Archive of Our Own

“Hard at work, as always. No matter the hour, I’m always told you’re too busy for company. Don’t you ever do anything fun?”

“Greetings, Dottore.” Light scatters off Pantalone’s glasses, his mask arranged on his face with a flash of silver. By the time he looks up from his papers, there’s an amicable smile beneath his gimlet eyes. “You’re looking well.”

Dottore leans against the doorframe and surveys the study. Already his mouth quirks in an indolent smirk, half-shadowed by the beak of his mask. Amused, and he hasn’t even fully crossed the threshold. Rarely is that a good omen.

“No riposte to my commentary on your immoderate work ethic?” Pushing off the polished wood, Dottore closes the door behind him. The lock clicks.

“I see little value in indulging your juvenile antics. However, I should point out that two research facilities won’t pay for themselves.” Pantalone pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Speaking of, I wasn’t expecting to see you back in Snezhnaya. To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?”

“Merely collecting some equipment before heading to Nod-Krai and wrapping up a few remaining experiments. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

So, definitely something out of the ordinary.

Dottore begins to pace the perimeter of the room, fidgeting with all the curios and antiquities he passes, nearly upending a leaded glass lamp. He pauses at the grand piano, the suave fingers of one hand dancing over the keys, filling the room with half a tune of unsaid things.

“That’s quite the detour.” Papers shuffle. Pantalone slips a handful of missives out of sight beneath his pile of reports. “What’s that you have there?”

“Ah, so you noticed!” The music cuts. Dottore holds up a bottle. “Consider it a gift, seeing as you always act so petulant when I show up empty handed.” Strolling to the antique sideboard, he snatches up two long-stemmed glasses. “You’ll drink with me, won’t you? There’s so very much to celebrate.”

Pantalone levels Dottore with a smile that betrays nothing. “It’s barely past midday. The cogs of capital are hardly inclined to pause simply because you’re bored.”

“Don’t be like that,” Dottore huffs. He sets his spoils down and drops himself into his preferred armchair, sprawling over the quilted velvet, long legs crossed at the ankles. Gilt heels sink into the rug by the fire.

Pantalone counts out some thirty seconds of unspeaking quiet, punctuated by the rat-a-tat tap of aimless fingers on the table, and then—

“Why don’t we play a game? You must still have that gaudy chess set somewhere.”

If Pantalone’s curiosity had been piqued upon Dottore’s arrival, this persistence now has him entirely intrigued. He hadn’t expected they’d have the opportunity to cross wits for at least another fortnight, when the Harbingers would gather on Paha Isle for the opening of their latest Experimental Design Bureau. The diversion isn’t entirely unwelcome.

“We can place a wager on it,” Dottore presses. He’s already slicing the foil at the bottle’s throat. “Three million mora when I win.”

The paltry offer is a calculated slight. Too transparent in its effort to goad.

The real enticement comes after, taking the form of a sensuous sequence of sounds: the strained squeak of a twisting bottle-screw, the whispered drag of cork through a narrow passage, the palatal pop of the stopper coming free. And the most luscious of all, the controlled trickle of wine flowing into glass. Dottore finishes his pour with a flourish of his wrist and a dimpled grin aimed directly at Pantalone.

“When you win?” Pantalone lilts, pushing himself up from behind his desk. “Tread lightly. One of these days, your arrogance will get the best of you.”

But he crosses the study to retrieve the chess set. A lavish creation, it’s a masterpiece of unparalleled grandeur, a marriage of fine art and high jewelry. Regal pieces formed of white gold and polished obsidian are set, respectively, with cornflower blue sapphires and lustrous amethysts. They reside on a board made from crystal glass, appointed with pearls cultured in the Sea of Clouds. Gaudy, Dottore calls it. So uncultured. It had been personally authorized by the artist, one of only three ever made.

Pantalone claims the armchair across from Dottore and places the chessboard between them. Dottore slides a glass across the table in exchange.

Within the broad bowl, the wine is the deepest of rubies, a red so dark and rich it’s nearly purple—the robust, light resistant red of venous blood. Pantalone sets two gloved fingers to the crystal base, drawing tight, counterclockwise circles; the contents swirl, slow and hypnotic. Observe: the pronounced tears forming on the inside of the glass, viscous droplets flowing slowly down into the bowl. A strong wine, then.

Raising the glass by the stem, he inhales, lips parted, breathing in the esters and aldehydes. Eyes closed, he appreciates the bouquet—the fleshy sweetness of plump berries, the spicy aromatics of black peppercorn, the ageing notes of charred oak and vanillin. It’s a virile blend, nuanced and complex, and Pantalone finds himself unexpectedly pleased by the Doctor’s selection.

When at last he opens his eyes, Dottore has finally stilled, head tilted ever so slightly as if appraising this silent ritual.

“You look lovely today, Pantalone. Have I mentioned that?”

“Flattery, this early in the proceedings?” A coy smile tugs the corners of Pantalone’s mouth. “Do you intend to sweet-talk me into lowering my guard? That’s hardly a virtuous way to play.”

“Oh, no. I would never presume you could be so easily swayed.”

“You know, we never determined my reward, should I be the one to get the better of you.” Pantalone reaches across the table as he speaks, plucking the Doctor’s mask from his face. “That’s better.”

“Hmph. No doubt, you’ll think of something.” Dottore holds his own glass aloft. There’s an anticipatory glint in his newly exposed eyes, a sparkle magnified by the stemware’s optical refraction. “Shall we have a toast? To your health.”

Pantalone’s movements are a mirror. “To your heresy.”

“And to the liberation of the new world order!”

How engrossing, the fervour in Dottore’s voice, layered over the resonance of their glasses clinking. Bell-to-bell, the tone rings out between them.

Pantalone takes a generous sip and holds it in his mouth to savour it. Heavy, it coats his tongue with velvet opulence, a mature, full-bodied vintage. Primary flavours develop on the palate in quick succession: blackberry, raspberry, and the richness of black cherry. More subtle are its secondary tastes, those he had discerned earlier by scent, but also other, more nuanced flavours—the earthy brine of olive, a toothsome hint of charred meat. Smoothly, Pantalone swallows, enjoying the grip of tannins on his tongue. The finish is long and savoury. It lingers, developing in layers of smoke and vanilla, a floral sweetness suggesting violets, and the barest salinity of an additive.

Well then.

As a banker and a perspicacious diplomat, Pantalone is connoisseur of a great many things. The tides of commerce, of course, and the various market values of goods and intel. But he is also a hedonist well-versed in decadence, a gentleman of means fluent in the delights of wine and vice.

A single sip is therefore all it takes for Pantalone to know that his drink has been tampered with. Colourless, odourless, but certainly not tasteless.

The little minx.

“Exceptional,” Pantalone says, setting his glass down. “Bold on the palate, displaying all the qualities of a proper élevage. I’m particularly impressed by the rather daring finish. An inspired choice.”

“I aim to please.” Dottore’s smile is full of teeth.

Pantalone arranges the chessboard, the obsidian army lined up before him, white gold soldiers standing rank and file on Dottore’s side. But before he can gesture for his opponent to open, Dottore rotates the board, black to white, inverting their positions.

Pantalone lifts an elegant brow.

“I’m curious to see how you might go about positioning yourself against me,” Dottore elaborates. “It hardly seems fair that you never get to dictate the tone of the game.”

“How magnanimous of you.”

Carmine eyes skewer Pantalone, pinning him in place with their intensity. But before Pantalone can reach for a pawn, Dottore’s gaze flickers to the side and—“wait! What are those?”

He’s on his feet in an instant, crossing the study in a shocking economy of steps to examine several artifacts arranged beneath the lancet windows.

“Dottore!” Pantalone makes a small moue of displeasure. “I thought we were about to play. You’re like an oversized corvid with your penchant for shiny things.”

“Bah! You’re one to talk, given the magnitude of your collection. I’ll only be a moment”

Inquisitive hands lift up an ancient cup for closer inspection. Marvelous and luxuriously wrought, its glittering surfaces are bright in the winterlight, clear crystal and amber gold. On the handle, a sapphire shines like a dome of stars, a gemstone harvested from the scarlet sands. Holding the goblet to his ear, Dottore hears a murmur from its hollow innards, vibrations chronicling an enchanting dream.

“These are from Sumeru,” Dottore says over his shoulder. “How did you get your avaricious hands on them?”

“Oh, I have my methods.”

When Dottore returns to the table, Pantalone is sipping his wine.

“Methods, which include…?”

“The sooner you understand that the world does not answer to your orbit, the better we will all be for it.” Pantalone doesn’t deign to acknowledge the muttered, yet. Instead, he sets his fingers to the board and opens. Pawn to E4. “All I’ll say on the subject is that, when presented with the right incentive, even the Curatorium is amenable to doing business with the Fatui.”

“That’s less interesting than I had hoped.” Dottore follows the respected sequence: Pawn to E5.

In step, their dance commences. They meet, head to head, in the centre of the stage. Let the scene begin, as they say.

Pantalone pressed onward. Pawn to F4.

“The King’s Gambit. You do enjoy the classics.” Despite the faint trace of derision, Dottore accepts the offer, his own pawn drawing first blood.

Tick, tick, tick. On the table between them, the silver pocket watch keeps their time.

“Tell me, how was Natlan?” Bishop to C4. Pantalone strengthens his hold on the centre at the expense of his right to castle.

“Intriguing.” Dottore leans forward in his seat, contemplating Pantalone’s unusually aggressive play. “The Ancient Moon’s Remnants proved to be well worth the trip. I was able to garner a great deal of information by reverse engineering Secret Source technology. With further refinement, I believe I may even be able to construct an artificial moon marrow. One more piece for our grand experiment.”

Queen to H3. He develops with tempo. It puts Pantalone in check.

Steepling his fingers, Pantalone surveys the board. Three turns in, and they’ve both made calculated risks, though it will take many more moves to determine who has made the better gambit.

He’s unused to being on this side of the board, more accustomed to playing black than leading. There’s a certain driving desperation in knowing one is at a disadvantage before they even move a piece; he finds that to be quite bracing. Still, he could hardly call himself a venture capitalist if he never pursued a risky investment. The greatest risks, after all, do so often beget the best rewards.

“A false moon,” Pantalone hums. He picks up his king, idly tapping it against his lips, then sets it down out of reach of Dottore’s queen. “A misdirection.”

