Imagine in a more overtly gay adaptation of TPoDG (not that it isn’t already incredibly overt but hear me out) getting an arc where Dorian intercepts James before he’s figured out the identity of the man who drove his sister to her fate and does what he does best: slowly seduces and drags him under, what he does to every moment’s favourite young man of his, specifically to keep him from enacting his revenge, and it works. By the time James realises just who he’s been dealing with this entire venture, this man who looks too young to possibly be responsible in the first place, whom he trusted and whose company he enjoyed and whom he loved, goddammit, whose youth and charm and glittering potential even reminded him of Sibyl, Dorian has once again walked away scot-free from consequence and left him in a hole he can’t climb back out of, drugs or blackmail or debt or coercing him into a cooperative crime that only one of them is getting punished for - after all, who’d believe the word of a middle-aged, blue-collar sailor over a barely-legal gentleman, especially one with a face like that? - and it’s as James is being cuffed and marched away that the pieces fall into place, the betrayal hits. Dorian has ruined his first Vane in a moment of spontaneous rage with unintentional consequences and crushing guilt, left with a hole in his soul he’s been trying desperately to fill and bury with whatever sensuous distraction life has to offer ever since, and now his second, years later, with a cold conspiracy and calculation he could never back then have imagined, and no remorse at all, only relief, even satisfaction. He walks away from Sibyl frigidly as she sobs and reaches for his affections, and he stands unmoved as James is dragged away, cursing and screaming and reaching to tear him limb from limb.
