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Tension hangs low and thick in the air. The early, dreamlike glow that illuminates the sky shortly before the dawn breaks is far too weak to break beneath the waves, leaving the inside of the submarine quiet and dark—as murky and clouded as his demeanor as he pours himself a cup of coffee in silence. You eye him carefully, dancing gracefully along the line between staring intently and getting lost in the labyrinth of your own mind; the wheels were turning fast enough that Law could hear the cogs turning inside your head. He knows. He knows this conversation, the one that remains unspoken but hangs in the space between the two of you is imminent, though it doesn’t prevent him from attempting to avoid it. Feigning normalcy, he pours a splash of cream into his mug, and more than a splash into yours, sliding it across the counter towards you.
For a moment, there’s a respite from the painful tug on his heartstrings as a familiar sense of gratitude graces your features, though there’s a sad undertone in the smile you give him, as if this were the last time you’d be partaking in this daily ritual with him. He was far from a fool—he had seen your bags partially packed in your room, and though the gift of a cup of coffee was nothing out of the ordinary, something deep in his heart prayed that the simple gesture was enough to salvage things. Far from an ideal partner, Law was closed off, blunt, and stubborn, though he had thought you admired those qualities in him; however, here you were, on the verge of jumping ship into the cold depths of the unknown without so much as attempting to talk things out with him. As he sips from his mug, he watches you closely with his intense, molten stare; your lips part once, twice, three times without a single word escaping them. Vexed by your hesitation, he almost implores you to spit it out already, and bring your hidden woes out into the open so the two of you can fight about it, but he loses his nerve right as your voice breaks the silence.
“Do you love me?” you whisper numbly, all hint of emotion wiped from your face. The timbre of your voice betrays your pain as it wobbles and warbles, and almost fades into the stale air of the submarine.
Hitting his eardrums sharply, your words pierce straight through the thin membrane and send needles of pain into his head. He had attempted to prepare himself mentally for this conversation, but the reality crashing down on him like a violent, stormy wave is too much for him to handle, overwhelming him before his head even falls underneath the cool water.
“Of course I do. Have I given you the impression that I don’t?” he says; it’s curt, tense, and straddling the line between dismissive and disinterested as Law makes a last-ditch effort to shut the conversation down before it begins.
“Could have fooled me.” you rasp out, nearly choking on the short phrase. The tone that spills out of your throat says more than four simple words ever could, and Law knows full and well what you’re trying to tell him. You’ve never told me that you love me. You’ve been neglecting me. You never open up to me.
None of these sentiments were objectively untrue, but they anger Law nonetheless; his inner world was nearly entirely occupied by you, doubly so during long stretches underwater when a sense of stagnancy enveloped the Polar Tang, leaving the crew with nothing to do but float. As he wakes, his first action is to pull you closer to his chest and place a soft kiss to the back of your head. His time spent locked away in his office studying, drawing up plans, or organizing shifts for the crew is inefficient and takes far longer than it should on account of the visions of you dancing in his mind, distracting him from the dullness of necessary paperwork. Each tick of the clock in the evening is an incessant countdown to the time left until he can pull you close under the comforting confines of his sheets, drifting out of consciousness with you safely tucked into his side.
But how were you supposed to know? He never expresses those feelings, verbally or otherwise, and instead masks his affection for you with an unbreakable stony façade, concealing his feelings in an attempt to preserve his dignity.
He takes a while to speak, jaw clenching so hard he nearly hurts himself. “You’re not leaving.” he says lowly, with authority, and no room for argument, placing the venting of your frustrations on the backburner; Law could address those later, behind closed doors when his overwhelming fear and trembling dies down, but he can’t lose you—not without losing his own mind in the process.
“I didn’t say anything about—” you start, attempting to steer the conversation back to its original course with no avail.
“I saw your bags.” he spits out, unable to mask the pain in his voice. Your jaw snaps shut as your face burns red with the embarrassment of being found out as he continues. “Were you even planning on telling me? Or were you just going to slink off at the next port and disappear on me?” The sheer concept of abandonment has his dark eyes brimming with more pain than you’d ever seen in them, his stare holding a compounded sense of loss and agony.
“Law, I don’t want to go, but—” you whisper, whiny and almost verging into a desperate wail. His glare is dangerous and pins you in place, the edge of the counter digging into the flesh of your back.
“But what?” he hisses, venom and hurt coating his words as he cages you against the counter, arms on either side as he towers over you, puffing himself up in an attempt to plant your fleeing feet to the ground and make them stick.
“I can’t do this anymore if you keep me at arm’s length.” you say, voice wavering far more than you had intended it to; the words you had so carefully crafted in your head felt like daggers crawling up your throat, scratching the fleshy, mucus covered column to break skin along each stretch of their ascent. The last thing you wanted to do was leave him, but you couldn’t go on any longer giving pieces of yourself to a man who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—reciprocate the sentiment.
