Lundgren is a Celestial Dragon. Big, ugly, indifferent to the commoners' cries. Cries for help, desperate weeping, supplications to be able to see their home and family again. Shouts that have fallen into the pit of the most profound cruelty, because that pale blond man with metal eyes and flaccid neck takes too much pleasure from his slaves' services to free them.
Homing tries to stay calm and not be overwhelmed by the quiet anger that usually gets him whenever he goes to visit his older brother. He is not a raging man, his anger against slave exploitation only leads him to open long rigamaroles on peace and equality, and for Lundgren this is worse than a fight with lots of dishes thrown to the wall.
The Donquixote brothers couldn't be more different: as the older is sloppy and lazy, as the younger is elegant and idealistic. In an exaggerated manner, since Mariejoa is a place hostile to those who go against the worldly lifestyle, of Olympus privileged to the others' detriment.
Lundgren will receive his little brother in the main living room, the one with a round table and airy windows overlooking the wonderful garden.
Next to him is his four-year-old son, Mjosgard. The child is trying to bend the teeth of a pure silver fork, and his father scolds him.
Disappointed, he puts it back in its place. It's lunch time.
"Go and open to the guests." he orders his maids. He's not particularly unpleasant, but the tone is as inflexible as steel.
A girl with hazelnut hair and a purple veil on her face approaches the solid wood door, accompanied by a colleague who has just finished crying in silence, and who is stealthily drying a tear. A new recruit. You never get used to it completely.
The door opens and reveals friendly, different faces: Homing and his little family, a little picture that makes happy even the heart of the cold maids, now anesthetized in their feelings. How could it be otherwise? Be that, or the whip.
"Homing, sit next to me." Lundgren gestures to him, waving a strangely delicate hand as compared to the rest of his body.
His brother obeys, and Caroline, his wife, also makes her way. In her arms she has a newborn of few months, Rosinante. Doflamingo, the eldest son, is taken by hand by his father and settled on his seat.
Starters are served: sweet and sour onions, honey and fine goat cheeses.
Mjosgard snorts, he doesn't like that stuff.
"Daddy, where are the fries?" he moans, with his plaintive little voice.
"Be patient, son. They will come with the second course."
The boy begins to play with the onions in the plate, making them spin with the tip of the fork, bored.
"It's so fake..." begins Homing, helping Doflamingo with his fork.
Lundgren stops suddenly, fork in mid-air: here we go again...
"What, Homing?" he growls, with a surge of annoyance.
"This place... that garden. These people." answers his brother, quiet but sure of his ideas. The black eyes clash with Lundgren's gray ones, without ever lowering.
"We have already discussed it, Homing. Several times." Lundgren demands to be served with another piece of cheese, with the intention of declaring the matter closed.
"But don't you ever think about our children? What future will they have in Mariejoa?"
"The future that belongs to them as children of Celestial Dragons. A future above the earth scum."
"If I can, Lundgren... I agree with my husband. Mariejoa is beautiful but dark."
Lundgren glances at his sister-in-law for a long time; she's a descendant of the Lauren family, a thirty-year-old tranquil, beautiful presence with a sweet gaze. Despite this, he barely bears her. Too much sucrose. Too identical to his brother.
It's time for the first courses and Mjosgard is given a generous portion of fish pasta. His father hears him speak the deadly word, the one that no Celestial Dragon should ever blow out of his lips:
"Thank you!"
"MJOSGARD! YOU MUSTN'T THANK THE SERVANTS! A GOD DOESN'T NEED TO THANK ANYBODY!"
The green-haired child withdraws, hurt. He puts his head between his shoulders and look down.
"Lund, he's just a child..." Homing defends him, offended by his brother's scene.
"HE MUST LEARN WHO HE IS NOW! NOW THAT HE'S STILL LITTLE! OTHERWISE HE'LL DISGRACE HIS LINEAGE!"
Caroline puts a hand on her nephew's arm, who smiles at her. Homing doesn't know yet that these little gestures will be forgotten by his nephew for many years, ruined and subjugated by the absurd Celestial mentality.
Lundgren grumbles, asking for some wine. Homing and Caroline reject it.
"I'm still breast-feeding Rosinante." the woman excuses herself, squeezing the little boy to her chest.
"I prefer to drink an orange juice like the rest of my family." Homing justifies.
Lundgren grunts; those two deprive themselves of pleasures to support someone else's good. Crazy stuff.
There is no loyalty in the majority of the Celestial Dragons, not even between relatives. They are only blood-bound persons who pursue the same deviated ideal.
The first course is consummated in silence. Once his portion is over, however, Homing returns to attack:
"There are some enchanting views on earth. Peaceful islets, forests and deserts."
