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Celestials, they were once called.
With fair skin and ruby eyes and hair the color of spun gold. Clad in pristine white garments and residing in ivory palaces high above the skies where no mere human could dream to reach.
Heavenly beings, graced with divine blood. God chosen.
Angels, they were once called.
When Rosinante looks at his brother, he isn’t so sure anymore. There is nothing angelic about him.
Not in the way he murders innocents, neither in the way he plunders and steals and hurts.
This isn’t the brother he used to look up to. The strong, brave, kind brother who used to protect him and sing him to sleep when the world around them wanted to see them dead.
This thing, this vile creature, is a Monster.
(Doffy’s once beautiful white wings have been clipped, blackened through the fall, corroded at the tips where the hellish fires of all the towns he burned down to the ground licked the aether off his feathers.
Rosinante’s own look none the better. They too are ripped, torn, broken.
This is what Earth does to Angels. The putrid pit of sin corrupts them and lets them rot to something unrecognizable. Ugly clumps of useless flesh and torn feathers on their backs.)
At night, the Monster sleeps and out of its belly through the fanged mouth crawls Doffy, slick with blood like a newborn.
The stench of death and gore clings to him no matter how many times he tries to wash it off with water and soap. By now it has eaten through his bones, through his marrow (through the pathetic little dark fleshy stems on his back where a set of proud wings was once folded).
He sheds his clothes one by one and leaves them like a trail of shame on the floor leading up to his little brother’s bed.
It’s not the first time he invades Rosinante’s chamber in the dead of the night during a bout of insomnia, nor will it be the last.
It has turned into a crude ritual of sorts and the consistency of it is something Rosinante welcomes, despite its rotten nature.
Despite the bruises that bloom on his neck and chest and hips and the nausea that settles in the pit of his stomach every time they indulge in each other.
(Every time they melt into one, more feathers die off, more sin piles up on their heavenly bodies.)
Seeking comfort in each other's arms like back then among the garbage piles they had to scavenge for food.
Both broken as they are, maybe they could build a new whole together.
Rosinante certainly isn’t a stranger to nightmares. He knows all too well about the terror that haunts Doffy in his dreams, the horrid visions that make him lose sleep. The awful stench of burned flesh, of smoke and blood.
Rosinante isn’t sure if the Monster dreams. The Monster is fearless and wild. It has no sense of morals. Feels no sorrow, no grief. It delights in killing and controlling, in molding the world around it to its fancy.
There’s the tell-tale dip in the mattress when Doffy’s knee sinks into the bed, when he leans down his large body, hovering above the man that could almost be his mirror image.
Rosinante stares up into his older brother’s face. Blond strands frame his sharp cheekbones, loose and matt from the lack of gel that usually keeps them standing straight like spikes during the day - alert, aggressive, imposing.
Doffy isn’t any of that at the moment.
Instead of the cheshire smile that usually keeps his lips turned upwards, his mouth is kept in a hard line, thoughtful. Somber.
It’s not often that his eyes are unhidden. A glint of attentive ruby red and blind milky pink in the dimly lit room, curiously tracing over Rosinante’s features.
Doffy looks so vulnerable without his sunglasses.
He always hated the wreath of long lashes framing his expressive eyes and so he decided to hide all the softness on his face - all the weak spots, all his feelings - behind impenetrable glasses.
The fact that he allows himself to show his eyes to Rosinante sends a pinprick through his heart.
Is this really all for show?
No, Rosinante doubts it. This feels too genuine. Doffy truly trusts him.
Then Doffy leans down, finally resting his weight half on top of his younger sibling as he presses himself against him, searching his near, his warmth.
(His fellow angel.)
“Rosi, I need you.”
Rosinante swallows hard when his brother buries his face in the crook of his neck, soft lips brushing against scar tissue.
Doffy kisses the blemishes that litter his collarbone, one by one, slowly, gently gliding down the mound of Rosinante’s chest and leaving a blazing trail with his lips all over the pale expanse of his marred skin.
A bony hand rests on his thigh, first one, then two fingers dance around a familiar spot that makes him arc his back in anticipation.
When Rosinante thinks of earlier that day when Doffy - no, the Monster - tore a man apart before his very eyes and laughed in sadistic glee at the carnage, this sort of tenderness is almost too uncanny.
In these moments, these tender moments on some nights, it’s hard for Rosinante to think of him as evil. The only thing he sees is his beloved big brother of the past, the one who protects him from all harm, the one who loves him unconditionally.
(The one who makes him gasp and moan and shamefully buck his hips in chase of pleasure in the secrecy of his chamber when the rest of the crew is fast asleep and unaware of the filthy acts they indulge in.)
Memories of them as children flood Rosinante’s mind. Doffy who holds him close, shielding him from the cold and the rain and the angry mob’s yelling. Sharing the last few crumbs of moldy bread he found in the trash. Gathering torn rags to patch up Rosi’s moth-eaten shirt.
(The one who uses his wings to shield him from the sharp stones, the sticks, the arrows, the ropes, the fists, the teeth, the nails, the knives. The one who’d rather let them tear out each of his precious feathers one after the other, one by one, and swallow the pained screams than have them hurt his little brother.)
It’s almost too much.
Rosinante knows that his brother is dead.
