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When he turned the corner onto the street and saw the safehouse sitting demure and pastel at the end of the road Doppio found himself picking up speed. He was already sweating under his heavy coat and his breath was coming out in white clouds in the brisk winter air, but it took a great effort to resist running the rest of the way to the door. It wasn’t that far, he chided himself, he could wait a few more minutes. Still, his feet trotted heavily on the icy path and he began fumbling for his key before he was even halfway.

When he had negotiated it with the lock and brought himself inside he sighed, the warm air hitting him like a pillow, and put down his briefcase. He reached into the recesses of himself for King Crimson’s arms, then stopped, glancing around. The little house was empty, of course, or should have been, but that was not the reason he paused, leaning back on the door and straining his ears for any sound at all.

None. No call, at least not yet.

He had decided at some point that that was a good sign. He knew it wasn’t that simple, that the Boss could call at any time and see him probably just as often, but in the quiet, guilty part of his soul that still wasn’t quite sure if he wasn’t doing something wrong, silence was enough of a green light.

King Crimson’s arms materialised and with firm, gentle motions they helped him out of his coat. The fingers glanced over his shoulders and brushed down his arms in the process, and when the coat was off and hung one of them came up to fix his hair where it had come untidy under the faux fur-lined hood. Another steadied him as he crouched down to undo the laces of his boots and slip them off, bracing him and then taking his hand to help him stand up. Doppio allowed them to dissipate for a few minutes as he went through into the kitchen and fixed himself a hot drink, though as he was adding sugar one of them did fade back in again to brush the backs of its fingers against his cheek. He brought the drink through into the small, neat little lounge where a number of illicit papers were still stacked on the table from his work that morning. He ignored them for the moment, turned on the television and settled back onto the lumpy sofa. King Crimson’s hands rested on his shoulders as he got comfy, one of them sliding down to cover his own hand where it lay on the arm rest, squeezing his fingers.

The stand did none of this autonomously, of course. It was not the kind that had its own will or did things on its own. Doppio commanded every movement, every touch, down to the precise level of pressure exerted on his body. No matter how much he tried to disassociate that part of his mind from what was happening, he was very aware at every moment that the stand only did exactly what he wanted it to, with no spontaneity and no feeling behind the gestures beyond that in the depths of his own soul. It was just a kind of puppet show and puppets, no matter how expressive and animated they might seem or how much one might wish to pretend otherwise, were only ever an extension of the puppeteer that steered them.

But, letting the other hand undo his messy braid and card his hair free in smooth, soft movements, it was sometimes not hard to pretend.

Vinegar Doppio was not lonely.

He never had the time to be, really. There was always something else to monopolise his attention, some little task in service of some big scheme that he simply had to get done, and when he had finished that there would always be more and they were never quite as simple as they might look. It was amazing, really the amount of energy one person could spend on the smallest of things. Paperwork he had been sure was completed would spontaneously spawn an extra page he hadn’t noticed, trains he was sure he was on time for would rush by him if he lost concentration for even a moment, he would be on his way to a location he knew very well and glance up to find that he had wandered entire streets away. It seemed that no matter how certain he was that everything was all planned and arranged and going as it should, something would fall out of place. He was forever playing catch-up with himself. Doppio worked diligently all the hours that god sent, but god always seemed to be sneaking them back when he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t afford to start spending them on morose introspection or worse, socialising.

So no, he was simply far too busy to be lonely, but that was alright. People were problematic in his business, anyway. You never knew which cheerful stranger on the street might be a hitman hired by a rival mob or an undercover or off-duty cop or just particularly nosy and prone to gossip. Some people could dart through difficult conversations like fish weaving through the shoal, but Doppio was more of an unassuming mollusc undulating through oceans deeper than he could fathom. It would be far too easy to trip him up into something revealing. The longer he was in contact with anyone, the higher the risk that something would go wrong, and when they were civilians he always felt a little bit guilty about the resulting cleanup. It was better for all concerned if he just limited his opportunities for his mouth to get him into trouble.

The Boss had been the one to point out this little issue of his. Well, not in so many words. He was never quite that blunt with him, even when he probably ought to be. “You have an honest soul, Doppio,” he would say, or, “Your trusting nature is so refreshing in such a deceitful world,” things like that. He was so good at making Doppio’s many, many faults sound harmless, if not positively endearing, but while naivete might well have been one of them, Doppio was not quite credulous enough to believe it. No, it was better that he limit his opportunities to make mistakes.

All of this he would have admitted quite willingly if asked. He was not lonely because his work was far more important to him than socialising and all the many risks attached to it, and that was that. The Boss would ask, sometimes, in the way that he sometimes asked Doppio about unimportant things. Little tests, he assumed, or professional politeness. The Boss was far too nice to him, sometimes, and would waste a little time on things like that when the mood took him. The same way that he was so kind about his flaws. Kinder than was perhaps strictly accurate.

