Chapter Text
“We cannot resist the fascination of sacrifice, since a passion for sacrifices is part of a Chessplayer’s nature.”
- Chess Master Rudolf Spielman
The princess of Mary Geoise stood upon the balcony to watch her beloved kingdom burn.
She dressed plainly for the occasion. No finery, no frills, no fuss. That night she wore but a simple gown and plain shoes, bare of all regalia but the bauble she never took from around her pretty neck. She clutched this necklace in her shaking hands for comfort. Most days she hid it beneath her clothes, tucked under modest necklines and away from the prying eyes of her maids and watching father, but the time for such caution had passed.
They were almost at the end, now. Her father could levy no punishments graver than what awaited her come dawn.
“My lady.”
The third and newly appointed general of her father’s armies — for their enemies had slain the first and his replacement alike — bowed upon the flagstones at her feet. Distant fire reflected in the depths of his worried eyes. The princess could not remember his name, though she recalled the black tattoos upon his hands well enough. She bade him stand with a nod, gaze returning to the tableau of destruction playing out before her. Fire had not yet touched the noble quarter, but sparks rose to the stars at the city’s edge, spreading inward through the other districts in a sullen, rust-red ring.
“What news?” she asked with the taste of ash upon her tongue.
“Our blockade has fallen. Pirate forces breached the city walls.”
She closed her eyes. “How many?”
“A-all of them.” The general swallowed. “The Pirate Warlord sent them all.”
From his rightful place atop the conquered throne, her weary father murmured, “Don’t…don’t call him that.”
The wan-faced king sat slumped, mouth slick with wine, fingers clasped around the neck of the seventh bottle he’d downed since news broke of the pirates reaching his kingdom’s shore. He did not look like a king that night. Tonight, he was just a man, the dignity of his station crumbling in the face of imminent defeat.
And like a diamond that had lost its luster, he was ignored. “Pirate ships block the harbor,” said the general. He answered to her, now — a princess in name but the kingdom’s queen in practice. Especially after the secrets that had recently come to light. “There can be no escape. Not anymore.”
He needn’t have said it. The princess already knew. A game of Monarchic Chess sat behind her, half complete, tiles of the board arranged in the shape of her kingdom, the game of this attack splayed out upon them in perfect, miniature detail. But although the game was not yet finished, she could already predict the outcome. The number of ships, the element of surprise, the pirate warlord’s tactics…her forces were outgunned, and with no warning to aid them, they were outmaneuvered, too. Their allies had all abandoned them, too fearful of the massive pirate forces to come to the princess's aid. Even the soundest strategies crumbled under force overwhelming. The blockade had been naught but a desperate, last-ditch effort to repel his forces, her final attempt to save them — to save not only herself and the monarchy, but to save the people she had vowed to protect. Her people were the ones who truly mattered in this scenario. She had known her efforts would fail from the outset, and that she acted on their behalf in vain, but hope compelled her try for one last chance at victory.
A chance now slipping through her fingers, as impossible to grasp as hope itself.
“Thank you, General.” She turned from him, and from her father, and returned her attention to the kingdom she had failed. “You are dismissed.”
But he did not leave. Instead he said: “There’s more.”
Bitter laughter charred her throat. “What more could there possibly be?”
“Messengers from the Pirate Warlord — from the enemy.” He corrected himself with a sideways glance at her father. “They came to tell us citizens have been taken hostage.”
Her blood ran cold. “How many?”
“Hundreds. Our operatives have confirmed it. They are gathered in groups, held at gunpoint.”
She considered this for a time. “And the Warlord’s demands in return for their safe release?”
“He…” The general looked as stunned as she felt. “He hasn’t made any.”
“So far,” the princess murmured. “There is still time yet.”
