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In the immediate aftermath of the raid on Onigashima, while all the living bodies are being treated and all the dead ones are being buried, Law finds himself waking up in the triage center, located handily on the Live Floor of the Skull Dome.
As a patient.
For a variety of reasons, he doesn't like that at all.
Not because of the (completely unfair and ungrounded) stereotype that doctors make terrible patients, but because he has other, much more important things to do than get poked and wrapped up and ordered to stay still. He pushes himself to his feet with some difficulty, straps Kikoku to his back and immediately locates a stash of medical equipment. On all sides, injured samurai groan, snore and converse with each other.
Most of his injuries were caused by blunt force and shockwaves, but he knows broken bones, internal bleeding and perforated organs when he feels them. His more serious lacerations have been sutured, his leg splinted, bandages wrapped securely around his torso. Law grabs a suture kit for himself and limps to a clear corner of the triage area, summoning a Room as he sits on the wooden floor. Sterilizing the field is quick now, almost automatic, the smell of a pre-storm evening washing over him as the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end. The scalpel comes out first, blade snapped into place onto the handle. A length of gut through the eye of a curved needle, locked between the jaws of stainless steel forceps.
Scan tells him to start with his heart.
A quick application of Mes pops the sturdy muscle out of his chest, and several of the vessels near it. The poor thing's been shocked a few times, suffered a few tears in the veins, and has developed a mild arrhythmia. All easily fixed with a gentle application of the op-op fruit's power (and an electrical massage). Law aims for his spleen next, patching a few perforated blood vessels and the ugly rupture on its dorsal surface.
He's just finishing up with his bruised kidneys when a samurai staggers up to him, clutching a recently-stitched gash in his side. "Excuse me, young man! Are you a doctor?"
Law considers the question as he pops his kidney back into his body. "I'm a pirate," he says flatly.
"My friend, he's in bad shape." Oh, so he just wasn't listening at all. "Can you take a look?"
Law goes to take a look.
All of the patients on the Live Floor triage center have already been treated to some degree by very capable hands (and hooves, if Law's right about the suturing on a few of them). A quick Scan shows that all of them have been stitched, splinted, bandaged, and injected with antibiotics and painkillers as needed, and are almost certainly in the 'bed rest' stage of their treatment.
Once he dismisses the scanning Room, Law extends his Observation outward, all the way to the Live Floor's backstage area. There, he's hit with a wave of pain and urgency so strong it nearly bowls him over in his just-fought-an-Emperor state but he goes toward it like a moth to flame, knowing exactly what it means.
Law slides back the paper door, shuts it behind him, to a corridor of open shoji screens, five rooms on each side. Unlike the Live Floor, none of the patients here are in any shape to speak, and he hangs close to the edges of the walkway to inspect the layout of the makeshift hospital.
It is, to Law's trained eye, breathtakingly efficient.
Two rooms nearest the back are lined corner to corner with mats, barely enough room to walk between them. One on the left, clean and sterile, contains freshly-treated pirates and samurai. The other, on the right, is a disaster zone; blood soaks into tatami as medics frantically pack wounds and tag patients by the severity of their injuries, preserving their lives as best they can before they can be operated on. As soon as one patient leaves the waiting area for surgery, another one is brought in.
The center room on the left contains a hastily-built autoclave in the sunken hearth where an irori used to sit, and all around it medics of all species grind and synthesize salves and drugs. Each room adjacent to it is an obvious OR, tatami stripped from the floor and a metal table in the center, extra lights brought in to illuminate.
On the right, a central room piled high with enough medical supplies to make Law's mouth water. Operating rooms on either side of it as well.
The two rooms closest to the Live Floor main area catch his interest most, but Law had saved them for last. On the left, a cold room-- practically refrigerated-- long troughs full of ice dripping into trays set below them. One row of hearts, another of lungs. A trough each for kidneys and livers and skin. Little flags beside each labeled with the estimated time of death and blood type of its owner.
To his right, a morgue.
Law has heard much of the Whitebeard Pirates' medical operation, when they were still active: a huge, streamlined machine with Marco the Phoenix at its beating heart. Some of the best hospitals in the New World were located on Whitebeard-claimed islands, all of them referring to the Moby Dick's blueprint for infrastructure and logistics. He's not surprised to find the Phoenix in this area, patiently giving instruction to a young medic, but he is thrown off at the sight of the man elbows-deep in a dead body.
Marco pulls up a kidney, too damaged to use, before tucking it back into the cavity. A lung in similar condition, a liver that's practically bisected through its left side, but with two intact right lobes. He expertly separates the usable parts from the rest, and calls over an assistant to transfer them to the organ preservation area. Blue flames light up his arms, disintegrating the blood and viscera, before he reaches for a pair of forceps and suture thread.
Law grins.
"Room."
Marco looks up in surprise as Law steps forward, arm extended. "I'll close him up," he offers, "and handle the transplants."
Several different emotions flash across Marco's face, but the one that finally lands is curiosity. "Alright," he answers, "but I'd like to see you at work first."
Law's never been employed at a proper hospital before but he's not foreign to the concept of paying his dues. He'd argue that fixing up Straw Hat after Marineford should be more than enough to prove his skill, but they don't have time for that kind of posturing and Marco isn't actually doubting his abilities-- just conscientious about who he allows to take over his operating room. Law would do the same.