You needed his heart to spill, leaving pooling blood around your feet as proof that he was alive and beating.
As Law glares down at you, his grip on the counter causing his knuckles to turn a crisp white, he knows the time for bargaining for a lighter sentence had long since passed; it was either spew his guts for you to pick at like a vulture, or lose you to the soft roll of the tides. And so, with a deep breath, he’s forced to tell you why saying those three little words is so difficult for him, how the last time he heard them before you came along was from Corazón’s lips, and how he replays his death in his head every time he hears the phrase I love you, Law. He tells you, tears in his eyes, how he loved his parents, his sister, his neighbors and classmates, and that he fears that loving you—speaking it into existence—would condemn you to the same fate.
He tells you that he loves you, and that he has been loving you silently all this time.
It was the most emotion you had ever seen from Law in the many years you had known him, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and threatening to roll down the plane of his cheek. His confessions were more than enough to sate your need for trust and vulnerability from him, and seeing him so rattled left you with nothing in your chest but the intense need to soothe him. And so, your lips latch onto his, both of you murmuring a muffled I’m sorry into each other’s chapped and cracked mouths. Law had never pressed himself to your body harder as he threads a hand through your hair, digging his nails into your scalp to pull you closer. Coaxing your tongue to entwine with his by dragging gentle stripes along the wet muscle, he takes you, consuming your soul whole with each drag of his lips against yours. He’s messy—sloppy and messier than he’s ever been as he pours himself into you, each twitch of his tongue another confession too fragile to speak aloud.
“You’re not fucking leaving me.” he growls, placing his knee between your legs, “Not now, not ever.” Unable to temper his patience, his hand grasps harshly into your soft thigh, creeping upwards under your nightgown towards your core.
“I’m not—I love you, Law.” you whimper against him, allowing him turn the sounds dripping from your lips from devoted assurances to lewd mewls as he sinks a finger inside of you. His cold skin shocks the warmth of your insides, doubly so when he adds another digit and curls both upwards into your sweet spot.
“I love you too.” he whispers back; the sentiment still feels alien, and in a sense terrifying as it falls from his lips, though the discomfort is well worth its weight in platinum if it means keeping you wrapped around his fingers, his waist, and his heart. “Dripping wet for me—you needed this, didn’t you?” he murmurs, holding only the slightest bit of characteristic teasing in his voice, too mentally exhausted to do much besides act on instinct.
“Needed you. I always need you, Law.” you mumble between gasps as the press of his fingers inside of you brings heat pooling to your cheeks. Scissoring his fingers inside of you, he keeps you straddling the edge, a form of punishment for gaining control of him emotionally, enough to force him to divulge things he’d sworn to keep buried deep in his chest under heaps of cold, dense snow.
A heated whine settles in your throat as he slows down right before your precipice once more. "Lemme come…” you plead, your fingernails digging into the groove of his waist as you cling to him. Denying you the mercy you were expecting, he withdraws his fingers from you and pushes your shoulder down harshly, satisfied as he watches you sink to your knees, back dragging along the metal cupboards. He drops to your level unceremoniously, silently coaxing you to lay down, flush against the floor as he pins you below him like a lowly piece of prey. Latching his lips to yours again, he props himself up with one hand and lets the other roam, harshly grasping at your breasts, trailing down your sides and splaying out over your stomach, and finally settling between your legs, teasingly dragging along your slit, causing you to whine and grind against him. Giving into the sweet song of your begging, he circles his thumb along your aching bud, slowly working you up; tongue buried deep in your mouth, he intends on getting you close but not too close, wanting to keep you panting and writhing beneath you for his own benefit for a while longer. As you whine at the loss of contact against your clit, he undoes his zipper and lines himself up with you, slathering the head of his cock in the slick arousal that coats your folds and inner thighs.
The connection between you had been signed in consummating fluids and deep sighs hundreds of times over, but this is the first time that Law truly makes love to you. He slides into you, keeping his lips firmly on yours, his mind swirling with intimacy he thought himself incapable of. Full of newfound initiative to make you snap as soon as possible, his hand is quick to return to the needy, aching spot you need it most; his movements are practiced and hold precision honed over countless sessions tuning himself to your needs, but each touch is imbued with something novel, intoxicating, and foreign—as you turn red hot and flutter around him, Law is intent on showing you how much he loves you, sealing your promise to never leave him and using his flowing affections to keep you locked into that decision.
Law promises himself he’ll be better to you moving forward, that he will reassure you more, and take care of you in the same way you care for him, but in this moment, he places improvement on the backburner for a short while—all that mattered to him right now was you falling apart for him against the kitchen floor.