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chemanalystdata · 9 months ago

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Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) is a crucial raw material in the production of linear alkylbenzene sulfonate (LAS), a surfactant widely used in detergents and cleaning products. The pricing trends of LAB have significant implications for industries involved in the production of household and industrial cleaning agents, as well as other related sectors such as textiles, agriculture, and oil refining. LAB is a petrochemical derivative, and like many products in the chemical industry, its price is influenced by a variety of market factors, including crude oil prices, supply and demand dynamics, geopolitical issues, and production costs.

The global market for LAB is largely driven by demand from the detergent industry, which consumes the vast majority of LAB produced. LAB serves as a key ingredient in the formulation of both liquid and powder detergents, and as consumer demand for cleaning products continues to grow, the demand for LAB rises correspondingly. This close link between LAB prices and detergent industry trends makes LAB a sensitive commodity, highly influenced by seasonal fluctuations, macroeconomic conditions, and evolving consumer preferences. For instance, increased awareness about hygiene and cleanliness, especially in the wake of health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, has bolstered the demand for cleaning products, thereby influencing LAB prices.

Get Real Time Prices for Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) : https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/linear-alkyl-benzene-lab-14

A major determinant of LAB prices is the cost of its primary feedstock: benzene and paraffins, which are derived from crude oil. Crude oil prices are notoriously volatile, fluctuating based on geopolitical tensions, changes in production levels by major oil producers, and disruptions in global supply chains. As crude oil prices rise, the cost of producing LAB also increases, leading to upward pressure on LAB prices. Conversely, when oil prices decline, LAB producers may experience lower production costs, potentially leading to price reductions. However, the relationship between oil prices and LAB prices is not always linear, as other factors such as refining capacity, transportation costs, and environmental regulations also come into play.

In addition to crude oil prices, the supply chain for LAB plays a critical role in determining its market price. LAB is manufactured in chemical plants, often located in regions where petrochemical production is concentrated, such as the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. Any disruption in these regions, whether due to natural disasters, political unrest, or logistical issues, can lead to supply shortages, driving up prices. Moreover, changes in refinery operations, plant maintenance schedules, and capacity expansions can all impact the supply of LAB, influencing its market availability and price.

Demand-side factors are equally significant in shaping LAB prices. The increasing use of LAB in industries beyond detergents, such as the agricultural sector for herbicides and the oil and gas industry for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes, has expanded the market base for this chemical. This broadening of LAB’s applications has added new layers of complexity to its pricing. While detergent manufacturers remain the largest consumers, the growing demand from other sectors creates additional upward pressure on LAB prices, particularly during periods of strong economic growth or when specific industries experience rapid expansion.

The global distribution of LAB production and consumption also has a significant impact on its price. Asia, particularly countries like India and China, is a major consumer and producer of LAB, driven by the large population and the growing demand for cleaning and hygiene products. As these economies continue to develop and urbanize, the demand for LAB is expected to rise, which could result in higher prices if supply cannot keep pace with the demand. In contrast, regions with more mature markets for detergents, such as North America and Europe, tend to experience more stable demand, although changes in consumer preferences toward eco-friendly and bio-based cleaning products could introduce new variables into the pricing equation.

Another important factor influencing LAB prices is the shift towards sustainability and environmental regulations. As governments around the world implement stricter environmental standards, particularly concerning emissions and waste management, LAB producers are being forced to adopt cleaner and more sustainable production processes. This transition can increase production costs, particularly in regions where regulatory frameworks are more stringent, such as the European Union. Compliance with environmental regulations can require significant investments in new technologies and equipment, which in turn can drive up the price of LAB. On the other hand, regions with more lenient environmental policies may enjoy a cost advantage, potentially leading to lower LAB prices.

Transportation and logistics costs also contribute to the overall pricing structure of LAB. Since LAB is a globally traded commodity, the cost of shipping it from production sites to end-users can fluctuate based on factors such as fuel prices, shipping availability, and port congestion. Any disruptions in global trade routes, such as those caused by geopolitical tensions or natural disasters, can lead to increased transportation costs, which are typically passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

In conclusion, the price of Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) is shaped by a complex interplay of factors, including crude oil prices, supply and demand dynamics, environmental regulations, and transportation costs. As LAB is a key component in the production of detergents and cleaning agents, its pricing is highly sensitive to trends in consumer behavior, particularly in emerging markets where demand for hygiene products is on the rise. Moreover, the ongoing push for sustainability and the tightening of environmental regulations are likely to introduce new cost pressures on LAB producers in the coming years. Keeping track of these factors is crucial for industry stakeholders seeking to navigate the volatile market for LAB and make informed purchasing and production decisions. As the global economy continues to evolve, so too will the factors influencing the price of LAB, making it essential for companies to stay agile and responsive to market changes.