To begin with, he uses the op-op fruit's power to seal the edges of Marco's incision on the primary body, sticking them together as if they'd never been cut apart.
The morgue is lined with ice too-- ice shelves on which the bodies sit, waiting to be harvested. Law runs a Scan on each of the bodies and with an expert twist of his hand pops the usable organs out of all seventeen cadavers in the room. He Shambles them to the preservation area, exchanging them for single ice chips, and gives Marco an expectant look.
"Open up that one for me," Marco says, selecting a body at random and pointing at it. Law switches it instantly with the body on the table and cuts a rectangle into the front of its chest, lifting skin, muscle, sternum and ribs away from the cavity as Marco leans in. He'd left the severely-impaired lungs and kidneys, but taken liver and heart. Marco plunges his hand right in after a brief flare of blue flames-- must be his method of sterilization-- and confirms that everything left behind is too damaged to use.
Law would normally balk at being given any kind of order, but even he can recognize when he's stepped into someone else's operation. He seals the corpse back up as Marco sterilizes his hands again and crosses the hall to the organ preservation area to pick up one of the newly-extracted hearts and inspect it carefully.
"They'll be rejected eventually," Law points out as Marco replaces the heart in the ice. "How are you going to handle that?"
"Miyagi's working on the drug now to suppress the reaction. We had something similar on the Moby Dick, so I gave him the formula." Before Law can say anything about that, Marco nods at him. "I'll send you copies of our manuals too, if you're interested."
So he's gained the Phoenix's approval after all, if he's offering all that hard-won knowledge. "I'm interested," Law says.
"Great. I'll just ask that you do the transplants individually rather than all at once; I want redundancies in place."
Under normal circumstances Law would dismiss that as pointless, but he's already half-dead on his feet. An extra pair of eyes, professional support for the surgery, that's hard to come by in his little OR on the Polar Tang.
He dismisses his Room, then follows on Marco's heels as the older man leads him to the primary theater where Chopper's just about to cut into his patient, a samurai whose skin is yellow from jaundice.
"Traffy!" Chopper says happily, having last seen him when Law was passed out cold. "It's good you're here!"
"Trafalgar will take over the transplants," says Marco with none of that warm, gentle presence that had bolstered Chopper through their fight with King and Queen, only an unassailable confidence in its place. "We'll assist him."
Chopper backs off immediately, nodding. Law would find it surprising, how easily the young doctor makes room for them, but it doesn't shock him that all present have decided to cede authority to Marco. Only one of them has ever had to coordinate this scale of triage, after all.
"Alright!" Chopper grabs a chart and a brush, already jotting down notes. "I've seen his abilities at work, it's really amazing what the op-op fruit can do, isn't it?"
"We're lucky it ended up in such capable hands," Marco agrees. He checks the tag secured to the samurai's arm as if he doesn't notice Law's flustered glare. "This one's type XF."
Law materializes another Room, this one stretching over the entirety of the makeshift hospital wing. It's not a large area but the effort staggers him, forcing him to grab onto the metal table for support as the sphere stabilizes.
After a long moment of contemplative silence, Marco makes a thoughtful sound. "Are you sure," he says, "you ought to be operating in your condition? You've done plenty already, 'Surgeon of Death'. We can take it from here."
It is the most tempting offer Law has ever heard. But they all know that the op-op fruit gives these samurai the best chance of recovery, all but completely mitigating the trauma of surgery-- no need to heal over incisions through skin and muscle, prying back ribs, sutures to seal the wounds. Besides, Law won't complain about a chance to flex in front of one of the most well-regarded pirate doctors in the New World. "I'm a surgeon, Phoenix-ya."
"Oh, of course." That easy-going ex-commander of Whitebeard's first division lets just a little bite slip into his tone. "Far be it for me to question your god complex."
Yet another deeply unwarranted stereotype about surgeons, Law thinks. He's too dazed to notice Marco moving behind him, and he flinches from the cool palm that lands on his forehead, jerking away only to slam his back into Marco's solid chest. "What are you--"
"Give me a second," Marco says, voice soft by his ear. His hand bursts into blue flames then-- a sight that Law had seen from a distance, but hadn't had a chance to witness up this close until now. "This can only help a bit," Marco continues, the fire deliciously cold against Law's skin, "but it should keep you going a while longer."
Law pushes against Marco's arm but the man doesn't budge an inch until he deems that his flames have done their work. The pounding headache that he's been fighting through is gone, and the chills from his exhaustion-induced fever have subsided. "What did you..."
"It's a good thing you upstarts have a lot of stamina," Marco comments with a genial smile, "I just augmented your body's healing processes a bit. Make sure you eat a lot for dinner, alright?"
"You didn't need to do that," Law protests, but it's not as if he can make Marco put the headache and fever back.
"I'm a doctor, too." Marco's eyes are kind, but not pitying. "You've got a lot ahead of you, if you insist on taking lead."
There are many doctors in the world, Law knows, who would resent how much his op-op abilities trivialize surgery that would usually take hours.
Luckily, it's the nature of Minks that their jealousies are usually food-motivated and easily assuaged. Chopper seems to share that temperament with them, Miyagi and the little reindeer both having nothing but praise for Law as they watch him work. Marco is... less forthcoming about his feelings on the matter, silent except to make calls about which patient to operate on next.
