Chapter Text
20
The doctor assigned to fix him or break him or whatever must have been notoriously bad at conversation. For several nights now Feofan had listened to the click of boots down the hall, the metal scrape of key through lock, the creak of wood hinging inwards, a breath, and a scream. It was always in that order, not many deviations to tempo. After the scream was where things got interesting. A new voice each night would plead for its owner’s life, or spit curses at the doctor, or otherwise call for the gods to help. Predictable, but futile behavior.
The doctor rarely deigned to respond. Feofan wasn’t sure he ever heard the doctor’s voice clearly, preoccupied as he was with plotting revenge or not dying in his quarters. His cell. The prison. Meals were sent in the form of capsules. An inorganic escort took him to the latrine three times a day. He was provided nary a blanket for warmth. All in all, his living situation was abysmal, but it wasn’t that novel or even the worst experience. For one thing, a younger Feofan would not have had the nutrients to keep going in these conditions.
He didn’t know how many others were held in the facility. An estimate based on the path to the latrine put it anywhere from ten to thirty. He knew the others were being… dealt with, he supposed, one by one, but had not a clue if the disposals were replaced with new bodies.
The day his turn came, the facility was stormed. Security on the place must have been sparse, because the fighting that took place was devoid of the colorful blasts of elemental energy that came with truly spectacular combat. The commotion jostled Feofan out of his bland thoughts, turning from the grout smearing out of its crevices of the wall corners towards the rattling in the hallway. The door to his room — cell — shelter — crumpled open. Men armed with polearms flooded in. Feofan found he could not smile his way out of the ensuing scuffle at the same time as the tip of the polearm, heavy and cold, slid through his flesh. Perhaps if he survived this, he would get a Vision. If he was lucky, it would be a Geo Vision, golden Geo, enduring upon the earth.
His breathing turned wet. Something kept spilling out of him, sometimes in a stream and sometimes in chunks. His knees scraped across concrete. His hands tore across brick.
Through it all, snaking underneath the chaos, he heard a familiar tread of boots in the hallway: click, click, click. The door opened wider. There was a blast of something — energy? — and the scuffle ceased, abrupt, like wires being cut from a puppet.
“Ah.”
Feofan turned his cheek towards the low utterance. He’d missed the wall and ended up on the floor during all of it; his skin was quite scraped up; his insides continued to strive to become his outsides.
“Why, the doctor is in today after all,” he said, and he smiled, because if his luck held, he would survive, and a Vision might appear in his palm.
He had seen the doctor briefly when he’d first arrived, just in passing: wisps of pale curls, ear splitting grin, a silk tie of striking Lumidouce blue folded over an unbuttoned lab coat. The doctor was dressed much the same today. Feofan himself still wore the filthy clothes he’d arrived in.
The doctor tilted his chin down. “You are alive. Speak, state your name to confirm lucidity.”
“Feofan Sergeyevich Veksel,” Feofan answered promptly. “And you are, dear doctor?”
The doctor always wore a mask. Now he crouched and leaned in, close enough that Feofan could see the viscera-glint of his eyes through the slits of bone porcelain. With one hand, the doctor pressed his gloved fingers into Feofan’s mouth, to deposit a single pill. Feofan swallowed. The pain of the stab wound bled out of him within seconds.
“Well, Feofan Sergeyevich, today is your lucky day.”
The doctor stood up, but not before slipping an arm under and around Feofan’s back to haul him along.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to hand me a Vision,” Feofan murmured, his stomach in freefall, though hopefully not in a literal sense.
“If that’s what you consider luck, I will rethink your position as specimen.”
“I can’t help but notice you refer to me as specimen and not patient, dear doctor. You have yet to tell me your name.”
“Zandik,” he said at length. Feofan hummed as blood spilled over his lips. “You are remarkably calm for a dying man.”
“I’m an optimist,” Feofan lied. He was a pragmatist at best, and he suspected Zandik was, too, as they clipped along at a pace just short of unbearable. Zandik led him predictably to an operating table. “Will I be put to sleep during this procedure?”