Get Real Time Prices for Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) : https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/linear-alkyl-benzene-lab-14

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dastardly-imbecile · 20 days ago

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RIGOR MORTIS

AO3 HERE

Jealousy petty enough that you know it’s childish, but still, you look at Simon—always straight-backed, at attention, watching Price with something that approaches reverence, worship for the hands that shaped him from the great primordial mire and brought him to this glorious cage of esse—and you wonder what he has that you lack. --- As the good Doctor's research assistant, you must take care of both him and his monster. | Frankenstein AU OR this is all an excuse to make a throuple, isn't it?

---

Wordcount: ~7k

TW for dubious consent

The good Doctor Price likes many qualities of yours: your quick, nimble fingers, your obedience, your willingness to get down on your knees when he asks you to. Sometimes, you can delude yourself into thinking he also admires the quickness with which you pick up mathematics in science, how you can replicate the circuitry of a machine with a glance, how you can lean over his shoulder and whisper, timidly, the solution to an equation before he finishes writing it down.

Most of all, though, you think he likes your ability to hold a skull by its decaying hair and suppress your gag.

Certainly, at the moment, that’s your most useful skill. Price does not spare you a glance—only a murmured, “there, keep still,”—as he sews careful sutures into the space between head and neck. The head was taken from a prisoner’s cemetery—those executed via guillotine. You do not know what crime the man went under the blade for, but it doesn’t really matter, not anymore, not when his face has decayed to the point of being unrecognizable as human. A gaping hole where a nose would be, eyes picked apart by carrion birds, and lips peeled dryly back to reveal yellowed teeth in blackened gums.

Not ideal. You tighten your grip around the remnants of his hair and try not to look at the maggot peering out from his left eardrum. Avert your gaze, examine the rest of his half-body. His chest is in marginally better condition—taken from some fallen soldier, muscles well-defined, if bruised. Hip narrows down to a sexless pelvis, lean legs that you do not know the origins of. No hands, wrists cut off in flat longitudes of bone and tendon and nerve.

Price finishes the last suture. Looks at you with that characteristic pleased look that has your chin inching forwards, smile brightening.

You’re not a stupid girl. He wouldn’t employ you if you were, no matter how much he likes you to act pliably obsequious. He knows that you know that, and he knows you love him most when he praises you for your intellect, not only the fineness of your features, not only the warmth of your mouth and your quiet, docile moments.

All that and more runs through his head, easily read in his eyes, when he turns to you. Gestures a single calloused hand towards the severed wrists.

“Find a good pair of hands for me, Pet. That’s all I need.”

You nod eagerly. This, you will do. In a world where your kind, those of the fairer sex, are either housemaids or whores, you’ll do anything to stay in this rare position—in which you are not only an assistant to a greater man, but sometimes his muse. Sometimes—during late nights, in which he’s hunched over some problem of physics and electricity, trying to puzzle out the supernatural intricacies of the biological—you sidle up to him, whisper a solution that has his eyes widening, and you feel like an equal.

So you will serve. You will please him, however he desires ((even if you prefer when it’s tasks like these, and not those that require your other womanly wiles (though, you’ll never complain, in that case, either.))

—

You spend a month roaming the city streets, pattering over the rough brick inlays and listening for words of gossip. Doctor Price has given you a handful of money on top of your usual monthly stipend—in case you must do something so uncouth as bribe a mortician, as pay your way out of a constable’s scrutiny—and your hands fiddle with the clean, crisp bills.

It is one of those weeks in which you are distant from each other, which is not necessarily bad. You endure plenty of long stretches of partnership, crammed into a lab from dawn to dusk, midday to midnight, until you cannot smell anything but formaldehyde and leather, cannot see anything but dancing numbers and the crook of his smile. The perennial cycle of the binomial must be naturally balanced out by reserve, by your brief detachment into singular units.

He spends his days penning through stacks of papers and fiddling with beakers of chemicals, working through the more conventional of his experiments—those that he displays to his fellows at the international symposiums, those that aren’t contained and rotting in the cellar beneath the house. You spend your days flipping through newspapers, sitting in patisseries, watching the ebb and flow of life, trying to pinprick where it falters, where you can reach in and staunch the flow.

Nights, he spends in his study, penning letters to his distant, faceless family. You pad through gated cemeteries, toe at the freshly-dug graves. Peer through the window of the morgue, cataloguing the bodies within; trail behind the undertaker’s cart, handkerchief held delicately over your nose.

