Chapter Text
Kidd steadies his arm cannon at the Red Force, building charge.
And then the air pressure is suddenly crushing under Red Hair’s Color of the Supreme King.
Everyone except him and Killer drop like flies. He has a fraction of a second to recognize the cut of a sword as it bisects him and his ship in a single stroke.
The world explodes into pain, blood, and noise. Splinters and scrap metal rain down, gravity tugs him towards the waves. In the eternity between one second and the next, before his back hits the water, he sees a few things.
Kidd sees the lower half of his body spin away from him, severed at the abdomen, legs still bent to brace for the cannonfire. He sees his unconscious loyal crew members who are about to drown. He sees the bleeding body of Killer, awake but unable to swim because of that fucking SMILE fruit. Forced to watch as the nakama he was sworn to protect dies helplessly like newborn kittens in a burlap sack, tossed to the waves.
And Kidd realizes he may as well have stuffed them in the bag himself. Heat, Wire, little Dive - ten fucking years old - drowning in their sleep. Because their captain couldn’t wait to chase after an emperor whose underlings already took his arm.
This is a direct result of his hubris.
The five billion belli of power and respect - of freedom - that he and Killer earned inch by painstaking inch over the past several years is shredded into five billion pieces around him, raining uselessly into the water. Kidd managed to pry it all back from Kaido’s fingers just to beg Shanks to destroy it instead. And he fucked over literally everyone who ever gave a rat’s ass about him on his way to hell.
He has nothing, now. He has nothing, and it’s his own damn fault.
Kidd hits the water.
Reality smears like blood on glass; opaque, messy, wrong… wet.
His vision blurs, his ears ring, his nose burns worse than the time he huffed bleach. Water soaks through his clothes, cakes wet hair to the back of his neck, probably smears his makeup. His equilibrium is so shot he’s struggling to stand-
No- no, Kidd is drowning. How is he standing?
He can move. He’s on land. Standing. He scrubs at his stinging eyes and uses his frankly shit observation haki to get some kind of bearing.
It’s immediately clear there’s a fight going down between some real powerful motherfuckers, and that his crew is not here. He knows Killer’s presence better than his own name, and if he’s not here, the rest sure as fuck aren’t. Except Kidd doesn’t know why he’s here.
Red-Hair just cleaved the Victoria Punk. He- how-
Blinking through stinging eyes, he can make out some figures.
A talk, pink, and powerful presence looms over crumpled black and yellow, two strong fighters but clearly barely holding on. Dying.
Kidd’s ears finally stop ringing. The air is full of distant screaming, and irritating as fuck laughter.
“Fufufufu…”
The scene sharpens into focus.
Donquixote Doflamingo crushes the limp body of Mugiwara Luffy under his shitty tacky kitten heels. Trafalgar Law, missing an arm and gushing blood from a dozen gunshots to his chest, grits his teeth in rage as tears roll down his face.
“Oh, Law,” Doflamingo coos, flexing his fingers and dragging Mugiwara into the air by an invisible noose. It cuts a thin red line of blood into his neck. “When will you learn that you don’t get to have a heart?”
Then he levels a gilded shotgun at Mugiwara’s skull.
Kidd’s body reacts before he even remembers he has one. It tackles Doflamingo to the ground and slams a metal arm over his throat, choking. The gun skitters a few feet away and automatically crumples under his magnetic aura. There’s something that repels his power in the chamber, but it hardly matters when the barrel mangles beyond recognition.
Kidd’s mind catches up and it has exactly one thought:
You can’t lose anything else.
Doflamingo sneers and swipes at him. Kidd leaps back, leaving his metal arm behind to keep the bastard down, and positioning himself protectively between the injured Trafalgar and Mugiwara.
“Don’t fucking touch them,” he snarls, spit flying from his mouth like a rabid dog.
“Wha?” Mugiwara croaks behind him.
Doflamingo’s strings dice his detached arm and he’s on his feet, circling like a predator. It’s clear he’s already been beaten down significantly, based on the way he limps.
“Another Worst brat? Where the hell did you even come from? My cage-”
Kidd is not interested in letting him finish. He takes hold of every spec of metal in a hundred foot radius and hurls them with full force at the stupid pink dipshit.