And so she waited. The general left. In his absence, advisors slinked from their hiding places in the shadows of the throne room to stand about like carrion, black-cloaked and beady-eyed, waiting for the corpse to pick clean with their sharp beaks. They wrung their hands, watching her. Whispered in her father’s ear, though he was too drunk to heed them. Many though they numbered, and brilliant in their own right, they were no help to the princess. They never had been, she ruefully mused. She alone had been their savior for many years, unknowing all the while, fighting their battles for them atop the Monarchic Chessboard. But now, even with eyes at last open to the truth, she was helpless to deliver them from this hell on earth.
It was over. It was well and truly over.
High in her tower above the city, the princess’s eyes burned as she gazed at the burning kingdom, lids heavy and thick in their struggle to remain open. So many sleepless nights. So many games played. So many tears spilled that evening, and in the many evenings before the Pirate Warlord attacked her borders outright. But all had been for naught, and now he marched upon her shores. Her enemy, her foe, her villain — he would be here soon. Soon, she would look the devil in the eye, and fall.
Unable to resist, she allowed her tired eyes to close. Smoke and ash rose from the burning city. Wind caressed her cheeks, her throat, even her hands as they clutched the necklace she loved so much. But the cold comfort of the jewel on her palm could not guard against the distant screams of her people as they were menaced by the pirates who had laid her father’s armies to waste. There could be no comfort for the princess as the noose prepared to pull tight around her throat. There could be no stopping the ring of fire sweeping toward her.
Closing her eyes was an insult to the citizens she had failed to protect. They did not have the luxury of awaiting their fate from the impersonal height of a palace tower.
Thus, she opened them again to stare into the heart of her burning, beloved capital…but to her surprise, the image before her did not match the horrors in her head. The fiery horizon had not moved. The ring of fire had not closed. No, it somehow held steady, a constant halo of destruction that had moved not an inch deeper into the capital city and the palace waiting at its heart. The onslaught had been held at bay by…she knew not what. Had the invasion halted? But why?
What was the pirate warlord waiting for?
Her hands left the stone parapet along the balcony as she whirled to face the throne room.
“You there,” she asked, but the advisors scattered like crows under the stone of her gaze. She turned instead to the guard at the door. “Where is the general?”
“I can find him, Princess,” the guard said, scrambling. “I can — ”
He vanished through the huge oak doors. She returned her stare to the line of fire. Her knees ached from standing on the cold flagstones for hours on end. The princess had not moved since they received word of the unified pirate army’s invasion of the capital, but she refused to sink into despair alongside her wilting father. The bauble in her hand gave her strength. Oh, that beloved pink jewel she wore on its delicate chain — it gave her courage even when weariness clawed her eyes and dug sharp teeth into her psyche. She rolled it through her fingers, weighing it on her palm and giving the sparkling gem the smallest kiss when she thought no one was looking. The diamond held more than mere glitter or monetary value. It held the very core of her dreams in its facets, glinting back at her with a thousand possibilities and all the lives she might have lived had the unthinkable not occurred.
But the unthinkable had occurred. The war had been lost. The pirates had won. She would never be able to tell the person who had given her the gem how much his words had haunted her since their parting. She would never be able to tell him she wanted to reconsider the offer she had rejected. She would never be able to take his hand and say yes as she so longed to. That possibility had gone dark the moment the fires lit. If only she had met him in some other life, perhaps —
The door opened, and the general said: “He has stopped advancing, Princess.”
She spun in a tangle of skirts. Once again the general knelt upon the stones behind her. Her father moaned atop the throne, but she hardly heard his cry of despair.
“Have our forces rallied?” she asked, but there was no hope in her heart. “I did not think they would be capable — ”
“No. They are not capable.” He passed a tattooed hand over his weary face. “He could press forward again at any time. He has the forces to destroy us in an instant.” But here he paused. “And yet.”
“And yet he has not.” Her hands fisted, fingernails scraping soft skin. “Why has that monster — ?” She shook her head. “He is just a man.”
“Princess?” asked her general.
“Never mind.” She dropped her hands and turned, head held high, tired eyes unyielding as they dragged her scattered advisors from the shadows. “Tell me again. Tell me everything you know about him.”
“We have told you everything already, Princess,” they whispered.