It is practically a carnival of hands, that week, a catalogue, narrows your view to a single pinpoint. Strolling through the market, you look not at the shopkeepers’ wares but instead at the conditions of their fingers. When a handsome gentleman stops you in the street, whispers at you some honey-steeped woo, you brush him off with a smile and an admiring glance at his manicured fingernails. Gloves and rings, wrinkles and wrists, all the intricacies of the human body distilled to twenty-seven bones and thirty-four muscles.

More than anyone else would, you take the job seriously, which is another reason that Price keeps you under his wing. He’s told you, many times, that it is not the eyes that are the window to the soul, but instead the hands—you may know everything about a person in the space between those five fingers. The callouses and dirt of a laborer, the grease stains of a factory worker. Know the washerwoman by the lye-beget cracks, know the noble by the pristine skin, as smooth and pale as cream. Spot the restless with their fiddling fingers, the murderer with the flecks of blood beneath the nails.

The hands of the common, you rule out immediately. Too rough, skin sloughed away to reveal bone, jaundiced and colored with the grime of a hard life. Head of a prisoner, chest of a soldier, legs of some unknown class, you want something fine, something unique, perhaps even noble, for this final piece of the puzzle.

You consider, briefly, finding a woman’s hands—you like the leanness, the slender fingers—but no, the image of a man must be entirely preserved. Besides, you think Price may see that as a bit of a slight—as putting too much of yourself into his glorious creation, diluting it with a feminine soul. Eve needs Adam’s rib, but Adam eschews all but what lays between her legs, perfection already, beget by the hands of God.

As the week ekes on, you get closer. A sewer’s hands, a painter’s, a jeweler’s—that last one, you almost take. The fingers are long and svelte, well-proportioned, and there is just the right balance of callous and burn, teetering on the edge between pampered and industrious. The type of hand that knows both the sting of the flame, the thrum of the saw; and the heavy weight of gold, the feeling of opulence in the palm.

Almost. Almost, but you shy away at the last moment, some dim part of your mind whispering that you can find better.

Sure enough, it is on the seventh day that you do. Price watches you leave the dwelling with the same light, good luck, as always, but you can smell the impatience brewing, even if it has not yet materialized. He found the head in two days, the chest in three—he understands the necessity of perfection, but does not always adhere to those values. Sometimes, you fancy yourself—if not a better scientist—then, a better artist, a better eye for purpose than function.

So, you set upon the streets with a mission. It is not yet midday before you find it, find the body in the morgue—a surgeon, cold and pale upon the table. Young, for both his occupation and his death, perhaps a decade and a half over you, yourself. If pressed, you could not name a single feature of his face, not the color of his hair nor the hue of his eyes, whether he smiled in death or snarled or wept.

There is another thing to focus on.

You look, and you know that they’re perfect.

A physician’s hands. As dextrous as the jeweler’s, perhaps even moreso, hands well-worked. Same balance of both worlds, but instead of burying themselves in fire and metal, these fingers have known the body. Have known the push of the liver and the warmth of the blood, have touched the womb from the outside, performed some perverse violation of the art of birth—leave the mother through nature and instinct, return with the cold precision of a scalpel and the impersonality of rubber.

It fills you with a brief joy to imagine.

There is, as well, a connection to Price that you think he will appreciate, if not consciously. Doctor maker, Doctor monster. On those sleepy fall nights in which he indulges in the bottle, he tells you, sometimes, about his family—always his cousins, nieces and nephews and siblings. Never a wife, never a child. The topic is always skirted around with a reserved sort of sensitivity, despite the fact that you’re sure he would have both, if he could, if there was not some unknowable obstacle.

So perhaps you will not make the monster into a son, with these hands, but you will connect them in a way you think he’ll be pleased with.

Acquisition is a far easier task than location, funnily enough. You slip the morgue’s night guard a fistfull of crinkled bills, a coy smile and the promise of more, if he waits. Spend a few hurried minutes sawing at the hands with one of the Doctor’s serrated blades—less bloody, this many days dead—and shove them into a burlap sack.

When you return home, under the cover of night, you first change your clothes from the formalin-soaked gore, scrub your hands down, and proceed down to the bereavement lab, where you upend the bag’s contents upon the great white table. Arrange the hands neatly, five fingers all splayed out, and only then do you ring for Price.

With careful anticipation, you watch his face as he crests over the stairs, as his eyes alight upon your gift. First a contained interest and then, as he draws closer, it melts into flat-out intrigue. When he stands before the table, lifts them up and turns them about in the light, and you babble something about doctors and meat and dexterity, he smiles, turns to you. Wraps a single hand around your neck to tug you closer, brush a kiss over your hairline.

“Good, Sweet,” he murmurs, “I knew you could do it. Good.”

You bask in his praise, as you have always done. Meet his eyes, and without needing to be asked, sink down to your knees.

