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Neither Law nor Zoro were the kind to indulge in the afterglow all too often. Law always has something to do; Zoro’s post-coital activity of choice flips between drinking and sleeping on the daily. For once, though, while his breathing returns to a normal rate and the beats-per-minute of his heart drops, Law allows himself to stay pressed up against Zoro’s side on the bedroll as he thinks.
His eyes narrow for a moment. He turns his head to look at Zoro’s jaw, and a hand traces slow up Zoro’s thigh to curve over his hip, and the other man opens his eye to a slit questioningly.
“You know, the tendon in your hip probably keeps catching because of scar tissue,” he says, thumb pressing into Zoro’s hip where he can feel the tendon in question and the slight irregularity that suggests scar tissue. “You probably tore it at some point and it healed incorrectly. …I could fix that, if you want.” His voice is still a little low, a little raspy.
Zoro snorts, and then his face cracks into a grin as he starts laughing. It's deep, and just a touch breathless. Fond, too. Law presses his teeth together infinitesimally tighter against the unsteadiness it knocks into him. “You are so fuckin’ weird,” Zoro says, turning towards him a little more without dislodging Law’s hand. One well-muscled arm comes up to tuck underneath Law’s head. “I’ll be honest with you, I hadn't even noticed.”
Law's eyebrows furrow. “You hadn’t noticed, ” he replies. Insane. He can feel the knot of scar tissue through the other's skin - how in the hell had he not noticed?
“Nope. Doesn't really register, I guess. Not really the same caliber of thing I tend to notice.” This man is insane, Law thinks for what feels like the thousandth time.
“That's insane,” he says in return. “Most people would be limiting their walking time with that kind of injury, you know. I can't imagine how much other shit is adhered or scarred or otherwise injured in your body. …Actually, the problem is that I can imagine it.” He mumbles the last part under his breath.
“I guess. Not gonna lie, Torao, this is some fucked-up bedroom talk. Were you thinkin’ about all my organs and shit while we were fucking, or did this just occur to you?” Zoro’s still grinning. Law flushes, just a little.
“I was admittedly pretty thoroughly distracted, but it did occur to me. I could feel your hip catching, apparently better than you could.” He rolls his eyes, presses his thumb against that little knot of tissue again, and watches as the edges of Zoro’s eyes twitch together just a bit. So it does hurt. You just don't think about it.
“You think about all my internal shit often, doc?” It's teasing. He clearly isn't expecting an honest answer.
“ Yes. Luffy is another matter, his body isn't - I mean, I doubt there's much physically wrong with him, apart from the obvious. But I would like nothing more than to open you up and clean out all the scar tissue in you, maybe make adjustments back to a healthy morphology.” An eyebrow raises. He feels like he's issuing a challenge.
Zoro is quiet for a moment. His eye, dark grey and easy to get a little more than lost in, meets Law’s. He can see the exact moment Zoro accepts that challenge by the way his lower eyelid squints up infinitesimally. “Sure,” he says, and Law is left floundering.
“Wh - sure? ” That… was not a request Law thought Zoro would agree to.
“Yeah, sure. You know what you're doing, right? I don't mind the idea of you getting your fingers up in my organs.” This is accompanied by a smirk bordering on a leer. “Besides, practically, if it'll make me more efficient, I'd have to be stupid to tell you no. Should probably wait ‘til Luff’s around to do it, though. He'll probably wanna watch.”
Law is stunned into silence for a moment. It's a feeling he's become used to experiencing, with Zoro and Luffy. When he replies, it’s hesitant. “...You're sure.”
“ Yeah. Did I stutter?”
“…Alright. Fine.” And so, as Zoro pulls himself out of the bedroll and Law sits up and stretches his shoulders out, he starts planning.
He'd be lying if he said the prospect wasn't a little exciting.
—
It’s a few more days before it happens, but it does happen.
After dinner, as soon as Luffy’s returned to camp, all three of them pile into Law’s tent, and he lays a fresh linen sheet down before Zoro can tell him he’s changed his mind. From all appearances, he hasn’t. Zoro strips down leisurely, and Luffy sits cross-legged, just off the side of the sheet at Law’s impatient hand-wave.
“Soooo… you’re just cuttin’ him open for fun?” Luffy asks, eyes as clear and bright as ever as they gaze up at Law. He takes his hat off, setting it aside, and rolls his sleeves up.
