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It’s late enough for the white glow of the full moon to be unsettling. It’s a comfort, typically, a scrap of light in the infinite winter darkness, but it flickers now through the old stained glass, casting shadows that seem to creep and crawl over the walls, dancing to the whistle of the blizzard winds.
The stone beneath Pantalone’s boots clacks and echoes with his every step down the length of the corridor, and the creak of the heavy steel door when he pulls it open grates against his nerves like a hacksaw.
There’s a string of old, little electric lanterns lining the curved path down the steep stairwell, and it hums like a swarm of insects. It’s a drone that seems to grow louder the further down he gets, the more the suffocating air smells of mildew and stale blood, and it further kindles that uncomfortable tightness in the space between his ribs.
Dottore’s been missing for days. Missed a meeting, too, just that afternoon, and that absence in particular served as the catalyst that drove Pantalone here. Dottore's truly become one with the shithole he spends all his time in, buried beneath gears and fizzling test tubes. It truly has been too long. It was a comfort, the realization that Pantalone’s not been overreacting, that he hasn’t been imagining just how cold his bed has grown, and a nudge to action.
The instant he pushes open the door at the base of the steps and enters the laboratory, he’s hit with a wall of permeating chill. His breath clouds instantly before him in translucent, little puffs.
A mechanical whirring sounds from somewhere, clicking and creaking. The final notes of a frantic classical piano piece play from the imposing gramophone stood up on a crate against the furthest wall, repeating and scratching and looping, and scratching and looping, the record damaged and stuck in its violent death throes.
Valiantly, Pantalone ignores it. He walks to the center of the lab and turns the corner. He knows where to go, where to look.
Dottore, as expected, is slumped across his desk over a pile of notes: singed and stained and torn in too many places to count. Pantalone leans carefully forward to peer at them. Dottore’s handwriting has always been surprisingly neat, though entirely illegible: shorthand and pictograms and arrows directing the reader from one corner of the page to the next, from a scribbled formula to an afterthought hidden in the margins, notations only a lab assistant born from Dottore’s own mind could hope to understand.
One arm cushions Dottore’s head, crushing his mask to his face, the other hanging limply in his lap. It’s a pathetic sight. He’s always such a pathetic sight.
There’s a vial of something caustic spilled across the far end of the desk, the sticky amber rivulets flowing sluggishly as though alive, slithering and squirming dangerously close to Dottore’s matted mess of hair.
He’s too fond of it, Pantalone decides, that soft rat’s nest, to wait and see what happens.
He sighs and nudges Dottore’s shoulder with two pointed fingers, then again with the flat of his palm. Calls his name. Shoves him harder, and again and again, until Dottore startles and lurches upright, whirling blindly to face the source of the assault.
His vertebrae crunch with the abruptness of the movement and he flinches, winces, grunts out something completely incomprehensible. He’s a child lulled to sleep by the rocking of a carriage with no one there to carry him inside when he goes out like a light; it’s Pantalone’s curse and his alone, a curse he chose to bear of his own volition, to do the honors.
“What time do you think it is?” he asks gently. “Take a guess.”
Dottore’s breathing is dangerously uneven, erratic, hitching and lodging in his throat like his body’s forgotten how it all works.
Pantalone steps in between his legs to intervene, cradles Dottore’s head in both hands and tilts it up, up, up to face him, clearing his airway.
“Late,” Dottore mutters after a moment.
“It certainly is.”
Pantalone struggles to support the limp weight of Dottore’s skull in his grasp as he maneuvers his head to the left to undo the clasps at the side of his mask, at the back of it, to undo everything that keeps Dottore hidden from the world and the world from him in turn when it’s all a bit too loud, too bright, too much.
Dottore does nothing to stop him. His head lolls, unable to remain upright quite yet. He continues to do nothing as Pantalone sets the mask down on the desk, as he presses his thumb against the pattern of indents sleeping in the accursed thing left up Dottore’s temple and over the slope of his cheek, irritating the sharp, jagged scar tearing across the side of his face, the bridge of his nose. Rosy pink skin pulled taut, outlined in raised, colorless white. Pretty, Pantalone thinks, he’s always so pretty, even like this.
“And what does that mean?” he prods.
Dottore snarls. “Would it kill you to not speak in riddles?”
