Cosmic Joke: Donquixote Doflamingo (1/3)
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1/3: Doflamingo x Reader Length: 6k+ Rating: 18+ (This one's not a joke) Warnings: mature audience, 18+, Mdni, Strong Language and Sarcasm, Mentions of War, Violence, and Murder (Canon-Consistent), Unstable Personality in a Psychic Bond, Dark Humor and Coping Through Comedy, Existential Crisis in Soup Form, Doflamingo Being... Doflamingo (Ego, Violence, Manipulation)
Having Doflamingo as a soulmate is like being stuck with a narcissistic puppet master who thinks every thread in your life should be his personal chew toy. His thoughts are loud, twisted, and have more flair than a peacock on a caffeine binge. All while wearing designer sunglasses, of course. He’s been rambling in your head since the moment your souls collided, and let’s just say your childhood is now a weird, glittery horror show. “If my soulmate’s a gremlin, I’ll just tie them up. Easier than killing.”
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Growing Up Soulbound to Donquixote Doflamingo: A Tragedy in Several Terrifying Acts
-X-Bond Awakening-X-
You were a regular child, more or less. You liked stuffed animals. You colored inside the lines. You cried when balloons popped and believed broccoli was the worst thing a man could inflict upon you.
And then, sometime between learning the alphabet and losing your second baby tooth, it happened.
You started hearing thoughts.
Not yours. Definitely not yours. Laughter.
“Fufufufufufu-”
Low and feral, like someone had tied a candelabra to a hyena and let it loose in a cathedral. It echoed in the back of your skull with far too much glee for a school day. You remember it clearly because you were coloring a turtle. He was, apparently, winning a fight.
Soulmates, as it turns out, don’t come with manuals. Or names. Or helpful pop-ups from the universe saying, “Hey, heads up! He’s a bloodthirsty egomaniac with a God complex and a deeply questionable fashion sense.”
No. You just get his thoughts. Silken, smug, and utterly convinced the world was his to stage a monologue on.
“They should worship me. Why don’t they worship me? I could fix the economy if they'd just give me all the money…I miss murder.”
That voice became your unwanted childhood companion. Sharp as broken glass and twice as charming. The kind of presence that always sounded like it had just burned down a country club and would do it again if someone so much as breathed wrong.
He gave himself titles: The King. The Joker. Their Salvation.
You gave him one too: Birdman of the Opera.
At first, you thought he might be a noble. He ranted about “peasants” often enough, and once spent twenty uninterrupted minutes mentally waxing poetic about people not bowing low enough anymore.
But then came the tangents.
Unhinged ones.
“What if I dropped a city from the sky?” or “I wonder how hard it is to replace a spine.”
At one point, he got stuck on the phrase “puppets dancing on strings”.
He repeated that last one 213 times in a row. You were twelve. You kept count because it was either that or scream into your math homework.
Over the years, you pieced together a profile. Unwillingly. Accidentally. With all the enthusiasm of someone forced to cohabitate with a sentient peacock.
Whoever he is, he’s:
– Rich. – Dangerous. – Emotionally allergic to empathy. – Deeply enamored with the sound of his own voice.
You once told a friend—drunkenly, at a sleepover, while clinging to a bag of frozen peas you’d mistaken for a pillow—that your soulmate was probably a narcissistic noble with a tragic backstory and enough wealth to build a tower of solid gold just to push people off it. She stared for a moment, then nodded solemnly and said,
“Sounds like a Celestial Dragon.”
You laughed until you cried. Then you cried until you laughed again. But no. It couldn’t be.
Celestial Dragons sever their soulbonds young. Everyone knows that. They have ways. Methods. Entire departments are dedicated to cutting the cord before it forms.
Which means, if he’s still there, still talking, still hissing “Mine” through your dreams when he’s feeling particularly dramatic, He isn’t exactly one of them.
He’s something else. Worse, probably.
A Sample of Your Childhood Psychic Transcript – Extended Cut (Aka, Nine feet of sunglasses, feathers, trauma, and felony)
Age 5:
You were five when the voice arrived. Not yours. Yours were soft things: juice boxes, sparkly rocks, the moral dilemma of stepping on a line of ants. Thoughts that bounced around like marbles in a shoebox. You liked colors. Songs. You wanted to be a cloud.
His were about puppet governments and the economic benefits of murder.
“Kill the old man. Take the port. Easy.”
You dropped your crayon.
It rolled across the floor and under the couch, and you didn’t go after it. You just sat there, small knees crossed, staring at your turtle drawing while some distant pirate plotted a hostile takeover inside your skull.
At first, you assumed it was your imaginary friend. That made sense. Other kids had tea parties with theirs. Yours muttered things like:
"I’ll hang that bastard by his spine."
You didn’t know what a bastard was. Or how spines worked, really. But your toy rabbit got tied up in thread and hurled off the top bunk that night. Because science.