Three dozen gnarled rods of rebar shoot from the surrounding rubble and lance Doflamingo in every possible direction. One of them stabs into his skull from behind, blowing the fucker’s brains out through his forehead and launching his cracked red sunglasses clean off what’s left of his face. They clatter uselessly at Kidd’s feet.
There’s a thud behind him as Strawhat drops to the cobblestone.
He releases his hold on the metal, but it only settles slightly. Donquixote Doflamingo’s impaled corpse remains propped upright like a gorey scarecrow.
Kidd doesn’t give a rat’s ass, he turns his back to it to confirm that Mugiwara is in fact still alive, and not in fucking pieces. He nudges the guy’s ribs with his foot to confirm that he’s unconscious, which turns out to be redundant because the dumbfuck starts snoring. Loudly.
He scowls and looks down at Trafalgar, who is conscious, staring dumbly at what’s left of Doflamingo with his mouth wide open in shock. His face is caked with tears, snot, dirt, and blood. Which- now that he looks, there’s a lot of blood pooling around the guy. Especially his stump. As someone who lost his own arm, that shit starts to kill you pretty fast.
“Oi, Trafalgar. You’re not allowed to die,” Kidd orders, because while he doesn’t know shit about medicine, he does know how to make demands. And Trafalgar is a doctor or something, so he can fix himself. Now. Or else.
Trafalgar doesn’t make any moves to turn the air blue or whatever it is he does, though. Instead, he turns his dopey unfocused gaze up at Kidd.
“C…Cora-san?” He chokes out, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Uh,” Kidd says, staring back. “No. The fuck?”
“Love you… too…” Trafalgar murmurs, before his eyes roll back to whites and he collapses.
“Oi! What the fuck!” Kidd snaps at him, but even when he nudges him with his boot, the guy doesn’t wake up.
“Shit,” Kidd mutters. Then, for the first time, he actually looks at the scene around him. There’s an entire fucking city leveled for miles in a perfect circle around them. Hundreds of dead bodies – a combination of civilians, marines, pirates – dotting the rubble. In the near distance, on the border right before everything isn’t completely flattened, he can make out people cheering.
“Shit,” Kidd swears again, with more feeling. He has no fucking clue where he is, where his crew or Red-Hair Shanks or the motherfucking ocean went, and he certainly doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. Trafalgar and Mugiwara are his enemies, and years of carving his place in the world has taught him to drop all the deadweight today to save your skin tomorrow.
But... Kidd has nothing. The closest thing he has to something is these two guys that at least never tried to stab him in the back or laugh at any members of his crew, even at their lowest. He even sorta enjoys fighting with them, and against them, even when they piss him off.
They’re rivals, but they’re Kidd’s rivals. They might be the only thing he has left.
“Fuck me,” he mutters, running his hand down his face.
With a clench of his fist, he un-skewers Dofla-fuckface and manipulates the rebar into a relatively usable basket weave. The resulting “stretcher” is lumpy and bloody as hell, but Trafalgar is already bleeding everywhere anyway, getting someone else’s blood on him won’t make a difference. Kidd drags the guy onto it by his piercings and the studs on his jeans.
The gurney hovers beside him as he grabs Mugiwara by the ankle and flips him over his shoulder like a gym towel.
“You shitheads better hope there’s someone useful around,” he tells them.
Eventually, he gets the two of them to someone that can help. More accurately, he lugs their bodies through the destroyed city until he stumbles into that one super-smart Strawhat chick and a posh blonde guy in a top hat that’s chatting with her. They slide into combat stances when they see him and his cargo.
"They're bleeding out. I think. Trafalgar especially," Kidd tells the posh guy he’s pretty sure is their cook, bulldozing whatever he’s saying. Their hostility gives way to concern when they realize Kidd isn’t the one who did this to them.
"Think he’s got a concussion,” Kidd adds, because maybe that’s helpful. “This one-" He shrugs Mugiwara off onto the ground. "-Fell asleep or maybe fainted, I dunno."
