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On the balcony, il Dottore waits. It’s night, the only time when he’s allowed to be out and about at the Winery. Too many visitors come through during the daytime; Mondstadtians—fathers with eligible daughters; bachelors with open hearts; and businessmen looking for a deal to fill their pockets—often wander the grounds for as long as the sun shines, hoping for any opportunity to come across Master Diluc himself. Travelers from all across Teyvat swarm the place, too, with kameras in hand.
Being seen by just a single visitor would be one too many.
Neither Dottore nor Diluc are in a position to underestimate the consequences of their flirtations being caught. Then again, whatever they have is beyond the brevity of a mere dalliance; it’s been nearly a year since Dottore first negotiated himself a place Diluc’s bed, and closer to two since Dottore had tasted the blood spilling from Diluc’s split lip. They are a well-kept secret—and considering the violence that public appearances inspire within the both of them, perhaps no one can fathom them as anything other than enemies. Perhaps, no one can fathom that they’re capable of harboring affection for each other.
At times, Dottore himself can hardly believe it.
Tonight, though, he believes in full.
He keeps his eyes on a quiet little pathway that meanders south-west from the Dawn Winery, along the soft-bodied river at the edge of the vineyards. It’s dimly lit; all other trails leading to and from the Winery are lined with lampposts, and Favonius Knights wander the full extent of them from dusk and through dawn with their torches and swords. If Diluc were to take any of those paths home, he’d be spotted and questioned within minutes.
So, for every night that Diluc dons his mask and cloak, it is the long way home.
Overall, it’s an agreeable arrangement. Dottore more often than not burns the midnight oil, his pages of research and the sharp swoops of his font illuminated by cuts of moonlight through the windows. He works through the indecisive darkness that is neither late-night nor early-morning, and eases the furious scratch of his quill over parchment when the crickets soften their melody.
He stepped away from his desk for tonight only a quarter-of-an-hour ago; it’s a warm night with a lazy breeze, so he hadn’t bothered wrestling on too much clothing—just a pair of cotton pants and a borrowed robe, tied loose around his waist. His mask lies, abandoned, on the desk back inside.
“It’s you who made them,” Dottore had told Diluc, when he’d first seen the burns scarring the left side of his face. “Some of them, anyways.”
“Then it’s me who should atone for them.”
(Dottore once hated the naked feeling that accompanied a bare face.)
“And how might you atone?”
(Diluc has long-since kissed the hate out of him.)
A lithe shadow slips down the pathway. Dottore leans in, bracing his forearms against the balcony railing to watch that sneaking silhouette for as long as he can—three or four seconds, at most, before it slinks into the shadows of the vineyard trellises. From here, it’s a guessing game.
Rarely, and when he knows the maids will be asleep, Diluc will enter the Winery by normal means; most nights, he climbs up the vines beneath his window, or scales the brick wall with his fingertips and boots clinging to half-inch exposures of stone. Dottore just keeps his eyes among the leaves and grapes, as if there’s any chance of spotting him.
“There’s ink smudged on your face,” Diluc says, dropping down from the roof. Other than his voice, the only giveaway of his presence is the thud of his boots as he lands on the balcony. He’s as stealth as ever. He had been a menace five years ago, during the years of his sojourn—and so, he is something entirely worse, now.
Dottore loves him so.
“And on yours?” Dottore wonders, turning to look at Diluc and coaxing the halfway mask from his face. “Not a scratch, nor a single drop of blood. Unscathed, as always.”
“You sound disappointed,” Diluc says, entertaining Dottore’s stare for a matter of seconds before wandering inside. He unfastens his cloak, and shrugs off his shirt. Dottore follows, and closes the balcony doors behind him.
“You know I delight in seeing you bloody and bruised.”
“How about seeing me safe?”
“It’s a nice change of pace,” Dottore admits.
“As is seeing you out of that bowtie.”
“Careful, Ragnvindr. You’re talking your way into an empty bed.”
Diluc nears him again, unfastening the tie of Dottore’s robe so that he can slide his hands over Dottore’s hips. He lightly squeezes the flesh between his palms and fingers before leaning in, pressing his forehead into the shallow valley between the muscles of Dottore’s chest. Dottore hums, gliding a hand up Diluc’s back to pull the ribbon of his ponytail and let his hair fall loose. He is always like this, losing both bark and bite as soon as Diluc puts a hand on him.
