The Laboratory Where Feathers Remained — ᨳଓ . pt2
PART 1
synopsis ⋆✴︎ After Dottore's manipulation leaves her doubting everything between them, the reader stops waiting for his permission, taking missions, attention, and affection from anyone but him. Dottore tolerates it, until he doesn't.
tags ⋆✴︎ NSFW, Smut w plot(mdni),p in v, use of y/n, fingering, biting, marking, Dottore x reader, Dottore x f!reader, Dottore x fem assistant reader, reader is a crow shapeshifter, slight jealousy, mention of other fatui harbingers, wc⋆✴︎ 5.9k
Note" Hello everyone! This would be the latter part and also the end of The Laboratory Where Feathers Remained. I had so much fun writing this whole fic and I hope everyone would find the same excitement the way I did. I tried to make the transition to the explicit scene smoother after receiving feedbacks from the previous chapter. Thank you so much and enjoy reading!! PLEASE LIKE AND REBLOG 🥺🩷
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The door slid shut with a quiet, unhurried click, leaving you alone in the silence of the laboratory.
He was gone by the time your head cleared enough to notice.
Not far, probably, you could hear him somewhere beyond the door, the familiar clatter of instruments being set down with more force than necessary, but gone all the same, and the space beside you felt colder for it in a way the room's actual temperature didn't explain. You lay there for a long moment, piecing the night back together through a haze that hadn't fully lifted, and the longer you lay there, the more the shape of what had happened started to sour.
He hadn't stayed. He hadn't said anything before he left, no reassurance, no explanation, not even the clinical detachment you'd almost have preferred to silence. Just gone, the way a man leaves a room once he's finished with whatever brought him into it.
You told yourself, at first, that you were imagining the worst of it. That exhaustion and the last traces of whatever fog still clung to your thoughts were doing the doubting for you. But the thought, once it took root, wouldn't leave: had this been another experiment? Another variable catalogued and closed out, no different in kind from the nuts, the notebook, the months of quiet observation, except this time the data had been you, laid bare, and he'd gotten what he needed and walked away the moment the study concluded.
It was, you realized with a kind of hollow, humiliated clarity, exactly the kind of thing you should have expected from him from the very beginning. You'd simply let yourself forget, somewhere between the shiny trinkets and the dish of nuts and the way he'd said something considerably less efficient like it cost him something, that efficiency had always, eventually, won out with him before.
You didn't cry. You'd promised yourself a long time ago, somewhere around the twentieth escape attempt, that you wouldn't give him that particular satisfaction. But you lay there a long while, staring at a ceiling that had seen every version of you the lab had ever produced, and let yourself feel, fully, how much it hurt to have been so wrong about how far this had actually gone.
You saw him again the next morning, and somehow that was worse than not seeing him at all.
He was at his desk when you came in, exactly as he always was, sleeves rolled, a stack of reports already sorted and waiting for you the way they had been every morning for months. He glanced up when the door opened, and for one unbearable second you thought, hoped, some small traitorous part of you admitted that something in his face might acknowledge what had happened.
"You're late," he said, and returned to his notes.
That was all. No mention of the night before. No hesitation, no awkwardness, nothing to suggest anything between you had shifted at all, just the same clipped efficiency he'd greeted you with a hundred mornings before this one, as though your body under his hands, the sound he'd made when you'd finally stopped resisting, the fog he'd left you in afterward, had simply been filed away with everything else and closed.
He gestured, without looking up, toward the edge of the desk. "Reports need sorting by priority. And—" a small, careless nod toward the familiar dish, set out in its familiar place, "I had more of the ones you prefer brought up."
The mixed nuts. Sitting there exactly as they always did, exactly as they had for months, an offering that had once felt like the closest thing to tenderness he was capable of giving you.
You stared at the dish like it had personally wronged you.
It took everything you had not to sweep it off the desk. Because you understood, all at once and with a clarity that made your stomach turn, precisely what that little dish had always been to him, not affection, not the quiet language you'd let yourself believe it was, but a controlled variable. A comfort measure, dispensed on schedule, the same as antiseptic or a change of bandages. Something you administer to keep a specimen docile. You'd let yourself read devotion into a feeding schedule, and the realization made you feel sick in a way the fog from the night before never had.
