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1
The first time the Doctor took his chin in hand, raising it just to twist his face from side to side, the Regrator had found it debasing. It was offensive, the action, to do so, treating him as though he was someone to be used without reason. There was no respect in the motion and there was even less respect for him as a person. It was as though he was a body, lying on an operating table.
However, it was soft, how he was handled, gentle, and with a care that was clearly an attempt to remain peaceful, so he had given up all protest. The fingers, gloved or not were cold, and they left, in their wake, a thin trail of snowy dew that could only have been left there if the weather wasn’t so chilly that even the moisture of his face was being slowly frozen.
At the time, he took it in, accepting the hold because he had no method to refute the other. Even if the Doctor refused all matter of politeness, he had to pretend that he wasn’t ready to snap the fingers off. However, it was after the third time that he had grabbed the offending appendage and pushed it back, scowling and reminding the Doctor that it wasn’t in common human formality to simply grab at people who without their permission.
The response he had received had been perplexing.
“How else am I supposed to check you for injuries when you bundle yourself like you’re in the middle of a snowstorm?”
He hadn’t responded, unable to tell him to ask, knowing that he would reject the other without a doubt, and the edge of the Doctor’s lips twitched in a soft-hearted manner that he rarely saw.
2
Another oddity was the arm touches.
A brief coincidence on the upper arm, all the way to a hand gripped on him to pull him in a direction. The Regrator found himself easily dragged from one edge of the hall to another. The fingers were tight, and they reminded him that he was once again, somehow still smaller than the other as his hands wrapped around the arm completely, fingers tracing the clothing.
And if his arms were bare, then the Doctor would make sure to let his fingers meet the wrist, unwilling to grab at the flesh. It was a strange shyness that the Regrator later concluded was not shyness, but rather a distinct space that the Doctor intended. It was okay to place both hands on the shoulders and lean forward to nip at his ear, but it was too much to drag fingers down the sides of his arms.
It was the affixation on the thin lining of his skin underneath the coat that finally had the Regrator slip it off one day, as he pulled the Doctor’s fingers towards him, letting him touch the bare skin, even as it was a cold day and the windows were open to remove some of the stuffiness of the boilers that worked to keep the room warm.
The gloves were rough, and the Doctor let his fingers press against him.
He wasn’t sure why the Doctor enjoyed staring at his arms, nor did he understand precisely what it was that was attractive about them to him, but he knew that he enjoyed it and so he let him be, even if he held onto him for hours at an end.
3
When the Tenth disappeared, the meeting room became void. The Eleventh was a furious insanity that helped to reconcile his own weakness, but the Ninth was a quiet, unremarkable person.
In that sense, he appeared to be weaker than the rest of them in demeanor.
As the Knave once commented, he had no backbone, or rather he gave the impression of having no backbone. If the others were to argue, he would pacify them. If the others were to point fingers, he would face the brunt of the result. The Eleventh was the favourite, and the Ninth was the delegate dog of the Harbingers.
There was no power to his words, merely rebuke.
So, when the Doctor began to sit next to him, sleeping in the chair without caring for the contents of the meeting, the Regrator nearly stood and left the seat. However, with his arms crossed, mask on, and irritated boredom seeping into the room, his foot tapped against the Regrator’s, just a slight tap, as though to tell him to sit.
If he had been any closer, then the ledge of his coat would brush against his in the cold meeting room in which they met the Jester to receive their orders.
Suddenly, the cool harshness of his existence was tended to by a barrier of overwhelming uncaringness. Chase the blame onto others, lest you direct your attention to the one person who was so unpredictably unstable, that even the Captain became cordial. And this endeavour was successful as the Regrator enjoyed his relatively peace, only bothering to give reports on the status of everyone’s accounts.
And if there was the slightest ‘affection’ in the action, the Regrator repaid it in overlooking the small inconsistencies in the Doctor’s bank account.
4
“The pens in Snezhnaya are designed to avoid freezing the ink,” The Doctor suddenly spoke, “But that means that the flow is decreased and writing quickly will result in the pen seemingly ‘drying’ out.”
The Doctor had seated himself in his room once again, bringing with him some slew of reports that he had written out himself. The Regrator had no method of understanding the numbers that decorated the pages, but he had the space to contain the man and so he sat there, chewing through half his storage of overly expensive food.
This time it was a single biscuit.
“And you decided to impart this knowledge because…?”
“You write too quickly,” The Doctor made a vague motion towards him, “It’s why you are switching pens so often. If you wrote slowly then the matter would be resolved.”
“If I wrote slowly, no amount of time in the world would be enough to finish half of the work in a day.”
The Doctor flipped through a page without answering him. The issue seemed to bother him, and the Regrator assumed that maybe the sound of him harshly throwing the cheap pen aside had grated his nerves enough that he was asked to slow down. The Regrator found the comment annoying, or rather, that is was frustrating given that it was an admonishment of noise over his work when the Doctor could very well work in the basement.
However, his assessment was quickly proven to be an insult to the other man’s personal honour just a short two days later when he handed a pen to the Regrator.
It was smooth, and completely black, but when he pressed it against the page, all concerns of functions were erased as a clear line was produced, even as he wrote across the page, fast enough that soon, an entire section was filled out. The Doctor was still before him, as he raised his head to thank him, but the Doctor responded first instead.
“Have you considered hiring?” The Doctor asked drily, watching him create a single legislation within a stroke.
There was sarcastic bite to his question, one that would usually have the Regrator scowling, but somehow, it felt as though it was said an endearment, rather than an attempt at mockery.
“Thank you,” The Regrator replied.
He was truly thankful, but maybe to the Doctor it was merely an offhand problem that had attracted his interest for a while.
The small stack of biscuits were kept full for his spontaneous visits.
5
It was in the middle of the night that the Doctor wandered into the middle of his bed. His arms were wrapped around his waist, and his chin rested on the back of his neck.
“Are you awake?”
The Regrator was asleep until his door was opened and a knee was taken to his bed to lean in next to him.
The Doctor did not care for if he was disturbing other people’s rest, or it was better to say the concept of needing to rest was absent from his mind.
The hands were held around his hip bone, a single thumb pressing down to remind him that there was someone there. As though the Regrator would mistake the breath on his neck as someone else’s. He wasn’t quite sure if the Doctor needed to breath, but he knew that he did and the matter was dropped.
“Wha–t are you doing here?” He asked, somewhat groggily.
“I was thinking about your bones,” The Doctor admitted, “The last patient that was on my table… I could crush their bones with just enough pressure. The skin was broken on the hipbone before it cracked and shattered.”
The fingers were tracing his.
It was far too early in the morning for the Regrator to consider the implications of the words that fluctuated between wanting to test the Regrator’s bones and concern for the Regrator’s bones.
“Yours are also light.”
A few experimental taps and the Regrator hissed, the inching pain forcing him awake as his hand came to push the Doctor’s arm away, but it refused to move.
“What are you doing,” He asked flatly, annoyed to having been woken up by the Doctor’s thoughts for no other reason than a perverse sadistic experiment.
The Doctor refused to answer him as he sighed and wrapped his arms around his waist. The Regrator tensed in his hold, unsure as to what the Doctor wished for at the early hours of the night. However, when the arms relaxed and the breathed steadied, the Regrator realized the Doctor was asleep.
The grip around his waist was tight enough to prevent him from leaving, but it was just shy of causing pain.
For a moment, the Regrator thought that it was concern for his own wellbeing, wondering about the pressure of his strength overlapping the weakness of his body–
–But it was far too early in the morning to come to a decision on those matters.