I've been thinking about getting used to and unknowingly loving Dottore as a pest that always comes back.
You tried to poison 25 and he drank it on purpose to challenge himself to find a cure and he did it in 4 hours. Failed.
You blew up his piano once and you failed.
You tried to hypnotize him into falling off a cliff and he played along and floated back up because disappointing you would be fun.
You put glue in the shampoo of his youngest segment. Definitely not your proudest moment but he tried to get you to eat a bug. Success, but it didn't count for much.
You tried infecting him with elezar and he just showed you old notes from that messed up clinic.
At one point you glued on an academiya graduation outfit to one of his old photos just to taunt him. He made you throw it into an incinerator.
Failed to eliminate him with a gun. Failed to keep him sealed in an old puzzle. Failed to get rid of him even when the rest of his clones were deleted. Failed to get rid of him when he disappeared and you hoped he was on some other planet entirely. Failed when he rewrote himself as a diety, he still came back after that fight to taunt you.
You just got used to failing and to saying 'hello again' more than you said goodbye to him despite the attempts.
So now, when he fails instead of you, when he doesn't come back from the fire and the ashes - you have a 'hello again' on your tongue that has no place anymore.
Dottore (Zandik) x reader | Mask
fluff | 0.9k | gn!reader
A/N: ik someone asked for zandik comfort but this is not the rq (i actually want an excuse to write more zandik comfort)
The wood crackles in the fireplace, lazily, as if time came to a standstill. The flames lick up the firewood without any hunger, soon about to become dying embers. The room is warm, the lighting dim and shadows deepening.
And in the intimate half-darkness, even monsters grow relatively tame. Their sharp teeth dulled by comfort, their high-strung nature soothed, lulled by the tentative sense of safety that can be felt in the soft shadows.
“Hold still,” Zandik whispers into your ear. His hand strokes your cheek, the other combing your hair back from your face. “I don’t wish to hurt you.”
So you do. You close your eyes, eliminating the most taxing of your senses, to truly focus on what’s important - his touch. The tenderness of his handling of your face, your hair, every movement precise and slow. He doesn’t pull on your hair, whenever his fingers find a tangle, he loosens it with utmost caution.
Because such is he in the safety of your bedroom, in the safety of the fading light of fire and the late night, its stillness and silence. Such is he when allowed, desired even, to be present and allowed the luxury of no expectations or roles to play. When his trembling heart finally may peek out of its carefully crafted shell, to leave the shadow of a segment of the heart that usually covers for and stands in for the real thing.
“Keep your eyes closed,” he murmurs, his lips pressing a kiss to your temple.
His hand disappears briefly and when it returns, the darkness beneath your eyelids grows deeper.
You feel the strap of his mask being laid down gently over the curve of your skull, his hands skillfully avoiding any tugging on your hair or biting into the skin above your ear. The mask itself sits comfortably on your face. Its weight is new and strange, uncomfortable only because of how novel the sensation is. And finally it is secured.
Carefully you try moving your head. The mask remains in place, though it feels like a new body part. The movement feels unusual, as if you actually grew a beak.
“Open your eyes now,” he instructs. His voice is always so low, more of a rumble, when the day is turning into another, when there’s only you to witness it.
You follow his guidance once more. You blink a couple times, getting used to the uncanny sensory experience. Zandik’s hands stay on your shoulders. It anchors you through a short bout of dizziness. Then, you allow wonder to overtake you.
“Is this how you see?” you ask, equally quiet as his voice’s been.
Your vision is sharper. Undeterred by the shadows or distance, you can see as clearly as you want if you focus, or simply settle for how you usually view the world. You can read the maps of lines on the leaves of the plant in the corner. You can count the pages of the book resting on your night table. If he wasn’t standing behind you, you’d like to see the sky. The fake celestial tapestry, or could you, perhaps, see beyond it?
“Of course,” he chuckles, his hands squeezing your shoulders, “That’s what you’ve been curious about.”
“Thank you,” you whisper.
Out of respect for him, you don’t turn around. You don’t tilt your head back. Though the mask doesn’t seem to be able to see through objects, and although he himself is wearing his mask, you want to be safe. Especially in such a crucial moment, you want him to know he can trust you. That he truly is safe here.
“It was an easy project,” he hums, nuzzling into your hair with his own beak, “There were enough adjustments to be made to make it an entertaining endeavor.”
You don’t ask what he means by that, knowing answering truthfully would require him to expose more about himself, and you don’t want to push. It’s enough that he already shared as much.
“Can you see through the fake sky?” you ask instead.
He takes the hint and silently allows you to turn around. It’s a smooth sequence of steps, a private dance for the two of you, as you move in sync so that you wouldn’t gaze at him. Did he take off his mask after all, you wonder. You’d like to believe so, and with the lack of evidence to prove otherwise, you choose to do.
From behind, he guides you towards the window. To your disappointment, albeit only small because it is only a matter of time before he succeeds and tears the counterfeit apart, revealing the cosmos beyond, not even the mask allows you to see the real stars. Still, you test the realism of the night sky and have to admit that were you not aware, you would also believe what you’re seeing to be the real thing.
“Art is meant to be beautiful,” you wonder aloud. He laughs, his arms now wrapping around your waist, his chest meeting your back.
“And the moon is especially beautiful tonight,” he confesses, nosing into your hair. His lips press another kiss just behind your ear.
You close your eyes to the improved vision he so graciously gifted you, if only temporarily. And as if sensing that, or perhaps trusting you - perhaps simply accepting the possibility of being perceived, Zandik shifts closer to your side, closer still, until he’s standing in front of you.
For the first time, the mask is not in his way when he wishes to kiss you.