The cook – Kidd thinks he’s named Sanji – calls out to some others for help. He’s going to take Law and Luffy somewhere to fix them and do whatever else doctors do. Cool. That’s good. Good…
Kidd’s never seen Luffy so pale. He felt Luffy's Voice go out in Wano but he didn't see it. It’s weak here, too, but not gone. It's there and it's steady. But there's still a shit-ton of blood everywhere. When Mugiwara gets blood in his straw hat, how does he get it out? Does blood stain straw the same way it stains metal?
Trafalgar's missing an arm. Trafalgar shouldn't be missing an arm – how else is he supposed to do his stupid blue sphere devil fruit power and wield that stupidly long sword at the same time? If his rival was weak, that would reflect poorly on Kidd. Obviously. He should- Kidd’s a fuckin’ moron, he should have checked around for it. He… he’ll go back to look.
"-tass Kidd-san?" Something lightly touches his shoulder and Kidd flinches harshly, snapping around to face the threat only to meet a frown from the Strawhat chick. "My apologies, I need you to release Luffy, please."
What? Oh, shit, Kidd's been hunched over Mugiwara’s unconscious body, good arm wrapped tightly around his torso. Weird how much smaller the other captain is compared to him.
Numbly, he pulls back and stands. Someone takes Luffy away. Kidd stares at them go for a little too long.
Right, Trafalgar’s arm. Still needs to find that. He turns around and walks back the way he came, ignoring the random people calling after him.
When Kidd’s feet eventually bring him back to the crumpled bloody heap that is Doflamingo. As he stares at it, the shock and adrenaline start to finally wear off, allowing him to process information beyond “kill, move, or panic.” And a few things start to sink in.
1. Kidd just killed Donquixote Doflamingo
2. Mugiwara and Trafalgar are critically injured, currently unconscious
3. Trafalgar’s arm isn’t here, so he doesn’t know what the hell to do now
This… This has to be some kind of fucked up fever dream fabricated by his severed upper body as it sinks to the floor of the ocean. It feels like he's watching the world through the end of a metal pipe, pinpoint and distant. Too far to make anything out.
"The fuck am I supposed to do now?" He growls at the dead body in front him. The body doesn't respond. Unhelpful asshole.
What can he do? His crew isn’t h-
His crew is dead.
Nope, he’s not going to think about that. His mind sharply veers back to Trafalgar and Mugiwara. …The only living people Kidd knows. They’re not allowed to die, too. He wouldn’t-
Sudden panic grips his chest. If they die, Kidd will have literally nothing to live for. He needs to- to see- to check. Make sure.
He relies on his shitty-but-passable observation haki to make his way back through the city, following that damned Strawhat’s Voice like a beacon. He can hear it, at least, but maybe- he’s hallucinated before, this wouldn’t be the first time.
Kidd breaks down the door of a tiny cabin where Mugiwara should be. He shoves off all the people getting in his way, mind solely focused on physical confirmation that he’s not alone in the world. That Trafalgar and Mugiwara are still alive.
When he finally breaks through and presses his ear to Luffy’s chest. Then Law’s.
All the people in the room are staring at him, but he doesn’t care. They’re breathing. They’re alive. They’re fine.
Kidd isn’t alone.
Law
Law comes-to slowly. His arm throbs and he almost wants to pass right back out to avoid it and everything else that hurts like he’s been shoved through a meat grinder. But a sudden memory of the gun that killed Cora aimed at Mugiwara’s face is enough to cut violently through the haze. He tries to sit up, which he very quickly finds is a bad idea.
He’s in a bed, and Doflamingo isn’t here, so he collapses back into the pillow with a groan. No light comes in through the window so it must be some time into the night.
Sifting through his recent memories, he vaguely recalls hallucinating Cora-san killing Doflamingo right before he passed out. A tall, dark feather cloak blocking out the sun, and in his delirium, he was fully convinced that the ghost of his dead father figure came to meet him at death's door.
But in a bed to his left, Mugiwara snores away loudly. And while it makes sense for his personal eternal damnation to involve being stuck in a room with Luffy, he can’t imagine hell would be generous enough to let him sleep while Law got his bearings. So he’s probably still alive.
