Chapter Text
The most frustrating thing about Doflamingo was how perceptive he could be.
With the way that he acted most of the time, it was easy to assume he had the emotional intelligence of invasive sea algae. On his best days, he was only marginally more mature than a fussy toddler, spoiled and desperate for attention from anyone and everyone, but doing so with elegance and carefully selected barbs rather than inarticulate screams. Those unlucky enough to cross his path had to give him due adulation, or risk a tantrum that might well level a city and end their bloodline. By all measure of logic, there was no reason to believe that he had the emotional depth to realize that other people were, in fact, people, never mind understand how they felt, or why.
The truth was, however, that he could read people just as easily as a post-graduate professor could read a children’s book, and by the time Lily realized he had figured her out, he could have written entire novels on how her brain worked.
It made outsmarting him difficult – but not impossible.
In his desperation to make sure that she didn’t get out of the castle, he had neglected to think of what she could do inside of it – which was how she got her hands on a lighter, and access to any number of rooms full of unguarded drapery.
The trainwreck himself was outside, blissfully unaware portions of his castle were aflame before lunch. Whenever the weather was nice – which, in Dressrosa, was often – he liked to work outside if he could, rather than lock himself in his office. He would spend hours on end bunkered down on a comfortable sofa with a clear view of the pool, which would slowly fill with scantily clad women from all over the island. He insisted that they were only there for the entertainment of his unmarried crewmates – that he, himself, was a loyal husband – but from the way they congregated on the sofa beside him, a blind man could see that wasn’t true.
It didn’t bother Lily. To care about such blatant indiscretions, she would have to care about her marriage, which she most assuredly did not.
What did bother her, however, was that he had decided that she had to be punished for refusing to join him and his harem for hours of boredom and thinly veiled innuendo. The books that she’d accumulated in the queen’s chambers were nowhere to be found, each bookshelf stripped bare while she slept, and no amount of threatening had been able to leverage the location of her stolen entertainment from any of the staff. For good measure, he had locked her out of the library entirely – as well as any other room that might possibly offer anything more substantial than the daily newspaper.
Two rooms in his castle paid the price already, and his bedroom was going to be next.
First was his office, where she’d found the lighter to start with. With the shelves and desk doused in all the liquor from his wet bar, it had gone up like a firework. Along with three servants, who had been taking a collective of sheets to the laundry, she had watched as the ancient wood desk he was always bragging about vanished into a vicious inferno, but the satisfaction of seeing something he loved brought to ruin hadn’t abated her sour mood.
The dining hall was a victim of convenience. It happened to be on her way to his bedroom, and as she’d passed it by, she had thought of all the times he demanded that she sit with him and the rest of his fucked up family for every meal, or be left without so much as a scrap to eat. He had given up on that particular quest of his after she’d collapsed from hunger, twice, but the resentment still lingered, so she’d detoured long enough to see the old, silk curtains go up in glorious flame.
The staff had burst into frenzied chaos in response – but no one tried to stop her. Someone had gone to get the Young Master around the same time the fireball that was his office started to spread to the hallway, but he had yet to arrive, and until he did, she was going to violently abuse the letter of the law he’d given to his staff – that no one but him was allowed to touch her.
“Mi reina del fuego.”
The moment she heard his voice, she picked up her pace, but just a few steps later, her field of view was filled with nothing except tan skin and pink feathers.
Doflamingo loomed in the massive hall, barely arm’s reach away, where he had dropped from the ceiling like an extravagant spider. There was a new breeze from somewhere behind her, from the glass veranda doors that he’d left wide open, letting in too much warm air and golden sunlight and the sound of entirely too much laughter. The coalition of strange women, all gathered in the pool just out of view, tittered and splashed, completely at odds with the acrid smell of charred silk, and the quiet chaos of a band of servants, rushing with buckets to put out the blaze before it reached the dining table.
“You’ve been busy,” He frowned, just a little – tried to seem casual, one hand tucked into his jacket pocket, but the frustration in him was obvious, throbbing through the muscles in his neck. “I've been waiting for you all morning, mami. Tell me, what's this little tantrum about?”