The mixing of the flesh and the theoretical is not too uncommon for Price. When he’s not in the mood to hear your input—or, when the problem he’s puzzling out is too complex even for you—he sometimes likes you under his desk as he scribbles overhead, finding the derivative of cosecant while you find the same in the gleam of his shaft, the heavy weight against your tongue.

“A moment,” he says, moving swiftly off to one of the great refrigeration cabinets lining the room. He opens it to extract, of course, the half-man, the thing that is lining up to become his magnum opus: frost clouding his limbs, vaster than any human man would have the right to be.

Price’s been refining it, in the time you’ve been gone. The face is still scrappy, almost repellant to behold, but he’s grafted upon it some other soul’s aquiline nose, refined the lips and cleaned the teeth to just off-white. It is eyeless, but you don’t miss, upon the shelves, a jar with two white orbs suspended in gray-green formaldehyde.

With a grunt, he hoists the limp body up, carries him to the table and drops him with a limp thud. As he grabs a long silver needle and a spool of suture thread, you undo the buttons on his pants, slowly ease them down. Move to his boxers next, fingers looping under the waistband to tug them away for ease of access.

If it were not for the hardness of his cock, you would not have thought he was aroused at all. Above you, his hands move with the practiced ease of someone who is utterly focused—threading the needle in a single thrust, picking up the hand and lining it up with the wrist. You hum in satisfaction when you see that it’s a perfect fit.

It’s that that finally pulls an iota of attention towards you. He reaches down with a languidness that approaches absent, buries his hand in your hair and pushes you gently forwards, until your nose bumps against the tip of his cock.

Right. The time for your scientific contributions is over, for the moment. Now, all it is is the widening of your mouth, the movement of your tongue as you flick it over the slit, lapping up salty drops of precum. He moves his hand back up to the creature, but not without an approving sort of pat, as gentlemanly as one would do to a dog.

You lean forwards, taking more of him into your mouth, until he hits the back of your throat. Give him a light suck, tongue running over the most prominent of the veins. With your own hands, you reach up to cup his balls, squeezing them as gently as one would an overripe fruit. Not the most appetizing of metaphors, but you’re not in the mood to think of something more palatable.

As you close your eyes, tears trailing off the edges, pushing his cock further into your throat, you almost laugh to imagine what your mother would think of you now. Somehow, you suspect she’d be less distressed over the image of you on your knees than she’d be over the visage of you in a lab coat, hair done up and graphite stick in hand.

“I’m almost through with this side,” Price says, and you take it as the cue it is—hold your breath, move forwards, sucking and licking as much as you are able, cup his balls in the way you know he likes, after a thousand other nights in the lab. As his hand above ties off the final knot, his stomach stiffens, and he lets out the only indication of enjoyment this whole night, a low grunt that quickly dissipates.

You have no opportunity to do anything other than swallow, as he unloads into the hollow of your throat. Another moment of rapturous tension before you cannot take anymore, before you must eject yourself backwards, draw a desperate heave of air into your lungs. You look up at him, trying to catch his eye, searching for approval in this art of yours as well.

He does not meet your gaze, but he does extend a hand down—it smells faintly of rot and alcohol, of the sharp and the dull comingling into one—and uses his thumb to wipe a stray tear from your cheek.

“I can handle the rest alone,” he murmurs, “thank you, Pet. Get some sleep.”

Obediently, you stand, brushing the concrete dust from your skirt. Proceed up the stairs and leave him to the darkest experiments of mankind. Down a glass of water to cleanse your mouth—necessary, if you’d like your tongue to taste any sort of pleasant come morning—but still, you mourn that bit of reminder, the tactile proof that you are loved, if only in a half, twisted way.

—

It is not until the end of the month, until the autumn season begins to slide into an entropic sort of winter, that you’re called back into the lab. Also not entirely unusual, though the span of time is longer than you’re used to—but you find other ways to amuse yourself. Go rummaging through the market for dresses that you’d never find an opportunity to wear, spend morning hours people-watching in cafes and readjusting your comprehension of the human body from the phalanges to the face.

Otherwise, you get to exercise the intellectual side of your mind by maintaining Price’s experiments, balancing chemical pHs and feeding the lab rats, marking down long lines of decimal-counted data. Even grade the rare student’s paper, when it passes across your desk. You’re sure that they—these gilded young men, hailing from rich families in distant, green lands—would throw quite the fit, had they known a woman’s hand gave them that red-inked, merely satisfactory, but that’s part of the fun.

