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Moonrise spills in through the lancet windows and bathes the Regrator’s lavish quarters in silver. Poured from its crescent cup, the light flows over porcelain vases and gilt-framed paintings, stealing across the polished surfaces of prized artifacts. It weaves over dried petals strung up in generous garlands: hellebores and snowdrops and bleached bulbs of winter aconite. Decay made delicate by the Regrator’s hand.
Dottore stands in the midst of all this artifice, heels sinking into the plush carpeting. Around him, treasures wink and gleam—so much so that the room nearly seems to breathe with the rolling shadows of each passing cloud. It lends a strange animation to this luxury, as though all these possessions are alive and watching, weighing Dottore’s sins and finding him wanting.
Dottore frowns. He’s being absurd, seeing spirits when there is only the worldly greed of a mortal man.
Yet, where he expects the Regrator, he finds an empty armchair. On the cedar desk, expense reports and ciphered missives sit unaudited and unanswered. A candle has burned so low that it extinguished itself in a pool of melted wax. Beside it, an argent pocket watch ticks the time away with an incessant tick, tick, tick.
It’s curiously unsettling.
Seldom does the Regrator leave his chambers, this capitalist’s cathedral from which he reigns over Teyvat’s trade. Secrets and schemes concealed behind the deception of a decorous smile, all while the lifeblood of the world drips from his despotic hands. Inflation this, redistribution that—how often Dottore has heard him proselytize about commerce and contracts.
So he should be here now, at work, with that lovely head of his bent over piles of papers. It rankles Dottore that he isn’t.
Footsteps muffle into the woven fibres as Dottore walks further in. Past painted silk screens and embroidered tapestries, a warm glow slinks through the gap where a door has been left ajar. Steam wafts out in fragrant curlicues, carrying the sweet scent of qingxin and almond blossoms.
A simple answer to the Regrator’s absence, then. He’s merely taking a bath. Perhaps Dottore’s timing is fortuitous, after all.
Suddenly, the shadows shift. Wind whispers at Dottore’s back and then cool, unyielding metal kisses the base of his skull. Pantalone cocks his revolver with a loud click.
“How did you get in?” Pantalone’s question sinks into the moon-bleached strands of Dottore’s hair. “I made it quite clear to my attendants that you were not permitted here upon your return.”
“Such a cold welcome,” Dottore drawls. He opts to ignore the question of his trespassing. “Is that any way to greet your partner after so much time apart?”
“It’s no less than you deserve, my dear doctor.”
“How heartwarming to know you missed me.”
A mirthless laugh tickles the column of Dottore’s throat. The gun follows the line of his collar as Pantalone begins to prowl around him in a wide arc, each step deliberate and predatory. He halts once they face one another. With a quick flick of his wrist, he sends the doctor’s mask to the floor. Exposed, Dottore doesn’t bother to conceal his stare.
Pantalone’s milky skin shines in the sliverlight, warm and dewy from the bath. Dressed in nothing but a robe of sheer, black silk, he looks the pinnacle of beauty. Diaphanous fabric drapes down from his shoulders in artful waves, clinging to his figure and caressing the narrow cinch of his waist. Against the luscious curls of his unbound hair, droplets of water scintillate like a scatter of diamonds.
“Where are your Segments?” Pantalone smiles pleasantly, but Dottore catches a pale flame flicker in his violet gaze before his eyes curve to crescents.
“It is a poor researcher who ignores the evidence before him, Regrator.”
“Oh, but I’m merely a humble banker. It is you who is first and foremost a scholar, and you’re always so verbose when you recount the results of your little experiments. Enlighten me, then: how did this one conclude?”
“You know very well that the Segments are gone,” Dottore says sharply. “Collateral.”
“Hmm, yes. Gone.” The gun’s muzzle watches Dottore unblinkingly. Even the Regrator’s firearm is a luxurious thing, all sleek lines embellished with ornamental filigree, gold inlays distorting both their reflections. “It isn’t like you to lean on euphemisms. Tell me, do you know where Epsilon was when he became collateral?”
