Work Text:
He knew it was her before she’d even knocked. Footsteps almost silent, calculated, but the shadows under his door would never go unnoticed, the one thing she couldn’t control. He’d been home for a while, for once, waiting up for her in agitation, usually something he was too tired to have the energy for. Tonight, the low lighting in his apartment flickered in rhythm with his anxiety, scenarios in his head worsening as each minute ticked by.
His extensive first aid box sat on the kitchen island, it’s presence heavy in his peripheral as he heard her struggle with the lock on the other side of the door for longer than usual. She was usually so slick, clean, silent, no one ever saw her coming, least of all Law. He couldn’t see anyone remotely like her hurtling into his life from a mile away.
And yet here she was, finally falling through his front door, face relaxed but body poised for a fight until she registered the body watching her from the kitchen to be his. Shoulders slumped, she locked the door behind her in record time, laptop and files and camera balanced in one arm as she ambled over to the island, spilling the contents in her arms across the marble top like guts.
“You hurt?” Slipped from his tongue by way of greeting, eyes looking everywhere but at her face, assessing, taking in her stance, if she was favouring a leg, if her hands were hovering over anything. She brushed him off with a smile that said, ‘I’m fine’, but Law knew she lied more often than she told the truth.
Tonight, though, she pleasantly surprised him. “Only a little. Big guy clocked me on the chin when I was booking it out the door towards my car, but Zoro took care of him.” She admitted, somehow sensing it was easier to show him she was more or less okay than lying and claiming she’d made it out without a scratch. He was on her in a second, hands tilting her face towards the nearest light, thumb brushing so, so lightly over the bruise shadowing the bone of her jaw just beneath her chin.
Law’s eyes flickered in concern at first, but melted away to a tenderness when he cupped her face in his hand, cradling this dangerous little slice of his life that felt so separate, so utterly detached from the rest of it that it felt like a daydream. Or a nightmare. Depended on the state she was in every time she showed up on his doorstep like a stray cat.
“Zoro, huh?” Law mused, tonguing the inside of his cheek as he looked down at her, mischief glittering in his eyes that reflected her own. “He couldn’t have ‘taken care of him’ a little earlier?”
“If he’d left it any later, we’d probably be spending the night in your ER instead of your bed, so be grateful for that” She hummed in reprimand, eyes glancing around his open apartment as she spoke. “No work tonight?”
Law was too focussed on the fact she was talking about his bed to be paying attention properly. When he acknowledged that she’d noticed the absence of his work shoes and bag kicked off by the door, no scrub shirt tossed into a corner anywhere, he nodded too late, actively avoiding the smirk on her face. “Nah. Got let off early, been home since four.”
“And I’m guessing you’ve spent all that time sat around worrying about little old me?” She teased, poking his side as he hissed, letting her shoulder past him to pour herself a glass of water.
“How am I expected to sit around and worry when I don’t even have your phone number, and therefore have no idea of your comings and goings in and out of my life?”
“You don’t have my phone number because I don’t have a phone, and before you bring up the brick in my back pocket that I use for work, it’s for just that, work. And you-” She downed her water and sidled up to where he was leaning against the counter, caging him between her arms and pinning him with her eyes. Despite the height difference, Law swallowed. “-You, are not work.”
“I think first responder to all your injuries you refuse to go to the hospital for counts me in as at least a colleague” He retorted, putting all his energy into not getting drawn into those eyes that didn’t tear from his face once. A short laugh just below his chin had him looking anyway.
“You asking to be paid?”
“Oh, that’s the last thing I’m asking for.”
“What, then?”
Law stilled for a moment, letting her sit in his quiet. Slowly, he leant forward, lips brushing the shell of her ear and talking in that low voice she seemed to like so much. She knew exactly what was coming, but Law felt her tense in excited anticipation anyway.
“I want you in my bed, writhing underneath me, pulled apart bit by bit, until your nothing but nerve endings and pleasure.” He all but whispered, loud in the otherwise silent apartment. The words were bold, bolder than what he was used to, but the hitch in her breath told him it had been the right move.
Carefully, she took a step back, and Law watched like he did every week as she unsheathed about thirteen different weapons from her body that he would’ve never guessed in a million years were there, eyes not breaking from his once. A final knife was flipped up from the inside of her boot, caught in one hand, and tossed onto the counter with a clatter.
And then she was on him.
Launching at him like a missile, legs wrapping around his waist with practiced ease, hands tangling and pulling in hair as lips collided like a punch, Law taking the impact of it all with unmoving grace, a concrete wall to her sledgehammer as he softened the kiss she was searing into him. He let her get it out of her system, the adrenaline of whatever death mission she’d been on that evening that she couldn’t tell him about being pushed out of her pores with every kiss, every tug, every scratch she made against him.
