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Appendix
The first time Scaramouche is strapped to Dottore’s lab bench with his guts spilling out and his intestines on the floor, it’s because he breathed.
His puppetry was not hidden amongst the Harbingers. Scaramouche speaks in tongues too old and long dead and holds no vision nor delusion but can manipulate electro with ease. They all had their suspicions that his origins weren’t entirely normal. But it was when his eye popped out of his socket and shattered against his cheek did they learn the extent of his exceptionality.
Dottore was the only Harbinger that did not seem impressed with it. While the youngest of them would fawn over his body, Dottore had flipped him away with a crude statement that Scaramouche is, “Nothing more than an expensive ruin guard.” Scaramouche would not admit but that statement stung more than it should.
Thus, Dottore and Scaramouche didn’t get off on the right foot. It wasn’t until they were put on a mission together did Dottore truly and genuinely become fascinated with Scaramouche.
It was a stealth operation, one neither of them was adept for. Twenty below zero in the freezing winters of Snezhnaya. The operation went as smooth as it could go with the two of them, and on their long trek home Scaramouche had let out a stressful sigh, fog leaving his mouth and disappearing into the sky. He thought nothing of it.
Dottore, however, had stopped and then prodded at him to “Breath again.”
So, he did. And suddenly, he went from an expensive ruin guard to a gift made by Celestia themselves.
“You have a functioning organ system,” Dottore had said, keeping Scaramouche’s eyes locked onto him with blood-stained fingers pinching his cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a functioning organ system?”
Scaramouche had shrugged then, batted his hand away, and threatened homicide should he dare touch him again. He didn’t know why his creator gave him a functioning organ system, or how for that matter. He knows that while he doesn’t need to breathe, exhaling is calming, and inhaling nicotine is euphoric. He knows his heart pounds against his ribcage in a steady beat, but never goes faster than the dallying drum. He knows he has a stomach too, functional that it allows him to eat but does not hurt him when he hasn’t eaten in days. He’s as fake as he is real. His organ system isn’t something new to him, or extraordinary.
Dottore did not have the same sentiments, because he spun some story to The Tsaritsa of how learning the way Scaramouche works would advance Snezhnaya. So now Scaramouche is here, wrists bound with leather to a cold laboratory bench. His stomach was cut open and the flap of skin was somewhere in a freezer that keeps Dottore’s whisky and wine. Dottore peers inside him, the glimmer in his eyes looking like a child in a candy store, it has Scaramouche squirming.
“Fascinating,” Dottore says. With his index and thumb, he pinches one of Scaramouche’s organs, just under the threshold of popping it. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t I be able to feel it?” Scaramouche snaps back, fights against his restraints.
Dottore ignores his attempts. “What does it feel like?”
“Like your pinching my gallbladder,” Scaramouche replies, and Dottore offers him a sick laugh of amusement.
“This is your pancreas actually, Balladeer,” He moves his fingers a little further down, and pinches a separate organ closer to Scaramouche’s pelvis. “This is your gallbladder,”
“And I can feel that too. Hurry up,”
Dottore laughs again and removes his fingers from Scaramouche entirely. The both of them are silent for a couple more moments before something catches Dottore’s eye. He makes a curious sound in the back of his throat and his eyes narrow. He doesn’t bother wiping his blood-soaked fingers off before grabbing a pen, scribbling something down in his notepad. “Interesting. Interesting. You have an appendix,”
“Cool.”
“You don’t need an appendix. Not really.” Dottore explains, although Scaramouche couldn’t really give a fuck. “Appendixes rupture all the time, get removed, nothing happens.” Scaramouche begins to think Dottore is talking to the phantoms in his head and not actually him. “I would like to perform an experiment on you,”
“No.” Scaramouche says.
“Don’t be a child,” He scolds, holding scissors to another part of Scaramouche’s body. “Even the children I experiment on are more compliant than you,” Before Scaramouche can snap back, Dottore continues his long tangent. “I’m taking your appendix. You shouldn’t need it to live. I will be placing your appendix in—”
“I really don’t give a fuck what you’re doing with it,” Scaramouche cuts in. “Take it out, put my skin back on and get me away from you,” Scaramouche sneers.