Dottore scowls. “Warming your bed, no doubt.”
“Tsk. You make it sound so mercenary when you phrase it like that.” Pantalone draws closer, silk slithering around his ankles and consuming the distance between them. His free hand rises to Dottore’s cheek. Divested of their leather gloves, Pantalone’s fingers are white and slender, gentle as they trace over the gruesome scars that sprawl across Dottore’s face.
In his vanity, the doctor had never etched those vile lines onto his Segments’ skin.
“Nevertheless, your estimation is correct. Epsilon was with me, under me—as he so liked to be.”
“Tch.”
“Then there was poor little Tau.” Pantalone threads his fingers through Dottore’s hair. His breath fans over the sharp cut of Dottore’s jaw, curling up to his ear like smoke. “Barely old enough to understand what was imminently about to occur. How wide his empty eyes were!”
“He—”
“Alpha in the lab, of course, all by himself. Now there was a dutiful one. I found his corpse collapsed on the workbench in the middle of transcribing your notes! Compliant until the very end.”
With an impetuous twitch, Pantalone’s hand tightens into a fist. He yanks Dottore’s head back, baring his throat to the revolver. Hard metal dimples the soft skin beneath his chin. Pantalone’s dark lashes rise over mercurial eyes, and his smile slips into a sinister sneer. “Trading them away like that… it’s all so wasteful.”
In the face of the Regrator’s theatrics, Dottore resists the urge to laugh. How quaint, the Regrator thinking he stands a chance in a game like this. “Experiment is the sole interpreter of nature, but every experiment must come to an end. Revel in your temper all you’d like, darling, but dispense with the empty threats. Even you would never be so brazen as to wave a loaded gun in my face. You simply wouldn’t dare.”
“Is that what you believe?” Pantalone arches an immaculate brow. He glides the revolver over Dottore’s cheekbone, mirroring the path his fingers had traveled. “Would you care to make a wager, then? Seeing as you’re ever so fond of gambling away your lives these days.”
Boldly, Dottore flicks his tongue out over the gilded barrel, wetting the metal with suggestive promise. He smirks at the faint hitch in Pantalone’s breath.
Here in this almost-embrace, they hold each other hostage, the air between them heavy with anticipation. Then, in a swirl of silk, Pantalone topples them both. Down, down, down they fall, tumbling through the luxury. Dottore’s back sinks into the plush threads of the carpet and Pantalone’s mouth is upon his, desperate and devouring.
There’s nothing generous in this clash of teeth and tongue, the tilt of their lips like colliding blades, tasting just as much of iron. Pantalone kisses Dottore as if to consume him, licking over his gums, his hard palate, the tender insides of his cheeks. It’s violent and messy, and when Pantalone cuts himself on those razor teeth, Dottore sucks the blood from the shallow wound on his tongue.
“I should kill you for what you’ve done.” Pantalone smears his rubied lips along Dottore’s jaw, nipping at his throat. The bites stand out pink and glossy, spit and blood shining wetly upon his skin.
“I did warn you not to get attached,” Dottore counters with no small measure of acrimony.
“Oh, that I won’t dispute. But creating Segments cost a great deal of mora, doctor. My mora.”
With his gun tucked against Dottore’s carotid, Pantalone tightens his thighs and grinds his hips in a slow, tantalizing circle. He finds satisfaction in the obvious hardness below him.
Dottore snorts. “So you’ll claim your pound of flesh now, will you?”
“I will.” The sheer robe does little to hide his own erection, gossamer fabric clinging to the curve of it and sticking wetly to the tip. “Taken from whatever part of your body pleases me.”
“You’re so predictable when you’re upset.”
