Il Dottore

Dottore hated you in a way that went beyond anger.

It was not the loud, impulsive hatred of a man who had been wronged. It was not rage, nor resentment.

You were not a blessing. You were not a miracle.

In Teyvat, people were always reaching upward— Just as Rhinedottir had devoured Naberius’ heart and fused divinity with flesh, Dottore had done the unthinkable in his own way.

He had sought to capture what existed beyond divinity.

Something unbound by Teyvat’s laws. The materials had been obscene in both quantity and cruelty—years folded into years, failures stacked atop one another, hypotheses discarded and resurrected until even uncertainty lost its meaning.

There had been no guarantee.

No proof.

Not even faith.

And yet—

He had succeeded.

That was the true horror.

What he caught was not fragile. Not gentle. Not luminous in the way Celestia’s propaganda painted its creatures. When you awoke, you did not thrash or scream or plead. You simply looked at him.

And that look alone made his blood curdle.

Angels, he learned that day, were not naive.

They were predators.

He did not know how you stayed. He did not know how you had not torn reality open and escaped the moment consciousness returned to you. The containment array should not have worked. The cage was imperfect, hastily reinforced, held together by calculations that screamed impossibility.

And yet you remained.

Silent. Watching.

As though the cage had never been meant for you at all.

At first, it had been tolerable. You could not leave without his authorization. The bindings were absolute—physical, metaphysical, conceptual. You were anchored. Stalled. Trapped in a way that satisfied his need for control.

Then he learned the truth.

You did not need to move to escape.

You drifted through thought instead.

You walked through minds as if they were corridors left unlocked. You listened. You touched. You rearranged. You nested.

When he realized you could hear his thoughts—feel them—the revulsion set in.

You lived inside him.

Every emotion he experienced reverberated through you. Every irritation, every flicker of curiosity, every suppressed impulse—nothing belonged solely to him anymore.

He had not wanted this.

He had wanted ownership, not entanglement.

Instead, he had bound himself to you more thoroughly than any chain, any sigil, any contract. The irony made his hands tremble with restrained violence. He, who dissected gods and reduced souls to data, had become the subject of his own experiment.

And you knew it.

You tested his limits deliberately. Pressed against the edges of his composure with an awareness that felt mockingly intimate. It was as though he were the one caught, pinned beneath your scrutiny.

Disgust coiled in his chest.

Hatred followed close behind.

The laboratory lights hummed as he entered, movements sharp and precise. An assistant—a girl, insignificant—stood adjusting equipment, clearly waiting to speak.

“Lord Harbinger,” she began nervously, “Lord Pantalone sent a message. He insists you attend the banquet this evening. By Her Majesty’s command.”

Dottore clicked his tongue.

A waste of time. A parade of forced civility and hollow laughter. Being ordered to attend only made it worse.

“A banquet?” you mused lightly.

Then—

His body went rigid.

He felt it before he heard you. The sensation of fingers pressing against his back, not physically, but existentially. A presence that slipped beneath his skin, brushed against his nerves, crawled along the inside of his skull.

The assistant froze.

Dottore’s expression darkened.

Irritation rolled off him in controlled, lethal waves. He refused to turn toward you.

He would not acknowledge you more than necessary.

“Return to your cage,” he said.

The words were forced out between clenched teeth.

Not to test whether even an angel could be broken.

You were his greatest success.

And his most unbearable mistake.

And the fact that he had created you himself—

That was what disgusted him most of all.