Archive of Our Own

The rain started three days before Rosinante found out.

He thought that was significant, later. The way the sky had come apart at the seams, sheets of water hammering the roof of the clinic until the sound became less like weather and more like something trying to get in.

The woman at the counter had kind eyes. She took one look at Rosinante's face and reassured him.

Yes, the results were definitive. Yes, there were options. Yes, she understood this was a shock.

She handed him a pamphlet with a cartoon stork on the cover. He stared at it in the waiting room for a very long time, turning it over and over until the paper went soft at the corners.

He was twenty-four years old.

He was a covert Marine agent.

He was the brother of Donquixote Doflamingo, which meant he was also, in any room he entered, the most dangerous and most doomed person present.

He was clumsy, always setting fires accidentally and had a bad habit of falling down stairs.

He was going to have a baby.

Donquixote Doflamingo's baby.

He sat outside the clinic until his coat was soaked through and his cigarette had gone to mush between his fingers.

A dog pressed its wet head against his knee.

Rosinante put his hand on the dog's ears and thought about all the ways this could kill him.

There were a lot of ways.

He didn't tell Doflamingo.

He told himself this was tactical. Protecting an asset. His cover. The Marine operation.

He told himself Trebol didn't need to know, Diamanté didn't need to know, Pica didn't need to know and that keeping secrets was the only thing he was good at in life.



He had six weeks before Doflamingo noticed.

The thing about Doflamingo was that he saw everything.

Not the way a careful man sees things. The way a predator sees things.

The dry swallow behind the rim of the wine glass.

The laughter a pitch too high.

The half-second where the prey forgets to perform normalcy.

He looked at Rosinante across the dinner table. Watched him push food around his plate and pour a glass of wine he didn't drink and chuckle too loudly at something Baby 5 had said.

"Rosinante," he said, very pleasantly, when the table had emptied. "Walk with me."

It wasn't a request. With Doflamingo, it had never been a request.

They walked through the palace gardens, Doflamingo with his hands clasped behind his back, face tilted toward the sky.

Rosinante walked beside him. He looked at Doflamingo's moon-lit face and felt his heart trying to exit his chest through his sternum.

"You're not eating," Doflamingo said.

"I ate."

"You moved food around a plate." He crossed his arms over his chest. "You look like shit, little brother."

"Thanks."

"You've looked like shit for almost two months." He stopped walking. "You've stopped smoking as well."

Rosinante stopped a half-step late.

Doflamingo turned to look at him. "What's wrong with you?"

The garden smelled like night-blooming jasmine and the sea. Somewhere beyond the walls there were children laughing, which seemed like something the universe had arranged deliberately just to hurt him.

"Nothing. My throat's sore. Maybe I caught something. It'll pass."

Doflamingo looked at him for a long moment.

"Alright," he said, before he started walking again.

It wasn't until Rosinante was in his room that night, sitting on the edge of the bed with his forehead in his hands, that he understood that Doflamingo had believed him.

No, had decided to.

Which was somehow worse than if he'd pressed.

He wanted desperately for there to be someone he could tell.

This was the cruelty of his situation. He lived in the space between two identities. He trusted no one fully. There was no one he could call and say I am pregnant and I don't know what to do and I'm frightened.

Sengoku would have pulled him out of the field. He couldn't allow that. Not with Law. Not with everything they still needed to do.

His mother was dead. His father was dead. His brother was the reason he was in this situation and also the reason any disclosure of it would be fatal.

He put his hand on his stomach, which still felt like just him. He lay there in the dark listening to the palace breathe around him.

There was nothing to do. That was the worst part. Nowhere to go. No one to call. Nothing moving.

Just this.

Three months in, his body stopped cooperating with the lie.

He was standing in the training room watching Pica work through forms when Doflamingo came in behind him and stopped.

Rosinante felt the warmth of Doflamingo at his back, unmoving. His fingers clutched the bottom of his shirt and he stayed very still.

"Turn around."

Rosinante turned around, refusing to meet his eyes.

