#genshin fatui

0- The Jester

Pierro embraces you the way he did five hundred years ago.

Long ago, you had planned this. Planned the way you would go out together.

You would both share any final regrets, secrets, and grievances you had left unsaid.

For the two of you, burdened by immortality, this is a farewell to the world long overdue.

But when the day comes, The Jester, the formidable director of the Fatui, is unable to find it in himself to remain stoic and composed.

He embraces you, and this time he knows it will be the final one.

1- The Captain

Capitano, no, Thrain, weeps.

He weeps not for himself, but for you, you who had yet to see the flowers of the next spring, you who had yet to see one’s own child grow.

As he holds you, he will let himself be comforted. For once in his life, he allows himself vulnerability.

And as it ends, you wipe the tears from his rotted face and tell him how beautiful he is.

2- The Doctor

Zandik fights until it is too late.

Il Dottore is a heretic, and a defier of fate. He spends what could have been his final moments with you studying, searching, and resisting.

Zandik, yet to profess his love to anyone, Zandik, yet to call someone his own, oh, Zandik.

And, when he finally realises that there is nothing he can do, he looks back at your face and realises it is too late.

3- The Damslette

Columbina holds you and sings a lament to the moon.

She sings a final lullaby to send off the world, softening the end with gentle sleep.

She strokes your cheek, allowing her eyes to open at last.

And as a single tear falls down her face, she gasps as she witnesses the world’s, and your beauty for the first and final time.

4- The Knave

When the time comes, Peruere softens and allows weakness into the House of the Hearth.

Arlecchino sends the children for a day off, allowing candy and muddy boots in bedrooms.

She will gather you and the children, and read a storybook for them all, no matter their age.

She couldn’t bring herself to tell the children.

So, as she allows herself one final moment of softness, she tells the children how much she loves them, and she closes her eyes for the last time in your embrace.

5- The Rooster

Together with you, Pulcinella will reminisce.

He will sit with you in front of the fire, leafing through old diaries, photo albums, letters.

You will laugh together, weep together, and sit close like teenagers in love.

You’ll speak about what comes next, in your next life, and as always, it’s always together, the both of you together.

You’ll hold his hand and giggle at photos until it all ends.

6- The Balladeer

Scaramouche will allow himself to be held, and allow himself fear.

Long ago, Scaramouche hid away the part of him called Kunikuzushi. With it, he hid his fear, and there it had stayed.

Now, in your arms, he feels fear. And he allows it. He knows you fear too. But, he knows as well, that you hide it for him.

And you hide it well.

You sing him that simple Inazuman rhyme that mothers sing to children at bedtime. Kunikuzushi allows himself tears.

7- The Marionette

Sandrone feels warmth for the last time.

In her cold, unfeeling body, Sandrone has kept herself the same. Cold, unfeeling and unpleasant to all.

So why, did you allow this puppet to feel what was reserved for humanity?

She had just begun to cherish this feeling in her chest, a warmth not unlike what a true heart might be.

And now, she holds onto that warmth until the very end.

8- The Fair Lady

Rosalyne was not allowed her own goodbyes before. She will hold onto this one for as long as she can, despite the pain stabbing her fingers.

Signora will draw out her final moments with you for as long as possible. She will speak out loud every thought she has on you, listing everything she loves about you, and everything she wishes she could have done with you.

She may hold regrets from her past, but she will not allow the past to create regrets in the present.

She will hold you to her burning heart, and kiss you as the world is set on fire.

9- The Regrator

Pantalone will set it all aside, and sit with you by a river.

Pantalone will enjoy the sound of running water, the feeling of grass under his hands, the taste of you on his lips.

He will remember the times spent at this very spot before it all, before the Mora, the status, the pain.

You will smile at him with that dazzle in your eyes like you always have, and he will feel like a boy again.

10- ???

They wish they could be by your side, one last time.

11- Childe

Ajax will bring you to meet his family.

Watching you play with his siblings, Tartaglia wishes he could see the family you could have had together. He wishes he could see a child of his own grow without troubles. He wishes he could grow old with you, without the fighting, and the Fatui.

So instead, he’ll settle with popping up behind you and surprising you, laughing with his brothers and sisters while you scold him, pretending to be a happy family.

The storm in Snezhnaya had no interest in mercy, and neither, generally, did he.

