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Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
Haeresys is the last place Pantalone ever expects to find a bouquet of flowers from his homeland.
Deep in the bowels of Zapolyarny Palace, the inverted tower is striking in both its scale and its horrors. Brass sconces hold torches that flicker with sea-green flames, illuminating the hollow stone staircase at even intervals along its wide spiral. Carved arches and balustrades proffer a view onto the arena below. There, patterned tiles play the stage upon which ghastly experiments unfold like tragic theatre: dramas starring mechanized terrors and chemical perversions and the screaming—oh, the screaming. There’s a reason it’s so deep underground. The entire edifice is a monument to Dottore’s terrifying genius.
Pantalone rather thinks it a glorified sepulcher.
Every month, the same charade.
Faceless attendants scuttle about, their arms laden with overstuffed boxes containing with equipment of dubious purpose. They murmur differential greetings as they pass, to which Pantalone inclines his head politely, the mask of his placid smile ever in place. At least Dottore’s personnel have manners, even if the Harbinger himself remains woefully deficient in that regard.
A garland of skulls catches Pantalone’s eye, hanging from one of the arches like a posy of dried roses. It’s terribly gauche. Pantalone suppresses the instinct to wrinkle his nose.
The further he descends, the quieter it gets until there remains only the sound of his own immaculate shoes clicking against polished stone. No one else, just him and Dottore—busying himself with whatever nightmarish project currently occupies his fixation—behind a door at the foot of the stairs.
Perhaps this time they can keep things civilized.
Pantalone slips into the laboratory like a furl of dark smoke. Beneath the usual notes of iodine and isopropanol, the room smells curiously sweet.
“Your expense reports are late again,” he says by way of greeting.
Dottore doesn’t deign to look up from his diagrams. He’s slouched at a workbench, one hand scribbling while the other absently dances a liquid trail of mercury over his fingers. It’s a habit he had picked up on a trip to Fontaine, a way to pacify the cacophony of his thoughts. There’s a certain dangerous glamour to how the quicksilver licks over knuckles and tendons that Pantalone can’t deny he finds appealing.
“Do the customs of politeness not dictate that one should knock first? An intolerable narcissist taught me that, once.”
Pantalone laces his own decorated hands together in outward leisure. The curve of his mouth doesn’t waver. “If you knew anything of politeness, Doctor, you would not have suffered me to descend all the way to your little dungeon merely to collect my papers.”
Dottore’s lips curl beneath the beak of his mask. “It is a dreadful waste of my genius to concern myself with such inconsequential matters when you are so adept at balancing the books yourself, darling banker.”
The Doctor must really be trying to hide some fiscal abomination if he’s dispensing compliments this early in their exchange.
“Come now, you know I didn’t come all the way here simply for your bon mots.” The crescents of Pantalone’s eyes crinkle further. “I really would prefer a financial report from your own hand.”
“I am a man of science, not pecuniary drivel.”
“If rumours of your latest enhancements hold true, you are hardly a man at all,” Pantalone scoffs.
“How condescending.”
But Pantalone now has his attention. With no small measure of satisfaction, he feels a carmine gaze trace the figure he cuts as he begins to pace and peer about the laboratory. Cabinets crammed with curios, vials of coloured glass, schematics of automatons splayed across maps of constellations. Projects guided by the vanities of a madman. Surely some of them could prove profitable acquisitions with which to line the Fatui’s coffers. Let the sycophant finance his own operating budget.
“Have you always been so nosy?”
Pantalone ignores Dottore’s scorn behind him.
How many of these projects have been abandoned, cast aside like barely used toys when something glossier catches the Doctor’s fancy? Surfaces teem with them, the refuse of a flash of ingenuity, the flagrant evidence of his intemperance. So wasteful.
Pantalone passes tanks of murky liquid. He prefers not to look too closely at the specimens suspended within—he still regrets letting his curiosity get the better of him, once. But then he turns and finds the unexpected: a lush bouquet, surrounded by clipped stems and flasks of solvents.