Your teacher gave you a gold star for your drawing of a smiling man standing on a hill of bodies.
You titled it: My Friend’s Thoughts.
She stapled it to the bulletin board, but looked concerned.
Your parents started whispering at night.
At family dinners, you began to speak with strange conviction. Echoing ideas you didn’t understand. Once, while chewing on a dinner roll, you declared:
“Entrails could be elegant, if arranged properly.”
There was a silence. Your father blinked. Your mother passed the peas.
Later, you heard it. He’d admitted it. Casually, like one might mention a favorite sandwich.
“I’m a pirate, obviously. What did they think I was? A baker?”
You had never met a baker who spoke in snarling baritones and discussed political assassinations before breakfast, so no. No, you hadn’t.
You coped the way children do. With crayons and misplaced confidence. Your art became dramatic. Guillotines. Fire. A disproportionate number of people falling off cliffs. Your teachers expressed concern. You smiled and drew another sword.
He got louder when angry. The rants came in waves. Names you didn’t know. Betrayals you didn’t understand. Battles you couldn’t picture.
But sometimes… You hummed. A little song, soft under your breath, as you hugged your stuffed animals to your chest and waited for sleep. You thought he didn’t hear.
Until he did.
…What the hell was that? Was that… singing? Is that—you?”
You froze. Sir Beartington fell off the pillow.
“Oi. Who are you? Why are you quiet? Wait—oh. You’re real, aren’t you? A soul tether. Talk, brat.”
You didn’t want to. You’d seen enough after-school specials to know this counted as Stranger Danger, even if it was psychic and possibly extradimensional.
Still, you said:
“That’s not kind.”
A pause.
“Hah. You’re a kid? Figures. This bond is defective. Don’t worry. I’ll wait.”
You scowled into your blanket.
“I’m not supposed to talk to homicidal strangers.”
Another pause. Then something strange. Something new. A sound like teeth bared in delight.
“Huh. Smart parents.”
You didn't know it then, but that was the first time he sounded entertained. Not furious. Not murderous. Just… intrigued.
You didn't like that.
And you really didn't like how quiet he went afterward.
Like a tiger in tall grass.
Age 6:
You are just trying to live your normal, legally-sanctioned, cookie-filled, frog-drawing life.
You have two cookies, one juice box, and a plush frog named Pancake. You are safe. Curled up in your blanket fort. The world is soft. Silent. Blessedly free of intrusive monologues, cape rustling, or declarations of war.
And then, like the worst kind of divine punishment:
“…Doflamingo Donquixote.”
You blink.
“What?”
He says it again. Proudly, smoothly, like a velvet rope being slowly pulled across a trapdoor.
“My name,” the voice says again, slow and smug, like a velvet rope being pulled across a trapdoor. “Doflamingo Donquixote. You should know the name of the man who’ll be—”
You sit bolt upright. Pancake the frog plummets to the floor in horror. Sir Beartington looks concerned.
“…FLAMINGO? Like. A bird???”
There’s a pause. He tries to recover.
“It’s Doflamingo, brat. It’s a powerful name. Feared. Remembered.”
You stare at the ceiling of your blanket fort with the fury of a child betrayed by nomenclature.
“It sounds like a salsa dancer with bird issues.”
Silence. He does not respond.
You are absolutely lit with the fury of a seven-year-old who just found out her soulmate is named after a lawn ornament.
“Doflamingo Donquixote sounds like the name of a magician who performs at birthday parties and then vanishes with your wallet. It sounds like you’re the evil twin of a fancy vacuum. It sounds like you were cursed by a swamp witch who said, ‘You will be powerful, but your NAME will be STUPID.’”
He is silent. You can feel his ego crumpling like tinfoil in the microwave.
“Do people call you Doffles? Is that your pirate name? Captain Doffles?” You clutch your sides, wheezing. “Oh no. I can’t be soulmates with a man named after a piñata with a superiority complex. Is your crew called the Party City Pirates?? Do you shoot glitter out of your fingers??”
He finally snaps.
“My name strikes fear into the hearts of men.”
You cackle like a gremlin child in a bouncy castle of chaos.
“It strikes confusion into zoo workers.”
You throw yourself back into your pillow fort, laughing so hard you spill juice on Pancake.
Across the sea, in a room made of velvet, mirrors, and questionable taste, Doflamingo Donquixote lies flat on a gilded chaise and stares at the ceiling.
“I should’ve gotten their name first,” he mutters aloud.
“Too late, Featherboa,” you whisper into the bond. “I’m naming my next pet after you. It’s gonna be a bird with a bad attitude.”
You assume he’s the ugliest flamingo ever born.
Doflamingo Donquixote stares at the ceiling, velvet robes askew, soulbond still ringing with the sound of your laughter. And in that moment, he knows two things with absolute, bone-deep certainty: You are going to be a menace. And he is going to be very annoyed.