“Perhaps.” Pantalone smiles enigmatically. A fetching shrug sends the silk sliding down his narrow shoulders, a dark tide pooling around their hips. Pale moonlight catches on Pantalone’s naked skin, silvering the planes of his slim chest and throwing the cage of his ribs into sharp relief. It makes him look hungry, this dark shadow play.
Dottore’s hands steal out to touch, but Pantalone swats them away with the revolver. The metal bruises Dottore’s knuckles even through his gloves.
“Ah, ah. You don’t get to touch me tonight, doctor.”
“You’ll deny yourself?” Dottore doesn’t keep the disbelief from his voice. The Regrator’s avarice has always been absolute. He wants and he takes with an insatiable greed, an obsessive, all-consuming need. Abstinence is hardly in his nature.
But Pantalone laughs, cruel and patronizing. “No, dear. I’ll deny you the luxury of touching me. I already told you that I’ll take what I want.” He feels a rush of satisfaction at the way Dottore’s cock twitches helplessly against him. It fuels the fire of his arousal, having the Second beneath him like this. Crudely, he shoves two fingers past Dottore’s lips and rubs over his tongue. “Surely you don’t need me to tell you what to do?”
Dottore glowers, but he sucks the digits all the same, tonguing at Pantalone’s manicured cuticles and laving over his knuckles. The doctor is surprisingly agreeable like this, almost docile in the way he slurps around Pantalone’s fingers, getting them wet without biting him even once. Pantalone rewards him with an indulgent roll of his hips.
“That’s it,” Pantalone purrs, drawing his wrist back. His fingers shine above Dottore’s lips, strands of saliva webbing between them. “So you can behave yourself, after all.”
“For now.”
There’s a brief instant in which Pantalone’s expression almost appears fond; then his eyes narrow to violet slits and the illusion disappears. Shifting up onto his knees, he lowers his hand between his thighs and slowly circles his hole, nudging his fingers past his puckered rim. He sighs softly and begins to fingerfuck himself.
It’s performative rather than preparatory, an erotic display of his mastery over his body. Before Dottore had so rudely intruded, he had been having a rather lovely time in the bath, savouring his own touch under the perfumed waters. He’d been close, too.
Now, he draws his pleasure out once again. His insides are soft and pliant, hungry and greedy for more. Leisurely, he curls his fingers against his prostate, circling the sensitive gland with slow drags that make his thighs quiver. Occasionally, he’ll taunt Dottore with the barest brush of knuckles over his clothed cock. But for the most part, he relegates the other Harbinger to the role of a mere spectator—and what a spectator he is! Carmine eyes avid and observant, riveted on the intimate rhythm between Pantalone’s legs.
All the while, Pantalone’s other hand remains steady, holding his gun to Dottore’s throat in a fatal display of control.
“I could have done that for you, you know. Made you cum on my fingers. You would have enjoyed it more.” Dottore’s words are as officious as ever, but there’s a breathlessness to his tone that Pantalone finds terribly appealing.
“You think rather highly of yourself, don’t you? I’m enjoying myself well enough like this,” Pantalone answers airily.
(Yet they both know the doctor is right. How could he not be—his lover, his partner— this selfish scientist who has pushed and pulled and probed his body with clinical precision, coaxing out pleasure with the same rigor he applies to his research. Pantalone will simply never give him the satisfaction of hearing the words.)
Even so, he withdraws his fingers with a lewd noise and deftly extracts Dottore’s cock. It springs up from his trousers, firm and flushed, the head of it already nice and messy. Dottore spits into his gloved palm and Pantalone wrinkles his nose, but he allows the doctor to give himself a few quick strokes, slicking the skin with saliva and precum. Then impatience gets the better of him and be bats Dottore’s hands away.
“Stay still now, doctor.”
Pantalone teases the blunt crown of Dottore’s cock against his pink hole, nerves sparking at the promise of more. With a beguiling smile, he sinks himself down, his body swallowing inch after inch in a drawn-out descent, a single, endless fall. Pantalone takes and takes and takes until, finally, the backs of his thighs press against the jut of Dottore’s hips and he’s full, deliciously full. So exquisitely full.
