Work Text:
It was night again. Minion Island lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The smallest part was a rasping, enduring quiet, made by a sacrifice to save a boy. If Doflamingo had not loved his brother he would have killed him with a gunshot to the head, put an end to the labored breathing, and ripped the silence open with screams and pounding from a treasure chest. If there had been treasure left behind, even one abandoned chest, it would have lit the silence with pained gasps and apologies, the sounds of tiny hands pressed hard against bullet wounds. If the boy had not been a D… but no, that wasn’t the reason anymore. It had gone beyond just “D”, and so the silence lived on.
Descending the mountain was the brother who had been betrayed. Doflamingo led his family with a wordless finality, having put the issue to rest behind him. In doing this he added a restrained, boiling silence to the weak, lingering one. It made a rupture of sorts, a rift.
The third silence would not last for much longer. If you noticed it, you would hear it in the noiseless crunch of footsteps in snow and in the guttural, lonely wails that tore out of a boy without a sound. It was in the boy’s grieving march towards a future he had been given a chance to live. It was in the weight of three words said to him that he would never get to say back. And it was held in place by the man who cast it, lying bleeding in the falling snow that already started to bury him.
The man was known as Cora-san, a name he earned. His smile was peaceful and ready, but he kept breathing with the immovable resolve that comes from knowing what will happen when he stops.
The boy was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the most crucial silence of the three, freeing the boy from a life lived for a monster. It was cruel and kind as a parent’s love. It was heavy as a single breath. It was the willful, heart-fueled sound of a man who was waiting to die.