Pantalone had always thought Dottore more a butcher than an artisan. Yet even he can’t find fault in the balance of blossoms and ornament: a spirited mix of glaze lilies and silk flowers, at once subtle and opulent. They’re cushioned on a bed of qingxin soft as fresh snow. Each stem has been fastidiously angled, singed at the ends to seal in moisture. Despite such care, Pantalone cannot conceive how they had not wilted during the lengthy journey from Liyue. Unless—
Untangling his hands, he slithers a finger over the delicate, translucent petals of a qingxin blossom. Covetousness flares through him, sharp as frost.
“The bouquet is simply breathtaking, wouldn’t you say?”
Dottore’s smooth, dangerous voice makes Pantalone jolt. Embarrassing. Sloppy, too, to have forgotten he was being watched. It earns him a laugh, an unhinged cackle of a sound.
“But I would not get too close if I were you,” Dottore continues.
Pantalone twists his mask back into place, tilting his head amiably. Somber blue lights glint off the chain that drips from his glasses. “Hmm?”
“The petals are brushed with ether. Awfully potent,” he says with predictable relish. “Delightful symptoms, too: irritation of the nose and throat, drowsiness, dizziness, increased saliva production, irregular breathing, unconsciousness.”
“I hesitate to ask what you plan to do with the intended recipient. Or is victim more appropriate a term? You’re never one to mince words, dear.” Pantalone deadpans. But he retracts his finger, settling his clasped hands against his sternum. “Speaking of: who are these for?”
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head about that. No one you know.”
Pantalone clenches his jaw and grows silent. His body is a tense, dark line, an oil-slicked dagger. He’s here to collect documents for his audit—whatever else he finds in the laboratory is none of his concern.
Years of accruing revenue through protracted investments have made Pantalone a patient man. It is a virtue that Dottore, accustomed to the immediate results of his experiments, sorely lacks.
With a resigned sigh, Dottore shapes his fingers into a point and watches the mercury trickle back into its flask like molten rain. He wipes his hand on a cloth as he comes up behind Pantalone, then tosses it aside in favor of lifting waves of ebon hair to press cold lips against the nape he reveals.
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous, banker?”
Spoken against his skin, the words coil down Pantalone’s spinal column until his nerves feel like live wires. How utterly absurd. Pantalone wants nothing short of what he deserves: the gold heart that pumps currency around the world beating between his palms until the moment of its cessation. Who the doctor chooses to play poison with is hardly his concern.
“You think too highly of yourself,” is all he says. He feels the curve of a sly smile at the base of his skull.
Featherlight kisses slowly build up over his skin, over and over. Delicate and adoring, interspersed with playful nibbles, until Pantalone softens the same as the doctor’s liquid silver. When the knifepoint of Dottore’s mask nudges at his jaw, he tilts his head obligingly. Then teeth latch onto the strip of flesh above his high collar, sucking and worrying the skin to a radiant bruise.
“What have I said about leaving marks?”
Dottore docks his chin on Pantalone’s shoulder. “Nothing your body does not emphatically contradict.”
Nimble fingers splotched with old scars and blackened nailbeds make quick work of the clasps at the front of Pantalone’s cloak. One hand steals downward to cup the stirring evidence that proves his point. The other pinches at a nipple, turning it sore and puffy beneath the sumptuous fabric of his shirt.
“Come, you avaricious thing.” Dottore croons at his ear. “I have a better way to take your breath away. You’ll let me, won’t you?”
Pantalone allows himself to be led to the other side of the laboratory. Sharp nails dig into the small of his back as their footsteps weave between shelves stacked with oddities, whistling machines and medical apparatuses. He deposits his coat on an empty stool while Dottore fusses with his workstation—stoppering vials, adjusting the height of the surgeon table. The underground air nudges its chilly muzzle against Pantalone’s bared forearms.
Dottore leans against his desk, crooks a finger.
“Get me ready, will you?”
Won’t you, will you. It’s all rhetorical posturing. Pantalone always obliges him. Dottore always makes it worth his while.
Sliding to his knees like a spill of satin, Pantalone trails his gloved hands over the planes of Dottore’s chest. His fingers outline each strap and buckle of the harness that digs into antiseptic skin, holding the doctor together like a rig.