“Very good.” Dottore grins. He takes a swig of his wine and nudges a pawn forward, a sacrifice to remove some pressure. “One step closer to creating a god.”

Pantalone’s bishop takes the pawn and, with it, he regains material equality. “Do you think she’s ready?”

“Becoming a god is no trivial affair, but I’ll be there to guide her every step of the way. By the time anyone discovers what we’ve done, I’ll already have the moon in the palm of my hand.” Knight to F6. Seeking to threaten a mate.

“Puppetteering from the shadows, enticing her to dance to your tune… I must say, subtlety is a good colour on you.” Knight to F3. Pantalone’s own knight rears up, attacking the queen, solidifying his control over the centre of the board. The game picks up.

“Perhaps you’re rubbing off on me.”

“Charmer.” Pantalone picks up his glass, its long stem shining liquid by candlelight. He punctuates his words by motioning in Dottore’s direction with the glass. “Don’t think it hasn’t escaped my notice that you’ve never mentioned how this plan of yours ends.”

Then he takes another deep drink, neck arching to direct the wine back over his tongue. Dottore watches openly, even enviously, as the thin, finished rim of the glass kisses Pantalone’s lower lip, smoothing the wine into his mouth. Unblinking, that red stare clings to the slow ripple of Pantalone’s throat—a hungry carmine, as dark and lush as the wine.

It’s delightful, the way Dottore watches. Pantalone revels in the theatre of being observed. He plays it up, slowly licking a drop of wine from his lips, setting the glass down and running a gloved finger in a slow circle around the rim. Perhaps it’s reckless, provoking him like this.

Dottore sways closer, their back and forth like a tide. “Do you trust me?”

Whatever current had begun to pass between them is interrupted by Pantalone’s laugh. “Absolutely not!”

“Well, I suppose that’s wise. But all in good time. Suffice to say that the Heavenly Principles will be vanquished by its own technology. I intend to introduce a little interference, a virus that can eat the system from within.” Attention returns to the board. Knight to F6. A perfect counter.

A small furrow forms on Pantalone’s brow. He weighs the costs and benefits of several plays, then moves. Rook to G1.

Dottore is pompous enough to offer commentary after another sip of his own drink. “Sacrificing a bishop for a lowly pawn? This won’t be any fun at all if you’re losing your touch.”

“It will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass. You’ll see the vision eventually.”

Dottore snorts. “Drink a little more. You might find reason again at the bottom of your glass.”

But Pantalone has Dottore’s queen in his crosshairs. His pawn advances; the queen retreats. Advance, retreat. Advance, retreat. Three turns spent in this détente, until Pantalone forces Dottore’s queen to return to her initial position, all advantage lost, the gleaming crown of her finial shadowed by the stiff line of Dottore’s tight-clenched jaw.

Folding one knee over the other, Pantalone sets his clasped hands upon them. “Did the Phlogiston extraction research yield anything worthwhile? The Mayor is nipping at my heels to finance Stuzha. He’s taken to threatening ever-greater violence against my person. You should have seen him at last week’s banquet.”

Queen to F3. Pantalone baits Dottore into sending his bishop after a pawn. Dottore now faces two threats: one to his queen; another to his knight. And a third if you also count Pantalone.

“Would that I could have been there,” Dottore snickers. “Truly, you have elevated taunting the Rooster into an art form.”

Dottore is slipping, having to underdevelop his knight again. His material advantage is hardly felt; apart from his queen none of his pieces are doing anything at all, and all the queen is doing is being chased around.

“I’m quite serious. The facility on Ashveil Peak is hemorrhaging my mora. Without new revenue, there is only so much a humble banker like myself can do to keep your profligate spending off the books.” Dark lashes fan over sculpted cheeks. Pantalone’s bishop takes the pawn attacking his queen.

“So says the commander of Teyvat’s fiat currency.” Queen to F6. Another retreat. Dottore worries his lower lip between his teeth and takes another drink.

“Sound accounting is a matter of principle, just like experimental rigour. I can hold you in contempt for breach of contract. Where would that leave you, I wonder?” Knight to C3. Pantalone protects his lines, antagonizing Dottore’s knight at the same time.

“Alright! No need for threats, you usurious charlatan. I’ll have some blueprints on your desk before I go.” Bishop to C5.

Pantalone feels a triumphant thrill. That right there was an incomprehensibly terrible move. Dottore is slipping. Pantalone takes another long drink; he hums as it glides down his throat. The theatrics are only partly for show. It is, in truth, remarkably good wine.

“Was that so difficult?” he asks, teasing. His tone turns serious a second later. “Remember, you’ll have to maintain appearances on Paha Isle, at least for the time being. The Jester handed you a poisoned chalice with the Experimental Design Bureau. If Sandrone gets wind that—”

“Yes, yes.” Dottore waves a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry your pretty little head. I drink from the chalice willingly. I’ve never been afraid to step up and play the villain’s part.”

“Oh, I’m quite aware.” Knight to D5.Pantalone continues aggravating Dottore’s queen, seemingly blundering an exchange in the process. But his vision lies upon the future, not the present. Dottore only catches what’s on the surface.

“Leaving openings on purpose…” he taunts. “Are you distracted?” Dottore charges forward on the board, the queen taking a pawn and threatening a check.

“Ah, just feeling a little warm.” Pantalone says, the hint of a slur in the ligature tie between his words. Sliding a little further down in his seat, he runs a finger under the tight collar of his shirt. For some time, he stares down at the board, long enough for the pocket watch to tick, tick, tick him into action. Bishop to D6. He sacrifices both rooks in a move of debatable quality. Blinking slowly, he asks, “Where were we?”

Dottore’s mouth slashes into a serrated grin. His palm slips off the table in his eagerness to play, his bishop claiming the first of Pantalone’s rooks. “Talking about how monstrous I can truly be.”

“Ah, no doubt a topic of conversation that can last hours.” Pawn to E5. Pantalone offers up his other rook.

“Absurd!” Dottore cackles. “You really seem to be enjoying the wine.” Brazen, his gaze rakes over Pantalone, now slouched low in his seat. Rapidly, he claims the other rook, now at thirteen points of material advantage, directly facing Pantalone’s king.

“Mm, s’good wine. Strong. You picked a good one this time.” Demurely, Pantalone smiles. He tries to move out of check, but he drops his king in the process. Dottore rights it for him, Pantalone moving much more slowly. He covers the back of Dottore’s hand with his palm, stroking coyly.

Knight to A6. Dottore stops the oncoming bishop.

Pantalone puts on a pout when his play is momentarily thwarted. Dottore laughs.

“What’s—what’s so funny?” Knight takes G7.

Now, it’s Dottore whose king is in check. He has no choice but to move it to the side. “You seem to be rather ineb–inebri—” Dottore falls curiously quiet, eyes fixed on the board. His neck tips forward with the weight of his head. He flexes his fingers.

Queen to F6. Pantalone’s fourth and final sacrifice. There’s nothing quite like offering up such a valuable piece to force another’s hand. They so rarely see it coming.

Dottore’s mouth is dry. Too many tannins in the wine, an astringent sensation on his gums, his tongue, the roof of his mouth.

Observe, inquire, analyze. Something isn’t adding up. Something isn’t—

“Checkmate.”

“Impossible!” Dottore’s frantic eyes flicker over the blurring board. Pantalone is down two rooks, a bishop, a queen, his strongest pieces out of play. And yet, despite all that, he seems to have overcome an enormous material deficit, trading pieces for time. How had Dottore missed it? How had he—

Dottore grip the edge of the table, gloves creaking over his knuckles. He sways, taking a deep breath, then another, then another.

Raptly, Pantalone watches the scene unspool. He lies in wait, predatory, biding his time until the moment realization settles into place. Then he laughs—a slaughtering kind of laughter—and transforms before Dottore’s eyes, shoulders straightening, spine lengthening out of its slouch. The affable diplomat, the cunning bureaucrat.

“Figured it out, have you?” Pantalone’s affected slur is gone. Behind the glint of glasses, his gaze is lucid, bright and hungry with promise.

“You!” Dottore rasps. “You drugged me!”

The wine stains Pantalone’s smile a deep red, a sanguine gash over a flash of white teeth. “On the contrary, my dear Doctor. I think you’ll find you drugged yourself. I merely seized a profitable opportunity when it presented itself.”

It had been an impeccable performance. Under less urgent circumstances, perhaps he might have been impressed.

“When?” Dottore rasps.

“When you distracted yourself with the artifacts.” Pantalone clicks his tongue. “You, of all people, should know better than to leave a drink unattended.”

“Scoundrel! You dastard! Reprobate!”

“I’d think twice before adding more onto that list. You lost this match. To the victor go the spoils. And I believe I have determined what I want as my prize.”

One by one, Pantalone removes his rings and sets them on the board, their cabochon gems splashing light across his victorious, white-gold army. Rising like a curl of dark smoke, he eliminates the few short feet between them and folds himself down over Dottore, caging him in with hands against the armrests, close enough that he can feel the radiant heat of his body. Delicately, almost romantically, Pantalone’s gloved fingers skate over the slant of Dottore’s jaw, chasing the flush of his scarred cheeks.

To his credit, Dottore attempts to struggle. It’s almost beautiful, really, the way he tries to wrestle against his own chemical blasphemy, a testament to his fortitude. Or, perhaps his stubbornness. But when Dottore does finally manage to get a hand around Pantalone’s throat, it’s only a loose, ineffective hold. Pantalone covers that hand with his own and squeezes.

“Is this what you want to do? Do you want to choke me?” Tighter, he puppeteers them to strangle him together.

And when he lets go, Dottore’s hand swings down uselessly at his side. Pantalone isn’t short of breath at all.

A muscle jumps in Dottore’s cheek. It’s closest thing he can manage to a scowl

“Tsk, tsk. What have you gotten yourself into?” Pantalone coos.

Deftly, he removes the tie clip that holds Dottore’s jabot in place. Silk floats down like a navy feather. Next, he frees the top button of Dottore’s shirt and strokes his throat, dimpling the skin over his neck, tip-taping over his jugular and carotid. A thumb settles against the cartilage of Dottore’s windpipe. Haltingly, Dottore swallows. When his breath stutters from his chest, Pantalone’s rubied lips curl upward in another dark smile, a promise and a threat all blurred together.

“W-what—what’re you—going to do?” Speaking is a labour when Dottore is unused to the molasses on his tongue.

“Nothing more or less than you were planning to do to me. You’re the one who wanted this.”