“Of course, Balladeer,” and Dottore smiles up at him. He snips away the organ with precision, holds it to his face like a prized possession. So close to where his lips are under his mask, Scaramouche is curtained he’d kiss it if he could.
“Gorgeous. Stunning, really,” Dottore says, twisting it around to see all the angles.
“You’re sick,” Scaramouche mumbles, and at this Dottore really does bring it to where his lips would be. He presses the organ against his mask, mimicking a sound of a kiss, smearing red against the white porcelain, and he smiles again, razor-sharp teeth peaking out of his wide smile.
“Just for you, Balladeer,”
Liver
The second time Scaramouche gets strapped onto the bench is four months later after the first time. The crude stitches on his stomach were long gone and the light scarring was nearly undetectable against his pale skin. He did not want to be back on the lab bench, four months being much too soon but apparently, Dottore had “found” a piece of Scaramouche’s appendix in a box and was reminded he needed to run extra tests.
Scaramouche almost scolded him for keeping a piece of his appendix in a box.
Dottore runs his scalpel right along the edges of the scarring like a guide, and Scaramouche admits Dottore is skilled with his hands. Blood bubbles against the wound, spilling onto the bench but neither pays much attention to it.
“Why’d you keep my appendix in a box,” Scaramouche accuses when Dottore begins the second line.
“Ah, you’re curious about the results?”
“No. I want to know why my appendix was in a box,”
Dottore ignores him, begins speaking to the phantoms once more. “I was curious to see if you could survive without your appendix. You’re very old, so perhaps your creator had mimicked a time when an appendix was needed,” That could’ve very much killed him, and Scaramouche was going to snap at Dottore about that however, Dottore continues without acknowledging him. “Luckily, it appears that, just like humans of today, you don’t need it. I’m grateful, it would be ashamed to lose such a gorgeous test subject,”
Scaramouche snorts.
“I was more curious, however, to see if your organs will spoil. Normal organs, unless kept cold, will die.” Dottore finishes the final cut. He pulls the entire flap of skin off, reveals Scaramouche’s intestines once more, and lays it on the table beside them.
Scaramouche eyes the skin. “I assume it didn’t die,”
“Precisely!” Dottore practically lights up, eyes shining. “I cut the appendix in five. One went into the freezer per normal. One I put in the window still. Another in a heater. Another one I submerged in water and finally—”
“—You put the last one in a box,”
“I put the last one in the box, correct.” Dottore says. “None of them died. When I checked on them, they all appeared as healthy as the one I put in the freezer. This has led me to two hypotheses, would you like to hear?”
“No.”
“The first is that you and your organs are separate. You don’t need them to survive, and they don’t need you to survive.” He snaps a latex glove around his hand. “The second is that your relationship with your organs is commensalism. You need your organs to live, but they don’t need you. Whatever the case,” Dottore reaches into the intestine, squeezing them like putty in his fingers. “I cannot assess either without putting your life at risk. That is not acceptable. You are unique. One of a kind. Your organs even more.”
“I don’t need my organs,” Scaramouche says. “I don’t use them.”
Dottore looks mildly surprised at this, and Scaramouche feels gratification for catching the Doctor off guard. “And this wasn’t information you could’ve provided before?”
“You didn’t ask,” Scaramouche snaps back, curls his fist against the bindings. “They’re just there.”
Dottore stares at him impassively for a few more moments before shaking his head, tutting in indignation. “Whatever doesn’t matter. Your organs still provide functioning without dying. Should we be able to replicate the process we should be able to keep someone alive forever.”
“Who would want that?” Scaramouche scoffs, even though he knows a lot of people do. Crave longevity and seek any means to be closer to a God. It’s in human nature; to want and to need more than already given. Scaramouche can sympathize, or as close to sympathizing as he could get. But living forever has been nothing more than a hassle and has given him nothing but a strange doctor prying around at his insides.
“Plenty of people,” Dottore replies. “So many divine beings but we must be kept hostage to the clock? Selfish of them if you ask me,” Dottore snaps, as if he doesn’t serve a divine being, brings her what she wants and what she needs, and worships the ground she walks on.