Some of the clones are taut and wiry, overlaid with the muscles of youth, but there’s a softness to the original Il Dottore that has Pantalone very much besotted. Unwrapping the starched fabric of the doctor’s shirt, he lavishes insistent, open-mouthed kisses over the cold flesh of his abdomen, across the sharp jut of his hipbones. Dark lashes dust over the pale skin, a study in contrast.
Fingers grasp his hair and yank sharply. A sinister growl follows the sting. “Quit stalling. I am growing bored.”
Pantalone’s lips twist into a moue, but he brings his decorated fingers to the front of Dottore’s pants and eases his cock from its confines. Half-hard already, the fabulist.
“Why, doctor, you seem to be getting awfully excited for someone who claims to be bored.” Pantalone blinks up coquettishly, but he wraps his fingers around Dottore’s cock and strokes languidly.
“Mere biology. I do have an eager whore on his knees before me.”
At the warning tug of his hair, Pantalone quells his smirk and leans in. He curls his tongue around the base of Dottore’s shaft, then laps slowly up to the tip, sucking at the frenulum as he passes. Kiss by kiss, he laves at the hardening length, tongues the velvet skin of his balls.
When precum begins to crystalize at the head, smearing over Pantalone’s lips, he pulls back, licking over his mouth consideringly. Dottore tastes of something familiar, at once earthy and sweet. Pantalone arches a delicate eyebrow above the line of his glasses.
“Really, doctor, almonds?”
“You have quite the discerning palate. Do you like it?” A thumb smudges the moisture on Pantalone’s lower lip, then slips inside to become a heavy weight in his mouth. It rubs loose circles over his tongue. “You so enjoyed how I fed you amaretti when we last met for tea.”
Fed because Pantalone’s arms had been bound behind his back by lilac ribbons, the Regrator reduced to little more than a dressed-up doll licking the powdered sugar of imported sweets off Dottore’s fingers.
It is nothing but grotesque, the way Dottore turns his own body into an inexhaustible site for enhancement and experimentation. Yet Pantalone cannot deny being oddly moved by the thoughtfulness, however unconventionally it manifests. Not that he would ever give him the satisfaction of knowing.
Instead, he bites down on the thumb in his mouth, slicking his smile with blood.
“You minx!” Dottore extracts his finger to snatch Pantalone’s chin up in a bruising grip. Only his disinterest in plucking glass from his palm halts him from striking Pantalone full across the face. “Try that on my cock and I can assure you that what follows will be singularly unpleasant—even for a wretched thing like you.”
“Promises, promises,” Pantalone tuts. The red stretch of his lips is terrifying in its hunger.
“You really will take anything you can get,” Dottore marvels over a low groan. He pulls Pantalone back onto his cock by the violet roots of his hair. “Suck me, you desperate slut.”
Hollowing his cheeks dramatically, Pantalone gazes up through fluttering eyelashes, collecting each bitten-off sound as he sucks and licks, hoarding every twitch of those narrow hips. The way Dottore tips his head back in an overt display of pleasure makes Pantalone feel feverish all over.
Trapped within his pressed pants, his own cock twitches, yet he devotes himself entirely to his task. Rather unseemly, how much he enjoys making use of his mouth this way, milking the doctor’s cock with his lips and tongue. Each lap at the slit tastes of sugar cookies.
“Ngh—ah, I do so prefer you like this,” Dottore spits out, rough and feral with want.
His desire draws an answering moan from Pantalone, which vibrates around Dottore’s shaft in an erotic feedback loop. He sinks deeper until the cockhead kisses the back of his throat, glides a gloved hand over Dottore’s thigh to fondle his balls, greedy for the sounds and the scent and the taste of—
With sudden ferocity, Dottore wrenches Pantalone off by the waves of his hair. (Humiliating, how he whimpers at the loss of the thick length stretching his lips.) The doctor holds him at arm’s length, his other hand clutching at his chest. It rises and falls rapidly with his panting breaths.