“N-not, not like—”

“Hush, Zandik. Conserve your breath. You know, this is the worst part of it. Too much of the paralytic in this batch, too, I think. But you’ll metabolize it soon enough. It’ll get much better after that. You’ll be able to speak, at least. Maybe even squirm a little. Take it from someone who’s intimately familiar with this particular cocktail of neurotransmitters.”

Then Pantalone bows his head again and seals their mouths together, tongue swiping sensuously over the seam of pliant lips, slowly stroking his way inside. Dottore tastes like wine and poison, smooth and intimately intoxicating, ravenous and lusciously wet. Pantalone lingers against his mouth, drawing their kisses out, biting Dottore’s lips, sucking on his tongue. He kisses Dottore until their mouths are red and tenderized, swollen from their hunger. Until Dottore’s legs spread wider, hips shifting minutely in search of friction, letting out the sweetest little mewls just from kisses.

When Pantalone pulls back, Dottore slumps forward as if to chase him on instinct, a dazed flavour of desperation bright across his face. Pantalone smiles indulgently and lowers his mouth to Dottore’s neck, biting just above the dark leather of his collar, sucking a bruise that matches the color of their eyes.

One final effort. Dottore slides the hidden knife into his hand from his sleeve and lunges. But the drug leaves him sluggish, his attack obvious. The scalpel skitters over the silver inlays of Pantalone’s shirt, missing his naked throat by inches.

Pantalone clicks his tongue. “None of your knifeplay tonight.”

Seizing Dottore’s wrist, he squeezes, fingers grinding carpel bones together until the knife falls to the rug. Then he tugs, drawing Dottore up, their joined arms extended off to the side. Swift and strong, Pantalone’s free hand cradles the back of Dottore’s skull—and they could be dancing for the way they sway together in the study, lit by the midday blizzard and the fire in the hearth.

“Are you afraid of how far I’ll go?” Pantalone licks a stripe over Dottore’s neck, reveling in the filthy possessiveness of it. He feels the stammer of Dottore’s swallow beneath his tongue, the riot of his pulse spending time between his teeth.

Dizzying, dazzling, they turn in counterclockwise circles, spinning and spinning in a glacial waltz. Look up: the chandelier swirls in whorls of gold and crystal, an opulent star framed by the coffered ceiling, unlit and yet still gleaming. How did he—?

Dottore lies on his back, numb limbs cushioned by the fibres of the rug. A dark chuckle hovers high above him. When Dottore blinks, Pantalone comes into focus.

Like a bird of prey, he circles Dottore, long-limbed and impeccably dressed in his embroidered tailcoat, void-black barathea accentuated by violet silk grosgrain. A body honed like a blade, sheathed in silver and shadow. An elegance belying a raptor’s hunger.

Pantalone’s foot drags over the inside of Dottore’s thigh, fine leather nudging his legs wider. He surveys the strain against Dottore’s trousers with satisfaction, damp fabric drawn tight over the thick head of his cock like an offering. Eyes drag upward, climbing over Dottore’s heaving chest, his flushed neck, a face twisted in a mask of primal fury. Dottore’s pupils are enormous. Dilated like dark suns, they eclipse red irises until only the barest sliver remains, a crimson moon with all its promises of blood and vengeance.

Beautiful. Breathtaking. Dottore’s reaction is spectacular, the way he wages a war on two fronts, wrestling with Pantalone, trying to resist the drug. Futile, in the end, but it remains its own kind of persuasive permission. An invitation for Pantalone to keep pushing. To take him under, to take him further—perhaps further than they’ve ever been.

Heel set to the rug, the tip of Pantalone’s shoe lifts up and brushes the underside of Dottore’s dick. His pained intake of breath is as sharp as a knife. The sound of it makes Pantalone feel alive.

“N–ngh, f-fuck.”

Pantalone knows Dottore’s desperation deeply, viscerally, with all the intimacy of memory. The first time: in Haeresys, splayed out and pinned down like a specimen, a butterfly wrung dry for preservation. The second: in his own bed, surrounded by Dottore’s former selves, a shadowplay of time segmented by science (how very many of them it had taken to sate him). The third: ah, the third had been a punishment for the second, the full furor of the Doctor’s envy on glamorous display. The scars from that one had taken so very, very long to heal.

How delightful, then, for Pantalone to find himself before a mirror. As above, so below. Pantalone bestows Dottore with the force of his full attention. He beholds him with no shortage of inspiration, a hundred branching visions for how this encounter can unfold.

“What would be more cruel?” Pantalone asks, his cadence mild. He could be talking about tax law and annuities for how laissez-faire he sounds. “To take advantage of your intoxicated body? Or to leave you hungry—desperate, dripping, aching for release—lying here while I return to the business you so rudely interrupted.”

The foot retreats.

Dottore’s eyes widen with low-lying panic. Across his features, Pantalone witnesses Dottore’s crusade against his own prodigious pride, weighing the drawn-out siege of an unanswered aphrodisiac against the humiliation of acknowledging his need. Which will it be?

Dottore bares his teeth. “Don’t go,” he finally grits out.

“Oh, you’ll have to do better than that.” Pantalone runs his tongue along the back of his incisors, savouring Dottore’s struggle.

“Please.”

The statement sole of Pantalone shoe lifts up and skims over Dottore’s inner thigh, dragging against the inseam of his trousers before his toe touches the hard line of his cock. Dottore’s moan comes from deep within his chest. In answer, Pantalone steps down the slightest bit harder.

“Again,” he says.

“Please.”

This one lacks conviction. The pressure eases. Dottore’s teeth chatter from denial.

“Again. This time, say it like you mean it.”

“Please, Pantalone. Hng. Please!”

Three times. It’s enough. Polished leather lifts and Pantalone drops his foot hard over Dottore’s trapped length. The breath leaves Dottore in such a rush that one might think Pantalone had kicked him in the chest instead. Blood bursts over Dottore’s mouth from how hard he bites into his own lip, hips bucking up into the gorgeous, hideous friction, and Pantalone’s adrenaline spikes from the sheer physicality of this reaction. Overcome, he palms himself over his clothes, the silhouette of fine couture broken by the commanding outline of his cock.

Oh! He’s going to flay Dottore open and serve him the world.

Dottore only manages a single, shuddering exhale before the violet sole scrapes over his tormented groin. Again, raw reflex has him arching into the harsh step even as reason should urge him to curl away. Such admirable determination! When Pantalone grinds down even harder, Dottore nearly howls, eyes rolling back, pain ricocheting into pleasure, muscles seizing with the sudden onrush of an orgasm.

It’s impossible to tell who’s more surprised.

“Already?” Sure enough, beneath the diamond-patterned imprint of the shoe, a wet patch darkens Dottore’s trousers. Pantalone tosses his head back and laughs until he’s breathless, tickled by this early victory. His voice is fond and filled with dark wonder. “That barely took anything at all.”

It inflames him, the sight of Dottore in pained pleasure. His own need throbs quick between his thighs. He wants to see Dottore naked, kneeling in service, investing in the splendor of these unfolding hours.

Crouching down on his heels, Pantalone begins to divest Dottore of his clothes. His gloves, his coat, his shirt. Sweat slick, the fabric sticks to him, but Pantalone works with economical precision, his every touch cool and efficient, soothing over Dottore’s fevered flesh.

Still dazed from the force of his climax, he is malleable as he is stripped down to his most intimate layers. Pantalone inventories the flash of feeling he catches in the glitter of Dottore’s eyes: rage at the inability to lift his limbs; relief as his damp trousers are drawn away from his thickening cock. Dottore’s hips buck into the teasing scrape of knuckles along the underside, too purposeful to be an accident, too innocuous to satisfy.

Another buckle clinks. A subtle hiss of leather. Click. Pantalone fastens his own slim belt through the ring of Dottore’s collar—leashed.

“Would you like to know how this is going to play out?” Pantalone purrs.

Belt twisted around his fist, he pushes off his heels and claims Dottore’s vacant seat, his posture regal—imperious—as though he means to transfigure the armchair into a throne through force of will alone. A single motion tugs Dottore close, body nestled between Pantalone’s spread legs, head pillowed on a thigh. With his free hand, Pantalone unzips his trousers and draws out his cock. It juts out from a thatch of dark hair like a command, hard and throbbing with arousal, a bead of precum glistening over the swollen tip.

“You’re going to suck me,” Pantalone continues, low and sultry. The fingers of his free hand trace the silvery scars stark on Dottore’s cheek. “You’re going to let me fuck that insolent, arrogant mouth of yours until I come with my cock so deep in your throat it makes you choke. And then, if you’re good, if you swallow everything I give you, I’ll fuck the drug out of your system, over and over, for as long as it takes.”

Crude words, ill-suited to the Regrator’s refined inflection, and all the more potent for it. The sound Dottore lets out is deliciously pathetic, half rage, half shame, all pleasure. Poetry, not of word but feeling. Peel back their clever entendres, lift away their wit and erudition, and find that the Second and the Ninth are driven by the same base cravings as anyone else.

“Ngh—”

Red eyes rise, starved and righteous. What a sight to behold! Decadent, Dottore is too much like this, with the lust occluding his rational mind, the hunger jumping in the muscles of his jaw, the unwitting heat of his cheek, so hot Pantalone feels the warmth of it through the leather of his glove. Does Dottore even realize that he’s nuzzling into his tormentor’s touch? That his mouth is watering in anticipation? His lips skim the underside of Pantalone’s wrist, grazing the translucent skin where his glove begins. There’s an impish nip of teeth, and Pantalone groans.

“Open your mouth.”

Placing his hand against the back of Dottore’s skull, Pantalone guides him into position and feeds his cock past Dottore’s parted lips.

“Mmph.”

There’s little finesse to it. Dottore is too intoxicated for technique, his tongue too heavy, his mind too addled. Pantalone has half a mind to taunt Dottore for making him do all the work, but the sloppy suction of his mouth is too endearing, almost sweet in its mindlessness. Opportunities like this are rare and much more valuable for it.

Still, Pantalone is not above a little teasing. With a shallow roll of his hips, he rubs his fat cockhead back and forth over Dottore’s tongue so he can taste what he’s done, the mess he’s made of Pantalone’s restraint. He fucks Dottore’s mouth shallowly, at first, gently petting his disheveled hair until Dottore begins to shiver and whimper with need.

