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The air still tastes like smoke. Sengoku wonders if the scent will ever leave, or if the horrors that happened here have carved themselves into this island’s marrow. He might not know the details, but he knows enough. A family of Celestial Dragons descending to live as mortals, a burned home, and a half-decayed corpse with the head severed in one clean strike. The Elder Stars won’t let this stand. The Celestial Dragons cannot afford to let people know they can be killed.
His men are picking through the ruined manor for any sign of tiny bones. The adults are dead, but the Elder Stars said there were children here. Sengoku has to look for them at the very least. He has to know for sure that they’re gone and, if so, lay their little bodies to rest. There’s a chance they could have escaped, but Sengoku isn’t hopeful.
Few of the villagers were willing to speak to them, but those that did spoke with faces haunted by guilt. They told him that the family who once lived here was chased out to live in squalor. The people here were angry; they blamed the family for the actions of their kind and punished them accordingly. It was easy to do so in the moment, when anger and mobs drove emotion to a fever pitch. It’s harder to swallow in the aftermath, when the sound of a child sobbing is louder than the satisfaction.
Sengoku hopes the Elder Stars will spare those who helped them, but he isn’t hopeful. The Celestial Dragons cannot allow mortals to know they can be killed.
It is on the edges of the junkyard, his Observation Haki fully extended, that Sengoku first senses the brush of something. He pauses and turns his attention towards it, feeling its shape. A Voice shrieking in agony. It isn’t dissimilar from a battlefield that way. Decisions that are easy to make but difficult to live with.
He passes the manor, following the winding forest trail. At the base of the hill opposite the town is a junkyard. It’s large, overflowing with generations of garbage. This is where the townspeople said that the former Celestial Dragons lived; a shack somewhere near the edge, ramshackle and left to rot after the junkyard expanded and the previous owner abandoned it. Sengoku doesn’t know what he hopes to find there. Maybe something he can bury in place of the children’s bodies.
He isn’t far past the threshold when Sengoku freezes, his Observation wiping around his mind like a storm. Somebody’s Voice is screaming, the pain so intense it burns the edges of Sengoku’s senses. He takes a deep breath and focuses, trying to discern a direction. Then he runs. The closer he gets, the easier it is to feel, and he finds what he first thought was one Voice is actually two. The pain of the first entirely drowns out the one beside it despite the powerful grief, fear, and loss that would normally catch his attention.
He passes a dilapidated shack. It shows signs of recent inhabitation; it must be their home. Sengoku spares no time to investigate it as he winds through piles of trash. The Voices grow louder and easier to pinpoint. It comes from a pile of rubble, and for one horrible moment, Sengoku is scared they are trapped beneath it. Then he sees the pipe half buried at the bottom, big enough to crawl through. It won’t be an easy fit for Sengoku, large as he is, but he can hardly do nothing when he feels what can only be two children crying out for help.
He pulls off his coat and tosses it aside. There is nothing holstered on his belt to catch on against the metal, so he drops to his knees. Inside the pipe, he thinks he hears weeping.
“Hello?” he calls. The weeping silences, the air still with held breath. “My name is Admiral Sengoku. I’m with the navy. Are you alright?”
Nothing. He should call for backup, but that would take time the children might not have. Fuck it.
Sengoku crawls through the pipe. It really is too narrow for the likes of him, tearing the seams of his clothes where they drag along the edge. He is only just emerging into a small cavern inside the piled trash when his Haki screams in warning. He only has one arm free, but it’s enough to bring up his Armament, blocking some sort of wire intent on cutting him through.
There are two boys inside, one crouched in front of the other. The attack came from the first and the only one awake. He’s trembling with bared teeth and a raised hand. The light filtering through the trash illuminates just enough to see the wires connected to his fingers. He doesn’t look well, too skinny with wrists that are bloody and chaffed, but he is the better off of the two by far.
The second boy is even smaller, younger, lying unmoving on the ground. Sengoku can hear his wheezing breath from here. Blood stains his clothes and the rags wrapped around him as makeshift bandages. It shines off the metallic strings woven into the flesh beneath, piercing it or spiralling down limbs so tightly that they’ve broken skin, blood clotting and clinging along the edges. It looks like a metal cage encasing him perfectly, keeping him still.
Sengoku recoils. He’s never seen anything like it. For a moment, he has no words, no thought beyond, oh, seas, that’s a child.
“Leave,” the older boy growls, snapping Sengoku’s attention back to the very real danger present. “Leave or I’ll kill you!”
Sengoku tries to hold up his hand to show he isn’t a threat while freeing the other at the same time. His heart beats quickly. Already he is wondering what first aid he can offer, what he can even do in a situation like this.