“Do I look like a nanny to you? Absolutely not.” But Zandik reached into his pocket and took out a syringe, into which he loaded a purple substance. The needle went into Feofan’s body without fuss, and all feeling around his middle vanished as the needle came back out.
In a nearby tray, Zandik laid out his tools. Feofan watched idly as a pair of scissors made quick work of his wretched, bloodied shirt. Dying felt anticlimatic more than anything else, though he suspected that was the result of the drug and injection. Zandik took the bloodied shirt and wiped down the stab wound, which was still spitting mess, clicked his tongue, abandoned the attempt to clean up, and went in with the scalpel.
“Out of the way,” he hissed when Feofan craned his neck to see better.
“Can’t I watch?”
“I assumed you had more common sense than the rest when you didn’t scream the minute I entered the room. Perhaps I was mistaken,” Zandik said in a tone that suggested he was never mistaken.
Feofan laid his head back to rest. ”There is value to be found in each organ, you know. Of course I’d be curious to see the make of my own.”
Zandik pursed his lips. “It will not be necessary to take out your gut to show you.”
“Oh, what a relief, then.”
It was slow going to be stitched up like this, slower still when Zandik headed off his attempts at conversation, claiming to need focus, and Feofan could not feel the pull and tug of surgical thread. He gazed up at the ceiling of the room. It was bare. He gazed around at the walls — all bare. There was a table pushed a body’s width away, stacked full with files and folders in precise piles. No chairs. He came to the conclusion that this must only be a temporary base of sorts.
“Say, shall we call this an even transaction?”
Zandik’s head twitched.
“You saved my life, and so I lay it in your hands for a time.”
“I doubt you’re in a position to be proposing.” Rhythmically, Zandik’s hands dipped and pulled, feeding the needle through the sides of the incision. The stitches were even and neat. It was just too bad about the inevitable scarring.
“Proposing? Surely you’d want to know more about me first?”
“I’m sure that will come with time.”
Zandik laid down his surgical tools. All in all, it must have been a routine job for him; he swept out of the room with hardly a glance back. Feofan took this as a dismissal to leave on his own time. The only trouble was that his shirt was covered in blood and cut into pieces. It was cold in the room.
As he made to stand, the pain of the wound returned all at once and he crashed back down.
“Bastard,” Feofan muttered.
--
56
It had been over ten years — almost twenty years — yet Pantalone still woke with his breath held. Most mornings he greeted the same weary sun, from winter-grey to summer-gold, and found that he still looked and felt much the same as yesterday. Gradually his points of comparison had widened in time: he looked much the same as he had a year ago, two years, five… the other Harbingers must have barely noticed, as permanence in appearance seemed to be commonplace among them. Between their numbers, only Zandik seemed to grow old.
Pantalone found it quite charming, if he were to admit it to himself. He risked Zandik’s wrath when he caught the man’s hands trembling with exertion before barking at one of the segments to aid him and made a joke at the Doctor’s expense. Half the files on his working desk went flying towards the floor then: a worthy, entertaining reaction.
This morning, however, he could not see.
Correction: he could see, but it cost him. He turned his face away from the window, but it was already too late. Pain shrieked through his eyes and settled in his head. With the fine details of his quarters reduced to blurry contours, he felt his way into his clothes and towards the laboratories. The palette of his sleeping chambers was dark, muted, an eternal quiet twilight where his thoughts could bob gently to the surface of his mind, or sink away, into the stillness and silence. By contrast, streaks of dusty morning sun banded the halls of the palace. Blinding light, obscuring shadow. Pantalone shielded his eyes with one hand; the other rested with a tremor against the stone wall to guide him.
Each step seemed to knock the balance out of him a little more. Had it been the late nights? The visit to the mint factory? The recent battle with Pulcinella over allocation of funds? A combination of all factors?
Or was it that his eyesight aged rapidly and was escaping him?
“Dottore,” Pantalone called, forcing his voice into a calmness he pulled — crassly — out of his ass, rapping on the door of the lab. “A moment, if you please.”
