CN: gore, (consensual) violence, self-harm, (mentioned) disregard of safewords
Another kiss request (prompt: kiss accompanying an injury), from @constantlytiredghost. Vincent is their OC, Keppler belongs to @ghoulcaro, Marlowe belongs to @arocalyptic who was also our amazing DM for this oneshot. This is basically a "what if?" for our long rest scene.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
"You're my kind of guy cause I like your style and you sound as horrible as me,
And I don't mind if you're unkind you're reminding me of me."
Kaiser Chiefs - My Kind of Guy
Teo hadn’t paid much attention to the smaller doctor so far. Or the other one. Or anyone of his unlikely companions, for that matter. There were simply more important matters at hand. Now he wished he could direct his attention literally anywhere else but Vincent.
Vincent didn’t even seem like he had noticed what he was doing, had simply rolled up his sleeves and started dragging his nails through his skin, like it was just a normal activity one did while bored during watchkeeping. Not that Teo was in the position to judge here. It just made things a lot more difficult for him. For a moment, he wanted to grip his weapon, then remembered that he didn’t have his weapon. He laid his hands on his knees, looking away, looking anywhere but the doctor’s blood-covered arms.
From the corner of his eye, Teo could see Vincent shift. “Sorry”, the doctor said, stopping the movement of his hands.
Teo cleared his throat, still looking away. “Is there a reason you’re doing this?”
“It… helps.”
Teo looked over at Vincent, brow furrowed.
“I don’t know what happened to you all in the diving bell, but for me, it just suddenly made everything disappear”, Vincent explained further. “It’s kinda nice being able to feel again.”
Teo couldn’t help but laugh dryly at that. “I can relate to that.” He paused. He knew he shouldn’t do it, knew that it was a bad idea. He knew where it would lead. If he wanted to have any chance in the nightmarish labyrinth that was the realm of Aberrant, he needed the group. He couldn’t risk any of them dying or distrusting him, not until he had Dex back. But he still couldn’t keep himself from asking: “Do you need help with that?”
Vincent’s eyes wandered to the longsword lying on the floor next to Teo, brow raised. “I’d, er, prefer to keep all my limbs. But thanks for offering.”
There was a moment of silence in the room.
“Unless you were thinking of using something else instead of the sword?”, Vincent said.
“I don’t have anything else.” Teo paused, thinking. “I can try holding back.” He knew that wouldn’t work. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself once he started. But he needed this. Especially after what had happened in the diving bell, he needed to distract himself, stop thinking about what he would have done, what he could have done (what he had wanted to do). The fight had been nice, but he needed an opponent who could feel pain on some level, someone who bled. He looked at Vincent, for the first time noticed the two beauty marks under his eyes, the upturned nose. A cute face, and if he could see it distorted in pain, that was sure to drive the other face he had seen in the water away. So he held back his remark about not being very good with self-restraint. Vincent didn’t need to know that, did he?
Vincent was mulling this over, looking down at his bloodstained, scar-covered arms. “Well, I have scalpels”, Vincent said. “Should be easier to hold back with that.”
“I don’t have any experience with those”, Teo said. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
Vincent considered this for a while, looking at Teo, like he was trying to figure out how smart it was to trust him (and maybe also how much he cared about the smartness of his choice). Then he sighed. “Sure. Let’s do this. Not like my own scratches are helping much.”
Teo couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “Do you want to do it here, or should we get some more privacy?”
“Well, technically we are still holding watch”, Vincent said. “And I think I would prefer not being completely alone with you, at this point in time. Nothing personal.”
“You have magic, right? Shouldn’t be a problem to stop me if I go too far”, Teo said, still grinning. If the doctor started struggling, that would only make it more fun.
“I’d also prefer saving my spells for when I actually need them. I trust you won’t do anything too stupid while the others are nearby and could wake up from me yelling for them.”
“Fine. But if they wake up to see this, you tell them that all of this is consensual.”
“Sure”, Vincent said, taking off his leather armour and unbuttoning his shirt. “As long as you keep it consensual. Are you familiar with safewords?”
Teo nodded. “We – I just used “stop” so far, nothing complicated.” Not that he had ever been good at sticking to them.
“Should be enough.” He opened the medical kit sitting next to him, taking out a little leather case and from that a scalpel, which he held out to Teo. He took it, flipped it around in his hand to get a feel for it. It wasn’t much different from a small knife. He had used knifes to kill before, but only rarely.