Out of courtesy to the older pirate, Law makes sure to pop open every patient and allow him to watch each transplant with that eagle-eyed care. This forces him to pay more attention to each surgery, and Marco occasionally steps in to apply his flames to damage that Law's abilities can't fix, or that he had missed on a rudimentary Scan. It's never a lethal oversight, always secondary to the main procedure, but something that would make a drastic difference to the patient down the line. Law's not, himself, ever that considerate to someone he doesn't even know.
The Phoenix also checks in after every single procedure, transplant or not. It rankled at first, like he doesn't believe in Law's resilience, but closer to the end of the eight hours Law spends on his feet he really begins to look forward to the water Marco presses into his hand, the insistence on a break and a snack while they clean up the OR and prep the surgical field for the next victim, the phoenix-fire infusions to aching muscles.
Just before the last stretch of operations, Marco puts his hand on the back of Law's neck and pushes him down to sit on a stool he'd dragged in. At any other time, in any other state, with any other person-- Marco would've lost that hand to Kikoku's vicious edge. After seven hours of nonstop surgery, three doctors moving and working in such close proximity that they feel more like extensions of each other than separate people, Law can't even bring himself to give the man a dirty look.
"What," he says instead.
Marco jabs his thumb directly into a tight, hard knot in his trapezius muscle. "May I?"
Law very pointedly doesn't let himself be embarrassed about the noise he makes.
Earlier, someone's bloated stomach had unexpectedly ruptured while Marco was helping Law locate an obstruction and he'd taken a spray of acid and half-digested food to the face, which Law had helped clean while Marco used his blue flames to burn away any contamination inside the body cavity. What's a little yelp after he'd held a scrap of surgical gauze to a man's face and told him to blow the hydrochloric acid out of his nose? It was a testament to the iron stomachs of all doctors present that no one had so much as gagged.
"Do whatever you want," Law says, and he spends the next five minutes getting the muscles of his back and shoulders kneaded like a very tense and fibrous dough. The noises he makes then, he's a little embarrassed about. By the time Marco takes his hands off his body, Law's been reduced to a boneless puddle, barely able to stay upright in his seat. When he leans back, it's into a solid mass of tattooed muscle as Marco steps up to take his weight.
"Alright?" Marco asks, laughing, like he doesn't know exactly what he did. Like he isn't conjuring up another round of phoenix flames to smooth into Law's temples.
"I hate you," Law grumbles.
The Skull Dome's onsen is deserted at well past midnight when the medical team files in, nurses and assistants and medics and doctors alike while a second shift of medics takes over. The Minks all end up in the men's bath, unwilling to be separated and not all that concerned about segregating the spaces, and to Law's complete lack of surprise gather up around Marco.
The Phoenix doesn't stay long, pulling reluctantly away from his pile of Minks to take a quick dip in the hot springs before he disappears for the next several hours.
By the time everyone's done bathing, changed into scrounged-up kimono, and returned to the Skull Dome's basement, they're greeted by half a dozen cooks and a spread taken straight from the kitchens of Kozuki (formerly Orochi) Castle. Black Leg is there, directing the others with an unlit cigarette clenched in his teeth, and he gives Law a big, familiar grin when he sees him.
"I heard the doctors were finally taking a break," he calls over. "Come eat something!"
Law approaches warily but when Black Leg pushes a plate of onigiri into his hands, he digs in. They'd been so busy that he hadn't even realized how hungry he was, and despite the multiple trays of rice balls topped with umeboshi laid out for the rest of the medical team, his own are thankfully lacking in them. Instead, Sanji's stuffed two with tuna and mayonnaise, two with salmon, and grilled two with miso. It's a lot of food. Black Leg had given him grief for not liking bread when he sailed with them, but even that short-tempered cook knows when to shelve his shit talk.
"Heard from where?" Law asks, mouth full.
Sanji makes his way out of the food prep area and onto a balcony that leads outside, lighting up his cigarette as he goes. "You didn't know? Marco came by the castle to speak to the Akazaya and said the medical team hasn't eaten all day, since they gave the food onsite to the injured." He leans against the wooden frame of a shoji door as Law joins him, mindful of the paper screen. "Most of the cooks were already up, so I grabbed a brigade and said we'd handle feeding everyone on this end. I wanted to check on Chopper, too. He's had a rough day."
"Phoenix-ya did?"
Sanji takes a long drag on in his cigarette. "I'm not here because he asked," the cook clarifies, his expression going blissful and hazy, "but Nami-swan did! A personal favor, just for her. How's a man supposed to refuse?"
Law's brow furrows in confusion. "Why did Nami-ya ask?"
"Said he protected her when Kaidou was rampaging." Sanji flicks his thumb against the butt of his cig and grinds his heel into the ashes, just in case. "Can you believe it!" he whines. "I should've been there! Why did that birdbrain get to protect her?"
"Thanks for the food," Law says, eyes already half-closed.
He eats while Sanji waxes on about how cute Nami looked in a kimono, and stays on that balcony to finish eating well after the cook has finished his smoke break and headed back inside.
Law gravitates toward the backstage area again, for some reason drawn to the familiar space despite the possibility of being dragged back into the operating room. He pulls up short upon realizing that the entire place has been rearranged since he was last in it. Two of the operating rooms and the original waiting area have been converted to recovery wards for any samurai or pirate in need of further care now that the Live Floor's triage center has been cleared. Another one of the operating rooms is now a basic exam room.
