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The sensation of sweat gathering beneath his armpits and the rough cloth blinding him are foreign sensations. The heat of the fire below has begun to melt the soles of his shoes, singing the bottoms of his feet. If he gets out of this, if he can run, he won’t be able to get very far as he feels the skin blister and his shoes warp. Homing fares worse, tall enough that the flames have licked up his pants. Everything smells like burning hair and burning rubber and burning fabric and a life crashing down while they are blind and helpless to stop it. Doffy knows they’re all crying – even himself, which terrifies him – but Rosi cries the hardest. Of course, he does.
He’s blindfolded but he can see every face.
He can see the twisted anger of the man whose arrow met its mark in his left eye, the lines in his face like the gaps between row crops harvested by identical beaten-down slaves in the Holyland.
He can see the mother of the girl who committed suicide, how she’s punished herself for it beneath the threadbare clothes on her back despite not having a hand in any of it.
He can see the children in the crowd who will harbor the memory of witnessing it forever same as how Doffy and Rosi watched metal collars tick and explode, how humans ran themselves into ragged corpses to appease their masters in the Holyland.
They’re not that different.
He is above it.
The blindfold turns to ash, stinging his eyes, but finally, he can see clearly.
They’re all scared livestock.
A herd of cows and sheep and chickens roasts alongside him, eyes rolling as they struggle against the tide of their own mass pushing against one another. Doffy’s eight-year-old self wishes he couldn’t see the crushed beasts beneath their hooves, and his older self fights to keep him watching because this is what it’s really like, but his younger being wins over and he finds himself screaming and crying alongside his brother and father.
He jerks himself awake, falling from his place nailed to the wall back into his present self, breathing heavily, sweating and crying as he had been in his dream. Doflaming looks around for Rosi and Homing and finds only Trebol, scrutinizing him over the tops of his glasses.
“You had the dream again, didn’t you, Doffy?” Trebol asks, smirking. His shining upper lip crumples with the twisting motion of his face, like it’s doing something it shouldn’t.
Doflamingo reaches under his glasses to wipe his eyes and finds they’ve been removed. He stops breathing, feeling around on the table for his glasses till his hand hits something plastic. He puts them back on clumsily before he nods at Trebol.
“Ne, what’s wrong, Doffy? I thought I could look you in the eyes,” Trebol said. “Or am I part of the masses now, too?” He fake-pouts. It’s disgusting.
“No, of course not,” Doflamingo replies.
He hopes Trebol will die for him. Humans were born to do so and Trebol, no matter how close the two are, is human too.
Trebol is aware of this.
He knows his place and exacerbates his filth as an example to Doflamingo. Yet here he is with the audacity to overestimate his role. It’s contradictory. Trebol was Doflamingo’s savior, he was certain, but he knew a day would come when he would outgrow the need for Trebol – when he truly reigned supreme.
He’d have to wait that out, though.
Trebol spots the crease in Doflamingo’s forehead like a hawk. The once-smooth skin resembles a topographic map more and more these days, laced with veins popping with anger and tension, and his face warped with smiles that touch the corners of his eyes but don’t make them smile with him.
“Why don’t you blow off some steam, ne, Doffy?” He suggests. “There’s plenty of blood to be spilled around these parts.”
Doflamingo never disagrees with this. Silently, he pulls his coat back up his shoulders where it had been slouched around them before and disembarks with Trebol worming along behind him.
Doflamingo comes away from his spree covered in blood that isn’t his own, grinning savagely, his teeth stained pink and red. He licks it off, stepping over bodies whose forms are indistinguishable between human and livestock. Their frozen faces fill him with broiling anger. They all look far too vulnerable to be allowed to exist for very long, if at all. He ends up leaving with a blaze behind him as he so often does. He doesn’t want them to have faces.
Trebol praises him all the way back to the ship and Doflamingo reflexively preens though he barely hears it over the roar of the flames behind them and the rush of his thoughts. The air smells more like burnt hair and burnt rubber and burnt fabric and lives crashing down around them than anything Doflamingo anticipates. It happens every time. They’re animals and they should smell as much when they cook but they never do. His nose wrinkles at the scent but if Trebol is bothered by it too he doesn’t let on. He sniffs hard, attempting to curb a thick string of snot from leaking past his upper lip to little avail.
Diamante, Pica, and Vergo are waiting for them at the prow of the ship in varying states of jealousy and awe.
“We wanted in on that too, you know,” Diamante says in mock bitterness.
Trebol waves a sticky hand at them in dismissal. “I know, we’d all love to see the Young Master in action. Next time, maybe.” He’s smug about being the only one along for that excursion and Doflamingo isn’t sure whether he wants to laugh, gag, or roll his eyes at that.
Diamante and Pica jokingly heckle Trebol about coming along while Vergo looks almost genuinely disappointed. Doflamingo takes quick notice and slips away from his executives with Vergo in tow. He’s strong and tall but all the same Doflamingo’s massive, spindly hand wraps around his bicep with ease as he pulls him downstairs to his quarters. He locks the door behind them and pops the cork on a bottle of wine.
“Next time, it’ll be just you and me,” Doflamingo says, grinning at him. “What do you think?”
Vergo’s face turns an identical pink to Doflamingo’s jacket and he stammers. “Y-yes, please, Doffy.”
Doflamingo’s smile grows. He’s seen Vergo’s attraction towards him flourish over the years, and he’s well aware of how he can wrap Vergo around his finger with ease. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already, but Doflamingo liked his bonds deep, his strings tight and sharp around each of his Family’s hearts (certainly it was something he had picked up from Trebol, though perhaps unknowingly).
They end up laying together, legs tangled, two hours later, nude and panting. Vergo had cried in reverence as he’d come and Doflamingo hadn’t felt quite so mighty as he had then. Of course, he didn’t feel the same way for Vergo. He felt little remorse about it. Vergo gave him a rush of power as he bent unto his will, but anyone that submissive could, Doflamingo knew that. The thing about Vergo that was irreplaceable was his competence and loyalty. No one could do Vergo’s job the way he did but him.
When they sleep together, Doflamingo wills himself not to have nightmares. It’s imperative Vergo does not, and never will, see him vulnerable. All the same, he dreams about a pig with food stuck to its face and his heart twists a little as he watches the blade swing forth and its head tumbles into a basket.