“You already know what, you arrogant fuck.”
His fingers twitch at his side at the sound of her voice. Not with strings ready to cut, but with the barely restrained compulsion to grab – her arm, her throat, whatever was most convenient to him in the moment. It wasn’t a habit that he’d started to break naturally, but one she'd forced him to acknowledge and correct. The wound that she’d left on him was still fresh enough to sting every time he breathed, sharp enough to remind him of precisely how she felt about his touch.
“I want my books back.”
A small battalion of servants sprint past them – watching, but unwilling to stop and observe. They rush by with buckets of water, whisper-talking to one another about what can be saved and what can’t. One questions out loud what might have sparked the queen of the palace into setting her own home ablaze, but there’s no answer forthcoming, just a demand by someone older, more senior and experienced, to please shut the fuck up before they both lose their heads.
At the same time, the pool party continues, unbothered. There’s a splash as someone slices through the water in a dive surely meant to be sensual, the distant pinging of a beach ball flying through the air in a makeshift game of volleyball. Trebol fusses at someone over his drink being empty for too long – grouses about how everyone ran off over a “little fire”. Someone unfamiliar coos for “Doffy” to come back, but doesn’t dare show their face.
“Your girlfriends are missing you, Doffy,” The nickname comes out with nothing but venom. “Better give me the key to the library and get back to them, before they start the orgy without you.”
A low hum rumbled through his chest – something close to a chuckle, but not quite. He doesn’t step closer to her, but he leans, one elbow propped against the wall. He tips into the space between them like he owns it, like he owns the air and the silence and everything else.
“Dulzura,” He drawls so sweetly, it’s hardly better than the plain loathing in her own voice. “Is that what you’re upset about? My guests?”
The grin that breaks across his face promises that he thinks he already knows the answer. He thinks she's jealous - because he would be jealous - willfully ignorant to the concept that it might be anything else that has turned her into an arsonist.
“I’ve told you,” He waves his hand towards the door behind her, like he’s fending off smoke – or maybe just her sarcasm. “They don’t interest me, mi tormenta preciosa. They’re just set dressing.”
“Well, the view is fucking terrible,” She snaps back, and he twitches, his smile all the tighter. “Give me the damn key, Doflamingo. I’m not in the mood for your bullshit games today.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t bristle in response to the insult, or wiggle his fingers – just waits, still as a statue.
“Games, mami?” He leans a little closer, but Lily doesn’t balk, staring up into the red lenses of his ever-present sunglasses. “Who’s playing games?”
She realizes only a moment too late that he’s baiting her.
He’s brilliant at that – rage baiting, but especially when she’s the one he’s trying to rile up. By the time she catches on, she’s already too angry to stop, listening to her own mouth run away from her control. It’s the only attention that he can get, so it’s the attention that he’ll take, and she knows that – but he has decades of experience in riling people up, and her control of her temper has never been what anyone would consider good.
“Don't play dumb, asshole. You’re always going on about how I can have anything I want,” She doesn’t step away from him, exactly, but moves to the side, towards the curling staircase that will get her up to his bedroom, and his delightfully flammable mattress. “But the second I’m content without you, you go out of your way to ruin it.”
She doesn’t put her back towards him. That would be too much vulnerability, and her pride, and his ego, don’t need to feel it.
“Oh, mi reina, I love you so much,” Her mockery is high pitched and whiny, and accompanied by all of the appropriate, exaggerated swooning. “Come watch these women fondle me, mami. I’m the only one here who can have fun, ninfa.”
He’s silent, for one long breath.
Then his head flies back as his laughter echoes off the halls. Rich and wild, like she’s just said the most hilarious thing he’s ever heard in his life, his entire body rattling with every noise. It’s strange enough that she pauses – thinking that, maybe, she’s finally broken him, and that her next thought is going to be discovering what it’s like to look up at her own headless body.
When he gathers his breath, he’s grinning. He stoops a little lower, closer to her height, and though his stare is obscured by his near-opaque lenses, it feels hungry.