“It isn’t for fun. He just agreed to let me clean up the mess his insides are in.” Zoro snorts, pulling off his haramaki and tossing it haphazardly into the corner of Law’s tent, along with his yukata. Law keeps his eyes on his preparations.
“He’s neurotic, I dunno what you expected.” Zoro strips out of his pants next as Law pulls his kit out. “I shoulda known he’d be fucking with my organs at the first opportunity.”
“I’m actually more worried about your tendons than your organs,” Law deadpans back, unrolling his surgical kit. He’s going for that hip tendon first, he thinks. After he scans him and figures out what all is actually wrong with him. Considering that for everything Law knows about the Straw Hats, they didn’t have a doctor on their crew until they were already five strong, and Zoro was a lone bounty hunter before that, he presumes that the man hadn’t had proper medical treatment since he was a child before Chopper showed up. And Chopper may be a doctor, but he’s no surgeon.
“Lay down,” Law says.
“Aye, doc.” Zoro gives him a mock salute, stripped down to nothing now, and lays himself down on the linen. Luffy scoots a little further in for a better view, and Law has to shoot him a glare to keep him a respectable six inches away from Zoro.
Law murmurs “ Room, ” and his familiar blue bubble expands from his hand, no further than the edges of the tent. He holds his arm up in front of him, mimicking how he holds Kikoku in a more combat-oriented situation, and murmurs “ Scan.” What he’s looking for, first, is scar tissue. He ignores Luffy’s scars that show up on his scan, focused on Zoro’s supine body in front of him. He ignores the network of scars on the outside of Zoro’s body, as well. He doubts the swordsman would want him to take those away, although he could. Instead, he looks deeper, and finds, to his distinct lack of surprise, a number of scar-tissue-laden tendons, organs threatening adherence under scar tissue in the skin, and scar tissue laced through thickly-built muscles. The fact that he’s still able to move as well as he does…
He lets the scan end, wetting his lips and holding one hand up with his fingers positioned in a half-circle. “ Sterile. ” A circle of softly-glowing blue light opens between his fingers. He sweeps it carefully around each of his tools, over Zoro’s abdomen a couple of times, and then up his left arm, as if putting on a glove; then he swaps the hand that it’s in and sweeps it up his right arm the same way. He dismisses it with a wave. “Don’t touch him unless I say so,” he says, looking up at Luffy. He waits until Luffy nods, and then he takes a deep breath, reaches for a scalpel, and rests his hands on Zoro’s skin.
It’s different, like this. Of course it is; he knew it would be. It’s the same in some ways, too. He’s used to feeling Zoro’s skin beneath his fingers, but not with the expectation of splitting it open. This isn’t a standard operation, either, though, which leaves him a little off-balance emotionally, but he keeps his hands as steady as always, smoothing his fingers over Zoro’s stomach and sliding them down to the hip that’s been bothering Law. Zoro pulls in a breath, and Law can feel his rectus abdominis muscles tense under his fingertips. The hip in question still has that knot of scar tissue, of course. He pictures removing it, and then he puts a moment of thought into his scalpel to keep from triggering his patient’s nociceptors before sinking it carefully into Zoro’s skin just below the curve of his iliac crest. He didn’t numb it completely, just removed the pain receptors from the equation; Zoro still makes a strange little sound at the pressure in an unfamiliar place, his hands twitch at his sides, and Law keeps going.
Luffy leans in, showing a surprising amount of restraint by keeping himself far enough away from Law that he doesn’t have to worry about knocking their heads together. His eyes are wide and clear, and fascinated, as Law carefully peels the skin back from the muscle and tendon in question in a neat triangle shape. “The scar tissue here is on the tendon that connects your sartorius to your iliac spine,” he murmurs, ever so gently sliding his scalpel underneath the very top end of the man’s sartorius muscle to free it from the muscle below. “I’m guessing it went through a partial tear once and the scar tissue stuck around because you kept tearing it instead of letting it heal fully.”
Luffy snickers. “That sure sounds like Zoro.” The man in question grunts out a vaguely irritated noise, but he doesn’t move. Good. He’s taking this seriously. Something strange worms its way into Law’s stomach. He very pointedly ignores it, instead following the scalpel under the muscle with his finger to hold it up at the right angle.
He severs the tendon slowly, carefully, following the ragged edges of the original tear and keeping the pain deadened in the nerves along the way. When he takes his scalpel to the tendon to prise away the scar tissue, he does it lovingly. He’s always wondered a bit at how craftsmen feel, if a skilled whittler would relate to how he feels now, scraping away what doesn’t belong and leaving the most perfect version of the tendon between his fingers. His fruit keeps any possible associated blood firmly within his patient’s vessels, but the interstitial fluid between all of his muscle cells still coats his fingers.