In all that time, you hardly see hide nor hair of the Doctor. A passing in the halls, wherein you do not have enough time to note any of his features except for the bags beneath his eyes. Half of a meal, during which he hurries out midway through, and you pack up his dinner for the next day (and, a week later, must throw it out, because he never came back for it). A quick suck in his study, where he leaves before you’ve finished swallowing, and you must wash blood out of your hair, scrub the crimson handprints off your cheeks.

The night he finally calls you down, the sky is midway through birthing a storm—lightning striking indiscriminately at the ground, thunder speaking tongues of the ancients to the cosmos. His facial hair is thick and unruly, and his lab coat looks as if he has spent the entirety of the past month sleeping in it, but you cannot help the excitement bubbling in you as you descend the stairs—all this dishevelment only speaks of better things to come. He only ever loses track of his carefully-maintained facade when there is something bigger to worry about.

Below, the basement is far messier than when you left it. The air is wet and heavy, permeated with a haze of decay. Every possible surface is crowded with opened jars, pooling discolored liquid, tools coated in gore.

Most obvious, though, is the body laid out across the white table. Wrapped around its limbs like coils of chain are thick cords of copper wire, all of which spiderweb out to long, rodlike structures. As you draw closer, you’re able to make out more of its features, and they tell the story of work.

Its—his, you suppose—face has graduated from ragged to defined, bones shaved away in some places, augmented in others, patchwork skin grafted over the wounds. Hair threaded like a wig, some dirty-blonde color that looks too smooth for its host.

The rest of his body hasn’t been spared alterations either. Already-muscled chest padded out to gargantuan proportions, biceps almost as large as your head—when standing, the man must near seven feet. All decay cut away, replaced to a corpse in pristine condition.

You hide a small smile when you notice he’s barely altered the hands, if at all.

“What is this?” You ask, as Price buzzes around the room, checking the wires, flipping switches in small black boxes. He turns to you, and you do not miss the half-manic look in his eyes.

“The boundary,” he says, looking up as if he can see through the basement floor, “that has never once been breached. The recreation of life, as God never intended.”

You draw in a quick breath.

“What can I do?”

He shoots you a smile. You cannot tell whether it’s fond or patronizing. Probably both, but you choose the latter.

“Watch, Pet.”

Thunder booms overhead. He steps back, moving to the doorway. A moment—the pounding of rain, the aftershocks of a storm, the buzzing of indeterminable power—and then, the room lights up.

Every cord of wire flares bright white, and the body upon the table begins to jerk, spasming and seizuring with a force that would crack a normal human’s spine. Price rushes forwards, places a hand upon the chest, and though you know the art of science—frog legs twitching at electric shock, exposed muscle convulsing with a bit of salt—it looks, for a moment like magic.

Moreso, when the lightning fades, and the body is still twitching, when its head slams each cheek against the table and…

And it is the hand that moves first. The twitch of the fingers, breaking free from the stiffness of quietus—and then, they clench into a fist. Price steps back.

It fills you with a horrible, heady sort of terror to watch. You stumble back, pressing a hand against the wall, as you watch what you feel humans were never meant to behold—the cleaving of the veil, the swing of the elbow and the slow opening of the eyelids, revealing the rutilence of half-life behind them. Your stomach churns, pushing nauseous bile up your throat, and you must turn, retch some vile green liquid onto the ground.

Intellectually, you prepared for this—no good result could come out of six months of collecting corpse parts, after all—but it is different to watch, as different as voyeuring a murder versus feeling the knife across your own throat. If it hurts this much to watch, you cannot imagine how it feels to engender—to bring life back to the dead, to buoy along the soul like Charon and his ferry. It would have driven a lesser man mad, you suspect. John Price is not lesser. Nor, at times, do you think he is a man.

Certainly, he doesn’t look the part now, wild-eyed and laughing and cursing all at once, spitting the language before humans knew languages up at whatever Gods he purloined this soul from. You shy away, despite yourself.

Upon the table, both hands move in unison. Even Price backs away a step as, with the clumsyness of a newborn foal, the monster pushes himself up to a sitting position. You resist the urge to put a hand over your face as he looks around, head ticking slow as a clock’s hand. Some animal instinct kicks up in your hindbrain, archaic warning of predators before humanity divined gunpowder from the womb of the earth.

He opens his mouth, closes it again.

“...Where?” He croaks out, eventually, the word so mottled by disuse that you only translate it when Price answers.

“Life,” he says, “you are alive.”

He tilts his head. Surprisingly innocent, childish, but then—you suppose that this man, large as he is, is an infant in the technical side of things, in the eyes of God, if God dares to peer at this small crescent of His earth. If you were Him, you would let this storm rage until forty days of inundation wash all traces of this from the land.

“I… I. I am? Am?”

Above, the rain lessens. Looks like you have once again escaped the merciful wrath of your maker.