Tightening his fist around the makeshift leash, Pantalone tugs at the same time as he ruts in deeper. The blunt head of his cock touches the ring at the back of Dottore’s throat, made a little more supple by the relaxant in his veins. Another thrust and Pantalone pushes past it, biting the inside of his cheek when the muscle contracts around him. Dottore swallows instinctively, a hot tear crawling from the corner of a carmine eye.

Gagged by a cock in his throat, choked by taut black leather, Dottore thrums with desperation, heart palpitating, endorphins at war with the inevitable. His muscles spasm, rapidly losing oxygen, all while his own dick throbs with arousal. Swallow, exhale, sink into the murderous rhythm of Pantalone’s thrusts, little gluk-gluk-gluks filling the air between them.

Worshipful, Pantalone bears witness to this act of service. The wet squeeze around his cock is luxurious, the wordless sounds as precious as a votive offering. Under the cradle of his palm, he feels the tremors that tell him Dottore’s running out of air and even so Dottore stays there, hot and wet and perfect.

If there is a world beyond this feeling, Pantalone is content to let it burn.

He pulls Dottore off by the roots of his silver-streaked hair just long enough for him to catch his breath, yanking him back down by the leash to fuck his face again. Saliva spills from the corners of Dottore’s mouth, trickling over the belt, soaking into the silk weave of Pantalone’s expensive suiting. But he finds he doesn’t mind. For this—for the pleasure of the godmaker on his knees, his mouth stretched wide, slurping and gagging and drooling around him—Pantalone will gladly suffer the ruin of his clothes.

Harder, every thrust pushes Pantalone’s cock in further. Dottore takes it, anchored in place by the punishing grip on his hair. His frantic swallows only urge Pantalone to sheath himself deeper, an endless feedback loop of pleasure.

“Mmm, just a bit more,” Pantalone sighs. The honeyed sweetness in his voice is so terribly at odds with how roughly he uses Dottore. “So good. You’re doing so good for me, Zandik.”

Dragged up for another gasp of air, a guttural groan travels from Dottore’s lips to the tips of Pantalone’s cock. Praise has always unmade him.

This time, Pantalone doesn’t need to direct Dottore back down. As soon as he inflates his lungs, he seals his mouth over Pantalone. Greedy. Perfect. Those red eyes flare in a bold challenge, as if it were a victory to swallow Pantalone of his own volition.

“Yesss,” Pantalone hisses. Releasing the belt, he flattens his palm over the struggling tendons of Dottore’s neck and feels the flesh and ligaments ripple with his swallow.

It feels like revelation.

“Swallow every drop.” Pantalone’s breathless command cuts to a stifled cry. He had wanted to watch, but his eyes roll back in ecstasy as the force of his climax rips free from his control. He spills thick and hot down Dottore’s throat, spurting over his tongue as he pumps his hips once, twice, three times more. Dottore chokes, his throat closing rhythmically around the crown of Pantalone’s cock, milking out the last of his orgasm, until at last Pantalone pulls him away with an obscene pop, languid limbs sinking back into the cushions.

Without Pantalone’s grip on his hair, Dottore slumps forward, head landing in his besotted tyrant’s lap. His first intake of breath is bruised, almost grotesque for how wet and ruined it is. He gasps and sputters, shoulders shaking with his coughs. When his heaving finally settles, he blinks up with glazed eyes and swollen lips, his face a mess of tears and spit and cum.

Pantalone is mesmerized, a predator pleased by his prey’s devotion. There’s a faint flush over his cheekbones. Sighing contentedly, he sets his fingers over Dottore’s jaw to massage the soreness there. His thumb swipes over a shining lower lip, tugging at its scalloped divot.

“Say thank you.”

Desire and defiance wage a war across Dottore’s face. There’s a faint twitch at his lips, the tiniest of tells. His voice comes out raw, but the words are unmistakable.

“Fuck you.”

Oh, isn’t he just exquisite? He may as well have simply begged Pantalone to destroy him. What a gift!

Composed despite his lingering breathlessness, Pantalone tucks himself back into his trousers. He takes a slow sip of wine, savouring its velvet richness on his tongue. A clink as the glass is set back on the table. A beat. A breath.

Then Pantalone surges, tumbling them both to the ground.

Dottore gasps at the sudden motion, fingers scrabbling up to the table, seeking something to hold. It’s no use. Chess pieces overturn in a flurry of glass and gold and gravity rises up to meet him, somehow even harder than before. Winded, he wheezes.

“Truly, Dottore, your folly knows no bounds.”

Pantalone straddles Dottore, body bent low. Waves of dark hair curtain them from the study, from the lambent glow of the fire, from the entire stagnant world—until all Dottore can see is the shine of avaricious eyes, violent and ultraviolet. The sensuous shape of upturned lips seeks out Dottore’s ear. When next Pantalone speaks, it’s in a whisper—a co-conspirator divulging a secret, a lover proffering a vow.

“I’m going to ruin you.”

Images flash behind Pantalone’s eyes like the reels of a stereoscope: Dottore strung up and taken, taking his cock, his belt, his knife. Bruised and bloodied, beatific with sensation, the scholar’s detachment undone, unmade as he pleads Pantalone for mercy, for more. A thousand possibilities and all of them divine; they’ll be the madman rulers of a world where all things are permitted.

“I’m going to inflict the most exquisite pain upon you,” Pantalone promises. “The most excruciating pleasure.” His tone is so sweet, so indulgent. Such a contrast to the sinister words, to the cut of his claws across Dottore’s chest, lacquered nails pricking a cage of pain over Dottore’s heart. “I’m going to do the most beautiful, frightful things to you, and you’re going to take it and you’re going to beg me for more.”

A raw, animal sound rips from Dottore. Pantalone feels the pitch of it like pleasure in the marrow of his bones. Beneath his hips, Dottore’s dick swells and twitches, precum dribbling over his tensing abdomen.

Pantalone brings his thumbs to Dottore’s chest, drawing circles around rosy-pink nipples until they peak and pebble. Dottore moans into the pleasure of it. Even with Pantalone’s promise not three minutes old, he has already let down his guard.

Arrogant fool. Pantalone pinches both nipples and yanks. Viciously, he twists them between his fingers, and Dottore’s back arches as though he’d been electrified. Again, again, again, Pantalone pulls and tugs and twists and rubs, torturing Dottore’s nipples until they’re bright pink and puffy.

It’s gorgeous, so gorgeous, the film of misery over Dottore’s timeless eyes. Bending forward, Pantalone licks one of his abused nipples, tasting the rawness of it in his mouth. He suckles, gentle at first.

Then his teeth clamp down and Dottore howls, half-gagged by the tidal outpour of pain.

Priceless. Pantalone licks over the indents of his teeth, lapping up the beads of blood they beckoned. Open mouthed kisses take him across Dottore’s chest to that nipple’s undecorated twin. He licks around it, experiencing a frisson of delight at Dottore’s anticipatory tension, every atom of the Doctor vibrating with sensation.

And even though Dottore knows it’s coming, he can’t do a single thing about it. Pantalone bites down and, at the same time as he does, he presses a palm against Dottore’s cock, squeezing the head, and then Dottore screams through a shuddering climax, pain overriding the relaxant, all his muscles seizing at once, cock spurting over himself in bursts.

When at last Pantalone loosens his jaw, Dottore’s body slumps, sinking back into the rug.

“Remarkable,” Pantalone says, almost awestruck. “You didn’t go soft at all.” He runs the seam of a gloved finger over the damp slit of Dottore’s cock where the wetness still dribbles out with every aftershock. Still, he stays hard. “But, seeing as you cannot seem to control your unruly body…”

He grabs the thinnest of the belts from Dottore’s coat and weaves it around his cock and balls, coiling it once, twice, fastening it tight around the base. Caught, stalled, throttled.

“Fuck—”

“There,” Pantalone says, terribly pleased with himself. “Until I’m ready to fuck you.”

Smirking, he drags his fingers through the mess over Dottore’s abdomen, smearing it over his skin, dipping into his navel to collect more of the viscous fluid. Pearl white, the cum glitters against the dark leather, webbing across his fingers. Imperious, he holds them to Dottore’s mouth.

Dottore’s eyes go darkly murderous, but the expression is incongruous with how lax he is, how his lips part around Pantalone’s fingers, the leather butter-soft beneath his tongue. He sucks and laps at Pantalone’s digits, tasting himself while Pantalone explores his gums, scrapes over his molars, strokes the fleshy insides of his cheeks.

Long past when the gloves are clean, Pantalone plays with that dangerous mouth, stretched wide around his hand. Saliva dribbles down around the leather, making the mess more immoderate yet, and Pantalone gathers the wet strings of it with his tongue, smearing it across Dottore’s cheeks. Thrusting with a measured undulation of his wrist, he pulls formless sounds from Dottore’s throat that sound like music to his ears. The fingers of his other hand gently cup the side of Dottore’s face so he can feel the working hinge of his sore jaw, the erotic bulge of his cheek with every press of knuckles in his mouth.

Surely, this is a better use of this orifice than Dottore’s monologues.

Eventually, Pantalone pulls his fingers out until only the very tips of his gloves remain in Dottore’s mouth, the fine saddle stitching set between sharp teeth. “Bite down,” he orders, and Dottore obeys, snagging the seam above his nail, holding the glove in place while Pantalone draws his hand free.

Like the rest of him, Pantalone’s hands are hungry, sharp-boned and slim, a delicate wrist, a slender palm, long, tapered fingers. But be not deceived: there is plenty of power in these hands. For a fleeting second their gazes lock, a question answered.

Before Dottore can even spit out the glove, Pantalone’s hand whips across his face.

Crack!

Gunshot loud, the sound echoes though the study before the lavish tapestries tamp it down. Pain starbursts over Dottore’s cheek. He keens, the glove falling from his lips, head snapping into the gentle caress of Pantalone’s opposing hand. Already, the bright red echo of a palmprint forms over his scars.

“Let’s try this again,” Pantalone says with a devastating grin. “Say thank you.”

“Th-thank you.”

“Much better.” The gentle hand resets Dottore’s face to centre.

Crack!

Dottore blinks to clear the sting. The pain is magnified by the toxins in Dottore’s system, but this one hurts far less than the first for the fact that it had been so expected. Pantalone has always been driven by the allure of symmetry, the gambler’s love of double or nothing.

Pantalone pinches Dottore’s chin, digging bruises into his mandible, slithering dark words onto his tongue. “This is going to get so much worse before it gets better.”