He hadn’t bothered to check the time. That was just as well, since Dottore conformed to a schedule that was beyond anyone’s comprehension.
Thankfully, the door opened. Pantalone tilted his face towards the crack of the door as Dottore — one of the Segments, he noted judging by the speed of the motion — reached out and yanked him through as if reeling in a fish on the hook.
“You look a fucking mess,” the Segment crowed. It was 25, who had the brightest, hardest voice of the bunch. Pantalone made sure to pretend he was none the wiser, if only to continue their little mind game. “I’ll be sure to note these expenses to subtract from the funding pool later. What’s the matter, old man?”
“My eyes,” Pantalone began, and then stopped. “Surely the great Dottore, Second of the Fatui Harbingers, could have told me himself? Did you not say you enjoyed picking out everything going wrong with me last time we talked?”
25 shoved him into a chair that was nearly reclined flat and pried his eyelids apart to take a closer look: first the right, then the left. 25 wore spectacles himself, as did 18. Maybe in later years Dottore had cured himself of nearsightedness. Maybe the mask came with a seeing aid function; Pantalone wouldn’t know. He gazed past the pulsing pain of his eyes and did his best not to blink too much.
25 released him after a few minutes to turn away for a fresh sheet of notes, but not before Pantalone caught him swearing under his breath: stupid, pretty things.
“It will be a repair surgery. Sign this form. I’ll have me mark the cost in the ledger.”
“My dear Doctor, I’m afraid I can’t see well enough to sign within the confines of the line,” Pantalone said smoothly.
“Then I’ll forge the signature.”
“Oh, now, let’s not be hasty. A signature stamp will do.” Pantalone reached into his breast pocket for an embossed coin. The raised etchings made quick work of his fingertip, and he gestured for Dottore to bring the form closer so he could press the blood-inked coin stamp against it. “I always say the currency of the Bank is blood and tears — well, here is my payment.”
“You don’t look like you’re crying,” Dottore said. “Should I punch you?”
“We both know that won’t make me cry,” said Pantalone, tone placid but smile tight. “I am in quite a lot of pain, so if you could make this quick…”
“A deferred payment, then,” Dottore responded after another agonizing minute. Out came a now-familiar syringe. Pantalone exhaled. “Since you won’t be able to observe this, I will be putting you to sleep.”
“How considerate. Corneal transplant?”
Dottore flicked the syringe impatiently. “Not if I can help it.”
There it was again: Pantalone closed his eyes, but he could picture the displeased thinning of Dottore’s lips. Every Segment down to the child had the same propensity towards that singular expression. The original Zandik had it, too, but it appeared less often on Zandik’s face, at least around Pantalone himself.
“Well, I appreciate the care,” Pantalone murmured. A moment later, he felt the needle tip burrow itself into his right arm.
Before he faded, Dottore pressed his hand gently on his shoulder. Pantalone had the thought of asking if something was on his mind — Dottore wasn’t one to initiate contact in this way, after all — but his tongue felt heavy, his eyes, too. A stray strand of hair had gotten into the crease of his eyelid, but it was quickly brushed aside.
It wasn’t as if Pantalone never expected the sort of soft touch from 25 — but he’d known Zandik for a decade before the man had so much as laid a finger on him outside of necessity, well into his forties. How unexpected. What a pleasant surprise.
--
73
It didn’t matter, not quite, that Pantalone sat at his piano bench, shoulders slumped and fingers poised over the keys, yet not a single note coaxed from the instrument.
He had intended to keep busy this time of year. A trip out to Meropide had been booked a year prior as the second leg of a tour around Fontaine, where he intended to introduce his microcosm of an economic experiment. He’d hashed out the basic rules with Pulcinella and Pierro over the years: stage one was to present the currency to a slate of people with no alternative; stage two was to gradually phase out the existing Mora. Up until a year ago, the machinations were exciting to work on.
Yet the twelve months passed and Pantalone was no closer to a ship leaving the Snezhnayan port than he had been prior. He cancelled his reservation and deferred the initial meeting with the Meropide Administrator indefinitely.
