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"I heard you returned from Liyue with something curious," Pantalone says as he enters Dottore's lab. His steps ring hollow in the vast space. "It must be curious indeed if it bears mentioning at all, seeing as Lohefalter brought back the Geo Archon's gnosis. What could be more interesting than that?"
He doesn't bother to hide the faint mockery in his tone. Dottore rarely pays any heed to feigned politeness. Just as he seems to pay no heed to Pantalone, either. He's engrossed in outfitting the cranium of his latest specimen with electrodes. The specimen, which appears to be humanoid in shape, and small – even by Pantalone's standards – lets it happen. Docile, or drugged.
As Pantalone approaches past the rows upon rows of empty examination tables, he settles on drugged. The figure is slumped forward on its seat, held upright by no more than its bound wrists, lifted to forty-five degrees on either side and looking quite uncomfortable in the shoulders. Pantalone rolls his own.
And stops beside the examination table Dottore occupies.
"Well?"
He smiles out of ingrained habit. It has proven useful to defuse tensions on numerous occasions. Smiling takes the sting out of his insults, to the point where his opponents can no longer be certain if what he's uttered was truly an insult. Generally, they'd rather not find out what would happen if they were wrong. Or right, for that matter.
"You may have a look for yourself," Dottore replies with a wave of his hand, adjusting the last wire before typing commands into his workstation. Charts and graphs light up on the monitors, displaying data only Dottore and those schooled in his shorthand know how to read.
Pantalone does not concern himself with the fact that he is not in possession of that particular piece of knowledge, as long as he can benefit from the results it brings. Besides, the rarer access to Dottore's research is, the dearer they can sell it. That is where Pantalone comes in. With his vast network of connections, he can turn anything into a profit.
Even this specimen, once Dottore's research has concluded.
Pantalone inspects it, the way a merchant would inspect another's wares. It may be small, but the definition of its biceps and what is hinted at beneath its top suggests a strength that is easily underestimated. A point in its favour. Pantalone traces the green markings on its arm; this might limit the number of potential buyers but make the remainder more willing to part with their money. He can already imagine the questions they might pose: does it bear other markings and where? To which he would reply they would need to find out for themselves.
His fingers trail over its shoulder to the necklace ringing its throat. That would have to go – or more precisely, he would find another market for it. Its religious aura is too strong for the kind of customers he has in mind for the specimen, and he wouldn't want to offend anyone. Or worse, remind them of commandments that might forbid such a purchase.
Perhaps most importantly, it is not only clean but immaculate. Not a speck of dirt clings to its attire. Being able to defile something so pure harbours a special appeal. Its hair, too – though dishevelled by the electrodes – has a silken sheen to it. An urge grips Pantalone to run his fingers through its hair, to feel its softness for himself, forgetting for a moment that he is wearing gloves.
Setting that thought aside for another time, he closes his fingers around a handful of hair, careful not to jostle the wires too much, and tilts its head up to get a better look at its face. And smiles. He can definitely turn a face like that into profit.
"Wait, is this—?"
"The Vigilant Yaksha, Conqueror of Demons? The very same."
Dottore sounds pleased with himself. He sounds pleased with himself no matter what, yet this time Pantalone has to grant that he had earned his smugness.
"My, my," he says, admiration oozing from his voice and only half played up. "That is quite a catch. What are you going to do with him? Use him to create more Sigils of Permission?"
"That is my backup plan. First, I want to know what makes him immortal. What more would it take for him to become a god? Is this a path that we can follow?"
"He's as beautiful as they say," Pantalone muses, not taking his eyes off the yaksha as he turns his head this way and that, appraising him from every side, watching him stir. Not just a catch, but a prize. "I did not want to believe it."
"I can already tell what's on your mind."
"That I, too, can think of a few backup plans if you need more funds for your research?"
Dottore smiles, showing his incisors. Pantalone smiles back even as his neck throbs beneath his scarf.
"He would fetch enough to fund you for years," Pantalone whispers as he leans down, keeping his gaze locked onto those red, red eyes.
Dottore, however, flicks them downward, to Pantalone's lips perhaps, as he licks his own.
Pantalone's grip tightens in the yaksha's hair. The yaksha groans, slowly coming to.