Age 7:
You are seven years old, simply trying to live your normal, legally-sanctioned, cookie-filled, frog-drawing life. You want peace. You want stickers. You want to eat animal crackers in the shape of justice.
Unfortunately, somewhere in the world, your soulmate is plotting evil and thinking way too loudly.
Most kids have imaginary friends. Yours critiques your coping mechanisms and gives monologues about bloodshed between dessert courses.
“Why are you crying? You skinned your knee, not lost your empire. Get up. Pathetic.”
You had tripped. It was a perfectly reasonable fall. There was blood. There were tears. And there was him, calmly narrating the assassination of a rival arms dealer like it was a bedtime story, complete with sound effects.
You tried telling your mom that you didn’t like your “inside voice” anymore.
She gave you warm milk.
He gave you trauma.
“Milk? You’re drinking milk? Oh my god, you would.”
You stared into your cup, deeply offended on behalf of calcium. Pancake the frog looks on in dismay.
“You’re seventeen. Get a diary.”
There was a pause. Then, he laughed.
Not politely. Not even evilly. He laughed like someone who’d just ordered an airstrike and was now enjoying espresso about it.
“You’re surprisingly aggressive for a seven-year-old.”
“You built a ship that looks like a bird. I rest my case, Featherduster.”
The silence turned sharp.
You could feel the bristle. Like his sunglasses fogged over from indignation. You knew he had them because he telepathically took you shopping to brag.
“You little shit. Do you know what I can do?”
You didn’t hesitate.
“Gonna ruffle my feelings, Count Cranky Feathers?”
A beat.
You sipped your milk like it was victory itself. He mentally shrieked like a diva denied a mirror.
You survived months of his inner drama; monologues about conquest, rants about peasants, a deeply unhinged tangent about velvet and vengeance. You’d endured his commentary on politics, posture, betrayal, and which flavor of cake best paired with murder.
And now, for some reason known only to the gods of bad decisions and flamboyant pirates, he’d decided to share something personal. Probably to scare you.
His Devil Fruit.
He said it like a god unveiling the cosmos, like he was parting the veil of destiny with a single manicured hand.
“It’s called the String-String Fruit.”
You were silent.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.
You stared blankly at the wall. Pancake the frog slipped out of your lap in slow, stunned horror.
Four. Five.
“You ate a string?”
A pause.
You could feel it—the shift in posture, the inhaled ego. He cleared his throat in your mind like he was about to give a talk titled “Why I’m Better Than God and Everyone Else.”
“It’s a Paramecia. I control threads. Fine, razor-sharp threads that can manipulate the battlefield. Puppeteer my enemies. Stitch the sky itself.”
You blinked. Once. Twice.
Then you slowly looked down at your juice box. It did not deserve to be part of this moment. And yet, here you were. Being forced to parent a man who is your senior.
You took a sip, just to fortify your soul.
“Why would you eat string?”
“It’s not an actual string—”
“Did it taste like string?”
“Yes, but—”
“Was it crunchy?”
“…Yes.”
“Then that’s worse.”
You stared off into the middle distance like a tiny war veteran watching your hopes crumble into yarn. Pancake the frog flopped gently against your side, the only witness to your suffering.
“You saw a weird glowing spaghetti fruit and said, ‘Yeah, this seems edible.’”
“It was a Devil Fruit. They’re rare. Powerful.”
“So are batteries, but I don’t eat those.”
He audibly choked in your mind, like someone who’d just been spiritually tackled by a toddler.
“I’m not going to explain Devil Fruits to a child.”
You clutched Pancake like he was your government-assigned trauma counselor.
“No. You should explain why you ate an evil fruit and now walk around talking about world domination like a sleep-deprived sewing machine.”
You paused..
“And why are you a meanie? You’re a feral knitting kit with legs.”
You could feel his offense.
His ego flared like bad cologne. Somewhere across the sea, Doflamingo Donquixote, Warlord of the Sea, probably slammed a table in a room filled with velvet furniture and poor life choices.
And you, seven years old and full of cookies and righteous judgment, took another sip of juice.
“I could cut the world in half.”
You didn’t flinch. You didn’t even blink.
“And I could cut your fruit into slices and serve it to toddlers as a cautionary tale.”
Silence. Not the good kind. The kind that vibrates with wounded ego and the realization that your telepathic soulmate might one day weaponize glitter and pipe cleaners against you.
He didn’t respond. You could hear him breathing through his nose like a man who just lost an argument to a juice-box-wielding child.
You took a calm sip, eyes locked on your juice like it was your personal anchor to sanity.
“Don’t eat weird things. That’s how you get possessed by fruit ghosts.”
“I am the future Pirate King!”
“You need a friend. And a nap.”
He muttered something dark about fate. Something about destiny being cruel and humiliating.