Snezhnograd was still running. Pulcinella saw to that while Pantalone… meditated in his room.
The door burst open.
He’d not caught the footsteps approaching, though it was no real matter of security. The matter laid in the cadence of the footsteps: unhurried, familiar, unchanging from the ones he’d first heard from within his cell block fifty years ago. All the older Segments walked the same, after all — the exception was the child, who had shorter legs and must strive to keep pace with the rest with a quicker step — at some point, Pantalone realized he had begun to unconsciously expect Dottore when he heard the rhythm, that his body turned and his head tilted a certain way, like a liar’s tell.
“You’re still here,” rasped 65: out came the cane as the door closed behind him. “When will you be done sulking?”
“Sulking? I hardly think a sabbatical for self-reflection can count as sulking,” said Pantalone, curling his fingers so that his nails clicked against the ivory keys in a lifeless flop. The whole parlor had been likewise lifeless for the better part of the year. The bespoke velvet armchair, the handcrafted tea table, the chaise with its upholstery of green silk brocade, even the stained glass table lamp were all covered with a bland tarp. Only the piano and piano bench had been left alone. They stood, stark and black in the center of the room, where Pantalone spent much of his time hunched against the lid like he wanted to grow onto it.
“What’s the occasion, Doctor?”
65 scoffed and hobbled over to the piano bench, bullying his way into a seat as Pantalone had no choice but to scoot to the side. “The occasion is that you’re drawing unwanted attention to yourself. Squandering resources that you’re supposed to be managing with that budget of yours. Clean up your act before this temper tantrum escalates beyond Pierro rubbing his temples and into the Tsaritsa’s office.”
“My, my.” Pantalone stroked his finger between two black keys, still silent. “If I didn’t know any better…”
65 had hands far less steady than 25, or 35, or even 45. Pantalone took a moment to wonder why there was no 55, and filed it away as a mystery he would likely never solve. The grip of weathered fingers stretched out and whitened the thinned out skin over 65’s knuckles as they strained around the handle of the cane. Pantalone heaved a sigh.
“… I’d almost say you were concerned about me, Doctor.”
“I’ll put this into terms you can follow,” 65 said. “You are an investment that I’d rather not see fail.”
“How touching.”
Quiet bubbled between them in the shape of Zandik.
“So are you going to play something or are you going to keep sitting here day after day?”
“How many days has it been?”
65 cocked his head, very much like a bird. “363 days.”
Pantalone’s finger stilled. “Not quite a full year, then.”
“I’d like to hear you play,” 65 said baldly. “You were the one who taught me in the first place.”
“Not you.”
“They are all me.”
“Yet you all behave so very differently. What would you like to hear? A funeral march?”
“I don’t like when you play coy. You act like I died, yet here I am sitting shoulder to shoulder with you. I am not lesser than that Zandik, the one who was so feeble as to beg for help and succumb to a mere fall. You’d do well to remember that you haven’t spoken to 8 or 18 for months. Now play music, and get over yourself. Am I not here, still?”
He slowly pressed down on a key. No clear note rung in the air, only a dull, dead thunk of hammer.
65 sighed with impatience. “Regrator.”
Pantalone closed his eyes, his habitual smile fading. By muscle memory alone he settled both hands into place.
His fingers twitched against a black key. Again. Wrists lifted, dropped. A slow, pensive melody emerged, carrying a progression of carefully calculated dissonances and suspensions — no resolution. A lingering, repeated two-note motif in the right hand tolled over the broken left hand harmony. Note by note, measure by measure, phrase by phrase, he bid Zandik farewell, accepted his existence solely back into his heart. It was a heavy one.
“This is my song,” Dottore said after the piece faded, the final chord still suspended in the air. “It sounds different when you play.”
“Well, your play is much more methodical,” Pantalone said. “Remember what I said about phrasing?”
“I prefer to have the composer’s intentions laid out in notation.”
“Writing music,” Pantalone pointed out, “is not dissimilar to drawing up a contract. There will always be clauses that can be further interpreted. Now, you and your experiments, your notes, and your duplications — that’s not how we artists think.”
