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Doflamingo's breath billows around his long fingers where he curls them against his jaw, whiteness seeping through their spread and bleaching the landscape below him. It dissipates, and he sees--vaguely, with a rising memory dim in his mind, rumpled paperboard at his ears and his eyes straining for that little chip in the wretched round of the sun--the wrecked landscape of Minion Island stretching meekly beneath him. Bodies strewn across the plain of it, through the glare and flicker of midnight snow, have the impression of movement, their blood smeared in living arcs beneath them.
Tsuru's soldiers begin creeping between them, congregating like ants around each of the corpses, carrying off crumbs of flesh as they scrub their pockets for weapons and contraband. Corazon's coat, blood-damp and exuding heat, shivers in the cradle of his arms; One of those living smears is making a long, grey streak leading from the burnt husk of one of the buildings towards the shoreline. He dives, the skywire he teeters on singing high and long as it's plucked by the sudden shift of weight.
"Law!" He screams--deliriously, unintentionally, the abrupt smack of his voice peaking against the top of throat and rising, shattered, into the space behind his temples making him jerk and twitch. The boy turns, and the sway of his cloak makes no sound when it whips against the snow; Makes no sound against the rising shouts of the marines, the sharp thunder of distant, firing bullets, the deafening snowfall that suspends time.
The snow kicks up around Doflamingo’s lunging in a wide arc, and it powders Law’s jaw, sticking briefly against the snotty heat of his mouth, before melting. He’s still snuffling, still gasping and heaving and teetering with the weight of his tears making his head lopsided, his eyes desperate and searching, but they narrow onto the glint of Doflamingo’s glasses, and his look blackens. His mouth falls open, eyes flaring, and his teeth--too small for a boy his age, everything about him shrunken and wrapped about itself--flashing. Doflamingo’s parabolic frown twitches, an erratic movement that offers the barest clarity.
“Look what you’ve done, you little idiot!” He heaves, and he snatches Law by the back of his cloak, lifting him into the air. He raises Corazon’s coat in his other hand, brandishing it’s full, draping length to Law, like some sort of prized pelt, and he screams--soundlessly--in horror; Doflamingo hears it in his head regardless, and the shriek reaches the very top of his skull, a spike through the grey matter.
“The, ha--” he loses his focus, his pupils shrinking, ”--fucking killed him because of you, idiot!” Doflamingo’s breath clenches his voice, tightening it and thickening its tone; He tries to listen to himself, tries to hear the way his own voice rings through the air like mangled brass. He heaves, and the cold air is abrupt to the heat of his throat, to the holy fire lighting his belly.
No, no, no, Law mouths, delirious, scrabbling and kicking and aglow with fever. Doflamingo shakes the coat at him, and a fleck of blood crosses the white patch on his nose.
“-at do you mean! What do you mean!?” His voice--hoarse, airless--cuts in abruptly, and his spine jerks with a weak, dampened force. Doflamingo, suddenly disgusted, dashes the boy to the ground, tossing the coat atop him. The sleeves steam when they hit the snow, and the moving air makes the feathers rustle gently. Law wails from beneath it, sitting up in a feeble, bruised shock. He clutches the coat below his chin, panting thinly above it, “What do you mean? Is--did--what happened? Tell me what happened, you bastard,” He lapses back into a sobbing fit, but he tries to keep his chin level, lowering his brows and snarling through his tears, “What did you do to Cora-san?”
(Law speaks with a hundred tongues, and looks at him with his brother’s eyes. Why, Doffy? Why?)
Doflamingo’s temple tightens, eyebrows raising and spreading back, and the thinning skin makes his veins pulse more erratically. Law, falls back, frothing at the mouth and choking on malice, slipping deeply through the scent of blood and tobacco that leaches up from the coat. Doflamingo smiles, head cocking with a twitch.
With an irrepressible derision, Doflamingo folds the boy’s limp body into the lining. He tucks the bundle underarm, the other jerking straight upwards to send a string to the clouds. A chill moves through the tips of his fingers, and it stiffens all the joints in his hand.