Pantalone turns Dottore’s head in his palms again. The burst capillaries in his left eye, always curling and sprawling like the crimson of his iris is spilling onto the pristine white around it, seem to have doubled and doubled again. More and more, bloody tributaries, winding vines. He’s not slept in days. They’re all bloodshot, his eyes. The red’s clouding his vision, Pantalone muses, about to overflow and dribble down like grotesque tears over the pale swell of his cheek.
“My, my, don’t you look positively awful,” he says. It isn’t true, no, but he hopes it stings. He’s been abandoned, after all, for days. “Allow me to offer a hint: a long table, and everyone at it is arguing.”
“That’s tomorrow.”
Pantalone clicks his tongue. “Oh, darling, how long have you been asleep? What day do you think it is?”
“Bullshit.”
Dottore’s accent slips. He’s too far gone to notice, to care. Soft vowels wrap around pretty, clipped consonants, and Pantalone adores it: Dottore’s guard down, only for him. He adores the little frown that adorns Dottore’s brow too, the way he stares up at Pantalone, who stares back and buries his wandering hands in pale, tangled hair.
He smooths it back and out of Dottore’s face. It’s disheveled, knotted hopelessly at the base of his neck, bunched up and caught in his collar where it should instead be curling down to rest against the flat of his shoulder blades. A bath is in order, very much so. A long soak and a good scrub and a hairbrush thrust through that unkempt mess. Perhaps later. Perhaps in the morning. It’s a daunting thought, the idea of hauling Dottore’s sleepy dead weight out of the tub and onto the bed once finished.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Pantalone reminds him. “All you missed, though, were two hours of senseless droning. You’re in trouble, of course, but it’s nothing that can’t wait for daylight.”
Across the laboratory, the record loops and scratches again. The music distorts, the needle hissing, the gears clicking. Pantalone sucks in a breath through gritted teeth.
“Are you alone in here?”
Dottore shrugs limply.
Pantalone turns his back to him, faces the room at large: “Is there anyone else in here?”
There’s no need to raise his voice, not really. Sound carries perfectly well throughout the cluster of chambers, and the segments know, of course, to treat any request from him, however mild his tone may be, with the same esteem they would one from their maker.
Within moments, a child’s head pokes around the corner. Oh, good. Pantalone smiles at him. If he had favorites, it would be that one. No more than seven—though Dottore himself isn’t sure—and with eyes bright and round and endlessly fascinated by every smallest thing. Obviously Dottore, but quiet and polite, like all the mess inside his head hasn’t quite yet made it out into the open.
“Be a dear and turn that bloody thing off before I strangle someone, hm?”
He gives Dottore’s hair a pointed yank backwards and the child’s eyes flash with concern before he scurries dutifully off to do as he’s told.
“I thought you liked that one.”
“I do,” says Pantalone. “I’m not threatening him. I’m threatening you.”
Below him, Dottore makes a small, amused sound, a laugh or a scoff or the brief hum of a song.
“Same difference,” he points out, and rolls his head out of Pantalone’s tight grasp, cracking his neck one way, then the next. Still, all the while, Pantalone’s hands hover. It’s instinct more than anything else. It’s familiarity. It’s been far too long without their hands on each other.
The music stops.
“So it’s Thursday,” Dottore says; it’s not entirely a question. “Evening?”
Pantalone hums contemplatively. “Night.”
Dottore’s head droops forward to press against Pantalone’s middle. He stays that way for a moment, Pantalone’s hand petting at the back of his skull, before he turns with another unsettling crack of his spine to face his workspace.
“Damn kid didn’t wake me up. Oh, fuck—”
In an instant, he pulls out of Pantalone’s grasp in a panic to right the overturned vial. He sways when he stands and his grip falters, and the lip of the vial touches the leather of his glove. It sizzles and smokes, and an overwhelmingly acrid smell hits Pantalone’s senses.
“Shit.”
Dottore caps the vial and wipes his hands off on a tattered rag he procures from nowhere. He sets it gently down where it’s not prone to falling again, squeezes his eyes shut tight for a moment, and then he’s bunching up the papers strewn across the desk, shuffling them out of the way of the mess.
The furious way his hands shake is mildly alarming, either from lack of sleep or the aftereffects of the empty pot of coffee balanced on top of a defibrillator in a dented, metal tin, or whatever stimulants he injected himself full of to stay awake as long as he did before crashing this hard.