Gone is Pantalone’s look of calm superiority. What little colour had endured in his eyes is now consumed by the gluttonous voids of his pupils, a reptilian darkness devouring the moon. The fire behind him casts a radiant halo around his hair. He is ethereal, a study in contrasts, an angel-faced demon, grinning with carnivorous delight.

Pantalone grabs a cushion, which he uses to prop up Dottore’s hips. Then he rifles through the pockets of the Doctor’s white coat until at last his fingers close on what he sought: a small, shimmering vial of oil.

“Should I be flattered that you had planned to prepare me with my favourite?” he asks with a coquettish flutter of his lashes.

The cork pops free, suffusing the air with silkflower sweetness. Its floral perfume combines with the thick scent of their mutual arousal, the antiseptic tang of Dottore’s skin, the pungent camphor of Pantalone’s inks, an intimately recognizable bouquet.

Oil, poured into his glove by his uncovered hand: Pantalone rubs it between his fingers, the leather slick and shimmering. A blunt finger circles Dottore’s hole with slow, possessive strokes, drawing closer and closer. So eager, the pink ring already twitches under Pantalone’s attention. At the first firm touch, it tightens, trying to lure Pantalone inside.

“You’re so hungry here. Look how well you take me, your hole sucking me right in.”

It’s true. Like this, Dottore’s body is wonderfully accommodating. He accepts the intrusion of Pantalone’s finger right down to the second knuckle, constricting around it with a small sigh. Lovely, just lovely. Skillfully, Pantalone works Dottore open, reveling in how incredibly sensitive he is. It takes very little before he’s trembling, only a few purposeful nudges over his clustered nerves.

With a languid curl of his wrist, Pantalone draws the finger out. He pours more oil over his glove, and then plunges in with two, the glide satiny smooth. Slow, sensuous, he caresses Dottore’s silken walls, spreading his fingers wide, stretching him, exposing the tender pink of his insides.

The wavy ends of Pantalone’s hair tickle Dottore’s thighs when he lowers his head. Transfixed, Pantalone studies the lewd display, committing it to memory with all the pleasure of an artist admiring a master’s brushtrokes. The pink strain of Dottore’s hole, swallowing his fingers. His bound cock, painted in a furious shade of red, head nearly purpled with arousal. This rosy palette stretches upward, too. It’s there in the flush across Dottore’s chest, the red rings of teeth around his puffy nipples, the blush smeared high over his cheekbones.

“Ah, h-ha, ah, ah.”

Breathy exhales are summoned with every touch of Pantalone’s fingertips. It’s the way they move, catching over the groove of Dottore’s prostate, massaging the gland as if he could imprint it with the textured saddle stitching of his glove. Dottore is burning, melting to a deep and primal yearning, corroded by the contamination in his bloodstream. Sweat shines on his skin. It drenches his hair and pools in the hollow of his throat.

Pantalone had almost forgotten his own erection in all this—distractingly satisfied with the sights and sounds and tastes of Dottore in pain—but he becomes keenly aware of it now as he crooks his fingers and watches Dottore’s tongue loll out from his mouth. There’s an undeniable appeal to this tableau, this elegant contrast of black leather stretching at Dottore’s pink rim, the copious amount of oil making everything gleam indulgently. The rougher he is, the greedier Dottore’s body become, and, soon, Pantalone has three fingers stuffed inside, fucking him roughly.

“I could keep you like this all night,” Pantalone purrs, beginning to weave a gossamer fantasy around them. “Speared on my fingers. It’s more precise, like this. Efficient, too.” He rubs thorough circles over the swollen gland, making Dottore mewl. “Isn’t that the sweet spot for research?”

“Mph. N-not… I need—”

“We have plenty of time and plenty of oil. I wonder how long it would take before I can fit my entire fist in you.” Three fingers deep, he teases his pinky at the pucker of Dottore’s hole. “In all our years reprising our roles in these little scenes, I’m surprised we’ve never tried that. Watching you come apart on my hand might be almost as good as fucking you.”

No, not on his hand. His glove. Another layer of distance, as if Pantalone can’t even be bothered to touch Dottore himself, to taint his skin on the depravity of it all. Yes, yes, that is certainly part of the allure in his imagination. Knowing that Dottore can’t come until Pantalone undoes the belt around his dick only makes it that much sweeter.

It gives Pantalone a thoroughly scandalous idea.

Slowly, he draws his fingers out, appreciating the sight of Dottore’s hole closing back around nothing, the dribble of oil trickling out and leaking into the rug, effulgent in the light of the fire.

Dottore makes a plaintive sound at the loss, but there’s a note of hope in it, an eagerness to be freed of the restraint and finally fucked. It’s short lived.

Rather than undo his own trousers, Pantalone picks up a fallen chess piece from the rug. The obsidian king. Pinching the base between two slender fingers, he appraises it consideringly. The dark crown catches the dying daylight, its inlaid gemstones as bright as Dottore’s widening eyes.

“Shall we play?” Pantalone asks, low and sensuous. “That was what you came here for, wasn’t it? For fun.”

“You—you wouldn’t dare!”

“Would you?” Pantalone scrapes the finial in a diagonal line over Dottore’s cock, grazing the crown over the seam of Dottore’s balls. He skims it further down to nudge at his twitching hole. It gleams wetly, already swollen from being so thoroughly fingerfucked. “Be honest. If the positions were reversed and I were the one beneath you, dosed and delirious, would you spare me the indignity? Or would you turn this into another of your little experiments to see how many of these pieces you could use to defile me all at once? Another test of the body’s limits in the name of science.”

There’s no purpose in waiting for an answer. Dottore’s sputter is confirmation enough. Pantalone pushes the king past Dottore’s rim.

Fingers scrabble over the rug, a pair of ragged claws scuttling across golden fibres. Alight with avarice, Pantalone watches the king sink into Dottore’s pliant hole, past the sculpted collar, the widening stem, all the way to the weighted, beveled base. Dottore’s body clenches down instinctively, garbled noises torn from his throat.

“G-gah. Hah! And they call me a villain,” Dottore spits.

His indignation only summons more laughter, fond and mocking in equal measure. “My dear Doctor, don’t you understand? I am exactly as you made me.”

What they share is a hunger that whets itself on what it’s fed, a greed sharpened so keenly it can vivisect them. Through the fear and rage in Dottore’s lustrous eyes, Pantalone sees the wellspring of pride.

“If I were a betting man,” says the Regrator, Teyvat’s most illustrious speculator, “I’d wager the only thing you hate more than this is how much you love it.”

Through it all, Pantalone doesn’t stop fucking Dottore with the proxy of his king, plunging it in and out of him. Entranced, he’s fixated on the way Dottore’s muscles squeezes around the volcanic glass, the way the king drags over his slick insides, this hideous display of wealth turned into a lavish violation. Drawing the chess piece all the way out, he watches Dottore’s rim clench down around nothing—hollow and bereft, practically begging to be filled—and then he fucks it back in again with perfect aim. The finial scrapes over Dottore’s prostate, inducing pleasure, punching out pain.

“Let me give you what you crave,” Pantalone entreats. His voice is low and a little mocking, but there’s the slightest strain to it, a sliver of his own desire seeping through. “Let me fuck you. With that nefarious drug in your system, it’ll be even better than you can imagine. So good you’ll never want it to end.”

“Yes, yess,” Dottore hisses, delirious. He can barely comprehend the words Pantalone is saying. His mind is hazy with need, starbursts rupturing behind his eyes with every strike against his insides.

“All you have to do is ask for it.”

Bowing his head, Pantalone descends over Dottore’s cock, sucking him down in time with the brutal collision of the king against his prostate. Dottore cries out, arching into the inviting heat of Pantalone’s mouth. Pantalone can taste the artificial sweetness of Dottore from his earlier release, the dribble of precum that ekes out despite the belt’s constriction. Again, again, the smooth obsidian fucks into him with unerring accuracy while Pantalone’s tongue curls around the purpling cockhead, his insistant suction drawing out another scream.

Helpless, Dottore’s hips thrust up with what little movement he can manage. He’s overwhelmed by the dual sensations, staggeringly sensitive from his earlier orgasms, yet still so desperate to come. Denied by the leather looped around his dick, he snaps and snarls, impatience scorching his eyes. Pleasure rarifies to agony. It builds and builds behind his navel, and he needs—he needs—

“Nhg–please! Pantalone, please, ah, please. Fuck me, you vengeful thing.”

Pantalone rears up, lifting his mouth off Dottore’s cock with a lewd pop, an echo of the wet squelch of the king being withdrawn. Peeling off his remaining glove, he tosses the leather aside and shoves his trousers down only far enough to free his dick. It throbs, hot and hard against his palm as he slicks himself with oil. Swiftly now, he lifts Dottore’s hips, arranging his trembling thighs around his waist. He’s urged on by Dottore’s babbling, his fervid pleas for Pantalone to fuck him, please fuck him, he needs Pantalone to fuck him.

And who is Pantalone to deny him?

Black nails pry the belt from around Dottore’s cock. The instant it falls free, Pantalone strokes his liberated shaft from base to tip and thrusts inside.

Dottore shouts. He clamps down, body seizing, cum spurting over Pantalone’s fist. Pantalone refuses him even a single minute to recover. He slams the rest of the way in, cock buried to the root, hips flush with Dottore’s ass.

Euphoric, Pantalone tilts his head back and groans, black hair rippling down behind him. Fuck, it’s sublime. He feels like a god, fucking the climax out of Dottore, his cock massaged by the aftershocks of orgasm.

When he looks down, Pantalone stares into the face of his own demise.

Dottore’s eyes are wide, blissful and tormented. Tears shine like sea pearls at their corners. See how expressive he can be when his scientific distance is burned away by his own blasphemies?

Still, it isn’t enough. Dottore’s too prodigious an alchemist for this to be enough. What is a little liquid ecstasy compared to the elixir of life. No, he won’t be let off so easy. Dottore’s erection doesn’t flag even a little after it pulses his release all over his abdomen. Overstimulation singes his synapses, and he teeters between trying to fuck himself back on Pantalone’s cock and frantically scurrying away.

Pantalone is glad he’d had the forethought to use Dottore’s mouth; he can’t imagine he’d have lasted long otherwise.

“You’re intolerably lovely like this,” he breathes, allowing his genuine veneration to colour his voice. “I see why you find this so appealing.”