(The Family gives the Young Master a wide berth when he strikes the deck as righteous thunder, Corazon’s coat trailing his own like a streaky shadow. It mists blood when it pounds against the board; The berth tightens, ever so slightly, out of intrigue, when Law tumbles from it with a pained gasp, his narrow shoulder striking against the ground.
His eyes are dim, unfocused, and his head lolls when he tries to sit up; He knows nothing but the pain, stuffed overfull with lead, and the slant of the dark sea against the dark sky and the light-drained clouds that drift across them, the blood-stiff feeling of the feather coat beneath him and its undulation on the waves. Then, Doflamingo’s hand coming up to grasp him by the throat.)
“You…bastard,” Law comes to, gasping and blinking, unable to parse the light and the shadow of the cabin. He’s hyperventilating, attempting to push the thin blanket off his torso, the coat--immeasurably heavy--so he ends up grasping at it, taking fruitless handfuls of feathers and soot. Doflamingo’s back casts a severe shadow, and Law’s eyes widen, “You bastard, what did you do to Cora-san! What did--”
“I didn’t kill him, you useless brat.” Doflamingo’s neck cranes away, and his shoulders shift beneath his shirt.
“We talked it out, and he told me everything; he’s my own blood.” Law feels a cold, hissing comfort follow along the veins in his wrist, and he shivers at the thought of Cora-san’s words. Doflamingo rubs his shoulder through Cora-san’s coat, his hand big and warm on his slight frame. “I, of course, accepted him back into the family--how couldn’t I? My, my own brother.” He spits, turning away from Law, grip on his shoulder stilling, tightening. Law leans up towards him.
“The navy, of course, immediately figured out what he was doing. Betraying them. For you. But they’re not so quick to forgive, you see?” Again, tighter, and his grimace is deep enough that Law can see his molars, even sat behind him with his head angled slightly away. Anger flares in him, and it sets his limbs into motion, easing their passage as his elbows tighten and relax in turn.
“Why did you leave him?” He clasps his hands together, leaning forward onto his elbows.
“What?” Doflamingo’s glasses flash, and, had Law been anyone else, any less accustomed to pain and fear and hellfire over every inch of his skin, he would have shrank away.
“When--when you came to get me--I still, I think I was still quiet, it means, he was alive, he was alive when you--” He kneads the feather coat, spongy between his fingers, pinkening the little seams between them where the White Lead wraps his knuckles.
“You. Ungrateful. Fucking. Bitch! ” He turns, swiveling on his hip to fully face Law, and the brunts of his palm clap into the wall behind him, “I should’ve thrown you into the fucking sea. He wasted his life on you, Law. I’m trying to redeem it.” He speaks lowly and intensely, threat laced in his words, and his breath fans heat across Law’s face. He blinks back tears; However much pain he had endured, he is still a boy, sick and trembling and overfull with fresh grief, with a seeking hatred, looking desperately for a new target--or a familiar one.
“I know what he wanted.” Doflamingo is panting, and the lining of his throat is glossy, grotesque. Law clenches his fists in terror, feeling a tightening in the knit of his ribs, a hopeless wanting, without abandon. He loves Cora-san, he loves Cora-san, and he loves him enough to believe him, to believe the words the phantom forms in Doflamingo’s mouth--the one Doflamingo forms in the phantom's.
Doflamingo’s tongue flickers, hitting the roof of his mouth.
“Why don’t you cooperate with me?” His head dips, bird-like in the swooping extension of his neck, and Law is sickened by his own gaunt reflection in the Young Master’s glasses as it curves away from him, magnifying the crimson threading through his sclera.
He breathes heavy, darkly, and smells rising tobacco as Doflamingo faces him; From his breath, from the walls, rising up from Law’s own skin as if he’s sweating it out. He tries to speak, but he can hear the wet shifting of muscle in his throat, sees his mouth moving through the lens--wrong, all wrong--and he heaves instead. He-- wrong, all wrong, strung stiff and still with terror --nods.