"I'm not hungry," you said. Your voice came out flatter than you meant it to.
He looked up then properly, for the first time since you'd walked in and something in your tone seemed to catch him off guard, though he covered it quickly, the way he covered everything.
"You usually are, by this hour."
"Not today."
He studied you for a moment too long, the way he studied anomalies, and you hated, hated, that some part of you still recognized that look as attention, even now, even furious, even disgusted at yourself for ever having wanted it.
You let out a deep sigh as you were gathering your thoughts and words.
"You left," you said.
"I had reports to finish." He still didn't look up.
"That's not what I asked."
"No," he agreed, "it wasn't. But it's the answer you're going to get, unless you'd like to phrase the question more precisely." He set his pen down at last, folding his hands with the unhurried patience of a man who'd already decided how this conversation would go before you'd walked in. "What is it you actually want me to say?"
"I want to know why you left me like that."
"You seem to have already decided why," he said, mildly, almost bored.
"You've been looking at me as though I've committed some unforgivable offense. I'd hate to disappoint you by contradicting a narrative you've clearly put so much thought into."
"Don't do that."
"Do what."
"Twist it back on me. You know exactly what you did."
"I know what I did," he said, evenly. "I'm considerably less certain you do."
He rose from the desk, unhurried, closing the distance between you with the same deliberate calm he brought to everything, and you had to fight the instinct to step back.
"You've spent months, by your own account, believing I felt something for you. Now, at the first inconvenient silence, you've decided the opposite must be true instead, that it was all conditioning, that you were simply managed into compliance like everyone else who's passed through this lab."
His voice dropped, softer, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if he'd raised it.
"Which version do you actually believe, I wonder, or is it easier to believe whichever one lets you feel the most wronged?"
"That's not—" you started, and hated that he'd already made you doubt the sentence before you'd finished it.
"Isn't it?" He tilted his head, watching the effect of his own words settle over your face with the same clinical patience he gave every experiment.
"You came in here certain of your anger. You're considerably less certain now. That should tell you something about how much of it was ever really about me, and how much was about how easily you can talk yourself into believing the worst."
You felt something in you waver, the particular, sickening sensation of your own convictions being dismantled by someone who'd clearly done this before, to someone, and knew exactly which supports to remove first. For one long moment, you almost let him win the room entirely.
Then you caught yourself.
"No," you said, slower, steadier, forcing the anger back into focus even as your voice shook.
"Don't do that. Don't stand there and make my own hurt sound like a flaw in my thinking. I know what happened. You left. And now you're trying to make me apologize for noticing."
Something shifted behind his eyes, not quite surprise, but close to it, the flicker of a man watching a variable refuse to behave the way he'd calculated. He didn't answer immediately.
"You're good at this," you added, quieter now, though no less firm.
"Turning things around so I end up defending myself instead of you answering anything. I'm not doing that tonight."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the ones before it, his, for once, rather than yours. When he finally spoke again, some of the practiced control had gone out of his voice.
"...No," he admitted, slower now, the calm finally slipping a fraction. "I suppose you're not."
Nothing was resolved that night, not fully. He hadn't apologized, not in so many words, and you hadn't forgiven him, not in so many words either. But something had shifted, some balance in the room quietly recalibrated, and you left with the distinct, unfamiliar sense that for once, you'd been the one who'd won a battle of wits against him.
It didn't feel like enough. Not yet.
So you stopped waiting to be assigned anywhere.
Pantalone had a task in Fontaine that wanted for an extra set of eyes he trusted more than his own staff; you volunteered before Dottore had so much as heard the request existed. You didn't ask permission. You'd told yourself, walking out, that you no longer required it, a small, deliberate cruelty aimed less at proving anything to Pantalone than at seeing what, if anything, it would cost you with Dottore.
