Work Text:
Crocodile stands long in the rain, feeling the plaster and soak, the way the water drips through the grit and imbalance of his body in long travel, making novel trails and following paths of perfect incidence until his entire being is compacted, crumpled down. Still, even thoroughly defiled, he feels at odds with the world, he feels untouched; Doflamingo reads it in his eyes, or maybe he’s fabricating it in some flight of fancy.
The execution is roaring in his blood, all the basal cries for blood and money and theater that had opened the sky and sent Roger’s head tumbling through it, that had sent him to splatter and had cleared that lurid stain away all in one vulgar stroke of weaponized wanting. He enthralls at sharing in it, and wants to feel it; He wants to make Crocodile believe it, and he wants to break him open upon the fallacy. He needs to be the one to put the hurt in him, pushing up beneath the sternum until it forces his mouth and makes him cry.
His step across the clearing square is jittery, the film’s stutter track, and the light upon the rain complements his movement, disorienting in its tongues of silver. None touching, and no gazes catching for the scald of his presence. It’s a summer storm, its heat bled into the water, transported perversely into deep autumn. His feathers shiver, and his mind oscillates.
All worldly truth is felt. Crocodile goes easy when he drapes the length of his hands over either shoulder and hunches down to contour against him, doesn’t make any gestures except the barest tilting of his head to receive the tongue that’s already brazenly pressing against his earlobe. It feels so damn good to be taller than the bastard.
The inside of his mouth is cooler than the rain, but it warms as he feeds his tongue down his throat. He works his jaw, fucks down into that promise of heat, and Crocodile starts making these lovely dying-animal noises, all convulsive, yes , and a ringed hand snags his nape, impotent with damp.
There’s more than lethargy in him, it seems. Still gagging on his tongue, Crocodile pulls them backwards, slinking away from the square’s edge to knock against the post of an awning, then back again, against the facade in stumbling, jerking movements, that lovely connotative stumble of lovers in the day-dark, or the stagger of a man freshly knifed.
Doflamingo blindly shoves his knee between his thighs, keening and half-pleading, and Crocodile punishes him for it, slamming him against the brickwork. The lover’s stumble to the warm bed—they fall into the dark interstice between the buildings, and it swallows them without complaint.
Doflamingo begins peeling his clothes away, there in the alleyway, and the new animation in his hands gives him precision, another fill of fancy. The plaster and the soak, and his whole incorporeal body filled with the dullness of rain. Taking it in. With Crocodile's shoulders bare, his shirt crumpled around his elbows, Doflamingo fits his lips to the side of his throat, secures his vantage with his teeth, and sucks.
There’s water in there, making him solid, but all he tastes is blood, high on the palate and nauseating. Filling without emptiness, dripping into the surface tension of his being and making his suspension all the more tenuous.
Doflamingo's stomach lurches, and he rises to his toes to complement the sensation, smothering. Something unthought flares in his hindbrain—the alleyway’s open mouth and the soulless bodies lurking beyond—so intense that the occiput physically warms, and he covers Crocodile with his whole body in a gesture of claiming, naked skin to damp clothing.
The rain pouring around them like a torrent of blood! He entertains this moment beneath the gigantomachy, caught in its spray. He hopes it never stops, and Crocodile grunts.
“Fuck!” Doflamingo shrills, laughter making the hinge of his jaw creak as he clamps his hands around either side of his head.
“How romantic the whole affair is!” He squawks, and it earns him an embarrassingly sincere flinch. His ears must be waterlogged, and his breastbone looks like a plate of ivory, insuperably smooth. Doflamingo’s nauseous, suddenly, and his thumbs drive into Crocodile’s temples.
He keeps it from his voice, replacing that odd lightness with a different flavor of indistinction, warbling and wild, “Will that be you next, Crocodile? On the scaffold, and setting the world ablaze?”
Crocodile smiles at him for the briefest moment, like some ephemeral weather phenomena. Inexplicable, irreplicable, leaving no memory beyond impression. Reality-altering for the distrust it breeds. The instant it passes, he feels that odd sensation, new and forgotten, too, that is not unlike regret. He draws close and nips at his ear, painful beyond the threshold of teasing. He fits his nose against his own wrist and smells nothing on his skin.
He wants to look at him again, and Crocodile waits until their eyes meet to speak. Anticipation.
Waiting for nothing.
“You must be fucking high…” He chastises, his tone completely familiar, and his mouth predictable—still breathtakingly lovely. Intoxicating, corrupting by that lone canine.
Why isn’t he disappointed? Doflamingo’s head serpentines, and he sucks Crocodile’s lip as he jerks his fly open, tugging the subdued, bronze-hued zipper of those fine slacks of his. Ever tasteful.
“No, you feel it, too, don’t you?” He jerks those pant legs down around his thighs without consideration of convenience or logistics, and Crocodile hisses at the exposure. Doflamingo's hot hand canvasses his thigh, and the rain scrawls pattern across his damp skin. Hot, too. “Don’t lie to me, don’t play disaffected.”