“Oh, vida mia! Come adore me!”
He pitches his own voice up, like mocking him is a secret joke that they both share, but just as quickly, it drops back to his usual timbre. It rips the wind out of her, steals the energy that had been burning in her chest just a moment before. Bitter comments and sarcasm have been, until then, the only weapons that she had against him – and now he’s taking those away, too.
“I want you to watch, mami,” The incredible length of his body moves, surrounding her, and at the same time, blocking the stairwell. “You know how much I like it, seeing you glare at me from the corner.”
Unfortunately – she did.
That was precisely why she refused to give in. It was why she spent every day like an antisocial shut in, preoccupied by dusty old history books and refusing to speak to anyone.
Until he had forced their marriage, she had never been a particularly voracious reader. On occasion, she might pick up a book at the request of her sister, but more often than not, if she wasn’t working, she was asleep. It was hobby she had started only after she arrived there, in his stupid castle that he never let her leave, because she wouldn't sacrifice her pride for anything else.
She could have anything that she wanted, but it came at a price that wasn’t nearly worth paying. In exchange for access to materials – for a sewing machine, or paints, or whatever else she felt like trying in order to occupy her time – she would need to speak politely with him, and that simply wasn’t going to happen. The only two things at her disposal, then, were the library or the drawing room, and one was a much quieter, much more boring option than the other.
He had already caught her looking longingly at the harp once, and that was one time too many.
Instead, she spent her time in the library. She kept a boring book about the patterns of migratory birds or rock formations on her person at all times, dry and educational and not worth the breath it would take for anyone to ask about – something she wouldn’t miss if he took it away, like he took away everything else, in his desperate bid to consume every aspect of her life.
“You know what, maybe I will join you,” She knew the threat was a mistake the second she started to say it, but her mouth kept moving without her permission. “You won’t let me read, so why not fuck around? King or queen, I’m sure it doesn’t matter to them, as long as they think they’re fucking their way to the top.”
The idea sat on the same strange tightrope as his expression – caught somewhere between brilliance and horror.
Under just about any other circumstances, he would no doubt relish in the opportunity to watch two women go at it. Odds were good that was precisely what he had been watching just a few minutes earlier, before someone summoned him to get a handle on the arsonist he had accidentally let loose in his castle.
It would, however, require him to let someone other than himself touch his precious wife – an act he’d expressly forbidden, under any circumstances. The only exception was Pica, and only once, in order to stop her from plummeting six stories from his bedroom window.
That fucking voyeur. She would get back at them both for that, eventually, too. The one time Doflamingo respected tradition, and it was to let someone listen in while he "legitimized" their marriage. If Pica hadn't been lurking in the walls, she wouldn't have to deal with any of this bullshit, anymore.
He stills for half a heartbeat, baffled for just a fraction of an instant, before his lip starts to curl upward. His grin is blaring white in the afternoon sun, too wide, too aggressive, slick in a way that made her feel like her she’d just bathed in congealed grease. He inhales in a great, meandering huff, like he's savoring the bouquet of a fine wine.
The laughter is slow, at first. Quiet, subdued in a way that’s unnatural on him, more a click in his throat than a real sound. As she breathes, nose burning from the stink of cocoa butter and patchouli cologne that pours off of him in waves, the sound in his chest swells. It becomes sharp, manic, and a jolt of real, genuine fear spears up her spine to settle between her ribs.
“I wish you would,” He whispers over his own laughter – close enough, now, that the edge of his coat brushes her chest. “Make my dreams come true, mami. Let me see those lovely thighs, wrapped around some pretty stranger’s face while you fuck yourself senseless on her tongue.”
It’s all one big show, for him – for her. There’s a flicker, beneath the deranged grin and mad laughter, of what he really feels. It’s there so quickly she could almost miss it – but she had spent months, now, forced into his presence, and the only way to survive was to learn him as well as he’d learned her.
His jaw ticks. His shoulders tighten, muscles flex in his neck. Pure, acid hatred bleeds through the veneer of amusement. The jealousy in him burns hotter than his office had.