You'd taken your crow form for most of the trip, easier for slipping through the places Pantalone's negotiations required a quieter kind of observer, and he'd taken an immediate, faintly amused interest in you that had nothing to do with the mission at all. He found it delightful, in his own detached way, that Dottore's "prized specimen," as he insisted on calling you, could be coaxed onto his shoulder with considerably less effort than you ever let on to anyone else. He took to running a careful finger along the feathers at your nape whenever a negotiation ran long, an absent, idle habit that you allowed more out of boredom than fondness, though you were fairly certain, watching the pleased little curl of his mouth each time he did it, that he knew exactly how it would look reported back to Dottore, and enjoyed the idea of that report more than the gesture itself.
"He really does keep you well," Pantalone mused once, stroking a thumb down your wing with an idle sort of proprietary ease that would have made you bristle from anyone else. "I confess I hadn't expected the Doctor to be sentimental about anything with feathers."
You said nothing. You didn't need to. You suspected the silence would be reported just as faithfully as anything you might have said.
Before you left Fontaine, he produced something from an inner pocket. A small, deliberate motion, the kind that told you he'd planned it well before the negotiations had even concluded. A thin bracelet, Northland Bank made by the look of it, gold-threaded and set with a single dark stone that caught the light in a way you found yourself staring at longer than you meant to.
"A parting gift," he said, watching your reaction with open amusement,
"for services rendered. I understand your kind has a certain... appreciation for objects like this."
You should have refused it. You knew that even as you let him fasten it loosely around your ankle in your smaller form, some small, treacherous part of you was already cataloguing the way it caught the light every time you moved. It was, you told yourself, simply a gift, nothing more calculated than any of the shiny trinkets you'd have gathered for yourself, if you'd found them somewhere unguarded.
You suspected, watching Pantalone's satisfied little smile as he watched you admire it, that he knew perfectly well it was more than that.
Dottore said nothing when you returned three days later. You noted that carefully.
It was two days after that before he said anything about the bracelet at all, and even then, it came sideways, disguised as something else entirely. You were sorting reports at his desk when his gaze caught on your wrist, you'd taken to wearing it in your human form too, unable to quite bring yourself to leave something so deliberately pretty tucked away in a drawer, and his pen stilled mid-sentence.
"That's new," he said, in the same flat tone he might have used to note an anomaly in a blood sample.
"A gift," you said, not looking up.
"From Pantalone."
It wasn't a question, which meant he'd already known, which meant he'd noticed it the moment you'd walked back through the door and simply chosen not to say anything until now.
"Yes," you said anyway, if only to watch what he'd do with the confirmation.
"Northland Bank made," he said, studying it with the same clinical focus he gave everything, though his jaw had gone tighter than the observation required. "Expensive, for a parting gift."
"Jealous?"
"Merely noting that he's rarely so generous without expecting something in return." He returned to his notes, too deliberately, the picture of a man uninterested in a subject he'd clearly been unable to stop looking at for the better part of a minute. "I'd be careful what you assume that generosity costs."
"Careful," you repeated, amused despite yourself. "From the man who's said nothing about it for two days."
He didn't answer that. But his eyes flicked once more to the bracelet before returning, with obvious effort, to his reports, and you decided, watching him, that you'd let the silence say what he wouldn't.
It wasn't only Pantalone and Childe, either. Word of you had apparently spread further than you'd realized among the Harbingers themselves, and it wasn't long before others started finding their own excuses to seek you out whenever you were in your smaller form. Columbina found you first, delighted in a way that unsettled you slightly with how genuine it seemed, she'd coo softly whenever you hopped near her, tracing a gloved finger along your wing with unsettling gentleness, murmuring something about how precious you were in a tone that made you suspect she meant it in more ways than one. Sandrone, characteristically, treated the whole thing as an extension of her usual clinical curiosity, examining your feathers with the same detached precision Dottore might have used, though she at least had the decency to ask before handling you, which was more courtesy than you often got from him these days. Even Arlecchino, who acknowledged almost nothing beneath her notice, paused once to let you land briefly on her forearm, studying you with a long, considering look before remarking, to no one in particular, that she understood the appeal now.
