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I.
Their meeting is punctuated by moaning, the rhythmic slap of great oars in greater waves, all to time with the droll beat of the drum, the tinny, ringing crack of the whip. Crocodile wipes his eyes; the work, when there's any to be had, is good and hard and mind numbing, drawing up ledgers until his temples pulse, but the atmosphere is unbearable. It reeks; not only the sweat, the bodies and the stagnant blood that pools in the perpetual welts beneath the shackles, but the smarmy attitudes and pathetic eyes. There's no power in it, only weak, insignificant men desperate to maintain delusions of grandeur, grinding their skinny heels between the shoulder blades of those even weaker.
Despite the bed, the money, the honeyed looks and lingering fingers from the galley's captain that tell him he'll never go a day without comfort in exchange for something much more dire, much more consequential than comfort, he finds himself tiring. Mild, sadistic pleasures can only gratify for so long, all things of the North Blue's meager slave trade operation--particularly when he catches Paradise on the wind, elaborate and edged and begging for his knife in its tender underbelly. He'll leave at the next port, he decides, never having given anyone on the ship the impression he's anything more than what he is--a hired hand, another working body, only differentiated from the trafficked slaves by his insistent, cruel stare that indicates his freedom, the nature of his work, and his paycheck.
Perhaps, too, he'll leave not a trader, nor a slaver, not a hired hand nor a processor, but a pirate. He feels it, thrumming in him, the only thing great enough to fill his skin, only the battering of the sea to his lonely bones, salty spume filling his throat with a foreign, implacable joy.
And so, he doesn't mind harboring the little bilge rat, found ducking between the cargo and weaving around the slumbering bodies of the slaves in the hold, lain like lounging seals on the beachside. He opens the door to his quarters, a smile ghosting his lips at both his musings and the vague memory of his little mutiny.
"Hey," Doflamingo squawks, laying unashamed with his filthy feet kneading at the bedding of Crocodile's cot. What has he been doing? He's hosed the brat down at midnight at least twice already, his knuckles clamped between the boy’s teeth when he yelps involuntarily at the flush of the water, ultimately drenching the both of them. "I'm bored."
Maybe he does mind.
“Smoke, then.” Crocodile spits, fumbling through his pockets for the crumpled packet, tossing it onto the kid’s stomach, hard enough to make his scrawny body sink around the impact.
“Boring!” He snarls in return, but he lights up anyway, rubbing the filter frantically between his lips for a moment before taking a drag that does nothing to ease the jitter in his shoulders, crawling long-legged across his collarbones, “I’m hungry.”
“I fed you.” Crocodile shoves him aside, dropping onto the mattress and sticking one hand beneath the cot to fish out a flat metal tin. He plucks a cigar from the case, posture loosening enough that his slack elbow spills into the boy’s lap when he inhales, “If you want more you’ll have to take it from my mouth, you little shit.”
The little bird stares at him, mouth going slack, a flush moving from--oddly enough, Crocodile’s noticed--his temples to his cheeks, a little pinkening of the skin, making it look intensely thin, breakable. Crocodile envisions rasping his fingers along the corner of his eyes, seeing the layers of it pull away delicately, like crepe, exposing the thin webbing of blood-swollen vein beneath, and he smiles a bit--at the gawping, at the strangeness, at the fact that the slightest quirk of his mouth seems to send the stupid brat into some sort of internal frenzy that stiffens his shoulders, throat.
Doflamingo takes a sharp breath, and the stream of smoke that pours off the cigarette zags; Crocodile takes a long, indulgent drag, then lets the cigar smoke seep from his gently parted mouth. The kid is getting easier to fluster the longer this goes, and he thinks, with small satisfaction, that he'll tire of him soon. How lucky the both of them are; after this time tomorrow, they'll never see each other again.