Once he’s set the small mass of scar tissue aside in a neat little pile, he very carefully lays the top edge of the tendon down where it belongs. He smooths Zoro’s sartorius down again, sealing the connective tissue he’d severed back together along the way, and when he reconnects the torn edges, they meld together perfectly. It’s intensely satisfying. He smooths the triangular flap of skin down, too, carefully erasing any evidence that it had ever been broken.
When he looks up, Zoro isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at his hip, instead, where he’d made the incision, eyelid halfway lowered, skin a little flushed. Law can practically feel the blood suffusing his capillaries. It makes him momentarily lightheaded. “Lift this leg for me. Tell me how the hip feels.”
Zoro does as told without comment, for once. Law knows what he’s going to say before he says it. “...Smoother. Less resistance.” Then Zoro barks a breathless laugh. “You really fuckin’ know what you’re doing, huh.”
“Thanks for noticing,” Law intones dryly. Luffy laughs again, eyes still bright.
“That was so cool, Torao.” Of course Luffy thinks it’s cool. He won’t turn the compliment down, though. Having his skill acknowledged in real, actual surgery, not just surgery-themed combat, is always satisfying.
“I try.” Back to work. His fingers trace down the inside of Zoro’s thigh, now, following his gracilis muscle all the way to his knee to the sound of another sharp intake of breath from his patient.
And so the night goes. He clears scar tissue from Zoro’s right anterior cruciate ligament after carefully separating his knee joint, puts it all back together with meticulous fingers. Zoro outright gasps when he sinks his scalpel into his chest and opens him up all the way down his linea alba, cleaning out scar tissue from the muscles and tendons in his external obliques and latissimus dorsi. He carves away the adhesions that formed between his skin and most of the muscles underneath along the underside of his long chest scar, the one he now knows was Dracule Mihawk’s doing. He pauses, here, glancing up at Zoro for confirmation. The man looks at him long, and hard, and he nods, and Law continues to filet out the long-lived scar tissue within those muscles that Mihawk had sliced through. It is, admittedly, surreal to meet Zoro’s eyes over the top of his flayed-open chest and abdomen. Law thinks he’ll remember that image for the rest of his life.
Law frees Zoro of more than a fistful of scar tissue, slowly and meticulously. His hands are covered in interstitial fluid. And while he can feel this expenditure of his fruit’s power beginning to press ever-so-slightly at his shoulders, he doesn’t acknowledge it; he’s entranced by the way Zoro’s muscles and tendons seem to want to give up all of the tissue that’s been making them catch and strain unduly when he takes his scalpel to them. If he were inclined to call himself an artist, Law would claim Zoro’s repaired musculature as his masterpiece.
Luffy hasn’t sat completely still during the procedure, but he also hasn’t left, which might well be likened unto a miracle by Law’s measure. He’s gotten to every piece of scar tissue he can reach in the layers of muscle, now, and he bites the inside of his cheek before glancing up. “You have a rib that healed a couple millimeters off-kilter from how it should have,” he says quietly, words bouncing back off the edges of his Room. “And some scar tissue on the lung underneath it. You trust me to fix those too?”
“You’ve literally been under my skin for an hour,” Zoro replies. It’s followed by a snicker from Luffy. “If I didn’t trust whatever the hell you think is best, I would have already said so.”
Law doesn’t have enough presence of mind to split between controlling his expressions and his careful repair of Zoro’s body, so a long grin spreads over his face before he can stop it. “Alright.”
That’s all he needed. He presses his scalpel into the muscles that connect to his sternum and smoothly splits open Zoro’s chest, pulling back intercostal muscles and serratus muscles and exterior obliques with the grace of a conductor setting an orchestra off on a grand composition. The muscles lay to the side easier than he expected, considering the sound it drew from his patient - and the gasp he heard that was distinctly Luffy’s - but he takes the laxness in them as a sign of Zoro’s self-control, and how seriously he’s taking it, for which Law is grateful.
