Work Text:
There’s a hand on his back, and his cheek is pressed through feathers against something warm; something beating to tempo with footfall, footfall, beating like a heart, like great wings. The air is thin and cold, ductile in his lungs and lashing thinly against the lining of his throat. A voice, even and warm, but Law can’t make it out through the pressure between his temples, air bloating the space in the canals of his ear.
Law wakes up choking, mouth full of a damp density he can’t place, can only feel bunching and curling in his against the inner scoop of his gums. Pricks of solid pressure, and wet clotting, iron-laden and smoke-thick as he gags against--his--coat, facedown and spluttering, his first exhale frigid. His shoulders draw back, and he attempts to heave himself up onto his elbows, drooling and scrambling and damp-eyed, and hacks single, broken feathers. He laughs a little bit at himself, at the saliva dripping onto his bare forearms and down his chin, unable to take full breath.
The scent of tobacco rises, behind the eyelids and squeaking through the gaps in the skull, and it makes his head heavy, laugh-cough-laughing, mouth warming. He can’t find purchase, with the bunk swaying and the sea moving hugely beneath him, convecting and stirring and drawing the Numancia Flamingo somewhere inwards, somewhere downwards.
Slam-slam-slam. His spine straightens, wide-eyed and shuddery, and the strip of light through the cracked door blazes apart into a full arc, sudden in the night when Law looks over his shoulder. A shadow falls upon him, and he stills in the dark.
“Eh, don’t be surprised, I even knocked.” Doflamingo laughs, folding himself through the narrow door to Law’s quarters, elbows bent and still brushing either wall. He lopes forward, head dipping forward to disappear in the full of his silhouette--massive, absorptive, even without his plumage. Law tucks his face between his forearms, exhaling a heavy breath into the bunk.
“It’s fine, I just feel sick,” Law says, his jaw shiny. It’s no concern, he always feels sick. “Please go back to bed.” His arms are trembling, and the coat beneath him shifts; Each rustle of a feather fills his head with blood, and Doflamingo’s hand covers the whole back of his throat like a scruffing.
“Hey...” His palm is sticky, and it makes Law’s skin heat, a heat that crests his shoulder blades follows in rays across his back, tucking into his sides and diffusing in his hips with a fester of itching disgust. He trembles.
“Nrgh, Doffy, leave me--” His shoulders ripple, sweat beginning to prickle on his biceps, and the coat beneath him breathes damply. Doflamingo’s fingers curl to stroke the little knobs of his spine at his nape, before smoothing flat along the curve of his skull. He presses his face into the coat, and Law inhales deep, starved lungfuls of the meager air that filters between the netting, between the dense plumage. It passes through, winter-bit, tasting unlike anything in the stinking vacuum of his quarters.
“Hey,” He laughs, “it’s okay.” and he’s folding his knees up onto the bunk, contorting himself to fit onto the bunk, collapsing Law’s body--gangly and foreign, freshly-made--into the hollows of his own with a surprisingly deft negotiation of the wrist. His bare feet press flat against the wood, and he hangs his chin over Law’s narrow shoulder, sheltering them with his exposed back.
“We used to do this all the time,” Doflamingo mutters, breathing into his sweat-greased hair, chuckling faintly, and Law’s head throbs for oxygen, his throat angling away--towards--away, a thrashing in inches and centimeter. Doflamingo’s skin is thrumming, blood circulating just beneath it too-quick. He feels the phantom sensation of a hand on his shoulder--first the top, then down the side, to stroke him as he’s curled fetal; The shape is about right, the size, too.
He’s mumbling, and Law’s overfull with stimuli, the heat and the scent of ferment, sweet fruit and thick, acrid smoke, and the soft, worn coat beneath him, when we were kids, we’d always get in trouble, you never wanted to sleep alone, you know . Law’s head rolls, and Doflamingo’s arm is fitted beneath his waist, his hand crossing the whole of his chest, gripping the fabric there, but you were supposed to grow up. The pressure becomes immense, and Doflamingo’s nails wear through the thin of his shirt, Law’s spine flexing in resistance, Guess you never did, right? Doflamingo laughs with gritted teeth when Law fails to suppress a pained whine but in the dim space where Doflamingo’s temple presses to the hinge of Law’s skull--through skin and hair and the mangled knot of his brain stem--he can’t tell if it’s responsive or autonomous.
I didn’t mind, you know, I promised I’d protect you, and I’d look after you. His voice is so strange, muffled through Law’s hair, and no longer sound but mere vibration, mere heat and moisture and the strange, painful sparking up his trigeminal nerve. He can’t pin the voice, whether it’s high or low or thin or broad or smooth or manic. Doflamingo strokes over Law’s chest, and his fingers touch his sternum, two of them pressing into where his collar bones meet, and then skimming to his throat. You’ll make it easy for me, won’t you? and Law’s breath is rasping, bubbling where it rises from where Doflamingo’s fingers press against him.
“Doffy..?” he breathes, unsure, and Doflamingo’s head cocks, his shoulder kneading into the coat beneath them, making it breathe, and everything rises, everything spins, and turns back, and sinks, and he wants to cry, but he’s --too old to cry, isn’t he, by now? Doflamingo strokes his throat, once more, spreading thumb and forefinger wide to grasp fully across the skin and depress the mealy, tender little spots of his cervical lymph nodes. He stills there, feeling Law swallow.
“Yes, Corazon?” He replies, thick-throated, smiling at the boy’s ear. Another stroke, and an airy, dank pleasure flutters up the same path as the tobacco scent, the gunpowder, the blood, the rubbing alcohol, the snow. Corazon …
He shrinks into himself, and Doflamingo, with a stuttery, drunken laugh, folds over him until his shoulder is warm again.