The spaces that had served as morgue and organ refrigerator have been cleaned up as well, converted to break areas for the medical team. Morbid but logical; it's long past time any viable organs can still be harvested from the dead, and they'd completed all the transplants they could already.
Low-slung tables and seating cushions are arranged throughout the room on the left, and a larger table pushed up against one wall loaded with protein-heavy snacks, teapots and hot water dispensers. In the room on his right, carpenters have built a dozen bunk beds and lined them up in the darkened space. Clean white sheets, soft pillows, thick, fluffy futon. The whole thing screams of a certain doctor's quiet, behind-the-scenes consideration. Disgusting.
Law makes his way to the back corner of the room to the bunk furthest away from the entrance and is only mildly surprised to find it already occupied.
Marco's sprawled on his stomach on the bottom bunk, one leg hanging off the edge as if he'd collapsed into bed and passed out immediately. His sandals and a pair of glasses are on the floor, the yukata he'd changed into slipped off his shoulders and scrunched up around his hips. In the baths, Law had heard from Chopper that Marco hadn't slept since before he arrived on Onigashima with Cat Viper and Izou, and had just assumed that possessing a mythical zoan fruit simply meant that the Phoenix didn't need to sleep.
Above him, Chopper snores gently in the bunk, his hat at the foot of the bed. Miyagi and Tristan are up there with him, all three of them cuddled up together. Law settles on the next bed over, fighting back a very conscious pang of 'missing Bepo' as he lays his head down on the pillow.
He stirs what feels like hours later and true to form, Bepo has found him. The bear'd squeezed himself into the bottom bunk at some point and wrapped that big, warm bulk around Law. That's not what had woken him, though, and he extracts himself just in time to catch Marco fixing his yukata and pulling on his sandals.
"Have a good rest?" Marco asks softly. Behind him, Tristan, Miyagi and Chopper are curled up in the space he'd previously occupied. "They were just keeping me company," he says with a shrug, when he catches Law looking.
"Before you go," Law says, dodging medics as he follows Marco across the hall into the empty break room, "I've got some questions."
"Ask away."
"What happened to Straw Hat-ya? And the others?"
"Our little reindeer friend treated them before you joined us." Marco takes a plate from the end of the table and starts loading it up with freshly-cut fruit and little cubes of cheese and ham. Two boiled eggs, a handful of nuts, a bowl of soup. "They'll be fine."
Law's sure that they would've appreciated some assistance from his op-op powers, but they're all experienced enough doctors not to get hung up on the could-have-beens. He follows Marco to a table in a corner of the room, determined to pick his brain. "And where'd the autoclave come from?"
"The Straw Hats' shipwright put it together in about ten minutes." Marco politely offers his plate to Law, and digs in when the younger doctor declines. "I gave him the specifications," he says around a mouthful of pineapple, "and he rustled up enough scrap to build it."
"The ice?"
"Had Yamato freeze the whole room, and one of the swordsmen carve out the ice for shelves." Marco wolfs down one of the eggs in two bites. Mouth still full: "We broke up the pieces we cut out to keep the organs cold."
Law scowls, suddenly uncomfortably aware of the difference between their abilities. A mythical zoan like the phoenix is hilariously overpowered and probably quite useful to Marco personally, but the average pirate could be forgiven for thinking that it's the main source of his strength.
There was a time when Law first met him that he didn't think much of the Phoenix. He knew of his reputation as Whitebeard's first division commander and as a doctor, but he'd thought they were empty titles, cruising on the strength of Edward Newgate's flag and the expertise of his crew. That sleepy, mild-mannered guy? It had to be a joke. He wasn't particularly impressed by his power on the battlefield, either-- anyone running with Whitebeard in the New World should be able to hold their own against another Emperor's crew.
That was, of course, the point. It's easy to forget that Marco was Whitebeard's right hand, his most trusted confidant. It had rapidly become clear to Law while he operated that the Whitebeard Pirates' entire operation had rested on one man's back, Marco picking up and delegating out the hundreds of little tasks around them to keep things running smoothly. Coordinating sixteen divisions, numerous island territories, 43 subordinate crews, hospital operations, balancing them against the whims and rapidly deteriorating health of a notoriously stubborn Emperor-- setting up a field hospital in the aftermath of a raid must have been child's play.
Even more impressive, Law had to admit, was the way he'd brought that incorrigible Straw Hat crew to heel. Locking down enthusiastic cooperation from Franky, Chopper, Nami and Sanji without so much as a threat, demand, exchange or bribe has to be some kind of magic. They didn't even manage to suck him into their clownery, as they did when Law deigned to ally with them.
He refuses to consider the scenario that Marco had simply asked for their help. What a farce. No self-respecting pirate--
"And no one had a problem with your organ harvesting farm?" Law asks.
"I'm sure the samurai didn't like it," Marco answers between stuffing his face with cheese, "but they'd rather be alive."
And Marco would rather be busy, Chopper had said in the baths. He'd lost a former crewmate, one of the samurai who'd ended up on Whitebeard's crew. He has to be used to it by now, Law figures, after what happened at Marineford and in the two years since.
"But," Law says thoughtfully, "you wouldn't take them from your friend."