"Do you want to know a secret?" Doflamingo's voice rises thinly in the dark, reedy and distinct. There's a whisper of desperation threaded to it, the way a child speaks to a grave, uncomprehending and begging answers. A spindly hand falls upon his sheet, and his temple crowns the edge of the cot before leaning up so his jaw can rest on it. Crocodile squares his shoulders, renegotiating his crossed arms. The back of his head thunks against the wall, just by the porthole, and its open curtain wisps gently at the side of his throat.
"I won't even trade for it. This one's free, okay?" He tries, and his shoulders raise, peaking through his thin shirt. "Don't you want to know?"
Crocodile huffs, rolling his eyes.
"Don't you?" Somewhere in the night, a grown man is groaning his dying breath.
"Alright. Fine." The kid scrambles up, further, drawing both of his elbows onto the bedding and propping his face with his hands, lips spluttering wordlessly.
“But--” Crocodile raises a finger between them, his wrist level with the boy’s chin--"I don’t do free. That’s not how this world works.” His brows rise, cool and intrigued as they come into view from behind his dark glasses. “We’ll be even after this, stowaway. You better hope it’s worth your weight.” He lowers his hand, tipping his head.
Doflamingo nods furiously, a little smile spreading his lips. He jerks his head, harshly, once and twice, and he’s pulling his torso onto the cot; Crocodile withdraws further, drawing his folded ankles closer to his hips and flattening himself to the wall, watching as, in the manner you’d unleash a dog that has been sicced on a doomed man, Doflamingo yanks his glasses off the bridge of his nose. The little smile on his mouth stretches wide, becomes vicious, but Crocodile, with a tightening of his own lips, peers down. Doflamingo tilts his chin, and their faces are perfectly parallel, close enough to just barely feel Crocodile’s breath on his cheek as he permits Crocodile to peer down at him. His arms stretch to either side of Crocodile, his glasses balanced loosely in one palm.
One eye, sea-dark in the night, bitingly blue. The other, for the slightest second, flashing pure white, as if a little portal to limbo contained in the hollow of his skull. Crocodile resists the strange urge that possesses his wrist, compelling him to grasp the boy’s chin and angle his head; The moment passes, and he sees the iris, clotted and milky. Unseeing.
“They say I’m a monster.” He says, sickly, almost sing-song with satisfaction and glee. His shoulders are trembling, his arms twisting a little on the bed, “They can’t beat me.” Still, though, that grave, confessional quality, the way he speaks laden with a hundred other voices that Crocodile can’t distinguish and doesn’t understand the implications of. In the snake’s den, with the drag of scales pulling against his hips and belly, he feels nothing.
"What low standards they have.” He drawls, taking a long exhale.
“It's gonna take a lot more than a dead eye to impress me, kid. I've seen pirates real mangled that could chew you to bits." He grins a little, angling his jaw in a self-satisfied way, letting the light lance across white stitch of healed skin that crosses neatly between his ears.
Doflamingo gapes at him, eyes desolate and lips falling open, slowly apart, his head creeping forward with an involuntary, shocked lean of his shoulders. His eyes dart, uncomprehending, and his fingers tighten around the legs of his glasses, making them creak sharply in the dark. Crocodile’s grin falters--he didn’t intend to truly upset the brat (more in regard for saving himself trouble than the thing’s feelings), particularly when he seemed so precarious. Then--
“Really?” His voice rises to a sharp squawk, his shoulders drawing up so that the tender insides of his arms draw along the bared skin on the outside of Crocodile’s calves. His smile does something strange, wavering with an intense discreteness, almost like the warble of sheet metal. He follows the rolling of his shoulders, falling back to flop against the hardwood. He laughs like shattered glass, broken with raspy, delirious breaths, “What a wretched place this is! How miserable!”