Doflamingo looked at him. His eyes traveled down, from his face to his stomach and then back up. His face showed nothing, which was the most dangerous thing his face could do.

"Come with me."

They went to his office. Doflamingo closed the door, went to his desk and sat behind it. He put his hands flat on the surface and looked at Rosinante standing in the middle of the room.

The silence became its own kind of pressure.

"How long?" he asked.

Rosinante's throat closed.

"Doffy—"

"How. Long."

"Three months."

Doflamingo picked up a pen. Turned it over once in his fingers before setting it down.

"And you weren't going to tell me."

He said it without anger. Not even an accusation. As if he was merely stating a fact.

"I don't know," Rosinante murmured. The truest thing he'd said in months.

Doflamingo rose from the desk and walked around Rosinante slowly.

He stopped in front of him and put one hand on Rosinante's jaw to tilt his face up.

"Look at me," he murmured.

Rosinante forced himself to meet his gaze.

"Are you afraid of me?"

Rosinante said nothing, which was an answer.

Doflamingo's thumb moved against his jaw slowly, touching him the way he touched things he was deciding what to do with.

"You should have told me immediately," he said. "This changes things."

"What things?"

"Everything." He released his face and stepped back. He was smiling now, which was always worse than when he wasn't. "This is mine, Rosinante. Whatever you were planning—this is mine."

Security first. Two men outside his rooms. No travel without a Family escort.

He did not argue against it. There was nothing he could say.

He couldn't contact Sengoku. Not safely at least. He'd gone dark the moment Doflamingo found out about the pregnancy, and the circle around him was getting tighter. Somewhere out there Law was with Sengoku, safe for now.

Then Doflamingo told the Family. A quick distribution of information.

Rosinante felt it in the way people looked at him afterward. Trebol's unconcealed disgust. Diamanté's and Pica’s careful neutrality. Baby 5's genuine, bewildered warmth.

He'd spent his entire time here as the lesser one. The stranger. The one who didn't fit. Now they looked at him differently and he couldn't decide if that was better or worse.

There were nights Doflamingo came to him.

This wasn't new. Rosinante's body had always been useful to him. On bad nights. After deals that hadn't gone as planned. When something needed taking out on someone.

He'd let it happen for as long as he could remember, for reasons too painful to be examined.

But it changed now. He lay with his hand on Rosinante's stomach and said nothing. The nothing had a different weight than anything before it.

Rosinante lay awake until the grey light came through the curtains and thought about running.

Which he was always thinking about. Which he knew he could never bring himself to do.

He was clumsy and Doflamingo had eyes in every port, yes, but also because of the other thing. The thing he didn't like to look at directly.

He loved him.

He had always loved him in the catastrophic way that would make running feel less like escape and more like amputation.

And now there was this too. This thing beneath Doflamingo's hand that was also his, that he already couldn't not love.

He was very thoroughly stuck.

At five months, Doflamingo started bringing him tea personally.

He sat across from him and watched Rosinante drink it.

"You're unhappy," Doflamingo said.

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine." He leaned back with his arms crossed. "Tell me why."

"I'm just scared," Rosinante whispered, putting his hands on his stomach.

He thought about Doflamingo finding out what he was. What it would mean for the child.

This is mine

He knew exactly what those words could become if Doflamingo ever had reason to turn them against him. He would lose everything. The child would grow up in this palace, in this Family, with no one to turn to.

"Of what happens," he breathed. "If things go wrong."

Doflamingo looked at him for a long moment and said nothing.

His eyes tracked Rosinante’s face while he drank his coffee.

At six months Rosinante sat in the garden and felt the baby move.

He found himself wishing, unexpectedly, that Doflamingo was there.

Not the Doflamingo who came at night and placed his hand on his stomach like a claim.

The other one.

The one Rosinante had been constructing in his head for years out of glimpses and half-moments. The one who might have sat beside him in the afternoon sun and felt this too.

Who might have said something, or nothing, but been there in the way that meant something.