“You need to rest,” Pantalone says flatly. “Leave the mess. Come with me, would you?”
“Just slept—fuck, what time is it—all fucking day.”
“Yes, yes. What’s got you so bothered? Still the—”
Dottore’s hum of assent is more of a growl than anything else. Irritable already. His vicious temper flaring. He woke up on the wrong side of the smoldering, fucking acid-drenched desk. “Still corrosive, the last four tries.”
“I can see that. You’re going to need a new desk at this rate. Come on now, come along.”
“I just slept,” Dottore snaps. “Don’t nag.”
“And did you have a nice nap? How’s your neck? Do you feel particularly refreshed?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m awake now. I need—where did that damn kid go?”
“Darling—”
“Don’t start.”
“Listen to me,” Pantalone hisses.
He uses the voice. The voice, slow and firm. Do you want me to hear you out or help you out, he asked once, and it’s become their thing, the only way to avoid inane quarreling whenever Dottore gets so frustrated he loses all rationality, whenever a truly frightening, manic urgency slips into his voice, his actions. Pantalone stays calm and level when that happens, he needs to for both their sakes, and figures out what it is Dottore needs, whether it’s comfort or advice, a pat on the head or a helping hand to get him unstuck.
He doesn’t ask outright now. He doesn’t need to; for a long time now, Dottore hears the question even unspoken, and Pantalone sees the answer plain as day in the way Dottore’s eyes twitch and narrow.
“Have you considered,” he continues, “that you’re barely conscious and doped out of your right mind, if I were to hazard a guess, and that’s why that monstrous brain of yours isn’t operating at peak capacity? Your damned project can wait. It’s not going anywhere. Come to bed with me.”
“How scandalous, Regrator.”
“I’ll fuck you in the morning if you behave and sleep all through the night, if you want scandalous. How does that sound, hm? I’ll force you down and tie you up, and you’ll take what I give you until you’re sobbing and begging me to stop, just how you like it.”
Dottore goes still for a fraction of a second, then resumes his flippant, unbothered act. He forgets, though, that his eyes betray him completely. He’s too used to hiding them, fails to control the way his pupils blow wide. Breath catching, pulse picking up, fingers twitching at his sides. His pretty tells. He’s affected. It takes hardly any effort at all for Pantalone to wrap him around his little finger.
“The conditions here are inhumane, might I reiterate,” Pantalone comments idly. He draws the thick fur collar of his overcoat tighter around himself.
“Mm,” Dottore hums. “Specimens.”
“There’s refrigeration for that.”
“Oh? And will you be funding that?”
Pantalone’s lips curl into a helplessly fond smile. He holds his hand out and it takes only a moment of cagey contemplation, of Dottore staring down at it like it might bite, before his own gloved fingers slip in between Pantalone’s.
“Good boy.”
“I’m not your fucking lapdog.”
Pantalone’s free hand flutters up, fingers skimming the wrinkled fabric of Dottore’s dark shirt. They settle over his chest, his heart—he has a heart, he does, and it’s all Pantalone’s—and then walk playfully up, up, higher, and tug on the leather band around Dottore’s throat.
“Whether or not you get to collect your prize is entirely up to you,” he coos. He drops his fingers from the collar and smacks Dottore’s other hand away; he’s reaching for the mask, the ghastly scrap of plaster always hiding him away, out of Pantalone’s sight. “Leave that there. No one’s roaming about at this hour.”
He heaves Dottore’s heavy coat over his shoulders when he makes no move to do it himself, and allows him one final round about the lab to ensure nothing else has spilled, that no live wires lie in wait for an unsuspecting spray of liquid. They can’t have the place blowing to smithereens in their absence, of course, though it’s enough of a mess that a proper explosion leveling it to nothing would do it more good than harm.
From a nook near the back, Pantalone hears Dottore’s voice say something to the child. He can’t make out the context, whether he’s instructing or berating him, but there’s little time to guess before Dottore is back and Pantalone is reaching out and reclaiming his hand.
They step out onto the stairs, Pantalone trailing behind to ensure nobody slips and falls in their drugged haze. The child, he imagines, will curl up and sleep too, wherever he does so, now that he no longer needs to fear Dottore waking up and finding him slacking off on the job, whatever the job may be.