Crocodile’s nose wrinkles. Squeaky little thing, coasting on luck and wit and a canny charisma, all things which Crocodile takes no stock in, but he finds himself, absently and bloodlessly, not wanting the little brat to die--or at least having no interest in seeing it, or hearing of it, should it happen. He’d almost pity it, if the entertainment value had not already worn thin for him, unwilling to entertain and unliking of the vague, directionless intrigues the urchin draws up in him. He is pointed, he is driven, determined and unflinching, however loosely he entertains himself, however many things he permits, and there is no room for him in the unspeakable majesty that spreads his ribs like unfurled wings, the wordless chasm of fancy that stirs dimly, painfully inside of him.
Morning comes, and he leaves the boy and the slave galley and the pitiful slavish men that operate it there on the dock, none of it worth a glance.
II.
The night is cool, utterly featureless, pulled from the amorphous, sparse pages of a children’s storybook, and, in that great stretch of negative space, the blunt turning of pins and tumblers inside the window’s lock is loud, dissatisfyingly messy. Clink, clink, and the hinges bearing the glass panes shrill gratingly as they open. “I’m not in the mood, fool.”
Doflamingo swings through his window, legs-first with one arm hooked over the top, graceless as a monkey, he lands on one, flat foot. The other knee rises, then, trembling, he falls, the sound of his coat damp and thick against the tile, like a waterlogged body out at tide, thwapping into the breakers. He scrambles onto his arms--drops, stomach to the floor and spine bending as he restlessly wrestles himself out of the feather coat--scrambles up again, scuttling until he can stand again. It'd be funny, in isolation, but there's iron on the wind, and something worse, cloying like burnt sugar.
Crocodile rises--only after draining his tumbler of whiskey, the sudden imbibement making him go momentarily, blissfully lightheaded, just a little sick--and stands between the open window and the desk he'd been formerly seated at.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” He angles his hip as he watches Doflamingo, bare-armed and bony, skin draping thin, and shifts his thigh resting against the desk in order to give the impression of casualness.
Doflamingo cocks his head at him, grinning widely, meanly. Stupid question.
“I mean--” He snarls, but he’s unable to finish clarifying--not sure if he could--as Doflamingo crowds him, clapping an unusually large palm on his hip to shove him sidelong, stepping forward and forward until Crocodile’s back hits the wall, cursing and spitting all the while.
“I’ll kill you...!” Crocodile growls, rolling his shoulders in bracing, but then the bird shakes his head and makes some sort of animal noise, garbled and rumbling, approximating speech, but not any one word in particular. His hand comes up between them, shuttering broadly like the blade of a guillotine as he knocks his glasses from the bridge of his own nose, letting them clatter to the floor.
“Where’s that shitty family of yours, birdbrain? This--this is their job,” The stutter is decisive, a reaffirmation of what the thought half-formed. His mouth tightens--it couldn’t be fear in his voice, but it’s something strained and scrawny that he detests when Doflamingo’s hands clap just above his head. Huh, he's gotten taller than him.
The thought clears when Doflamingo's head sinks along the droop of his neck, meeting Crocodile's black stare with his own: One of his eyes electric blue, and the other festering in the socket, leaking translucent yellow through the ruddy, starburst slits like a sachet of fouling cream. He stinks of sweat, like stale skin and enclosed spaces, that sticky, savory toffee scent magnified in proximity. The alcohol settled in Crocodile's stomach rises, burning fiercely behind his sternum for a few nauseating moments.
"It'll scar, right?" He asks, jaw hanging down and looming in Crocodile's vision, the same way the reaper drags his scythe, swiping for the Achilles.
"Who did this to you?" Crocodile asks, instead, not in the mood to entertain the inane babbling, unwilling to climb the thin array of strings arranged before him, leading ever skyward. The scent clouds his head, his thoughts going opaque with the umami of clotting pus, and the genuine note of anger in his voice surprises him; Printed on the pane of his internal monologue, drawn through the sweat-steam in foreign scrawl, he realizes he wants the bastard who touched Doflamingo dead. Strange.
