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The prototype–Scaramouche’s other self–makes all the experimentation feel worth it.
Worth the indignity of Dottore’s hand and scalpel; worth being kicked off Harbinger missions because Dottore pled his need to run more tests on the Sixth; worth the frustration, only moments ago, of being pinned down by one clone (as if he’s stupid enough to squirm) and strung up in wires and tubes by another.
Dottore sets his gloved hands beneath Scaramouche’s and lifts his arms, as graceful as a dance. Electric pulses run from his inorganic muscles and through the wrist-thick wires plunged into his flayed back. Metal whirs behind Scaramouche as the creature awakens, extends its arms, like a dragon unfurling its wings–like his own shadow, thrown thrice its size against the wall. The weight of all the metal and fiberglass pulls on the infrastructure that passes for bones inside him.
Dottore’s emotion may be hidden beneath his mask, but it’s crystal clear in his voice: “Beautiful. You are beautiful.”
Scaramouche turns, pulling the cords to their limits in his naked torso, so he can get a better look at the prototype as it follows his movements. It’s not very elegant– yet . It’s only a hollow torso and arms, with missing pieces and tarnished metal recycled from old projects. For months, he’s watched the skeleton take shape in the shadows of the lab, feeling like a vishap forced to sit within eyesight of a bleeding buck. Now, he can finally taste the blood.
Scaramouche throws a hand out. The puppet’s metal appendage sails over his own head with a whoosh of wind, forcing Dottore back a step, and crashes into the wall. A bookshelf packed with tools and jars explodes in a snowfall of glass onto the ground. The whole lab shudders. Dottore snags his wrist.
If Scaramouche had a heart, it’d be bursting.
He plucks his wrist free. “I suppose you’ve done well enough. Still a ways to go, Zandik.”
“Hold your tongue and show me what else you two can do together.”
Here’s an experiment Scaramouche is pleased to be involved in, though he still grumbles as Dottore makes him go through endless minute actions to test the machinery. Dottore fills page after page in his notebook with his untidy scrawl.
“I have one last concern,” Dottore says, standing and setting aside the notebook. “We must be absolutely certain that nothing can break the connection between you and the vessel.”
Puppet, Scaramouche corrects.
“For example, could an…overstimulation of your nervous system–or what there is of your nervous system–shake your mental faculties enough to break it?”
Dottore approaches with his usual prowl that’s somehow careless, somehow full of intent. If he gets too close, Scaramouche could have him up against the wall by the throat. Dottore knows that he deserves it–that he deserves to get crushed, and that Scaramouche deserves the chance to crush him.
Scaramouche says, “If you design it properly, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“It’s best to prepare for all eventualities.”
Scaramouche keeps his glare on Dottore. The room is full of things to cut and carve him; he knows how this goes. And now he doesn’t dread it. Let him try . Let anyone try to hurt me once the puppet is mine.
Dottore sweeps down to pick up a large shard of glass from the jars Scaramouche broke. His coat flares out around him. “What if you fall unconscious? We should know for certain what that means for your vessel.”
He holds the glass close to Scaramouche’s neck. Scaramouche’s sharp blue eye flashes in it; a slight tilt, and it reflects Dottore’s blank mask.
“None of that matters if I decide the puppet isn’t worthy.” Scaramouche runs his tongue over his teeth, feeling jittery. “I won’t settle for throwing my weight around. It needs true power.”
“Is that so?”
“It needs to sustain the gnosis.”
Dottore tilts his chin up with the sharp edge of the glass. “Oh, is that all? I wanted to aim higher. Give me nothing more precious than time, and this vessel will hold more power than a pathetic Archon ever could.”
“Yes,” Scaramouche breathes. “Yes.” That is what he’s here for. That is what everything he’s ever suffered has been leading up to.
Dottore tosses the glass aside. Scaramouche’s body relaxes in a shudder, but he tenses right back up as Dottore releases the wires from his back. The main connection port, the one glowing with light like Inazuma’s Electro Seelies, has a lever that Dottore has to thrust free. It releases with a loud crack and Scaramouche loses his balance, feeling like the port took out all of his insides with it.
Dottore lets him collapse to the floor. Head spinning, Scaramouche looks over his shoulder–the puppet is ugly, headless, lost in the shadows of the ceiling. Without him, it’s nothing. Without him, it’s empty.
Power rushes through him like he imagines blood must for humans when they’re elated or aroused. His ears ring; his hands are hot. He gets to his feet.
Dottore’s back is turned–he wants to drive that glass shard into his spine.
Dottore has made his dream a reality–the fragile puppet who was left in the rain so many times wants to cry thank you, thank you , regardless of all the shit Dottore put him through . A slap and a stroke. Thank you.
Dottore leisurely takes his seat and writes another note. He doesn’t even glance up when Scaramouche stands before him. Maybe. Who knows what happens behind the black glass of the mask.
Scaramouche says, “Your madman’s work is finally worth something. Do you deserve a reward, doctor?”
He sets a hand on the table. Then the other, pushing his weight down. Boxing Dottore in. Scaramouche’s back is still bare and torn open, all the ports gaping and empty, but he feels like he holds the presence of the vessel, big enough to crush Dottore if he pleases. That black glass just reflects his own face, but still, he feels connected to Dottore in the way he was connected to the puppet. Pumped full of life and blood and hate and sickening gratitude, so thick and sweet he wants to retch. He wants to fall to his knees.