“You’re a businessman, not an artist.”
“A man can have more than one interest, my dear Dottore.”
Abruptly 65 stood. The meager warmth his body provided at Pantalone’s side vanished. The Doctor, however, merely rounded to the other side of the bench, causing Pantalone to now shift towards the right hand side of the keyboard.
“I’m not in the business of psychotherapy,” Dottore said, “but I will make an exception this one time. Ready yourself, Regrator. We will play.”
They were not in the habit of duetting, either, but Pantalone had managed to impress one single 4-hands piece into the limited repertoire of his former pupil, and so it wasn’t a question of what they’d play. It was an old favorite of Pantalone’s: a Dumka set in waltz meter1, melancholy enough to be interpreted as a song. Dottore, not much of a singer, favored keeping the beat in the lower register, snapping him out of too much rubato, so Pantalone indulged himself and let the melody flow, snaking from one hand to the other, coiling up intimately between the keys.
Their hands swept up arpeggios in broad strokes, washing the room in myriad harmonies that shifted as water did. With every plaintive twist of the melody, Dottore gave him an answering rumble of bass. Encountering the hymnal of the middle section, the sides of their pinky fingers brushed against one another. Pantalone turned his head, his eyes slitting open. Like this, Dottore’s hands resembled those of Zandik’s: they were aged, yes, and trembling, and fumbled through the topography of an upwards run, strikingly human, wearing out under the weight of sixty-something years of life, but it was this pair of hands that had pieced Pantalone back together more times than he could count.
Precision was not required of this kind of music the way it was required in surgery. Yet, something inside Pantalone shifted back into place as if he’d finished a bout on the operating table.
”Are you done feeling sorry for yourself?” Finished with the music, Dottore snatched his hands back before Pantalone could do something foolish like seize them for himself.
“Yes — quite,” Pantalone conceded. “I suppose I am.”
--
359
It must have been hundreds of years — yes, Pantalone thought — hundreds of years since the last time his insides were torn up.
Not a cold blade this time. Instead, his whole stomach area seemed to be wrong, turned inside out, too light and too heavy at the same time. Despite the cold of the room, his forehead was damp with sweat. Same with his legs. Heat threaded through his veins before abruptly turning icy at the back of his neck. He blinked up at a cool, clinical white light overhead. Wasn’t he meant to be avoiding strong lights? His eyes closed quickly.
“Are you conscious?”
“Mmh,” said Pantalone, doing his best to stay agreeable. That was his ticket to getting out of this: stay agreeable, make vague promises, strike deals with loopholes, push away the unpleasant consequences far enough that they wouldn’t come back to bother him.
“What happened? Who made you like this?”
“Who…?” Now, that was a query for information Pantalone simply did not have. The past day, maybe week, was blurry; it was common enough that he’d upset someone or other, financially or emotionally. He was confident it was no one close to him. Most likely. He would have to look into the matter at a later date, after first solving the issue of his acute discomfort. “Perhaps…”
“Perhaps?”
“Perhaps later,” Pantalone mused, slipping away, into a welcome dark.
It was then he realized later was the wrong direction he was headed. His eyes opened to a blurry, vaguely familiar sight: Zandik with a scalpel in hand. The light was very strong and irritating, enough to nearly shine through his eyelids, rendering them into useless strips of film through which he could still see Zandik’s silhouette. Strange… was something wrong with his sight? Or was the light meant to be that strong?
No, that was right. He’d been hurt in the abdominal area and the doctor was fixing him.
“Zan—”
Zandik looked over sharply. Something was wrong with his sight. Why was Zandik blurry? He could barely make out his features. “Awake again?”
Feofan frowned. Again? Had he passed out — again?
“Do you remember who did this to you? When your symptoms started?”
Feofan frowned harder. Was it not obvious? “You were there. With the weapon.”
“Weapon? What weapon? The poison?”
“Am I poisoned, doctor?” Ah, wasn’t that just the tip of the shit iceberg, then? Feofan felt his face go lax and his eyelids grow heavy again.