To anyone who struggles with mental health problems right now: you're not alone.
(I'm sorry I know I told someone the next one would be fluff, DON'T WORRY, I'm working on it.)
• You've been with Zandik through thick and thin. Through Akademiya days, through expulsion, through expeditions, through Fatui times. You are both ancient as time, both have seen too much. So if you're depressed, he doesn't pity you(he hates pity in general), he doesn't give you toxic positivity, he doesn't promise you that everything is going to be okay. He simply understands.
• He would recognize the depression patterns immideately. Zandik would see the signs: the hollow eyes, lack of reaction, passivity that you've never had before, as well as the fact that you've often been in a bad mood recently.
• Zandik would sit besides you for hours. Not because he's ignoring you, but because he cares too much to let you be alone in your dark thoughts, even if he doesn't show it with meaningless loud words. Rarely he would say something like: "I know. Every morning, I wake up disappointed too. But you're still here. So am I. That's enough for today."
• He could also point at his own trembling, old, wrinkly hands and say: "See? I'm falling apart faster than you. Probably have only months left, you idiot. If you waste them in despair, I will resurrect purely to scold you."
• Zandik, the very man who could defeat gods, would suddenly be making you tea with sandwiches at 3 AM because you haven't moved from bed all day and didn't eat anything. He'd grumble about "wasting his precious sleep", him being "inefficient" but he would still do it anyway. Even if his hands were too shaky to hold a cup, he would still try. You lost count on how much cups he already broke.
• He would also hold you close at nights, not asking for deep conversations about science how he did when he was younger, even though his old bones hurt from uncomfortable poses.
• Also, somehow novels you mentioned you were intrested in a long time ago started to appear on your bedside table. You didn't question it.
• Zandik could dissect gods, could create clones of himself, could rule the very substance of life if he wanted, but he somehow couldn't cure your depression. It enraged him. But the anger was never directed at you, it's at his own helplessness. Not to mention how much it hurt his self-esteem as a genius scientist.
• He would never try to cure your depression with experiments though. He would only try to use already proven medical methods that existed in Teyvat, but only see every last one failing. He knows some wounds aren't exactly scientific, despite him wanting them to be.
• He'd make jokes about both of you rotting away together. He would say something like: "At least our bones will tangle in grave. I will make sure of it." But deep down, he was afraid you are gonna give up before he does.
• Zandik kept all the gifts that you gave him. You don't know where he keeps them. In fact, you think he already threw them all away. But sometimes he'll go in his personal lab, open the secret shelf by the table and reread your ridiculous valentine cards that you put in his locker at the Akademiya, reread your silly love letters. He missed you so, so much.
• He'd try to monitor you: to make sure you eat, sleep, go out, but his own age doesn't let him. He also needed a caretaker himself. This was the second time his helplessness enraged him. But he would never, ever trusted his Segments to monitor you.
• Deep down, Zandik will ask himself for the first time: was it his fault? Were his experiments too dark? Did watching him decay too broke you? Even if you told him it wasn't his fault, he would carry this guilt deep inside him anyway. It was such a strange feeling.
• You'd both know death was coming for one of you. One of you will die eventually first. You'd both pretend it isn't.
• If you die before him, he'd live his final days in sorrow. He'll try to pretend he's not affected by that to maintain his persona, but everyone who knew him noticed that the spark in his eyes was gone. Because you were the one who made this spark appear in the first place. With your stupid corny jokes, with your awkwardness and your unconditional love. He'd pass away not long after. Zandik would spend his last days in complete ruin, not eating, not sleeping, just staring at your empty chair. The Segments would simply just watch him decay. Some of them will point out that the emotional lamentation clearly accelerated the process of original speciman's death in their research papers.
• If he dies first, Zandik would leave you his final experiment: a small device that plays his voice whenever you need it. His last words were recorded on this device.
• "You're allowed to be sad. You're allowed to miss me. But you're not allowed to give up. I didn't preserve your life for so many years for you to waste it. Now, go. Be angry at me, be mad, hate me. Be alive. That's an order."
• He still didn't understand. You could never hate him. He was the best thing that ever happened to you and the only constant that ever made sense in this dark world.
tags: established relationship, soft dottore, suggestive
The sky in Sumeru is unlike the sky in Snezhnaya, the latter often grey and filled with clouds that bring ice and snow; on clear nights, illuminated by the aurorae. Here the setting sun casts the sky and earth in a warm glow, your skin turning to molten gold as the last rays hold you in their tender embrace, tangling in your hair and kissing your parted lips.
You, so soft and fragile—so human—look absolutely divine draped in swaths of sunshine, Sumeru Roses at your feet and a Zaytun Peach in your hand. Zandik forsook the gods long ago, yet he finds himself worshiping the ground you walk on, your presence allowing him to stomach the harsh memories of his homeland and leaving a bittersweet taste in his mouth.
How infuriating you are, unearthing these emotions he once buried in his youth. He wishes he could rip his heart from his chest as your teeth sink into the flesh of the fruit between your fingers, juices dribbling down your chin and neck. There is nothing sweeter than a Zaytun Peach plucked straight from the stem—far sweeter, fuller, and softer than those imported into Snezhnaya—or so he believed.
His tongue traces the sticky sweetness from the corner of your mouth and over the column of your throat, delving between your breasts, not letting a single drop go to waste. He was wrong. They taste better with you, with the way your breath catches in your lungs and your body shudders beneath his touch.
He presses an open-mouthed kiss to your chest, devouring your pulse between sharp teeth and a sigh.
This means nothing, he tells himself as his heart pounds against his ribs, rattling the bars of its cage.