“Any hard limits?”, Teo asked while testing the blade with his thumb. It was a bit sharper than he had anticipated, cutting the skin and drawing blood immediately. He smiled.
“No dismemberment. And keep it to my arms, maybe the legs if you have to.”
“What about chest and stomach?”, he asked, turning the bloodied weapon towards Vincent again.
“That could end quite – aaah!”
Teo had already swiped at Vincent’s chest while he had spoken, a thin cut trailing over his skin.
“Sorry”, Teo said, not meaning it. He couldn’t help but smile as he saw Vincent’s blood mixing with his own on the blade.
“I guess that was alright”, Vincent said. “Not deep enough to be lethal.”
“See, I can hold back”, Teo grinned. Where would be the fun in just going for the lethal injuries right away?
“And I felt that, at least”, Vincent continued. “Just – keep it away from my face and hands, keep everything attached and me alive, and we should be fine.”
“You do have a pretty face”, Teo said, gripping into Vincent’s dark locks with his free hand. “I understand why you’d want to keep that.” He yanked the doctor’s head backwards, slamming him to the ground, then got on top of him to fix him in place.
Vincent sucked in the air as Teo plunged the scalpel into his right arm, then dragged it through the flesh. There was something exciting about using a weapon this small, the way he could control the trail of the wounds, how he could just go all in without having to worry about immediately hacking off a body part. It still didn’t compare to Dex. Teo missed him even more in that moment. He really didn’t want to kill Vincent now, not like this, he thought while running his fingers through the cut, not without Dex. But there might not be much of a choice here.
Teo licked his lips, then inflicted another cut on Vincent’s skin, feeling the flesh beneath part for the silver blade. He let go of Vincent’s hair to be able to grip into the wounds and cut new ones at the same time.
“Are you getting off on this?”, Vincent asked.
Teo looked at his face, even prettier now that it was filled with pain, and maybe something else. “Not exactly. Are you?”
“Don’t dodge the question.”
Teo laughed. “What you said before, about not feeling much… I have a similar problem.” He cut into Vincent’s chest again, between the ribs, getting dangerously close to the lungs, but making himself stop just short of them. “This… hurting people… it makes me feel things.”
“Like what?”
Judging by the way his voice was hitching, Vincent’s numbness was being driven away at about the same rate as Teo’s was, which he welcomed. He pulled the scalpel out, then stabbed it into Vincent’s shoulder, relishing the silent scream. “Alive, mostly.”
Vincent gritted his teeth, nodded. “I get that.” A lopsided smirk spread on his lips. “And you know what? You hurting me really does bring some sensations back. You’re pretty cold, you know?” His arm, mutilated as it was, shot up, grabbing for Teo’s left wrist. Teo looked down at him in confusion.
Vincent’s smirk widened. “No pulse”, he observed.
Teo yanked his hand free and gripped Vincent’s hair again, pulling his head back, and held the scalpel to his throat. “I could kill you right now.”
“You could”, Vincent mused. “Would be a pretty boring and fast death, though, and I think that’s not what you want. Plus, I do have a death ward on me, and I have some ways to deal with people like you.”
“You’re right”, Teo said. “It would be a boring death.”
Still holding on to Vincent’s hair, he moved a hand down to his arms again, stroking through the wounds. He could feel a lot more now, could feel both the cuts and Vincent’s older scars. The doctor’s skin was cold, though not as cold as his own. He could feel the sticky wet blood under his fingers. The pulsing of Vincent’s heartbeat, and, for just a moment, he imagined his own heart beating along with it, though of course he knew that couldn’t be true.
He looked down at Vincent’s face, so young-looking behind the sneering sarcasm and the tiredness. Of course, he fixated on the nose, so like someone else’s. The beauty marks, one too many, and in the wrong place, but still…
Teo leaned farther down, and, as he plunged the blade into Vincent’s arm again, he kissed him on the lips.
A sound of surprise came from Vincent, muffled by Teo’s lips. The doctor stared at him, perplexed but not necessarily objecting. Teo half-closed his eyes, kissing the man under him who he could so easily pretend was Dexter. The man started kissing back. Teo kept moving his fingers through the torn flesh, as the kiss turned more hungry, more violent. Teo imagined the half-elf under him looking up at him out of doe eyes that held fear and pain, all for him. For just a moment, even though he had lost him, Teo could be with Dexter.