Both their heads turn. But Dottore, unlike Pantalone, is not looking at the yaksha. His eyes are fixed on the monitors.
"What did you give him?" Pantalone asks.
"A concussion."
"No drugs?"
"I want to monitor what effects certain compounds have on his system. It would falsify the result to introduce foreign chemicals before I have established a baseline. Which I have now done."
After another few keystrokes, a clear liquid drips into one of the tubes attached to the yaksha.
"What is that?" Pantalone asks. Dottore's process intrigues him and he wonders as to the sort of foreign chemical the man would administer first.
"Lesser minds might call it a truth serum. It lowers the inhibitions of subjects and makes them more trusting."
Pantalone's lips quirk. Dottore has effectively forestalled him calling this drug a truth serum unless he wants to suggest that he is of a lesser mind.
"It has rousing properties, too. Here."
Reaching past him, Dottore taps the yaksha's cheek three times in rapid succession.
The yaksha's eyelids flutter open, but it takes a moment before his eyes stop rolling back into his head. Once he has more control over them, they land on Pantalone, whose hand is still gripping his hair.
His mouth opens.
"My... lord...?" he croaks, blinking and unfocused.
Pantalone's eyebrow twitches upward. Dottore laughs, a full-throated, head-thrown-back, stomach-clutching laughter.
"What's going on?" Pantalone whispers.
Once Dottore has mostly composed himself again and wiped the tears from his eyes, he nudges Pantalone.
"Go on, play along. We can get more out of him if he trusts you."
Pantalone was about to ask which "we" he was referring to but decided against it. Instead, he turns to the yaksha, strokes his hair and says in his most reassuring voice, the one that sets even his most skittish customers at ease: "I'm here."
The yaksha lets out a breath and visibly relaxes. This trust, it wakes something dark and hungry inside Pantalone, something that demands to be sated. He considers this feeling as he brushes the yaksha's hair behind his ear, strokes his thumb over his cheek. Where his skin has been pale as moonlight before, it now reddens under his touch and the yaksha turns his cheek into his palm as if to nuzzle it, or as if to hide his blush. Curious.
Even Dottore is engrossed in the scene before him. He's entirely still and his red eyes are gleaming, recording everything.
"You want to fuck him," he says suddenly, having assessed the evidence as it presented itself. Pantalone feels never more transparent than when Dottore's focus is on him.
He leans toward him again, so close their breaths mingle this time.
"Do you want to watch?" he murmurs, so close now their lips touch.
"Always," Dottore says and closes the gap.
Pantalone is not too proud to bite back his moans when he truly appreciates something, and Dottore's tongue sliding against his own is one of those things.
Dottore taking his bottom lip between his teeth, however, decidedly is not.
"Ah-ah-ah," Pantalone chides and would have had more to say if he could have uttered it intelligibly.
Beside them, the yaksha whines.
"Poor thing," Pantalone says once Dottore has let go of him. "Are you feeling neglected?"
"Mhh, he's definitely feeling neglected," Dottore agrees and brings his chair closer so that his knee would nudge the apex of the yaksha's thighs, where a noticeable bulge is lifting up the fabric of his trousers.
How delightful. It's rarely this easy.
The yaksha tries to shift away when Dottore's knee rubs against his erection, yet with his wrists still locked in place he doesn't get very far.
"Let me," Pantalone says and cups the yaksha's chin in his hand. "Look at me, little one."
The yaksha's eyes are large and dark when they lock onto his own, the golden irises reduced to mere slivers.
"What a beauty you are," Pantalone murmurs.
The yaksha huffs and casts his eyes downward again. A modest one, is he? Well, Pantalone can work with that.
"Don't hide your face from me," he says, brushing the yaksha's sumptuous lips with his thumb.
They part around a small gasp and when they do, Pantalone surges forward, captures them with his own, and kisses him the way he hasn't kissed anyone in a long time. Not since he'd vied for the hand of the young heiress he eventually married for her money. It's pure seduction and so effective it steals even Dottore's breath, and he's nothing more than a spectator.
The yaksha becomes putty in his hands.
He melts into every touch, arching toward him, and making the most musical of abortive noises, as if he cannot bring himself to moan outright.
"Don't hold back, sweet one," Pantalone murmurs. "Let me hear your voice."