“Then tell me again,” demanded the princess, “about the Pirate Warlord Doflamingo.”
That name — that name, oh, that dreaded name! The most unholy of names rang in the air like a gunshot, and under the weight of its heavy crack, the advisors shrank and moaned. Then, like a rising chorus of vultures before the gallows, they opened their mouths and obeyed. They repeated everything they had already told her when they roused her from her bed in the middle of the night a fortnight prior, demanding she play a game of Monarchic Chess with them. But they had roused her with true fear in their eyes, and even before they and her father spilled the truth in a frantic rush, she had known this was no mere game like the hundreds she had played throughout her life. The hundreds before they had pretended were just idle distractions, but even before they told her the truth, she sensed the battle she fought that night was anything but ordinary.
And then the warning bells had rung. Deceit no longer an option, they had dropped the charade. This was a battle for the fate of the kingdom, and her opponent was a monster from a bedtime story brought to life.
“The Pirate Warlord Doflamingo,” they called him. “The Pirate King.”
Her opponent — the beast who would raze her kingdom to the ground — had forged a nation from the ashes of the many countries he had overthrown on a bloody path to power waged with lightning speed in the scant year prior. All while he gathered power, he organized a covert war against her kingdom, puppeteering a slew of seemingly disconnected attacks by brigands and pirate militias, ones now revealed to have been Doflamingo’s secret allies all along. A king in name and power, but one not recognized by the rulers of the world, as he claimed no ancestral lands or formal title. A monster of a man, unpredictable and fierce.
“That is his reputation,” said the Princess when they finished crowing. “What can you tell me of the man himself?”
“The man himself?” they asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Weaknesses. Strengths. Anything.”
“But, my lady — there is nothing.”
Nothing she could use, anyway. No chinks in his armor to exploit. No threads to pull and unwind. No dry tinder to catch flame. He was a monster, bigger than life — and her advisors were useless in his shadow, so taken as they were by the tall tale of his reputation. But while the princess knew he must simply be a man, all her life she had been kept from the world. Without their help, she did not know how to parse myth from man. And even her father on his throne was no help. He thrashed in the grip of wine and fear, dribbling alcohol from his lips, whimpering in his royal robes and beneath the weight of his heavy crown. She had slapped him two nights prior, hurting her own hand in an attempt to bring him back to her for counsel, but even that strike had not shocked him from his stupor.
And now he sat upon his throne, writhing and useless, to mutter and moan, “Why? Why did we ever bring him there?”
Though far he had fallen, he was still her father. She went to his side and knelt, gathering his hand in hers to ask, “Bring who where, Father?”
“That man,” her father, the king, whimpered. “The Crown Summit.”
The princess frowned. “The Pirate Warlord Doflamingo attended the Crown Summit?”
“A formality.” Her father gasped for air like a gutted fish. “A formality, to appease him. He wanted power. We would not grant it. But an empty title that meant nothing…” He shuddered in his seat, small inside his stained velvet robes. “’Pirate Warlord’ affords him no power, but once a year we let him sup at our table, and that empty title we saw fit to bestow to sate his growing appetites.”
The king cast aside his empty wine bottle and wept into his shaking hands. The princess rubbed soothing circles across his knuckles, but in truth, she needed comfort of her own. She had been due for her fourth visit to the Crown Summit in just a few weeks. Truth told, she had been looking forward to it — though for reasons neither her father nor her maids could fathom. The princess had but one true friend in the entire world, and the Pirate King’s invasion had robbed her of the one chance she had to see him again. Thanks to the Pirate Warlord Doflamingo, she would not likely survive the night, let alone visit the Crown Summit this year.
But her personal sorrows mattered little compared to that of her kingdom’s, and something in her father’s lamentations pulled her lips into a frown.
“What do you mean, to appease him?” She shook her father’s arm. “Father, no matter how powerful he became, why was a mere pirate granted an empty title and invited to join the Crown Summit at all?”