"The islands are often pirates' haunts, the forests are stinking damp and the deserts dehydrate you while just pronouncing their name." Lundgren replies with superiority.
Caroline leans over a little to observe her husband's reactions, with little Rosinante in her arms.
Homing turns to her, eyebrows arched by discouragement.
When the second course is served, roast beef in a vegetable sauce with baked and fried potatoes, Lundgren throws himself into a tirade against his younger brother:
"You've always been the favorite of mom and dad, you and your absurdities. They have even arisen in me the doubt of being adopted, Salvatore and Maureen were too different from me."
Lundgren calls his deceased parents by name, and retains too much rancor to consider them as such. They too were like Homing, also without slaves, but only with a help paid and treated with gloves. They too fantasized about the world below; had it not been for his frail health and her fear of traveling at this time the entire Donquixote family would have already been deprived of its privileges, to make mold in some brick cottage in some lousy seaside village, smelling of fish and mediocrity.
"They tried to inculcate authentic values, values that don't exist in Mariejoa."
"And you never asked yourself why? This is the highest spiritual place in all Earth. What doesn't exist up there is evil, put it in your head."
Homing remains silent, while his brother gives himself a sip of wine. After drinking, he looks at him arrogantly:
"Over there is promiscuity... monstrous hybrids born from barbarous and inferior beings. Would you see my son married to a mermaid?"
"What's a mermaid?" asks Mjosgard, innocent.
"It's a fish-tailed woman, son. A collector's piece."
"Lundgren, don't tell him these things. Don't raise him like that." Homing begs him.
"SHUT UP! You won't ruin my son as well with your hippie skits." the fat man yells at him, fed up.
The second course also slips away into total silence, with increasing tension.
When a richly decorated cocoa pudding is served, Lundgren begins to praise his palace neighbor, Roswald of the Sophia family. A tall, lean man, thick blond hair and dark eyes.
Even Homing knows him very well, and has always maintained cordial relations with him, if 'cordial' can be the boast and the pride of which his speeches are soaked in described. Speeches in which Roswald always speaks and Homing limits to listening and nodding while smiling.
"Tomorrow we are invited to Charloss's birthday. For a gift we thought of a child slave. He's in the other room, in his gift cage."
This time, Homing cannot hold back a shocked expression; Caroline, too, stares intently at her brother-in-law with her chestnut irises, and stares at him as if she doesn't want to believe the filth that is hidden in that envelope of a man.
"Why are you staring at me? That child needs company and I will give it to him."
"I don't like Charloss."
Everyone turns to Mjosgard, who is quite sure of the statement just made: the plump little child his age, black-haired sticking up on his head and idiotic expression named Charloss is not his liking.
His father gets up and puts the napkin on the table, leaving his slaves the task of folding it up.
"I don't care, Mjosgard. You have to make him a friend of yours."
"NO!" he screams, already knowing that his father will drag him to the party of the Sophia scion, then will force him to smile and hold the chain of the human slave and behave with Charloss as if he were his best friend.
"Can't I stay home?" he whispers, making himself small.
The threatening shadow of his father is ever closer.
"To do what? Listen to the slaves' whining?"
Mjosgard trembles. When someone is against him, Lundgren is terrifying.
Suddenly, a hand reaches the child's ear and pulls it hard, until he's forced to rise from the table.
"Listen to me well... I am your father and you will do as I say, because I am ALWAYS right. Tomorrow you'll come with me to the party of the Sophias and behave like a Donquixote worthy of the name, is it CLEAR?!"
He speaks to him as to a stubborn and obtuse adult, perhaps the child doesn't fully understand everything being very small, but that little is enough to make him form tears on the sides of his eyes.
"Now enough, Lundgren!" Homing scolds him, grabbing his hand.
His brother releases his son, who runs to his room, immediately followed by his nurse, the slave prepared to take care of him twenty-four hours a day.
Mjosgard throws himself on the bed, and showers his pillow with tears.
Behind her, a timid, shaky, nervous figure is approaching: Yrjola is a young slave, but has lived on her skin hundreds of years. Her face is tired and overworked, with high cheekbones that centralize the looks, two hopeless eyes and unkempt black hair.
She doesn't say anything to the child, she just goes quietly near the bed and listen to his desperate sobs.
With her arms she lifts him from the mattress and whispers a sentence in his ear:
"When you grow up, you'll have to go away from this place, and never come back."
After helping him to put on his pajamas, the servant leaves the room and is about to return to the salon, aware every time she cannot do more for the boy she gave birth. She is not a mother, and it's already a miracle that Lundgren hasn't forced her to throw away the fruit of his sick pleasure, and then gotten rid of the body that supplied it.
