1. Suspended Symbiosis

For Trafalgar Law, there were a great many things that scared him. Despite his towering height of six foot three, the man's Achilles tendon wasn't limited to a single spot on his foot, but instead, it permeated his entire existence. Quite worse, that existence dwelled not within him, but was the tangible embodiment of a twenty-year-old boy, who kept claiming to be the captain of a pirate crew.

What was even worse than having a liability, so inextricable from himself, run around on its own two feet—what was far, far worse than the very idea, and current reality of this—was the fact that Trafalgar Law himself knew nothing about this.

If you were to ask this man, whose very temperament could be summed up by: logic, austerity, and mild anxiety (yet often pulled through such anxieties by said logic)—if you were to ask such a man what was the root of his incessant worries as of late, he would point to a not so logical answer.

That totem!

It's definitely because of that totem!

It all began when Law, a man so married to his job as a cardiac surgeon, finally succumbed to the troublesome meddling of his father. One day after work, the surgical cap having barely lost any heat after he pulled it off, Bepo, his coworker, suddenly congratulated him.

Law frowned, for he did a surgery nearly every day. Why was his friend suddenly congratulating him?

Bepo, amused at his confusion, told him to check his messages. Alarms went off in his head—his father and Bepo must have been up to some collusion once again, but nothing could prepare him for the text message that greeted eyes once he opened his phone.

[Meddlesome Old Man: I've booked a plane ticket for you to a tropical island named Poneiro. We took the liberty of processing your vacation days. Have a great two weeks ♥︎] [BookingConfirmation.JPG][https://visitponeiro.po]

Law couldn't believe his eyes. This wasn't simply a figure of speech; perhaps the 6-hour surgery was beginning to make him hallucinate. He glanced after Bepo's retreating silhouette, raced to the reception desk, and asked the redhead sitting there to read the image on his phone screen to him.

"Eh?" came her voice. Her look of confusion turned to clarity, however, as she replied, "Isn't this a flight to Poneiro scheduled for the 16th? Congratulations Dr. Trafalgar!" Law had barely processed her words, as she informed him giddily, "my husband and I had wanted to go there for our honeymoon, since you know, the story surrounding that island is very fitting, but only 50 flights are allowed each year, and the island had been completely booked!"

Law's ears rang, and this conversation closely resembled a hearing test he would give patients for their regular checkups when he was a resident. A muffled sound came from his left, a squeal from his right, and he was supposed to say aloud from which direction the sounds came, but in reality, it was all from one fixed direction. It had been him who was spinning.

Law's legs felt weak, and he slumped against the counter. The receptionist—in his haze, her nameplate read something between 'Cynthia' and 'Cindy'—leaned over the counter slightly and tentatively pat his back.

"Oh don't worry, you won't meet the same fate we did. Your flight has been confirmed!" In case he didn't believe her—which she was right, Law was questioning every fundamental of his reality right now—she pointed to a hexagonal icon in the lower right of the ticket confirmation. "Look, don't you see the crest of the Poneiro Department of Tourism in the email footer? This is a flight directly booked through their government agency, you'll definitely be able to go there!"

Anyone could tell she was excited, but Law could hardly tell his left from his right, much less try to question why this was such a joyous piece of information. In the same way, Cynthia/Cindy could hardly tell that the nausea plaguing the man in front of her could hardly be assuaged by two perfunctory pats and her interminable rambling. She continued all the same.

"Ah, are you perhaps going with your significant other?" She snapped her fingers, a self-satisfying smile stamped across her face. Then it turned gooey. "Ohhhhh, that's so romantic! I didn't peg you for that type, Dr Trafalgar! We certainly learn as we live—hmm?"

At the sudden loss of the phone in her hand, she realized that Law had marched off, leaving her to stand there slightly perplexed, before a patient walked in asking to meet with a general physician. As she searched for the patient's record in the hospital's system, she could only help but sigh wistfully, and think to herself that whoever Law was dating, was quite lucky.

Quite lucky indeed...

So lucky in fact, that the good fortune had been sapped completely from the man in question, and deposited into this person. A person, who didn't exist.

"How are you, my lovely~!"

Law was furious. The voice that answered the phone was definitely Corazon, but it sounded too content—was life going too well for him? Should Law help him change that?

"Rosinante," Law said stiffly, and his father's cheerful intonation didn't change one bit.

"Oh no~ Calling me Rosinante, you must feel very aggrieved right now, my poor Law. Don't feel that way, ah?" His voice was both cheerful and gentle, as if coaxing a cat with a temper not to scratch at his rug. "You behave as if you hadn't seen this coming~ Didn't you agree to let me assign your vacation days to anything I see fit after the incident? Shall I help you recall the memory?"

Law's memory worked just fine. He hadn't forgotten the week when he had collapsed from overwork (however, if you asked Law, it was just because he hadn't slept for nearly 72 hours). Being an attending ER physician, while also being a cardiac surgeon in an ER Department during his downtime, meant Law was stretched thin down the slimmest, most minuscule outer layer of the stratum corneum of his skin.

This layer must have been the width of a fruit fly's wings, multiplied to the negative power of infinity. It was so infinitesimally small, that Law, who had grown used to this style of gross self-neglect, had hardly even noticed that, despite having successfully converted from 'warm-blooded mammal' to 'caffeine-blooded cryptid' his body hadn't seen a warm bed in almost 3 days.

When in the middle of treating an ER walk-in with a classic case of chest pain, Law, mid-sentence, collapsed on the spot. Maybe it was that he couldn't keep running off of pure liquid stimulants for three days, or because all the coffee had (rarely, but nonetheless) increased his blood pressure, that Law's body simply opted out, and he fell backwards, before Shachi rushed over from behind the ECG to catch him.