Marco has a strange look on his face when he lifts his gaze from his food. He's been extraordinarily hard to rile up, every surgical mishap simply accounted for and handled with the kind of professionalism that speaks to decades of experience. But for a split second, the Phoenix really looks as if he might kick Law through a wall.
He tamps it down immediately, as if reminding himself that Law had been unconscious for most of the morning after the raid, and he should expect an arrogant young upstart to push his buttons now that he's been fed and rested. "It'd be nice," Marco says coolly, "if that were the case."
Fuck.
Law tries to imagine losing Shachi or Penguin or Bepo, and cutting into them to give their hearts and kidneys and livers to someone else. The thought just makes him nauseous.
"Izou's was the first lung I took, to replace Kin'emon's." The unwaveringly patient expression Marco'd held through their shift in the operating room is plainly absent, and in its place sits something that actually makes him look like Whitebeard's first division commander. "He told me years ago that he'd like it if his death could save someone else, so I honored that."
Well, Law figures, he's already put his foot in it once. "You don't consider that," he says, "a conflict of interest?"
He's never put much stock in the idea that doctors shouldn't treat family and friends; it could theoretically lead to preferential treatment and lethal oversights due to familiarity in a hospital setting, but a pirate doctor doesn't have the option to maintain a professional distance from their crew. The familiarity becomes an asset on a ship, but when other doctors are available and treatment involves harvesting organs from a crewmate without the clean impartiality of the op-op fruit, even Law is pretty sure that he'd rather cede that task to someone else.
"Chopper volunteered to operate in my place," Marco answers with a lopsided, brittle smile for that considerate little reindeer. He doesn't stop eating, picking up his soup and sipping it right from the bowl. Actually seems to gain some speed with it, as if determined to relish living, breathing, eating in his friend's stead. "But I thought I would give my brother the courtesy of doing it myself."
Having spent some time in Wano, Law's noticed that the samurai also love to toss around words like honor and courtesy, yet they always seem to come at a cost. "Are all samurai like that," he says, annoyed.
"I assumed the others would feel similarly to Izou."
"And if not?"
Marco shrugs, popping a handful of almonds into his mouth. "I'm a pirate."
"I'm worried about him," Chopper says in the break room, later that day. He has a little porcelain cup of tea in his hooves, and he frowns down at it while Law eats his way through a bowl of curry over rice.
Law's not actually needed in the field hospital with all the major surgeries out of the way, and quite frankly he doesn't have the bedside manner to do routine exams even if Scan would make quick work of it. Besides, it's Marco's operation and the Phoenix has been downright chilly to him since they last talked, only warming up slightly when Law volunteered to take a shift in the exam room. Which he definitely did for no reason at all.
I think you're better with unconscious patients, Marco had said, with a smirk. Rest up in case someone needs emergency surgery.
Asshole.
"Phoenix-ya?" Law asks. Marco had spent most of his day with local doctors who had volunteered to train with them, in preparation to take over care of the people of Wano once Marco, Law, Miyagi and Chopper leave. They have to learn to use some brand new equipment to run tests, mix and synthesize and prescribe new medications, and get up to date on best practices. "He seems fine to me."
"I think he's having a harder time with losing Izou than he's letting anyone know, is all."
Law says nothing, being that that guy's mental and emotional state is really none of their business, but Chopper takes that as a cue to continue.
"He seemed really down this morning," he says, quietly, "and Cat had to be in the castle with Momo, so we just piled on top of him! I think it helped."
Bepo's confidence had given Law a significant amount of pull with the Minks. Their uncomplicated loyalty has always been one of Law's favorite things about them, the unabashed physical affection, their simple sense of unity. It doesn't surprise him then, that Marco's friendship with Nekomamushi and Inuarashi gave him not just community with the Minks, but status. That status doesn't seem to confer much beyond above-average amounts of minkship and garchu'ing, but a man from the notoriously familial Whitebeard Pirates would probably appreciate that.
"Oh," says Law.
He had awoken briefly in the early hours of the morning to what he'd thought was Bepo snuffling in his ear, but the memory's too hazy to pick apart at this point, and he'd gone right back to sleep. If that had, in fact, been Marco getting mobbed by furry little doctors, Law's almost sorry he missed it. No hint of it now in the older pirate as he walks a samurai to the exit, smiling gently as he explains what kind of aftercare the man should expect to do.
Chopper motions him over, and Marco joins them at the table with a sigh as he folds his legs under himself. "How many of them are actually going to follow instructions?" the reindeer asks, immediately draping himself over Marco's knee.
"In my experience, about a quarter?"
Chopper happily allows himself to be picked up and shifted into Marco's lap, his hat removed and a pair of hands immediately going to work scratching behind his ears, between his antlers, under his chin. "Are samurai better or worse patients than pirates?" he asks.
"I suppose we'll find out."
"I was hoping you would have some tips for increasing patient compliance," Chopper sighs, pushing his face more firmly into Marco's hand as it massages his cheeks, "but I guess we're in the same boat."
"If you get a little stronger," Marco says cheerfully as he replaces Chopper's hat, the young doctor now boneless in his arms, "you can increase compliance rates with force."
"Is that how you got so strong, Marco?"
"Part of it, I'm sure."
He's about to address Law when the sliding doors leading out of the field hospital slam open and a yakuza stumbles in. Marco shifts Chopper back to tatami gently (the gesture of a man who spends a lot of time around children and animals) and is on his feet in seconds.