“You are altogether too tempting,” Dottore says between panting breaths. Releasing his iron grip, he pats the table beside his hip with a shaky hand. “Up you get.”
Pantalone allows Dottore to draw him back to his full height. Cobalt light scintillates off metals as he gingerly removes the doctor’s mask to expose the mottled skin below. He presses reverential kisses against the dappled burns, licks the scarring etched below his left eye. He does it because he knows Dottore abhors his ruined flesh. And Pantalone adores the way the softness makes him squirm.
“I am not one of your frivolous trinkets to be fawned over,” Dottore snarls. “Get on the table.”
“You lack patience and subtlety,” Pantalone answers. But, with a final kiss to the darkest part of the scarring, he complies with the demand.
Carmine eyes trace the clean lines of Pantalone’s limbs as he climbs gracefully onto the table and settles on his back, head hanging just over the edge.
“There. That’s better.”
Cold fingers feather along Pantalone’s cheeks as Dottore plucks the glasses from his face to tuck them safely out of the way. Their absence leaves Pantalone feeling naked, but he doesn’t have much time to dwell on it before Dottore casts a looming shadow over him. The obsidian waves of his hair cascade over Dottore’s bared thighs.
“One day, I ought to tie you down with a spider gag behind your teeth and use your mouth at my leisure,” Dottore murmurs, low and decisive. A finger delicately traces the soft line of Pantalone’s rubied lips—plush and already swollen. “You’d be a desperate mess, drooling uncontrollably like some wild, untamed creature. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You are vile and perverse, Doctor. It’s a wonder the Akademiya didn’t cast you aside sooner.” Any bite behind the retort is undermined by Pantalone’s position, slack and stretched out across the medical table. They both know it.
After all, the scene is well-rehearsed, the roles easy to reprise.
On cue. “What does it say about you, then, dear banker, that your arousal is so plainly visible. It’s pitiful, really.” Insistent fingers rub at the hinge of Pantalone’s jaw. “But come now, be a good little whore and open wide.”
Pantalone goes obediently, loosening his jaw and slipping his tongue out. For a few seconds, he feels intolerably ridiculous like this. But then Dottore nearly purrs as he nudges the fleshy head of his cock, hot and hard, over the wet muscle.
Drops of precum dissolve like sugar as Pantalone laps them up, trying to coax out more of that synthetic sweetness. Cloying as it is, he cannot get enough. He never can, when it comes down to any of this.
“Greedy thing, so openly wanting,” Dottore sneers, running his thumb around the damp seal of Pantalone’s mouth around his shaft. He only indulges him a moment before sinking deeper with an obscene, slick sound.
Angled this way, Pantalone can do little more than suck and gurgle as the blunt head skims against his soft palate and eases past his gag reflex. (Many years ago, Dottore had assured its near total annihilation over the course of a ruthless and ambitious fortnight.) Pantalone swallows around the ridges, making a choked off sound when the punishing weight in his mouth sinks down to the hilt.
It’s different this way, intrusive in its intimacy. Pantalone’s airway is entirely restricted by the cock in his throat and the heft of Dottore’s sac over his nose. He could suffocate like this.
Dottore has a way of turning things very terrifying very quickly.
Drool collects at the corners of Pantalone’s mouth, spilling inelegantly over his flushed cheeks. His jaw already aches brightly—as do his balls, cramped in his too-tight pants.
“Perfect cock-hungry slut, getting off on having your throat fucked.” Dottore’s faraway voice is tinted with wonder, a timbre he seldom bestows upon anything but his marvelous and terrible creations. Pantalone supposes he is a creation of a kind, one shaped and molded to the doctor’s unhinged proclivities.
The first time they had tried this, Pantalone had lacked discipline over his own reflexes. When his futile attempts to take in oxygen through his nose only formed a tight seal around the shaft in his mouth, his survival instincts had kicked in. Dottore had been left with lurid chemical burns blotching the skin of his thigh from the flask of pyridine Pantalone had overturned in his thrashing. Neither of them had ever spoken about how fiercely Dottore had come down Pantalone’s throat at the sight of his panic, the sensation of his visceral struggle.