When Law felt her loosening in his hold, he sucked her bottom lip between his teeth, signalling ‘enough’ as he began walking them to his bedroom. He let her bite her way down his neck, stifling his groans right up until she sunk her fangs into his collarbone, and he threw her (gently) onto the mattress, descending on her like a starved man a breath later.
She shrieked, laughing and sighing and squirming under him as he repeated her actions onto herself, sucking and nipping at her jaw and neck until the skin his teeth grazed over and over began turning red, then darker shades of lust-fuelled bruises. Her top was practically shedded, her boots and socks kicked off and sent flying to hit something of his on the other side of the room. Law pulled back for a moment, studying her breathless, already twitching form beneath him, one of his hands splayed on her stomach, his thumb ghosting over a scar just below her ribs. He looked up from it, met her hungry eyes, and knew what was needed of him next.
Carefully, he lowered his head to that spot just below her ribs, eyes not leaving hers as he pressed a tender, graze of a kiss to the neat scar. His scar, his hard work. Another in the shape of a starburst just below her diaphragm, small but deadly, another kiss pressed there, for longer. He hadn’t slept for a week after digging that bullet out of her on his kitchen table, unable to stop her as she’d waltzed out of his apartment less than 24 hours after she’d entered it, bleeding all over his doormat and falling into his arms in a way he very much didn’t want.
This attention to detail was making her whimper, tugging at his hair to convince herself she was pulling him up to her, not that he was just kissing his way up her body, kissing every line of raised skin that marked her as wrong. She had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying when he kissed each of the three, neat lines, at her wrist, holding her arm so gently, like his tenderness could wash away all the years of blood she’d shed, her own and others.
He reached her collarbone, kissing along the line that marked where it had snapped in two, kissed her right shoulder and its litany of burn scars, swept her hair aside and kissed the still-angry scar just past her ear, half hidden in her scalp. Finally, finally, he reached her lips again, kissing softer than they had been before, like her lips were the gateway to her very soul, and he was kissing the scars littered across that, too.
“That was romantic, for you” She huffed, voice airier than she was aiming for, more breathless as her cheeks warmed. He grinned, knowing she’d loved every second of it, and turned his kisses bruising again.
“Would you have rather I flip you over, bury your head in a pillow and fuck you stupid?” He questioned, raising an eyebrow that pulled up the corresponding corner of his lip in a sly smirk. “Because that can be easily arranged. Although I know that’s not your style, as much as you’d like to pretend it is.”
She was wheezing now, peeling apart under his gaze, under his body, just like he’d wanted. He studied her like she was another subject on his operating table, all too eager to start prying her open. She felt a little sorry for his patients.
“Nah, you like it slow.” He murmured right up against her lips, his breaths as ragged as hers now, anticipating what they were about to do to each other, with each other. “Deep, hard, yes. But slow, agonisingly so. And I’m all too happy to provide.”
His words had turned more into kisses the more he spoke, and by the time he was done his tongue was halfway down her throat, stroking and splitting her open for him so easily. She moaned, muffled by his mouth but loud, until he broke away, and began kissing his way down her body again, hand snaking behind her back and pinging off her bra as he went. A tongue danced over each nipple, his first stop. A hand reached down to cup her heat, pressing barely enough pressure for her to arch into it, teeth grazing the sensitive buds in his mouth before he released her, and started the whole process again. He reached her stomach: kiss, kiss, bite. Her hips, the same treatment, teeth grazing against bone harder making her weep.
And then he was right where they both wanted him to be. Breath caressing her whilst his fingers caressed her inner thighs, up and down, up and down. She squirmed a little impatiently, only to be happily pinned down at the waist by a forearm.
“Law-”
God, when she said his name. He retorted with a groan, sinking his teeth into the pillowed flesh of her thigh, barely enough to leave a mark, but she shrieked, nonetheless.
“Law-”
“Keep saying my name like that and we’ll get nowhere” Law all but growled, nosing at her, making her twitch, just before trapping the edge of the lacy thing she was wearing between his teeth and dragging it down, down, down, off. She shivered when his goatee scratched lightly right beside where she actually needed him and had the audacity to giggle when the sensation became too much. Hearing the bubbly noise at the other end of the bed, Law lifted his head indignantly, frowning at her in that way that just made her laugh harder.
“Something funny?” He snarked, dragging her hips further down the bed in protest, which she only smiled at.
“No, no, it’s your goatee-it, it tickles” She hummed, still looking at him with a too-fond look on her face.