Dottore is tight and slick and hot—unnaturally chemically fevered. The velvet grip of his insides clings to Pantalone’s shaft as he pulls out slowly and slams back in, the tremors massaging him like a swallowing throat.

Limbs lax, Dottore is folded over, cast in Pantalone’s shadow, the elegant drape of his tailcoat enshrouding Dottore in a dark embrace. Luxury, wrapped in luxury. In the smothering excess of the Regrator’s quarters, the ticking timepiece is drowned out by the lewd symphony of intercourse: the percussive smack of thighs and hips, the flutelike clink of belts and metal, the melodic backbone of their moans, all bound by a fanfare of squelches.

“More, more.” The syllables scrabble up from Dottore’s abraded throat. He’s sore from having come once, twice, three times in quick succession, yet still he aches with need. His dick dribbles weakly, bobbing over his abdomen with every thrust.

The flagrant display of greed turns Pantalone’s hands to talons. Black-tipped nails scrape rails over Dottore’s chest, red lines beckoning his lifeblood to the surface of his skin. Pantalone dips his head to taste it, lapping it up with the flat of his tongue savouring the iron tang.

When he lifts back up, he shoves three fingers into Dottore’s mouth, anchoring them over his bottom teeth. No glove this time, he feels the wet suction directly, intimately. The tongue laving over his nailbeds and knuckles. Matched to the tempo of his thrusting, he prods deeper, fucking Dottore’s mouth. A current completing a circuit.

Dottore bites down, hard enough to break skin.

The last of Pantalone’s mask shatters. He rams into Dottore without mercy, tearing his fingers free to wrap his wet and bloodied hand around Dottore’s cock. Remorseless, he slakes his hunger on the body beneath him, soaking up the whines, the snarls, the weak, overstimulated struggles, chasing his own pleasure and—

Dottore’s fourth orgasm overtakes him first. Like a thunderclap, the suddenness of it makes him gasp, saliva dripping from the corners of his lips, body seizing like a vice around Pantalone, who hurtles over the edge a step behind. He groans, flooding Dottore with the hot rush of cum, fucking him through it until he starts to go soft.

It takes a long while for the aftershocks to settle. Golden hour has now caught up to them, the low-angled sun breaking through the nebulous gaps in the stormclouds. Blue light scatters, ceding the sky to hues of pink and orange. Ice crystals form a halo around the bloodred sun.

Awareness returns to Pantalone in increments: the cool air against his damp hair, the stinging ring of teethmarks around his knuckles. Dottore’s muscles continue to flutter around him, silken insides clinging to his soft cock as if to keep him there, a body begging not to be left empty. Pantalone withdraws anyway, damp fingers descending between Dottore’s thighs to catch the trickle of cum and shove it back past his swollen rim.

Dottore grunts. The voids of his are eyes ringed by deadly red. Witnessing, despising, recording, adoring—adoring Pantalone, his benefactor and his tormentor alike.

Pantalone feels such a potent surge of affection it threatens to choke him.

Like a goldthread, it twists around his sternum. Too late to eradicate, the invasive feeling has already been invited in, these strangling vines creeping in too slow to have been noticed. Now it festers like a thorn beneath his skin, a poison in his bloodstream, forever syncopating with the tick, tick, tick of his heartbeat. And he knows, from the way it wraps around him, that he has been irrevocably compromised.

Play dangerous games; win dangerous prizes.

This threat to Pantalone’s control brings out the glory of his cruelty.

Lying on his side, he props himself up on an elbow and pushes his glasses over the bridge of his nose. “You know,” he says, all careless nonchalance. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that your constitution is far more robust than mine. All your many enhancements, your little experiments in life and death…”

One laconic eye peers in his direction. “Would you like an accolade for stating the obvious?”

“Clearly that concoction of yours has had no lasting consequences on your ego. Such a pity.”

“Was there a point to your prattle?"

“Oh yes.” There’s a dark undercurrent of amusement behind Pantalone’s genial smile. “You see, I’m no chemist, but even a mere banker has enough knowledge to realize that a drug potent enough to render the formidable Il Dottore so cock-drunk and incoherent—”

Dottore scowls at the vulgar turn of phrase.

“—well. I shudder to know what effects such a dosage would have on a poor man like myself.”

“Perhaps I simply had high hopes of rendering you unconscious. We had such fun last time, didn’t we?”

Vividly, Pantalone recalls the evening in question. Aided by a bastardized gadget from his homeland, Dottore had turned Pantalone incandescent, inside-out and devastatingly fucked out, so raw he could hardly sit for a week. Worse still had been the shame of it, not from the sex but from having been so outwitted. Imagine it, his undoing had come at the expense of a loophole in their contract, one Dottore had exploited with alacrity.

In the years since, Pantalone has not made the same mistake of underestimating the Doctor’s jurisprudence. He shakes his head to dismiss the smoulder of the memory.

“Or perhaps,” he ponders aloud instead, “this particular elixir was never intended for me at all.” Leaning down, he feathers a kiss over Dottore’s mouth. “I think you wanted me to swap the wines.”

“Tch. An inane hypothesis.”

“Is it? I think you like this. The back of my hand, the heel of my boot, barely breathing while my cock’s in your throat.” The filth pours from Pantalone’s mouth into Dottore’s, warm breath misting against his lips. “I know your depravity just as I know my own, Zandik. You always enjoy it best when I give you no choice.”

It isn’t enough to simply meet the Doctor’s expectations. Pantalone must exceed them. All that ambitious greed and sadism held in trust, collateral for days like this. Let tenderness unfold only in the quiet aftermath, paid for by flesh and tears. In the here and now, the shades of benevolence invert to malice.

For Dottore, Pantalone’s cruelty shall be his most sincerest form of devotion.

And so Pantalone reaches up and plucks Dottore’s abandoned wine from the table. He lifts the crystal stemware in a mocking toast.

“To your health, Dottore.” Lips to glass, Pantalone tips his head back and pours the last of the tainted wine into his mouth.

Dottore understands what’s about to happen only in the frantic seconds before Pantalone bows his head. Eyes gone wide with bloodshot terror, his mouth rounds on a strangled protest. But it’s no use. Pantalone’s grip is iron on his chin, fingertips digging into the hinge of Dottore’s jaw, forcing it open so he can seal their mouths together. Wine floods over Dottore’s tongue, delivered past his lips in a perversion of a kiss. Dottore chokes. He tries not to swallow, but Pantalone strokes his throat and coaxes him to relax—shh—to drink—that’s it—to take—yes, yes, yes.

Pantalone pulls back only once Dottore’s mouth is empty, tingling with the lingering sting of tannins. A strand of spit connects their lips. Like spider silk, it glistens, stretched taut until it snaps, and Pantalone’s tongue flicks out to taste the final drops of wine from the corner of Dottore’s mouth.

And then Dottore burns. There’s enough of the drug still in his system that even this little bit more threatens immolation. Ethanol added to an open fire, a flame without smoke. Desire combusts beneath his blistered skin. His throat vapour locks around a scream.

“Y-you—you’re insane!”

Scythe sharp, Pantalone smiles. A true smile, wine-red and blood-smeared. A terrifying smile, the grin that slumbers under the counterfeit mask of the businessman. Here is Pantalone in all his violent splendor, death’s merchant stripped of the artifice of gentility. Here is the beating heart of him.

Every move Dottore has made has been a gift, an invitation for Pantalone to bare his teeth.

Dottore’s cock swells back to hardness.

“What can I say?” Pantalone replies. “I learned from the best. Now, up you get. Quick, quick, before you’re immobile again. We’ll be more comfortable there.”

Dottore groans. He’s tugged up by the harness and laid down on the recamier, naked and scar-strewn across the cushions. For his part, Pantalone has remained almost entirely dressed, tailcoat unbuttoned but still shadowing his shoulders. There’s power in the contrast, but he finds himself longing for the intimacy of skin, so he strips, taking his time, folding his clothes into tidy piles. He pours himself another glass of wine, red splashing into his glass like rubies, flowing bold and rich over his tongue. By the time he returns to the chaise longue, Dottore has already taken to rutting against the cushions, flushed dick leaking all over the brocade.

Crack! The harsh thwack of Pantalone’s hand, hot across Dottore’s ass in reprimand.

“None of that,” he scolds. “You’ll come from my touch or not at all.” Pain, soothed by sweetness, Pantalone feathers a kiss over the reddening mark. “Your suffering is far too irresistible for me to share.”

Pantalone stretches out on the recamier. He shuffles Dottore onto his side so that their bodies are curved in matched parentheses. Skin to skin from chest to calves, the embrace is exquisite. Pantalone sighs deeply, a vaporous exhale, lost in the damp strands of Dottore’s hair.

“Pantalone—”

“Shh.” A cool palm lands on the jut of Dottore’s hip, rubbing in soothing circles. It finds his stomach next, petting gently, then reaches further to cradle Dottore’s cock. For a moment, Pantalone simply holds his fingers there, cupping the throbbing shaft with all the entitlement of a man who considers it to belong in his possession. When Dottore rocks into the touch, it earns him another berating strike to his ass.

Voiceless, Pantalone instructs. It doesn’t take long for Dottore to catch on to the rules of this game.

Dottore stills. After a moment, Pantalone returns his loose grip to Dottore’s dick, the touch light and teasing. Indolently, he traces the bulging vein on the underside, admiring how it twitches under his touch, luxuriating in the flushed heat of silken skin, the translucent droplets of precum that manage to eke out from the sensitive tip. Each stroke is languid, almost absentminded, as if Dottore were merely a stimulating toy to occupy the Regrator’s fingers while his thoughts engaged in more industrious pursuits. But when Dottore’s hips twitch in a bid for friction, that deft hand retreats again.

“I will dismember you,” Dottore growls.

Pantalone only chuckles. Dragging his hand up, he tweaks a still-sore nipple, a sudden lick of fire spreading across Dottore’s chest. His hand is gentle again when it returns to Dottore’s aching length, the touch as soft as ruffled velvet. Slow, so slow, the pumps of Pantalone’s fist must be a terrible tease. Chiffony glides of his fist, fingertips grazing the head. Even with all sensations amplified, it can’t possibly be anywhere near enough.

Too soon, Pantalone feels the torture just as keenly, lured to hardness by soft moans and slow violence. His own dick smears precum over Dottore’s tailbone. It becomes increasingly difficult to stifle his noises of want. Unseen, his eyes go heavy-lidded. His fingers squeeze.