“Simon,” Price murmurs, reaching out to brush a single finger down the space between his eyes, as one might anoint the holy with ash, “Simon.”

“Simon,” he repeats. Slowly, he turns, and the dully-rising dread peaks when his eyes land upon you. They are a strange, electric blue, as striking as the storm that birthed him.

Price says your name, but you don’t hear it, caught in the nexus of those eyes. The monster repeats it as well, and it’s only when his scarred lips form the shape of your soul that you snap back into reality.

“Your hands,” you say, swallowing past the lump in your throat. He looks down at them, as if he’d not realized he had these limbs. “I gave them to you.”

You chance a look at Price, afraid that he will anger at your presumptiveness—really, you only found them, it’s him who gave them—but all he does is nod, a paternal sort of pride painted clear on his face.

“And I, the rest. Price. Doctor.”

“Doctor,” Simon says, and this one comes with a low, hungry sort of growl. You must concentrate on not letting your legs give out beneath you, not letting the rasp of his voice shake you to the core.

—

There is much to do during winter—a deceptive amount, especially with the new addition to your household. In the early days of spring, Price tells you, he has a yearly symposium—the largest, the glitziest—and there is only one creation he will be presenting.

And so, besides the normal jobs, now, you must contend with the monster stalking your home. At the best of times, Simon is unnervingly quiet, an unknowable presence that lurks in the corners of the house, watching you with those eyes like midsummer noon. At worst, he trails hardly a step behind you, hands so close that they brush the small of your back.

Hard to tell which one of you he takes to more. Spends more time with you than Price, of course, but that is simply because you have been set to the task of glorified governess. Smarts at you, at times, because you know your skills are higher than teaching a half-man the alphabet, but he takes to it surprisingly quickly. By two weeks' time, he can tear through any book you give him, discuss it in that gravelly, halting voice (that is, if he deigns to speak, which is not often). Mathematics, similarly, he soaks up like a sponge—arithmetic in two days, algebra in a week, trigonometry by the end of the month and calculus in three.

Sometimes, when you perch upon the plush chair in Price’s office, teaching him in one subject or another, he seems to be hardly listening at all—fixes that queer gaze upon you, hands fluttering like caged birds, like he wants to grab something, twist something, break something.

Quite the contrast to his manner around Price. Him, he watches as well, but there is a shade of devotion to his gaze that is off what he gifts to you—he is utterly still and utterly proper, always a polite distance away, speaks when ordered to and seems to leave you by the wayside. It smarts at you in the same way that catcalling men do, that your crisp University rejection letter did—the idea that you are somehow, automatically lesser, that you do not deserve that same measure of respect despite your competence.

Perhaps it’s loyalty to his maker—nothing personal. Still. You cannot help it if you’re a bit snippier, next time you’re instructed to teach him something as inane as the history of the Greek city-states. Cannot help it if you try to meet his gaze, which is both bright as flame, and dark, dull as pennies, avert your eyes almost immediately.

Spring approaches. There is a strange, thrumming energy in the air that you cannot quite capture, no matter how many times you attempt to revert to homeostasis. Help Price in the lab, and he is there, standing in the corner with hands behind his back. Spend time for yourself, those rare snatches that you can flee into the city streets, and it simply makes his presence all the more suffocating, when you return home.

One night, you seek some release of your own, huddling under your sheets and running a finger through the slickness between your legs, only to see the gleam of blue in the darkness, the shape of someone in the doorway.

“Out!” You shriek immediately, bolting up, smoothing your nightgown over your thighs. It is not even so simple an issue as a casual glance—he must have opened your quarter doors, stood there for who-knows how long.

When you complain as much to the Doctor, he simply hums in acknowledgement. Does not even bother to look up from his newspaper.

“It’s his way, Pet. He watches. Doesn’ mean he knows what he sees.”

Your neck bristles, and you turn to see him standing a ways behind you, watching, listening. “Price, Sir-”

“Relax,” he says, “lock your door, next time, if it bothers you so much.”

You know that it’ll be no use arguing. Don’t bother to say you did, don’t bother to point out whatever smug satisfaction radiates from his broad shoulders.

It is as if you are a moth, and Price, your lantern, your light, has been dimmed. Sometimes, taken entirely. Strangely, you find yourself missing those quiet moments in which he’d take his pleasure from you—now, all his time is monopolized by the hulking creature. Wherein once you would have had a brief snatch of free time, now, he stands in the lab and runs a magnifying glass over the expanse of his back, takes small samples of skin from his chest to biopsy in spinning machines.

He plays into it too, you’re sure, though not sure enough that you can call it out without fear of appearing hysterical. Tilts his head up and exposes his neck in the way you know that Price likes, in the way that you perfected. Rasps quiet questions about his family, about his life outside the bounds of a lab, those that you have always wanted to ask, but have never mulled up the bravery to do so.