Doppio did not, in fact, have an honest soul. He only had a propensity for running his mouth when he got nervous and a difficulty filtering his output. An honest person would have admitted that beneath all his rationalisations about his work, there was a far deeper reason that he was so content to be solitary.

Doppio was alone, but he had the Boss, and the Boss had a way of… filling up everything.

He would hear the phone ringing and his entire attention would hone in on it like a bloodhound on the scent, the anticipation sometimes almost painful if it took too long to reach it. He could get frantic, and while at first the physical discomfort of not being able to reach the phone had taken several minutes to become noticeable it appeared to take fewer and fewer seconds, nowadays, before the ache in the base of his skull would set in. He knew that there were very logical, self-preserving reasons that a person would not want the head of a crime organisation to think that he was being snubbed, but even in those agitated moments he could tell that it was not that. From the first hint of a trilling ringtone he felt wound up and concentrated, his entire world narrowing to a single point. Everything in him was put on hold and he wouldn’t, couldn’t go back to himself as long as he knew that the Boss was waiting for him to answer.

Then he would hear his voice. He would hear his name in that voice, and everything that had been taut and tense would come unwound, soft and settled around that sound. The Boss would talk to him, pry him open bit by bit and put into him his impulses and his ideas and his will and stitch him back together with kindness and compliments that he did not deserve and took anyway.

The Boss didn’t talk to anyone else. Not anyone who would have long to appreciate it, anyway. Doppio had asked him about that once, after what felt like years of anxious, jealous wondering, and perhaps the answer had been yet another gentle, placating lie but it had lodged itself into him as the truth. The Boss only called him, only trusted him, only offered his comfort and the honour of executing his desires to him.

That was worth any amount of isolation. That was worth more than ten thousand close friends and family could be for him. Doppio needed nothing else; nobody could need anything else, and all the people he saw walking around arm in arm with their loved ones or laughing with their friends had no conception of just what they were missing out on. What he had was so much more profound, so much purer.

Or… it should have been. It was, most of the time.

It was not that it never got to him. Even the other members of Passione had friends or families or their coworkers to talk to and share their hopes and fears with, they had people around who could smile at them and hold their hands and hug them and look after them when they needed it. The Boss would call him when he had work to do, or for updates or sometimes, even, for seemingly no reason but to call. Perhaps that meant that he understood? He knew that Doppio was small and weak and sometimes, in spite of everything, needed more than he deserved.

Doppio couldn’t bear to ask about that much. He didn’t want the confirmation of mercy or pity- he didn’t need it. What he needed was that moment where the whole of the man’s attention was focussed down on him, on pushing and pulling and manoeuvring him into where he needed to be. In the moments when the Boss was speaking to him he could feel, for just an instant, like he was everything.

When he wasn’t, he was nothing. He had nothing; even if he had known someone else that he could have approached for companionship he had nothing to offer. Every scrap of care and devotion in him was tied up in someone else and that was fine, so long as he called. So long as Doppio had a place to lay it all out and have it acknowledged and appreciated.

But the Boss couldn’t call him all day every day, after all. He was busy, too, with far more important and difficult things. He could not spend all his time speaking to Doppio, he couldn’t stoop down to his level and be his actual, real friend and he could never, ever meet him in person. He could open Doppio up and fill him with purpose and affection but he couldn’t so much as lay a hand on him. That was fine. That was the nature of things. It was what the Boss needed to be safe and Doppio would never do anything to jeopardise that. He would never want to.

And, perhaps, he didn’t need to.

It started… Well it started several times, when he looked back on it. Lots of little starts building up to one big one, maybe. But if he had to sit down and plot it all out, he would have had to conclude that the long and short of it was that one day, towards the end of a particularly wet October, a man had jumped him and he had panicked. Just a mugger, looking to empty his pockets and menace him a little along the way, and Doppio had crumbled like so much overbaked cake and allowed himself to be meekly robbed and even mumbled a timid apology when the man complained that he wasn’t even carrying enough to be worth it.

“You could have butchered the miserable creature, Doppio,” the Boss had said later, when he was nursing his bruises and what little pride he had. “You are more than capable. We have both witnessed your lethality in the course of my service several times.”

“I know, Boss,” Doppio had sighed, “but it’s different when it’s work, y’know? I can psych myself up to it if I know it’s coming, and even if it’s not… I just think about you. I mean, about how important it is to protect you,” he hastily corrected, “and I’ll do whatever it takes. When it’s just about me it’s harder to think about it like that. I don’t really have… that kinda attitude.” This was something of an understatement and both of them were more than aware of it. Doppio’s first response to danger was anxiety, quickly followed by fear, flight and, if flight were not viable, meek surrender and a fervent hope that the danger would get bored of him and wander off to more entertaining pastures. It worked, to a certain extent. While he might be harassed or hassled with above-average regularity even outside of his work escapades, he had never been seriously hurt in any of those encounters. A morose, trembling Doppio was clearly not worth violently subduing. He basically subdued himself.