Now, though, Pantalone relaxes into the stretch of his jaw, the lights that coruscate behind shut eyes like a kaleidoscope of crystalflies.
Seconds pass, stretching into a minute, then two as Dottore pitches his hips in tiny thrusts that feel like earthquakes. Dizziness claims the base of Pantalone’s skull. His lungs begin to sear. The accelerated pounding of his heartbeat moves from his chest to his ears to his throat, a heavy thump, thump, thump syncopated with each frantic gluck, gluck gluck of his swallows around the cock between his lips. Amaretti laced with the faintest trace of ether sparks along his olfactory nerve. Synapses fry with desperate desire. His abdomen flexes, shudders.
Haeresys and its horrors retreat. Glossy gold lanterns float up to a star flecked sky. Laughter rings like handbells. A soot-streaked, barefooted boy pilfers a steamed bun from a market stall while the merry parade diverts the shopkeep’s gaze. Sweet dough filled with rich almond paste melts in his blistered mouth; it’s the first morsel his hollow stomach has encountered in days. A woman’s lilting soprano meets with cheers as she croons upon an ornate stage: we praise Rex Lapis for this bounty. But the god’s eye does not alight upon the destitute child, who fades back into the shadows.
Bright light expands as Dottore pulls back, the thick head of his cock smearing a viscous concoction of spit and precum over Pantalone’s lips and jawline. A thumb follows the sticky trail before the doctor’s nail cuts a crescent in the tender skin of his wet cheek.
“You’re alright, banker, you’re all right,” he coos. “You’re doing so well for me.”
Pantalone coughs and sputters around cool breaths that feel like needles puncturing his lungs. Each of Dottore’s Segments peers down at him for a second before his vision shifts back into focus around the gash of his doctor’s serrated smile.
Folding himself over, Dottore licks at the moisture that leaves salty streaks beneath dark lashes while he scatters words of praise. It’s transfixing the way mere tears can capture Il Dottore’s attention. He reveres those tears the way Pantalone venerates his paltry gemstones.
Dottore only gives Pantalone another moment to recover before he nudges him back in place with a kiss to the bridge of his nose. He watches with ravenous attention as Pantalone blinks up through bleary eyes.
“Again, darling. Deep breath for me now.”
Obligingly, Pantalone fills his lungs and holds his mouth open. This time, impatience gets the better of the doctor, turning him cruel, and he forces himself deep without preamble. Pantalone scrambles to swallow around the cock that surges deep past his swollen lips even as the undulations of his throat drag it further and further. In short order, his face is wedged against the apex of the doctor’s thighs.
Dottore throws his head back, features relaxing into a beatific grin.
“Yes, yes, yes!”
Pantalone anchors himself against the onslaught with a talon tight grip on Dottore’s hips. The frigid bite of his rings does little to deter the relentless rocking. The lancet pricks of his nails, blunted by leather and oxygen deprivation, might even urge the doctor on.
“Pretty, pretty Pantalone. So compliant.”
Tiny, distressed noises vibrate around Dottore’s cock. Tears leak uncontrollably from the corners of Pantalone’s eyes, pooling into the hair at his temples and splashing onto the dark stones below. He is sculpted of glass, held above the liquid evidence of his own surrender, ready to shatter into a thousand pieces.
Asphyxia renders Pantalone infinitely more sensitive, attuned to every ridge and vein pressing at his tongue, his throat. It’s all a conduit for his thundering pulse, which beats in a frantic rhythm. He’s drunk on it, head swimming with desire. Trivial concerns fall away like dross. Instead, the world narrows to pinpricks: frigid fingers cupping his chin hard enough to bruise; velvet skin crushed against his nose; hissing breaths spilling from overhead. He’s too choked out to put up even the most token resistance. Strange, how he feels no alarm.
Dottore keeps himself buried to the hilt, hips rutting minutely, up to the moment Pantalone’s hands slip from the jut of his hipbones to hang limp and twitching over the edge of the table.
The second his airway is freed, Pantalone rolls to his side and heaves. He shudders over each wheezing breath. His limbs are loose, but his jaw is sore. The laboratory is an aquamarine blur, shimmering as though submerged under sea. Floating on sea waves, dizzy for air, dizzy with need, drifting and splintered.