"It's old man Hyogoro!" the yakuza shouts, looking over his shoulder as two more gangsters haul a little old man in on a stretcher. "He collapsed!"
Recognizing him, Marco points them to the operating room and follows them into the hall. "Why didn't we see him yesterday?" he snaps, already sterilizing his hands.
"He didn't come in for treatment!" one of Hyogoro's teary-eyed underlings explains. "We begged him to, but he said the others needed it more and he felt fine."
"He's a stubborn old man," says another, "but please, you have to help him!"
Marco, who must feel a sense of kinship with these gangsters who serve under a stubborn old man that keeps refusing medical care, sends them out of the backstage area and turns to Law. "Are you good to operate?"
"Ready."
"Chopper, if you could take over the exam room?"
"On it!"
Law summons a Room and runs his Scan on Hyogoro as soon as he enters the OR. The problem is immediately apparent to him. "His liver's shot to hell," Law says. "There aren't any viable organs left for transplant."
"Let me see," Marco says, and Law obligingly pops the old man's chest open.
"I know what I'm talking about," Law says, and he raises his brows when Marco's hand immediately combusts into blue flames. "Don't waste your energy. Any reasonable doctor would just close him back up and call it a day."
His mistake, Law supposes, is thinking that Marco's a reasonable doctor. Few pirates make reasonable doctors. "I'm not going to just let him die when there's something I can do," Marco says, making unhappy sounds while he digs around inside Hyogoro's chest cavity. It's bad in there, old traumas and new, extensive organ damage of many kinds even if the most pressing is his liver. "He's important to the samurai."
Law scoffs. "Why don't you just give him your liver while you're at it?"
Marco's hand comes to a slow stop, blue flames still eating away at some of the minor tears as he stares contemplatively into the cavity.
"Phoenix-ya," Law says, "I wasn't serious."
"But can you imagine," Marco breathes, looking up at him, "the things we could do together?"
"We should run a controlled experiment," Law says, rapidly developing a headache at the thought that he's the voice of reason in this scenario. It's usually other people staring at him in horror. "With something that won't kill you if it fails."
"Do we have time for that?"
Law massages his temples.
Marco, who had not twenty-four hours ago insisted on multiple redundancies for their patients, is now implying that he'd be fine leaping into this with absolutely no guarantee for his own safety. It's not surprising that he'd have a different standard for himself, being a mythical zoan fruit user who literally can't die, but.
"I suppose half of your liver will be a decent test subject," Law sighs. "Do you regenerate infinitely?"
"Not infinitely, but I can keep it up for a while." Marco takes off his shirt, leaving it folded on a stool nearby, and directs a few medics to bring in another operating table. "We're both still pretty worn out from the fight, though, and both of our abilities drain stamina."
"Let's have a signal for when either of us is at our limit." Better to call things off than pass out face-first into another man's chest cavity, Law figures. "As soon as someone gives it, we pause everything, close everyone back up, and take a break until we're ready to go again."
The Phoenix blinks a few times, smiling. "Like a safeword?"
Law realizes with some chagrin that he did, in fact, just describe a safeword. It's a good idea and Marco doesn't seem opposed to it, although he does look way too amused for Law's ego. "Yeah. Mine'll be 'bread'."
"Why bread?"
"Hate it."
"Oh." Marco cheerfully hops up into the newly-arrived operating table and lays himself down on it while the other medics retreat, looking apprehensive. "Then, mine's 'beans'!"
"They're a good source of fiber and protein," Law points out, setting up trays and basins to hold the various organs he's going to be working with. Levitating them out of the way takes a small but not negligible amount of power and he'd much rather not deal with that.
"I've got other sources of that," Marco says conversationally. It's a complete change from the serious, stern man he'd been on the other end of the knife. "What do you like, if you hate bread?"
Law ignores the question. "You two have different blood types," he says, "but if I strip your liver of any tissues that could set off a rejection, it won't be an issue."
"Oh, we're in business mode now?" Marco interlaces his fingers over his stomach, as relaxed as if he were sitting in a beach chair on some sunny resort island. "Remember you can't just cut it out, either. It'll get eaten up by my regeneration instantly. That's where your op-op powers come into play."
The hypothesis, as Marco had explained earlier, was that by making his liver compatible with Hyogoro, it would also isolate the organ enough from his regenerative abilities to not be consumed in the renewal. The example he'd used was that if his arm were torn off, the old one would burst into flames and his body would use those flames to reassemble it in its proper place. If that arm were completely obliterated, it would take a much higher concentration of energy to grow a new one.
"I'm only gonna ask you one more time," Law says. "You're sure about this?"
"You have my complete and informed consent," Marco tells him, much more solemnly than he has been up to this point, "to take half my liver and transplant it into the gentleman next to me."
Against all odds, that does put any doubts he had to rest. As a child, one of Law's many happy memories of his parents was his father overseeing his dissection of a frog and telling him in no uncertain terms that while animals can't give informed consent, the majority of people he'll someday operate on can and must. To do otherwise is to harm them, and as a doctor his creed must first and foremost be 'Do no harm'.
That didn't turn out to be the case, as most of the nonconsensual surgeries Law has performed with his devil fruit power were performed with intent to harm, but it was a good lesson.
Law cracks his knuckles. "It's going to hurt."