“We can explore our fantasies as much as you like,” He declares, a little more calm – he reaches, again, for her arm, but stops at the hem of her sleeve, as he circles between her and the steps she was still trying to reach. “But only after you let me explore all of you.”
At the edge of his jacket, tucked against his ribs, there’s a flash of white.
It’s been two weeks, and the wound doesn’t still need a bandage, but he keeps it covered, anyway, during the day. He can explain it away if no one knows what it is, rather than admit to what really happened. As far as his family needs to know, it’s a burn from a joint he dropped while too high to use his own hands properly, and the people of Dressrosa have all heard rumors about the lingering gash he had gotten from an assassin, who’d dared try and take his precious wife’s life.
“Fuck off with that,” In truth, the idea of being touched, by anyone, for anything, makes her skin crawl after what he'd done. “What’s the truth, Doffy? Can I have whatever I want? Or can I only do what you feel like letting me do?”
The silence that follows is thick, heavy – but not empty. Tension shifts somewhere beneath it, like the earth itself opening wide, ready to drag them both down into a bottomless chasm.
At the same time, he stops smiling. The corners of his lips are no longer lifted, and there’s no playful sneer leering down at her. All that’s left is a blank, eerie stillness, as his lips draw thin and level. He absorbs every inch of her defiance, and reflects nothing back, secure behind the veil of his sunglasses. The air starts to grow cold and stiff, like the palace itself fears what’s going to happen next, the same way she does.
He leans forward, slow and smooth, just a breath from her lips. For perhaps the first time, however, this violation of her personal space doesn’t persist, doesn’t linger. Instead, he drops onto the stair behind him, a graceful heap of too-long limbs. The tail of his extravagant coat spills behind him like blood on the marble floor, as if to proclaim that she’d managed to wound him for a second time.
“You think I’m a liar, pajarito?”
His voice drops, low and smooth, but tight, like velvet over steel. He leans back with a practiced, theatrical grace, but the air in the hall remains wrong – choked not just by lingering smoke, but by something else, pulled taut and ready to snap.
“There's almost nothing in this world that I wouldn't give you,” A chuckle bubbles out of his throat, but the ring of amusement in it is hollow. “But you won’t even speak to me most days. How can I make you happy if you don’t tell me what will please you?”
“I told you I want my fucking book back,” In the grand scheme of things, she doesn’t really care about that particular novel – but it’s the principle, at this point. “But here we are, having this ridiculous conversation when I could be reading.”
He doesn’t look sorry at all. The corners of his mouth twitch, even, but he drags his expression back into something more neutral before the grin can escape.
“I'm never going to ask you for anything,” There’s no good way to get around him, not with his knees stretched out to box her in, though she looks for an escape route, anyway. “Because this is what you do. You turn it into some stupid fucking game."
For an instant, she feels like a child again. She remembers, specifically, a time when she was very young, and giving a very impassioned speech to her mother about how important it was that she get one of the neighbor’s new puppies. She had made all the well-reasoned arguments any child would, about how she’d take care of it, feed it, walk it, and, obviously, snuggle it for at least six hours a day, and her mother had nodded along the entire time, asking questions for the sake of humoring her. The entire time, however, Aster had known that she was going to say no.
That’s all he’s doing – nodding along, entertaining an argument he has no intention of actually hearing. She can sit there and try to make any point she wants, but it’s already proven to be a waste of breath, to try and make him understand.
The only language he understands is violence.
He had made that clear when he’d ignored every time she said no.
When he’d grabbed at the same dress he had picked for her in the morning, and ripped it away so forcefully her skin still stung.
When she had stopped him with the stem of a broken wine glass, shoved deep between his ribs – and even then, he still hadn’t believed she was serious. That had only come after she had already flung her body out of the bedroom window, with every intention of breaking her neck in the garden below.
There’s no point. There’s no purpose in standing in the middle of the main hall, bickering with him over things like bodily autonomy. The sigh that breaks out of her is filled with all the burning, all the heat, that thundered like an engine beneath her sternum, flooding out until there’s nothing left inside.