The next afternoon Lundgren and son go to the Sophias; Mjosgard is holding the chain culminating in a metal collar surrounding the flesh of a young boy who might be seven or eight years old.
When they arrive on the place, Charloss is in the arms of a servant who shares with him the same black hair, but has graceful face feature and an iron patience, since the child is wiggling and shouting about wanting another lollipop.
"VICTORIA! Let him have it!"
The voice is harsh and sour, and Lundgren immediately identifies it as his great friend's, Roswald.
Victoria lets go of Charloss, who runs like a lightning to the mountain of sweets and candies that has come as a gift.
The girl then remains still to observe the blond man.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING STANDING THERE?! AREN'T YOU HEARING SHALULIA'S CRY?!"
The woman disappears in another room, without asking questions.
Roswald shakes his head.
"If she were not my favorite slave girl, I would have already kicked her down from Mariejoa... she is such a ditzy at times..."
"Did she give birth to your children?"
"Yes, a wife here in Mariejoa is not convenient. The World Nobles are all horrendous. Homing was lucky."
Six years elapse. This time it's Homing who has summoned his brother to his home.
"So you've decided. You're staying at your word."
The man with flowing blond hair and elegant mustache approaches the window, beyond which two butterflies can be seen flying one next to the other.
"I waited for my children to become old enough. Now they are ready to face the journey."
Lundgren is sipping some punch.
Doflamingo is seated on a small armchair and looks out of the same window, without however seeing the butterflies or the poetry of that magnificent spring morning; the child is unable to enjoy the little things, for him there is only the good life, the beautiful clothes and the expensive whims.
Mjosgard, seeing him irritated and in a closed position, tries to call his attention to talk to him a bit.
"Can I come and stay with you?" the blond child asks him, taking off his sunglasses and cleaning them on his shirt.
"Damn!" he complains immediately after, "... This sun makes my eyes watery!"
His ten-year-old cousin is about to answer him, when Homing arrives and takes him in his arms:
"Do not be silly, Doffy! You will like the land below!"
"Leave me! I'm no longer a baby!" his son growls, kicking and paining his father with his rancorous way.
Homing puts the child down, and in doing so, meets Mjosgard's penetrating, half-moon cut dark eyes. The same inquisitorial gaze of his father.
"What are you hoping to meet down there?"
Homing is now accustomed to his nephew's insolence, so he answers him as if he were an adult.
"A real life, Mjosgard. A life as a human."
The boy shrugs, indifferent; the signs of empathy and curiosity towards the other that he had manifested as a child have vanished, destroyed by the violence of paternal education, aimed at stifling all traces of deplorable humanity in his pupil.
Doflamingo starts to scream, to stomp on his feet; in short, his becomes a real hysterical crisis and only in his mother's arms he can find some peace: he looks like a stray cat with disheveled fur.
"We will leave tomorrow... we will leave tomorrow and soon we'll have to get used to be beggars, I can feel it!" he sobs in a disconnected way, worrying his mother enormously.
"Doffy, stop it..." she murmurs, stroking his forehead, close to a peak of fever due to the fatigue and anxiety accumulated, "... Don't always paint everything black..."
All that commotion has awakened Rosinante, who was sleeping blissfully on the sofa in the living room.
"What happens? Why is Doffy crying?"
The elder brother suddenly stops moaning and looks angrily at the younger child, as if he had pronounced some kind of blasphemy:
"Rosi... Are you happy to go among the slobs?"
"They're not slobs, Doffy, they're human beings... like us."
"Yeah, why am I asking you? You're dad's parrot..."
"I'm not a parrot! You are bad!"
"Ah, I'm bad because I find stupid to leave everything here?"
"You don't trust mum and dad! Shame on you!"
Now the two of them are crying. While Caroline and Homing console them, Lundgren keep drinking and eating, not very participant of that emotional exchange, indeed quite annoyed. His son is standing in the middle of the room, motionless.
When Lundgren and Mjosgard leave, it's time for lunch. Doflamingo lives that last day in Mariejoa as if it were something rare and tremendous together, with a sense of atrocious impotence that compresses his stomach and causes him to nibble a few food.
At night, Rosinante falls in his sleep, while Doffy keeps rolling over in bed: he wants to break everything and scream until convulsions come, but he knows that his parents will not change their minds, but they would explain to him for the hundred thousandth time that is a decision made for their own good, to make them grow 'as humans'.
"Tsk! They want us to deal with beasts... but with me it doesn't work... I will never lower myself to their level." he thinks, and sleep envelops him soon after.