"I'll be alright. Go ahead, 'Surgeon of Death'." Marco's brows rise after a moment, and he blinks several times at the air pressure change inside Law's Room. "Are you sterilizing?" he asks, looking delighted at what doubtlessly feels like a tickle across his skin. He unlaces his fingers, and keeps his hands at his sides. "It's amazing, how much control you've got over this operating room."
"Standard procedure," Law mumbles. He picks up a scalpel and with a flick of his wrist, cuts a neat rectangle into the front of Marco's chest. It lifts-- skin, muscle, sternum and ribs, a layer of visceral fascia and all-- and moves to the steel basin on the table next to Marco's head. Law reaches right into the cavity, nudging Marco's stomach aside to find his liver. "How is it?" he asks, just a cursory question while he digs around inside the other man's guts.
"Barely feel it," Marco answers with an insolent grin, and the lung pressed up against Law's wrist spasms with his self-effacing laugh. "My internal organs have been rearranged much more violently than this before."
They had discussed the possibility of Law taking Marco's liver out and working on it externally, but the chance of the organ regenerating immediately was high and Marco claimed not to want to force Law to have to do the same procedure twice, or to have to regrow his own liver twice.
"Having trouble?" the older man asks when Law's been poking around for a while without pulling anything up. It's pretty hard to miss, especially with such an open surgical field, and he gives Law a look that plainly says, I hope you're not just bad at basic human anatomy, spoiled as you are with that devil fruit power.
"This is like something out of a textbook." Law pulls up a kidney, wet and shiny, and squeezes it a few times to test its firmness. He runs his fingers over the left side of Marco's lung and gently pries it up to glimpse the bronchi that lead into his trachea. Dips his hand between the lungs to scoop his fingers under the Phoenix's slow-beating heart and feel it contract in his palm. "No scar tissue, no growths, no aberrations. You shouldn't even have muscle growth with powers like that."
"I've found that being a little sore after exercise doesn't set off the flames but if I have to recover from some major damage, it'll wipe out any gains before I heal completely." Marco reaches up to tap his tattoo where it should be, but falters when he remembers that his ink is with the skin and muscle and cartilage of his chest in a basin on the table beside him, not in its usual place. He tips his head toward it instead, with an easy smile. "Doesn't affect fully-healed scar tissue, but I had seastone on for weeks to make sure that one stuck around."
Law's hand squelches around inside his chest cavity a few more times, cupping around each organ before pulling away as if familiarizing himself with the topography. Spleen. Pancreas. A few coils of small intestine, like links of sausage. "That phoenix fruit is really something," he murmurs.
"It must be a little boring for a surgeon of your caliber, though." There's a sarcastic undertone to Marco's voice that Law finds he likes more than that gentle Doctor Voice he'd been subjected to earlier. He supposes now that he's intimately acquainted with the Phoenix's internal anatomy, there's no reason for any professional distance. "Idiosyncrasies are always the most interesting part of a body."
"Boring to operate on," Law agrees, "but cool to see."
"Feel free to poke around some more later," Marco offers before Law can even voice the request (not that he would). "We've got some work to do."
"You're a crazy bastard," Law says decisively, looking over his shoulder as Chopper returns to the operating room. He's in his human form, the tall one that allows him to see over the top of the table. The reindeer cringes a bit at the sight of Marco opened up and awake on the table, but steps in for a closer look after he's adjusted. "You don't even know me," Law says, "but you're letting me cut you open and take your organs."
"I'm in better shape than you are at the moment," Marco points out with just a hint of a challenge in his expression, "so I can put a stop to it at any time if I wanted to, even without our contingencies in place."
He doesn't even know what would happen if he forcefully shut down Law's Room with haki. For all Marco knows, it would just leave him with most of his torso in a tub, and then where would he be?
Well. Regenerating, probably.
"That's a bold claim, Phoenix-ya."
"And the Minks seem to like you."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"They're excellent judges of character," Marco says lightly, "for the most part."
Law would trust Bepo with his life, but he also wouldn't consider his judgments of character particularly astute. The bear had chosen to sail with a captain like him, after all. "That's a bit of an over-generalization," he argues.
"I'm also biased," Marco laughs, "since they like me."
"That's a beautiful liver," Chopper says, one hand rubbing soothingly on Marco's shoulder as Law finally gets the operation underway. Marco definitely doesn't need it, extraordinarily mellow for how Law lifts the organ out of his body, but he allows it for Chopper's comfort. The two of them watch intently as Law wraps the two right lobes inside a bubble of his Mes, leaving it attached but suspended, cut off from the circulatory system.
"Thank you," Marco quips, smiling warmly at Chopper as the young reindeer turns a concerned look on him. "I don't get complimented on my internal organs very often."
Law pushes all the blood out of the vessels of the liver first, leaving it pale and a little deflated. There's a creak from the operating table, where Marco's clenched his fingers around the edge of the steel slab, knuckles white.
Chopper notices too, of course, and he gently pats Marco on the top of his head. "Marco, are you sure you're doing okay?"
"Y-yeah, it's f-ahh-ine." Marco's legs shift, just enough to brace his heels against the surface of the table and breathe deep. "Just feels a little weird."