It was not something that Doppio thought the Boss would ever understand. He always spoke as if Doppio were failing to grasp the mere ease of the situation, like pointing out the triangle shape of the hole to a child frustrated about their inability to pass the circular block through it. “Nevertheless, you are fully authorised to use King Crimson’s arms when you are off-duty, as it were, when such a need arises. You are my underboss, Doppio. You do not need to cower for anyone.”

“Oh, but what if I used it and you needed it, and then you wouldn’t be able to-”

“Rest assured that that is not something to concern yourself with. When I need to use it it will come to me. When you have need of it, you must not hesitate.”

Doppio deflated. “I’ll try,” he had said, knowing in his heart of hearts that it was likely to be in vain. There was just no explaining the why and how of it to a person so different from himself. They had different skill sets. The Boss was built for grandeur and power and Doppio had very much been designed to be one of nature's cowerers. “I wish you could just use it for me, Boss. Keep it stuck to me but control it yourself, so I only have to worry about getting close enough for you to work.”

The Boss had laughed, not without sympathy. “Alas, that is not possible. When you summon it I have no control; functionally it is your stand in that moment in all practical senses.”

Doppio had not liked that much. It felt very presumptuous of him to have any stand at all and call it his own in any context, nevermind the Boss’s. “But it’s still yours really, right? It’s linked to you, or whatever.”

“It is mine, but… all the inputs and outputs of that link have been temporarily transferred to you, shall we say. It appears to be absolute, with no co-piloting.”

Doppio frowned. “So you can’t control it at all when I’m using it? You can’t see the future I can see or move it or feel what it does? Can you feel this?” He summoned the left hand and tapped on the palm with his own fingers.

“No. Can you?”

“...yeah. I guess I can.” There had indeed been an echo of the tapping on his own left hand, a peculiar phantom sensation. “But it’s still… still you, and your soul and spirit and stuff, even when you don’t have any connection to it? It’s all you but… it’s with me?”

“Correct.”

“Doesn’t that feel…” Doppio paused, chewing over the words he wasn’t sure he was looking for. “Weird?”

“A little odd, perhaps, at least in concept, but it does not trouble me. After all, my sweet Doppio, it is in the safest possible hands.”

And Doppio had not been sure that that was true at all, but the Boss had said it in that warm way of his and the conversation had already wandered beyond the means of his own philosophical understanding. So he took the compliment and, for a little while, he forgot all about it.

Or, he thought he had. It had been percolating somewhere, he supposed in retrospect. He could not say at what point things had changed.

It had been odd, that feeling of something touching him through the stand. He’d never really spent much time just experimenting with the thing, always feeling uncomfortable monopolising the Boss’s gift for any length of time, and in the midst of a battle he never really had the time to stop and linger on the way that he could feel a chest caving in under the borrowed fist through the link and probably would not have enjoyed the sensation if he had. It was peculiar to pick up a cushion with one of King Crimson’s hands and have the echo of the softness against his own, closing his eyes and squeezing it until his brain was certain he was holding the thing himself, right up until the moment he opened those eyes onto the sight of a snowfall of feathers. He’d wanted to try it out a little, really, just to see what the limits were.

So, he experimented. He could pick up or touch things with the hands and feel it himself, perform actions on the objects with more strength or dexterity than he could ever manage with his own human appendages. He even worked himself up to testing more dangerous things, just to see what would happen. King Crimson’s hands were much stronger and harder than his own. Of course they could perform physical feats that would leave his own muscles pulled or torn, but they were also much more resilient. They could hold sharp objects without being damaged so easily, even touch things so hot that they would have burned his own skin.

That had probably been where the mistake started, if he wanted to put a label to it. Doppio was not used to feeling strong, but he was even less used to feeling invulnerable. Watching the stand appear and perform feats that would have left him strained and bleeding was reassuring. Comforting, almost, even if no amount of practice instilled in him the bloodlust that would let him default to it in actual trouble. Watching the stand remain whole and strong through everything he put it to had a certain calming effect on him. It could endure anything, even if he couldn’t.

The Boss could endure anything, even if he couldn’t.

So when he slipped walking through the kitchen of one of their nicer and more luxurious safe houses with an armful of casserole dish and found himself whimpering on the floor with a chunk of glass in the heel of his right palm, the realisation that he had summoned the arms in his flailing journey towards the floor was not a total surprise to him. “You’re… a little late. Shit,” he hissed, attempting to remove the glass from his hand and jerking away at once.

He made a few more attempts at finding his nerve long enough to dig the thing out of himself, but the situation had a built-in feedback loop that was not in his favour. The more he wiggled it, the more it hurt, the more his vision started to swim, the more he bled, the harder it was to get a grip on the thing and the more frustrated he became. Doppio picked and cursed and whimpered for a few more minutes and King Crimson’s arms hung beside him, steady and still.