He’s even harsher on the child than he is on himself. On all of them. He’s projecting. He’s cruel, he’s too rigorous, too demanding, and all he’s really doing is punishing himself.
“Where are the others?” Pantalone asks idly.
Dottore knows him well enough to understand what he’s asking. He can tell by the set of Pantalone’s shoulders, the weight of his tone, the tension of his tendons between his own fingers. He can always tell; they know each other entirely too well.
“Hell if I know,” Dottore mutters. His hollow voice echoes through the stairwell, dissipating into the stone.
“You always know.”
“Busy,” he concedes. “Elsewhere.”
The corridors they glide down are as blissfully empty and mind-numbingly cold as they were on his perilous journey to the lab, and Pantalone sighs in gracious relief when he finally closes the heavy oak doors to personal rooms behind them and locks the heavy latch.
His coat comes off. He hangs it dutifully on the hook where it belongs, and leans down to undo the laces of his boots. The warmth that surrounds him like an embrace is an immediate balm. The fireplace by his desk is lit, the windows closed and curtains snugly drawn. He inhales, welcomed by the sharp, familiar scent of Palo Santo, the incense long burned out but lingering still in the air.
He instructs Dottore to take his shoes off too, and for a moment Dottore only blinks at him, uncomprehending. He hasn’t said a word since they departed the laboratory. Not a single complaint. He let himself be maneuvered about like a puppet. So abrasive, usually, so bright, his eyes are glassy and distant now; he’s not entirely in there, he’s somewhere else.
Still, he does as he’s told in the end, and once his feet are bare, Pantalone pulls him further along to the sleeping quarters.
“What if instead of citrate—”
“No,” Pantalone cuts in. Of course he’s been thinking. No more thinking. Not tonight. “None of that. Are you going to take that coat off, or do I do it for you?”
“Do it for me.”
Pantalone scoffs, charmed.
Dottore’s eyes focus on him, dubious. Cautious. That won’t do. His walls are to stay down in these rooms. It’s Pantalone’s job to keep them down.
“None of that,” he repeats.
He guides Dottore backwards with gentle hands, positions him squarely in front of the soft chaise at the foot of the bed. The cloak comes off, gets tossed onto one of the armrests. His shirt is unbuttoned, Pantalone’s gloved hands clumsy yet entirely more effective than Dottore’s trembling fingers could hope to be. He undoes Dottore’s belt too, and ignores the way Dottore’s breath catches, the way his eyes flick up to his face.
“Take those off,” Pantalone instructs quietly. He’s done enough damage. His fingers aren’t needed anywhere near those parts in that moment.
He leaves him to finish stripping the rest of his garments and comes back to wrap him in the largest, softest robe he’s able to find. It’s all he has to offer outside of his own tailored sleepwear, and while the two of them are very nearly the same height, Pantalone cannot deny he's far more on the willowy side. In his current state, though, Dottore might not have minded, might have crawled into Pantalone’s bed in all his regalia unless otherwise advised.
“Come along,” he says.
Dottore does not.
Pantalone tosses a damp washcloth across the room a moment later. Dottore ought to clean up a bit, brush his hair, splash water on his bedraggled face, he thinks, but rather than join Pantalone in the adjoining bathroom, he frowns petulantly and stumbles to sit on the chaise like a sulking child.
Pantalone watches him in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, swaying on the edge of the plush seat. Loose strands of hair fall in waves over his broad shoulders. The sash of the robe is done up loosely around his middle, leaving his chest exposed, revealing old scars and gashes from drunken brawls and projects gone awry and hell knows what else.
Dottore stares at the cloth in his cupped hands for a while, then slowly lifts it to his face. He holds it there for a moment, motionless, before rubbing it uncoordinatedly over his cheeks and forehead, across the deep bruises beneath his eyes.
It’s a particularly bad come down. Even if Pantalone knew what Dottore stuffed his syringes full of to keep himself conscious for all the time he was cooped up in the laboratory, he wouldn’t know what to do about it, how to reverse it, how to help him.