Dottore yelps, near wheezing at the cruel and sudden constriction. Gentleness, turned to its inversion. Firm now, Pantalone’s hand engulfs him. After so much denial, the harsh treatment sends Dottore’s mind into a tailspin. It’s nearly nauseating, this sudden acceleration, the telltale coil in his abdomen.

“You’ve been so good,” Pantalone murmurs. “You’ve certainly earned a reward.”

In that wicked mouth, praise becomes a succulent threat. Goosebumps prickle over Dottore’s skin. He knows something is coming but he isn’t sure what. Pantalone feels the fear grip him through the tremors of his muscles, a crackle of panicked anticipation. He won’t make the Doctor wait much longer.

A malevolent finger rubs at the tender slit at the tip of Dottore’s dick and then Pantalone’s fist works him harder, wrapped tight around the swollen shaft, mercilessly squeezing.

“Come,” Pantalone commands. “Come for me. Now.”

Dottore complies, careening over the edge again as he thrusts into—

Absolutely nothing. His hips meet empty air. Pantalone had drawn his hand away the second Dottore’s body had begun to seize. Untouched, unfilled, Pantalone watches Dottore arch into nothing, his unsatisfied cock spurting out only a few weak drops. It’s a cheap, ungenerous kind of torture, an orgasm hollowed out of pleasure. Dottore can feel the rumble of Pantalone’s wicked laughter at his back.

“Oh, now that was just exquisite. I wish I could have had a better look at your face.”

The glare Dottore casts over his shoulder is lethal. Or, it would have been, if it weren’t for his miserable whimper and the fact that he’s still mindlessly grinding his ass against the hard curve of Pantalone’s dick as though he’s somehow more aroused now than he had been before his paltry climax.

“Your cock,” he gasps. “I want—”

Pantalone rolls Dottore back onto his front, pressing him down into the cushions. A knee nudges his legs apart. Look how gloriously desperate the Doctor is, already lifting his hips to entice Pantalone in. Pantalone contemplates getting up for the oil, but a cursory test of his fingers finds Dottore is still sopping wet from earlier, slick with sweat and cum and oil. Greed overtakes him. He wants to hear Dottore beg again; he wants it with an undistilled covetousness. He can never get enough.

So he folds himself over Dottore’s back, nestling his length in the valley of Dottore’s buttocks, blunt tip catching on his swollen entrance. Pantalone pushes, just enough for Dottore to feel the promise of a stretch, not enough to force his way inside. Dottore rocks back with a whine.

“Is there something you want?” Pantalone asks, all faux innocence. He buries his smirk in Dottore’s hair.

“Hrmph. This again?”

“I have no idea what you mean.” The lie is effortless on Pantalone’s tongue. When he rocks his hips, his cock glides between Dottore’s damp thighs, back and forth, pantomiming what he wants. “You’re all wet! Look, you’ve made such a mess of the upholstery. I ought to fine you for it.”

Dottore’s voice breaks into a snarl as Pantalone’s shaft drags over his aching balls. “You wretched, miserly—”

“Friendly word of advice,” Pantalone interrupts. “It will be easier to get what you want if you ask nicely.”

“Just—ngh. Just take me,” he snarls, jaw clenched. He takes a deep, resentful breath. “Please.”

How he loves that sound! Dizzy with power, Pantalone drags his cockhead over Dottore’s hole, massaging the fluttering ring of muscle. Still, he doesn’t breach it.

“Hmm? Take you how?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“All of a sudden, you don’t want to talk? You’re usually so verbose. All your ostentatious monologues about the principles of research, the merits of scientific rigour.” This time, Pantalone doesn’t bother smothering his huff of laughter. Taunting Dottore always comes so easy at times like this.

“I-I need your cock inside me. Fuck me, please.”

A frisson of bliss. Pantalone drinks down the sounds of Dottore’s supplication like it’s the finest wine—sweet and greedy on the palate, a long finish of desperation lingering at the back of his throat.

“With pleasure.”

Pantalone bottoms out in a single thrust; Dottore quakes from it, clenching around the intrusion. His groan is born more of relief than pleasure.

Once again, Pantalone gives Dottore no time to grow accustomed to the stretch. He pulls back, withdrawing until only the tip is sheathed, and then drives back in without hesitation, pelvis pressed firmly against the swell of Dottore’s ass, reveling in the hot grip that tries to keep him in. Skin slaps against skin. Pantalone’s pace is ripe with purpose, pain-pleasure rattling through Dottore’s bones.

“You could have come to me with your most immodest fantasies.” Pantalone’s words settle over Dottore like a heavy fog. Somehow—an impossible somehow—he manages to sound almost composed, untouched by the ruinous ignition of his hips. “You could have prostrated yourself at my feet and confessed your desires. And I would have slaked them as I have so many times before.” Teeth nip the sharp line of Dottore’s jaw. “But that wasn’t what you wanted, was it?”

A burst of heat. Dottore is a living fire, a blaze stoked by Pantalone’s voice, veins gone molten. It’s the drug, just the drug.

“You can pretend it’s just another experiment gone wrong,” Pantalone murmurs, and Dottore experiences a delirious, delusional fear that Pantalone has somehow entered his mind, as though fucking him so hard and for so long had established a neural link with his subconscious. “But I think you’re far too clever to underestimate me. I think you wanted to see just how monstrous I can be.” Nails dig crescents into Dottore’s hips. “So here I am.”

Incomprehensibly, Pantalone rails Dottore’ harder, so hard Dottore feels it to his teeth. It makes his toes curl, his entire body shudder. Scraped raw, he can’t hold back his punch-out grunt. Ecstasy and agony beyond all reason. The pendulum swings between pain and pleasure, one oscillating to the other, refracting back in an endless hall of mirrors. He screams when Pantalone’s hand slips between him and the couch to squeeze his cock.

Pantalone groans, at the reflexive clench of muscle around him. He leans down, wrenching Dottore’s head to the side.

“Kiss me.”

Their bodies twist, chests heaving, mouths meeting in a death-defying kiss, a spit-slick clash of teeth and lips. The moan that trips from Pantalone’s tongue onto Dottore’s is quickly returned with interest.

Light and dust and chemical lust, the orgasm burns a scorching path right through Dottore. He comes with a reverent sob.

This time, Pantalone is there to catch it. He fucks him through it, tongue plunging past Dottore’s lips to taste his pleasure from the souce, consuming every groan and gasp.

It’s a testament to Pantalone’s self-control that he manages to leash his own orgasm, with nothing more than a few deep breaths and the relaxation of his pelvic floor. When he regains his composure—far, far quicker than Dottore—he begins to rock his hips in small, steady circles, summoning a series of fucked out whimpers into his mouth.

“C-can’t,” Dottore rasps. It’s too much, too soon. Even the aphrodisiac can’t keep up with Pantalone’s monstrous appetites, the demands of his mouth, his hand, his heel, his cock.

“Shh, shh.”

The sweetest kisses feather over Dottore’s cheek, petal-soft and delicate. And still, Pantalone doesn’t stop. He rocks in deeply, incensed by Dottore’s pleas, the jut of his angular hips striking hard enough to bruise.

“A-ah, hah. Too much. I can’t—”

“You can.”

Pantalone circles an arm around Dottore. Fist tight around his harness, he pulls, drawing him upright in defiance of the very concept of gravity. He lifts Dottore until he’s kneeling on the cushions, spine pressed tight to Pantalone’s chest. They’re both glossy with the sweat of exertion, skin flushed and shimmering.

“You’re almost there.” Pantalone shakes the wet curls from his eyes, and presses a kiss to the silvery hairs at Dottore’s temple. Hot and humid, his breath muzzles over Dottore’s ear, before his teeth close around the lobe. When Pantalone smiles, the glass of Dottore’s earring clinks against his teeth, half-full with the evening’s elixir “Just one more. Give me a seventh. You can do that for me, can’t you? It would be divine.”

Seven. Dottore nearly laughs. His head falls back against Pantalone’s shoulder with a groan.

Three pertains to appearance. Four pertains to the intrinsic. Seven, obtained through their overlap, constitute the number of paths for vertical transcendence.

Leave it to Pantalone to turn even this into something sacred.

Death, purification, resurrection—such is their bargain. For years, decades, centuries, they have seen the most visceral filth in one another. They have bowed to it, been torn apart by it, shaping and reshaped in kind. Let every vice become virtue, two sides of the same coin tossed high and twirling. Heads, I win. Tails, you lose. Zeros turn to one. At the end of the day, modern love’s all chemistry. Synthetic, organic, it’s still oxytocin, epinephrine, the d and s of dopamine and serotonin. And there are no lengths to which they wouldn’t go for one another.

Like this, the angle is even better. Pantalone barely even has to thrust at all. He can just grind his hips in sybaritic circles and pleasure sparks over Dottore’s overworked nerves, so acute it burns like pain. Dottore sobs, uselessly reaching back to grab Pantalone’s thighs, seeking an anchor. Every sensation is amplified, magnified, and he’s so far gone, far under, flying as Pantalone’s dick tenderizing his insides.

No one, Pantalone knows with certainty, has ever undone Dottore like this. No one ever will again.

Each thrust feels deeper than the one before. Pantalone mouths at Dottore’s nape, teeth sharp over the atlas of his spine. He licks over his vertebrae, nipping his way to where neck meets shoulder.

“You’re never going to forget this,” he hisses. “You’ll never forget the shape of me inside you. It doesn’t matter where you go—Natlan, Nod-Krai, the infernal leylines themselves. You’ll never forget this.”

Me.

They are breathless and outside of time, no space between them, alive with sensation as they chase another little death.

“You belong to me, Zandik. Today, and everyday after.”

Wanted. Favoured. Adored.

Pantalone bites down. Blood bursts over his tongue, hot and metallic and alive.

And Dottore cries out, arching into the claim of Pantalone’s jaw, as he’s dragged into the undertow of pleasure. He comes, untouched, enough to have the smoke of Pantalone’s words around his ear, the lightning snap of teeth over his veins, the cock fucking him so deep that it erodes the limits of where he begins and ends. Carved and bloodied, he is subsumed, disassembled and made anew by the purest distillation of pain and pleasure.

Used, marked, owned. Possession is nine tenths of the law, after all.

“Yours!” Dottore is beside himself, ravaged by a gut-wrenching euphoria.