It seemed reasonable. Logical, even. The stand could do things that he lacked the strength or precision to do himself. A moment of inspiration struck and Doppio allowed one hand to hold his own steady while the other deftly plucked out the shard. The whole motion could not have taken more than twenty seconds.

Then he just… stayed.

He was a little woozy from the sight of so much of his own blood, probably, his head swimming with the chemical cocktail of panic. He felt like a clumsy idiot and very much not like the second-in-command of a powerful criminal institution and he wanted to catch his breath for a little while before getting up and cleaning the evidence of his incompetence away. Doppio let the hand holding the bit of glass drop it, and the one holding his own hand steady stayed holding him.

It was… grounding, he supposed. The feeling of the hand holding his own, damaged limb in a firm but gentle grip. All his shaking gradually tapered off and he let his eyes drift closed, catching his breath. The hand remained there, holding his own with a tender patience.

Of course it did. He was making it do that. It was fine.

After a little while, he moved the other one to join it, so that his smaller hand was being cupped between the two larger, harder ones. Just to see if it… helped. He felt his breathing slow to a steady, calm level.

It had to be some long-buried memory, he had guessed. When he was a kid, or something, someone must have been there to hold him still and soft when he tripped and skinned his palms or bruised his knees. If his adult life was anything to go by, it had probably happened a lot. So it was perfectly reasonable to find some comfort in the sensation now, to let it soothe him a little, even though the gestures were all his own and he could even feel the strange, ghostlike sensation of holding his own hand in his hands, the echo of what was being registered in whatever passed for King Crimson’s nervous system.

The Boss called later, when he had finally got up and bandaged himself and cleaned up the rest of the glass, and though he fawned over Doppio with all his usual disproportionate concern, he did not mention his stand at all. Doppio noted that at the time, though he did not then know exactly why he felt the need to.

Doppio was clumsy and unlucky and, just occasionally, a direct player in violent illegal actions. Doppio got hurt a lot. Never too terribly; the Boss wouldn’t allow it, but scratches and cuts and bruises were frequent companions. For a month or so after his incident with the casserole dish every one of them gave him a little twinge of a reminder about how nice it had been to be comforted through injury, even by himself, but it wasn’t until a nasty ankle sprain left him largely immobile for a few days that he actually worked up the nerve to try it again. It was boredom that motivated him more than anything, or so he assured himself. There wasn’t much of anything practical that the stand could even do in that scenario. It was a dangerous, violent thing, good for crushing and tearing and breaking.

Still. Doppio lay on a long couch with his ice packs and his bowl of snacks and the radio on low, and he made the arms just reposition him, just smooth down a blanket over him, just rest their hands on his shoulders while he lay there and tried not to notice the way his heart picked up, ever so slightly.

Doppio spent a few days like that in his own, slightly protracted company. Enough to get used to the feeling of calling out the stand just to do little things or to support him as he hobbled around or, increasingly, just to be there, the hands a gentle pressure against him. Long enough that he found himself doing it without pausing to think about it, and long enough that he found himself a little disappointed when his sprain began to fade from a constant ache to a background twinge. He had wanted the excuse and the plausible deniability to last just a little bit longer.

That was the breaking point, he decided. He had a lot of important work to do and a very important person counting on him to do it and he couldn’t afford to linger over every little injury just for a chance to do something as silly and pointless and probably highly improper as having the Boss’s stand lay its hand over his own. If he kept it up, who was to say where it would end? Would he start carrying glass objects back and forth over slippery floors or neglecting to check both ways before crossing the street, just for an excuse to use the stand on himself while he recovered?

Unacceptable; he was far too busy. Doppio resolved to rid himself of the impulse, before it could form a dangerous habit.

And he meant it. He almost always meant it, when he tried to be better. He might have actually managed it, had he not been interrupted by another opportunity at betterment that he had been struggling with for far longer. He’d never been all that good at juggling two things at once.

“I think she’s just getting a coffee, Boss, unless- You don’t think that’s the guy, do you?”

“Unlikely. They would want to meet somewhere less open.”

Doppio had been fanning himself with a magazine with what he hoped was a casual, non-threatening, non-incriminating style, watching as the woman he’d been trailing for half a dozen streets picked over her pocket change. The Boss had called him early on in the mission and on another day he might have been a bit put out at the implication that he needed to be babysat through such a simple task, but that day had been sweltering and any distraction had been welcome. He had bought himself a can of cola from the first refrigerated unit that presented itself, but he had lost track of it when the Boss called.

“If she retreats to a more remote area, we will consider breaking off. She will be alert.”

Doppio nodded, letting the woman and her coffee get ahead of him a little ways before slouching up and resuming the leisurely chase. He had dressed for the weather and though the Boss had not outright said that his aggressive floral and butterfly-patterned attire would stick out the moment they entered any secluded or unscrupulous locale, it was probably not ideal.

