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Doffy was born without a heart, Rosi thinks.
What he remembers most from the miserable nights of their youth, nauseous from hunger and the smell of death, is warmth draining from him like his mother’s cooling body. Doffy would huddle up next to him and take and take and take, like everything else in their lives, and Rosi would give without a second thought. But despite hugging each other so tight it hurt, he never felt a heartbeat.
He is even more sure when he’s found standing in a pool of his father’s blood and carried away by his winged savior. Doffy doesn’t have a heart, he can’t, or else he would feel the constricting ache of guilt in his chest that Rosi does.
His dreams are set to a rhythmic, familiar beat. Every night he relives the fire, the screams, his father’s distorted face as a bullet tears through his skull and Doffy holding the gun until he wakes up screaming. Is Doffy tormented by memories, he wonders? Or does he sleep soundly, thinking he’s done nothing wrong?
When he is accepted back into his brother’s good graces, he is given the name Corazon and realizes what it means. Rosi is Doffy’s heart, cut out of his chest to exist outside his body, to save him from the crushing weight of the evils he commits. Rosi has been burdened with this load since the womb and accepts it with all the love Doffy cannot feel.
Rosi is Doffy’s heart, except Doffy decides he doesn’t need one.
“I need you,” Doflamingo says, and Rosinante realizes with sudden clarity why those three words make Baby 5 fall to her knees in worship.
Doffy doesn’t mean it, of course, he isn’t stupid. Doffy has the Family - he’s managed without Rosi for fourteen years.
Rosi barely managed without Doffy. His life as a Marine was gray and dull. Wake up, train, eat, sleep, only motivated by the vague notion that he was doing good. His drab existence grated on those around him, made him weird, unlikeable, unpopular. Even Sengoku treated him as just another subordinate, perhaps with more affection than others. He was alive but not living.
“Don’t you want me?” Doffy whispers into his shoulder, strings holding him in place as he curls around his body like a spider.
He’s wanted Doffy so badly for so many years. No one else has gone through what they did, Doffy made sure of that. No one else could understand the pain and pleasure of having Doflamingo as a brother, loving and hating him equally. Like an alcoholic driven to drink, he dreaded nights and looked forward to them, because seeing Doffy in his nightmares was the only way he could see him.
He knows his brother is a monster. And yet. There is no one else who truly knows him.
“Don’t you need me?”
Rosi needs Doffy far more than Doffy needs him. It’s been like this since they were children. It was Doffy who fought for him, who took the brunt of the violence inflicted on them out of his one moral obligation. I’m your big brother, of course I’ll protect you.
Doffy never questions his loyalty, even when he should. Doffy accepts him as he is - doesn’t scold him for being too clumsy, or laugh at his makeup, or flinch at his burn scars in pity, because he shares the same wounds on his back. Things would be different if he knew, but he doesn’t, and Rosi clings to the acceptance and familiarity he has never known.
(Rosi wants to burrow inside his brother, make a nest in the confines of his heart until he’s rooted so deep that to rip him out kills them both)
The Donquixote Pirates are bright, loud and colorful. He sticks out like a sore thumb: weird, unlikeable, unpopular. He wakes up, eats, kills, sleeps, only motivated by the vague notion of doing good. But even if Doffy treats him as just another executive - with perhaps more affection than the others - he’s still his big brother, who knows him, even if he doesn’t need him. Even if the smile he wears is painted, at least it’s a smile.
I would do anything for you. I want you. I need you. Do you feel the same?
Locked in his big brother’s embrace, so tight it hurts, they both know the answer.