“Leave me alone, Doflamingo,” His face twitches again – this time, though, it’s in the opposite direction. “That’s what I want.”
One beat, then another – he says nothing, does nothing. Without warning, his hand moves, and she doesn’t have it in her to even tense, despite how certain she is that it’s going to wrap around her throat and squeeze.
Instead, he presses the cool metal of the library key into her palm. His fingers, astronomically long compared to her own, wrap around her hand, close it into a delicate fist. His flesh against hers is too warm, soft but only just, tight with restrained possession, and one finger lingers over the pulse point in her wrist for just a second too long.
“Okay.”
His murmur is soft – calm, deceptively gentle. It’s broken in a way she’s never heard before, resigned in ways she never thought he could be. He replies like he hasn’t just lost his throne, but as if he’s watching his entire world collapse into nothingness.
“I’ll leave you be, amorcita.”
The hurt is, somehow, far worse than his anger.
It’s a well played move, convincing in how pitiful it is. Despite doing nothing wrong, she feels a sharp pang, as if she’s somehow guilty of a terrible crime. As if to hammer it home, he leans back, pushing away, while the sort of sad smile the entire court of Dressrosa would weep at stretches across his lips.
“No more forcing myself on you today.”
He never gives in this easily.
Everything is a battle with him, one more fight in an ongoing war, and he never surrenders just because she asked him to. Her wants, her needs – even her literal consent – were just suggestions to him, whims that he humored or refused just to keep himself entertained. It’s impossible to take on face value that he means what he says, after all he’s already done. If anything, it seems more likely that he’s still playing some sort of game she isn’t fully privy to, just yet, and the seemingly genuine way that he’s given up feels more like trickery than compliance.
It's nothing but a trap. It isn’t even a particularly well disguised one, but that’s the problem with him. He’ll leave a bear trap out, barely covered, in the hopes that she walks around it entirely, so he can catch her with a noose instead.
“…I don’t trust you.”
He hums – caught off guard, maybe, that she was even still speaking to him, or just playing more into his role of broken hearted lover.
“You keep saying you want me to love you,” She should stop, take the small victory and walk away – but she can’t. “But all these games you keep playing, all this bullshit just to get my attention – I can’t trust you. I won’t love you, I won’t ever even like you, if there’s no trust.”
His lips click as he opens his mouth, but she doesn’t let him get the words out. On the chance that, for once, he’s actually given her the consideration it takes to treat her seriously, he might finally listen.
“Don’t even try to tell me I can, Doffy,” The line of his mouth becomes thin, pale as his lips roll between his perfect teeth. “You uprooted my entire life on a whim. You proved from the very start I can’t rely on you to care about how I feel, or to treat me how I want to be treated.”
He doesn’t reply, but moves, to rub the bridge of his nose beneath his sunglasses. They flash against the rays of light pouring in from the window, hiding whatever storm might be raging behind them.
“I’m sick of this game,” She doesn’t like the sound of her own voice, the way it cracks. “Send me home. Kill me. I don’t care. I don’t want to play anymore.”
He sighs. It’s not dramatic or mocking, but an actual, quiet expulsion of breath – the kind that came from someone old, and weary, and very human.
“Lily.”
It’s almost gentle, the way he says her name - for the first time, at least as far as she can remember. He lowers his hand and looks directly at her, not leaning, not threatening, not leering. He just stares, through the shadow of his lenses and the heavy lines on his face.
“This,” He murmurs, gesturing at her, at himself, at the invisible cage of tension that keeps them both rooted in place. “This isn’t a game.”
He doesn’t stand, but he still takes a step back, moving one stair further away. It puts him even higher than her, but at the same time, he seems to shrink, curling beneath his plush coat. His long legs draw up, knees closer to his chest, as his arms fight not to cross around his belly, and settle on his thighs instead.
“They all warned me, you know.”
His fingers, spread loosely over his knee, wave vaguely in the direction of the courtyard somewhere behind her, where people are still laughing and splashing and enjoying themselves.