It’s a tight fit—too much friction and not enough lube, but Pantalone relishes the burn of it, the fierce stretch at his sensitive rim. He grinds his hips in languid circles, lashes fluttering each time Dottore’s cock strikes his prostate, gradually working up a rhythm, long, deep, relentless strokes. His muscles ripple with each dizzying drag, and he arches his back, pebbled nipples standing out against the pale curve of his chest.
Throughout it all, he never releases his gun. Instead, he trails it over Dottore’s prone form: his sternum, his clavicles, the tender underside of his neck. When Pantalone rests the muzzle against his lower lip, Dottore smirks and tongues at the metal. Then, in a display of unimaginable hubris, he leans forward and draws the barrel between his lips. With a low groan, Pantalone eases the gun forward, scraping it over Dottore’s tongue, slowly fucking his mouth in time with the bounce of his hips.
It makes for a pretty picture, Dottore sucking off Pantalone’s revolver as though it were his cock. There’s a taunt in those carmine eyes, a laugh dancing on the thin stretch of his lips. Deliberately, he plays up the obscenity of it all, moaning around the metal and hollowing his cheeks dramatically. It’s so audacious as to be nearly disarming, and Pantalone’s finds his dick twitching at the sight. Precum drooling from the tip in endless pearly strands, making a mess of Dottore below.
Deeper now, Pantalone thrusts the gun into the doctor’s mouth, nudging it against the back of his throat. Dottore chokes, spit bubbling up from the corners of his lips, but he loosens his jaw and takes it, eyes flashing in haughty defiance. The wet squelching sounds go tighten his balls. It’s so much like this, messy and wicked and overwhelming.
Pantalone feels his control slipping with each nudge against his prostate, such pure and perfect pleasure pooling molten behind his navel. He forces himself to slow down, carefully undulating his hips. His free hand splays over Dottore’s chest for leverage, and the metal buckles feel delightfully cool against his overheated skin.
Dottore turns his head, teeth scraping against the barrel of the gun in his attempt to free his mouth. Pantalone draws back his arm.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting tired already,” Dottore rasps when he catches his breath. His throat sounds raw from the abuse.
Pantalone blinks down coyly from beneath his dark lashes. Apart from the pink dusting on his cheeks, he somehow manages to appear composed. “I’ll collect my debt at my leisure, doctor. This is about what you owe me, remember?”
“My darling creditor, it’s hard to tell if you’re more upset about Epsilon or your precious mora.”
Crack!
Dottore hadn’t expected the strike—Pantalone’s pistol whipping clean across his cheek. Even the tapestries can’t deaden the sharp sound of it, the starburst of pain spreading out over the scarring. Dottore’s head snaps violently to the side. A rose blooms beneath the barrel’s kiss, skin spreading open around a trickle of blood. Rubies spill from a cut on his lip.
“Ooh, seems I touched a nerve,” Dottore says. Spittle flecks over the carpet like dashes of cinnabar paint, red standing out against the silvery threads. He turns back to Pantalone with a satisfied smirk. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you? Don’t try to deny it. I felt the way that hot hole of yours tightened around my cock. Do you want to hit me again?”
“What I want is for you to keep his name out of your mouth,” Pantalone hisses. A hollow madness glitters in his eyes.
“His name? Ha! He didn’t have a name. Epsilon was nothing more than a fragment—a memory. An eye placed in the dimension of time.” Dottore’s hips thrust up in a fit of spite. Pantalone’s muscles clench involuntarily at the fierce collision against his sensitive nerves. “You’re a greater fool than I thought if you ever believed otherwise.”