“I saw the wound on your belly,” Dottore murmurs. He spotted it—the cut of red on his navel—as soon as Diluc had stripped off his shirt. When it comes to Diluc, Dottore does not overlook anything.
“I can clean it myself. It’s not very deep.”
“Let me tend to it.”
It is one of few nights when Diluc offers no fight.
“Get to the bathroom, then,” Dottore says, using his hands to turn Diluc and nudge him in the right direction. Diluc puts his back to the sink counter, braces his hands on the edge, and hops up, all with nothing more than a small grunt of discomfort. He keeps his thighs propped open; after fetching a small medical kit, Dottore wedges himself in-between.
“You’re closer than professionalism allows.”
“How wonderful that I’m not a professional.”
“Working without a license?”
Dottore’s lips twitch; he faintly smiles.
“I’ve done worse.”
“You have.”
“Well, you’re welcome to push me back if you don’t care for the proximity. Celestia knows you have the advantage of strength,” Dottore suggests. Diluc’s only response is the tightening of his legs, his knees digging harder into Dottore’s side. “You’ll have to ease up; I can hardly see the wound now.”
Diluc obeys, scooting back on the counter while allowing Dottore more space. Dottore fetches a clean washcloth, wetting it in the sink and then wringing it out. He softly drags it over the cut on Diluc’s abdomen, placing a finger beneath the cloth to gingerly scrape away dried clots of blood. Admittedly, it’s all more tender than it needs to be; Diluc had been telling the truth when he’d said that the wound wasn’t horrible. It’s so rare that he yields himself like this, though, and just as uncommon for Dottore to act on any inclination for true kindness. It would be a waste to be cruel.
Dottore holds Diluc still with a stern hand on his waist when he blots disinfectant over the cut. Diluc’s muscles clench beneath his fingers, and sucks in a sharp breath through clenched teeth.
Dottore looks up to his face; Diluc is gritting his teeth, and he offers something like a growl when he catches Dottore staring. In reply, Dottore grins, his lips stretching to show the jagged fit of his teeth—this, once, was a grin that Diluc loathed to see. It gleams with immorality: Dottore’s smile is a door swinging open with only a hinge to hold it; it’s an iced-over lake one crack away from shattering; and it’s a half-loaded gun, leaving one to wonder if he means to bite down with those teeth, too, or if he’ll only open them to laugh.
“You look nice,” Dottore purrs.
“Just treat the wound.”
“You’re distracting me.”
“You’re shameless.”
“I should hope so,” Dottore says, his smile easing into something soft-lipped and shallow-dimpled. “Shame would get me nowhere.”
“Shame might help you find that moral compass of yours.”
“There’s no finding a thing that does not exist.”
“Make one, then. Your hands are capable things.”
“Indeed,” Dottore says, that grin creeping to his face again. “When might we discuss your morality, Master Diluc?”
“You mean to imply that I’m less than virtuous?”
“Virtue and morality are not the same creature.”
“Maybe,” Diluc concedes, “but they are, at the very least, heads of the same hydra.”
Dottore sorts through the medical supplies for a cotton patch and a roll of gauze. He presses the patch on first, along with a generous slather of healing ointment—the smell of lavender and mint catches, sweet and sharp in the back of his nose—and then steps back for the room he needs to wind the gauze around the circumference of Diluc’s trim waist. He smooths his thumb over the layers of bandaging, a satisfied rumble sounding at the back of his throat.
“I should have bathed beforehand,” Diluc mutters, sliding off from the counter.
“An item for your morning agenda,” Dottore suggests, lazily nosing his way into the crook of Diluc’s neck so that he can lick at his skin, the salty tang of sweat settling on his tongue. “What are the odds of you allowing me to care for you in the morning as I have tonight?”
“Slim to none.”
“You’re too proud.”
“I won’t take lessons on hubris from you.”
“Ragnvindr,” Dottore says, scraping his teeth over Diluc’s throat before leaning away again, “you wound me.”
