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eluxcastar · 10 months ago

Text

Dottore giving child reader a check up

── ୨୧：il dottore & reader

୨୧﹑synopsis :: nobody scares you more than the Doctor, and that's why you're wholly betrayed by Father tricking you into getting a check up right under your nose, but perhaps your worries are exaggerated by rumours

୨୧﹑genre :: fluff

୨୧﹑content :: gn reader, child reader, he's a lil soft (cause if he's not poor kid might explode on site), reader is mute, reader is also autistic (but tbh you don't have to read it that way), not proofread

୨୧﹑words :: 2.9k

idk what possessed me to write this I just has the thought and decided it had to be done. I got in the zone and wrote it in a few hours 😭 this is kinda loosely based off one of my characters but ambiguous enough I think to be read as a reader insert. little ball of anxiety with legs reader hehe. they come from the house of the hearth so every instance of father refers to arle

You can't think of a single person able to scare you nearly as much as the Doctor can, whether it's the daunting trip to find him wherever he hid this time or the fear of knowing he tried to bargain with Father to have the more unimpressive children—as some would call you—shipped off to him to become experiments.

Father won't allow him to get his hands on any of you, but it hardly eases the fear that he may disregard Father's warning and decide to pluck the first child he comes across up and feign ignorance when she realises they've disappeared.

Father personally entrusted you with this letter, so you cannot turn back as you make your way to where she said he should be.

The sleepiness might manage to numb you to the danger by the time you arrive and make it easier to stomach his presence, but most likely, he will only frighten you awake, and it will worsen with the shock to your system.

There's no turning back now and no declining when Father asks you to take letters, which she says are of great importance. You can't treat letters like this lightly, even if you fear the recipient.

Knowing who is behind it makes the door all the more daunting. Doors that separate you from Harbingers always make you nervous as it's not every day you find yourself faced with one armed only with a letter and shaking hands. If it were anyone else, you could've knocked in a heartbeat, but you pause to gather your bearings before raising your hand to knock.

One two, three…four. Spaced just as Columbina taught you to, and then you wait.

Several seconds pass in silence before you hear footsteps from inside, then a voice calling out to you. "The door is unlocked."

You reach for the handle, cautiously cracking open the door just enough to peek inside. Your eyes travel across the room from your left to your right until you spy Dottore seated in a chair facing away from you. He hears you, evident in the way he turns to look at you as you work up the courage to step inside and leave the door ajar behind you.

"It's you," he remarks, the closest to acknowledgment you expect to receive. You are about to make your way to hand him the letter when he interrupts you. "Close the door."

The door is always closed here like it's trying to keep someone out, but there's no one here that he would dread seeing who would knock and accept that the door is locked. He must not be trying to convince anyone of that, and if he was, maybe he'd lock the door for real and leave everyone stranded outside instead of talking.

Dottore makes you nervous. You don't know what he thinks or why, but you probably don't like it. It's the only reason why he would be here right now. Normal doctoring wouldn't get him far as a Harbinger, and the sounds you've heard coming from his lab are enough to deter you from wondering too much.

Instead, you quietly spin yourself around to push the door closed before returning to your endeavour of handing him this letter from Father she entrusted you with.

"Who is it from?" he asks, a question you remember him asking before too. You concluded that he's trying to gauge how eager he is to read it, and your answer will set his mood for the remainder of your stay.

You turn the envelope over to show him the seal on the back, which you hold out to him. The mark of the House of the Hearth—Father's seal—is displayed so that Dottore can glean the answer from wordless actions. He accepts it from your hand with a stifled eagerness, the hopes of something he'll enjoy written there held back by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, it's a trivial matter.

The moment the letter leaves your hands, you retreat to the safety of the door, where you stand beside the frame to await a half-hearted reaction or collect his response. Father is always happy when you return to the House to inform her that Dottore sighed when he read her letter, even if she regards the news with her usual stoicism. She despises when he bothers to send something back to her, but she never tells you why, as usual.

He collects something off his desk just out of your sight, hidden behind him, and the sound of paper tearing follows. He drops the twice-folded paper into his hand, then unfurls it to read the contents.

You wait in silence, nerves evening out as you rub the sleep from your eyes with the back of your hand. Sleepiness does help you occupy yourself if nothing else.

Then, you are interrupted by a snap of his fingers and a motion of his hand to usher you closer.

Keeping him waiting will only make him mad, though you're sure not enough time has passed for him to pen any cohesive message in the minute or two you spent waiting.