“You despicable—”
Dottore clutches at one of Pantalone’s narrow hips with bruising force, and Pantalone’s words break into a gasp. His other hand encircles Pantalone’s wrist, dragging his palm up to his own neck, wrapping Pantalone’s slender fingers above the leather strap of his harness.
“Is this what you want? Go on, then. Do it. Do it.” Dottore barks out a laugh. “You can’t, can you? You don’t have what it takes. And neither did Epsilon.”
Pantalone sees red. Roses and rubies and the blank gloss of all the dead Segments’ eyes. A hollow, hungry red. Violent vermillion spilling, pooling, drowning his vision. He shoves the gun back into Dottore’s mouth to shut him up and tightens his fingers around the doctor’s throat, thieving his air, watching those bright, red eyes laugh and laugh in the darkness.
Faster now, Pantalone works his hips, slamming himself onto Dottore’s cock over and over. The fury of his release sparks and sizzles along his spine, building from where he’s speared on Dottore’s cock, body reshaped to the thick, relentless scrape of it. Bright jolts sear through him with each strike against his prostate and it’s almost too much, the brutal pleasure, the loud, obscene sounds of their skin smacking together. On another night, Pantalone’s own noises of delight might add to the depravity—moans and screams and sighs and cries—but tonight he holds them in his throat, contained and locked away, refusing them from Dottore’s ears.
Dottore, Dottore! Dottore matches Pantalone thrust for thrust. Pantalone thinks about how he could kill him now, a pretty, petty vengeance, riding Dottore’s cock to completion with his gun fucking between those sharp, bloodied teeth. The pad of his index finger twitches.
Click.
Dottore doesn’t even flinch.
Pantalone throws his head back and cums, untouched, to the hollow noise of the empty trigger. Red dissolves to white, stars dazzling behind his eyes with the relief of his climax. It tempers his rage for a blissful instant, silence roaring through his ears for that single moment of cessation. He clenches with the full-bodied force of his orgasm and spills over Dottore, splashes of cum standing stark against his navy shirt.
Dottore’s dark chuckle draws Pantalone back to himself. Slowly, he drags the revolver from Dottore’s mouth. A thread of spit connects the gleaming metal to his swollen lips.
“What did I say, darling?” Dottore meets Pantalone’s glassy gaze with an insufferably smug grin. “You don’t even have it in you to threaten me with a loaded gun.”
“Oh, you arrogant fool.” Pantalone holds his arm out to the side and fires.
Click—bang!
Across the room, a vase shatters in a snowstorm of painted porcelain, gold dust and cinnabar shards raining down upon the carpet with the bullet’s ricochet.
Dottore’s hips suddenly snap up with primal ferocity—once, twice—and he cums with wide eyes and a stunned cry. The force of his orgasm sends his entire body into convulsions, pumping Pantalone full of his release, hot cum coating his insides. Dottore’s hands scrabble out toward Pantalone, seeking an anchor, but Pantalone shoves them away.
“You!” Dottore gasps. His breaths come heavy. “You dare—”
And there it is: beneath the glaze of Dottore’s pleasure lies a delicious simmer of fear. Pantalone feasts on it, gorging himself on the sight as if it can finally sate the gnawing hunger that rattles in the cage of his chest, a hunger more boundless than the empty, lying sky. The hunger of obsession and possession and everything that’s been taken and taken and taken from him.
Bending forward, Pantalone licks a slow streak across Dottore’s face, sucking the raw metal taste of the drying blood from his cheek, lapping beneath silvery lashes made thick and heavy with tears. He sprinkles false-sweet kisses over Dottore’s brow, kisses meant for a memory, delicate, ghostly kisses. Dottore shudders below him.
“That fear you’re feeling now?” Pantalone croons into the candy-blue hair that sticks to the sweat at Dottore’s temple. “That’s what each of them felt in the instant before you traded away their lives. You selfish, impertinent brute.”
