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“I’ve already told you, I’m fine .”
Exasperation seeps into his tone in much the same manner he can see blood beginning to creep through the gauze padding haphazardly secured to his upper arm.
Amateurs. Dottore scowls. There’s a bullet embedded in the flesh. He can practically smell the intrusively leaden scent of it amidst the salty copper tang of blood.
“That’ll scar if you leave it in for too long.” He says pointedly, crossing his arms and making an appeal to the shallow vanity he understands occupies a significant fraction of the Banker’s psyche. “Let me tend to it if they’re so busy in the medical wing that they’re making you wait.”
Pantalone angles him with a scathing look thrown over one shoulder. “What part of no do you fail to grasp, Doctor?”
Dottore sneers. “The part that implies you consider my touch more abhorrent than having to face the unthinkable possibility of having your pretty porcelain complexion scarred from the ensuing neglect.”
“Perhaps I do.” He shoots back, and his lip curls up to show a warning flash of teeth. “I’ll have you know that I’m not so attuned to your eccentricities that I enjoy these little games of yours. Who’s to say you won’t make it even worse?”
It takes all his restraint to keep from storming off in a rage. What in Teyvat has he ever done to inspire such distrust? The lack of give between them is difficult to stomach. He can feel the tension building under his nails, coalescing and gathering in his palms, rising up the narrow vessels of his thorax and catching at his throat, only to rise further and grind at the backs of his teeth. “Why would I? It’d be a shame to ruin your pretty face.”
“Was that a compliment?” Pantalone scoffs in a voice bubbling with derision. “Ha! As if you would know anything about beauty. Speak of indiscriminate murder and perhaps I’ll better take you at your word.”
“Slander. I do not kill indiscriminately.”
His gaze lands on him, eyes sharp and skeptical behind the flashing lenses of his spectacles. “Now that’s a lie if I’ve ever heard one. Just last week I saw you dismember two of your subjects while a third watched on in horror.”
Damn it. Dottore falters, caught on a back foot. Just as quickly he recuperates and amends with a haughty rush of breath and a scowl.
“All’s fair in love and war.”
“Then which was it?” Pantalone presses, his arms crossed over his chest to mirror him in an obstinate refusal to yield. “Call it a fit of violent passion if you please, because as far as I could surmise, it was neither.”
“Love of war.” He hisses. “Surely you would not disdain me so much. There is very little left in the world which evokes joy anymore. As I understand it, this is precisely why so many of you are so miserable. Perhaps you ought to be congratulating me on finding a modest nugget of it instead of burdening me with your unfounded castigation.”
Pantalone turns from him with an almost peevish air, the fur lining of his collar sweeping into place to conceal his expression. Despite the motion, his voice is distinctly lacking in continued acerbity. “And even after this you would expect me to entrust myself to you? You must think me a fool. Dear Doctor, I do wonder whether you’re aware of what comes out of your mouth sometimes.”
“Snark doesn’t suit you.” On the contrary, the Ninth wears it like a tailored glove, smooth to the fingers and fitted to the wrist like snakeskin. Fitting, though the Regrator wears his fangs concealed beneath his sleeves rather than over them and bared to the gums. But now, even with the serpent in sight it is time to wait, time to sit back and watch from the shadows, to hold out the pleading hand and bide his time so that the skittish creature might approach. But Dottore does not plead, and Pantalone is the furthest thing from skittish. This is a game they play regularly- not that repetition serves in any way to diminish the associated friction.
It is Pantalone who finally cedes.
“Though... I suppose I can’t refuse an offer so generously made.” He murmurs stiffly, in a rare act of vacillation. His reluctant fingers brush the sleeve of his jacket where Dottore can see it beginning to spot with blood. He conceals the sneer that threatens at his twitching lip- how he despises the way he comes across as falsely demure, the melodramatic clown.
Pantalone has turned around again. He smiles, some species of archangel with wings like an oil slick and a beckoning crown of thorns. “You’ll be kind with me, won’t you?”
The scoff tears itself from his unwitting throat. Defiance in the face of false grace. Let him play at being a hopeless romantic all he wants, Dottore will not indulge his shallow thespianism. “Who do you think corrected Tartaglia’s unfortunate impalement last week? You certainly didn’t hear him shrieking about it.”
Pantalone looks unconvinced, but the change in demeanor is apparent. He allows Dottore to escort him out of the room, needing no guidance ( they’ve danced to this tune countless times before ) but yielding to the guise of it.