The following morning is strange, Doflamingo wakes up without a stomach ache or wanting to make things ugly with his parents. The thought of making kilometers and finally abandoning Mariejoa reaches him far away, like a reverberation among the mountains; on the contrary, Rosinante is leaking joy, for him it's an adventure and he feels overwhelmed by an emotion that Doffy would not share even in millions of years.
Not even the veiled threats of the other Dragons, outraged by Homing's words about humanity, make a grip on the short-haired child: his mind has fallen into apathy, and everything falls on him like rain in a canal.
Mariejoa drifts apart more and more, and the sounds around are muffled, his family's words useless: for that particular eight-year-old boy, the end of the Golden Age has just decided to go directly into the Iron one, without passing for intermediate ones.
After just nine months, Doflamingo sees all reasonable hopes going out: the people, the horrible people of the lower floor hate the Celestial Dragons. They hate them so much to force a whole family to flee constantly, they hate them so much to deny them food and assistance. They hate them so much to nail them to the wall and threaten them with death.
Caroline is dead, hit by pneumonia and sunk by vitamin deficiencies.
A bad day in January, a dark and foggy day, Doffy has found his mother helpless under the worn blankets, with little Rosi wailing softly for her soul flying to the sky.
That day, a part of him has been forever cankered. If he first felt an acrimony towards his father, now that frightful sentiment is no longer there and in its place a far greater and more dangerous entity has given way: hatred, the powerful acid that corrodes relationships and destroys everything.
One night, the night of Caroline's mournful and rapid funeral, celebrated by Homing by candlelight and ended in the uncultivated garden of their hovel, Doffy hears a call on the Den Den Mushi.
It's his father, who trembles dramatically with the receiver in his hand.
"Hello?" does a cold voice beyond the device; it's distorted but Doffy recognizes his uncle's voiceprint.
"Lund, it's me..."
"Who?"
"Your brother. Homing..."
"Weren't you told not to call anymore?"
"Lund, please. Listen to me... Caroline is dead... I've buried her today."
The man's voice cracks and even Doffy struggles to push back the tears of rage and pain.
"It was you who killed her, Homing. You and only you."
"I guess you won't give me your support."
"No. Save yourself from mushing again."
At Donquixote manor, in the beautiful center of Mariejoa, it's full day but it's as if darkness had fallen.
Lundgren has imposed indifference, but the dull anger that has enveloped him while reminding the folly of his younger brother shakes him from within.
"It was them, wasn't it?"
"Yup…"
For a moment, seeing his son's half-mooned eyes scrutinize him harshly, Lundgren fears that he may return to being the child of sound principles that he once was, but he can feel comfortable, because Mjosgard leaves the room without another word.
Only from the corridor comes his voice, strong and sure:
"They took the wrong path. Nothing can be done for them."
Yrjola has listened to his convictions, intent on dusting the furniture, and cannot help but feel sorry for him.
There go another twelve years. Doflamingo has ascended to high-class piracy. Rosinante cut every relationship with him after seeing him shooting his father in the back of his head, and now he serves the Navy.
Lundgren no longer have had direct news of his brother. Now he has other programs in mind.
"Son, now that those traitors have got out of the way we have to think about the future... We don't want to bring down our illustrious name, right?"
Mjosgard feels like an icy chill running down his back.
"It's time for you to marry!"
"But Daddy, I don't have any intention of it. Who should I marry then?"
Lundgren's pupil is mulling over a little, but now in his black eyes the horror makes its way.
"Do not tell me Shalulia!"
"Why not? She's part of the Sophia family, and she's very attractive..."
"I would become brother-in-law of that lardball! I don't want!"
"MJOSGARD! You've remained the same child! Get in your thick head that you MUST be a friend of every family here! None excluded!"
"And do I need to marry Shalulia to remain friends with the Sophias?"
His father is silent; he cannot stand him when he does that.
"Do you know what, Daddy? I'm going to Sabaody, to buy some slaves."
As he descends to the ground, Mjosgard thinks of his cousin, the child he consoled through the Den Den Mushi in secret and listened while he made furious outbursts against his uncle. The child now adult he has no longer had the opportunity to see, and who has had his life ruined because of his father's stupidity.
Mjosgard clenches his teeth. For nothing in the world he would give up the comforts and privileges that were given to him at birth.
For his part, Lundgren has been able to pull the strings of his family history, with a grandiose name soiled by people like his parents and his brother.
The big man orders the slaves to make him a hot bath.
It's an autumn day in Mariejoa, a day like any other. Orders are given to slavery, lashes are given. There's laughing, drinking, eating. There is strolling on degraded humans' back. There is blaming on those who think differently, the creatures of yonder are insulted.
A new sun will rise in twenty years, but it's still too early to think about it, and in any case the Celestial Dragons are too immobile on their brains to even be able to give an account.