Chapter Text
Agent Stone had waited for him.
He hoped, one day, he’d be able to tell him in person.
He didn’t expect the Doctor to believe him, at least not openly. Agent Stone had long made peace with that. He had spent enough time around the Doctor to know that he would never admit to needing assistance from another person. He showed his appreciation in smaller ways, such as how he ran his hands over his computer keyboards just a hair slower after Stone had dusted them. Or the way he eased his shoulders into his coats, assertively and always paired with a turning-up of lips and a small nod of his head, when Stone had done a particularly good job of ironing them.
Agent Stone was good at noticing the little things.
He wanted to believe that was why the Doctor had left him in charge of his base of operations when he had taken off after that strange, blue anomaly that had captured all his attention as of late. He had dutifully monitored his hovercraft’s whereabouts through its GPS coordinates, plotting its course even as it appeared to teleport haphazardly all over the world. (Had the anomaly somehow affected the ship’s programming, causing the location data to glitch? Surely, the Doctor would have anticipated even such a rare possibility as that when he wrote the code.) When the ship disappeared from his view entirely, he had noticed that as well. Agent Stone had watched the screen and forced down his ever-growing anxiety as he waited for it to blip back into view. It didn’t come.
Days later, it still hadn’t come.
And so Agent Stone had noted the exact time and place of the Doctor’s disappearance, contacted the law enforcement agency operating in that jurisdiction for any surveillance footage they had of the area, and reported all of this to his Commanding Officer.
And then, he waited for him.
He had fallen into his new routine more easily than he had thought: wake at 0600 and check for the Doctor’s tracking signal, wash up, make himself coffee, and perform every diagnostic check on the robots that the Doctor considered rudimentary enough for him to learn. Every twenty minutes, he would check again for the Doctor’s tracking signal. Twice a day, at 1000 and 1800, he contacted his Commanding Officer with his situation report on the whereabouts of Dr. Ivo Robotnik. And every time he sent it, this report consisted of only two words: status unknown.
Agent Stone didn’t start to worry until the first week had passed with no change in status. The Doctor had always insisted that he was the smartest person in the world and Stone had never found any reason to doubt him on that. Surely, wherever he was, he could take care of himself. He had a plan. The Doctor always had a plan. It was one of the many things Stone had admired about him. What truly concerned him was the possibility that the Doctor’s plan, whatever it was, didn’t involve him coming back.
He knew that his life had existed before he had been hand-selected to be the Doctor’s handler, but he struggled to remember what that was even like. That portion of his memories was fuzzy, faded into gray compared to everything that he had been through after the day he had been briefed on Dr. Robotnik and how to best monitor his activities in the service of the US Department of Defense. The files he was given on him were extensive, describing him as egomaniacal. Narcissistic. Difficult. Looking back, Agent Stone knew that his subject fit the most technical definition of those words, but he had personally never found the Doctor anything short of brilliant.
After the first week, Agent Stone began collecting memories.
It had started with a shopping list.
He had thought it was an ordinary scrap of paper at first, one that in any other circumstance, he would use to scribble down an account password and tuck underneath his keyboard, only for the Doctor to later scold him about. “You fool!” he’d shout. “You amoeba-brained buffoon, no wonder this country needs me to save them when their special agents can’t even be trusted with basic internet security!” Sometimes he would eat the paper to drive his point home. Stone had always appreciated his concern. But upon further examination, he had found that this bit of ephemera contained no outdated login information and instead a list of all the items the Doctor sent him on errands for on what felt like a daily basis: coffee beans, mustache wax, so many yards of electrical cables of every possible size and plug configuration. It was barely anything in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like a piece of the Doctor now that he had apparently disappeared from his world. Agent Stone found an unused drawer and stashed the list in it.
A bar of soap, partially used, was added to the drawer next. Then, a set of Allen wrenches found behind a mess of cords under his computer terminal made their way into his collection. A spare external hard drive, its data long since wiped. A toothbrush, unused. An unopened package of his favorite deli meat. Agent Stone knew how particular the Doctor was about the brands of food he liked and treasured the memory of the first time he got all the correct ones. He had stared, wide-eyed and flustered (and afterwards, refused to admit that he was either), at Stone’s grocery haul, and was unable to find any fault in it. After a rare moment of tense silence from the Doctor, he had sighed and told him that perhaps, even the dimmest of light bulbs could manage to shine in the right circumstances.