Scaramouche doesn’t mention her, instead, he says, “I’m a divine being,”
“No. No, you’re not. Not anymore,” Dottore plucks a piece of Scaramouche’s liver with teasers, brings it up to the light to investigate it. “You’re so much better,”
And despite Scaramouche’s previous musings, he feels proud of that.
Kidneys
The third time Scaramouche is strapped to the table is not even a month later. He was out of Snezhnaya, investigating an issue in Sumeru when some poor recruit told him he was needed back in Snezhnaya per Il Dottore’s orders and Sandrone was taking the position. Scaramouche nearly killed the recruit on the spot but had to remind himself it isn’t the kid’s fault that Dottore’s timing is awful and he has poor taste in replacements. So, he leaves the kid alive and makes it to Snezhnaya in three days.
Dottore doesn’t say one word to him, and Scaramouche doesn’t expect him to. He allows himself to be manipulated into the lab bench and strapped to it once more, feeling oddly calm about the whole situation of late. It’s when Dottore gets to the second strap does he start speaking.
“One of Pantalone’s men needs a kidney,” Dottore says, begins undoing the stitches that have yet to heal instead of cutting him open like usual. “He’ll die without a kidney. We’re giving him yours,”
Scaramouche frowns. “Are we even compatible?” He argues. He knows he can live without both of his kidneys but that does not mean he wants to part with either.
“Yes, yes. What do you take me for? An amateur?” Dottore snaps. “Now quiet, I need to focus,”
Scaramouche's frown deepens. Dottore is usually so careless with his body. Rips him open, tears his organs, places them in boxes and heaters and whatnot. Distracts Scaramouche from the fact that he’s splayed open like a butchered animal with quips that Scaramouche has grown to expect. Now his organ is going to some underling and he must be careful with it? Must treat it gently?
It makes Scaramouche sick.
“Now you need to focus, usually you love to hear yourself talk,” Scaramouche doesn’t know where this feeling of bubbling hatred is coming from, but he knows he feels trapped against the table.
“The transport of the kidney needs to be impeccable,”
“Oh? You’re not going to just throw it in a box?”
Dottore pauses at this, raises an eyebrow in Scaramouche’s direction. “You’re mad I put your appendix in a box?” and the edges of his lips quirk upwards, a vain attempt to conceal a snicker that wants to make its way past his chapped lips.
“No.”
“Oh, my dear,” The pet name rolls off Dottore’s tongue as if it’s meant to be there. “Are you jealous?”
Jealous? Scaramouche wants to laugh.
“I assure you you’re my favorite subject. I need to focus so that your kidney does not get ruined during transport, it’s much too valuable. Pantalone’s men well,” Dottore waves his hand away dismissively, “Whatever happens, happens. We have plenty of them to go around,”
He leans forward to peer back into the hole in Scaramouche’s abdomen. “But this,” he gently taps at the kidney with his index finger, watching in fascination as it quivers underneath his touch. “This is the important part. This will tell us just how independent your organs truly are,”
Dottore laughs when Scaramouche doesn’t answer. “Now, I need silence.”
This was the quietest of the exams, filled with nothing but Dottore's incessant ramblings and the hum of some tune that Scaramouche recognizes from Fontaine. Scaramouche is content to watch. Dottore is skilled, slicing one of the kidneys free from the rest of the body, handling it as delicately as one would an injured bird. Scaramouche is mildly shocked the Doctor could be this gentle.
He places the kidney into a carrier with ice, although they both know he could just plop it into Pantalone’s hand, and it’ll be fine.
Dottore doesn’t speak even when he redoes the stitches, putting the skin back into place. After, he then does something he’s never done. Usually, he unstraps Scaramouche from the table and allows him to walk away with nothing more than a swift goodbye. However now, he takes an ointment and rubs it into the stitches gently, lingers a bit too long when he’s done.
“The stitches will heal better now,” He says, unstrapping Scaramouche from the table finally.
“You never did that before.”
“Don’t think too much of it, Balladeer,” Dottore flicks his wrist, “I never opened you up twice in a month,”
They don’t say anything after that, and Dottore leaves the laboratory before Scaramouche does.
A few days later Scaramouche learns that Pantalone’s man had died from a kidney failure. A few days after that, he learns that his kidney died with him.