As if those were the magic words, the yaksha pants openly now, his abortive noises not gone but louder, less inhibited. He whines when Pantalone touches skin, grunts with effort when he rattles his bonds, and sighs when Pantalone cups his ass. His hips buck and squirm as if he wanted to rut Dottore's knee.
"Sit forward," he says, because he does not want to deny himself the sight of a wanton yaksha coming in his trousers. "Straddle his thigh and grind yourself against it."
He had anticipated it, and still, seeing the little yaksha obey him without question gives him a thrill of power that few things rival.
"Free him," he tells Dottore, with the same authority that expects to be obeyed.
Had Dottore not been so aroused himself, he might have balked at the tone. Or perhaps he does not want to interrupt the spectacle. The yaksha is indeed riding Dottore's thigh, crimson-faced and drooping, the forward angle straining his shoulders. He topples onto Dottore when his wrists are unclasped, forehead resting against his neck, and even as he struggles to regain control over his arms, his hips never stop moving.
Pantalone grabs them from behind and grinds his own cock against the yaksha's cleft. He's rewarded with a most joyous moan. It appears as though he is not the only one who is impatient.
He does not even protest when Pantalone pulls him up by his hair; in fact, he seems pleased to be leaning back against Pantalone's chest. Fascinating. Pantalone is learning so much about this little creature and his archon.
Brushing his lips against the side of his face, over the shell of his ear, he slides his hand between the yaksha's thighs and squeezes him through his trousers. The yaksha cries out so sweetly.
"Do you want me to fuck you?" he whispers, so close, so intimate.
"Please."
The reply comes out lightning-quick, as if the little one had been waiting for it.
"Beg me for it."
The yaksha moans. His next words come out more haltingly. "Please, master. Use me."
Master? He likes that. Morax is a kinky old geezer if he managed to train his pet so thoroughly. Perhaps he can use this knowledge to his advantage. He does like gambling, after all. Winning, even more so.
He places his bet. "Is that all I taught you?"
"Fuck me," the yaksha grits out, his brow creased as if he were pained. "I beg you."
"You can do better than that."
"Please give me your cock, master. Let me down and I'll beg you on my knees."
"Are you that desperate for my cock, then?"
The yaksha nods and bites his lower lip. He pushes at his trousers, but the sash around his waist is tied too tightly.
"A little help?" Pantalone addresses Dottore, who blinks up at him.
"That," Dottore says, pinning him with his blood-red eyes. "Was a thing of beauty."
Pantalone smirks, glancing down at the unmistakable tent in Dottore's trousers. "Do you want to beg me as well?"
"Don't bite off more than you can chew." Dottore smirks back and reaches for the sash.
Despite his eagerness to have Pantalone fuck him, the yaksha once again shifts away from Dottore. The man lifts an eyebrow at Pantalone.
"It's fine," Pantalone reassures the yaksha. "I want him to touch you. Just let it happen. Can you do that for me?"
At that, the yaksha nods and stops trying to escape. He still studies Dottore's every move, wary as a hawk, even as he allows him to work open the sash.
"Good," Pantalone murmurs as he slides the yaksha's trousers down his hips, trapping his erection between folds of fabric. More seriously, he addresses Dottore: "You're letting me hijack your experiment – why?"
Dottore spreads his hands wide in a version of a shrug. "I would have had to conduct this particular experiment sooner or later. At least now I will get data of his willing state."
As opposed to his unwilling state, the likely result without this fortuitous case of mistaken identity. Pantalone shakes his head. Everything is about research with that man. Rape in the name of science is just another box to tick.
He turns back to the yaksha, scrapes his teeth along his earlobe.
"Are you ready for me?" he asks.
"Yes," the yaksha gasps.
With trembling hands, he even reaches back to spread his ass for Pantalone, who is not one to spurn such a gracious invitation. He rubs the tip of his cock over the little one's hole, surprised to find himself so wet. As if he were a teenager. So, in true teenager fashion, he spits into the palm of his glove and circles it around his cockhead, then down the shaft.
"No prep?" he asks, swallowing a groan.
"No prep," the yaksha agrees.
"I'm big."
It's not a boast if he's that much taller and broader than the yaksha. Compared to him, almost anyone would be big. His cock looks gigantic pressing into this tiny hole.