“Not Giolla, she lives for the drama,” He smirks, just for an instant, as he recalls some memory just entertaining enough to grant him a moment of levity. “But Vergo, Baby 5…even Trebol. They all tried to talk me out of this. Out of keeping you.”
He lets out a laugh, short and dry – too strange on him, to be anything but real, though she's sure it isn't.
“I told them you’d love me, eventually,” The Adam’s apple of his throat bobs with a swallow she can just barely hear. “Not at first, but give it time, and you’d understand.”
He isn’t looking at her anymore. His stare is somewhere else, on the wall behind her – she can’t see it, but she can feel it, in the way the weight on her spine starts to lessen.
“I’m trying, Lilita,” The admission sounds so true, it make her skin crawl. “But every gift I give you gets thrown back in my face. Every time I say ‘please, stay’, or beg you to look at me, you act like I’ve done something vile. Like I’m no different than any other worm that wants to prey on you.”
“You’re worse than them.”
With the benefit of space, without his hulking form looming like a threat, it’s a little easier to speak. The entire conversation might be one long attempt to trick her, but it’s the closest that they’ve come to having a real talk since she’d been unceremoniously shoved onto his ship. There are things that need to be said – and she needs to say them now, while she can.
“Being used and manipulated I can handle. But this…” She gestures at his slowly curling form, at the castle beyond. “I don’t even know what this is.”
In other circumstances, their relationship would have been considered a fairy tale come to life. It’s precisely the sort of thing her sister was always reading about – a handsome, lonely king who’s grown bored with the world around him, who finds new purpose in the arms of some pauper girl who challenges the status quo of his life. In reality, though, it was nothing less than terrifying. There was no reason for someone like him to notice someone like her – not just because of the sheer difference in their stations in life, but because of who he is.
Servants and retailers and even other nobles weren’t people to him. They were objects. They were disposable things, that lived only to serve whatever purpose he decided for them. Even the family he claimed to love were only as permanent as long as they gave him their loyalty.
“Just tell me the truth, for once.”
The silence that follows runs for too long, heavy with his contemplation. He doesn’t shift, doesn’t twitch – doesn’t react in any way she would expect. There’s no rage, no threats, not even his well practiced, menacing charm.
Instead, he turns his head slowly, deliberately. He gazes at her, and his fingers flex slightly against the fabric of his pants at his knee. The sunlight cuts a sharp line over his features, casts him in lights that are too bright, and shadows that are too dark.
“I hated you the moment I saw you,” His voice is softer – honey drizzled and raw, and he chuckles in a way that’s almost affectionate at the sudden admission. “You smelled like dirt and cheap soap, but I liked the shape of your hips.”
There’s a smile on his lips, now, faint – mournful.
“I bought you on a whim,” One leg shifts, and she finds herself moving – not to leave, but to lean against a nearby end table, eager despite herself to hear what comes next. “I thought you’d entertain me for a while, and it’s not like your mother asked for much.”
The topic of her bride-price was one she had never been able to get an answer on. There hadn’t been time to talk about it with her mother, and Doflamingo had always maintained that it was the sort of thing she didn’t need to worry her pretty little head about.
“More than market rate,” He adds, like selling people is nothing more than a joke. “But it’s not like I don’t have the beri to spare. Besides, I knew she was planning to play me from the start, and I was bored. I wanted to see how far old Aster would go.”
This part she believed – but only because she already knew the story.
After Doflamingo had presented the idea of an arranged marriage to her mother, Aster had demanded that he take the time to get to know her first. She had insisted he present himself as an anonymous admirer through a series of letters, because if Lily knew that a Warlord was after her, she'd have been in Marineford before he could open his mouth to say hello. In reality, Aster had no intention of showing her daughter any of his letters, and had instead pretended to be the girl Doflamingo wanted – stringing him along for months on end, as she stole every last beri that she could.
It was her fault that Aster’s plan didn’t succeed – on some level, at least. Aster had been sick one morning, and Lily had gotten to the mailbox first. She had made the mistake of taking the scam and identity theft to Captain Montressor, in the hopes of scaring her mother out of continuing before it resulted in criminal charges, and he was the one who reached out to the admirer for her, hoping to put the whole thing to bed before the jail time began to rack up in earnest.