Intestines
The fourth time he’s strapped to the bench is five months later. Dottore hasn’t spoken to him since besides having brief, almost one-sided conversations when the Harbingers had their bi-monthly meeting or their monthly audience with The Tsaritsa. In fact, the reason he’s strapped to the bench this time is not that Dottore called upon him nor is it because someone needs another organ. This time, it’s because he’s been nearly sliced in half by a claymore.
That Ragnvindr kid or whatever was stronger and faster than Scaramouche anticipated; he managed to nearly split Scaramouche in two. Of course, Scaramouche didn’t die from such a measly slice and retaliated until the kid was forced to flee. Regardless, Scaramouche went back to the palace with his large intestines in one hand and a fistful of red hair in another.
When he walked in the new recruits fainted on the spot and other Harbingers look on the verge of throwing up, it was only Dottore who began frantically plotting on how to fix it. He had grabbed Scaramouche by the hand not holding his intestines and dragged him towards the bench Scaramouche can now feel in his sleep.
“What did you do?” Dottore sneers, shoves Scaramouche back onto the bench and Scaramouche almost drops all his entrails onto the dirty floor.
“I got caught off guard,”
Dottore barks out a laugh, straps only one hand to the table, and graciously allows Scaramouche to continue cradling his insides with the other. “Off guard?”
“Your little Mondstadt kid, the redhead,” Scaramouche says, but Dottore shrugs because of course he doesn’t remember.
Dottore doesn’t reply, works at getting the needle and threads for stitching and complaining about how the “canvas” is going to be ruined by oddly sharpened stitches instead of the neat box he has created. Scaramouche finds it mildly amusing how utterly frantic Dottore looks.
“Calm down, I’m not going to die,”
Dottore continues talking to his phantoms once more. “I’ll kill him, I’ll end him, he won’t breathe a moment longer for touching my finest subject.” He snaps the gloves onto place, removes the large intestine from Scaramouche's hand into his own, and attempts to find the best way to place it back into his body without disrupting the other organs.
“It’s fine,” Scaramouche reiterates, but he’s uncertain whether Dottore cares about him or about his organs.
Dottore practically growls at this, nearly slams the intestines into Scaramouche’s gut. “First I lose your kidney and then a grieving boy who needs therapy ruins your stomach. It is most certainly not fine,”
“So, you do remember the kid,”
Dottore huffs. “Not the point,”
Scaramouche shrugs, rubs the fluids off his hand by wiping it against his pant leg. “I don’t need a kidney, remember, and I got another one. Calm down. And make sure to stitch me up right I don’t want an ugly scar,”
“Not the point,” Dottore repeats, but begins to work, nonetheless. He fits the intestine back inside, pressing it in with deft fingers and making sure nothing will protrude out of Scaramouche’s belly once the wound is sutured back together.
When he pinches the split flesh together, preparing to stitch it together does he finally speak again. “Be more careful,” He then pierces the flesh with the needle, pulls the thread through to the other side.
Scaramouche snorts. “Worried about me?” He teases, and Dottore doesn’t respond, simply continues to focus on getting the needle through. “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Scaramouche finally says, turning his attention away from the Doctor up towards the ceiling. “I’ll be careful,”
Dottore doesn’t say anything, but the exhale of relief that he gives is enough to tell Scaramouche he heard.
Stomach
The fifth time he’s strapped to the bench is the first time Scaramouche begins to realize that he feels most at ease when Dottore is deep in his guts.
He tries not to reflect on that fact too much; simply adds it to the myriad of oddities that he’s gained since his relationship with the Doctor started. But he can’t deny there’s something easy, pleasant, strapped to a table and allowing Dottore to do as he pleases, with nothing but silent grunts when urged so Dottore knows he’s still lucid.
There’s no real reason to open up Scaramouche this time, Dottore tells him as much as soon as he lays Scaramouche’s skin on the table, poking around at Scaramouche’s stomach.
“Why do you always keep me tied up?” Scaramouche asks eventually, pulling his wrist against the loops for emphasis.
Dottore hums. “What? You don’t like it, Balladeer,” and the teasing lilt in his voice makes Scaramouche scoff, reverts his gaze off to the side.
“Answer the question,”
“I find it easier to work when my patient’s hands aren’t in the way,” Dottore replies with a haphazard shrug, and Scaramouche doesn’t miss the way he’s gone from subject to patient in the year Dottore’s been inside him.