Well, the first thing is convincing the older boy that he isn’t a threat before he gets cut into pieces.“I’m not here to hurt you,” he says, choosing his words carefully.
“I don’t care! Leave us alone!”
Sengoku shakes his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, not when your brother needs help,” he says, because they must be brothers. Even like this, he can see the similarities between them. Their complexion, their hair.
The boy lets out a furious sound. “So now you people want to help us?! Not when we were chased from our home by those lesser creatures. Not when we were eating garbage or when Mother fell ill. Now, after everything that’s already happened?!”
“Not everything,” Sengoku says, ignoring the comment about lesser creatures. The boy is just that, a boy. One who is angry and scared and whose whole world has been torn away. Sengoku can extend him empathy and understanding, even kindness; things he will no doubt have experienced precious little of in his life since leaving Mariejois. Maybe even before that. “Your brother is badly hurt. He needs medical care.”
“You think I don’t know that?” the boy snaps. His hands tremble. Behind him, his younger brother lets out a sound that might be a name. The boy flinches, shoulders tightening.
“Please, let me help you,” Sengoku says, wishing he could fix this as easily as he wants to.
The boy hesitates. His breath is sharp, shaking. Sengoku thinks he might be crying beneath his sunglasses.
“Fine,” he says, “but if you hurt him, I’ll kill you!”
Sengoku pulls the rest of himself into the small space. The boy hovers as he leans over the younger one. This close, he can see paper-white skin everywhere but the points of fevered flush. Beneath the wires and rags are bruises and swelling. He doesn’t dare try to move anything, but Sengoku can smell what he is sure are festering wounds. Carefully, he lays a hand over the young boy’s forehead. As expected, the skin beneath it burns.
The younger boy’s eyes flutter open at the touch, letting Sengoku see a sliver of red. He lets out a choked whimper, his head lolling to the side. Tears track down his cheeks, cutting through the sweat and grime. The other boy is at his side in a moment.
“Shhhh, it’s alright, Rosi,” he promises, one hand stroking his brother’s matted blonde hair. “It’s going to be okay. Just close your eyes. Go back to sleep.”
Every word feels like a dagger in Sengoku’s gut. This boy is trying so hard to comfort his younger brother through agony that Sengoku can feel scraping at his senses, even worse now that the boy is awake. His Voice is clawing and desperate, begging to die.
“What happened?” Sengoku asks, already suspecting the answer but knowing he won’t like it either way.
“They beat him,” the boy says with the type of hatred that will poison him if he lets it. “They wanted to hurt my idiot father, so they took Rosi and made us watch. He was so hurt after, I couldn’t-” he cut himself off, his hands clenched into fists, and his head bowed over his younger brother. “He wouldn’t stop bleeding. His arms and legs were twisted, and I could see his bones. I couldn’t just leave him like that; I had to do something.”
“So you used the wires?” Sengoku guesses.
“They said it was strings, from the String String Fruit,” the boy says. He sniffles. “I couldn’t let Rosi die. I thought maybe my strings could fix him.”
Somebody gave him a Devil Fruit. Sengoku files that information away for now. He can’t imagine what this boy must have felt, alone and hurt, plunging strings through his brother’s flesh to knit his body back together.
Sengoku hopes it is worth it. He hopes the younger boy—Rosi—survives, and that this horror does more than extend his suffering.
“I’m going to call my men; they’ll bring a doctor,” he says, pulling a baby den den out of his shirt pocket. The boy watches warily as he contacts his ship and relays the facts as clinically as possible. A young boy, malnourished and severely injured. Probable broken bones, internal injuries from blunt force trauma, and an infection. Unconscious but showing signs of extreme pain.
Getting him out is going to be a challenge. They’ll have to squeeze through the pipe; the junk pile is too unstable to risk excavating. At least the members of Sengoku’s medical team are smaller than he is. They should have an easier time getting in and out.
He doesn’t want to leave the boys, even as far as to wait outside, but his men won’t know where to look otherwise, so he squeezes the boy’s shoulder—Doflamingo, he comes to learn—and crawls back through the pipe. He’s filthy and, worse, left with his thoughts.
Sengoku knows more of the Celestial Dragons than most. An island this close to the Red Line would be prime pick for slavers, the type powerful enough to cross the Calm Belt and sail through Fishman Island or even cross over top legally. Whatever interaction the people here have had with Celestial Dragons, indirectly or otherwise, would have been through lost family members. He can understand, then, their anger, their desire for revenge, though he can not say he agrees with it. What he cannot understand is the children.
That Celestial Dragons harm children every day does not make it right. These two boys cannot be said to carry the weight of their people’s sins when their hands are still too small to understand the blood that the villagers claim soaks them.
