Work Text:
Their mother is a swan, narrow neck and drooping eyes, thin shoulders with a tendency to turn inwards as she stood, hands pooling over the silken creases of her skirt to draw the boys in front of her. No teeth on her, smile crimped and tight like the cracking of ice, laughter tucked behind a strategic veil of piano player's fingers. When Doflamingo begins to smile, lips parted until they creak and swell with blood in a grimaced approximation of joy, she lights up, drawing him in close to her chest and running spindly fingers through the flaxen hair coiled close to his scalp.
She married for love, she says, solemn and low-lidded, mourning something not quite hers but just almost, close enough to skim the pads of her fingers across until they bled. Love, she tells them again, smiling tight-lipped and truly meaning it, and again, when Rosinante hitches over Saint Homing's shoulders to jostle as they run, and once more, with their tiny hands fisting in the threadbare cloth of her button-up as she goes limp.
Doflamingo wasn't quite surprised when that pretty, narrow neck of hers snapped.
“Your mother is a beautiful woman,” a woman had told the two of them, rolling her head on her shoulders to peer down at them with narrowed eyes, scrunched nose speaking of something rank and unpalatable when Doflamingo runs his hand over a running nose. He can’t recall her face, only the way the light filtering through the window behind her chased the rim of her glass bubble as she moved to remove it in a blinding halo.
“Our mother was a beautiful woman,” Doflamingo mirrors one day, when he is pacing a proto- Numancia Flamingo , letting his mouth run like a leaking faucet (an inconvenience he’d never quite encountered in the marble halls of Mariejois), spluttering and filthy. He’s all itchy skin and awkward limbs, the clumsy making of a monster. He swings the bottle in a wide arc, recalling the snippy woman, speaking in kind with his memory, “bar her too-narrow nose and and cold demeanor and spindly hands!” Vergo catches the bottle by the neck with one hand, eyes never lifting from the newspaper in his lap, when it goes spinning out of his own spindly fingers. “Her poor endowment and meager hips!” He cackles until he can feel the noise seep in behind his eardrums, spilling into his head like hot ink, spiking across each wrinkle and fold of his brain in jets of searing pain, and then laughs a little bit more for good measure. Vergo presses his palms flat to his ears after setting the uncorked wine on the nightstand, brows furrowed in annoyance, half-contemplating giving his “captain” a good smack.
“I’d like to see your too-narrow nose, you fucking vulture!” He screeches at the apparition, voice hoarse from his own laughter, utterly incensed that the vintage had somehow flown from his hand--from existence, out of the wonderful little fantasy in which he was tearing the woman’s golden hair from her head in bloody fistfuls, his own blood spilling black down the ridges of veins popping from the backs of his hands after plunging straight through the glass, shattering her halo into her screaming mouth.
The bottle shatters somewhere behind his head, and he snaps back to finally, finally look at Vergo, grin twisted into a capricious snarl, haunches raised like a starved dog. They stare each other down, air thick with the young testosterone thrumming in their veins, keeping Doflamingo’s voice fragile and peaking when he squawks and bringing Vergo’s into his own baritone register.
Their gazes hollow out after a couple seconds, Doflamingo returning in small strides to lucidity and Vergo’s shoulders going slack, mouth following suit. Doflamingo breaks the terse silence with a pleased laugh.
“Thanks for wasting the drink,” he laughs, sinking into a questionably stained leather couch that will soon be too small for the both of them, his own feathers spilling from the back and into the seat by his own weight, and Vergo waves a dismissive hand. Doflamingo still gets a facefull of World Economy News a couple minutes later, though, laughing and coughing against thick pages.
It runs from his lips, too, beautifulcoldspindlypoormeager , words running into each other and knocking thick against his teeth, tasting of the blood of his inner cheeks the night his precious brother returns, soundless and cold-eyed . For many nights after he stains his own spindly fingers with her favorite son’s blood, it teeters from his gaping maw in heaved breaths, spoken in shudders into the night.
They’re both broad, unfurling from their respective hunches like beasts, mountains made to walk, speaking nothing like their elegant, narrow-waisted mother, and yet, Doflamingo’s fingers twitch like the legs of a spider, and Rosinante keeps his hands in his lap, shoulders curving inwards. Still, neither of them are quite the delicate, somber bird their mother was.
And yet, Cora-san’s neck snaps just about as easily, teeth flashing in a grimace as he lifts a pistol with a trembling arm. The blood blooms easily from his center, stark and vivid, lacking any of the graceful understatement of their mother, the sight of it searing the eyes.
Huh.