It was Rosalyne who made the biggest fuss of all, delighted, unbothered by rank or decorum, scooping you up without so much as asking and cradling you against her chest with the easy affection of someone who'd apparently decided you were the most interesting thing to happen to her week. She counted your feathers aloud, laughed when you nipped at her fingers in mild protest, and declared, cheerfully, that Dottore didn't deserve you if he was going to keep you locked away in that lab all the time.
You found, somewhat to your own surprise, that you didn't mind any of it. It was easy, uncomplicated attention, offered without agenda or leverage, and you let yourself enjoy it more than you probably should have, if only because so little else in your life had ever come without a catch attached.
Dottore noticed, of course. He always noticed.
He said nothing the first few times he found you passed between them, feathers ruffled with contentment, indulging Rosalyne's insistence on comparing the sheen of your wings to polished obsidian or Columbina's quiet, careful preening. But you caught him watching from the doorway more than once, arms folded, a faint and entirely unfamiliar discomfort etched into a face built for concealing exactly that kind of thing.
"You seem to be building quite the following," he said once, dry, arms still crossed, as you finally slipped free of Rosalyne's overeager hands.
"They're friendly," you said, once you'd shifted back enough to speak properly. "Unlike some people."
"I'm not unfriendly. I'm precise."
"You looked uncomfortable just now."
"I looked," he said, with the particular stiffness of a man defending a position he no longer fully believed, "concerned that they were mishandling a specimen unfamiliar with proper containment protocol."
"They were petting me, Dottore. Not running tests."
He didn't have an answer for that one either. He simply turned and walked back toward his study, a shade too briskly for a man who claimed to feel nothing about any of it, and you let yourself smile, just slightly, once his back was fully turned.
The following week, it was Childe who asked, half in earnest and half simply to see if you'd say yes again, and you did. You spent two more days away, trading easy conversation and easier company with a man who never once made you feel like a specimen mid-observation, and told yourself that was the whole of the appeal.
Dottore, for his part, did something you hadn't quite expected. He tolerated it.
Not gracefully, you caught the tightness in his jaw each time your absence was announced at a meeting, the particular stillness that settled over him whenever your name came up attached to someone else's mission roster. But he didn't forbid it. He didn't so much as comment on it directly, which unsettled you more than any objection would have. You'd expected control. What you got instead was a man visibly, deliberately restraining himself from exercising any.
It was only the small things that gave him away. He came looking for you twice that week for tasks that could easily have waited, or been handed to anyone else in the lab, and found instead an empty desk and a dish of nuts going stale, untouched, because you weren't there to eat them. He didn't ask where you'd gone. He didn't need to; everyone in the building seemed to know before he did, which you suspected bothered him almost as much as the absence itself.
By the seventh day, something in him had visibly worn thin.
So a few days later, when Childe found an excuse to linger near your desk longer than any correspondence required, laughing too easily at something you'd said, you didn't discourage it the way you usually would have. You let it go on a beat longer than necessary. You even laughed back.
You told yourself it wasn't deliberate. You knew, even as you told yourself that, that it was a lie you weren't trying very hard to sell.
Dottore didn't look up from his work at first. You caught the exact moment he did, a flicker of attention he didn't quite manage to disguise as disinterest, gone as quickly as it appeared, filed away behind the same composed mask he always wore. You almost let it go at that. Almost.
"He's rather charming, isn't he," you said instead, to no one in particular, loud enough to carry.
"If you enjoy predictability," Dottore said, not looking up, though his pen had stopped moving entirely.
Childe, delighted at having an audience for baiting him, leaned in further.
"Careful, Doctor, you're starting to sound jealous."
"I don't experience jealousy," Dottore said, flat, final, the words coming out a fraction too fast to be as unbothered as he clearly wanted them to sound.
You caught his eye, deliberately, and smiled, not for Childe. For him.
Something in Dottore's expression went very still.