He knew better than to want that.

He wanted it anyway.

He kept his hand on his stomach and watched the sky change colours.

He sat in the bath in the evenings because it was the only place that felt like containment.

He sat in the warm water and looked at his changed body. The swell of his stomach rising above the waterline like a small country, the stretched skin he didn't recognize, the weight that wasn't his.

He tried to feel like himself and mostly failed.

Then Doflamingo would come and place his hand on his stomach.

On the child, not on him.

Rosinante would lie there in the dark wanting him with a quiet ache that had become impossible to ignore.

He wanted his hands on him. He wanted to be looked at the way Doflamingo used to look at him.

He wanted him the way he'd always wanted him, which had not stopped just because his body had changed.

He'd tried to deal with it himself. It hadn't gone well. Too big, too uncomfortable, the angles all wrong. He'd given up feeling equal parts frustrated and absurd.

So he lay there instead. Night after night. Doflamingo close enough to touch and not touching him.

The wanting going nowhere, which was its own kind of miserable.

What if it's like him.

He'd dismissed the thought the first time. By the third, he couldn't.

The thought made goosebumps break out on his skin.

What if it inherits that part of Doflamingo?

The part of Doflamingo that had killed their father and brought his decapitated head to Mary Geoise and felt something clarify rather than break.

The part that looked at people and saw what they were worth and what they could be used for.

The part that had decided, somewhere along the way, that the world was something to be taken rather than lived in, and had never looked back.

Rosinante had been in the same burning house. Had been hung and tortured the same and yet came out different. But he'd been there. He'd watched every step of it. And he hadn't been able to stop any of it.

If he couldn't stop it in Doflamingo—

The child moved beneath his hand, distracting him from his thoughts.

He found Rosinante in the library at seven months, on a rainy evening.

Wedged into the window seat with a book open in his lap that he was visibly not reading. Doflamingo had known he'd been there for two hours because he asked the staff.

Rosinante didn't look up even though he heard footsteps.

"That book is upside down," Doflamingo said.

Rosinante looked down at the book before turning it over slowly.

Doflamingo walked to the window seat and stood over him.

Rosinante looked up.

There it was.

Doflamingo could see it clearly now. The same thing that had been drawing his attention for weeks.

Rosinante's eyes were wrong. Dazed and hollow.

Almost like he was looking through Doflamingo rather than at him.

"What's wrong with you?" Doflamingo demanded.

Rosinante’s face twitched involuntarily and he looked away.

"Nothing. I'm fine."

"You have said that approximately forty times in the past four months. Retire it."

"Then I don't have anything to say."

"Then stop lying to me."

He sat down across from him.

"You're sleeping badly. You're not eating."

"I eat."

"Rosinante," Doflamingo said. "Tell me what's wrong."

Rosinante looked up to face Doflamingo, trying to find the words.

"I'm afraid of what this child is going to be," he whispered. "Of who."

"Go on."

"As children, what we went through—I was there for all of it. I saw what it did to you. What it made you become and yet I couldn't stop any of it." His voice faltered. "If it comes out like you—"

He couldn't finish his sentence.

Doflamingo's eyes stayed on him for a long while before speaking.

"I'm its parent," he said. "But you are too."

Neither of them spoke after that. Outside, the rain continued, belting against the windows and filling the silence.

Rosinante looked at the droplets sliding down the glass.

"I'm very lonely," Rosinante admitted.

Doflamingo didn't reply. He just moved to sit down on the window seat beside him.

Close enough that Rosinante could feel his warmth.

Doflamingo's hand moved to his stomach and stayed there.

Not him. Still not him.

He slept that night. Really slept, for the first time in weeks.

When he woke, Doflamingo was gone.

Expected.

On the table beside the bed there was a cup of tea that was still warm.

Rosinante sat up and picked up the cup, bringing it to his nose.

It was the kind he liked, which Doflamingo knew because Doflamingo knew everything about him whether or not he'd been told.

He drank it while he watched the sun come up.