Dottore soothes sweat-slicked curls back with a gentle hand. “Easy, now. I have you.”
Despite the blurriness of his nearsightedness and a film of tears, Pantalone catches the briefest flash of worry twist across Dottore’s scarred face. The concern sparks a surge of pleasure so acute that Pantalone nearly keens.
Fast as it came, it’s gone and Dottore is kissing him, licking along the line of his teeth, tasting of salt and copper. When he pulls back, Pantalone sees beads of blood like a ribbon of rubies along Dottore’s bottom lip. He feels another rush of perverse glee at the thought of Dottore tearing into his own mouth from the pleasure of being buried in Pantalone’s.
“Give me your hands,” Dottore growls, manic and breathless—as if he had been the one choked out twice over.
He slips Pantalone’s wrists into the velvet loops along the table’s edge, tightens the buckles just shy of pain. The decadence of the cuffs is a stark contrast to the unyielding metal.
“So good, the way you give yourself up. You’ll let me do anything to you, won’t you?”
“For the right price,” Pantalone slurs.
It’s a reminder neither of them requires, but Pantalone says it because the alternative is to admit how desperately he wants. It festers inside him. Beyond all reason, beyond all propriety, he wants to be ravished, to be left brittle and frayed, molded around the sensations inflicted upon him. Above all, he wants to be the singular object of Il Dottore’s endless and terrible fascination.
“Oh, my dear Regrator, I will lay a fortune of inventions at your feet.”
This time, when Dottore slips between Pantalone’s pliant lips and down his ragged throat, he follows it with fingers scurrying up the pale column of Pantalone’s neck. At first, he does little more than trace the distension of where he’s nestled deep in that tight sheath, mouth parted in astonishment.
Then, with sudden viciousness, he wraps his hand around Pantalone’s throat and squeezes.
Pantalone gags and convulses. Silver bands encrusted with amethysts clink loudly against the table while Pantalone strains against his bonds. His muscles flutter involuntarily in his struggle, squeezing inexorably at the cock held in his throat. A fresh river of tears falls from his tightly shut eyes.
When Pantalone releases a wrecked, desperate wheeze, Dottore feels it twice over: once beneath the heel of his palm; once vibrating intimately around the head of his cock.
Casting his fervid gaze down, all Dottore can see is the plump curve of Pantalone’s lower lip, the tight hold of his jaw, the drawn arch of his neck—half-covered in dark linen that only highlights the outline of the cock nestled within the tight sheath of his throat. It’s enough to make Dottore groan under his breath as he stutters his hips forward.
For all that he has fabricated life and buckled the laws of Teyvat to his impious whims, this is the closest Dottore has ever felt to divinity.
Over and over, Dottore slides his hand up and down, squeezing and mapping the ridges of his own cock through Pantalone’s quivering throat. He is deranged in his pleasure and hardly gentle for it.
Pain smudges through the cavern of Pantalone’s chest and his hips writhe in search of relief. He wants so badly to touch his own cock, to release it from the stifling confines of his finely woven trousers, but his arms are bound so tight and he’s too dizzy and delirious to even consider how to get free. His throat is anchored between the wide stretch of Dottore’s cock and the insistent clench of his fist, the wet, guttural sound it makes as it chokes him over and over.
Pantalone’s bottomless greed narrows to the desperate desires to come and to breathe. Dottore was right that it’s pitiful—he’s pitiful—because he cannot tell which he wants more. Time stretches like taffy, contorts into an endless, recursive twist of pleasure-pain. Every part of him is taut as a violin string vibrating with the rapid rhythm of his pulse. Come. Breathe. Come. Breathe. Come. Breathe.
“Ah—yes, yes!”
Dottore’s cry echoes distantly as he comes. Pantalone can feel every twitch and swell against his raw insides. Liquid heat pumps directly down his throat until, for a short, timeless eternity, he thinks he might be drowning in an ocean that tastes of almond confections. Then the hand around his neck is gone and Dottore sloppily smears the last of his cum against Pantalone’s tongue as he draws himself out with a broken groan.