On this broad, sunny boulevard, however, he thought he blended in quite well with all the other people sweating and gently acquiring sunburn. “At least it’s a nice day for it, Boss. It wouldn’t be too bad if we had to let her slip and go enjoy the sun somewhere. Uh, not that I’d want that, or anything! It’d suck if we had to try again, so obviously I don’t wanna-”

“Since you would not be performing the… second stage of this particular mission in any eventuality, I see no reason why you could not enjoy whatever is left of the day once your part is done,” the Boss said, as if it had only just occurred to him and Doppio had spent the last few seconds in a very professional, respectful silence.

Doppio took the life preserver offered in that tone. “Oh, yeah! Sure, I can do that.” The target turned a corner and he picked up his pace a little. “You’d call me if you needed anything else, though, right?”

“Perhaps. I am not so short of competent agents that I cannot spare my Doppio for a single afternoon.”

“But it’s no trouble! Really, Boss, if you need anything at all-”

“I know, Doppio. You are always ready and willing.”

He chuckled and Doppio looked askance, hoping that his smile was not too visible from wherever the Boss’s current observational point was. He could be incredibly perceptive, sometimes. It was almost intimidating to think about all of that concentration, honed in on him out of all the people in the whole world, but he always sounded so content in that choice. A couple were walking along the opposite side of the street, hands intertwined and swinging in a silly, childishly exaggerated way. The woman was laughing, too.

Doppio found himself looking at their hands. How snug they looked, fingers tangled together and palms pressed close even on such a stifling day.

It was a small thing. Just a twinge of thought, a little reflex, automatic. He had manifested King Crimson’s fingers, barely a whole hand, wrapped around the hand that was not holding his phone. As he approached the corner his target had disappeared around he closed his own fingers around it and squeezed, and that was when he registered exactly what he’d done.

“Doppio.”

The Boss’s voice jolted him back to himself and he felt his face flushing. “Uh, nothing, Boss!” He tried to shake his fingers loose and inadvertently found himself attempting to shake both sets of fingers at once, his panicking movements no less awkward and uncoordinated when one half of them were being made by a powerful stand.

“No, Doppio-”

He stumbled forward, barrelling towards the corner. Towards work and the proper things he knew he was allowed to do. “I was just, uh, practising-”

“Doppio!”

He turned the corner and stopped dead, almost stumbling straight into the person standing there.

His target right in front of him, staring straight at him.

Wide, frantic eyes.

Pointing something shiny at his face-

There was a bang so loud it felt like the world was ending inside his head.

But, as luck would have it, he had already had the stand out.

Doppio had not thought about swinging the fist, not exactly. He did not have anything that could be classed as a coherent thought, with words and orders in it. He simply had an impulse, hot and terrified, in the microsecond between realisation and the shot, and his first actual real thought was that it had not worked. The sound had been so loud, so close, and something wet and sticky was running down the side of his face.

He crumpled to the ground, clutching his head, whimpering and shaking and waiting for the pain to hit and death to drag him down as he tried to find the hole that had surely been shot into his head.

Instead he found his hands coming away covered in lukewarm cola.

A phone started to ring, the tone warbling and fluctuating and strangely breathy. Doppio, his hands shaking and his legs refusing to work, crawled towards the phone lying on the ground next to what remained of the target. It was warm when he brought it to his ear, and smelled of bitter coffee.

“H-hello.”

“Doppio.” His ears were ringing from the shot so hard it hurt, but the Boss’s voice came through so clear.

“Hello.” Doppio fell back against the pavement on his fourth attempt to get up and decided to stay there until the world stopped spinning.

“Are you injured, Doppio?”

Very like the Boss to worry about him like that. Doppio checked himself over, feeling his head again to make sure he had not even been grazed by the shot. His scalp and skull all appeared to be where he had left them after his morning’s ablutions. It was difficult to tell if there was any damage to his extremities, because they did not seem to be registering sensory inputs other than a persistent tingling, but he could not find anything aside from a scuff on his hand where he had caught himself on the ground and the slight ache in his right ear where most of the tinnitus appeared to be coming from.

“All good, Boss.” He laughed, which made his head hurt worse. “Th-that was close, huh?”

“Look around you. She might have had back-up nearby.”

Doppio nodded, or tried to. He glanced up and down the small, narrow street several times, but could not see any other people milling about in a threatening fashion. In fact, underneath the relentless ringing tone, everything seemed very quiet. “Nobody here, Boss.” He glanced at the target as he turned back. King Crimson’s fist had reduced most of the things from the neck up into a lump of pinkish meat, stark white edges and dark hair. “Oh, no,” he mumbled, the words feeling ungainly in his mouth, “now you won’t know who sh-she was gonna meet. S-sorry, Boss.”

“You need to get away from here, Doppio. Someone may come to investigate the sound of the gunshot.”

Doppio nodded, but he couldn’t seem to make himself begin to rise. He looked around instead, lingering on the splatter on the walls and the splayed out limbs and the gun, when he spotted it, that had skittered against the curb. “That was close,” he said again. “Hey,” he added, with a jolt of realisation, “I did pretty good, huh? I used King Crimson on her right away, just like you always say. I told you, it’s way easier when it’s for work.”