You, with the grace of a smug seven-year-old who had already named your future pigeon “Flamingo the String Destroyer,” leaned sweetly into the bond; voice soft, syrupy, and sharpened like a crayon you weren’t supposed to use on the walls.
“Do you ever… regret biting the cursed yarn?”
Across the sea, in a room filled with velvet, mirrors, and unresolved trauma, Doflamingo Donquixote screeched. Not yelled. Not roared. Screeched. Like an expensive parrot being denied its emotional support chandelier.
Age 8:
By age eight, you had developed a recurring stomach ulcer and an unsettlingly robust vocabulary for describing war crimes.
Your parents thought you were just creative. You knew better. Like a drunk god yelling into your brain with a cigar in one hand and blood on the other, your soulmate was fucking loud.
He once spent forty-two minutes thinking about himself, shirtless in a fur coat, while plotting the downfall of a mid-sized kingdom.
"If I puppet this idiot just right, he’ll walk straight into the cannon fire. Oh look, another orphan. Add it to the pile."
You were in math class. You blinked at long division and considered faking your own death. You lost some friends that year. Mostly after you turned to one mid-recess and said:
“Hey guys, sorry if I space out sometimes. I’m just… tethered to a delusional, murderous sunglasses model who talks in third person and once mentally narrated his own evil laugh for six minutes straight.”
There was silence. Then Maya said she was going to play on the other side of the playground.
You started making escape plans after that.
“Trap him in a room full of mirrors?” you mused into your notebook. “No, he’d enjoy it. Too much ego. Too many angles. He’d probably flirt with his reflection and forget I was trying to kill him.”
You drew a tiny diagram labeled “Plan B: Yarn Guillotine.” It had sparkles.
Pancake the frog judged you from the corner of your backpack, one plush arm hanging out like he, too, had seen things.
Age 9:
By age nine, you know words no child should know. Not curse words—those are for amateurs. No, you’ve leveled up.
You know words like decapitate, asset stripping, fragging, and “useful idiot.” You use “fragile masculinity” correctly in a sentence. In front of adults. On purpose.
Your teacher sends a letter home.
“Your child seems unusually… sophisticated in language. Also, they referred to Fleet Admiral Sengoku as ‘a morally-challenged imperialist meat sock.’”
You are grounded for three days. Your soulmate? He’s delighted.
“She sounds like a mushroom and teaches like a corpse. You’re dumber for listening to her.”
He mocks her voice for fifteen straight minutes. At one point, he invents a short musical about her inability to inspire a room full of staplers.
You stare at your multiplication table and wonder how much damage a paperclip can legally do.
You begin to suspect, with growing clarity, that this man—who once narrated the toppling of a minor warlord while you were eating dinosaur-shaped nuggets—might not be a good influence.
Possibly.
Probably.
Maybe.
But it’s hard to prove psychological corruption when no one else hears the smug, baritone sociopath in your brain. Your mother thinks your sarcasm phase is just “advanced.” Your dad starts hiding the newspaper.
You begin writing vocabulary words on sticky notes and hiding them in a shoebox under your bed, labeled “Evidence.”
Age 10:
Other kids are learning spelling. You’re learning mass manipulation, psychological warfare, and the exact emotional flavor of betrayal.
You know what a coup d’état is. You can spell it. Use it in a sentence. Even diagram the political aftermath with color-coded highlighters.
Why?
Because Doflamingo doesn’t have an off switch.
He doesn’t speak to you directly that often, but you hear things. Thoughts not meant for you, leaking across the soul-thread like an open sewer pipe running through a couture crime scene. He is a nightmare in sequins.
"They begged so nicely. I said no, obviously. But points for style. I hate silence. It's like listening to your own breathing in a coffin."
You cover your ears. It doesn’t help.
“That’s not normal,” you mutter to no one. “Did he just narrate his own smirk? I think I can hear him posing.”
Your parents think you’re just dramatic. Maybe going through a “weird phase.”
You try to explain what it’s like—what it feels like—to have a chaos muppet in your head with a God complex and a boa made of the souls of his enemies. Instead, they give you a very nice school counselor. She offers breathing exercises.
Breathing doesn’t help when your soulmate is casually committing tax fraud and genocide in the same afternoon.
He once thought for six minutes straight about whether gold leaf would look good on artillery.
He once called you a “mental parasite” because you asked if his shirt had shoulder feathers or if they were those just emotional support tassels.
He once considered naming a puppet after you. You made peace with that one disturbingly fast.
You’re ten. You’ve started writing your own will. And drawing up basic escape plans.
Just in case.
Age 11:
At eleven, your tolerance for nonsense is critically low.
You've endured years of velvet-draped war crimes, unsolicited mental fashion shows, and the emotional strain of sharing psychic space with a man who owns more feathered accessories than a Sabaody drag revue.
And then, on a perfectly average Tuesday afternoon, it happens.