More than the sights and sounds and tastes of Dottore, more than the hot clench of his hole milking Pantalone’s cock, it’s this single word that drags Pantalone over the edge of pleasure. Behold the sheer, magnificent transcendence of it all. Exultant, Pantalone fills Dottore up with cum while the mineral ripeness of his blood still coats his tongue. He cries out, vision shattering into starbursts of colour, a scatter of sun flurries as radiant as an epiphany in the bowers of winter. His tongue laps at the wound his teeth had made. Once, twice, three times more, he grinds in deeply, prolonging their shared orgasm until at last the tide retreats, leaving behind a pure and perfect silence.

Satiation swallows what little remains of Dottore’s faculties. In the denouement, he can only mumble a few feeble, incoherent sounds as Pantalone sets him back down onto the cushions in a spent heap, their bodies still intimately joined. Loose-limbed and yielding, Dottore melts into the upholstery. Finally, his cock has gone soft. The relief is blissful in its own right.

Behind him, Pantalone presses a line of kisses to Dottore’s nape, to his shoulders, to the scarred lines of his face. Reverent, worshipful kisses, tasting every inch of skin his mouth can reach, stalking the tracks of tears up to their source. Such lovely tears—they burst like rapture on his tongue.

“That was perfect,” Pantalone murmurs between kisses. “You were perfect.”

Dottore barely manages to stifle his fluster.

Eventually, biology compels them to reckon with what their bodies have endured. Pantalone groans, not with pleasure but from the vicissitudes of middle age. He pulls out with a grimace. In the aftermath, the tacky streaks of cum and oil seem altogether less erotic.One more kiss to Dottore’s mussed hair, and he stands.

After such strenuous affairs, Pantalone’s preference has always been a bath. But Dottore is hardly in a state to be displaced, and Pantalone’s own limbs feel rather shaky. So, he compromises by bringing the bath to them. A bowl of warm, soapy water contends with the worst of it. Pantalone scrubs the trace of fever from Dottore’s skin, the damp from his chiseled cheeks, the blood from where his neck meets shoulder, red rippling out like watercolour. He washes the mess of them from Dottore’s groin with unwavering gentleness; even so, Dottore still groans at the first swipe over his well-used hole.

When they’re clean enough, Pantalone carries off the instruments of their ablutions. He returns with two glasses and a full pitcher of water.

“It isn’t dosed, in case you’re wondering,” he says, eyes curved to mirthful crescents. “Can you sit?”

“Hmph. Don’t flatter yourself. It’d take more than that to break me.”

Dottore’s voice is hoarse beyond recognition, and no doubt it will remain scraped raw for several days. What a pleasing thought.

For all his braggadocio, Dottore’s effort to sit turns out to be more of a slouch, and he makes no protest when Pantalone aids him in bringing the glass of water to his lips. It’s cool and refreshing, soothing his parched throat, and he downs it all in a single go. Wordless, Pantalone refills it and helps him drink, sipping his own glass at a more sedate pace while Dottore dilutes the last of the drug in his system.

When they’re both sated and a little bloated, Pantalone sets the empty glasses on the table. Prisms coruscate across the chessboard, gem-encrusted pawns and bishops gleaming, brilliant white gold and lustrous obsidian. The pieces are strewn across the table, over the rug, warmed by the smouldering embers of the dying fire. Pantalone gathers them up and sets the board to rights, all but for defiled king. Then, he rejoins Dottore on the recamier.

Boneless, Dottore falls easy into his embrace. They sit together in the quiet while the fire dwindles, embers burning low to the ever-present tick, tick, tick. Dottore’s lungs inflate. “Thank you, Fanya.”

Pantalone smiles indulgently at the pet name. A pale palm lifts to Dottore’s face, slender fingers splayed over the planes of his jaw, seeking the symmetry of scars. They meander over down to his neck where a mess of mottled plum and red has bloomed—a posie of bruises from Pantalone’s mouth, his leash, his teeth.

When Dottore finally has strength to lift a hand, he catches Pantalone’s wrist and sets a kiss to the centre of his palm.

Evening unspools and strings stars across the darkened sky. Outside, the snowflakes shimmer, white and weightless, falling obliquely against the distant flame of Kresnik’s Torch. Snow and more snow, it drifts across the nival nation, dusting over its serpentine railways, the treeless hills, dissolving into the churning seas where ice floes bob and chatter. Heavy, it blankets the Winter Palace, its gilded domes and twin belltowers, its iron gates and crystal gardens, sealing the threats of thorns, the fragile beauty of its dormant flowers. Silver snow, immaculate snow, it preserves the moon’s reflection, memories hoarded beneath the hoarfrost, a sepulchre of life and death and time.

In this silent sleeping city, in this quiet whiteout world, the Regrator’s study holds a frozen moment. Glass-bright, the flicker of a snowbird lands upon the windowsill. Peer in, observe, record: a scene caught in the shimmer of a small, shared star. Unlit but for the lustrous glow that pours in through the frosted panes, the silhouettes of the Second and the Ninth lie entwined upon the chaise.

Pantalone’s head rests against Dottore’s chest, tucked under his chin, his cheekbones carved by the fleeting shade of long, slow-blinking lashes. Beneath his ear, Pantalone can hear the steady tick, tick, tick of the Doctor’s heartbeat, returned at last to its metronomic rhythm. By now, Dottore has regained the better part of his command over his person, though his fingers lack their surgical precision. Still, he has enough fine motor control to thread a hand through Pantalone’s hair, caressing the waves with a tenderness that borders on devotion.

Dangerous games. How often they invite their own annihilation.

In the near-dark, Pantalone’s eyes gleam. Like night violets opening by moonrise, they peer upward, blooming over a midnight smile. Even nude, he exudes the confidence of one who dresses in power.

“I was correct in my earlier assessment, wasn’t I?” he says. “About all of it. You counted on my ability to detect your poison in the wine.”

Dottore’s hand stutters in the silken strands—a barely-there twitch. But Pantalone feels it like a current down his spine. Just as swiftly, the fist tightens, wrenching Pantalone’s head back. It drags his neck into a lovely arch, a lick of moonlight catching fetchingly on the pale column of his throat, on the strain of tendons and ligaments.

“Careful,” Dottore warns. “Or I might begin to think that you’re suffering from a guilty conscience.”

“An ill-advised hypothesis if ever there was one.” Pantalone’s laughter curls between their lips like smoke. “I seldom suffer that particular affliction.”

They’re so close that Dottore feels the words against his mouth, a ghostly, insubstantial kiss. “The inability to feel remorse is a defining indicator of psychopathy, you know.”

“Is that a clinical assessment? Or are you speaking from experience?”

“Merely stating a fact. Although I would be happy to provide a comprehensive psychological assessment.” Dottore releases his grip on Pantalone’s hair in favour of dancing his fingers over the delicate chain of his glasses. “Really find out what makes you tick.”

“You know quite enough already. At any rate, it would be a superfluous exercise. Capitalism, at its most effective, only rewards those who lack empathy.” Silver twinkles, twisted around Dottore’s finger. Its reflection shines like starlight in Pantalone’s teasing eyes, glittering over an enigmatic smile. “And I consider myself a very capable financier.”

Dottore snickers. “That’s putting it politely.”

“What’s far more intriguing,” Pantalone continues, undeterred, “is the question of your motivations. I’ll confess: I’m rather charmed by the lengths to which you’ll go to place yourself at my mercy.” He shakes his head in mock exasperation. “And people say I’m the schemer.”

Dottore barks out a laugh. “I daresay that title has been well-earned, along with your many other sobriquets.”

“Still,” Pantalone smiles in kind, teeth gleaming in the low light. “What kind of man lets such a thing happen to him?”

Dottore takes Pantalone’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, tipping his head up. He swipes over the plush swell of a lower lip. “Your kind.”

“Oh, Zandik.” Those tendrils again, twisting around Pantalone’s sternum until he aches. Vaporous, his voice goes hushed with worship. “I would have gladly fucked you, had you simply asked.”

Dottore vanishes the little space between them. He swallows Pantalone’s sound of surprise—delighted, delightful—and uses it to coax his way into his mouth. His tongue licks past Pantalone’s lips, stroking softly, slowly, unhurried, unrushed. It feels almost like a kiss meant just to be a kiss, guileless and without artifice, almost innocent—or, as innocent a kiss can be when they can still taste the trace of the other’s lust upon their tongues. A bounty of kisses, Dottore kisses Pantalone with unfamiliar generosity, memorizing the sloped shape of his upper lip, the tender curve of the lower. Enthralled, entranced, Pantalone syncopates to the rhythm.

When they part, Pantalone’s mouth tingles.

Foolish, dangerous games.

By the mercurial snowlight, Pantalone takes Dottore in by fractions: the austere ridges of his brow; his sovereign nose; the bruised curve of his lower lip. Red eyes turned wine-dark in the night; half-lidded and luminous, they brim with familiar feeling.

“How long before you leave for Nod-Krai?” he asks.

“Two days.”

Pantalone’s heartbeat quickens with a bargain on his lips. He’s testing his own limits as much as Dottore’s, playing a little too much of his hand. But the lingering glow of pleasure makes him daring, and prudence’s wisdom cedes ground to the folly of affection.

“Make it three and stay with me tonight. After all this, you must be hungry. Allow me to take you to dinner.” His voice is coy, his touches teasing, a single finger curled around Dottore’s collar. He takes Dottore’s lower lip between his teeth and tugs. “If you’re good, I’ll let you spike my wine for real this time.”

Whiplash—a flex of muscle, and Dottore reverses their positions. Pantalone’s back sinks into the soiled cushions, hair cascading off the chaise in a luscious fall of obsidian. Another laugh lifts from his chest, a genuine laugh, the kind that anyone might make. He feels buoyant, alive. Above him, Dottore hovers, propped up on his forearms. His own eyes are alight with interest, incisors flashing in the seconds before his head dips down.

“My, that’s quite the gambit,” he murmurs to the underside of Pantalone’s jaw.

A gambit, but a sound one. It procures a concession, a confession, the confirmation of Pantalone’s suspicions: even the ascetic Doctor can be taken in, for a price. In the end, they’re both compromised, embedded in the dark recesses of the other’s soul.

Lower, Dottore’s mouth drags over Pantalone’s throat. Sharp teeth scrape the apple of his larynx, and Dottore bites down, tasting the pattern of a pulse beneath his tongue, the evocative ripple of Pantalone’s swallow. His answer, when it comes, is already known.

“Very well, you ravenous harlot. I accept.”