"I know."
For the first time Pantalone detected pride in the yaksha's voice.
"Don't worry," Dottore chimes in, lazily rubbing his own bulge. "The little one likes pain."
"Oh? How do you know?"
Dottore taps a spot on his monitor. It's bright and fluctuating.
"His pleasure centre lit up when you grabbed his hair," he explains.
"Is that so?" Without taking his eyes off Dottore, he bends to the yaksha's ear again and murmurs, "Do you like pain?"
The yaksha only responds with a smile, both sultry and sweet. There's nothing shy about him now. Pantalone laughs. What a prize that Morax has been hiding all this time.
Pantalone is not a spiritual man, despite serving a god himself. Yet sinking into that tight body beneath him, he is gripped with the sudden realisation that this must be what other people deem a religious experience.
Pantalone is fundamentally a greedy man. He wants it all. If he experiences mind-numbing bliss, he will want more of it. So he snaps his hips forward, forcing himself deeper. And deeper. And deeper. The yaksha's bitten-off groans only serve to encourage him. Master, he had called him; Pantalone is the master now and he takes possession of what is his.
"You look like you're having fun," Dottore says, but Pantalone pays him no heed.
The palace could be burning down and he would pay no heed. Over and over he drives himself into the yaksha's willing body, chasing that feeling of transcendence that is beckoning him. The yaksha must be feeling it too, because he's moaning now, deep and guttural, like the pleasure is ripped right from his soul.
Pantalone had considered the first time he actived his Delusion to be the emotional apogee of his life. How green he had been. How easily satisfied. He should let this be a lesson to himself. To never stop striving for more.
"Master."
A pitiful whine registers at the edge of his awareness.
"Master, please. I can't. I'm close. I'm so close. I can't—"
At first he does not quite grasp what is asked of him.
"Please. Please let me come, master—Zhongli, please. I need— I can't—"
Amusement blossoms amid the torrents of his passion. How cruel of Morax to place even this simple act behind a lock of permission. What other devious decrees has he imprinted upon his pet? Pantalone can almost admire him for that callousness.
"Very well," he tells the yaksha. "Come for me then, little one."
The yaksha sags with pure relief the moment he hears those words. And after two-three more thrusts, he grips Pantalone so hard it hurts. His muscles are shaking, spasming, convulsing, as though an electric current were running through him. His back arches and he spatters Dottore's shirt, white on black. And then Pantalone's own world goes white, he hears nothing more than the click of Dottore's tongue and rush in his ears.
The white encompasses him, becoming a single brilliant note that he takes in with all his senses. He is vibrating with it, feeling his atoms rearrange to the new rhythm of the universe.
And once they do, he shatters.
***
It takes a while for his consciousness to piece itself together again. As his vision clears, he finds himself hunched over and panting. Still buried inside the yaksha, still clutching his hips to keep him in his place. His cock looks obscenely big, stretching this small body apart. Pantalone likes the sight of it. Likes how the yaksha can't seem to stop clenching around him, as though riding his cock was his single purpose in life.
Too bad Dottore's experiments are likely going to use him up. Snezhnaya's cold is cutting, and one can do worse than to have at one's disposal a warm body to sink into at night.
"Do you want to come?" he hears Dottore murmur.
A slick, familiar sound drifts toward his ears. The yaksha's breath hitches and he clenches harder around Pantalone, stiff-backed and trembling.
"What are you up to now?" he asks Dottore, watching him stroke the yaksha roughly.
"Just devising my next project."
Pantalone looks at his hand and raises an eyebrow.
"Moving helps me think."
"So, your next project. What is it and how much do you need?"
Dottore smiles. "There is a technology in Sumeru that allows you to access information from a central database – with your mind. This little one's lapse of perception gave me the idea to exploit a weakness in the Akasha Terminal. One that would let me project any kind of image I chose into the mind of another person.
"Think about it. Once we have a working prototype, we can demonstrate it on our pet here." He ruffles the yaksha's hair. "With your earlier business idea, the project would finance itself."
"Ahh!" the yaksha cries out as Dottore lifts him off of Pantalone.
"You could have asked," Pantalone says with a grimace.
"You two had your fun," Dottore leers and drops the yaksha onto the examination table. "It's my turn now."