He allows himself to look away briefly. He removes his rings, places all but one in the ceramic dish on the sink counter. His gloves come off, and he slips the one ring back on, the one that stays on. He undoes his clasps and buttons and zippers with a hint of urgency, divests himself of his clothes and slips into his pyjamas as quickly as he can, lest Dottore muster up the strength to escape while his back is turned.
He forgoes a bath. He’ll live; he can survive one single night encased in his own filth. He’ll drag them both into the tub come morning.
He thrusts the bathroom into blackness as he leaves and brings a glass of tap water along with him—anything to flush the concoction of chemicals from Dottore’s system.
Dottore accepts it with unsteady hands and lifts it strangely to his mouth like his muscles are gradually refusing to cooperate, limb by limb. Erratic movements, tongue peeking out and dragging slowly to lick at the seam of his chapped lips.
He’s quite lovely like this, really, completely at Pantalone’s mercy, yet all the same, the state of him does give rise to a flicker of genuine concern. He’s taken too much before. He’s nearly offed himself, again and again, in the name of fucking science. And as it stands, Pantalone believes he’s entirely too young to be made a widower so soon.
“Up,” he orders.
He takes the glass from limp fingers, and Dottore watches him all the while with big, flat eyes. He lifts the cloth from Dottore’s lap too, and tosses it in the direction of the bathroom, where it hits the tile with a wet slap. Pantalone finds he can’t be bothered to do anything about it now. A night on the floor won’t do it any harm.
Dealing with Dottore whisks him out of his comfort zone in that way. Forces him to be a little bit less rigid. A touch more spontaneous. Reckless. Disorderly. Somewhat frenzied.
He switches off the primary lights overhead, leaves only the orange glow from the lantern at his bedside. It’s more comforting than pitch black, that light. It’s deceptively warm. He feels less alone with it on, when Dottore’s lost in the throes of a breakthrough, when he’s away on business for so long that fear begins to creep like ice up Pantalone’s spine. He won’t come back. He won’t come back.
But he isn’t alone now. Finally, he isn’t alone.
It’s been too long. He’s missed this, the simplest form of companionship, breathing evenly in the quiet company of another, more than he cares to admit to himself, let alone aloud.
Dottore struggles onto the bed at Pantalone’s insistence, twists awkwardly to his side and flops down like his body’s given up at long last.
Pantalone sets his glasses down on the bedside stand and curls up to face Dottore, reaches out to cup the back of his head and draw him in. He presses a small kiss to his mouth. Hazy and half-asleep, Dottore reacts all the same. Pantalone coaxes his lips apart, pulls a soft sigh from the confines of his throat.
Pantalone takes his hand when they part, intertwining it with his in the space between them, and kisses the pads of his fingers. One by one. His hands are so warm, warm and dry and pleasant to the touch, with neat nails and fingers so graceful despite the endless scarring across his palms and the hilltops of his knuckles. Deceptively gentle when he’s patching up a gaping wound, closing it up with perfect little rows of tidy stitches, so elegant with a scalpel twirling easily between them as though it’s an idle quill in between notes; looking at him engrossed in his work, the work he’s supposed to be doing, one would never presume he’s an utter madman beneath it all, that he's got plenty more than a few screws loose.
And for all Dottore pretends to be more than human, he’s as good as unconscious by the time Pantalone sets their joined hands back down on the silken sheets. It takes very little to shut him down completely: a safe scrap of space to let his guard down and allow himself to be held and held under for as long as he needs.
The fingers of his other hand wander to rest lightly against Pantalone’s hip like he means to wrap the arm around his waist but can’t find the energy to lift it any higher.
“Wake me up when you get up,” Dottore murmurs. His words flow together like molasses, sticky and overlapping. “Don’t let me sleep in too long.”
“I thought you said you weren’t tired?”
“Fucking bastard.”
Pantalone bites back a smile. He sighs and tucks a stray wisp Dottore’s hair out of his face.
Dottore lets him. His eyes stay closed. He’s long since stopped flinching when Pantalone’s hands got too close without warning. Dottore folds into the touch now, wanting to be wanted, needed, curls into its comfortable, familiar warmth with a startling desperation. It’s endearing. It’s dangerous, is what it is, being trusted so implicitly by one who trusts nobody else.
It’s the sort of trust Pantalone would die before betraying, the sort he keeps close to his heart and treasures more than anything in the world.
“Sleep, darling,” he whispers. “I’ll wake you.”