You’re doing your homework. Long division. Peaceful. Normal. And there it is, echoing across the bond like a cursed kazoo from hell:
“Fufufufufufufu—”
You pause.
You blink.
And then, without thinking, you say aloud—calm, pointed, utterly done:
“Why is your laugh like a vacuum cleaner being murdered?”
And he heard you.
“Excuse me? You little parasite. You think you’re funny?”
Yes. Yes, you did.
You snickered.
He screamed.
For six hours. Straight.
Not words. Not yelling. Just one long, internalized psychic shriek of wounded flamboyant pride.
It felt like being haunted by a glam rock banshee.
You folded your worksheet. Ate a cracker. Wrote “feathered tyrant meltdown” in your notebook and underlined it twice.
Meanwhile:
Across the sea, somewhere in a gilded death palace soaked in ego and crime, Doflamingo Donquixote swore vengeance. He paced the length of his throne room, muttering insults and murder plots under his breath like a man personally wronged by a juice box and a third-grade education.
“She thinks she’s funny. She thinks she’s smarter than me. I’m going to find her and hang her brain on the wall like art.”
Rosinante looked very alarmed, but fell face-first as he tried to mime his worry. Vergo, halfway through a cup of black coffee and regretting all his life choices, didn’t even look up.
“She’s a child, Captain. Leave her alone.”
“She’s a little shit. A little shit with jokes.”
Vergo sipped his coffee slowly. Law, age unknown but already deeply jaded, was sitting nearby with a book and far too much sarcasm for his size.
“She should think she’s smarter than you,” Law muttered without looking up. “I like her already.”
Doflamingo whipped around like a bird of prey wearing designer boots.
“Shut up. Both of you. She insulted my laugh. She compared it to a dying vacuum.”
Trebol, lounging in the corner like a blob of emotional damage, shrugged without lifting his head. “Perhaps, young master… You could just go destroy an island until you feel better.”
Doflamingo rubbed his temples with murder in his eyes.
“Don’t tempt me.”
There was a long pause. Vergo sighed and flipped a page in his newspaper.
“She’s, like, eleven, right?”
“She’s a war criminal.”
Age 12:
At twelve, you decide this isn’t fate. It isn’t destiny. It’s a curse.
You are clearly cursed.
So you take action.
You attend a séance. You chant with a local priest. You eat an entire packet of salt like it’s communion for the spiritually exhausted.
You light a candle and whisper into your pillow: “Begone, chaos bird.”
Later that week, you inform him solemnly that you have attempted an exorcism.
“Salt? What is this, ghost therapy? I’m not haunting you. I’m tethered to you. There’s a difference.”
You try to cope.
You visualize him as something harmless. Something small. Something incapable of masterminding war.
“If you don’t stop picturing me as a Pomeranian, I will set an orphanage on fire and scream ‘FLUFFY’ while I do it.”
You snicker.
“You’re very fluffy when you’re angry.”
Doflamingo's aura flares like a disco ball, and a perfectly innocent vase explodes.
Your thoughts weren’t accidental. They were performed. Curated.
And they had been for seven goddamn years.
Seven years of intrusive commentary. Seven years of glitter-based emotional terrorism. Seven years of someone comparing him to a sentient curtain rod with fragile masculinity issues.
You were supposed to be a weapon. A partner. A tactical advantage in soulbond form. Instead, you were a disaster.
An untraceable, psychic comedy club that lived in his skull and refused to pay rent.
He was in the middle of a weapons deal when it started again. That subtle shift. The low, static pressure was building just behind his left eye.
Not silence. No, he would kill for silence.
This was worse.
This was the soulbond fog. Not a voice. Not a scream. Just the unmistakable, creeping feeling that his tether, the chaos goblin on the other end of this cursed string, was thinking.
And sure enough, it came.
“What if clouds are just sky potatoes?”
He froze. A vein pulsed in his temple.
Vergo, seated across from him with a sheaf of documents and the kind of blank expression that only meant something was about to explode, paused mid-sentence.
Doflamingo slowly raised one hand.
“Give me a moment,” he said, in a voice so calm it made everyone in the room slightly nauseous.
Age 13:
You have braces, anxiety, and exactly zero interest in being soulbound to a furious, couture-wearing maniac in designer pants.
He’s in his twenties now. Which, for someone like Donquixote Doflamingo, is objectively the worst possible age to be mentally connected to a real, live person with thoughts. And preferences. And boundaries.
He has a lot of sex and no chill.
You, unfortunately, have all the chill, and sex is a vague concept, unfortunately made more clear by the occasional mental peepshow.
Asshole.
Frankly, he deserves all the nonsense. Every recorder blast. Every glitter-fueled psychic migraine. Every frog-themed intrusive thought. Because you? You’ve endured years of his monologues. Not just the evil ones—the self-pitying ones.
“My father gave up our divine rights. We were royalty.”
Wow. Stunning. So tragic. You also wished he had stayed in Mariejois and gotten emotionally snipped.