Dottore moved through the snow storm with the brisk indifference of a man crossing a room he was familiar with. Snezhnaya’s winters were an inconvenience to be routed around, not endured, and his escort trailed a careful distance behind, having long since learned not to speak unless spoken to. The mission ahead was unremarkable. A supply route to confirm, a facility to inspect, nothing that required his full attention, which was, admittedly, why he noticed it.

A flicker of black against the white.

He might have dismissed it– a bird? Driven low and vulnerable by the wind, it was hardly worth the fraction of a glance he spared it, except that the shape was wrong. It moved wrong. It didn’t so much fly as fold, mid-motion, the way a variable folds when an equation resolves itself, and where a human had been stumbling through the drifts a blink ago, there was now a small, dark thing curled low against the snow, feathers driven flat one moment and puffed the next, some instinctive system trying and failing, to gather heat it did not have to spare.

Dottore stopped walking.

His escort nearly collided with his back and had the sense not to ask why.

He watched for a moment, longer than concern would have permitted, longer than urgency would have allowed. Not out of hesitation, hesitation was for people who had not already finished the calculation, but because there was, he found, a certain professional obligation to observe a specimen accurately before disturbing it. THe shift had not looked deliberate. No control in it, just seemed like a survival instinct.

He pondered what he could from his position: the size of the creature, different to any true bird, the way the feathers seemed to belong to it rather than replace something, patterned like an afterthought grafted onto a body that had, moments ago, with two legs. The traits of a hybrid shapeshifter would explain the phenomenon.

He had read reports of such things. He had never had the good fortune of finding one just in front of him.

“How unfortunate,” he said, to no one, and began working toward it.

He crouched, unbothered by the snow soaking into the hem of his coat, and studied it the way he might study anything half-alive and full of questions.

“You’ve made rather a mess of yourself,” he said,

“Tsk, freezing to death mid-transformation. Sloppy. Though I suppose you weren’t given much choice in the matter.”

No response. Only the faint ragged movement of feathers trying, hopelessly, to hold in the warmth that had already mostly gone.

Dottore considered, briefly, the shape of the decision infront of him, not should he, which was never really the question, but was it worth it? A shapeshifter, found alive, however in a critical state, was not the sort of variable one encountered twice. Leaving it here would settle the matter cheaply and immediately. Taking it would cost him time, resources, the responsibility of carrying something half-frozen back to a facility that had better things to process today.

The greater loss, he thought, was letting the data die in the snow.

“Well,” he said, already reaching for it with efficiency, “Let’s see how much of you is left to examine.”

He did not gather it up with his both hands, did not cradle it against his coat the way any human might have. He simply peeled off one glove, slid his bare palm beneath the small, half-frozen crow. It weighed almost nothing. That, too, he noted.

The crow curled instinctively into the warmth of his palm, feathers pressing flat against his skin, too far gone to do anything but accept the heat it was given. He held it there, level and unhurried, one hand outstretched before him as he resumed walking to his laboratory.

The warmth felt nothing like kindness.

__________________________________

Warmth came back before thought did.

You opened your eyes just to see a faint stray of light coming in. It was not sunlight, or fire light. It seemed like a surgical light..?

You tried to sit up and noticed, with a small jolt of alarm, that you could not.

You were, you realized with growing horror, still a crow. Small, black, undignified, nested in what appeared to be. You took a moment to process this, the folded corner of an expensive coat on a table that was absolutely not designed to be a bed.

Shift back, you told yourself, the way you’d told yourself a thousand times before.

Nothing happened.

Suddenly, the creaking sound of the white door echoed through the unfamiliar room, with a tall masked man with silver-blue hair entering.

“Ah. Awake.”

The voice sounded entirely too pleased with itself of a sentence with so little content. You went very still, every feather on your small figure rising at once and turned your head toward the source of sound.

He was seated an unhurried distance away, one leg crossed over the other, a notebook balanced against his knee. Red eyes beneath the pointy mask, unreadable, tracked you with the same clinical patience you imagined he might give a slide under a microscope. There was nothing in his expression that resembled relief, or welcome, or anything you might have wanted to see from the person who had dragged your half-frozen body out of the storm.

“Don’t strain yourself trying to change back,” he said, before you’d so much as attempted it again, as though your thoughts were as transparent to him.

“You’ve been at it for the better part of an hour already. Rather embarrassing, watching something struggle.”

You opened your beak, some urge to snap back at him, but produced nothing but a thin croak.

Something in his mouth curved, not quite a smile. “How articulate.”