When Pantalone pulls back, the mask of his obsequious smile has settled once again upon his features. He looks lovely, pleasant as ever. The consummate diplomat. He rises to his feet with his usual sophistication. Even like this—naked, with a glistening trickle of cum crawling along the inside of his thigh—he manages to appear dignified. Were it not for the faint flush on his porcelain cheeks and the red smudge around his mouth, it might almost appear as though their little exchange had been quite amiable.
Ah, but perhaps not. Pantalone still holds his gun, tapping it against his thigh in a steady, staccato rhythm. Tick, tick, tick. The muzzle feels warm from its recent firing. He glances down at Dottore with a look of blank indifference.
“Kindly see yourself out.”
Turning on his heel, he strides toward the adjoining room. Dottore watches him walk, staring at the sway of his narrow hips, the cascade of raven hair rippling in gentle waves over his prominent spine.
At the door to the bath, Pantalone pauses. The flickering light of a banked fire shimmers beyond the threshold, backlighting his silhouette. He tilts his head, and light glints off his glasses like the cut of a knife.
“I trust you’ll take better care of my investments in the future, doctor.” Then he sets his revolver upon a rosewood chiffonier and steps out of sight.
Dottore exhales a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Dazed, he stares up unblinkingly. Even the ceilings here are extravagant, all ornamental plaster and stenciled wood, with gold leaf gilding the decorated panels. Frescos unfurl in sweeping strokes of cinnabar and celadon, beautiful and unnecessary. Another shallow luxury, a passing amusement for anyone who deigns to cast their gaze upward where some might seek the gods.
Soft splashes susurrate from the bath. Dottore tucks himself back into his trousers and rises to his feet. There’s no helping his ruined shirt, but he manages to find his mask beside the nacred leg of an armchair. It settles him a little, having it back over his eyes.
He’s nearly at the door when curiosity gets the better of him and he crosses the room to examine the revolver.
Four. Four bullets nestled in their chambers and a fifth denting the wall where that expensive Yangcai vase once stood, its ruby-ground enamel now little more than jagged fragments and a handful of porcelain dust.
Dottore swallows thickly. Had Pantalone known which chamber had been empty? Had he intended one to be empty at all? Or had it been mere coincidence, an accident of forgetfulness? One hollow chamber out of six: a dark inversion of the lethal roulette so often played by overconfident Fatui in defiance of fate. Sixteen-point-six, recurring. Not the most favorable, as far as odds went.
Perhaps Dottore has miscalculated the variables in this equation.
In the next room, Pantalone smiles. Naturally, his dear doctor couldn’t refrain from checking. That experimental inquisitiveness of his remains painfully predictable. How easily Pantalone can play him, scripting his every move.
To be sure, Dottore could kill him now. A step to the left and he could send all four bullets into Pantalone’s naked chest in exchange for the indignity.
But he won’t. Of course he won’t.
The gun is set back down and Dottore wordlessly departs the Regrator’s rooms. Just like that, the curtain falls.
Pantalone sinks lower in the cradle of the copper tub until his face is submerged and the inky strands of his hair fan out around him. The water is barely lukewarm now, but he enjoys how it feels against his skin, the dense tension clinging to his limbs with the way his body unfurls and outstretches. He feels buoyant with the emptiness of his deadly wager.
From beneath the mirror surface, his amethyst eyes blink open and watch the ceiling blur. White marble and gold filigree ripple in shimmering swirls. The bubbles of his laugh burst from between his lips, hollow pearls popping soundlessly at the water’s edge as though the bath were aboil.
Pantalone can still feel the gunshot’s recoil thrumming through his marrow: a steady line from wrist bone to ribcage. He thinks of the ripe fear in Dottore’s bloodshot eyes, wide and disbelieving. He thinks of that same terror in the eyes of the Segments, of his sweet, darling Epsilon when he reached his hand out with his twilight breath. He thinks of how Dottore still fills him up so warmly even after everything he’s taken away.
Pantalone thinks of it all and he laughs and laughs some more.