“Speak, Regrator. From the beginning. What do you remember?”
Feofan tried his best to think about the beginning: a cell. Grout, dried down messy onto the walls. Hunger. Dirty clothes. Even footsteps — yes. The doctor, or rather, the reaper might have been a more apt term, claiming a new victim night after night. He was supposed to be angry about something, too, and he was running out of time, because… because…
“Regrator. Pantalone. Speak.”
… no, it was alright, in the end. His life was preserved. Someone had caught it as the threads were unraveling, reinforced the boundaries, twisted the frayed strands carefully back together, woven it into some finer fabric, and lost the end somewhere. Feofan could not remember how he knew this, but he had no doubt that he’d existed like this for a long, long time. When was the last time he’d examined his appearance and made a comparison? Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago. No, it was more recent. He had a little scar on the bridge of his nose which was almost completely faded away.
It was all thanks to —
“Zandik,” Feofan murmured. The beginning. “Zandik.”
“I thought I told you to—” An impatient click of the tongue as Zandik cut himself off. Feofan found he could only notice things in fragments from then on. A sound, here: the clatter of tools shifting about in a metal tray. There was the scent of stinging alcohol.
“Always taking care of me.” Feofan could have sworn he didn’t say those words out loud, lips barely moving, but his ears registered them in his own voice.
“Disregard what I said. Stop talking. Just — fuck.” More clatter. “Hang on. Fool. After everything, this has to be the most useless…” Zandik’s voice subsided. Feofan caught the second scent. Blood, too deep to just be metallic. He could smell something underneath that, too, something vile, the scent echoing itself in a taste at the back of his throat. The corner of his mouth was wet.
“My Zandik,” Feofan allowed, just once, but the name didn’t bring any relief, only a deeper slick wedge of pain.
So this was death: not a slow, inevitable fraying of his life, but rather a simple, unstoppable snip of the scissors. Feofan was just doing the thing he was supposed to have done over three hundred years ago on a different operating table but under the same hands. Something tapped against his cheek. A voice spoke indistinguishable words. It sounded different from common Teyvatian or the classical language of the Golden City. It sounded like a prayer. Cursed as the gods and heavens were, it sounded beautiful. It sounded like something he could lie down and sleep in, cradled between the lilting, sighing syllables. He decided to do so.
“Fucking bastard,” he heard.
He opened his eyes. His glasses had been placed with care back onto his face. The room was a mess. Glass shattered across a table, beakers in disarray, a book thrown carelessly face down and open, spine straining to hold. The cold, bright light overhead was gone, replaced by a dim table lamp which sat to another identical — broken — table lamp.
“Your workspace,” he said, knowing the Doctor was somewhere nearby. Sure enough, out came a crash — something else fell to the floor — the Doctor stood, his hair a total mess, as if he’d been tugging at it for hours. “Something exploded. Experiment gone wrong?”
It was Dottore, it was Zandik, it was 25, it was any and all of them, him, gazing down at his body, eyes gorged on blood.
Pantalone tried his best to sit up. There were bandages wrapped stiffly around his midsection to prevent movement. A hand emerged from the shadows to shove him back down.
“If you undo my handiwork right now, I won’t hesitate to kill you.” The same old threat came from the same old voice, but it was shaky and scratchy and not very threatening at all.
“Oh, my dear Doctor,” said Pantalone. “I seem to have been rescued from some trouble again. I suppose I’ll have to update the account balance… or have one of my men see to it.”
“You were poisoned by a foreign emissary three days ago.” Dottore’s voice went flat. “Her Majesty will handle the expenses. I don’t charge for emergencies of this nature.”
“Poison?” That would explain his location and the procedure. Pantalone regarded the room with mild interest. Soon enough, the drug that was taking away all the pain of recovery would fade and he’d either be left to deal with it on his own or fed more to keep him from complaining. In the space between, he could get some work done. “You must tell me what sort of poison it was that might have had such a strong effect. I trust you kept detailed notes of its composition to further investigate the interaction of such a thing with the Elixir.”