He died long ago - the moment the Monster was born - when Doffy took that cursed gun in his tiny hand and shot their father’s brains out. When he took the knife to cut off the sinew and crack the bone and tore the head clean off the cooling corpse, turned to his brother with a smile equally filled with despair and determination and said:
“Rosi, I’ll get us back to Heaven, I’ll make it all better, trust me, I’ll make it all better again”.
When everything went to hell and he fled from the Monster in horror, covered in his parent’s gore, running as fast as his bare feet would take him.
That was the last time he ever saw his big brother alive.
After that, his brother’s corpse had been devoured whole by the Monster and now it pretended to be Doflamingo, wearing the dead boy’s rotten skin like a coat.
The mighty head of the Donquixote pirates was merely an imposter. A morbid caricature of the boy he once knew. Like a marionette of horrors.
Such is the identity of the Monster.
(The few feathers on his ruptured wings are black as coals by now.
Doffy is surprisingly gentle, he always is when the after-shock of the nightmares near paralyzes him. A lone feather falls onto the mattress as he slowly thrusts into Rosinante who has his arms wrapped around his neck, tightly holding on.)
The Monster is cold and ruthless, it kills and robs and defiles like a feral beast on the loose. Sometimes, its disguise tears a little and Rosinante can see through the Monster’s translucent skin into its pulsating intestines where his big brother’s carcass rests.
It’s in moments like these, quiet nights like these, when Doffy’s torment is too much to bear on his own and the scared little angel inside the Monster ushers the body they share to find solace in Rosinante’s embrace.
Now, Rosinante lets him do what must be done.
(He lets Doffy inside his body and hit his deepest core, over and over, as many times as he needs to feel satisfied. He lets Doffy wrap his arms around him and embrace him while they make love. As if they were a pair of tender lovers instead of brothers sharing the same filthy Celestial blood.)
The first few times it happened Rosinante pretended to be fast asleep, but one night Doffy shook him awake and asked with an uncharacteristically quiet voice if it was alright to share the bed like they did when they were children.
“Is it alright?”
Now as adults they are too big to share a bed.
Doffy got his brother a custom sized one to accommodate his equally meter long legs, but even that isn’t fit to comfortably handle two giants side by side.
The limits of the bed frame urge Doffy to cuddle up closer to Rosinante. He rests his head on Rosi’s chest, the beat of his heart a lullaby to ward off the terrors in his dreams.
(It’s a means of escaping this hell. Temporary bliss. Because only Rosinante understands the pain, because only Rosinante knows what Earth does to Angels, because only Rosinante was made for him, born for him.)
And Rosinante grows fond of him once more, Marine training be damned.
All these years of steeling his body and mind wasn’t enough to suffocate the stubborn little flame of affection inside his heart.
When he feels Doffy’s even breath against his cheek, feels his brother’s lanky limbs wrapped around his own like a vice after they come down from the high that pleasure offers them, he is home again.
Home in the Holy Land with his parents and his big brother in a peaceful life they never had.
(Home where everyone had wings of white, pure and beautiful.)
Doffy’s voice rips him out of his wonderful daydream, back into the ugliness of reality.
“I’m so glad you’re back, Rosi.” He whispers. Voice hushed and laced with desperation.
“I love you.”
Rosinante’s breath hitches.
No, no, no, this is a dirty trick to melt his heart, to turn him weak.
His big brother is no more, an unfeeling cold Monster in his place instead, but why does it manage to tug on his heartstrings with such finesse?
How does the Monster weasel its way through Rosi’s defenses each and every time?
Is it the dead boy speaking through its sharp-toothed muzzle?
(Maybe they really were cursed.
Maybe this was their punishment for abandoning Heaven and descending to Earth. Their punishment for letting such despicable flowers of love bloom between them, besmirching the sacred bond of family.
Angels would rot to death on Earth.)
“Don’t leave me, Rosi. Don’t leave me ever again.”
Doffy holds onto him as if the world was ending. As if he’s afraid that Rosinante is merely a fidget of his imagination and the moment he lets go he’d vanish like a mirage in a wasteland.
(If he still had his wings, he would have spread them out above his sibling, to keep him safe and close and near after their carnal union, but Doffy cannot do that anymore. Not with these fractured stumps.)
Rosinante hesitates - don’t do it, if you let him inside your heart it’s over, he will kill you, he will crush you with his sick love - and then he places a hand on Doffy’s naked shoulder to pull him closer.
Doffy makes a choked noise. His kisses turn feverish, his hands desperate.
It’s like he wants to crawl inside his brother, melt into one with him, into one monstrous, ethereal being.
(A horrifying abomination with four crippled wings and two separate heads and one fractured heart merely held together by frayed threads.)
If his love turns out to be his demise, then so be it. Rosinante is no stronger.
(He can almost see Doffy’s ruptured angel wings sprouting from his back, but with their tar black color they could also merely be those of a demon.)
“I need you.”
Doffy’s love is sick. Like a tumor it infests the system and grows in the dark, festers and spreads until the heart rots to dead meat.
Rosinante struggles to breathe. It’s too much. Too much, too much, too much.
Yet still, he does not push Doffy away. He can’t.
Instead, he holds on tighter. Kisses Doffy’s temple.
And he knows he will never be able to leave.