Instead of a demand from some distant idiot for financial reparations, Donquixote Doflamingo had shown up at her father’s cobble shop. With no preamble, no real explanation, he declared that he’d have Aster hanged, unless he got what he was owed – his bride.
“Even then, taking you was just a little bit of petty revenge,” He drawled with a huff. “I considered killing her. I thought about killing you, even – but then, I saw that look on your face, all that bitterness and loathing, and I thought it would be even funnier if we were both in on the joke."
That admission was new, though not entirely shocking. Despite hearing that he had every intention of killing her, it was a relief, more than anything else, to finally have just a portion of what felt like the truth.
He leans forward again, fingers steepled loosely like a monarch in a private audience – like she’s finally become interesting enough to be worthy of real consideration.
“I thought you'd settle in,” His brows twitched, crushed together and eased again. “That we'd tolerate one another well enough to throw her greed back in her face. Get the occasional laugh, and go on about our business, living separate lives. Instead…I watched you fade.”
His voice shifts – still calm, still layered in honey and velvet, but rougher at the edges now.
“I made sure you had everything. Any food you could want. All the comforts you could ever desire. Even friends, bought and paid for to keep you perfectly content.”
Her stomach squirms with disquiet. Not because she hadn’t realized it, but because it occurred to her, in that moment, that she hadn’t seen any of those supposed friends in months – and she knew, now, what happened to people who didn’t live up to his expectations.
“You got quieter. Every day, you said less and less. You kept getting thinner, too. I’d watch you, sometimes, and you’d stand and stare out the windows for so long, I started to think your soul slipped out of one and left your corpse behind.”
His posture is stiff, now, tense with something that she doesn’t have words for. It isn’t the explosiveness of rage kept under pressure, but something quieter, something much more uncomfortable.
“That’s what ruined me,” His fist curls, knuckles white, as if holding onto the memory itself. “I had given you everything, and you didn’t want a single piece of it. That’s when it became love.”
His hand drifts up slowly, deliberately reaching for the space between them, as if he wants to cup her face, but knows better.
“Before you,” He continues in a tone fit only for confessing blasphemy at confession. “Love was a spectacle, a show to put on. But the way you stared at me, like you were telling me that you were going to die, and it was all my fault…I’ve never seen someone the way I saw you, Lilita.”
The hall is quiet. The entire world seems to have gone still, as if to emphasize the weight of his confession. There’s no music, no squealing and splashing, no flurry of feet on the floor. Everyone’s fled, as though they can sense the cloud of emotion that’s filled the stairwell of the castle, and they want to be as far as they can before the blast detonates.
“You clawed your way inside of me,” He draws his legs inward, claws at his own chest hard enough to leave dull, red lines. “Hollowed out my chest and curled up inside, and now I can’t get you out. Not without losing parts of me I can’t afford for you to take.”
The twist in his mood is sharp and sudden. A grin slices across his lips again – not real, but not fake, either. It makes her blood curdle and her stomach cry. Cotton is in her throat and needles sink into the beds of her nails.
She doesn’t like this – doesn’t like this look inside of him, at this new vulnerability that feels too much like the truth to be anything else.
Doflamingo isn’t supposed to take her seriously. He’s supposed to mock her, and tease her, and treat every tantrum that she throws like she’s nothing more than a beloved pet dog that chewed on his favorite pair of shoes. He isn’t supposed to acknowledge that she’s a person, that she has thoughts and feelings – and he especially isn’t supposed to treat those thoughts and feelings like they mean anything to him except to serve as the punchline of a cruel joke.
It’s a change, a shift in the status quo that’s so far outside the realm of the games that he was always playing that she doesn’t know what to do with it. He seems so genuine, it’s difficult not to believe that he’s telling the truth – breaking the one constant of dishonesty that he’s always been willing to grant – and it makes her heart ache with something too close to empathy.