“I can control myself,”
At this Dottore rolls his eyes, and huffs out something that sounds closest to a genuine laugh that Scaramouche has ever heard. “Can you now?” He asks, pulling his dirtied gloves free to throw them off to the side. Scaramouche watches as Dottore rolls on his chair to one of his hands, and with calloused fingers pushes the straps loose. “Be my guest, my dear. Just don’t interrupt my work,”
Dottore leaves momentarily to find another pair of gloves presumedly, and Scaramouche flexes the tendons in his now free right hand. He cracks the knuckles in his fingers, the satisfying pops echoing through the empty laboratory.
Scaramouche waits, and seconds turn to minutes and Dottore still hasn’t returned. Although the Doctor graciously released his bindings, he could just remove the other one and go find him himself. Dottore would throw a tantrum though when Scaramouche’s guts leave a path in his wake, so he finds himself staying put and growing bored.
He runs a smooth finger down the edge where porcelain skin meets the raw flesh of his insides, dipping in slightly to touch his sticky and warmblood with his fingertip. It feels enthralling; Scaramouche never cared for his internal body yet can admit that it’s fascinating, riveting.
Scaramouche moves the finger further in, taps at one of his organs – maybe his stomach, he thinks it’s his stomach – and it caves easily underneath his touch. Curious, he goes to try another organ, one more up and to the left when he hears an assumed sigh coming from the doorway.
“I leave you for ten minutes and you’re already playing with yourself, my dear?” Dottore says.
“You’re gross,” is Scaramouche’s reply. He snaps his hand back towards the bench, curls his red fingers around the steal, and smears it.
Dottore shrugs, doesn’t bother defending himself against the accusation. He returns to his position smoothly and gives Scaramouche a one over to make sure he didn’t ruin anything within his body. He hums in approval when he realizes everything is just as he left it. Dottore turns to grab the old abandoned gloves, snaps them back into place, and prepares to dig back into Scaramouche’s guts.
Scaramouche narrows his eyes at the dirtied gloves. “Where’d you go?” He asks.
“Nowhere. Just wanted to see what you’d do,” Dottore then smiles, mischievous and dirty all in one, and says. “And what a sight I returned to,”
Lungs
The sixth time Scaramouche is strapped to Dottore’s lab bench is because he thinks there’s something wrong with his lungs.
He’s asleep when he feels something piercing against his lungs, and he chokes up air he doesn’t need and his eyes blur with tears. Scaramouche doesn’t sleep really and doesn’t dream either. But when he does offer himself a reprieve from the real world into the dark unconscious, he sometimes is given memories – his or his creator’s – and they’re not always pleasant.
Most of his memories were back before he was the Balladeer, Sixth of the Fatui Harbingers, and simply Kunikuzushi, the abandoned puppet of the Shogun. Some dreams are of his friends being decimated before his very eyes. Some are being thrown out, being called useless and “too human, too mortal.” Others continue in the same fashion, but none of them worry him.
Until one night, Scaramouche couldn’t recall what exactly this dream – or memory – was about, just that when he woke, he could not breathe.
He left his quarters, navigates the long and icy halls of the palace, and pushes passed recruits in his way with just a glare. Scaramouche continues quickly and efficiently to Dottore’s laboratory. It’s nearing five am, but Scaramouche cannot fathom where else the Doctor would be.
He knocks frantically, his lungs constricting, and his throat feels clogged and he’s convinced his creator fucked up in building him, cause there’s something undeniably wrong. Dottore doesn’t answer, so he knocks harder. A shout is on the tip of his tongue when the door finally swings open.
Dottore leans on the door frame, he’s distinctively missing his mask, a nasty scar covers half of his face, tears down his cheeks like claw marks, and runs against his eyelid. Scaramouche doesn’t have time to comment, pushes past him into the lab with a quick,
“My lungs. Fix it.”
Dottore blinks, and runs his hands through his knotty hair. “What?”
“My lungs. They’re broken.”
“They were fine when I checked them, Balladeer,”
“And they’re broken now,” Scaramouche puts himself on the bench, uses his right hand to begin strapping his left hand in. “I can’t breathe. Fix it.”