Air. Frigid and invigorating. It fills his vacant mouth and stabs at his lungs like cut gems. Sight and sound return in a cacophonous rush, a smothering abundance of input that overloads his nervous system. He is overwhelmed with sensation, but it’s not enough because he needs, he needs—
Dottore reaches over and cups his hand over Pantalone’s clothed erection, palming him once, twice, three times and then Pantalone is convulsing as he finally comes. The ferocity of his orgasm severs his tenuous control over his body; his back arches into a clean fold, his eyes roll back in their sockets, his tongue lolls thickly around a jagged and inarticulate scream.
Were he in command of his own faculties, Pantalone might be scandalized by such an unmasked display of his own pleasure. As it is, all he can do is shudder and rut against the palm on his cock as he spills over and over until he’s wrung out and overstimulated. It’s good. It’s so extraordinarily good.
For a rare, liberating moment, Pantalone wants nothing more than this; he is stripped bare of his greed and his envy and his insatiable hunger until all that is left is unvarnished euphoria.
A moment of cessation.
When Pantalone returns to himself, he’s been freed from his bonds and Dottore is gently massaging at his wrists. He feels warm and sated. Content. It’s disconcerting in its unfamiliarity. Aftershocks run through his veins like a current, sending jolts of pleasure ricocheting through his limbs at steady intervals. Somehow, despite the tremors, he manages to adjust into a sitting position. The world only spins for a second.
“Welcome back.” Dottore’s voice is insufferably smug.
Pantalone only smiles weakly over the softest blush. How indecorous he must look right now, eyes red and puffy, lips swollen and bruised. Moisture clumps his dark lashes. He feels soft and shy.
Dottore tips Pantalone’s chin up to peer into hazy, amethyst eyes. He trails the parchment pads of his fingers upward, caressing the line of Pantalone’s jaw with unanticipated tenderness. From the workbench, he grabs a cloth square and begins to dab at Pantalone’s temples, over the gentle curve of his cheekbones, above the bow of his lips where the evidence of his pleasure lingers.
“Doctor,” Pantalone gasps as the edges of his vision curl with a violet haze. The world tilts as his lungs seize. “Doctor, I think you may have the wrong handkerchief!”
Dottore retracts his hand immediately, an expression of shock comically misplaced upon his features. He sniffs the fabric consideringly, blinking rapidly against the sweet, strangulating scent.
“Ah, so I do!” His cheeks dimple with his razor-sharp grin. “Believe it or not, darling, I did not intend to dose you at this point in the proceedings. Biological asphyxiation is quite enough for one evening.”
Pantalone sighs out a frenzied laugh and lowers himself back down. He trusts his ability to remain upright as much as he trusts the doctor—which is to say not at all.
Dottore chuckles. “Let me fix your hair.”
Pantalone is as malleable as gold as the doctor rearranges them so that he lies on the table with Pantalone stretched out over his torso, face squished against his chest. Their legs twist together like fraying wires.
A satisfied hum rumbles over Pantalone’s tender throat as Dottore’s nimble fingers work out the damp tangles from his obsidian locks. The doctor is never so affectionate as he is during these ceasefires. He scatters kisses in a hollow crown over Pantalone’s forehead, licks the salt lines around his closed eyes. Like this, they almost appear as lovers.
“Almost four minutes now,” Dottore later whispers, sweet and cruel, against Pantalone’s lips. “Do you ever let yourself think about it? That, one day, I might not stop?”
“Doctor, please,” Pantalone begs. “Don’t be ghastly.”
(He has thought about it, of course. Has wondered, too, how much more before Dottore’s tinkering marks him irreversibly, rewriting his synapses sure as the scientist rewires his abyssal machines.)
“Ghastly? You wound me. I’m merely curious. I never know what you are thinking. What are you thinking?”His knuckles run over Pantalone’s jaw before he presses his thumb reverentially against the lurid necklace of red-blue bruises above the collar of his shirt. Pantalone’s breath hitches.