He placed the notebook aside, and approached the table with slow, deliberate steps, the way one might approach something skittish they had no interest in startling, not out of kindness, you understood immediately, but because startled specimens tended to produce less reliable data.

“You’ll forgive me for skipping the formalities.” he said, leaning down until his shadow fell fully over your small, feathered form. “Names are better exchanged once I’m confident you’ll survive long enough for them to matter, For now-” he reached out, tilting your chin up with one gloved finger, turning your head this way and that. “Let’s see exactly what I’ve brought.”

_________________________________________

The first month, you escaped thirty-seven times.

The first attempt was clumsy. The second, ambitious. By the seventh, you had discovered that the laboratory possessed more hidden corridors than doors, and that the guards, though well-trained, had the unfortunate habit of assuming a crow incapable of understanding architectural layouts.

The thirty-seventh ended much like the first thirty-six.

The laboratory door slid open.

“.....Finished?”

You froze atop a bookshelf

Dottore stood beneath you, a stack of reports tucked between one arm. He sounded neither irritated nor amused. Merely curious. You stared. He stared back.

“Well?”

A long silence. Then, with all the dignity available to an exhausted crow, you fluttered down onto the desk. He made a note.

Escape attempt 37

-subject returned voluntarily.

-reason remains uncertain.

He never once wrote your name. Only Subject, followed by a number that changed less often than you'd have liked. He logged your feeding schedule, your shift frequency, the days you refused to speak in either form. He logged, once, the exact moment you stopped trying to leave, though whatever conclusion he drew from that, he kept entirely to himself.

Months passed. The escapes stopped being counted, mostly because they stopped happening. You learned the rhythm of him the way you'd once learned the ventilation shafts, instinctively, without meaning to, which reports he wanted first, which tools he reached for without looking, until it became easier to simply have things ready than to wait to be asked. "Scalpel," he said one afternoon, and it was already in his hand before the word had finished leaving his mouth. He paused, not gratitude, nothing so generous ever crossed his face around you, turning the instrument over as if it might explain itself, then looked at you the way he looked at anomalies in his data. "You anticipated that." "You always ask for it after the second incision," you told him. He said nothing further, but he watched you a moment longer than the observation strictly required, and something in his expression resembled a man quietly recalculating a variable he'd assumed was fixed.

It was around then that you found the error in his notes, a miscalculated variable buried three pages into a report, easy to miss unless you'd spent months learning the particular shape of his mistakes, which were rare enough to be memorable. You corrected it in the margin, small and unsigned, and braced for nothing to come of it. He said nothing the next morning either. But the notebook started staying open after that, not handed to you, not offered, simply left, angled just slightly toward whichever chair you tended to occupy, as though by accident. It hadn't been. Neither of you said so.

The first mission came without much ceremony. "You're coming with me," he said, already halfway out the door, and when you asked why, he told you he needed a pair of hands that wouldn't faint at the sight of exposed viscera, and that you were, unfortunately, the only candidate who met that bar reliably. That was the reason he gave. You didn't ask for another, you understood by then that whatever this had become would always be filed under usefulness in his ledger, never anything softer. You went anyway.

Somewhere in the months that followed, without ceremony or announcement, the notebook changed. You noticed it by accident, glancing at a page left open longer than usual, an entry dense with clinical shorthand, except for one line near the bottom, where Subject C-17 had quietly become your name instead. No footnote. No explanation. As if the correction had simply always been there and you were the one behind on the update. You said nothing. He never brought it up. But you found yourself rereading that single line more times than the occasion warranted, and somewhere beneath the part of you that still remembered thirty-seven escape attempts, something settled that hadn't settled in a very long while.

It was Pantalone who noticed first, out loud. "You still have the crow?" he asked lightly, glancing your way like a curiosity left over from some indulgent phase of Dottore's research, which, to be fair, was exactly how you'd started. Dottore didn't look up from his notes. "She's assisting with the project." "Interesting," Pantalone said, in the tone of a man filing something away for later amusement. Dottore didn't understand why that was amusing. Watching from the corner of the room, you thought you might.

After that, he stopped leaving you behind for meetings he once wouldn't have dreamed of bringing an assistant to. You attended in your smaller form, perched on his shoulder like an afterthought he'd forgotten to correct, silent through hours of politics you had no formal right to witness. He never announced why. When Sandrone glanced pointedly at you during the third such meeting, he only said, without looking up from his notes, that you were quieter than most of the room and considerably more useful, which ended the conversation, though not the glances.