“Your jokes are terrible,” Even with his confession, she can’t shake the feeling that this is another one, that she’s moments away from being mocked for being foolish enough to believe him. “If you think any of what's happened is funny."
For the first time – ever – he takes off his sunglasses.
He moves slowly, carefully, hesitant like he’s reconsidering the act the entire time. He ducks his head away as he pulls them off, far enough into his shoulder that she can’t see any of his newly unveiled features, and folds them with the sort of ritual precision that’s usually reserved for sacred relics. For a long moment, he stops there, staring into the floor beside him – and then, finally, he meets her eyes.
He only has one.
His right eye is sharp and brilliant, unbearably handsome despite the sickening intensity of his stare. The other is gone entirely – there’s nothing left, except a jagged scar and sunken pit of wet, pink flesh. Something sharp, a long time ago, had taken his eye entirely, and left in its wake a wound that had clearly never been treated properly. His upper lid had been stitched together so unevenly that, even at a distance, it was obvious the two sides hadn’t been matched together, one half sitting full centimeters higher than the other. The bottom of his socket sags down and away, displaying the moist, vulnerable flesh that’s usually hidden beneath it.
“I know,” His voice is as guttural, as raw, as the old wound. “I didn't, before, but I understand now, Lilita.”
A breeze ghosts through the hall. Somewhere distant, laughter spills from the palace guests, accompanied by sickeningly jovial music, but she doesn’t hear it, not fully, except to acknowledge how out of place it is. The world narrows – just her, just him, and the crumbling space between cruelty and confession.
“I know I ruined our story before it began,” Surrender fits him strangely, in a way that’s inherently wrong, and she feels her gums go dry. “I stole you. I used lies and money and violence to take you from your dull, safe little life, just so I wouldn’t be bored for a while. I earned every reason you despise me.”
A muscle in his neck throbs. He doesn’t look away, though it’s obvious how badly he wants to.
“But I have you now, and I can’t let you go. I’d rather endure your loathing every day than spend a minute without you beside me.”
Something breaks.
Not in him, this time – but in her.
There aren’t many things that she knows about him for certain. He talks about himself more than anyone she’s ever known, but the things that matter only ever escape him in tiny pieces, written in the margins of the story he’s decided to tell. She does know, however, that he never allows himself to be seen as anything less than perfect. He’s too vain for anything less.
He complains, in the quiet of their quarters, while he’s selecting something for her to wear that day, about the way his hairline has started to recede, and she’s well aware that he’ll try just about anything if it makes him feel like he can cling to the last vestiges of his youth.
He would never show her something so raw, so imperfect, just for the sake of a bit.
It’s not enough to make her forgive him – but its close.
“…It’s almost lunch,” Every instinct she has commands that she walk away, but something uncomfortably like remorse has taken custody of her mouth. “Have you eaten yet?”
She can’t make the concession – not fully.
It would make her too vulnerable to volunteer, out loud, to tolerate his company. Despite the certainty of his confession, she can’t help but feel like the other shoe is about to drop – that the soft underbelly he’s decided to roll over and show is still just a trick, designed to lure her into complacency.
The offer is still there, however, and in his eye, there’s nothing left except raw disbelief.
It’s smothered not by cruelty or mocking, but by hope – fresh, fragile as a spider web.
There’s no performance, anymore. There’s no arrogance to mask the discomfort, no peacocking designed to disguise his insecurity – just a swallow, one that involves his entire posture adjusting into something that feels nothing less than real. His shoulders droop the slightest bit. His puffed-out chest sinks towards his sternum as he sighs for so long, it seems like it lasts for days, rather than mere seconds.
“Tú me sorprendes,” He whispers – tender, reverent, and the smile that follows is soft, imperfect, terrifyingly human. “Mi Lilita…”
The chuckle that escapes him this time isn’t dismissive, but reflective, as though he’s marveling at some treasure thought lost forever. He rises from the stairs without effort, as graceful as curling smoke – but dialed back, gentler and restrained. Everything about him is still vast, still there, looming near enough to shield or to swallow her whole, but it isn’t heavy.
“Does it matter? When you sit, I sit.”