“That you are a twisted, heretical fool who blasphemes with scalpel and solvent alike.”
“Flatterer.” Dottore can’t help himself from squeezing—just a little. “You enjoy my little blasphemies, darling.”
Then the pressure around Pantalone’s windpipe eases and caressing hands come to rub soothing circles over Pantalone’s back. The dissonance leaves him dizzy.
As exhaustion thickens his marrow, Pantalone allows himself to be squeezed and nuzzled into. Subdued sounds of pleasure slip from his chest around their kisses. Dottore’s pointed teeth nibble gently at Pantalone’s lower lip, tongue licks into his mouth. The doctor pulls back just as his cock begins to twitch with renewed interest.
“I would love to indulge you in this play-pretend some more, but I really ought to return to my intellectual pursuits.”
Pantalone pouts. “How cold, Doctor.” Then he utters a distinctly distressed noise as he swings his legs over the edge of the table. The movement draws his attention to the chilling stickiness between his thighs. “My pants!”
“Perhaps you should have thought about that before you disgraced yourself like an inveterate slut. I should have you frolic back to the Palace like this.”
“I hardly frolic.”
“It fascinates me what you choose to take offense at.”
Dottore does Pantalone the kindness of handing him a cloth. Never needlessly altruistic, he counterbalances it with the cruelty of watching attentively as Pantalone undoes his laces and wipes what he can of the tacky mess around (mostly) softened cock.
It shouldn’t be so humiliating—not after his desperation on the table—and yet Pantalone’s ears still scald scarlet beneath the silken waves of his hair. When he’s as clean as he’s going to get, Pantalone collects his coat, grateful that it’s long enough to hide the evident stains. They can’t be helped, he supposes.
Dottore sets Pantalone’s spectacles back into place, then grabs something from his workbench: a paper pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“Don’t leave without your payment, darling Regrator. Diagrams for an energy reactor. Nuclear fission. I trust your manufacturers in Fontaine will have no trouble following instructions. It will make you a fortune.”
He places a chaste kiss to the corner of Pantalone’s mouth—absurd, after all of this—then seals his mask back over his face and walks to the far edge of the laboratory where his vials await.
Pantalone sighs. “I expect your expense reports tomorrow, doctor. Do not disappoint me.”
A little wave. “You know I never do.”
Pantalone can tell that someone has been in his quarters when he returns from a stroll in the hibernal gardens the following evening.
It only takes a moment to notice the displacement of an exquisite, ruby-ground yangcai from its proper place atop a rosewood chiffonier. The luxurious vase, adorned with carved openwork of cascading clouds and multi-colored foliage, now sinks into the lavish carpeting.
Irritation flashes through him like a thunderclap—he despises when others touch his precious things—but it passes in a hot exhale through his nose.
In place of the ceramic is a familiar bouquet, a chorus of glaze lilies, silk flowers, and qingxin, delicately assembled with a precision typically reserved for machines. This time, he can recognize the cloying sweetness that clings to the blossoms like a shroud, nestled beneath their natural fragrances.
Pantalone finds himself rather enchanted.
A card is tucked in the centre of the bouquet, a small square of powder blue stationary balanced against springy stems. He deftly extracts it between two fingers, careful not to jostle the arrangement. The ink is richly perfumed. How romantic.
These were only ever intended as a gift for you, my dear. You needn’t have purloined a memento like a spoiled child. But I suppose I am a fool to have expected anything less from a compulsive collector.
Until next month, think of me with whatever fondness that greedy heart of yours can muster.
In lieu of a signature is a messy scribble of an almond.
Pantalone chuckles despite himself. The sound is raw and unpolished, and it hurts a little as it scrapes past his bruised throat.
(He likes that—perhaps a little more than he should.)
Dipping a hand into his pocket, he extracts a single desiccated qingxin petal. Its edges have darkened to a loathsome brown, curled hungrily around the lingering softness of gently veined white. Pantalone places it upon the polished rosewood, in the shadow cast by the flower from which he had plucked it.
Then he bends down to withdraw the expense reports from where they had been rolled into the yangcai and saunters, satisfied, off to his desk.