Chapter Text
Law knows she’s not supposed to wear her scrubs outside the hospital, but what her residency advisor doesn’t know won’t kill them and she’s just so fucking tired. After being on her feet for over twelve hours with only a ten minute break to chown down a protein drink and pee, she stinks like isoflurane and hospital-grade cleaner.
It’s not that bad when you’re in there, because you’re surrounded by the smell–but the minute she gets inside her car and rests her head against the steering wheel for a few seconds to recollect herself the stench comes in like a punch in the guts. It’s not just on your clothes–it seeps into your hair and skin, making the air taste stale.
She puts the key in the ignition and turns the car on, not letting it even warm up before stepping on the gas to back out, taking a left to get to the parking gate, being meticulously careful to get close enough to the booth so she can reach out of the window and scan her card ID to get the gate to open without having to open the car door like a loser.
She vaguely toys with the idea of stopping somewhere to grab a bite to eat, but she feels a deep bone tiredness that not even the concept of warm fresh food can perk her up. Driving straight home takes generally about thirty minutes, but with how late it is and no traffic, she makes it in twenty.
Before she gets out of the car, Law grabs her duffel bag with her clothes, shoes and medical equipment. She beelines for the elevator, pressing the remote control and hearing a single beep from behind her. She hoists the bag up on her shoulder and presses the elevator button.
Standing in front of her refrigerator, Law stares at her options: three day old takeout, two bananas, onions, miso paste, soy sauce and an open bottle of skim milk. She reaches for the takeout container, pops the lid open and gives it a sniff. After deeming it okay enough, she closes the door with her hip, reaches for a pair of chopsticks and eats the leftover half beef and broccoli stirfry cold, in front of the kitchen sink filled with a few dirty mugs and cutlery.
After finishing her meal, she tosses the chopsticks in the sink and throws the carton in the trash can, making a mental note to take it out before leaving for work tomorrow. She should take a shower, she really should, to get the grime and sweat off her skin, but her current energy state wins. She strips out of her scrubs as she walks towards her bedroom, tossing them on the floor. That’s a problem for the Law of tomorrow. She gets down to just her underwear, taking her bra off and tossing it on the back of a chair in her bedroom.
Because nothing in Law’s life is ever easy, ten minutes after she crawls under the blankets and gets snuggled up with her giant bear plushie, her walls start shaking.
See, she shares a wall with her neighbor, Luffy, whose name she knows not by choice but by force, and who happens to like to have fun . Law liked to have fun once upon a time, but currently her life is filled with stress, sorrow and surgical rotation shifts.
Luffy is a healthy young woman with short messy black hair, big dark round eyes and a crescent moon shaped scar underneath her left eye. The scar is badly sutured; Law wonders who did it, because whoever did it did a shitty job. Luffy is shorter than Law, about half a foot, but her body is built in a way that signals it belongs to someone who puts effort into it. Law has seen her in sports bras and tiny gym shorts, shoulder blades wide, biceps and triceps bulging after a workout, thick thighs straining against the polyester material of the shorts. Law can safely conclude her neighbor spends at least two hours a day working out. You don’t get a body like that unless you give your blood and sweat towards it.
A loud moan snaps Law out of her thoughts, making her jump slightly under the comforter. She feels the headboard tremble. Then a second of silence, followed by another moan, followed by another and another and another, accompanied by wet noises that could be either from pussy fucking or from very wet kissing.
Law sighs and rubs hard at her eyes. This happens almost every day of the week. Law isn’t keeping track of Luffy’s schedule, but she presumes when she doesn’t hear it at night, it happened at some other time during the day. She’s run into Luffy going down the elevator with a pretty girl when getting home from work, or turning the corner of their hallway just as Luffy was saying bye to yet another different girl on her doorstep.
She seems to have them on rotation, Law ponders.
Another moan echoes through her bedroom.
Logically, she knows she should probably lodge a complaint with the landlord, as it is impacting her sleep quality. But on the other hand, she cannot think of something more pathetic than walking up to the middle aged guy that runs the apartment building and saying “Hi, my lesbian neighbor fucks so much I can’t get any sleep due to the paper thin walls on this shitty complex. Also it makes me kind of jealous as I haven’t gotten any in at least two years.”