Because he had been playing with it again, but the Boss hadn’t chided him for that. Perhaps because if he had been a microsecond slower, if he had tried to use Epitaph first, if he hadn’t already had one of King Crimson’s hands out and ready…

Then by the time he had thought to do something that thought might have been leaking out of a little round hole in his head.

“You must leave, Doppio, before-”

“Did I do good, Boss?” He tried to get up again, but only succeeded in stumbling to collapse against the wall. “I did a, a good job, right?”

“You reacted admirably under pressure, Doppio, now-”

“Not now, Boss.” He looked away from the body, focussing his gaze on a loose, cracked paving slab to his right. “I mean… all of it. If I’d- If I hadn’t- You would have… still thought I was your best, right?” His hands clenched and unclenched on his knees, and he could see blood on the hems of his trousers. “All the stuff I d-did and everything, all this time-”

“Doppio,” the Boss began in his firm, ordering voice, making him flinch. He paused, and Doppio braced himself for a reprimand. When he continued, his voice was far softer. “You are, and have always been, my greatest ally. There is no other that I appreciate as I do you, my dear, precious Doppio. There was no other action you could have taken in that moment. You see? Fate gave you to me just as you need to be.”

Doppio wasn’t sure if that were true, but he nodded, trying to take deeper breaths that couldn’t seem to begin right. “Are you close, Boss? Are you nearby? Would you have come if… If I couldn't-”

“...of course,” the Boss said, and Doppio tried not to notice the moment of hesitation. “I would not have let anything happen to you. Without you, I would be lost.”

He tried to believe it. The Boss wouldn’t have let him die, not in some stupid way like that, without even completing a mission he’d given him. He was never all that far away, his attention never off Doppio for very long.

Even if he would never have all of that attention, and even if the distance could never fully close.

“Can’t you come…” He swallowed the word “now” before it could escape, but the rest of it had already condemned him, he was sure. “If you had to finish the job without me,” he added, for the sake of appearances, his voice weak.

“I would not let anything happen to you, Doppio. I would come and I would strike down our enemies, and we would meet our goals together. But you did not need me,” he said, so gentle and patient, “did you? You were able to defend yourself. I am so proud of you, my Doppio. I was right to put my faith in you.”

Doppio shut his eyes tight (and later he would scold himself for that, it was so silly, of course it made no difference) and let his head fall back against the wall. “But if you did come, and you had to… to save me. What would you… If you had to, I mean, if it was for the mission-”

“Doppio,” the Boss said, and then stopped. Doppio tensed, his eyes still screwed shut as he made King Crimson’s hands settle heavy and reassuring against his shoulders. His heart began to race again, his face wincing in anticipation of a rebuke.

Instead the voice began again after only a brief beat, as though he had only been momentarily distracted. “You need to calm down, Doppio. You can’t stay here. You can’t be found at the scene.”

He tried to force his lungs to expand, eyes still squeezed shut. “I know. I know.” His chest kept hitching, and he shook his head, making the hands rub little circles, the way he’d seen people do on television. “I’m trying. You know how… how I am, Boss.” He managed a laugh again, this time croaky and rasping in his mouth. “You know that I’m weak and scared and-”

“Enough,” he said, in a low but firm whisper. “You are just as you should be. No other can serve me as you do. You are my perfect Doppio, and I will not leave you at the mercy of the world, just as you would not leave me. If there were a danger you could not handle then I would come and take you safely away, shelter you from it all while I disposed of the rabble. How many times have I put my life into your hands? I would gladly take yours in mine.”

Doppio sighed and nodded, letting the stand slide its hands up to hold his face, trying to imagine that every movement was not carefully choreographed in his own mind.

“You know this, don’t you, Doppio? You understand that we… are partners, and we must cover each other. Your safety is my own; guard yourself, protect yourself, care for yourself, and so you guard and protect and care for me. And I will not allow you to fall. I will not allow us to fall.”

Doppio nodded again, then murmured a soft, “Yeah. I know, Boss,” to be certain that his acceptance was known. He made the hands cup his face as tenderly as he was able to imagine, then slip down to his own hands and help him lift himself up. For just the smallest moment, the illusion was almost perfect.

Then he dismissed the stand and opened his eyes and he was only Doppio, alone and shaking in a small back street with a pulverised corpse at his feet. He shook himself and raised the phone back to his ear.

“I’ll leave the other way, Boss. There’s a bit of blood on me, but I’ll find a bathroom and… and wash it off and stuff.”

“Excellent, Doppio. Do not rush; it will only look suspicious.”

“Right. I’m… I’m sorry, Bo-”

“You have nothing to apologise for, Doppio. Not with me. Now, go.”

