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Visiting a cemetery is like visiting old friends.
Or at least, that’s what Dottore likes to think. Especially this one in the heart of Snezhnaya Cemetery. It’s interesting walking past every grave and tracing his fingers down the carved lettering on tombstones. He even remembers some of these people.
“Hello,” he says cheerfully, as the winter wind howls in the voice of an angry ghost. “What’s it like being dead?”
Of course, there’s no comprehensible reply.
It’s nice nevertheless.
In the early morning hours of Snehnaya, there is always silence. People are all huddled up in their homes. It would be far from optimal to freeze to death in a graveyard in the middle of nowhere.
So usually, there’s only him.
He hums a funeral tune as he reads the words marked on every stone, admiring the ivy snaking up the side of weathered marble, dotted with tiny white flowers. It’s like a secret garden.
He, too, used to grow some of these plants.
A lullaby floats up in his head at tiny shroom-like creatures that haunted his childhood gardens.
“Nara Zandik,” murmurs a voice in his mind, “the forest always remembers.”
But it’s likely the younger version of him has been long forgotten, replaced by the image of a man in a laboratory coat, with Aranara blood tainting his hands.
He knows he isn’t the innocent child he used to be. And by his birth name, it seems he had always been fated to live out a cursed life— after all, once a heretic, always a heretic.
Through the fog-draped backdrop, he walks amongst a land of the dead teeming with life, of butterflies flitting onto withering daisies and birds making nests on little gum trees. In the midst of it all stands a figure.
Upon the clearing of the mist, the silhouette comes into view, and Dottore immediately recognizes it.
He’d know that face anywhere.
Shrouded in a spray of white, his robes brush ice-frozen ground and a violet scarf trails in the frost-infused wind. His gloves are set aside; his pale, callused hands are folded together tightly, clasped with such tension his knuckles turn white.
A glassy haze has fallen over luminous amber eyes, like he is only half awake, trapped in a nightmare of his own making. Chin lifted, he stands facing the sky; but he looks achingly empty. Despite the heavy coat he wears, a shiver passes through the line of his shoulders.
To the untrained eye, he still would have looked imposing and cold, ready to take on the Archons themselves.
But for someone as observant as the mad scientist–
He looks deeper. He watches and sees and feels a sense of hollowness echo in his chest at how lost the Regrator looks. He finds the fear and hurt hiding behind the filter of fogged-up spectacles.
By accident, he treads on a fallen leaf. The crunch of rotted brown alerts Pantalone, who freezes in place.
“Show yourself,” he hisses, eyes narrowing to slits. A flicker of silver appears as he unsheathes his daggers. He squints into the mist, holding out the blades in front of him, an act of defensiveness learned from days spent fighting for his life in the alleyways of Liyue Harbor. “I said show yourself.”
“Don't take that tone with me,” says Dottore airily as he steps out of the fog, leaning against the nearest gravestone in a slightly failed attempt to look casual.
“Apologies. I did not think you would be here.” He smiles tightly, slipping his daggers back in place. Almost immediately, his apprehension is gone. It makes the Doctor wonder how many other facades his Regrator likes to put on.
“It's quite alright, Regrator dearest. What brings you here on this fine morning?”
For a second, Dottore wonders if he's crossed a line. Wonders if he should have kept his mouth shut and pretend he never saw his pretentious uptight banker in such a vulnerable state.
The briefest flash of panic appears in steeled golden eyes, then vanishes as he moves his head, presented as no more than a trick of the light.
“I am here to commemorate a death.”
His voice is heavier than stone.
Dottore looks at the patch of grassland he stands in, lush with wilting daisies and bluebells. Upon closer look, a single rose is clutched in his hand, thorns cutting long scratches onto bare skin.
“I sense I’m intruding,” says Dottore, with a rarely-seen note of concern in his voice. “However, please accept my condolences. Losing a loved one must be difficult.”
He would not know, but he fears he will. The hourglasses of god and mortal flow differently, and soon enough, someday, he will be the one kneeling by a grave with the Regrator's name carved onto it in swooping cursive letters.
Both of them, alone once more.
“Not a loved one.” Pantalone trudges through the snow-tipped grass, dirt gathering on the heels of leather boots, standing beside the Second. “Decades ago, upon my inauguration as a Harbinger, I lost myself.”
Both of them remember it in different ways.
But they both recall the same scene, of a young man with aspirations glowing with pride at the Delusion in his hands. He had been smiling, but there was a tremor to his fingers, as if he could not bear the weight of the Delusion, of the responsibility holding him down. Still a puppet of the Seven– just kneeling to a different archon this time.