Corazon had been furious, so too was Bepo, and every other person around him complained relentlessly that he was being too hard on his body. Law soothed their tempers by promising to go to the gym more often, working fewer hours, and getting more sleep.

In private, however, Corazon was not bought off so easily. His vacation days proffered up, Law lost another sphere of his personal life to his father, albeit a sphere that he didn't use very often, or at all. If Law were to suddenly run away for two months, he'd still have enough vacation days leftover from the last 4 years he had worked in the ER up until now.

Now, his short-term, cursory agreement to appease his fussy father had come back to bite him. He wasn't required to show up to work tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after the day after that. He wasn't required to step foot inside the ER for the next—he hated how his memory served him so—2 weeks!

"Yelloooo~?" Corazon hummed from the other end, and Law's jaw ticked.

"I remember."

There was an audible clap, followed by a sudden bang and some frantic, staticky sounds—sounds very much akin to a phone dropping on the ground, before Corazon's muffled voice and panicked yells slowly drifted closer and became crisp again.

"You dropped your phone didn't you," Law deadpanned.

The man on the other line chuckled, and Law could just imagine his stupid expression. "Haha, my son knows me so well, hmm? I hope you come to know others this well too...How nice would that be~"

"I don't need to have a deep relationship with someone to know what the sound of dropping a phone is."

Another silly chuckle. "Haha, My Law is so smart! I can only hope you meet someone who isn't too well-read, else you'll get along too well, ah~"

Law scoffed. "Are you wishing for my happiness or not?"

This time Corazon explicitly laughed, then as his chortling died down, he said seriously, "Don't hate your dad too much for imposing this break upon you, yeah?"

Law looked up to see that he had intuitively walked back to his office. The plaque on the door read, [Head Attending Physician & On-Call Cardiac Surgeon] and in the dimly lit, blue and green hued hallway, the plate on the door reflected a cool and impersonal light. It was strange how such a place brimming with life and death, often delved between both, and neither, at the same time. Just behind him and faintly down the corridor, he could hear the bustling of the main ER reception, but a few feet away, the hallway was isolated and frigid, and only his calm breathing filled the passageway with any semblance of life. Perhaps, he had been giving it too much life. Was he really working himself too hard? Without realizing it, his very blood was turning that same green and blue hue, as if what permeated his veins were not red blood cells and plasma, but the very twists and turns of the cold hospital corridors. Was he breathing in the air of the narrow space, or was it breathing him in?

Law blinked slowly as he opened the door as he failed to hold back a sigh, the air leaving his lungs and floating into the corridor in a kind of symbiosis. It gladly inhaled his life, yet it did not glow any warmer as he left its coldness to enter his office and collapse into the chair behind his desk.

What did emanate warmth were the sticky notes crowding his computer screen—from messages reminding him to eat, posted by Bepo, to the phone number for the different local anaesthesiologists on-call whenever he had to do a trauma surgery, which he had soon commit to memory—all the way to the oldest note, buried under three layers of yellow squares, which read: Your father loves you, son.

It was on his birthday, 9 months ago, when he had suddenly been called in for a surgery in the middle of dinner with his dad, and his father accompanied him on the drive to the hospital. Who would have thought that when he told him to wait in his office, he would leave such a sappy note. Law felt his heart clench as his fingers brushed over the worn paper.

It felt warm.

"But does it have to be two weeks," he said, already resigned to the fact that when he got home, he would be packing his suitcase for a 9:00 flight in the morning.

Over the phone, Law derived all the heating he needed from the warm playfulness in his dad's voice. "These tickets are hard to get, much less approve," his father reasoned gently, "It would be a waste to spend any shorter of a time. I've been planning this for months now, you know." Law could imagine Corazon, the most inept and clumsy person he knew, aligning enough coordination to plan something like this months in advance. The man went on. "Admittedly, I got help from Sengoku, and his friend Garp has a connection on the island, but I planned this myself nonetheless!"

Law hadn't heard of his grandfather in a long time, and wondered if he was enjoying life as a retired Fleet Admiral.

"Just think of this as a little break; I wish I could go with you, but I wanted to leave it up to chance."

At those words, Law's eyes snapped to the corner of his eye, as if he could see Corazon through the telephone. What did he mean by that?

"You force me onto a vacation, and you don't even pack my things for me," Law complained, quite seriously too, but his father only laughed.

"If I did pack for you, would you not complain that I put too many shirts? Or, better yet, that there were too many clothes? Or that I packed too many things in the first aid kit? Or that the shoes I threw in, you don't even wear anymore?—" Law was beginning to get the idea but he carried on, perhaps this father had more than one grievances to voice to his picky son, "—Or that you don't need to pack a shaving kit, you can just buy one when you get there? Or that you're a grown man and you don't need your father packing your luggage for you?"

Law didn't dignify the rant with any response. "I'm hanging up."

"Wait, wait!" he yelled. He knew Law would really do it. "Did I hit a sore spot?" he joked, "So quick to retreat? Well, go ahead and retreat, then! I may not have packed your luggage, but I have bought many essential items for your trip. I'll wait for you at your apartment~"

Law's eyes widened as he suddenly straightened in his seat. "Can't I just come to you? I will visit you, Cora-sa—"

"You're willing to drive 2 hours just so I don't go to your apartment? I know it's because you love me so much why you're willing to go to such lengths," he teased, "but I know you're tired. I won't stay long," he reassured, and Law, having already agreed to an impromptu two week vacation, felt that resisting a short visit from his dad before he left for an unknown island in the middle of the pacific was a bit futile.

"You won't stay long," Law repeated, warning him.

Corazon's smile could be heard as he coaxed, "Yes, I won't stay long. And worry not—I'll be bringing a little friend to keep me on schedule~"