Theoretically, she could put headphones on and listen to music to muffle out the noises. That still wouldn’t help her issue at hand though, as she needs silence and a slight breeze from the AC running to lull her into sleep.
More moans and whimpers come through, soft little ahhs and uhhs and even a very muffled harder, Luffy , makes its way through the wall.
Law feels a pang on her cunt and crosses her leg, half embarrassed and half annoyed, feeling her face burning up and hiding it underneath the blankets even though nobody else can see her. She’s not made of stone. Her current celibacy predicment doesn't help her hot neighbor fucking the living daylights out of a random girl roll off her.
The thing about lesbian sex is that it doesn’t really stop. You can just keep going. And Lord knows Luffy takes full advantage of that.
She got home around nine in the evening. In theory, unless she’s on call, she should be doing eight hour work days. In theory. In reality, she comes into the hospital at 7:00am and leaves at 5:00pm on a good day. On a bad day, she’ll leave anywhere between 7 and 9:00pm. She doesn’t get paid for overtime because she shouldn’t be doing any overtime as a resident, but it’s not like she can just walk out when she’s elbows deep in a splenectomy due to the clock striking five.
It was around midnight when the fucking stopped; everry time Law had almost fallen asleep Luffy and whatever girl she was with had gotten louder again, meaning that Law was left with roughly five hours of sleep. If she hadn’t gotten home so late and been so tired, she’d have at least organized her bag and lunch and taken a shower, meaning she could sleep in an extra hour. Since she didn’t, her phone rings the traditional iPhone alarm at 5:00am, blaring by her ear. She blindly pats the mattress until she finds it, cracking an eye open and pressing stop .
She closes her eyes again and takes a deep sigh. Gives herself ten seconds before dragging her body out of bed, sliding her feet on her fluffy white slippers and walking into the kitchen, turning the light on, where she starts making coffee.
Get the older filter out, thrash it, put a new filter in, fill it with ground coffee, fill the back of the appliance with water, turn it on. Even though she is still half asleep, the steps are automatic, her body slipping comfortably on autopilot. It’s still dark out, the streetlamp lights filtering through the living room window.
As the coffee brews, she walks towards the bathroom, slipping off her underwear. She cringes when she sees dried wetness leftover from last night. She turns the faucet on, flinching when the first cold stream hits her body. It warms up pretty quickly. She washes her hair twice and rinses it off first before starting on her body, scrubbing a soapy loofah over herself. She uses the same body soap to wash her face.
She spends at least ten minutes underneath the hot water, the bathroom steaming up. It feels so good she wishes she could just stay there forever. With a deep breath, she turns the faucet off and blindly reaches for a towel, grabbing it and drying her face, then her hair, before following down to her body. She’s gentle with drying her breasts, as she’s had her nipple piercings stuck on a loose thread one too many times to count.
She walks into her bedroom and grabs the same plain black bra she wore yesterday from the back of the chair before depositing the towel there instead. She slips it on before opening the wardrobe, grabbing a pair of underwear and sliding it up her legs. She grabs some used but still okay clothes from the top of the desk by her bed, slipping on some tight light blue wash jeans with a white tank top. She’ll generally just wear whatever to the hospital, considering she has to change when she gets there anyway.
She grabs the neatly folded scrubs on top of the desk by her bed and puts them inside her duffel bag. They’re black with elastic on the bottom, jogger style. She hates when they have the normal cuff, the wide hem hanging over her Crocs making her look ridiculous. She makes sure she grabs her ID card and clips it on the strap. Inside are her stethoscope, prescription pads, sphygmomanometer, infrared thermometer, glucometer, a pulse oximeter and a reflex hammer.
Technically, the hospital should provide all of that, with Law being expected to only bring personal use equipment. As it is, the reality of a public hospital is totally different than on paper. They should provide individual protection equipment, too, but Law knows that if she doesn’t bring her own gloves and masks she risks being without any at all.
Grabbing her bag and walking towards the living room, she dumps it on the couch. She walks into the kitchen and pours herself a mug of coffee, drinking it happily. She reaches into the washroom and grabs the clean pair of Crocs and drops them on the couch.
As she sips out of her mug, she preps her lunch: a forgotten protein drink she missed last night and the two bananas from her fridge. She also gets a snack size bag of chocolate chip cookies out of the pantry for breakfast, which she’ll eat while she drives to work.