Every time he says, “The world shall know my pain,” you mentally respond with:
“You know what pain is, feather boy? College debt. The housing market. You, when you get drunk, and I hear your singing.”
And when your thoughts get particularly spicy, when you start comparing him to cult leaders, reality Den Den radio villains, or emotionally repressed robots, he responds. Whiny. Wounded. Like you’d kicked him directly in the ego.
“You bully me like I owe you lunch money.”
His tone is offended.
Not outraged. Just personally injured, like a man who expected worship and got therapy notes.
“I bully you like your cult leader with abandonment issues,” you reply flatly, eyes on your math homework.
“You’re mean.”
“You monologue over poor orphans. With joy.”
“I didn’t ask to be psychically tethered to a mouthy gremlin child.”
“I didn’t ask to share headspace with a discount god complex in crime couture.”
“You don’t appreciate me.”
You don’t respond. You’re too busy reading about “how to psychically block flamingo-themed pirates with wounded narcissism. Then, as a precaution, you duct tape your frog plush to your forehead like it’s divine armor.
You like soup. He takes that personally.
Like:
"Soup again? You’re going to die bland and under-seasoned. But sure, mock my coat while stirring boiled sadness.
Sometimes it’s stupid shit:
"You know, cariño, it’s fascinating. You say you hate me, yet your brain thinks about me more than oxygen. That’s not loathing. That’s courtship."
And sometimes it’s deeply unfair:
"You call me ‘birdbrain,’ but I’m not the one who mistook powdered sugar for snow and tried to catch it with their mouth. Who’s the national security threat now?"
You’ve figured it out by now: If you keep your head boring—like mind-numbingly boring—he loses interest. You’re smart. You adapt. You become…become an accidental psychic saboteur, a mental landmine of pure, relentless, soul-bound nonsense. You build an internal fortress not out of steel or fire.
No, no. You build it out of garbage thoughts. Of deliberate, brain-rotting trivia. It is one of the most aggressively mundane inner monologues in recorded human history.
“Capybaras can’t jump.”
“Tupperware is technically a pyramid scheme.”
“The inventor of chips is buried in a chip can.”
“Soup.”
Just constant, slow-motion, inner monologue soup. Potato leek. Miso. Lentil. You compose emotional haikus about broth.
“Bean soup is humble. Warm in the belly, not loud. Unlike some people.”
And Donquixote Doflamingo? The world’s most volatile, fashionably dressed war criminal with abandonment issues? He goes absolutely bananas over it.
“You think you’re clever?”
“I’ve been mentally filibustering your evil plans with daydreams about laundry detergent and legal reform for years,” you reply, serenely. “At this point, I am your Shadow Cabinet. So—yes.”
You are, in effect, giving this man psychic tinnitus in the form of chicken stock. And it is driving him insane.
He’s currently:
Plotting the takedown of Dressrosa,
Manipulating underworld crime syndicates,
Babysitting a vengeance-fueled Law who keeps pulling knives,
And silently failing to connect with a brother who communicates exclusively in soul-crushing stares.
He is—to put it mildly—under pressure.
And somewhere—deep in the velvet-curtained, trauma-scented center of his murderous little heart he knows that the voice currently wondering whether soup can be carbonated is his greatest threat.
Not the Marines. Not the Yonko. Not Cipher Pol.
You.
And in the middle of a violent strategy meeting with Vergo and Trebol—charts spread, cities marked, lives priced in blood—he zones out.
Because suddenly, again:
“I wonder if broccoli works in soup. Probably, but only if you blend it.”
The table shakes.
“WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!” he roars aloud.
Vergo blinks. Trebol wheezes quietly in the corner.
“…Sir?”
Doflamingo inhales through his nose. He clenches a fist full of velvet. Smiles too widely.
“Nothing. Continue. Also, kill that merchant.”
You don’t have a tragic past. You don’t have powers. You don’t even really know who he is. You’re just out there in the world, somewhere, living a bland life and refusing to acknowledge him, which is new, and which is offensive. Because everyone wants Doflamingo, or fears him, or dies for him.
And here you are, tempting fate.
“Can rice noodles go in miso, or is that cultural betrayal?”
He twitches.
“ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME?”
You’re thinking about whether soup counts as a meal or a drink. You’re fighting off a cold with garlic, lemon, and passive aggression. You are wrapped in a blanket, sipping broth like it’s a tactical maneuver.
And somewhere, across the Grand Line, Donquixote Doflamingo is staring into space like a man on the verge of violence.
“Your taste in food is as questionable as your survival instincts. Do you think they’ll put it on your gravestone? Here lies the girl who thought ‘soupy’ was a personality trait.”
You blink. Offended on every level. Oh my god, he is such a bitch.
Far, far away, he laughs. Low. Amused. Unhinged in the way only a soulbonded warlord with a god complex and emotional glitter damage can be.