“Huh” Law shrugged as if to say, ‘too bad’, and before she could react, he dove his head down and fused his tongue to her with a slow, hot, lick.
Fuck.
She thought she’s said that in her head, but Law’s pleased huff of a laugh right before he pulsed his tongue against her harder had her thinking otherwise, toes curling as her legs ended up over his broad shoulders.
She started clawing at his shirt, and Law managed to drag himself away for long enough just to tear it off, before he was buried between her legs again, growling at the way her nails now clawed at his bare skin. His apartment was quiet other than when she visited, and now the walls were bouncing her deep, loud moans around the space like an echo. His poor neighbours.
Another couple seconds of this and she knew she’d be coming, and hard at that. Just when Law started insistently thrumming his tongue against her and her toes began curling, she poured all her free will into dragging him by his hair away from her legs and up to her lips again, silencing the protest with a kiss, long and promising.
“Wanna do it together, with you” She murmured against his lips, both of them breathless for different reasons. He was groaning into her mouth, panting and keening as his hands squeezed and rubbed everywhere over and over. “That okay?”
“More than okay sweetheart” Law murmured, a hand reaching down to grab himself, and she tried not to cry over the pet name, the way he said it so casually telling her she was about to get taken care of very well. And that was just what she needed right now: care. In its most tender form. “C’mere.”
He nudged her legs further apart with his body, making room for himself in her space as she laid back against the pillows, a hand idly tracing across his chest tattoos as he nudged at her entrance. He lowered himself down as he sunk in, but by the time he was halfway in he was being dragged by her hands clinging to his shoulders, a sort of un-human sound ripping from her throat quietly as her eyes watered, whether from pain or pleasure, Law wasn’t sure.
“You’re alright” Whispered against her lips, eyes inches from her own and open, studying her, wanting to know he was what she wanted right now, really. The crease between her eyebrows wasn’t telling him anything. “Right?”
“Yeah, yeah, just-” She winced then immediately moaned when he shifted, chest pressing up against his in an arch. “Just start moving, please.”
That was all he needed. Slow, deep strokes, gaining in force, kissing her soft insides so sweetly that she was trembling within a minute. He wasn’t much better off, groaning and grinding against her like a desperate thing, holding her as if that will convince her to stay this time, to throw it all away for him. To choose a life with him, where she’d be safe, and all his, and happy. The faraway fantasy only brought him closer to coming.
Less words and more noises were exhaled into the damp air above the bed, creating a mist of lust and longing and desperation as she came first, and he followed quickly after, hips softening their movements against hers but wringing out every last drop of her pleasure. He didn’t pull out straightaway, just stayed propped on top of her as she breathed hard, every clench around him testing his resolve.
“Is it bad if I say out loud that that’s just what I needed?” She mused, smiling breathlessly up at him as he cocked a brow, leaning his head to wipe sweat off his brow onto his shoulder.
“Nah, that’s what I’m here for, amongst other things” He reminded her, pressing a distracting kiss to her hairline before sliding out of her and rolling onto his side. She made a fuss, wincing and tucking herself up against his side, soft legs rubbing against his like a sated grasshopper. He looked down, surprised that she wasn’t slipping off to shower, eat his food, then leave like usual. He approached the topic gingerly. “All tired out?”
She grunted, barely nudging his leg with hers. Her eyes were fluttering, head resting heavily on his chest, and Law realised he’d never seen her like this. Never seen her give herself up to him, let herself feel safe enough to do so.
It was a start, in Law’s books.
“Come on, let me clean you up” He prompted carefully, not wanting to scare off this stray fox curled up in his lap. But she just nodded, humming gratefully when he lifted and carried her to the bathroom, held her up in the shower, looped an arm round her waist whilst they brushed their teeth. It all felt so easy to him, like it was meant to happen from the beginning, forever. He wondered if she felt the same as she spat in the sink and asked to use his floss.
Back on the bed, she was mumbling incoherently now, like his patients right before they succumb to the anaesthesia. Patient with this kind of thing and fighting off his own tiredness, Law let her ramble against his chest, nodding at intervals and drawing lazy circles on her back in an attempt to put her under.
“You’re so comfy, like a stale marshmallow – kind of hard but still soft too you know?” She said, drooling against his stale marshmallow pec. Law hummed, letting her ramble on. She was quiet for a second before sighing happily, squeezing his side. “I wish you were my day job.”
Law frowned, eyes sliding down to look at the top of her head. “I think the big guy from earlier hit you harder than you thought, this is a concussion talking.” He said lightly, absently feeling across the back of her head for a bump.