When Price answers—muses on a childhood among the Swiss alps, talks briefly of some beguiling young love who he does expand upon—Simon fixes you with those eyes and you can swear he almost smiles.

It all makes, of course, for a tense carriage ride to the Symposium, held in the center of Ingolstadt. You join, as you enter the city outskirts, many other carriages, all carrying scientists of varying ages and echelons, all carrying a menagerie of experiments. Tall machines of glittering copper that spin and squeal, animals with too many heads and too few limbs, anywhere on the spectrum from stark white to tar-black, great bushels of papers that are marked from top-to-bottom with lines of text crammed tightly as ants.

Price leads you through the streets with a hand upon your waist, the other wrapped around Simon’s arm. Two equal measures of possessiveness that somewhat shift your idea of the balance of power—he puts the same level of control over both of you, exerts it like a driver might the carrot and the stick, a scale balanced by a ton of feathers and a ton of hearts.

The day of the Symposium is a blur of motion, sights and sounds and lights, until, suddenly—before you can even really think to process it—you are standing in the centre of a grand amphitheater, Price to one side and Simon to the other. His voice is strong as nails, carries to the edges of the space, as he details the process of resurrection—makes the act of the unholy into a simple recipe, a checklist of ever-increasing sins.

It’s not until Simon steps into the limelight that the crowd gasps. Even without the necessary backstory, he is a striking sight—man of scar and gnarl, standing tall enough that he could hold the earth on his shoulders. Somehow, it puts him in a suddenly different light, than the one of half-vertigo, half-abhorrence—you can find traces of the grandiose in the space between his shoulderblades, see some ancient regality in the strongness of his features.

He raises his hand as Price withdraws a long knife, so sharp that the edge is invisible. You bite your lip as he carefully steeples the blade against the skin and then draws a slash that has the crowd clamoring. Blood, red as jewels, seeps from the wound, but before your eyes, it closes, drawn tight by the suture of some invisible angel.

After the dramaticism of the presentation, you flee back to your quiet room in the inn. Night falls, is long-past, by the time the Doctor returns—you’re sure he spent much of that time explaining the further intricacies of drawing life from the earth like thread from a spool. Simon, of course, trails behind him, but you’re gratified to see Price direct him into his own room.

When he approaches you, you fall upon the bed, already assuming your position, eager to let him fill the ache that has had an entire season to fester. He does not, however, seek the warmth of your mouth—but, instead, undoes the clasp of his pants himself, and tells you, with a low voice, “undress.”

Your heart picks up pace. In all the five years you have served Price, he has taken plenty of climaxes in the warmth of your mouth, under the pressure of your fist. More rarely, has coaxed one out of you with the help of his fingers and his mouth. Only twice, though, has he truly fucked you—some hang-up that you have never questioned him about. Something that transcends the expected boundaries of the master-apprentice, the bounds of the illicit, and makes it into something that approaches a partnership. Puts you on the level of equals, somewhat, exposes a soft vulnerability that Price does not trust you enough to show.

Today, though, you suppose he is exhilarated by a successful demonstration. Perhaps, also, on the glass of whiskey he no doubt had while talking business with his fellow men. In any case, it’s enough that, when you extricate yourself from his undergarments, he starts immediately upon your neck, sucking wet bruises into the skin. Moves to your clavicle, where he plants one right in the hollow center, and then down to your breasts, where his mustache tickets the sensitive skin enough for your nipples to harden. You wrap your hands around the back of his head—perhaps, the only time you have ever felt in control of this man—and allow him to take his measure from you.

When his fingers dip into your slit, he groans. “Already, Pet?”

You can only whimper in response. When he withdraws from your breasts, you are suddenly near the point of shivering—but it only lasts a moment, as he lines up his cock with your hole, too desperate to continue his ministrations. Desperate for your gloved embrace, desperate for this to end—as with the previous two times he has had his fill of you, you can already sense that some vulnerable part of him is withdrawing into the darkness, that he is already half-regretting letting you take so much of him.

When he thrusts into you, all that goes fleeing from your mind. He fills you to the brim, hips locked together, and though his kisses tastefully avoid your mouth, you take your pleasure where you can get it—this case, in the nips upon your throat, your earlobes.

And then, everything freezes.

The door to Simon’s room is open. He stands there, watching you with an unpracticed curiosity, and you freeze immediately, hands splaying against Price’s forehead and chest.

“Stop,” you say, “he’s- he’s watching, he’s-”

Price doesn’t pause. Quickens, if anything, another powerful thirst that blows your words out from under you. Leans down, to whisper in your ear, “let him.”