Scaramouche says, “Perhaps you’ll have earned your title once this is over.”
“Don’t be so arrogant, little puppet. I made you who you are.”
Scaramouche sneers. Arguing that point is a waste of time. “Well, now you can make me proud. ”
“I could ask you what use the Second has for the love of the Sixth–”
“But we both know what will end up piloting that thing.”
Dottore’s smile cuts bright under the mask, a hand snaking up behind Scaramouche’s neck. “The Second has no use for the love of a god, either.”
The girl’s usually insensible, but today she watches him.
Her pink gaze tracks Scaramouche as he passes by the cells and cages full of whimpering inbreds. She’s enough of a favourite to have her own cell. Maybe one day, she’ll graduate to walking free, her leash so long she won’t feel its tug until it’s too late–but Scaramouche doubts it. She’s made it far, but none of Dottore’s creatures make it to the end.
They simply can’t. They aren’t like him.
Scaramouche was generous to Dottore, and he apparently still has some care to spare. He pauses at the glass wall of her cell, lifting an eyebrow to ask, Well, what is it?
She takes a deep, shaky breath. She lifts her arm to show how the bandages are caked with a black crust. She lifts the hem of her cotton gown; the bandages on her legs are so soaked that she’s been tracking bloody footprints around in circles.
Collei, he reads off the pack of sheets attached to her door, like a name given to a shelter dog. Collei, such a shame, you pathetic thing.
Scaramouche unlocks the door with the passcode and steps in. She obediently hops onto her cot and sits straight. Her wide pink eyes never leave him.
Looking her over, he curls his lip. “Throw those bandages away. It’s not as if they’re helping.”
Collei unwinds them, dried blood snowing on her lap. Dottore has done nothing to cure the sickness she came in with. If anything, it’s worse. Her skin peels off in slabs of strange, carapace-like rot.
“He forgot you, didn’t he?”
Scaramouche supposes Dottore’s been distracted with the prototype, and so he feels less sorry for her. Or else the clone Dottore assigned to the dirty work has malfunctioned or gotten careless. The problem with a frivolous, whimsical scientist creating clones of himself at even more frivolous, whimsical stages of his life.
If Collei dies, it’s Scaramouche who will have to endure Dottore’s feelings of incompetence by turning him inside out.
“Wait a minute. Don’t move.”
Scaramouche winds back into the storerooms and comes back with fresh bandages and antiseptic and the special tincture Dottore uses on the girl. He’s no good at this. Even he knows he’s being rough as he smacks away the loose, bloody scales and drenches her chewed-up arm in the reeking antiseptic. Under the rusty blood, he smells her skin rotting, putrid but sweet. Poor humans and their fragile bodies.
When I am a god, will I stop sicknesses like Eleazar?
He blinks, startled by his own thoughts. It echoes without an answer.
He tosses the bandages on her bed. “That’s all I can do for you. You’ve seen them tie you up countless times. You can do it yourself, right?”
Collei nods. She’s fixated on him, trembling, and he thinks of the shattered shards of glass upon the floor of the lab. He absently touches his throat; Dottore nicked him after all.
Did she remember something today? Did a memory crawl inside her? Did it make her this soft and desperate? Or perhaps the pain is just that bad. Perhaps he’s the first person to speak to her in days. He knows loneliness like that, and how being acknowledged can taste like cool water in the desert. That feeling hasn’t mattered for decades, but the pain lives inside him.
“Dottore has no right to neglect you. I’ll speak to him about this.”
“Can you tell him–I–I can’t take this anymore. It’s not working. See?” She lifts her bloodied arms. “If he’s so tired of me, he can send me back home. I don’t mind. I’ll find another doctor. I can’t take this. Please.”
“That’s not up to me.”
“ Please !”
Collei reaches for him; he jerks back.
“Don’t you dare touch me.” You have no idea who I am. No idea who I’m about to be.
Worse than her gall is her eyes. He knows that search for any speck of kindness. Any goodness in those who did this to her.
A slap and a stroke. Thank you.
Scaramouche grabs her raw arm and squeezes. She yelps. Blood squelches between his fingers.
“No one here will be kind to you just because you beg for it. No one. Do you know what you are to him?”
Collei has some fight–she grasps blindly at his face, but he slaps her away.
“You’re a toy. I can tell him how amusing you are so he plays with you again, but remember that as soon as he’s done with one toy, he rips into another. Am I understood?”
Collei goes still, tension rippling through her little body. He holds firm. He swallows thickly. The ports in his back, the ones Dottore didn’t care to install closures or protections over because what use was Scaramouche when he wasn’t hooked up to the wires–the ports sting and itch. The instant Collei sneers at him like a frightened dog, he lets her go.
“I don’t know your dosage.” He tosses the tincture on her lap. “Drink it all if you think it’ll let you escape.”
As he steps through the door, Collei asks, “Will I see you again?”
Her intonation is oddly flat. Perhaps she’s scheming or has decided he’s something she needs to be uniquely wary of. You learn fast. I’m pleased.
“It’ll always be me who comes into the lab,” Scaramouche says. “But one day, you won’t recognise me when I leave. And then you should be very, very afraid of him, because it’ll be your turn.”