"A real pirate's scar, right?" His tongue drops from his loose jaw, and it touches the very bottom of the split in the wound, darkening the tip of it. It takes Crocodile a long, loaded second to register the memory; It pinches something near his brainstem, a painful, concerted shift to reach through the thick skein of apathy he's built between himself and the past. Once broached, it floods him, the boy rising in the dark, skull-like and erratically listless, the one who fancied himself bleeding steaming black.
Crocodile sighs, eyes shafting--away from that lurid wound, swollen edges winking and fluttering with the minute contractions of Doflamingo's face--in irritated resignation, "Yes. It'll be a nasty one,"-- monstrous, his mind supplies--"since you've let it get so bad." That seems to satisfy him, and his posture slackens, the lethal edge of every jutting bone sinking back through his musculature. His hands fall, sliding to Crocodile's shoulders, then down his chest, dropping to hang lamely between them; his fingers are stained with pus and plasma, tinged yellow at the tips and lined with flaking crimson in the beds, as if he'd been prodding the wound.
"Did you take his head?" Crocodile can’t keep staring, can’t keep watching and scrutinizing for the thick, buzzing signs of sickness that Doflamingo is fraught with; He focuses on the thought he knows to be his own, stokes the anger in a misguided effort for grounding, unwilling to acknowledge the magnetism in the thought.
Doflamingo’s breath rasps, panting like an eager dog having received praise. “Yes! Dead! Dead as a, a--ha! Haha, fufu!” His blue eye goes unfocused, and his head boggles on his shoulders, losing the thread. Another trickle of yellow fluid. Crocodile’s expresion blackens, and his hand snarls into his hair, the other fitting itself flat under his jaw, wrist facing outwards and fingernails pressing little white mounds into his ruddy face.
The puffy, split eyelid quivers, as if Doflamingo is trying to open it, to force Crocodile to peer down into the bloody, infect-swollen webbing that must trace all the way into his body, filling the hollow of his skull. "Go home and get this fixed, or I'll squeeze it out of your skull this instant, you shitty brat."
The bird squawks--something strange crosses his face, not unlike a please , exhilarated and completely, endlessly mad--before he jerks his chin away, sick of the stray dog appraisal. He starts to pull away, rolling his shoulders in a rhythmless swaying, beginning to cross the room. He hums a little, off-time to the twist of his spine.
"It’s useless to you now. Let go of it.” A beat of reigning silence, “Replace it, if you need to.” As Doflamingo plucks his coat from the floor in one flighty hand, as if it’s a pastry on a rack rather than 40 dank, filthy pounds of feather and netting, his head snaps back over his shoulder. He laughs, but his mouth doesn’t open, little huffs jetting from his nose as his head bobs, side-to-side, side-to-side, his good eye swallowing the dim light and making it new, all aglow. The smile that splits his face is completely foreign, his upper lip twitching to expose the barest gloss of his teeth despite the seal of his mouth, nearly more grotesque than the festering wound.
“That’s a funny idea…” Gently, dreamlike, nothing like the erratic jerking that overcomes his joints, making his drift stutter and freeze. He tosses the coat over his shoulder, and, in straight, direct sides, drops right out the window where he came.
Crocodile leans back against the wall with a sigh, pointedly not listening for the distantly wet, nauseating sound of a bird splattering on the cobbles below, shattering its deluded bones and spilling delirium from its cracked skull out into the street.
III.
They exchange a glance, Doflamingo flapping conspicuously until it catches Crocodile’s eye. He controls the irritated contortion of his face, endlessly grateful for the two feet--minimum--of clearance between his shoulders and those of the marine men milling about him, fussing and plying. He’s worked for this, he won’t let this idiot ruin everything for him--but no one seems to notice, the fine grains in the universe’s scale tipping ever unfairly towards the bird. He looks surprisingly hale, their last circumstances considered, but it brings Crocodile no relief.
Crocodile tries to gesture to him with a grimace, a scrunching of the nose and the brow and a tight shake of the head, telegraphing the sincerity of get out, right the fuck now ; His smile, however, doesn’t falter, and he shakes his head to drop his garish glasses loose. Crocodile stills mid-gesture.