And Doppio had gone, walked as briskly as he dared down to the other end of the street and turned towards the more populated areas. He found a small cafe where he ordered a late lunch and coincidentally spent quite some time in one of the toilet stalls, and by the time he finished forcing food down his throat he almost felt human again. Within the hour there were several police officers milling around the little corner, but by then Doppio had paid his bill and begun making his way back to the hotel room the Boss had had him order for the week, though he assumed his stay would soon be being cut short.

He sat himself down on the bed and put the television on, flicking through the channels until he found one that was playing an old movie he thought he vaguely recognised.

He was alright. The Boss was covering him. He was never far, and he would watch him and talk to him and keep him in his thoughts.

If Doppio hadn’t reacted quite so fast to that gun in his face, if he had fallen to the ground with his brains all dripping out of a hole in his head, then if nothing else he would not have been alone. Not really.

The man on the television screen looped his arm around the shoulders of the woman next to him, squeezing her close. Doppio watched for a minute until he was sure he had the idea of it firm in his head, then called up the arms and had one do the same.

It was not warm or soft the way that a human touch would be, but the position felt natural enough, and when he made it squeeze him, just a little, it was nice.

It had started there, really. Or it had finished starting and begun simply being. Not in accidents or in illness or in injury, but in the moments when he felt the fingers brushing against his skin, closed his eyes, and let himself believe it was more than just his own mind at work.

Even if he was borrowing it, it was still the Boss’s stand. A part of him, a reflection of his very soul. He had wanted him to have it, after all. Because they were partners.

It still felt a little wrong. Not always. In fact, the longer it went on, rarely enough that that rarity in and of itself became a source of guilt. But sometimes he would feel a little twinge of shame and sometimes that would even be enough to get him to stop.

Small things. The second time he had tried to make it hold his face the way that it had come so easily when the Boss had been comforting him, feeling cheap and needy and pathetic when he tried to replicate it. The first time he had called it to wash his hair while he was in the bath, which had seemed sweet and innocuous enough when he imagined it. It had turned out that while in his fantasy the idea of doing something with the Boss’s own stand while he happened to be naked the nakedness was rather incidental, in real life it quickly became the only thing he could think about. Or that time when he took the fingers of one hand and kissed them, the way he’d imagined he would if the real, actual Boss ever materialised in front of him, and that he had done with the stand dozens of times by then but this time he made the fingers turn under his mouth, take his chin and tilt his face up to see…

Nothing. Obviously. He didn’t even have the stand’s full body, nevermind anything… else. And he knew that, and that was fine and it always had and always would be fine, but just then and there in that moment as he stared up at that empty space it was also the most miserable thing he had ever felt.

So there were limits to his impropriety. That was almost a comfort. He wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognise that he had ever left. It wasn’t enough, of course, but perhaps knowing that one was doing wrong counted for something. He was sure, in some vague and faraway memory, that recognising the sin was good for something. A first step, maybe.

The problem was that the next step was probably confession, and that was simply out of the question.

Oh, he’d tried. He was quite sure that he had tried. He had at least tried to try.

If their calls were not a one-way street then he probably would have succeeded. Occasionally, usually after doing something that set off that internal sense of having gone too far, he would tell himself that that was it, that he would tell the Boss the very next time he called, accept the castigation that he surely deserved, and move on as a better, cleaner man. But he could never follow up those urges immediately. Doppio had never been given a way of calling him. He could only wait for a call that he could use to piggyback on his confession, and they never seemed to come very soon after these moments of common sense breaking through the clouds of indulgence. Sometimes he would be waiting for days.

Days was a lot of time for indulgence to fog up his brain. A lot of time for him to forget what he’d promised himself and, without thinking, have the stand braid his hair or help him into his clothes or stroke the back of his hand as he made his coffee. It was almost automatic and once he’d realised that he was calling it it was difficult to just stop. It felt weird, he would tell himself, even rude, to make the stand halt in mid-action, the way that one felt foolish for walking into a room and not knowing why.

And eventually the Boss would call again, but by then he would be at least half a dozen semi-conscious lapses in, and all his noble ideals would be so much smoke.

So he didn’t say a word, and every day it got a little easier not to say a word. He got the hang of having it hold his face in a way that felt right. He reasoned with himself that since the stand didn’t have eyes if he never called Epitaph (and he tended not to, preferring the more tactile comfort to visions of himself standing alone in his room) then there was no need to worry about it seeing anything one of them could be ashamed of. He closed his own eyes when he made it brush his kiss aside to tilt his chin up, and tried to picture a face he was not permitted to know.

The Boss didn’t say anything about it. It was difficult for Doppio to believe, after a while, that he couldn’t have even a suspicion. He knew almost everything, after all. But whatever he did know he had evidently decided to keep to himself. Perhaps it did not trouble him. Perhaps it was truly trivial in the grand scheme of all his… well, schemes. Perhaps it was just a silly, nonsensical behaviour that he felt no need to go asking questions about.

Perhaps he already knew all the answers, anyway.