And you—mildly congested, wrapped in a blanket, sipping broth and contemplating fate—you sit back and sigh. You are sick and still cosmically tethered to something that sounds like a sparkly bird-flavored drink they stopped serving in Alabasta because it caused hallucinations.
Age 14:
You’d been mid-rant. A particularly good one, too.
You were mentally listing, in alphabetical order, all the reasons Donquixote Doflamingo should never be trusted with state secrets, firearms, or upholstery.
“A—Arson enthusiast. B—Birdbrained. C—Couture crimes. D—Dictator energy. E—Ego so large it requires structural support—”
That’s when the bond surged.
Not the usual buzz of static. Not his smug psychic lounge act.
But something different.
Something hot.
Sharp.
And wrong.
It hit like an elbow to the ribs. Fast, jarring, close.
Your words dropped off. Your breath stuttered. You sat up, blinking hard, hands curling in your lap like you could claw your way back into reality.
But you weren’t in your room anymore. Not exactly. You weren’t anywhere, really. Not physically..
The world around you was white and wind-bitten, blurring at the edges with snow. Cold. Too cold.
And in front of you, a man stood. Shoulders hunched. Bleeding. Shaking. Pointing a gun. At Doflamingo.
The snow beneath him was red. His lip was split. One eye was nearly swollen shut. His coat hung from one shoulder, torn and smoking, like something that had once been elegant and had since been through hell.
Your first thought wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even confusion.
Who would dare? Who would stand like that, half-broken, half-frozen, and still point a weapon at him?
Corazón.
Rosinante Doflamingo.
The mute brother.
You never heard his voice in your head. Never saw the world through his eyes. But still, you knew him.
Because Doflamingo knew him.
And Doflamingo never shut up.
Even when he didn’t mean to share it, you saw him; that tall, awkward man with the cigarette always tucked between two fingers and a coat two sizes too big, with laughter like broken glass and kindness that crept into places it wasn’t welcome.
Corazón lived in the silent corners of Doflamingo’s mind. The places he avoided. Where grief crusted like old blood around memories of shared bread and bunk-bed whispers. Where a tall, clumsy man with a martyr’s smile had once offered his brother hope and never asked anything in return.
You used to call him “Side Character Number One.” The quiet one. The gentler man in the chaos. The wayward brother with the cigarette always half-lit, thoughts that barely bled through the bond. For some reason, his voice was never in any memory.
But he didn’t need to.
You could see how much he worried. How much he watched Doflamingo spiral. How often he thought about that boy.. You mocked him once, years ago. Called him ‘the chain-smoking nursemaid with a martyr complex’.
Doflamingo had actually laughed aloud, much to his crew’s confusion. Not a cruel laugh. A real one. A rare one. You held onto that sound longer than you meant to.
No, you’ve never met Rosinante.
But you knew him.
Knew the way Doflamingo’s rage thinned when he entered a room. The flicker of guilt he refused to name. The absence that filled the Doflamingo whenever Corazon left to find medicine, food, and safety.
The one person your soulmate actually cared about.
He was your quiet background character in the ridiculous mental telenovela you and Doflamingo were constantly acting out; mental daggers, petty color wars, soup rants, and psychic ceasefires.
And now he was pointing a gun at Doflamingo.
Brother. Traitor. Soft. Still hoping.
Not your thoughts.
The snow muted everything. Sound, breath, mercy. It swallowed the world in white, as if trying to make this moment make sense, when nothing about it did.
Your chest was tight. Ribs braced as if struck. Fingers curled unconsciously into the sleeves of your coat, heart stuttering beneath layers that could not keep out the cold pressing in through the bond.
You weren’t there.
Not really.
But you could feel the frost biting at his skin. The dull throb of bruises on borrowed lungs. The sting of betrayal settles like ash behind the teeth. You stood just behind Doflamingo’s eyes, trapped in the hollow space where thoughts become action and action becomes irreversible.
Rosinante did not beg. He did not cry.
He only looked up, eyes shadowed beneath the fall of a too-large coat, cigarette long forgotten in the snow. His shoulders were hunched. And still, there was no fear in him.
Only sorrow.
Your heart slammed in your chest.
Doflamingo raised the gun.
You moved without thinking, a whisper inside him, a breathless panic in the marrow of your thoughts.
“No. Don’t. Don’t do this—”
But he didn’t pause. He didn’t flinch.
There was no speech. No cruel flourish of ego. Just the press of a finger. The inevitability of gravity.
The gunshot cracked through the bond.
Sharp and final.
No ceremony. No flourish. No desperate villainy to cushion the horror.
Just collapse.
Like a marionette with strings severed, his body struck the snow with a wet, unholy finality. There was no poetry to it. No last gasp. No divine moment. Just the thud of something beloved reduced to ruin. Red spilled beneath him in widening arcs, staining the white as if the earth itself had been caught off guard. As if it, too, couldn’t quite believe what had happened.