You look up in anticipation nonetheless, expecting him to hand you something or tell you something so when he reaches toward you, it doesn't alarm you.

Not until he grabs you beneath your arms, picks you up, and sits you down on the table, much closer to eye level with him.

"Arlecchino has her concerns about your sleeping habits and your seeming lack of will to speak," he begins, reaching behind you to grab something you barely follow before he has it in his hands. It's only a light, small and thinner than the torches at the House.

Your mind races with every question you can think of as you try to find a way off this table back to the floor, but the only way out is blocked by Dottore sitting in front of you, unsympathetic to the fear in your eyes when you stare at him. You could swear you hear your heartbeat thrumming in your ears in a quickened rhythm.

What was written in that letter? Was it about you? It takes only a brief glance down in search of the open letter to realise exactly what makes this delivery so important. Father tricked you into coming here to see the Doctor after you so eagerly declined her previous offer to go willingly. You catch glimpses of your name in Father's handwriting and little else as it blurs into a messy sea of details, but you always recognise how Father writes your name.

You know better than to assume this is punishment but rather the manifestation of Father's worry as you keep oversleeping lately and need one of the older children to fetch you from the comfort of your bed. The idea that habit would land you here, presumably getting a check-up, might've inspired you to prize yourself out of bed a little earlier had you known.

Dottore seems to gauge your trembling as an obvious sign of fear, though a twitch at the corner of his lips is your only indicator, as you can't see his eyes beneath the mask. "Her explicit concern was whether or not you're ill." He rests his hand against your knee— they're cold, yet you almost expect it. It doesn't mean you especially like it. You can only interpret the action as a skewed attempt to comfort you. "As long as you're healthy, I see no reason to keep you longer than a simple check up."

He's not a real doctor, is all you can think, and he doesn't know what he's doing.

You have no choice but to steel yourself for whatever pain you're about to be subjected to. It might hurt, but you have no way out, no way back to Father, so you can curl up in a ball at her feet and ask why she would subject you to this torture—

"Don't tense your jaw," you suddenly hear, realising his finger taps your knee to grab your attention back from dreamland. "Open your mouth," he instructs you, and rather simply at that. It's something you can follow without getting scared he'll hurt you somehow.

He shines that light at you, inspecting something, though you can't say what. A slight tilt of his hand and, by proxy, the light he's holding is your only sign he's looking at anything.

The light is off before you know it. There was no pain at all, not even a hint of discomfort beyond what naturally arises from your ever-present anxiousness.

Dottore moves to set the light beside you, then appears to change his mind as he offers it to you. You take it from his hand and click it just as he had, the light coming on again. Another click, and it's off. Holding it just like that, an object of clicks and ridges and a light you can play with, is enough to give you something to at least take your mind off the fear of getting hurt.

"Lift your head."

This time, compliance comes easier as you tilt your head up until the point his hand stops nudging you, and instead, he presses his fingers against your throat. It's light enough to feel only slight pressure; it doesn't hurt, but you don't like that feeling. Your thumb brushes over the exterior of the light, smooth against the pads of your fingers and satisfying to touch. You pull away before you can come to your senses and stop yourself, but he lets go the moment your discomfort flares, and you do the closest you can to telling him no.

Your breathing begins to even back out seeing his hands so clearly in the air in front of you, away from you, not touching you. It's silent reassurance that what you just did counts enough as revoking his permission to touch you as anything can.

Dottore doesn't feel like dealing with the fussy child that trying to force it would invoke for a mere favour to the Knave.

Instead, simply asking you like the fully grown child you are seems much more efficient. "I'm going to ask you a few questions, all yes or no," he begins. "They're all simple enough you can answer without speaking."

You interpret the ensuing silence as Dottore waiting, expecting you to nod or shake your head, and you quickly offer a nod in agreement.

"Do you know if you're able to speak?"

You consider his question carefully, unsure of the answer. Your hesitation prompts him to rephrase the question.

"Are you able to make any noises at all?"

You nod. You know the answer to that.

"But not speak in full words?"

Not words. Words don't work. You shake your head.

"Would that be because you're physically unable to?"

You shake your head. You've spoken before, but each time you try, especially here, something robs you of your voice before you get the chance. You know you can talk, just not here like this.

"If not physical, then there's nothing wrong with you," he concludes. It feels sudden like there should be more, but he stops so quickly. "Nothing that I can fix," he promptly adds. That explains it.