“I don’t remember you having such an interest in the principles of my experiments,” said Dottore, turning away to pick up a fresh notebook.
“I would naturally take an interest in any threats against my life,” said Pantalone.
“If there were a traditional doctor present,” said Dottore, quite loudly, “one of them might tell you that failing to focus on recovery will present another sort of threat against your life.”
He turned to storm out of the room. Pantalone’s head fell back against a thin pillow with no amount of gentleness as he laughed. He knew better than to try and move, this time.
--
???
Pantalone made the decision to stop tracking the years he’d already lived. It wasn’t as if any of the Harbingers wanted commotion around something like a birthday. For example, the Third didn’t commit to one. Sandrone said hers wasn’t important. The only one who celebrated in recent memory was Tartaglia, and he did so on foreign soil, anyway, only returning a month later to report that he’d had a wonderful time, despite his persistent cough and nasal congestion.
The last mark of his age was the last time he’d been laid out on that cold table, all the Segments present, three pairs of hands eager to pierce his skull, the other three to handle the fragile organ within: 400. He had lived a long life, hadn’t he? Still, there was ever more work to be done, world to be changed, fury to be enacted upon. Since that particular experiment, Pantalone had stopped frequenting the lab, and Dottore had stopped visiting him as often. Since that particular conversation, the Segments had vanished. Since that particular trip, Dottore had been in relatively high spirits, and Pantalone…
He’d been through this once before, but the one who’d dragged him through to the other side was destroyed.
“I don’t care for this,” Dottore complained.
Instead of the seclusion they’d grown used to, the swaths of hours spent lavishly in private chambers finessing the digitalization plans and tracing avenues of access to the Bank’s high security vault, Dottore announced his opinion at the dinner table. Pantalone set his fork down and tilted his head. They were out in the open, two Harbingers with the black fur of their coat lapels still heavy over their shoulders, backs exposed to the wide, frigid air of the dining hall. Even so, they were alone, and the languid motions with which Pantalone and Dottore poured wine by turns had the same assured cadence of an intimate back-and-forth.
“Care for what, exactly?” He wasn’t stupid enough to throw up the menu as a distraction.
“You are sulking again.”
Pantalone hummed and resumed working through his plate. For centuries, he had eaten from a limited selection of food. The drugs, the smoke, the poison, the procedures, the transplants all closing in around his choice of diet until the act of dining fell away from his list of enjoyable activities and joined the rote tasks of daily upkeep. Still, he arrived and sat when Dottore asked.
“It’s distracting,” Dottore said. “I don’t like it when I want to discuss logistics and you just look at me like that.”
Now, that was funny. Pantalone’s eyes remained curved. “I am surprised you can see my eyes at all, most of the time, dear Doctor.”
“Ugh,” Dottore let his utensils drop. Like a sulky child. Who was the one sulking now?
“If I’ve upset you, you’ll have to be more specific as to how,” Pantalone invited. His hand drifted towards the wine glass.
Warmth flared in his stomach as he swallowed. In the deep of winter, the kitchens smelled of mulled wine all the time. Some time ago, 8 had paid a visit and suggested the addition of various Sumerian spices that deepened and enriched the aroma. But it was summer now, 8 was dead, and purple Sumeru roses bloomed in the gardens next to a trellis bursting with climbing violetgrass. Even the wine was a pale valberry pink, its fragrance light, flirtatious. A chandelier over the table fractured its light through the pale liquid and flushed across the white tablecloth.
“You know,” Dottore said. “We’ve known each other for long enough that you know I know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Pantalone. Through the shield of his eyelashes and spectacles, he watched as Dottore clawed through his hair.
“Your — gods-forsaken — eyes,” he burst out, a growl lining his throat, “you really don’t think I don’t know how you look at me — at him, when my head is turned?”
Pantalone traced the rim of his wine glass with his finger. “Harmless sentiment. I didn’t expect it would bother you like that.”
The unspoken you, of all people blared between them like a fog horn.
“We agreed to not pry into personal affairs,” Pantalone continued, his eyes opening fully. The Dottore before him snarled, a wronged young man with an ego the size of the Palace. “Yet here you are. How do you expect me to stop, as you say, sulking? You’d rather I stop looking at you from now on?”