He set his pen down. Rose from the desk with none of his usual unhurried patience, and crossed the room with enough purpose that Childe actually took a half-step back, hands raised, grin faltering into something more careful.
"Enough," Dottore said.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The single word landed with a weight that ended whatever Childe had been about to say next, and he excused himself with a low whistle and a glance your way that suggested he'd gotten exactly the reaction he'd been fishing for all along, whether or not it had been at your expense too.
Once the door shut behind him, Dottore turned to you, and for a moment he said nothing at all just looked at you with an expression caught somewhere between fury and something considerably less easy for him to name.
"Is this your strategy," he said, low, clipped, "to make me sit here and think about you? Unfortunately, that will never take effect on me."
"Won't it," you said, unable to keep the satisfaction fully out of your voice.
"No." The word came too fast, too defensive to be as certain as he wanted it to sound. "I am not so easily—" he stopped himself, visibly irritated at the sentence he'd nearly finished, and started again with more control than the first attempt had managed. "You're wasting your effort. I don't respond to manipulation."
"Funny," you said. "That's usually your line."
For a moment he looked like a man arguing with himself and losing, and when he finally spoke again, his voice had lost its usual clinical distance entirely.
"I don't," he said, low, almost angry, at you, or at himself, you genuinely couldn't tell. "This isn't— I don't care for you in the way you seem determined to believe I do."
"Then why does it matter who I laugh with?"
"Because you're mine," he said, before he seemed to have fully decided to say it, and something in his own voice seemed to catch him off guard the moment it was out. He stopped, visibly annoyed at himself, at the word, at how little it had needed his permission to escape.
"I pulled you out of a storm that should have killed you," he went on, quieter now but no less pointed, as though the memory itself had given him something to stand on. "I gave you a place, a purpose, work that made use of every part of you no one else would have bothered to notice. You were nothing but a dying anomaly in the snow before I decided you were worth keeping." His eyes didn't leave yours. "That is a statement of fact, not sentiment. You belong to this research, to this lab, to work I have invested considerable time in. It has nothing to do with—"
"Don't," you said, sharper than you meant to, something cold settling under the anger. "Don't you dare use that against me. You didn't save me out of kindness, you told me so yourself, I was a specimen too rare to leave behind. Now you want to wear it like a debt I owe you, like I should be grateful enough to let you decide who gets to look at me." Your hands had curled at your sides without your noticing. "That's not gratitude, Dottore. That's you making me feel small enough to keep."
Something flickered across his face, not quite guilt, he wasn't capable of that, not fully, but close enough to its shadow that you almost believed you'd imagined it.
"I won't feel guilty for existing before you decided I was interesting," you continued, quieter now but no less firm. "And I won't let you rewrite it into some debt I have to keep paying just so you can call it possession instead of asking for anything honestly."
He didn't answer right away. For a long moment he simply stood there, jaw tight, and you watched him do what he always did when cornered, search for the angle that would put him back in control of the conversation.
"You make it sound simpler than it is," he said finally, voice clipped. "As though there's some clean, honest version of this I've been deliberately withholding out of cruelty. There isn't. I don't have one to give you."
"That's convenient."
"It's true." A flicker of the old sharpness returned to his eyes. "You'd like me to say something you can hold against me later, some declaration you can point to and say he admitted it. I'm not going to make that easy for you."
"I'm not asking you to make it easy. I'm asking you to stop pretending this is about ownership when we both know it isn't anymore."
His jaw worked once, twice, and for the first time all night he had nothing ready to say. Not agreeing, he wasn't capable of that yet, not cleanly, but the silence itself was new, an absence where a deflection should have been.
"I don't know what to name it," he said eventually, and the admission clearly cost him something, dragged out rather than offered. "That's the truth, such as it is. I'm not going to dress it up as more than that just because you'd prefer a cleaner answer."
It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even close to one. But it was the first time he'd said I don't know about anything in the entire time you'd known him, and something about the rawness of not-knowing, coming from a man who always knew, landed harder than any confession could have.
"That's not nothing," you said, quiet.
"No," he agreed, guarded still, watching you with something that wasn't quite trust yet. "I suppose it isn't."
