansuke, on the other hand, being perfectly law biding and respectable, gets off his conversation with Dabi badly startled and badly confused but in one piece, which is good because Rei is very excited for her date.