His eyelid is scarred, visibly uneven despite the great distance between them, what sloppy work. It gives the impression of splitting; beneath it, pure crystal boggles in his skull, rolling gently to give refracted, beautifying glimpses at the tender, pink insides of the socket, a little stitch of black that must be the indicator of the enucleation.
He can’t articulate the sensation in him, the way his blood seems to rise in his body and make itself audible. His other eye, cruel and true, is almost starting--Crocodile had subconsciously expected just the same, Doflamingo having replaced everything scummy and tender within him with the hard, the impervious. It looks pleased, warming to the sight of Crocodile’s apparent shock.
Doflamingo raises his brow, the curve of his mouth somewhat sincere, boyish, and phantom laughter perks his ears as the brat flicks the bridge of his sunglasses, once again hiding his eye, his precious proof of monstrosity, no point in differentiating between which would be which. He slinks off without turning a single white-capped head, and Crocodile stands there, stiff and unsettled.
IV.
The young master is listless, foul tempered and scowling even in his sleep, his hand thrown over his eyes in a mocking posture of contrition. He wakes with one solid pull of the diaphragm, his chest jumping with the hard breath; he's not startled, moving between sleep and waking with the grunt of some great stone dislodging, deliberate and calculated in consequence. He sits up, drawing a thin, ugly swipe of thread through empty air; the veil of lucidity is thin, and his veins throb at the dissonance between the apparitions flanking him and the void in his observation haki, all enmity echoing from him and him alone.
Crocodile had left in the middle of the night without a word. He clamps a hand over his eyes, massaging his temples in a slow jerk that makes his knuckles peak.
Impossibly, he's been brusquer, even more clipped and impatient. Restless, too--eager if he were any other man, gloating and prideful as he may be, still too cautious and tense--however he tries to conceal it with biting words and casual posture; As enthralling as it is for Doflamingo, he can't help but lean into the angle of lover spurned, particularly with each dead end he encounters… A decade is a long time to spend playing hero, particularly for someone with such cold, efficient sensibilities.
His Crocodile, he’s sure not to disappoint, whenever he does pull the curtains on his little charade; The thought makes him shiver, but it also makes him even more foul. He was never good at games he couldn’t cheat at, and, as vile as it is, he can’t cheat time--not yet, not now, not about this. Here, with Dressrosa secure beneath the shelter of his palm, caged between his fingers with their pads on each of its pulse points, Crocodile sprawls even further beyond him, and it frustrates him to no measure. He rises from the mattress, hands fumbling on the nightstand. He knows by touch that it’s Crocodile’s tumbler, half-full of dilute scotch--he lifts and drains it without a thought, moaning lowly and sliding his thighs together when the cool glass presses to the inside of his lip. Fuck, goddamn, he’s so mad.
A good hedonist, without a lick of self-doubt in him, he adores the wanting, the wanting and the wanting and the wanting with no end and no direction, all gratifying, but something between them feels too old, too unspeakably, beautifully terrifying to leave to a drifting, erratic whim. He won’t bear to lose it. He has always wanted to own Crocodile, to own him or to kill him, both at once if the world could be so kind; He’s old enough to know it plainly. He wants, also, disgustingly, pettily--and this is where the clarity of thought ends.
Whatever it is that he wants, Crocodile’s restlessness has stirred his own, loath of the impression of being shouldered out, of having to scramble for his place in a vision he can’t capture in his own gaze. He tosses the crystal underhand, watches the tumbler shatter against the floor, and the crescendo of it does little to soothe his nerves; Amplifying them, as if each shard has pricked his grey matter, making his temples throb beneath his fingers.