The silence after his admission hung heavier than the blizzard he pulled you from. You could still taste the words, I don't know what to name it like metal on the tongue, rusted and reluctant. He stood there, motionless, waiting. Always waiting. As if you might fly out the window and leave him with nothing but the empty space where a specimen should be.
You didn't fly.
You stepped forward.
His eyes, those dissecting, cataloging eyes tracked the movement with the precision of a man who knew exactly how many centimeters separated you now. Two. One. Your hand found his collar, not gentle, not asking. The fabric of his coat was rough under your palm, expensive, and cold. He was warm underneath.
"y/n." Your name in his mouth sounded like a classification he hadn't finished revising.
"Don't," you said, and you didn't know what you were warning him against, speaking, stopping, disappearing into that clinical void where he stored everything he couldn't label.
You kissed him.
It wasn't soft. It tasted like the resentment you'd been carrying since he left the room that night, since he let you think you'd been conditioned like one of his experiments. He stiffened, half a second of genuine surprise, the most honest reaction you'd ever wrung from him and then his hand was at the back of your neck, fingers pressing into the junction where the spine met skull with the certainty of a man who knew anatomy well enough to break it.
He didn't break you. He held.
When you broke apart, his breath was controlled, measured, but his pupils had blown wide, black consuming the gold. "The Fatui," he said, voice low, clinical even now, "would call this a miscalculation."
"And you?"
"I didn't calculate anymore when you were in the room."
The admission cost him. You saw it in the tightness of his jaw, the way his thumb traced the line of your throat not with tenderness but with the obsessive attention of a cartographer mapping territory. His territory. The thought should have infuriated you. It did. It also sent heat pooling low in your stomach, corvid-bright and treacherous.
You pulled at his coat. He let you. The garment fell open, and you pushed your hands beneath his shirt, finding the scarred skin there, the places where he'd been stitched back together by his own hand. He hissed not from pain, from restraint. He was holding himself rigid, letting you explore, letting you take.
"Your bracelet," he said suddenly, and his fingers caught your wrist, thumb brushing the metal Pantalone had given you.
"I could remove it. Replace it." His grip tightened, not enough to hurt, enough to claim.
"Something that didn't come from a banker who looked at you like you were collateral."
You laughed, breathless. "Jealousy doesn't suit you, Doctor."
"It suited me perfectly," he corrected, and then he was moving, reversing your positions, your back against the wall beside his workbench. Papers scattered, his notes, where your name had replaced Subject C-17 in handwriting that had grown gradually less precise, more hurried. "I'd simply never had cause to wear it before."
His mouth found your neck, teeth grazing the tendon there with the care of a man who knew exactly how much pressure separated a bruise from a break. You arched into it, corvid-instincts singing at the possession of it, the claiming. He noticed, he always noticed, and made a sound against your skin, low and resentful.
"Childe touched your shoulder yesterday," he murmured, breath hot. "I saw. You laughed for him."
"You didn't stop him." you said
"I wanted to." The confession was dragged out, bitter. "I wanted to remove his hand at the wrist. Experimental purposes."
Your fingers tangled in his blue hair, pulling until he looked at you. His expression was fractured, that controlled mask cracked along fault lines you had put there. "Then do something about it now."
He didn't ask for permission. He never had. What he did was lift you onto the edge of his desk, clearing beakers and instruments with a sweep of his arm, the crash of glass irrelevant and stepped between your knees. His hands were methodical even in this, pushing up your thighs, mapping the shape of your hips, the curve of your waist, as if he were still taking notes. As if he were memorizing you for future reference.
"Rosalyne complimented your plumage," he said, low, while his fingers worked at the fastenings of your clothing. "Said you were exquisite. Sandrone offered you a perch in her workshop. Columbina sang to you."
Each word was a wound he was tending with his tongue, possessive and furious. "They didn't know what you were. What you cost."
"And what did I cost?"
His eyes met yours, and for a moment the mask was gone entirely. "Everything," he said. "You cost me everything, and you didn't even know it."