The Harbingers, to their credit, adjusted quickly. Arlecchino barely acknowledged you at all, treating your presence the way she treated most things beneath her direct concern, noted, filed, dismissed. Scaramouche found you endlessly, openly funny, and made no effort to hide it.

"The Doctor's got a pet now," he said once, loud enough to carry across the table, "how domestic." Dottore didn't dignify it with a response, though you felt his shoulder tense fractionally beneath you, which you decided to count as a victory. Childe, for his part, seemed genuinely delighted by you in a way that made Dottore visibly suspicious of his motives, and took to greeting you by name, your name, not Subject, not the crow, every time you entered a room, as though testing to see whether Dottore would correct him. He never did.

It was Pantalone who pressed hardest, and always with that same unbothered smile. "Does it understand what we discuss," he asked once, mid-meeting, tone light enough to pass for idle curiosity, "or is it merely decorative?" "She understands considerably more than most people at this table," Dottore replied, flatly, already returning to his notes, "which I'd have thought was self-evident by now." A small silence followed. Pantalone's smile didn't falter, but something behind it recalculated. You stayed very still on Dottore's shoulder and said nothing, because saying nothing had always been safer, and because some small, traitorous part of you had liked the way he'd answered, quick, unthinking, almost defensive, in a way that a purely clinical arrangement had no real reason to be.

He never seemed to notice he'd done it. You noticed enough for both of you.

It started as research. He arrived one afternoon with a small dish of mixed nuts set beside his usual instruments, informing you, without a trace of irony that he intended to observe whether corvid dietary preference persisted across your forms. You indulged him, mostly out of curiosity about what he'd do with the data. He recorded which ones you picked first, which you ignored, which you cracked open yourself versus which you left for him to shell, and none of it, as far as you could tell, ever made it into any report that mattered. The "study" simply never concluded. Weeks became months, and the dish kept appearing, always with slightly more of whatever you'd reached for first the time before, and slightly less of what you'd left untouched. He never once admitted the experiment had ended. You never pointed out that it clearly had.

Around the same time, he began noticing the other habit, the one you were less inclined to explain. A stray bit of foil, a polished button, the glass stopper from an old vial, all of it accumulating in some corner of your quarters that you told yourself was simply organized, not hoarded. He found the collection by accident and said nothing cruel about it, which surprised you more than mockery would have. He only made a note :specimen retains magpie-adjacent fixation on reflective objects, function unclear, possibly ornamental.

Except the notebook was lying, a little. Because not long after, small things started appearing in places you hadn't put them. A smooth, dark stone, catching the light strangely. A fragment of mirrored glass, sanded soft at the edges so it wouldn't cut. None of it explained, none of it acknowledged, all of it simply present the next time you looked. You started leaving things back, without meaning to at first,a curled wire twisted into some rough, deliberate shape, a coin from some country neither of you had been to. He never commented on those either. You both understood, by then, exactly what the exchange was, and exactly why neither of you would be the one to name it first.

The trouble started with Childe.

He asked casually enough needed an extra set of hands for a task in Liyue, something involving negotiations that required more finesse than force, and you, in his words, had "a good read on people, for a bird." Dottore didn't answer immediately. When he did, it was with the same flat, procedural tone he used for everything. "She's occupied with my research. Find someone else."

"She's not a piece of lab equipment, Doctor," Childe said, grinning in a way that suggested he knew exactly what nerve he was testing. "Let her answer for herself."

You opened your mouth. Dottore spoke first.

"She doesn't need to. I've already answered."

The room went quiet in the particular way it did whenever he said something that revealed more than he meant it to. Pantalone, watching from across the table, said nothing at all, which was somehow worse than if he had. Childe raised both hands in mock surrender and let it go, but not without one last look your way, amused, calculating, filing the reaction away for later the same way Pantalone had.

Dottore didn't look at you for the rest of the meeting. You noticed his hand had settled, at some point, on the back of your chair not touching you, not quite, but closer than procedure required, and it stayed there long after any reasonable justification for it had run out. When you finally caught his eye, he looked, for just a moment, faintly annoyed not at Childe, not at you, but at himself, at the shape of whatever he'd just let slip in front of a room full of people who'd remember it.

He didn't explain himself later. He never did. But that night the dish of nuts appeared again, unprompted, with exactly the kind you liked best already sorted to the top, and neither of you said a single word about what that meant.