“Have I ever done anything else?” Diluc asks, quietly smiling, the corner of his mouth quirked upwards as he reaches out to thumb the burns on Dottore’s cheek. Dottore leans into that touch, unsure of when he will feel it next. There are nights when they share a bed but do not touch so much as fingertips; when sharing a bed is only done for the sake of routine; when they cannot chew to pieces and swallow the horror of their intimacy; when they are on guard, intensely aware of their station and their duty; and when they cannot afford to recognize that not only are they comparable, but compatible, too.
Dottore, at the very least, is often able to say, “To Hell with it all. To Hell with everything and everyone but you.” He’s a man who’s condemned myriad things and countless people, to the point where damning the whole world does not seem too great or drastic a measure. It’s only Diluc, an ounce more methodical and patient than he, who offers Dottore any incentive for restraint. There is, Dottore finds, some pleasure to be found in the slow smolder they’re caught in. It will make the peak of everything—the moment in which, inevitably, this all goes up in flames—hotter, brighter, better.
So, he can bide his time. In time, all phoenixes burn; Diluc will make ashes of them both, burying them in this life and putting them into the next together—if such a cycle exists, but Il Dottore is not a romantic. He is not a man who waxes with lamentations and believes that beauty signals importance. Reincarnation is a silly thing, made by and for people who are burdened with big hearts, people who believe that this life has limitations. He vests no interest in the concept.
He has always taken the world raw and found a way to make it what he’d like. There is not a thing he cannot throw into the fire, and not a mold he can’t pour the meltings into. He has never needed the favor of a god. He’s made his path with sweat and blood. He forged his world alone, and in spite. Maybe he did not build the latter of the world, but he’s climbed it and is running out of rungs to reach—and he’s preparing to make more. Celestia is not high enough. There is a beyond. There are curtains to pull back and a truth to reveal, and Dottore will do this alone, too, because no other human deserves the glory.
That’s what he’d thought for so long, anyways—that he’d do this, all of this, alone.
And now there is Diluc, blazing, a beacon, and the flight beaten out of him, who does not back down like people are supposed to.
And Dottore does not think he can stand the solitude.
Diluc will be with him at the top. He will be higher, the only thing Dottore has ever bowed to. There is no time or place to say any of this, not now; Dottore does not yet have the hands or heart of a devotee—there is no place for reverence carved into him—and Diluc is not yet a god.
Dottore does not remember what he’d last said to Diluc, or what Diluc had last said to him. He’d forgotten that they exist beyond reveries. Two years have passed since they had licked into each other, like tongues, like flames, and Dottore still forgets.
“Just come to bed with me,” Dottore says, “while I still have you yielding to me.”
“I don’t yield to you.”
“No?”
“I yield to myself, and to my own desires.”
Diluc is pushing at Dottore’s chest, and Dottore lets him. He slowly steps backward while Diluc steps forward, and lets himself fall back when his knees crumble at the edge of the bed, and leisurely crawls up the length of the mattress while Diluc comes up after him.
“Your desires,” Dottore repeats. The pad of his thumb smears over Diluc’s bottom lip; Diluc has settled himself over Dottore, his knees at either side of the Harbinger’s waist to straddle him. He sits up straight, vertebrae perfectly stacked like the most noble of spines, while his hands knead the rolls of Dottore’s belly. “Pray tell, what does my phoenix desire?”
“Not a what,” Diluc corrects him, reddening, “but a who. ”
“What happened to your bluntness?” Dottore wonders. “You’re so demure atop me.”
“I spent three years trying to make a corpse of you. Give me my time.”
“I don’t dislike the shows of modesty, darling.”
“I know. You go out of your way to see me flustered.”
Dottore runs a chaste hand down Diluc’s thigh, pressing his palm flat over the muscle along the top. Perhaps chaste is a dishonest word, but the touch demands nothing, wanting nothing more than warmth. His other hand settles on Diluc’s hip, quietly coaxing him down, and Diluc goes willingly. He moves beside Dottore, curling up close to his side, and Dottore shifts to face him, crowding Diluc closer by tucking him into the open front of his robe.
In time, all of the aching devolves to pain. They will be at each other’s throats tomorrow.
Softness is a finite thing, demanded beyond the supply by incapable hearts.