Two blinks, and Crocodile's body gives little yield to the fingers crooking up inside of him, folding into that four-inch vacancy. He gasps, though, and his heartbeat is strong and damp against the fingers. It’s as good as avowal. He feels out the give of his body with renewed attention. Crocodile makes a noise that’s sweet, almost girlish, but Doflamingo can’t hear it beneath the sound of his own panting.
Doflamingo’s face morphs—it regresses, and his expression is filthy, wanting, completely glazed in the desecration. “You want it, don’t you? This is what wanting looks like, on you, hmm?”
Crocodile looks at him drily, smile wan and condescending. His circular talk. He was expecting things, too. And yet, he doesn’t seem disappointed. Doflamingo’s heart glows incongruously: this resonance of the hypersane.
He fumbles in that midday darkness at his own fly, and the seam at his left thigh tears when he tries to crinkle his pants to his knees. Only his groin is exposed, his groin and a bronze, unerotic stretch of thigh.
He aligns their bodies in that unbeautiful, simplistic way, helpless to the dizzying tightening of his stomach. Like the blood, Crocodile's hot too, there. If he fucks him good enough, he can get anything he wants from him; it’s the way of the world.
“Don’t talk to me while you’re trying to jam your cock in me, you fucking idiot.” Even here, though, there’s some whiff of beauty to him. He crowds him, and Crocodile gasps again, the press of blunt heat, only distinguishable from all other tepid dampness by the peculiar, revolting quality of tackiness.
“No talking, then.” Doflamingo admits, somewhat gravely, somewhat delightedly, and he takes Crocodile’s throat between his hands—the one tacky-damp, wonderfully depraved—and frames the burgeoning Adam’s apple with the twin press of his thumbs. Strings lance between his finger tips.
Rain-soaked, drawing Crocodile’s blood is easy, the flesh splitting and peeling away at its surface like a hot roll of bread. It beads on the wire, glittering like a line of sanguine pearls before the tension breaks.
The alleyway; the scaffold. Falling heads, perhaps in trade or perhaps in complement; galvanization.
Another ephemeral expression crosses, private and incomprehensible in its sincerity, and Crocodile thrashes his head. No , or not this , or not now . Gushing from the throat. Gigantomachy.
Doflamingo, for his own private, incomprehensible reason, acquiesces to the plaint.
“Fuck me, brat.” He rasps. Doflamingo had wanted to hurt him; He’s never seen him this happy before: it’s what it looks like on him, huh?
To this, too, he acquiesces.
The rain doesn’t stop, as if in acquiescence. There’s water, dripping down every exposed inch of skin, and soaking every unsheltered swath of fabric. Some pushing grossly inside of Crocodile, squelching and drying and relatively cool, making Doflamingo’s hips stutter.
“Are you crying?” He rasps, suddenly possessed by the thought.
“No,” he says, sharply, some note of pain entering the timbre of his voice, then, quieter, somehow wondrous, light-touched, “—why would I be?”
“I don’t know,” Doflamingo smiles, entertained by both the content and its private admission, being unable to remember having said as much to anyone else.
He presses their temples together with unbidden tenderness, and Crocodile’s stare, perfectly cold despite the wanton disarray of his face and fall of his hair, bores into him cleanly, leaving no fray and causing no bleed. Without complication, without interruption, without asking, sharing no part of its misery or its yearnings. As far from crying as it gets, and Doflamingo fucks him hard enough to make their pelvic bones bruise.
“You could be, couldn’t you?” The pleasure is like the spray of steel in an industrial warehouse, hot and white and perfectly consequential.
He whispers, rising with all the concentration and scalding tempo of bile, “Do you still cry, Crocodile? Or has that left you, too?” Gratifying, ruining.
He grabs at his bare shoulder, the one he had stripped, the one he now shelters with the appeasing curve of his own spine, and feels it becoming pulpy and gritty beneath his hand. An oozing of mud puddles into the lines of his palm—love, life, wealth—and grates against their distinction. He’s deformed by the abrasion; His fortunes will never read the same again.
There are too many things to hold in his mind, and a truth not his own is only a cheap threat. If he fucks him good enough, if he fucks him good enough, if he fucks him good enough…
Lightning strikes the scaffold, and the wood flares, smoldering and quelled at once in time’s interstice. Current along the iridescent flagstones.
There is no grounding here, in the hundredfold throb of thirsty commoners. It creeps along the alley wall, touches Doflamingo’s ankles and diffuses across his drenched skin as a uniform white fritz. His spend runs plainly down Crocodile’s inner thigh, but he keeps fucking him. There’s no complaint there.
He howls, and Crocodile returns the favor in crowning him. He fits his hands around his throat—Doflamingo loves him deliriously for it, the opportunity of feigned sameness—to shut him the fuck up, clenching until the cartilage in his throat begins to recede with a mild crunching.