Dottore raises an eyebrow and shakes his head in dismissal. “You don’t need your lungs.” He says and Scaramouche knows this, which is the exact reason he stomped his way up here in the first place. Because he couldn’t breathe, and his lungs kept constricting over and over again.
“Open me up,” Scaramouche demands.
Dottore gives Scaramouche a once over, walks over to his side and places his hand near Scaramouche’s nose. “You’re not breathing.”
“Cause I can’t,”
“Because you don’t need to,” Dottore retorts. “I think you’re having a panic attack, my dear,”
Scaramouche scoffs. Panic attack. He almost laughs in Dottore’s face at that assessment, some doctor he is. “I’m not a child,”
“Adults get panic attacks,” Dottore shrugs.
“Maybe people like you, but not me,” Scaramouche hisses, pulling his left hand against the straps, feeling the leather bite into his skin and it momentarily grounds him.
Dottore almost looks sympathetic, something in his red eyes looks soft and understanding. “You don’t need to breathe, Balladeer. Don’t focus on your lungs,” He then brings a hand up to Scaramouche’s cheeks, covers Scaramouche’s mouth with his right hand, and pinches his nose with his left. “Don’t breathe.”
And Scaramouche does as he’s told. He relaxes into the hands on his face, stares into the beady red eyes of Dottore, and notes the long scar and heavy bags, his thin lips that quirk down into a frown. They remain like that for five minutes, maybe more, but Dottore finally does pull his hand back, and keeps one cradling Scaramouche’s cheek.
They don’t say anything after that, don’t talk about the cause of Scaramouche’s panic attack or Dottore’s long scar.
Scaramouche didn’t get sliced open this time, yet he has never left feeling more vulnerable.
Heart
The seventh time Scaramouche is strapped to the bench is a week after the lung incident. Dottore had called him into the laboratory to run some tests, injected adrenaline into him. It was to see if his heart responds to hormones – Scaramouche is certain this question came up after Scaramouche left the other day, dizzy and breathless.
This time, Dottore takes his time slitting him open. Runs the scalpel slowly through the lines, eyes locking onto the blood that pools against the knife. The motion is monotonous, agonizingly slow as if Dottore is savoring the feeling. The next three lines follow just as slowly and methodically and silently, Dottore does not talk to the phantom or hum his tune.
He gently lays the skin over the desk, basically makes sure it’s free of wrinkles before leaving it to peer back into Scaramouche’s organs. Dottore doesn’t wear the mask today; the odd scars are on full display for Scaramouche to see.
“Your heart isn’t beating any faster,” He notes, cranes his neck at an awkward angle to peer at Scaramouche’s heart under his ribcage.
“It’s that a problem?”
“No. Not really,” Dottore says. “Interesting, really. I wonder what the physiological basis of your panic attack is, then,”
“It wasn’t a panic attack,” Scaramouche defends. He wasn’t a child, and he wasn’t human. He does not have childish things such as panic attacks or anxiety. Dottore gives him a look, a soft smile.
“Of course not, my dear,” He says, his voice easy. He looks at Scaramouche, something akin to adoration within the depth of his eyes, a softness that wasn’t there before.
Dottore runs his hands up Scaramouche’s legs, stopping just at his hip bone where the opening lays. “You’re gorgeous like this,” He says, uneven fingernails leaving an ashy trail on Scaramouche’s pelvis.
Scaramouche huffs, and rolls his eyes. “Tied to your lab bench with my guts out?”
Red eyes gloss over everything, Scaramouche watches as Dottore takes in the sight. He sees the flash of anger at Scaramouche’s missing kidney or his intestines that will never sit right, sees his eyes alight when Dottore notices the spot where his appendix should lay or the slice of the liver, nearly clouds over at the lungs that never move.
Under Dottore's gaze, Scaramouche feels prized.
Dottore then reaches into the large gaping wound of Scaramouche’s stomach, hand coating in thick red. He wiggles his hand through his exposed ribcage and curls his fingers around Scaramouche’s pulsing heart. Dottore squeezes once as he says, “Yes. Just like this,”
He then removes his hand from underneath Scaramouche’s ribcage, and neither talk about how the gentle pounding of Scaramouche’s heart turned erratic underneath Dottore's touch.