The order came directly from the Tsaritsa, which meant there was no version of refusal available to him. You were to accompany Sandrone to Sumeru, to retrieve something the Akademiya had buried deep enough that a subtler pair of hands was required than his usual methods allowed and subtlety, everyone at the table seemed to silently agree, was not among Dottore's more reliable qualities.

He didn't argue. Arguing with a direct order from her was not a mistake he'd ever make twice. But you caught the stillness that settled over him when the assignment was read aloud the same stillness you'd learned, by now, meant something was being suppressed rather than simply absent.

"Two weeks," Sandrone said mildly, already gathering his notes. "Perhaps three."

"I'm aware of the estimated timeline," Dottore said, in a tone flat enough to cut. He didn't look at you. You didn't need him to.

That night, before you left, he said almost nothing useful a list of standard precautions, a reminder to report any anomalous data, nothing that acknowledged what the separation actually was. But he pressed something small into your palm before you go, wordlessly, without ceremony: not a farewell, not affection, just a habit he seemed to need to complete before he could let you leave his sight, and you understood, without either of you saying it, that this was as close to be careful as he was ever going to get.

Sumeru was strange in a way you hadn't expected not the climate, which was gentler than Snezhnaya in every conceivable way, but the sense of walking through a place that had shaped someone you knew without ever having said so. You found yourself noticing things you had no real reason to notice. A particular shade of sandstone. The layout of old Akademiya corridors, half-reclaimed by the forest, that felt, absurdly, like the kind of place a much younger, much angrier version of him might have once walked through unnoticed.

You found the trinket in an abandoned research annex. Sandrone had no interest in a small brass instrument, delicate and old, some kind of measuring device whose function you couldn't fully place, etched with faded Sumeru script along its edge. It caught the light in a way that made your fingers itch before you'd even decided to pick it up. You told yourself it was simply a habit. You didn't entirely believe it.

You didn't decide to bring it back for him until you were already halfway home.

Sandrone noticed, of course. She noticed everything, in that quiet, clinical way of hers that made you suspect she filed people the same way Dottore filed data. She watched you turn the little brass instrument over in your hands more than once during the return trip, watched you wrap it carefully before you'd even reached the border, and said nothing about it until you were both standing in the doorway of his study, waiting to be acknowledged.

"How curious," she said, not quite looking at you, not quite looking at him. "Y/N randomly picked up some old, forgotten thing in the middle of an assignment." A pause, deliberate. "It's rather surprising she wanted to gift it to you, out of all people. How strange."

There was no warmth in it. You'd gathered by then that there rarely was, where Dottore was concerned whatever history sat between them, it clearly hadn't left room for particular fondness. Dottore didn't rise to it. He rarely did, with her.

"Was there a report to file, or did you simply come to observe," he said, without looking up from his notes, "because I don't recall requesting commentary on either."

Sandrone's mouth curved, thin and unbothered. "No report worth mentioning. The mission was uneventful." Her gaze slid to you, briefly, unreadable. "Mostly."

She left without waiting for a response, the door falling shut behind her with a quiet, unhurried click, and it was only once her footsteps had faded down the corridor that the room settled.

He was waiting when you returned, not visibly, not obviously, He didn't ask about the mission first. He asked, instead, with a carefully measured indifference that didn't fool you in the slightest, whether Sumeru had been "tolerable."

You held out the instrument instead of answering.

He went very still.

He took it slowly, turning it over in his hands the way he examined everything, clinically, at first, cataloguing its make, its age, the faded scriptwork along the edge until his thumb found a small, worn inscription near the base, and something in his expression shifted into territory you'd never once seen it occupy. Not detachment. Not amusement. Something quieter, and much harder for him to hold steady.

"Where did you find this," he said. It wasn't quite a question.

"An old annex. It looked forgotten." You hesitated. "I thought-" you stopped yourself, unsure, suddenly, how much of the truth you were willing to hand him along with the object. "I thought it might mean something. To you."

He didn't answer right away. He was still looking at the inscription, thumb tracing it once more as though checking it hadn't changed since the first pass, and when he finally looked up at you, the distance he usually kept so carefully maintained between observation and feeling had, for once, entirely failed to hold.

"It does," he said, quietly, and offered nothing further to explain it no clinical justification, no rationalization dressed as data, nothing to file this under but exactly what it was.