…He really didn’t expect to survive.
After staring blankly at the ceiling for a few beats, he gains enough awareness to notice a weight on his legs.
As much as he can, he cranes his neck. Curled up over his legs like a dog, fast asleep in a mound of red feathers and hair, is the Supernova Eustass Kidd.
“What. The hell,” he says, blinking rapidly in case he vanishes. Nope, still there.
“We couldn’t get him to leave, but Sabo seemed to think his presence was harmless,” a soft voice supplies.
Nico Robin steps into his line of sight.
Law doesn’t know a “Sabo,” unless you count the notorious revolutionary. But there were a lot of names being thrown around the comms before Doffy crushed his. It’s probably one of the gladiator army Mugiwara recruited. Maybe that’s where Eustass came from.
“You never mentioned that you were allied with the Kidd Pirates,” Nico Robin says, which completely blindsides him.
“What?” He asks, too bewildered to say anything else.
She tilts her head. “He was quite concerned for you and Luffy. Eyewitnesses say that he bodily defended the both of you from Doflamingo. We assumed he was with you.”
“What?” He asks again. He hasn’t seen the guy since Saobody, where they pretty firmly and mutually agreed to be enemies the next time they met.
“He killed Doflamingo himself, then carried you both to us.”
Law does a double take between her and Eustass.
“He what?” Law asks, agog. Killing Doflamingo… okay, that’s insane, but at the very least, Law can understand the motivations there for a hotheaded Supernova like Eustass Kidd. But protecting the two of them? Bringing them to safety instead of running off to claim all the credit? Waiting at their bedside?
“Why?” He asks, with a tinge of hysteria.
“I’m not sure. He was… non-responsive… to our questions. The only time he spoke was to describe your injuries.”
This is just bizarre.
At the foot of the bed, Eustass is soundly asleep, even lightly snoring. Law himself wakes at the lightest of noises – unless he collapses from exhaustion, which happens more often than he’d like to admit. For Eustass to sleep this comfortably in the presence of what are technically his enemies… hell, the guy is literally on top of him, and Law hasn’t the foggiest clue what he’s done to earn this absurd level of trust.
He notes that if a person's vision was hazy and colors were washed out by the afternoon sun, Eustass’ stature and oversized feather cloak would paint a rather familiar silhouette.
Law shifts his legs slightly, jostling the man experimentally. Eustass murmurs something and scrunches up his face irritably, but otherwise doesn’t stir.
A tiny, annoying voice in the back of Law’s brain says that Kidd looks rather approachable when he’s not frowning or snarling. It whispers that a man who would sleep at the foot of someone’s bed couldn’t be the one-dimensional, ruthless, uncouth bastard that Law assumed him to be. It points out that this is the person who avenged Cora-san, and he chose to save Law’s life.
The people who save Law never last long. Hell, Mugiwara was less than a second from a seastone bullet through the skull for it before Kidd showed up. And even if Doffy is… even if Kidd somehow did it, not just disposed of one of his string copies, but well-and-truly finished him; even if Law lets himself believe the nightmare is finally over, it doesn’t mean Kidd is safe. Before Doflamingo, there was Amber Lead. And after Doflamingo, there’s bound to be something-
Kaido. Oh, fuck. Law forgot about Kaido. Joker’s partnership with him was private knowledge that Law had to dig up. Kidd has a reputation for being brash and reckless, sure, but he doesn’t know what he stepped in by killing Doflamingo. Not like Mugiwara did.
There’s an emperor after his head. Just like everyone else before him, Kidd signed his own death warrant the moment he saved Law.
He feels ill.
Maybe it shows on his face, because Nico Robin’s arm sprouts from the bedside table and pulls open the drawer, handing him a bottle of painkillers. The woman herself is in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee. Politely and purposefully not looking his way.
Law takes the bottle and downs twice a medically reasonable dose.
He stares at the sleeping Supernova on top of him for several minutes, waiting for the pills to hit his bloodstream. Eventually, he falls asleep counting Kidd’s breaths, with a single hazy thought floating through his mind.
I wasn’t worth your saving.