“I — you,” it was the first time 35 had been rendered unable to speak. He spat out the growl lining his throat in a language that sounded almost familiar to Pantalone. A faint memory prickled at the back of his mind: shattered glass, the smell of blood, bile, a familiar head of messy hair. “You don’t even look at me! For fuck’s sake, Feofan. How many centuries has it been? Zandik is dead. He’s been dead for hundreds of years. The others are dead. I am the only one left. I chose to remain. I won. You don’t even look at me.”
Pantalone looked at him now.
“Why?”
Dottore’s earring swung heavy, knocked against his neck, the glowing Elixir inside sloshing.
“Why can’t you see me?”
Pantalone wished he could say it was because Dottore was selfish, that he wanted to be looked upon as a god, that he wanted to be the single object in the eye of any beholder. They both knew that wasn’t the whole truth, and Dottore deserved nothing less than the whole truth.
For all that Dottore complained about Pantalone’s eyes and what he was looking at, Pantalone couldn’t even remember when he last saw Dottore’s eyes.
“I would like to,” he began, grasping for words to resolve whatever this was, this painful, awkward confrontation that he’d been putting off for a few months, a few centuries. He would like to tell Dottore, this 35-going-on-400-something year old Segment, that he wasn’t enough, but he wanted to do it in a way that would preserve their working relationship. The path proved more intricate than he was ready for. “I would like to…”
Dottore’s lip thinned.
Pantalone studied the lower half of his face like a script was written on it.
“To think I’d see the day Regrator’s silver tongue would fail him,” Dottore mocked; Pantalone had taken too long to formulate his reply.
“It was a personal desire,” Pantalone deflected, at last.
They drained their glasses of wine.
“Can I not be the same,” Dottore asked with the insistence of a mad scientist brandishing his most treasured hypothesis. “I have everything I could possibly need to fix whatever is wrong with you.”
Except the years, Pantalone thought, but didn’t say out loud. Except the innocent curiosity of 8. Except the sting of rejection fresh in 18. Except the way 25 wielded his competency like a mace. Except the easy humor of 45. Except the way 65 expressed himself, exasperated but caring. Except Zandik, the only one of them who would had ever been all of them. He reached for the wine bottle and topped off Dottore’s glass, then his own. Potentially one of them would have stopped his drinking habit before it was too late, but he knew 35 enjoyed the optics of holding a goblet by its slender crystal neck without a care in the world.
The beak of Dottore’s mask pointed towards his glass; his hands stayed still.
“I wish to — I’m enough,” he argued, and it hit Pantalone.
Clumsy effort, but effort all the same. He tried to turn the same courtesy back, searching for pieces of the Segments in the way Dottore sat in front of him. Before he even encountered an inkling of recognition he knew he was already thawing out, willing to come back. At least this time he hadn’t spent a whole year silent and sullen in front of a piano. He’d simply acknowledged the two Gnoses slotted between Dottore’s fingers and carried on with his life — all in all, he was doing well. To hide it. To keep his gaze veiled.
Of course Dottore, a scholar who specialized in Pantalone, among other things, would have noticed. He really should have known. Dottore, who had seen his insides and outsides. Dottore, who must have seen the shadows of 65, of Zandik, of the tucked-away shared memories with each Segment, of the void where his own bond was by far the weakest, lingering in his lungs, his brain. Dottore, who must have realized that of all the pieces of himself the one that remained was the one Pantalone cared for the least.
Dottore, who despite all this was asking for him, in his own twisted way.
“You have to get over it,” Dottore said, when he really meant please. “For me, because I’m enough.”
Pantalone folded his fingers together.
“I’m practically begging to be thrown into debt,” Dottore added, wry, the corner of his delicate mouth inching upwards. “All so that you would look at me.”
Pantalone’s eyes crinkled, not at him, but at the half-full glass of wine. His body was pleasantly warm, circulation lively in his hands.
“My pleasure, dear Dottore.”