The coat he wore bunched beneath him; too big, too black, too soft for a world like this. Blood darkened the whiteness around him, soaking through like spilled ink on a blank page.
And Doflamingo just stood there. Silent.
No smirk. No speech. No vicious gloating to fill the void.
Only stillness.
And the soulmate bond seized.
Collapsed inward, low and quiet, like a lung emptied of air. Like a cathedral after the choir stops. You hadn’t even realized how much of your life had been shaped by his background noise; by the thrum of ambition, of anger, of biting arrogance and relentless presence always simmering somewhere in your head.
But now?
Now it was still. Not just gone.
Just absent.
And you couldn’t breathe.
Because Rosinante wasn’t background noise for Doflamingo, he had been everything to him. The boy in the bunk bed. The man in the corner of the room. The brother who still haunted every corridor of Doflamingo’s mind like a light too painful to look at. He had been the softness buried in cruelty. The coat wrapped around something feral. The last goddamn tether to grace.
And now he was gone.
There was no joke for this. No roast. No commentary.
Just silence.
Grieving.
And for once, you didn’t say a thing either.
No gloating. No mocking satisfaction. Just a long, raw quiet.
You felt his thoughts coil inward, tight and wrong. Cold. Wet. Heavy. Like chains sinking in water.
Donquixote Doflamingo, objectively speaking, is the worst person you’ve ever met. Egotistical. Violent. A man who speaks in threats and dresses in war crimes.
And this?
This was his fault.
He didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have to pull the trigger. But knowing that—rationalizing it, dissecting it—didn’t stop your sympathy.
You still feel bad for him.
The grief wasn’t yours. But it was in you now. The way his memory clung to Corazón like smoke in silk. The way the bond had gone hollow around the edges, not broken but scorched.
Doflamingo’s voice comes low.
It’s rough, like a thread pulled too tight, frayed and cold at the edges.
“You don’t get to feel sorry for me.”
It doesn’t stab.
It sinks.
Soft, sharp, and slow. Like poison in the bloodstream. Like something said through gritted teeth to stop from breaking, words spoken by someone who knows what he did, knows what he lost, knows how this will echo in the dark of his skull long after the blood fades from the snow.
Wounded. Like grief opened his mouth, and something too human slipped through.
“You don’t get to feel sorry for me,” he repeats, voice more and more uneven. “You don’t get to weep for my brother, who I shot. You hate me, remember?”
You do.
You do.
You hate his ego. His violence. The way he smiles like a god and bleeds like a man. You hate how he invaded your life, your head.
But something’s changed.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not compassion. It’s not some redemptive hope that he’ll be better now.
It’s just... quiet.
The grief sits in your chest like frost behind ribs. It aches. Not for him, maybe. But for the boy he used to be. The one who once shared bread. The one who had a brother.
And Doflamingo, somewhere behind the thorns and silence, feels it. He doesn’t lash out again. He just... withdraws. Like an animal nursing a wound too deep to show.
And the bond, for the first time since you were a child, feels lonely.
.
.
.
After Corazon dies, there are no more flashes of his sad childhood.
No stray memories drifting in like smoke. No laughter caught in the corners of his thoughts, no soft colors, no cigarettes and coat sleeves, and flickers of humanity slipping past his walls.
Just silence. Heavy and hollow.
Doflamingo hadn’t just lost someone he cared about. He’d lost the best part of him. The last flicker of light still flickering in that rotted, ruined cathedral he called a soul.
And the worst part? He knew it.
You felt the knowledge ooze through the bond like a fever, slow and inescapable. He had done it. He had killed the only man who could’ve softened him.
And now? It was just you and Donquixote Doflamingo.
Alone in a godless bond. No more buffer. No more brakes.
His voice came through the silence like a knife wrapped in silk. Poisonous, but somehow deflated. Ragged, in a way he didn’t know how to hide.
“So,” he says, poisonous but somehow small beneath it all, “Are you going to run from me too?”
The silence stretched.
Because your first thought—your immediate, unfiltered brain reaction—was:
“I can’t even run a mile without wheezing. You think I’m emotionally or physically equipped for fleeing a war criminal?”
It slipped through the bond before you could catch it.
A pause.
A stunned, dead silence.
Then a sound. Low. Choked. Was that—?
“Did you just—” he started, voice caught between disbelief and something that might’ve been laughter. “I am baring my soul, and you respond with asthma jokes?”
You swallowed, wiping your nose on your sleeve. Your voice came out hoarse.
“You started it. With the whole ‘I shot my brother, don’t pity me’ death soliloquy.”
“It wasn’t a soliloquy,” he snapped, half-heartedly.“It had staging.”
He didn’t respond. But the bond shifted. The grief was still there. Raw. Bleeding.
But something in him exhaled.
-X- End Part One -X-