He pushed your underwear aside, not off, just enough to expose you and you felt the air of the laboratory against your wetness, obscene and clinical. He looked down at you spread open on his desk, and the sound he made was barely human, a caught breath that became a growl.
"Say it," you demanded, because you needed to hear it, needed to know this wasn't another experiment.
"Mine." The word was bitten out, resentful, true. "My specimen. My mistake. My—" He stopped, and then his fingers were on you, two of them pushing inside without warning, stretching you open with the precision of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. You cried out, back arching off the wood, and he leaned over you, free hand pinning your hip to the desk. "My only variable I couldn't solve."
He fucked you with his fingers, curling them to find the spot that made your vision blur, watching your face with the intensity of a man recording data. You were panting, squirming against his hand, and he didn't speed up, he kept the rhythm torturous, clinical, until you were begging without words, nails digging crescents into his shoulders.
"Please," you finally gasped, and you hated how desperate you sounded, how much you needed this from him.
He withdrew his fingers leaving you empty, aching and worked at his own trousers with efficient, angry movements. His cock was hard, flushed dark, and he didn't touch himself, just gripped your thighs and pulled you to the edge of the desk.
He pushed into you in one slow, relentless thrust, and you screamed, head falling back, thighs trembling in your agitation. He didn't flinch. He watched them with something like hunger, the same way he had watched you eat from his palm months ago, and then he started to move.
It wasn't gentle. He set a punishing pace, each thrust driving you against the edge of the desk, his grip on your thighs bruising. He was studying you even as he lost himself, watching where you connected, where his cock disappeared inside you again and again, watching your face with the intensity of a man recording data, except his breath was coming in harsh pants against your ear, and his hips were stuttering when you clenched around him.
"The nuts- hah..," he said suddenly, nonsensically, voice wrecked, and you understood. It was the test, the one he had never stopped running. "You still ate them. Even then..."
"Mhm..Even then," you agreed, breathless, and you pulled him down to kiss him again, tasting the salt of his sweat, the copper of his honesty.
He broke the kiss to mouth at your neck, your collarbone, teeth grazing the swell of your breast where your shirt had fallen open.
"I thought about you like this," he admitted against your skin, voice barely audible, "when you were perched on my shoulder in crow form. I thought about how warm you were inside. How you'd look taking my cock while wearing nothing but that bracelet."
His thrusts became erratic, losing their precision. "How you'd look wearing my marks instead."
You came with a cry that sounded like a caw, trembling as your orgasm ripped through you. You clenched down on him, and he groaned, a broken sound that might have been your name, and then he was fucking you through it, chasing his own release with single-minded focus.
He came with a sound like a man being dismantled, buried himself to the hilt and spilled inside you, hot and claiming. His forehead pressed to your shoulder, fingers bruising in their grip on your hips, and you felt him twitch, felt the pulse of him filling you, marking you from the inside out.
After, he didn't withdraw immediately. He stayed inside you, holding, cataloging, until your breathing slowed. His hand found yours on the desk, and you felt him trace the bracelet Pantalone had given you, not to remove it, but to map its circumference, to memorize the shape of what he had to compete with.
You reached into your pocket with trembling fingers and pulled out the object you'd been carrying for three days, a gear from Sandrone's workshop, small and silver and perfect. You placed it in his palm.
He stared at it, then at you. The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but close.
"I had something for you too," he said, and retrieved his notebook from the floor where it had fallen. He opened it to the most recent page, showed you the entry: your name, written and crossed out and written again, margins filled with sketches of wings, of eyes, of a crow eating from a dish that sat permanently on his desk now.
No subject number. Just you.
You took the notebook from him and wrote, beneath his last entry: *Still not a specimen.*
He read it, and this time the smile was real, small and sharp and only for you. "No," he agreed. "Something worse. Something I couldn't put back in the snow."
He kissed you again, still inside you, still claiming, and outside the wind howled, Snezhnaya doing its best to reclaim what it had lost, but you were warm, hoarding this moment like the shiny thing it was, and he let you.