“Nah, nah, he didn’t, I’m strong” She waved him off, arm flailing and almost smacking him in the face in the process. Fell quiet again, Law convinced the concussion had taken her at last. Until: “Wish I didn’t have to be though.”
“Hmm?”
“Strong”
“You wish you didn’t have to be strong?”
“Yeah”
“…You don’t. You have me.”
“Law, you don’t even have my phone number.”
“But I’ve stitched you up more times than you can count on one hand. That’s got to count for something.”
“You’re my unpaid, personal trauma surgeon.”
“You pay me with kisses”
“I kiss you because I want to not because I owe you.”
“Well, that’s a relief”, Law huffed, kissing the top of her head again before settling further into the pillows. “Shut those pretty eyes, no doubt you have to leave me at a ridiculous hour tomorrow.”
“Wish I didn’t-” She was out before she could finish the sentence. Law wasn’t sure if she was talking about leaving him or still needing to be strong, but she was too unconscious for further questioning and Law was shortly out like a light himself.
Until three hours later, when his bladder woke him up and he found her not on his chest, on her side of the bed for once, staring at the wall behind him. Eyes round and haunted, like she was seeing nothing at all and everything all at once. She’d gotten like this before.
He shifted so she knew he was awake, and her brilliant eyes fixed on him instead.
“I’m gonna go pee” he said tiredly, already halfway out of bed. “And when I’m back, you can tell me all about it.”
She nodded, but by the time he came back her eyes and position still hadn’t moved an inch. Despite her stiff form, she let him pull her against his chest, giving her the decency of hiding her face as she took a deep breath, pulling herself back into the present. She didn’t say anything for a long, long while.
A nervous swallow. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
Law braced himself, adjusting his grip to be more grounding. “Which part?”
“Any of it. I hate it, and I hate lying to myself that I enjoy it even more.”
“Why do you want to stop now, after doing it for so long?”
“I can’t kill anyone else.”
“You don’t kill people-”
“I’m the reason they die though.”
“They’re bad people-”
“But they’re still people!” She cut him off with a raised whisper, lifting her head to look at him. He was shocked to see tears rimming her waterline.
He was quiet, letting her sift through her thoughts.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing” She murmured, like a confession in church.
“No one does”
“You’re a surgical attending at the best hospital in the city”
“And you think I know what I’m doing?”
“You’re an exception, I think. Not fair” She huffed, kissing his chest to show she didn’t really mean it. “I never call my mum anymore. She doesn’t know what I do, and she’s too proud of what she thinks I do that I can’t tell her otherwise; it’d kill her. I tell myself I don’t ring her because if an enemy’s listening in on my calls, then they can use her against me, my own mum. I can’t do that to her. But half the time I don’t call her because I’m afraid of disappointing her.”
“You could never disappoint her”
“The fact that she acts so proud of me makes it worse, the lying. I’m a fraud, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t think I ever will until it’s too late.”
Law stayed quiet; he knew there was more to come.
“I hate getting hurt too. I hate having to force you to patch me up, knowing how much it stresses you out.”
“You could never force me to do anything.”
“But you could never turn me away either, could you?”
“…No, I couldn’t”
“Then you’re just another person I’m hurting”
“Then stay, in the morning. Don’t go and do something that puts you in so much danger every day.”
She seemed to consider this, even if just for a second.
“But what would I do? For work?”
“You wouldn’t need to, for a little while. I can support us both.”
“No, Law, I need a purpose-”
“Then go get a job at the café down the street. Something inconspicuous, to keep you out of trouble. Write that book you’ve been wanting to start for so long”
“When did I tell you about that?”
“Dislocated shoulder. To be fair, you were high on nitrous at the time.”
“I hate that stuff.”
“I know, but I don’t like you being in pain.”
She made a small noise of affection at that, nosing his chest. She was quiet again for a long time, Law almost convinced she’d fallen asleep.
“They might come for me if I don’t go back without any reason. That puts you in danger.”
“Tell Zoro to tell them.”
“I can only rely on Zoro for killing people.”
“You don’t give him enough credit.”
“Maybe” She hummed, leg caressing his again. “You wouldn’t mind if I stayed?” Asked quietly, almost childlike.
“Not in the slightest”
“And how is that?”
“Because I love you, silly girl.”
She was beaming up at him now, like she’d been waiting to hear those words for the longest time.
“Well then, I guess I’ll have to stay a little longer, won’t I?”
“I guess so” Law hummed, meeting her lips in a long kiss as she drifted off against him again, and Law could only wish she was being serious. They’d had this conversation too many times before. It was always forgotten by morning.