Why not? He doesn't answer, unable to hear the things you don't say. To him, you remain as starkly silent as ever and as difficult to treat as you have been the past few minutes. You suspect he came to some greater conclusion between when you first walked in and now but neglects to share with you what it is.

You must look unsatisfied or just confused as he pauses to stare at you. You look away first, eyes drifting back to the light in your hands.

"Arlecchino only wanted to know if something was physically wrong with you," he says, briefly looking down at the letter as he skims a particular section again. "Your poor sleep may be the result of insomnia, or whatever is causing the mental block that also prevents you from speaking."

Mental block? Nobody ever told you about anything like that.

You eye him curiously, though you again remain silent, watching him while you think he isn't looking back. It's easy to look at him as long as you don't consciously think of the fact that he's staring at you behind that mask.

Dottore holds his hand out expectantly, a motion of his fingers telling you he wants you to return what you have in your hands to him. You do so, but not without a sadness-driven hesitance to accompany it.

"None of the things you're describing imply a physical problem, but a paranoid 'parent' overattentive to the wrong facets of what could be wrong with an orphan." You don't like the way he says that as if he's speaking ill of Father, but like always, you keep your mouth shut. "If you couldn't speak because of a physical injury, you would have presented with one when you arrived at the House of the Hearth—not now. Trouble sleeping and an elevated heart rate, shortness of breath, intense panic and your tremors are more likely the symptoms of anxiety."

That's a lot of words, but as he quickly lists every example, you seem to become conscious of it. Mental block, anxiety. Those are the two things you've been told that sound like explanations. You look down as if on instinct, hands held in front of you to investigate his claims that you're shaking. You are. Before your eyes, your hands are trembling, though you can't say why. You look back at him to see if he has anything else to say.

You thought your sleep troubles weren't the same, the result of bad dreams, but supposedly not. Dottore doesn't know anything about that, does he? No, he can't. You never told him, so he can't know. He knows lots of things he shouldn't, like your heart racing when you're scared or how you feel like you can't breathe at times.

Dottore clicks the light on again, shining it down at your hands resting in your lap. He circles it in place, and your eyes follow. It clicks off again after a few seconds. "Distraction helps anxiety," he says, then sets it down on the desk beside you. "Do you know why you can't sleep?" he asks.

Yes. You nod. Dreams. On nights when they're at their worst, they keep you awake long past bedtime when all others have gone to sleep. By breakfast, you can be so tired and sleep-deprived that dozing off over your food is the only thing you can manage.

You half expect to sit through another round of questioning before Dottore finds the one that clicks the pieces perfectly together in his head, just as he did in the first round.

Instead, Dottore stands, and his hands find your sides to hook you under your arms. Your feet are back on the ground before you can fuss any more about how much you do or do not like it. With you out of his way, he flips the paper Father wrote her request to him on.

"If you know the answer, then you're free to go."

That's it?

You stare up at him for a moment, perplexed by the surprising lack of pain compared to the abundance of fear you felt. It should have hurt, but it didn't, and now you don't know why you were so against coming here in the first place. Dottore spared five or ten minutes of his time, which he already didn't want to give you, and is sending you on your way without injury,

You can't see his face as he's turned away, writing something down that you can't make out. If you took a guess what it is, it's probably about you, just like the first one was. Still, you can tell why Father is so annoyed to receive letters from him. You don't recognise your name when he writes it. You don't recognise anything he writes. His handwriting is awful.

He folds it and slips it back into the envelope it was given to him in. That's not proper etiquette, but something in the way he practically shoves it into your hands tells you that he doesn't particularly care. So long as it gets from him to Father, it doesn't matter how it gets there in his eyes.

"Give that to the Knave." That is his final instruction. You're very used to following those kinds of instructions by now, having heard and executed them many times. They're second nature to your mind.

You nod, pinching it between your fingers to keep the paper from falling out of the open envelope. If Father's was critical, so is this one, and you'll get it back to her quickly—more importantly, safely.

You can't help wondering why it felt so much easier to have someone briefly look at you and ask a few questions. The older children make it sound torturous and barbaric, like being used as a lab rat to spite Father for her refusal with his only opportunity to access the children of the House.

Perhaps seeing a doctor to ease Father's worries isn't as scary as you believed.

#✦ — scenarios.#✦ — fluff.#for anyone wondering #yes this is extremely self-indulgent #because the little doctor-fearing child in me needs to be soothed #by a scarier doctor LMAO #dottore #il dottore #dottore x reader #il dottore x reader #genshin impact #genshin #genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader

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