Can I Steal Your Heart? - A LawLu fanfic

(Luffy) Chapter 52 - Betrayal

A/N: We know  that Luffy has no clue what "the mood" is, or how quickly it can be destroyed, right? That's an established fact? Good. Moving on.

"Can you tell me about Rusla yet?" Luffy found himself asking quietly a little while later when Law came in with the breakfast he'd insisted on getting up and making.

"Now? Really?" Law sighed. "Alright...." He lowered himself to sit against the headboard. Luffy moved to sit up next to him, grabbing that tattooed hand in quiet support as a warm plate of food was placed on his lap.

Law took a big bite of the fruit he'd set on his own plate before he started. "Rusla... was on my crew, for a time. The second woman we ever had. She joined about three months before we got to Sabaody.... At first, she seemed... well, a lot like you, in some ways. Bright. Happy. Curious. Helpful. She proved her worth pretty quickly. Good in a fight, always had our backs."

Luffy finished his breakfast and reached across to put the empty plate on the table.

"One day, after a successful raid... things happened between her and I."

He could hear in Law's tone what kind of things he meant, and the jealousy that twisted his gut nearly made him sick. But he didn't interrupt, didn't speak, just leaned his head against Law's arm, right over the heart-shaped tattoo on his shoulder.

"It was much later that I found out that the first time wasn't as clean-cut as I thought... but I'll get there. Um. She talked me into a relationship with her. Convinced me that since I at least liked her enough to have sex, maybe with time I'd like her romantically, too."

"That... never happened, but I tried to still be a good boyfriend, out of some sense of duty, I suppose. Made her special meals occasionally, gave her trinkets, both looted and bought. The works. And we were happy, for the most part. At least, I thought so. She helped... relieve some of the tensions that came with captaining a ship on the Grand Line. And I trusted her as much as I trusted most of my crew." Law sounded so resigned, his voice laced with remnants of pain as he poked at the food on his plate.

Luffy was beginning to wish he'd never asked.

"But then came Sabaody. And Marineford. And you, with all the curiosity you stirred in me. I'll admit, I became distracted for a while, trying to figure you out. Why you'd gotten involved, why you made such a scene and then disappeared. That's when things started changing. She became... entitled. Bitter. Insubordinate. It was like she got it into her head that being the Captain's girlfriend meant that she was above everyone else on the ship, including Bepo and Shachi and Penguin. And she didn't like that no one else bought into that delusion."

"The sex was still great. Hopefully you and I never need to have angry sex, but I won't deny that there's a certain... potency to it... but there was a wall between us. I could never truly relax with her, anyways, not like I can with you. I still had to be 'Captain' with her sometimes. Anyways, instead of relieving tensions, she was beginning to cause them, both with me and with the rest of the crew."

"One day, we docked on a new island, and all went our separate ways. Apparently, she found herself somehow in the presence of an off-duty Marine who proceeded to woo her.... I don't actually know if she physically cheated, but she seemed to feel something for him, because she started talking. She told him pretty much everything about us. How the Tang worked, what kind of islands I preferred to stop at, our battle strategies."

"It was a week later that we were pinned. Nearly a third of my crew was captured — some of them have scars to prove it. If Rusla's new boy toy had stopped monologing, he might've caught me, too. He made sure to tell me all about her betrayal, everything she'd told him. And she showed no guilt about any of it. Never denied it. Maybe she wanted me to beg her to stay, or get upset and ask why. I couldn't do either. I just left her with him, and pulled what was left of my crew away to regroup."