But just to be safe, or, on some level, because it felt more respectful, Doppio avoided summoning the stand while he called. It just felt like goading the conversation that clearly neither of them wanted to have, like rubbing in that he was doing something that he probably shouldn’t, even if it was a forgivable offence. So he answered the calls in true isolation, with no artificial company being carefully piloted around him.

Most of the time.

It was accidental, usually, as it had been on that sweltering day. The Boss might call him during one of his indulgences and he would continue on autopilot until with an embarrassed jolt he realised he had been hugging himself or rubbing his shoulders for several minutes of shop talk. Both of his hands would be occupied with a laptop or scribbling notes, but he would notice that nevertheless an unoccupied hand appeared to be feeding him snacks. Little hiccups that he could stammer and stutter around and dismiss and vow to never let happen again.

Sometimes it wasn’t much of an accident at all.

It wasn’t an accident when he collapsed into bed at two in the morning, his legs stiff from hours of driving and still in the clothes he’d worn for the journey. The call came just when he was drifting off and so he was a little irate to pick it up.

“Yeah? Um, I mean, hello, Doppio here?”

“Doppio. You have arrived?”

“Uh-huh. Geez, though, traffic was rough. Do you think we could get some of our guys in the government to hold off roadworks around places we need to be?”

The Boss laughed, gently, shaving off what little remained of Doppio’s ire. He settled against the pillows and burrowed under the blankets, phone pressed between his cheek and the bed.

“There are more… troublesome issues that we need them to manipulate in our favour, but perhaps we could leverage someone in transport to at least forewarn you. But you have made it in one piece, at least? No other problems?”

“Nah. All good, Boss.”

“Excellent. I can always rely on you, Doppio.”

He sounded warm and content and Doppio felt himself relaxing in turn, smiling into the empty darkness. “Thanks, but it was nothing. Way easier than a lot of stuff, really.”

“Still, your comfort is very important to me. Your comfort, your contentment and your happiness in your role.” He paused for a moment, giving Doppio time to soak in the words and bury them somewhere deep. “Is there anything else that you need, Doppio?”

He shrugged, lying back and sighing under the warmth of the duvet. “I don’t think so. It’s a pretty well-furnished place this time. I think there’s even a garden in the back? No food, but I can buy some in the morning. It’s a nice place.”

“Just so. But… is there anything else that you need, Doppio?”

Something in the wording made him pause, the automatic dismissal hanging in the back of his throat. Instead Doppio stopped, listening to the companionable silence on the other end, closed his eyes, and stretched out his arm under the covers.

He could have made King Crimson’s hand find his right away; that was trivial. Instead he summoned it a little way away from his own hand, had it fumble under the blanket for him until it brushed against his fingers and then crawl over them to clasp him in a cold, hard, but carefully gentle grip. Doppio smiled again, leaning against the phone.

“I got everything I need, Boss.”

“That is all I need to know. Goodnight, Doppio.”

“Goodnight, Boss.”

The phone hung up and Doppio yawned and lay back and drifted off to sleep, his hand held in King Crimson’s grip until his consciousness faded into oblivion.

As far as he was aware, he would sleep for the remainder of the night and a little too far into the morning, but nevertheless, after not even a full hour, his body sat itself up, stretched and yawned. It rose, clicking out its joints and making little sighs and appearing, although perhaps that was only the poor lighting, to start looking like someone altogether not like Doppio at all.

In this peculiar sleepwalking state his body rummaged through his things, retrieved a number of untidy folders and a laptop with a screen that was at least sixty percent scratch and sat down on the floor beside the bed it had risen from. It clicked and leafed through items whose combined net worth in information could have compromised a great number of bank accounts, reputations of national figures, and thumbs. It picked through lives and atrocities in the manner of a child painstakingly, industriously, but with not one thought of malice or cruelty in its head, plucking the wings off of flies. It did not particularly remember why it had ever begun this diligent process of making the world, on average, a slightly worse place for human beings to inhabit, but it did so methodically and keenly and, for the most part, entirely in these dark, quiet, solitary moments.

Purely solitary, in every sense of the word that matters. And yet, from time to time as it worked away at its little projects another figure would appear out of thin air. Fetching and carrying, sometimes, or acting out a particularly vile spike in mood, or simply sitting beside the body and watching, staring, murmuring its own voice back to it like an audio shadow.

Or, sometimes, in perfectly controlled and choreographed movements, reaching for its hand, or its face, or laying an arm around its shoulders and squeezing, very gently. Sometimes, with some finesse and a sufficient amount of concentration, the stand could murmur in a very different voice than the one belonging to the figure feeding it its lines. With enough practice everything from the movements of its brute, unyielding body to the expressions on its face could look as though they belonged to someone else entirely.

And the sleepwalker had had a long time to practice. With great care it manipulated its puppet through each gentle gesture, each sweet, ungainly movement, each expression of rapt attention and unconditional approval and, during a lull in its work, it might close its eyes and picture a face it would never be able to see and a body it would never touch. Not from the outside, at any rate.

Passione’s Boss was not lonely.