He takes a moment to run his fingers feather-light along Zoro’s exposed ribs, and gazes longer than necessary down at the viscera before him. His lungs move slowly, steadily, controlled; his ribs expand and contract. And Zoro’s heart, between those lungs, beats. Law watches it. His atriums and ventricles pulse out, and in, and out, and in - one-two, one-two, pushing blood through vessels as thick around as Law’s fingers. The sight is… entrancing. There’s nothing wrong with his heart, surprisingly enough; no evidence of trauma here. Just a strong, healthy organ, doing exactly what it should be doing. Law stares at it for a moment longer before sliding his fingers along the knot of mishealed bone he’d mentioned and reaching for his kit.
His free hand comes back with a small, unassuming silver-toned hammer. He gives the rib in question two small taps, and it separates, along the original break line; it was a jagged, nasty-looking break, so he isn’t surprised that it healed badly. He’s painstakingly careful as he moves it aside, then sets the hammer down and brings his scalpel up. His fingers rest barely-there on Zoro’s lung. He slices off the small mass of scar tissue where the rib had dug into the lung as if deftly peeling the skin from a fruit, setting the sliver of pale tissue along with the rest of it. He brings a duller, longer knife from his kit up to the rib, carving off the knotted extra bone mass, leaving only the original break line and the bone itself, and seals it in place.
He looks up once more. Zoro is watching him, now, his one grey eye locked with Law’s, his beating heart in the periphery. They glance at Luffy at the same time.
His eyes are locked on Zoro’s heart. Law can’t say he blames him. It’s a beautiful organ, if one were to classify organs by beauty, which he’s been told is a little off-putting to do. He’s sitting remarkably still. He also looks like he’s about to -
“Can I hold it?” - ask something. Law almost tells him no, but he looks at Zoro first, and closes his mouth again when his patient’s face does something strange. He kind of smiles, kind of grimaces, and then… for some reason, Zoro looks at Law and nods.
“…If you’re extremely careful, yes.” Law sets his scalpel down, murmurs, “ Sterile, ” and gestures for Luffy to hold out his hands. He sterilizes them, dismisses the power, and gently prises up the right side of Zoro’s ribcage.
Zoro’s heart beats faster under his fingertips, the contact drawing a strange, strangled little noise from his patient. He is as methodical as ever, dreamlike though this whole procedure feels, as he severs each of the thick, sturdy blood vessels leading from it to the rest of Zoro’s body. His fruit keeps his patient’s blood flowing, and with as much reverence as Law can gather in his body, he lifts Zoro’s heart from his chest.
The noise Zoro makes is somewhere in the realm of broken. Luffy’s eyes are shockingly wide. Law holds his heart like that, blood rushing in his ears, for just a moment, before setting it ever-so-carefully in Luffy’s hands.
His fellow captain is uncharacteristically quiet, entranced by his swordsman’s heart in his hands. Zoro seems entranced as well, in a different way, breath coming quick and shallow as the organ Luffy holds beats faster, his eye wide and transfixed.
There’s something fitting about this scene. Luffy holds Zoro’s heart in his hands, and Law watches, and enables, and they admire his work. The world comes to a standstill for a bare second, until Zoro’s breath hitches again when Luffy draws his thumb slow and gentler than Law thought he was capable of over the surface of his right atrium.
The moment passes in what could be seconds or an eternity, Luffy handing Law their swordsman’s heart back as if it were fragile, and Law sets it back in and seals up all those blood vessels with more diligence than he’s ever felt himself express. He still feels like he’s watching this happen in a dream. He closes Zoro up methodically, laying his muscles back down, then sealing up his skin without a mark left behind, and Zoro is whole again.
When Law drops his Room, his shoulders sag with the weight of his fruit. He’d expended more energy than he’d anticipated. He wouldn’t trade it, though, he knows that much. Zoro sits up, movement smoother than it had been, and runs his fingers along the line Law had cut. He looks faraway, and then he looks at Law, and then at Luffy. Somewhere, a dam breaks.
The latter scrambles forward to press himself to Zoro, kissing him like his life depends on it - and then he pulls Law in by the edge of his shirt, Zoro’s hand accompanying it as soon as Law is in reach. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget that, Torao,” his patient says, voice rough and low in a way that cuts through the trance in Law’s mind and drags him into the present. He doesn’t even have the chance to complain that his hands - and Luffy’s, for that matter - are still covered in interstitial fluid.
“H-happy to provide,” is all he manages, pressing his still-slick hands against Zoro’s abdomen. Luffy wraps the arm closer to Law around his shoulders.
The problem with being a surgeon is that his gift resides in taking apart, in putting back together. He supposes, now, throat filled with a strange, off-putting thickness of emotion, that the process itself is something he might want to take some amount of pride in, as well.