His wine-stained teeth gnashed. “That monster — ”
“No. Not a monster,” the princess soothed. “Just a man. Tell me, Father, what you know of him.”
Her father raggedly gasped from his seat upon the throne, “That man — he is more.”
And through his tears and woe, he told her the story of the fall of a distant kingdom. Of the power-hungry family called Donquixote, stripped from their throne and cast down when their avarice grew too great. Of lands divided and broken up among other monarchies, another king sitting upon the throne once held by the shattered Donquixote line. And most crucially, he told her of heirs supposedly slain when that monarchy was overthrown…but one heir, he believed, had survived. Thrived, even, once he found an unexpected army to call his own. The advisors looked on in horror mounting as the truth spilled like blood upon the tower floor, seeping into the cracks of the flagstones and the ears of all who heard it alike.
“That king — that fallen monarch — I knew him,” her father said. “I knew his face from past Crown Summits. And when I saw that pirate come to stand before us, I…”
The princess gripped his arm all the tighter. “You what?”
Upon his throne, the king opened his eyes wide and moaned, “I saw his father in him.”
She stared at her father in silence. The advisors hung their heads. The general stood by, a man of action rendered still by shock and disbelief. The princess rose and went to the balcony once more, beholding her burning city through eyes unseeing.
“The Pirate Warlord,” she said to no one, “is…a prince?”
And with that word, the truth of the matter fell neatly into place, chess pieces forming a pattern upon the board. Why he’d attacked her kingdom — why he had stopped advancing — what he must want —
Unsteady feet carried the princess to the Monarchic Chess board. Her eyes roved across the terrain tiles of land and sea, the cards in their stands representing armies and ships and citizens, the chips declaring resources in all their splendor…and the palace, too. That porcelain miniature with its tiny drawbridge and hand-painted stones, detailing even the tiny tower in which she now stood. The King card sat beside it — and beside it, representative of the princess herself, the card of queen.
“That’s it,” the princess murmured, gaze fastened upon the queen. “That’s what he wants.”
The advisors gasped. The general lifted his head. Her father stirred upon the throne, eyes blinking and slow and stupid.
“What, my daughter?” he asked with the light of hope shining in his countenance. “What does the Pirate Warlord want?”
The light went out when she turned to him and said, “He wants me.”
The princess stood in the palace chapel dressed in her mother’s wedding gown. Pearls and diamonds, lace and silk resplendent — her maids said she had never looked more beautiful than she did in the traditional queen’s tiara of Mary Geoise, the finest of heirlooms to don her brow only upon a princess’s sacred wedding day. But while it might be the most expensive item on her person, it was not what she found most precious. Under the neckline of her gown hid her favorite necklace — that beloved pink diamond she wished so dearly to hold, to gird herself against the inevitable fall to come. She touched it through the lace to comfort herself, though even its beloved presence brought scant little on that horrible night.
She had been right. Of course she had been right. The hiccuped protests of her father finally quieted once he saw the truth, and her offer had been sent to the Pirate Warlord Doflamingo in the hands of their swiftest messenger. The pirate had replied even faster with a yes — that he would gladly release the hostages and withdraw from her kingdom’s borders should he be given the princess’s hand in marriage.
As expected. A man hungry for legitimacy, eager to reclaim the title he had lost, had attacked a nation with an eligible daughter? Of course he wanted her as his wife. From all she’d heard, the man was a tactician to the core. Then again, so was she, and she would pull any tactic necessary to save her people from harm. Trading the queen to save the board, queen sacrifice ripped from the chessboard and into reality…it was a move she had used before to win games against her advisors, but those games had been mere theory. This was no game. Here, now, she was the sacrificial piece upon the board. But while tears fill her eyes at her misfortune, she held her head high, proud and content in the knowledge she had done her duty flawlessly.
This strategy would save them. It was the only one that could. And as the princess, it was her duty to save her people no matter the cost. Not even if she were to play the part of the queen sacrificed.