Agent Stone had briefly considered having those words tattooed before deciding against it out of concern that it wouldn’t meet DOD dress code.
He was briefly torn about adding the discarded sock he found to his cache of memories, but ultimately decided to leave it out. He wanted something that had touched the Doctor’s skin once, something that he could hold and imagine the Doctor holding in kind. Stone had felt sentimental when he had given the sock a sniff, trying his best to inhale whatever lingering scent the Doctor had left behind for him, and instead only got a noseful of dust, presumably collected from the inner workings of his robots. A spare pair of gloves was located shortly after; Stone was quietly thankful to be able to replace the dust sock with them. Every time he ran a fingertip over the smooth black leather, the precisely stitched seams, the electroconductive patches bonded to the palms, Agent Stone couldn’t help but miss every time the Doctor saw fit to lay his hands on him.
Those memories were all recent, and quite easily his most treasured. It had started with the Doctor’s hand on his chin, gripping it hard as he pulled their faces in close. Agent Stone hadn’t flinched at the Doctor scolding him then, his mouth close enough that he could feel his breath hot against his cheek. None of the Doctor’s antics surprised him at that point. The inverse, he soon noticed, wasn’t true. He could feel the Doctor’s eyes drilling into him just as hard as his fingers were in that moment, almost daring him to cower before him. To prostrate himself. Instead, Stone’s calm, compliant nonreaction in the face of his rage was something the Doctor found most curious. Something worth investigating much further.
The Doctor had first experimented with humiliation in his attempts to draw his desired reaction out of him, though it had proven ineffective after all the casual verbal abuse he had subjected Agent Stone to up until that point. Restraints were more effective, but barely so; the Doctor had no patience for ensuring compliance through physical means. Besides, he had said, Agent Stone only appeared to find pleasure in following his commands. What he really wanted was to see what it would take to see Agent Stone suffer a little bit at the same time.
Distraction, he soon found, was what did the trick.
Agent Stone had saved the item in question, unsure whether it was suitable for his drawer of memories or deserved a place of higher honor. It was a stout plug the Doctor had made for him after spending an afternoon taking extremely detailed and intimate measurements; a bulbous egg of white plastic and titanium at one end and a gently flared base at the other. He had rigged it up with a strong motor that could be programmed to rumble with great intensity deep inside him with the smallest gesture from his fingers. The Doctor had never forced it into him himself, instead preferring to watch Agent Stone open himself up and slowly insert it at his request. He recalled that the Doctor was particularly fond of ordering him to do so before briefings, when he could set the egg vibrating hard against Stone’s prostate with the slightest flick of his hand, though even the very pressure and weight of the plug inside him was enough to drive him mad most days.
A very treasured memory indeed.
After the first week, he had begun wearing the egg during those twice-daily reports, just for old time’s sake, but he quickly realized that it wasn’t the same. The basic sensation of the plug was as he remembered it, so much so that he found himself penciling in daily masturbation sessions at 1100 and 1900, but what had really made the exercise so enjoyable for him was the fear that accompanied it when the Doctor was in control. He missed the tension of not knowing when, or even if, the egg's motor would be activated, and at what strength and tempo, and if he would even be able to control himself in front of his superiors. Without that fear, the egg felt like a poor imitation of itself, but he continued to wear it for a few hours every day, if only to keep his memory of the Doctor fresh. At the very least, the way it filled him and the knowledge that the Doctor had put so much time and effort into designing it specifically for his body comforted him, even if he was unable to access its full potential. He had made several attempts to revive the vibration function, examining the surface of the egg in great detail and testing out the gloves from his memory drawer, but it appeared that facet of the plug’s construction would always be off limits to him.
So Agent Stone continued with his daily routine, collecting memories of the Doctor while checking his status every twenty minutes and reporting it as unknown once in the morning and again in the afternoon.
After the second week, exactly eighteen days, four hours, and twenty-nine minutes since Dr. Ivo Robotnik was first presumed MIA from the Earth itself, Agent Stone felt the egg vibrate furiously inside his ass.