For the first time since the snow, he reached for you the way you'd once reached for shiny, precious things without meaning to not out of usefulness, not out of ownership, but because some part of him had apparently decided, somewhere between the storm and this moment, that he wanted to.

The mission after that one went wrong in a way none of you had accounted for.

It wasn't catastrophic, you'd walk away from it, you knew that much even as it was happening, but a blade caught you across the ribs before you could shift clear, and by the time you made it back to the lab, your human form was shaking too hard to be useful and your crow form wasn't an option, not with a wound that size. You didn't remember much of the walk back. You remembered his hands.

He didn't send for anyone else. That, more than anything, told you how seriously he was taking it. Dottore, who delegated everything that didn't personally interest him, doing the cleaning and stitching himself, sleeves pushed back, face unreadable in the particular way it went when he needed complete focus. His hands were steady at first, clinical, exactly as precise as you'd expect from a man who'd done far worse to far less willing patients. He didn't speak much. He didn't need to; the quiet was its own kind of attention, the sort he rarely gave anything that wasn't a problem worth solving.

Somewhere in the middle of it, though, cleaning a cut that had already stopped bleeding, checking a bandage that didn't need checking again, his hands stopped being quite so steady.

You noticed before he did, or maybe he noticed and simply didn't stop. His fingers lingered at the edge of the bandage a beat too long, tracing skin that had nothing left to examine, and when you looked up at him, he wasn't looking at the wound anymore.

"You should rest," he said, low, though he made no move to step back.

"You're not moving," you pointed out.

Something flickered behind his eyes, irritation, maybe, at being caught, or at himself, for the same reason as always. "I'm making sure the wound is properly closed."

"It's already closed."

He didn't have an answer for that. For the first time since you'd known him, he didn't reach for one.

You could have let the silence hold. You didn't.

The surgical lamp hummed, a steady, droning vibration that echoed the throb in your ribs. The world tasted of copper and sterile alcohol. Everything felt distant, as if the room were viewed through a thick sheet of frosted glass. The anesthesia clung to your mind like wet wool, heavy and suffocating, turning your thoughts into slow, drifting clouds.

Dottore leaned into your line of sight. His mask caught the harsh white light, splitting his face into a void of porcelain and shadow. He didn't move. He simply watched, his gaze tracing the rise and fall of your chest with the precision of a clockmaker.

"Can you hear me?"

The words sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a well. You tried to nod, but your neck felt like it belonged to someone else. A small, broken sound escaped her throat.

"Focus. I need to know the level of cognitive impairment remaining."

He reached out, his gloved fingers pressing firmly against your cheeks. The coldness of the latex was a shock, a sharp needle of reality piercing through the fog. He shifted, his weight leaning over you, the scent of ozone and expensive chemicals enveloping her.

"You're drifting," he noted. His voice had lost its clinical edge, it had dipped into something lower, a resonant vibration that seemed to hum against your skin. "The sedative is still saturated in your bloodstream. Your heart rate is elevated. Interesting."

You blinked, your eyelashes heavy. You tried to lift a hand to push him back, but your arm felt like lead, flopping uselessly against the metal table.

"I... can't..."

"I know you can't."

He didn't pull away. Instead, his hand slid down, tracing the line of your jaw, then dipping lower to the edge of the bandages wrapping your torso. He didn't touch the wound, but his fingers lingered on the healthy skin just beside it.

"You were reckless," he murmured. "A lapse in judgment. A variable I hadn't accounted for."

"Did I... fix it?"

"The wound is closed. The internal bleeding stopped. You are, physically, a success."

He paused. The silence in the lab grew heavy, thick with a tension that felt different from the sterile atmosphere of the surgery. Dottore’s breathing shifted, becoming rhythmic and shallow. He moved his hand, sliding it beneath the hem of the thin hospital gown, his palm flat against the warmth of her stomach.

You shivered. The sensation was magnified by the drugs, every touch feeling like a lightning strike across a numb landscape. You tried to speak, to ask what he was doing, but the words dissolved into a hazy sigh.

"Your skin is flushed," Dottore whispered, his face inches from hers. "A systemic reaction to the trauma, or perhaps a response to the stimulus. I find myself wondering which."

"Dottore... stop..."

"Hm, should I?"

He didn't stop. He shifted his position, stepping between your sprawled legs, the heavy fabric of his coat brushing against your thighs. The movement was deliberate, devoid of the usual clinical haste. He looked at you really looked at you, not as a specimen or an assistant, but as something he intended to consume.