He wishes he could fix this, but Sengoku worries that all he will be able to do is give the younger one a comfortable place to die.
It feels like it takes an eternity for his men to arrive. They bring a stretcher and bags of medical supplies. Eroch, the ship’s main surgeon, has come himself. His expression is stoic, his eyes dark. Even from Sengoku’s brief description, he likely already expects the worst.
“Tell me what you can,” he says, forgoing the rigid Marine formality in exchange for expediency. Sengoku appreciates it.
“His name is Rosinante; he’s eight. His older brother said he was beaten about three days ago. He spiked a fever sometime the next day, and it hasn’t gone down. Suspected compound fractures, including his femur. There’s something wrong with his breathing; I’m not sure if it’s his lungs or his throat. He woke briefly but didn’t show any signs of lucidity. His brother used a Devil Fruit to piece him together and immobilize him. I’m not sure how effective it is; I didn’t want to touch him too much.”
Eroch’s mouth flattens even further, but he nods.
Sengoku re-enters first. He seems to have formed some kind of connection with Doflamingo, and he wants to be there for this. Eroch follows, staying quiet about the cramped quarters that were never meant for an adult, let alone two.
Doflamingo is nearly vibrating next to Sengoku, who has to slouch even while sitting to keep from disturbing the walls. He suspects that making Doflamingo wait outside would be a fruitless endeavour at best, and met with violence at worst. The best he can do is try to keep them both out of Eroch’s way.
The rest of the medical team remains outside. Eroch calls out what he finds in rapid-fire medical terminology that Sengoku doesn’t begin to understand. He asks Doflamingo questions about his strings, what he did, and about Rosinante’s injuries. Doflamingo’s answers are snarled, interspersed with demands that Eroch stop talking and start doing something. Thankfully, Eroch’s patience far exceeds the demands of a child.
He cuts away the remains of Rosinante’s shirt, revealing dark, ugly bruising across Rosinante’s abdomen. From what Sengoku can see, it’s even worse on Rosinante’s back, where the blood from his organs is pooling. Eroch orders the medical team to contact the ship and have the surgical suite prepared with bags of universal blood.
Sengoku’s already weak hope for Rosinante’s survival ticks a little further down.
Eroch pulls a vial and needle from his bag, calling out that he’s giving the boy morphine and the dose. If nothing else, at least they can ease some of Rosinante’s pain.
“What are you doing?” Doflamingo demands as Eroch starts cleaning a patch of skin between the spiralling strings.
“I’m giving him something for the pain,” Eroch says. He removes the cap from the needle and pierces the vial. “We need to get him back to the ship, but we can’t move him like this.” He doesn’t wait for Doflamingo’s approval before jabbing the needle into Rosinante’s arm. It’s a good thing Doflamingo has decided to trust them, or maybe he just knows how much pain his brother is in, because Sengoku has no doubt that Doflamingo’s strings can be lethal if he wants them to be.
While they wait for the medicine to take effect, the medical team prepares for the transport. They pass a neck brace and spinal board through the pipe, and they have a bag of saline ready to go as soon as Rosinante is out. Sengoku is once again grateful that navy ships carry a vast range of supplies for recruits of varying sizes. Rosinante and Doflamingo are a little taller for their ages, which helps, but they’re thin after two years spent scraping by on stolen or rotten food.
Slowly, Sengoku feels Rosinante’s screaming Voice begin to quiet. The tension held in his muscles eases along with a hitch in his breath. Doflamingo lets out a sound that might be a sob, combing his fingers through Rosinante’s hair.
They move quickly after that. Sengoku reluctantly leaves first, allowing another medic to replace him. A few minutes later, they carry the stretcher through the pipe. The rest of the medical team descends on them as soon as Rosinante is free, calling out vitals while hooking up an IV to a bag of fluids. Somebody slips an oxygen mask over Rosinante’s face.
Sengoku offers to carry Doflamingo back to the ship, but Doflamingo refuses. Whatever injuries he might have apparently aren’t enough to stop him, though Sengoku keeps an eye on him just in case.
The next problem arises when they arrive back at the ship. Doflamingo’s strings complicate things. Apparently, they don’t just wrap around Rosinante’s body; they’re inside it too. There’s no way to know what damage cutting them may cause, but the alternative is having Doflamingo slowly remove them while the medical team works, something that comes with its own risks. How much control can they expect a ten-year-old to have over a Devil Fruit he only just received? Yes, Doflamingo managed to use it to wrap his strings around Rosinante’s bones, but it could only take the smallest twitch to severe an artery, and they simply don’t have enough blood supply on the ship to keep up with that kind of bleeding, not with what Rosinante has already lost. Still, Doflamingo is adamant that he can do it, even when they tell him the stakes.