Law puts her mug down on the kitchen table and bends down to pick up her scrubs from yesterday, along with the dirty underwear inside the bathroom hamper. There isn’t a lot of laundry, but she might as well shuck it inside the washing machine. She puts two Tide pods in and programs it to wash and dry. The two-in-one washing machine was one of the best investments she made when moving; it doesn’t matter what Shachi and Penguin say.
Refilling her mug, she walks towards the bathroom again to half ass blow dry her hair. This is one of the reasons why she hates showering in the morning. The routine takes so long. After a while, it seems dry enough that it should finish drying on its own by the time she gets to the hospital. She puts the blowdryer away and picks up her mug from the sink, tilting it backwards and drinking all of it, even the gross coffee grounds at the bottom of the mug.
Law looks over the TV stand where her wallet, car keys and watch are. She slips them in her pocket, watch going on her wrist. It lights up and shows the time - 6:03 am. She puts the leftover coffee on a thermos, makes sure everything she needs is inside her bag before heading towards the door.
By now, the early morning sun is spilling through the living room, the curtains open, letting it filter in. She puts her black boots on last, making sure all the lights are off before leaving her apartment, locking the door behind her and slipping the key in her pocket.
Law is inside the elevator and has just pressed the close door button when she hears a voice coming a few feet away yelling “Wait!” Law sticks her hand in the door to stop it from closing. Two seconds later, Luffy stumbles in, a smile on her face, not even looking like she also just slept a few hours last night.
“Thank you, Torao!” Luffy exclaims, waving at her. She looks good, bright, happy. Law can only imagine what she herself must look like in comparison.
Law’s eyebrow twitches. For some unknown reason unbeknown to her, Luffy insists on calling her the nickname that she made up when they first met more than a month ago. Law was wearing her scrubs and Luffy’s mouth opened a little, surprised, eyes focusing on the writing on her chest before saying “Oh, so you’re a Doctor? Doctor… Trafal- Tragal- Torao!”. Sure, Trafalgar might be a mouthful, but Law did politely say she could just call her Law, to which Luffy smiled and said “Nah, I like Torao better.” Go figure.
“Good morning,” Law replies, dryly. On a normal day she might humour Luffy and let her neighbor run her mouth, blabbering a mile a minute, but today is not one of those days. Law is very, very tired.
Luffy blinks, big dark round eyes looking up at Law, who just stares down at her with a scowl on her face.
“What’s up with the sour face?” She asks, hand going up to her chin pensively, head tilting to left, other hand going to her hip. Law’s eyes follow the movement involuntarily, taking in Luffy’s outfit for the day: tight yoga pants, which make her tight ass look great, and a loose crop top, in which Law can see, looking down from her higher vantage point, Luffy’s pert tits, accompanied by some running shoes that Law wouldn’t be able to describe because her eyes are so focused elsewhere.
Law really needs to get laid.
The elevator door closes and they start going down. Law averts her eyes, shuffling away from Luffy, making sure there’s a respectable distance between them. She’s thinking about what to say when suddenly Luffy is right in front of her, peering up at her through her long eyelashes.
“You look exhausted,” Luffy casually says, and it makes Law’s remaining self respect snap in two.
The elevator gets to the bottom floor with a ping and the doors start to open.
Irritatedly, Law goes around her, stepping outside the elevator, heeled boots clinking against the marble floor. Before she can even think about it, she lets slip out “Yeah, I am, Luffy. I came back from a 14-hour shift yesterday and your guest was moaning like a whore the entire night.”
She hears a gasp behind her, but she doesn’t turn to look. She moves quickly towards the garage door, leaving Luffy behind. She rushes towards her car, opening the driver door and tossing her bag on the passenger seat. Face warming up, she shakes her head, trying to dispel the surging embarrass,emt. She generally tries to be civil, but it’s been weeks now, ever since she moved there. At some point she was going to have to say something. She wishes she had been able to be more polite and discrete instead of yelling it out in the entrance hallway, but alas, it is what it is.
She puts the key into the ignition and starts backing up, forcing herself to think about her cases of the day, focusing on what really matters.
When Law gets home that day, there’s a yellow sticky note in horrible chicken scratch stuck on her door.
“sorry about yesterday :(
IOU. LMK when i can make it up!!!!!
555 555 5555
luffy”