When rapture washes over you, when your walls begin to stutter, and he pulls out to spray his spend across your stomach and breasts, your eyes are still locked onto Simon’s.

—

Back at home, things are different, a buildup that escalates over the course of a week. Simon, now, does not only deign to follow—sometimes, you turn, to find him near-pressed to your skin, breath fanning out against the back of your neck. Dinners are somehow both more and less awkward—you are suddenly acutely aware of the balance of power in the room, the idea of the Doctor and his hounds. The hunter and the chaser, the killer and the lapdog.

But you do not know what it is building up to—at least, not until you stand in your room, one hazy afternoon, perusing your books, and turn to find Simon—as per usual—close enough to stab. This time, he blocks your exit from the room.

“Excuse me,” you say sharply. He does not move—simply tilts his head down, regarding you with those peculiar eyes.

“You,” he says, voice deep and husky as laudanum, “you and the Doctor.”

Your skin prickles with discomfort, with the memory of being watched.

“...Yes.” An attempt to sidle around him is quickly aborted by the shuffle of his body, and now you find yourself cornered against the wall.

“What he does t’ you,” he says, drawing a step closer, chest now practically pressed against your face, “You must… must find a way.”

You blink up at him. He lifts his hands, flexing his fingers.

“A way for what?”

“Y’ gave me these,” he says, reaching for the hem of your skirt, and you are suddenly acutely aware of the pace of your breath, “find me a cock, as well.”

The sentence is so absurd that it takes a moment to process—and, the instant it does, you’re trying to move, dodge past him. “I-”

He catches you before you can spit a denial, hand around your throat, the other coming around to your waist. Effortlessly, he lifts you, pinning you against the wall, bringing the one at your neck to traverse under your skirt, hemming you in with his body.

“Can do so much,” he grunts, fingers navigating past your undergarments, “with only this, Dove, imagine-”

His finger sinks into your hole, aided by the slickness. You let out an inarticulate sort of cry, half-speech, half-moan, still wriggling in his grasp. The memory of his body flashes before your eyes—the smooth stretch of skin, between his legs, missing the masculine that characterized the rest of his bulk—but the thought flees as he adds a second finger, driving it deeper inside of you. Simply one of them, those long, surgeon’s instruments that you hand-picked, is enough to fill you—two borders unbearable.

It’s enough to make you cry out. “I can’t,” you manage, but he shakes his head, growls something about need.

You feel a third finger probing at your folds, and gather the last of your wherewithal to yell, “Price!”

Simon does not quite laugh, but the rough exhale of breath might be a chuckle on any other man. He draws his fingers back, then thrusts them back in, curling them into your warmth.

Just barely visible over his shoulder, you see the crest of the Doctor’s head, see the way he halts at the door. Steps into the room with a far more measured pace, circles around Simon to observe you with the same idle detachment that all of his specimens get.

You can’t summon the breath to plea. Useless, in any case, as he places a hand upon Simon’s arm.

“She likes it,” he says, “when you touch the clitoris. It should be higher.”

You jolt when Simon finds it, shockwaves pulsing at the rough brush of his thumb. You sob something, back rubbing up against the wall with the intensity, but all he does is smooth a hand over your hair, coo a few gentle words.

“Shh, Pet. This is what I made him for.”

You throw your head back, not caring that it collides against the wall, as Simon slowly adds a third finger into your hole, stretching it beyond its limits.

When you climax, it’s with a special sort of violence, that that pumps adrenaline into your heart, exacerbated only by the four pairs of hands running down your skin. Good thing you are being held up, because all the tension bleeds out from each joint, rendering you into jelly and pigfat.

“Come, Simon,” Price says, and he spares you only a single further glance, as you’re lowered, not ungently, to the ground, left to recover yourself and reorient your mind, recover the memory of this encounter in the first place.

—

It’s not a surprise when he calls you down to the laboratory. When Simon is naked upon the table and Price stands behind him, a hand upon his shoulder. Nods to you, benevolent smile upon his face.

“I have a new job for you. Did so well on the last one, Pet.”

Your eyes flick first to Simon’s hands, then, to the space between his legs, the emptiness. Swallow once, trying to harness the saliva to quash the arousal burning behind your naval.

“Of course,” you say, dipping your head once, “anything, for you.”

You’re not sure who you’re talking to. You’re not sure if it matters. You’re all, in the end, one entity, lightning and flesh and eyes that pierce you like a butterfly to a pinboard. If this is another chance to seek approval, to prove worthiness, then so be it. There are, after all, many things to like about you, but it all narrows down at this moment to your ability to perform (though, of course, the body of a courtesan and the mind of a virtuoso don’t hurt, either).

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