Sengoku lets the medical team decide. When they agree to allow Doflamingo’s assistance—albeit reluctantly—he insists on being in attendance as well.
They make Doflamingo scrub himself in the shower with antibacterial soap, and then rewash his hands the way the whole medical team does. The gloves and surgical gown they dress him in are too large. It makes him look even younger, a child playing dress-up, thrust into an adult world long before he’s ready, but Sengoku supposes that already happened years ago.
Rosinante is small and frail on the operating table, hooked up to various machines, a tube down his throat to keep him breathing through what must be heavy sedation. They’ve managed to cut off the remainder of his clothing and Doflamingo’s makeshift bandages, letting Sengoku see misshapen bones beneath his skin. Strings stitch wounds closed where the bones must have pierced through. Eroch already said that they would have to leave the bones as they are for now. Rosinante won’t survive if they try to do everything at once. He might not survive anyway.
They cut into his abdomen. Strings are woven throughout the cavity, holding organs together with needle-fine stitches. The doctors marvel at it and ask Doflamingo how he knew what needed to be done. Doflamingo shrugs.
“I didn’t,” he admits. “I just knew I needed to save him.”
Instinct, then, the type born from a Devil Fruit falling into the right person’s hands. They seem almost alive, somehow, a sort of sentience. If Doflamingo doesn’t know the internal structures of the body, how could he repair it? The fruit must have known in its own way.
There is a lot of blood. The medical team places a tube to drain it from Rosinante’s abdomen, and another in his chest to keep the bruising in his lungs from suffocating him. They clamp minor bleeds, stitch organs carefully over Doflamingo’s work and remove parts that cannot be saved. Rosinante loses half his liver and one of his kidneys. He’s lucky, Eroch observes. His spleen wasn’t as damaged and his liver will grow back. People can even live a long time with just one kidney.
Doflamingo removes his strings with the same delicate precision as the surgeons. Some simply dissipate, though Doflamingo can’t figure out how to do that with them all. For now, they close up Rosinante, and have Doflamingo unwind his strings from Rosinante’s limbs. They’re replaced with splints, except for his thigh. The broken femur is one of the more dangerous injuries not yet addressed. Muscle spasms could shift the bone and cause massive bleeding. A special traction splint will prevent that and further surgery will hopefully stabilize it. The alternative is amputation, and Rosinante has already lost so much.
The surgery takes hours, but only after Rosinante is settled does Doflamingo allow them to look at his own injuries. They’re minor compared to his brother’s, but Sengoku still aches to see them, reminded again and again, they’re just children. He is covered in minor bruises and small cuts, with cracked ribs and a sprained ankle. There are burns on his legs; they’re not severe, thankfully, but still worrisome. His wrists are chafed from where he fought against the ropes that bound him. Sengoku stands guard as the medical team carefully catalogues and treats each wound before forcing him to take two pills they promise are antibiotics.
“Can I go now?” Doflamingo asks, increasingly agitated the longer Rosinante is out of sight.
“Yes you may,” Eroch says.
Doflamingo doesn’t hesitate to hop down from the stool, landing on his good ankle, and hurrying back to his brother’s side.
Sengoku waits until he’s gone to turn to Eroch. “Well?” he asks.
“It will be a miracle if his brother lives,” Eroch says. “And if he doesn’t, his remaining life will be very short and painful.”
It’s about what Sengoku expected. It still hurts.
“But he might pull through?”
“Maybe. He needs to beat that infection first but his body has nothing to fight with. Even if he does survive the next few days, he needs care that I can’t give him.”
Sengoku nods. “I’ll speak to the captain. We’ll head for the nearest base.”
“That won’t be enough,” Eroch says. “He needs specialists. A pediatric orthopedic surgeon at the very least, and a stay in a proper pediatric ICU. We don’t have those people in generic bases. Seas, we might not have one in Marineford.”
“So what can we do?” Sengoku asks. Surely they won’t just let him suffer and die.
Eroch’s jaw tightens. “Flevance,” he says after a moment’s pause. “They’re the bastion of medical science in the North Blue, similar to Drum and Alabasta on the Grand Line. They’ll have the specialists he needs.”
“Flevance isn’t an affiliated nation,” Sengoku says.
“Yes,” Eroch agrees. “But you’re a politician, aren’t you, Admiral Sengoku? If anyone can get approval to take a dying boy for medical care in an unaffiliated nation, it’s you.”
That is probably true. Sengoku straightens, grateful to finally have something concrete he can do to help the boys.
“Keep me updated on their condition,” Sengoku orders. “I have some calls to make.”