His laboratory is situated further from the body of the facility than he would like. Even his saintly colleagues consider the screaming and crying distasteful, and there’s the added hazard of volatile materials as well. Not that Dottore is anything but careful with his resources. However, even the Fatui cloaked in all their dubious morality cannot shake off the shadow of bureaucracy, and neither Pierro nor their tightly-lidded coffers can resist the allure of preventative measures. Hence why some policies are implemented on the basis of principle alone.
The doors match the aesthetics of the rest of the place: alabaster and icy blue, bordered with decorative accents carved in ice. What lies beyond lacks all the palatial intricacy of the Tsaritsa’s liking. Here, artistic grandiosity gives way to blunt and messy pragmatism, aquamarine and lapis transmute to graphite and gunmetal gray.
It’s warmer too.
Dottore shrugs off his coat as the doors shut behind them and tosses it aside over an empty workbench, discarding the limp, molted shell of formality. The room is mercifully clean. The blood and oil have been scrubbed from the floors, the metal of the drains and taps are shiny, the syringes and instruments are in order, the desks are only mildly cluttered- all in all, presentable.
Pantalone on the other hand, looks mildly lost.
“The padded seat.” He directs, exasperated. “Over there. Take your damn clothes off and let me have a look.”
For once, Pantalone does as he’s told. Meanwhile, Dottore takes the rare opportunity to gather his bearings. As much of a mistake as this may be, he’s more than waist- deep in his predicament. Into a metal tray go: scissors, a handful of scalpel blades, a naked scalpel handle, a wad of gauze and a bottle of pure spirits, a roll of bandages, a syringe. He picks up a carafe of purified water on his way back. Do no harm. What dull rhetoric. There is harm in the very act of living, and only fools would deign to think themselves righteous by believing otherwise.
It’s easy to get caught up in his thoughts and easier still when he’s alone. So he doesn’t even realize he’s staring until his visitor makes a noise of sharp derision. “Am I here to be ogled, Doctor?” Pantalone drawls, dropping his coat to the floor and treating him to a full view of his torso, shoulders to hips draped in fine dark cashmere. “If you’d wanted a quick fuck you could have just asked.”
His response is limited to an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Brat.”
“If you say so.” The cashmere is pulled back, dark spun wool giving way to pale, milky flesh; the moon casting off its brocade of night, the lamplight lure of an anglerfish yawning from the abyss. The banker leans back and props his weight onto the palm of his uninjured arm, baring a smile in all its smug and gilded glory. “All the better. That’s just what you like.”
Dottore swallows.
Thankfully, the wound reveals itself as a welcome distraction. Pantalone glances at it once, perfunctory, before looking away. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Dottore pounces, arrowing in like a shark to spilled blood.
The bandaging is messy and crude and he doesn’t bother hiding his distaste- it seems that even Harbingers aren’t exempt from the brusque and often negligent treatment of the triage teams. He peels the ugliness swiftly away and gets to cleaning the skin beneath, wiping up the blood with mats of gauze which he tosses carelessly aside.
The crowd of those who call him a madman may grow increasingly numerous these days, but there are none amongst them who can call him incompetent. He makes quick work of the preliminary cleaning, then steps back to assess the damage.
“There’s a bullet in here.”
“Is there, now?” Pantalone cranes his neck to peer at the much-improved mess, lackadaisical and sardonic. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
For all his flippancy, Dottore doesn’t miss the pallor of his skin, the tightness around his eyes, the way his fingers have curled, vice-like, around the edge of the seat. “I’ll have to extract it.” He declares with relish, and reaches over to his tray to retrieve a pair of forceps. “Try not to move.”
Much to his chagrin, his patient yanks away, practically kyphotic as he scoots away from him, his free hand rising to cup the wound protectively. “Not so fast. At the very least, you ought to give me something to numb it before you go digging around in there.”
“Don’t be a baby.” Dottore snaps, lunging for him and closing his fingers around the retreating length of his bony wrist. “You’ll hardly feel a pinch.”
Pantalone’s face twists into a sneer. “A pinch? Judging by the way the damned thing has all but relinquished me the use of my arm, It seems perfectly sensible that one might surmise that it would hurt just as much- if not more - coming out.” He yanks at his fingers and continues. “Would it be so difficult to request- Doctor - that you might call upon all the appropriate sensibilities as a medical professional-”
Dottore takes a long breath. In all his years as one of the Tsaritsa’s esteemed Harbingers, he’s found it often becomes rather difficult to remind himself, if not justify, that the benefits of the funding generally outweigh the accompanying caveat of having to tolerate the contumelious rabble.
