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It is a beautiful weapon.
Its body is carved from a type of mahogany which only exists within the walls of Mariejois, the Saints having razed it from the earth so that their trees might be unique. On its barrel is inlaid ivory, embossed with purest gold.
He remembers how large it had seemed, when Trebol had handed it to him.
He’d never asked where they’d gotten it. It’s possible that it had been discarded for some minor flaw or defect and subsequently repaired. Or, perhaps it had belonged to his family to begin with; useless in the hands of his cowardly father, but kept as an heirloom.
Now, in his hands, it is restored to its true purpose.
He turns it around, running his fingers over the design.
He resents it.
Resents having to kill his own family. But over and over again, they force his hand. If his father hadn’t wanted to be killed he should not first have allowed the blood of his own sons, his wife, to stain the unworthy earth. Atonement had been required for such sacrilege, and Doffy had been called to exact it.
And now.
He has not yet been called to spill his brother’s blood, but he tastes the coppery tang of the future on his tongue. He senses that a crossroads is approaching; that it will determine much of what will come, and that he will, again, be required to do this thing which he so detests.
He resents it.
Resents Rosi for forcing him down this path.
And, oh, how bitter it is to have been fooled— how it compounds the anger in his blood that so many of his advisors had counseled caution upon his brother’s return, and he had refused to listen.
He had believed his brother a wolf, like himself, but found him a broken dog.
To each member of his family, to many cowering future corpses had he said, “My brother’s blood is my blood. That which offends him, offends me.” And for this protection, this service, he was repaid with betrayal.
That vaunted compassion, which his Sainted parents had so prized— that innocence and naiveté had made his brother ripe to bend to the first kind hand. To be leashed and made obedient to larger dogs laboring beneath Heaven.
He recalls a thing his mother had oft been heard to say, in those roseate days in Mariejois: “You are like two faces of the same coin.”
She had believed in their synergy, their complementary natures. Contentedness: ambition; compassion: perseverance. She thought they could alter the face of the world.
Doflamingo gathers his people around him, barely registering the conversation in which he participates. His thoughts are tempestuous; mirrored by the dour gray of the cloud-bound sky above them.
He walks through the snow, brooding. His hand, all the while, on the gun.
Its use is reserved only for those worthy of it; no nameless underlings, no stepping stones on his way to greatness. It is a Heavenly instrument, each sacral bullet purifying the flesh in which it lodges.
He stops some distance before his brother whose blood already drips onto the snow; the iron bite of it is heavy in the air.
They speak. He sends his family to find the boy.
Rosinante points a gun at him.
And Doffy laughs.
Long. Raucous. His head tilted back, hand spread across his face.
His brother stands there, the pain of indecision on his features, his hand shaking.
Doffy relieves him of the burden of choice by shooting him in the chest.
He falls back against a wooden trunk.
Doffy thinks of their dearly departed father, then. How the impotent fuck’s last words had been in apology; how pathetic he had been. He could have stopped Doflamingo; he could have sent Rosi away. Instead, he allowed his sons to witness and enact his death, staining them with that moment.
The wound has not yet become fatal.
Each of Doffy’s steps, crunching the snow beneath him, is counterposed against Rosi’s labored breaths.
He crouches at his brother’s side.
He guides the barrel of Rosi’s gun to rest against his own temple.
When he had shot Homing in the head it had ruined his face; marred its aristocratic planes with a massive crater.
“Sweet brother-mine,” he croons. “Do you want to kill me?”
Rosi stares at him, fear and disbelief in his eyes.
“That’s why you came to me, isn’t it? To save the world from what I will do?”
Rosi seems to give a slight shake of the head, although he could just be trying to dispel his confusion.
“Come, then,” Doffy prods, pressing more firmly into the barrel, the metal digging into his skin. “Do it. Save them— save the boy.”
He sees Rosi’s finger twitch on the trigger, at that.
His heart rate increases.
“If you don’t, I will destroy everything,” he promises. “I will rip out the foundations of the world.”
Rosi stares at him, seemingly transfixed. Horrified.
“Come on,” he snaps. “Do it.”
Rosi’s finger wavers on the trigger. Falls away.
His gaze drifts to the right.
“Coward,” Doffy sneers.
He’s almost disappointed. He had hoped to see some spark in his brother, some will; a desire to take the shape of the world into his hands.
He wanted Rosi to at least try to live.
He lifts his own gun to place it directly over Rosi’s heart.
“Do you want to die, then?” he asks, conversational.
Rosi looks at him once more— grim, resigned.
“You will if I do nothing, but I could make it quick for you. A parting gift.”
Rosi lets out a derisive huff.
“You were practically begging for it— coming so close to me, with your little ruse. You know it’s dangerous to play with wild animals.”
He bares his teeth. Rosi says nothing. Does not move.
Doffy sighs.
He grabs Rosi’s gun from his unresisting hand, throws it aside.
He stands.
“You’re such a disappointment, Little Brother,” he laments, turning away.
He walks two paces into the snow,
and turns back, firing.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Click.
He looks down, in the ringing silence, at Rosi’s now-ruined face, at his dimmed left eye— the only remaining.
He starts to laugh.
It’s quiet, at first, but does not stay that way, crescendoing into a hoarse, wild thing; his voice booming and shrieking in turns. It is suffocating, compressive— he feels as though he cannot breathe enough to stop it, that he is possessed by it.
There are tears on his face.
When, finally, his laughter subsides, he returns to crouch once again before his brother’s corpse.
“Ah, Rosi-dear,” he sighs, removing his glasses.
He sometimes wonders what would have happened if Rosi were the more assertive of the two of them; if he himself had been more kind, more humble. Willing to follow where he was led.
Probably, they’d both be dead in a garbage heap.
He reaches out to tuck an errant strand of hair behind Rosi’s ear, bloodying his fingers.
“Look what you’ve done to me.”
Someone whimpers.
Slowly, Doflamingo leans to the side to peer around his brother’s body at the wooden chest.