And so she waited. She waited without flinching for the inevitable, ignoring her father as he sneaked gulps of wine, and her ladies in waiting as they wept, and the advisors as they cowered, and the general as his fists clenched, and the vicar as he turned paler and paler until it looked like he may faint —
And then, at last, the doors of the king’s most lavish chapel swung open under the heel of a massive boot.
Struck by the reality of what was to come, the princess’s stalwart stillness broke. Her eyes dropped to the floor. She listened from beneath her veil as heavy footfalls rang out across the cobbled floor. Advisors spoke and her father staggered, trying to greet his soon-to-be son-in-law, but a dark chuckle rent the air and stopped all their vapid chatter.
The Pirate Warlord Doflamingo commanded: “Silence.”
The princess stiffened — no, she froze solid. Not because of the power in that command, no, but because…that voice. That voice — !
She knew that voice!
Two syllables alone had sent recognition skating down her back like lighting before it struck. The hair on her nape, stifled by silk, rose to attention with a prickle. She locked her eyes on the floor as the owner of that voice came to stand before her, enormous feet in pointed shoes filling her swimming vision.
And pink feathers filled the edges of it all the while.
“What are you waiting for?” he said in that same familiar voice — one painted with the underpinnings of a laugh. “Marry us, vicar. Don’t keep my bride waiting.”
The vicar launched into the vows, a short version, skipping right to the end. But he was not fast enough for Doflamingo, it seemed. Although it was not yet time for such a thing, two massive hands lifted the princess’s veil over her head. Fingers gripped her chin, guiding her face from the floor.
She dared not raise her eyes. But Doflamingo merely chuckled, and his fingers blazed like an iron brand against her skin.
Voice low beneath the vicar’s, he said: “Look at me.”
And so she looked. And though the truth stood before her very eyes, grinning back at her like a skull stripped bare of flesh, she could not help the disbelieving words that came tumbling from her lips.
“I — I know you,” said the princess.
“I should hope so,” said the pirate.
Breath shuddered in her lungs, a cherished name rising in her throat. “Joker — ”
“So you remembered that, too. Good girl.” He chuckled at her wide eyes and trembling mouth, and at the lip he ran his thumb across in a slow, soft caress. “But someone as brilliant as you must know by now that that is not my true name.”
The vicar droned on. She took a deep breath. She watched the pirate before her, tracking every familiar feature, from the jagged curve of his smiling mouth to the gleam of his hooded eyes and the slope of his high, proud nose. That carved jaw, those hollow cheeks, the wicked way his fingertips traced a path down her soft skin…and now she could smell the scent that had haunted her dreams for the past three years, breathe in the longed-for salt of the sea and the sweet bite of citrus and the bitterness of smoke and leather. It was the very same scent that had set her thoughts to wandering far beyond the palace walls on many a sleepless night, filling her head with thoughts she dare not voice and her flesh with urges that left her breathless and panting in the dark. The pink diamond beneath her clothes burned her skin with every gasp. Fear and longing alike filled her chest, warring with each other, rendering her speechless. His grin stretched wider still when he stepped close, lifting her chin to make her look at him even as he towered up above.
“Say it, Princess,” he said in a terrible, teasing lilt. “Say the name of your husband.”
She shuddered. “Do — ”
“That’s it,” the pirate cooed.
“Dof — ” Her eyes filled with tears, but of happiness or of fear, she could not say. “Doflamingo.”
“Heh.” He bent, feathers blotting out the world. “Good girl.”
“ — under the eyes of the crown, I pronounce you wed,” the vicar said. “You may kiss — ”
A pirate does not need to be told to plunder. Such is in his nature. He claimed his prize before the vicar could make his declaration, already pressing his lips to hers in a searing hot kiss. A hand looped around her waist like an iron band, pressing her to his towering form, princess’s body eclipsed by the pirate’s in celestial suffocation. She gasped and he slicked his tongue into her mouth, stealing a taste of her before he pulled away, leaving her in his wake burning and gasping and disheveled — and irrevocably bound to the pirate she had met under another name, a world away, many moons before.