Still, his ire bubbles to the forefront. In the next moment he is surging forward and seizing him by the delicate porcelain of his throat, thrusting him back so that he lands squarely against the gentle incline of the raised backrest. Pantalone gasps- the air knocked from his lungs, and Dottore wastes no time in angling himself over him to pin him down.
“And what do you call upon?” He sneers.
“Magnanimity.” Pantalone breathes, flushed and glistening with fever sweat.
“Don’t. Move.”
The banker is malleable beneath his hands. Perhaps he handles him a little more roughly than is needed as he turns him to expose the injury, but his patience has worn thin. Dottore ignores the ensuing yelp of protest; once he glimpses the metal curve of the bullet, he grasps it in the teeth of the forceps and pulls.
Clink. Clink. It rattles into the tray and he examines the projectile first before he searches the wound thoroughly for shrapnel. For a bullet wound, the injury is relatively clean. Still, he flushes it out and picks at the ragged edges before deeming it ready to close. All the while, Pantalone looks on in disgruntled silence, seemingly having come to the belated realization that suspending his thrashing about was much to his own benefit as it was to Dottore’s convenience.
“Done?”
“Sutures now.”
“For Archon’s sake, would you just hurry it-”
Dottore meets him with bared teeth. “Afraid of needles, Regrator?”
“No.” He scowls, unperturbed. “But I’d rather not spend more time in this dungeon than I have to. All this disinfectant- it’s practically bleaching my hair.”
Complaints and snide remarks form the bulk of the banker’s daily verbal repertoire. Yet, Dottore cannot say with any amount of genuinity that he would prefer anything else. A little struggle always serves to keep things a little more interesting after all, and Pantalone’s sharp tongue is an integral component to his being.
To his merit, he endures the procedure without any more fussing. Dottore cements his focus on the hook and glide of his instruments, pointedly ignoring the banker as he makes a mental note of the tissue depth and begins to close each layer with practiced precision. It’s hard to dismiss the feeling of skin on skin- his bare forearms against the warm planes of the ninth’s chest, the stuttered brush of air against the tops of his knuckles with every exhale, the loops of raven-feather hair tickling his wrists. When he finally looks up- having closed the last knot and severed the trailing thread- Pantalone’s eyes are shut.
“Done.” He pulls away before they can open, retreating to the safety of all that is not-Pantalone before he finds himself affixed and dissected beneath that damnable violet gaze of his.
“Finally.” Pantalone grumbles, snatching away and examining his handiwork before he can bandage him. “And here I was, thinking that you were drawing it out on purpose.”
“Never said I wasn’t.”
“Brat.”
Dottore turns away to attend to his instruments. As entertaining as riling up the banker is, the pastime generally involves a near equable amount of provocation directed towards himself as to the other party.
That is to say, Pantalone is exhausting .
But Pantalone also makes it so difficult to disregard him. Dottore allows him to sit up, but kicks his sweater and jacket away as he reaches for them. “Don’t.”
This time, he sits quietly as he approaches with a roll of conforming bandages. He makes no move to push him away or even be remotely obnoxious as he dresses the wound and winds the strips over and around his bicep and shoulder to cover the neat picket-line row of stitches.
Satisfied, Dottore pulls away, stripping the gloves from his hands and carrying the tray with him. He doesn’t bother looking back, but his brow furrows as he calls- “Get out of my sight.”
“So eager to get your hands all over me, and now you’re kicking me out?” The tell-tale rustle of clothing from behind him speaks well enough to the banker’s activities; still a little too sluggish for his liking, though there’s nothing that a sharp word or a piece of glassware hurled at his face won’t remedy. There’s still not quite enough to incentivise him to resort to such measures, so Dottore sets himself instead to disposing of his soiled materials and leaving the rest of his instruments to soak in a foaming tray of disinfectant.
“Did I stutter?” Cold water washes over the backs of his hands and wrists, he scrubs half-heartedly at his nail beds and watches the fresh blood streak and run in rivulets down his palms and wrists.
“So cruel.”
A hand settles over his shoulder and Dottore snarls, whirling on him, suds flung into the air from the motion.
“Don’t.” He grinds out, stiff beneath his hold. “Touch me.”
“And forego my show of gratitude?” His lips graze the patch of skin beneath his mask.
“Thank you. Until next time, dear.”