"You've spent months learning my rhythms, y/n. You've corrected my notes. You've anticipated my needs."

He leaned down, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. The heat of his breath contrasted sharply with the chill of the room.

"Now, I want to see how you react to a variable you cannot anticipate."

His hand moved higher, his fingers grazing the underside of your breast. You gasped, your back arching instinctively. The anesthesia made the pleasure feel distorted, an overwhelming wave that crashed over you without warning, stripping away your ability to resist. You felt the world tilt, the white ceiling spinning as he captured your mouth in a kiss that tasted of desperation and dominance, blowing your mind away.

It wasn't a gentle kiss. It was a claim. He tasted of iron and obsession.

Dottore pulled back just enough to look into your glazed eyes. His pupils were blown wide, swallowing the red of his irises.

"Tell me you want this," he commanded. "Fight through the fog. Give me a conscious response." He was completely aware that you did not have the strength to protest.

You struggled. You wanted to say no, to reclaim the boundary he was systematically erasing. However, your body was screaming for something else, your hole clenching around nothing and your mind going more cloudy not because of the anesthesia, but the intimacy you are in. The warmth of him was the only thing keeping the cold of the lab at bay. The bond you guys had built, the shared silences, the hidden gifts, the unspoken trust, warped under the pressure of the moment. Your hand, trembling and weak, managed to clutch at the lapel of his coat, pulling him closer.

"Please..."

"Please what?"

"Just... don't leave."

A dark, triumphant sound vibrated in his chest. He stripped away the remaining barriers of cloth with a sudden, violent efficiency. The air hit her skin, cold and biting, before he replaced it with the crushing weight of his body.

He did not waste time entertaining you with his tip, and pushed his length all the way inside you.

You cried out, the sound echoing off the walls. It was too much, the pain in your ribs, the haze in your mind, and the sudden, invasive fullness of him. He froze for a second, his muscles locked, his forehead resting against yours.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes-..," you whispered, your voice so vulnerable, near to crying.

"Good."

He began to move, a steady, punishing rhythm that mirrored the precision of his research. Each thrust was a calculation, designed to elicit a specific response. He watched your face, his eyes tracking every flicker of pleasure and pain, as if he were recording the data in real-time.

"Your pupils are dilating. Your respiration is erratic."

He gripped your hips, his fingers digging into your skin, bruising the pale flesh. He wasn't being careful anymore. The mask of the Doctor had slipped, leaving behind a man driven by a hunger that no amount of knowledge could satisfy.

"You are the only thing in this facility that doesn't bore me," he groaned, his voice breaking for the first time. "The only variable that refuses to be solved."

As you parted your lips to gasp for air, he captured them with his, giving you no room to breathe. It was messy and almost like a predator devouring its prey.

You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. The fog in her mind began to clear, replaced by a strong desire for release. You could feel the friction, the heat, the way your breaths mingled in the chilled air. You stopped being a subject. You stopped being an assistant. In the wreckage of the moment, you were simply two broken things colliding in the dark.

“Ngh- Doctor I-..!”

Dottore gently wiped the single tear trailing down your cheek and arranged your strands of hair.

“Shh.. Not yet. You can hold it in for a bit, can't you?”

After few moments, the doctor's movements accelerated vigorously, hinting an immediate need for orgasm.

“Come for me,” he groaned in the crook of your neck as he slapped into you faster. “I- I’m close.”

As the climax hit, it felt like a physical blow. You clung to him, your nails scratching into his back, your world narrowing down to the point where your bodies met. Dottore let out a low, guttural sound, his body shuddering as he collapsed against you, his weight pinning you to the table.

For a long time, neither of you moved. The only sound was the hum of the surgical lamp and their ragged, synchronized breathing.

Dottore eventually shifted, pulling away slowly. He didn't offer a hand to help you up, nor did he apologize. He stood and began to dress, his movements returning to their usual, effortless composure. He reached for his mask, sliding it back into place, the porcelain void returning to hide his expression.

He looked down at you, lying breathless and shattered on the metal table.

"The recovery period will now be extended," he said, his voice once again flat and clinical. "I'll need to monitor the effects of the physical exertion on your sutures."

You watched him, her chest heaving. The haze was gone, and in its place was a terrifyingly clear understanding of what you were to each other.

"Was that part of the research?" You asked, your voice raw.

Dottore paused at the door, his silhouette sharp against the hall light as he looked back to you over his shoulders.

"No," he replied. "That was for me."