The bliss didn’t last long. Maybe it was the blood smeared all over him, painting the skin a dark red, maybe it was the teeth digging into the scar on Teo’s lips, bringing back the pain from before, but Dexter kept slipping from Teo’s mind, turning into another man, another person he had loved. No matter how much he tried to push the thought away, he kept going back to kissing Marlowe as well as Dexter.
He couldn’t do this. He broke the kiss.
“Do you kiss all your victims?”, Vincent asked, the smirk curling on his lips.
Teo needed a moment to regain the focus to answer. “Not all of them”, he said vaguely. “You do look very cute covered in bloo-“
Something hit Teo’s head full force from the side, pushing him off Vincent. His ears rang and vision went blurry for a second, as he was sent sprawling on the floor, the scalpel slipping from his grasp. He tried to get up immediately, but there was a pressure on his chest, keeping him down. Teo blinked until his vision returned to him. Standing over him, one foot in a black suit shoe (which was probably what had hit Teo’s head before) placed on his chest, was the other doctor, Keppler.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you stupid oaf?” He wasn’t exactly yelling, but there was a certain lack of composure to him. “I know you were fantasizing about this, but I never believed you would follow up on it!”
Teo just stared up at him, grinning. He could feel blood streaming from his nose. “He asked for this.”
Keppler moved his foot from Teo’s chest to his throat. He didn’t place his full weight on there yet, but the threat was there. Teo wondered how long it would take the doctor to realize he didn’t need to breathe.
“I don’t care”, Keppler said, leaning down a little. “If you ever lay your dirty hands on him again, our deal is over. I will make sure you will never get Dexter back. I'll make sure you live the rest of your sorry life without ever seeing him again.” He put more pressure on his foot, making it impossible for Teo to answer. He glared down at him. Teo recognized something in those eyes. Something he knew from himself.
“What exactly do you think you are doing here?”
The weight on Teo’s throat lifted for a second as Keppler turned his head in surprise. Teo tried to sit up, seeing Vincent’s blood-stained hand holding the scalpel up to Keppler’s neck. When he felt Teo move, Keppler immediately put his foot down on him again, but his attention was on Vincent now.
“I am simply teaching Herr Dagger some manners.” Keppler’s voice was almost a hiss in Teo’s direction.
“No need for that”, Vincent asserted calmly. “As he already pointed out, I consented to this.”
“I understand that. But I still think, Dr van Stein, that no matter how desperate you are, you really shouldn’t settle for someone like that, someone whose work is that messy and ugly and simply insufficient for you”, Keppler explained, confirming Teo’s suspicions from earlier.
“I think I can make those decisions for myself, Dr Keppler.”
For a moment it was silent in the room, safe for the occasional blood drop falling from Vincent’s arms.
“Do you want to take your foot of his throat?”, Vincent asked, looking down on Teo. “I don’t know how much air he has left.”
“Will you behave?”, Keppler asked, increasing the pressure for a moment.
Teo didn’t respond and didn’t stop grinning.
Keppler sighed heavily, then lifted his foot. He held out a hand to help Teo up. He ignored him and pushed himself off the floor with one hand, rubbing his broken nose (relishing the pain).
Keppler kept his attention on Teo for a few more seconds, then half-turned to Vincent. “Can I help you with your wounds, Dr van Stein?”
“I can take care of that myself, thank you”, Vincent said, putting the scalpel away. “I’d rather not have your hands on me right now.”
Keppler pressed his lips together, then nodded. “Of course.” Then he turned to Teo again. “Do you need help with your nose, Herr Dagger?”
Teo shook his head once, and Keppler seemed content with that, directing his attention back to Vincent. He kept rubbing his nose as the grin on his face spread wider. As soon as he got Dex back he would continue his work on Vincent. He would tear him limb from limb. He would rip him to little bloody pieces. And he would make sure that Keppler got to watch.
I really like this panel. I love that emma said it outloud how norman is actually afraid.
Remember when the lambda gang were hanging in the basement lab thing? And barbara got that headache? They were all looking at norman, asking him if he changed his mind, and hoping him not to.
They view norman so high thegeniuscoldemperor that they seem to forget that he's just a 13 year old boy, and maybe their boss is not so tough and brave after all.
I'm glad emma said it in front of them, and looking from their expressions, I think they're starting to realize and see that emma might be right (and all this time norman was just trying to look strong).
I hope they could get along because i really like the lambda gang too, (i just couldn't sit still with the pressure they seem to bring from expecting norman with almost everything without realizing they did so) but since they've seen the truth now, i hope everything goes well (ㆁωㆁ)
