Donquixote Homing

Tall and thin-faced, Homing carried a gentleness almost unheard of in his bloodline. Dark blonde curls fell to his shoulders in the style Celestial Dragons favored, and a heavy mustache sat above features people found strikingly kind. Throughout his years at Mary Geoise he dressed as a World Noble would, in a bulky white suit studded with medal-like knobs and topped by a blue collar.

Renouncing his rank, he undid the noble hairstyle and turned to plain but tasteful clothes, including a cyan dress shirt, dark trousers, and a light green cravat. As the family fled through the North Blue, those garments grew filthy and frayed until they barely held together.

Where his peers were arrogant and cruel, Homing saw himself as no better than any common person. His kindness baffled the other nobles, who called him a blasphemer for treating himself as humanity's equal, but their contempt rolled off him without effect. It took the fury of people the Celestial Dragons had abused for him to see how naive he had been, never once having understood the bitterness ordinary folk carried toward his kind.

For all his pampered youth, he cherished any small comfort that kept his loved ones safe, feeling grateful for a junkyard hideout despite the bugs that only Doflamingo bothered to complain about. He stood ready to bear the cost of his own choice, begging the nobles to take only his wife and sons while he remained to face the reckoning. His devotion to family ran deep, leading him to put his body between his sons and harm and to plead with the mob to let them live, and his dying breath was an apology for having failed them.

Homing's lineage was the Donquixote Family, counted among the twenty houses that founded the World Government, and his birthright granted him free rein over anything he wished. Unlike his fellow Celestial Dragons, though, he never placed himself above ordinary humanity, an attitude that troubled the rest of the nobles. He took a wife, and forty-one years before the present their first son Doflamingo was born, with Rosinante arriving two years later. The younger boy inherited his parents' humility, whereas Doflamingo grew spoiled and harsh in the mold of their caste.

Three decades and three years before the present, Homing put in a request to shed his noble standing. It was granted, and the government handed him money and a mansion as a final courtesy before he moved his family to a northern land outside its authority. He intended their new life to reshape Doflamingo's outlook, yet he had failed to foresee how fiercely the locals hated the Celestial Dragons. Their house was torched, and the family sank into hunger and ceaseless flight as townsfolk chased them down to torment them.

Holed up in a crumbling shack, Homing contacted his former peers and begged them to take in at least his wife and children, insisting they should not pay for a choice that was his alone. The nobles refused without a shred of pity and warned him never to reach out again, words a shaken Doflamingo overheard. Sickness soon claimed his wife. When Trebol gave Doflamingo a pistol after the boy awakened Supreme King Haki, the ten-year-old turned the weapon on his father, meaning to bring the severed head to Mary Geoise as an offering. The plan came to nothing, and the holy land cast out the family it now branded traitors.