He reaches for the bedside again, fumbling for the bottle he knows to be there, and stills when he catches a rounded corner, the prickling drag of velvet--he’s played this game before, chubby fingers over his good eye as Roci drops a trinket into his palm, or with metal tines prying the lids of one eye apart, a film reel playing in bleeding, incomprehensible fluorescences above his pinned, belt-strapped head--and the corner of his mouth twitches on a smile.
Surely Crocodile isn’t distracted enough to leave something of his own--no, this must be for him. He covers the object with his palm, the hinge of the square case pressing cooly into his distal crease as he gives a gentle squeeze. Well--now, some things fall into place, then, thrillingly, charmingly, and he envisions Crocodile’s eyes through a veil. What an idea…
Other hand still sheltering his brow, eyes shut, he flicks the case open. He taps gently at the silken inner lining before following the downward slope, conscious of the weight at the center of the case--oh!
He drops his hand as he turns on the bed, his smile aglitter and his good eye bright, the other flashing in its socket to reflect dim, emerald light. Lowering his face and bending his spine, he marvels at the thick little sheaf, the shape he knows so well: pure gold, indistinguishable from a fleck of something freshly mined or plundered, should one not understand the nuance in the curvature, fitted to the position of his socket.
He presses his thumb into the center of the prosthetic, seeing his thumbprint on the gilt surface in the place of the iris as a thrill traces his navel; It’s exactly what Crocodile would wear.
He can tell, too, by the heft of it, that it will hurt, and very badly. The metal will deepen the socket, creating a dull, imperceptible pressure on the implanted cushion by the nerve, pain building and building until it will leave him sick and staggering, making his under eyes droop should he wear it too long. This revelation enters him with no small measure of delight.
(He realizes, also, snaking on the heels of the prior, that he couldn’t give a damn what sort of false eye was sitting in that little case. It could have been anything at all, something perfectly plain and uninteresting--he complains enough about Doflamingo’s tastelessness. Nothing is good enough to compete with the knowledge that Crocodile had paid enough attention, spent enough time and energy to procure--commission, surely--something like this on his behalf.)
He’s never been good at resisting urges, particularly when he finds no good reason, when he can--probably--experience no truly devastating consequence: He reaches up and pops his prosthetic from his socket, knocking aside the crust gathered in his lashes and aching for its dryness. He blinks into the newly opened space, the contact of his eyelids spongy and caving without the propping structure.
He imagines, briefly, intensely, the salt of his own skin striking the inside of the gape in his head, a preemptive sting of promise. Thinks deliriously--falsely, he knows, without any loss of pleasure--about Crocodile’s fingers, about his rasping touch facing to the fleshy, capillary-riddled insides of his socket.
Replace it, if you need to, he had said, that night, vague and enigmatic and striking in him a strange understanding when Doflamingo had crawled to him on the coast of his delirium and misplaced grief, caught somewhere in the sticky, secretive, liminal of death and birth of new leviathan. Then he had been seeking nothing from him--the boy to whom he had offered his most precious thing in hopes of its amplification, in hopes of his attention--but the weight of his stare, the catch of his eyes and the curl of his lip. If you need to.
It all comes in on him, battering him like a flurry of physical blows as he rises, one hand clenching and the other gingerly wrapped around his little gift, drifting to the attached suite. The monster he has been, and the one he has become, the heavenly demon--their age and their ambition and the pitiful world at their mercies, their place in-above-atop it, fucking it into the ground. Oh, oh, oh!
He rinses his hands, wrists shivering as the veil of water passes over them, before stretching his scarred eyelid, plucking it up and outwards. He stares momentarily into the darkness of that space, unending and dense with unheard vocalizations, none his own. With a cruel grin, a cruel stare, he distends the skin so the scar shines white on his tanned skin, a bleary smear of light tracing the curved edge of the false eye--if it can be called that. He cackles.
Crocodile had left in the night, without a word, without a note. But, in a single, protracted, complicated stroke, has left something in its stead, something that scents--to the hysteric, the deluded, in foreign and esoteric private language--like promise.
Enough, at least, to soothe his nerves.