"Most people would be passing out from the pain right now," Law comments. He turns over the lobes twice more, ignoring Marco's stuttering breaths, the sweat dripping off his chin and the tip of his nose as he strips lipids, soluble proteins, sugars and any other tissue from it that could be considered 'Marco', that its new owner's body might reject.
The liver grows paler and lighter with each pass, until eventually only the near-translucent protein scaffolding is left.
"Marco?" Chopper asks again, checking in with the other doctor as he lies shaking on the table.
"The liver d-doesn't actually have nerve endings," Marco says. "And my tolerance is a little higher than average anyway. He's just pulling at the lining."
"You're experiencing severe tachycardia," Chopper tells him, three fingers pressed to the pulse point on his neck.
"He'll let me know if we need to stop," Law says nonchalantly, peeling away all the genetic material remaining on the delicate white scaffold. Then, with a flick of his scalpel, he severs the lobe. Law pulls back just in time to see blue flames erupt from Marco's chest cavity, and the Phoenix groan as his liver regenerates gradually, like a slow-burning ember. The ghostly matrix of decellularized protein in Law's hand remains, three sets of eyes locked on it.
"Did that," Chopper says, quietly, in awe, "work?"
"Unbelievable," Marco laughs breathlessly. "I think it did."
Reaching into Hyogoro's ruined liver, Law moves as much tissue and genetic material onto the scaffold as he can without killing the old man. It's not quite enough to inculcate the new organ, so he takes it to Marco instead.
"You said you can accelerate natural healing," Law says.
Cupping his hand under Law's knuckles, Marco lets the flames flicker across his palm, crawl up between the gaps of Law's fingers and engulf the lobe. "There we go," he says after nearly a minute, during which his hand has begun to shake again, but when he pulls away the organ is a healthy, ferric red.
Law secures the lobe in its new home, connecting veins and arteries, pulling its fascia back into place. He retracts the op-op power slowly, watching for leaks as blood floods into the network of vessels and then moves along. A Scan tells him that at least for the moment, Hyogoro's got a perfectly functional liver.
He smiles, pain and exhaustion forgotten for a moment.
Just a moment, though.
"You should take a look at his kidneys too," Marco quips, his voice much more even now that Law isn't effectively killing half of his liver, "I think he's on the verge of renal failure."
"That's just old age," Law says, about to sterilize his tools and close up both men. He'd unofficially agreed to help treat wounds from the raid, after all, not to become an entire country's on-call surgeon. Besides, as tiring as it is to obtain scaffolding out of an organ, the toll it takes on Marco, his other patient and a fellow doctor, is hard to overstate. "I'm not giving him your kidneys," he says.
Marco makes a disappointed sound. "Not even one?"
"Do you--" Law sputters, "do you want to give him one?"
"Marco," Chopper says, dismayed.
"It'd defeat the purpose if he got a liver and then keeled over a week later from kidney failure, don't you think?" Marco dips his own hand into his chest cavity before Chopper can stop him, biting his lip as he locates a kidney and pulls it into the light. He looks happy about it, like he's been dying to get his hands in there himself since the surgery started. "Besides, look how pretty it is."
Law pinches the bridge of his nose. "Do you want me to take a kidney."
The Phoenix gives him a grin, nothing but audacity. Don't you want to see, it says, how far we can take this? "Please."
"You owe me a drink for this," Law growls back, trying his very best not to look excited. Hell yes I do.
Later, once Hyogoro and Marco have both been closed up, the old man in recovery and the doctors fully dressed back in the break room, Law eyes the massive plate of food in front of him. Chopper had gone to find Sanji while he wrapped up the surgery, and apparently given him the memo on what they had been doing. The cook had subsequently decided to make an iron-rich meal for Marco, and a ton of carbohydrates for Law.
"Do you think it's thoughtfulness," Marco comments, popping a morsel of braised chicken liver into his mouth, "or irony?"
Law has honestly had enough of smelling blood and touching internal organs for the day, and silently thanks Black Leg for not including any offal on his plate. "Both," he says, spinning his fork around a bite of seafood pasta. Then, "You wanted to debrief, right?"
"I did!" Whatever awkwardness Law had caused earlier that day by being kind of an asshole is entirely forgotten now, and Marco is pleasant company. "You're sure rejection won't be a risk?"
"Nothing's a hundred percent, but I'm as close to sure as I can be."
"Incredible. You could have an entire catalogue of organs stored up this way, if you had a big enough freezer." Marco crams a forkful of spinach into his mouth, then spends a few painstaking seconds trying to get all the bits of it out of his teeth before speaking again. "Having to maintain that Room might be a bit of an issue, though."
Law stops eating.
Whether through careful observation or the Whitebeard Pirates' intelligence network, Marco seems to have a basic grasp on his abilities. It would be dangerous to reveal more, but Law swallows his mouthful of food, and takes a big gulp of tea to wash it down. Somehow, he doesn't think Marco's interested in using it against him. "Shouldn't be a problem," he says, "now that I've awakened the op-op fruit."
He decides not to mention the room he's already designated for it on the Polar Tang, but the look Marco trains on him is halfway between disturbed and admiring anyway, as if he just knows. "Trafalgar Law," he says, voice low and rough, "you're miles ahead of me, aren't you?"
"It's just an idea," Law demurs, "for now." Looking at the other man from beneath the brim of his hat Law gives him a wild, conspiratorial grin. "You want to contribute?"
"It would be my pleasure."