Perhaps Il Dottore is not the only one who has lost himself over the years.
“Are you not happy with what you've become?” asks Dottore quietly, feeling for the Regrator's hand. He holds it, flinching at how cold the skin is.
He must have been here for ages, he thinks grimly to himself.
“I've become worse,” Pantalone sighs, exhaling. He threads the rose between his fingers, tracing the three lines on the older's gnarled hand. “The childhood version of me, he would have been so ashamed. I killed what was left of my humanity years ago, and what have I become?”
“If you did not have humanity, you would not have loved.”
It's simply stated, a remark that is honest and close to affectionate, a fresh breath of air to save him from suffocating entirely.
“I love you because you are inhuman enough to love me in return.”
And then he's shifting closer, leaning his head against the Doctor's shoulder, lifting the rose up so its rotting sweet stench pierces the air. He finds that disgusting sense of comfort in having familiar arms wrap around his neck and pull him in beneath a hazy sky.
“There is no changing the past,” whispers Dottore by his ear, “so won’t you indulge in some of life’s better moments and stay by my side?”
“I am but a mortal. After my passing, you will move on, and forget we ever cared for each other. I have no humanity, and lack your accomplishments; surely there are better options than a feeble banker?”
A pause. An annoyed huff.
“Really, Regrator, I’m sure there were better choices for you too. But you ended up with me for a reason. Fate brought us together.”
“It’s because no one else will date either of us,” mutters Pantalone under his breath.
Dottore ignores him.
“Regardless of what you have become, it’s something that compels me to grow closer to you, don’t you see?”
His words are gentle, his touch soft against the midnight-dark hair that has become tangled by the onslaught of Snezhnayan gales.
“But I am lifeless. Empty. A living corpse, the recruits say I am. Sickly-pale skin and all.” He laughs, but it's bitterly done.
“Take it as a compliment. Corpses are great.”
“Oh, shut it,” Pantalone retorts, but a smile flickers across his face. “You’re so morbid.”
The Doctor’s fingers dance along the smooth softness of the younger’s cheek, pushing the corners of his lips upwards. “See. You look better when you smile. Don’t always wear that frown on your face.”
“Hard not to scowl, when you come in to bother me every day during my mealtimes.”
“You enjoy it, don’t you?”
Pantalone doesn’t deny the statement, but he’s laughing now. His cheeks always flush in that exact same way when he’s pleased.
Dottore grins.
He hasn’t felt this sort of warmth in quite a while.
The dramatic banker and his thespian manner with which he acts. His sulking, his fits of anger, his emotional tirades. He’s erratic, insufferable, mercurial, and for some reason, Dottore finds it charming.
“My heart has been empty for decades.” sighs Pantalone in acceptance, offering the rose to Dottore, who takes it, running the velvet-textured petals under his fingertips. “Instead I partake in this waltz of insanity with you, and amuse the gods, who watch us with cruel mocking and await for the day they may tear us apart. And why did I choose such a life? We will never know.”
In the fog obscuring rows of gravestones, standing in a clearing of dying flowers, a god and a mortal enjoy rarely found moments of solace in each other’s arms.
“If we must be fools of the Archons’ court, at least we shall do so together.”
With that, Dottore offers the briefest touch of lips to the cheek, like he fears he will be caught loving another.
Pantalone regards his surroundings and laughs.
“Ironic, isn’t it? A nice little chance meeting of lovers…in a burial ground. Most would think of this as more disturbing than romantic.”
“It’s fitting for us, isn’t it?” Dottore shrugs, taking him by the hand once more. “A nice, normal graveyard date like a nice, normal couple.”
Pantalone gives him a disbelieving look. “There are dead bodies here.”
“Come on. This is the perfect place for a date. Especially with you.”
He glances at the man next to him, clutching his hand like he’d sooner die than let go. Smiling softly, bared to the mercy of Celestia, so demure, so gentle it would be difficult to believe he was a ruthless Harbinger at all.
Turning to Dottore, he tilts the mask upwards until he can see red eyes veiled in shadow, twinkling in darkness amidst a web of scars.
There's a twisted beauty found in what most would call hideous.
“How so?”
So Dottore plucks a daisy off the nearest grave, and a hyacinth from the next, until he has an entire stolen bouquet in his hand and the single rose in the other. With a flourish, he presents the collection of flowers to the Regrator, then holds the rose, angling it so the stems brush his wrist.
“After all,” murmurs the older, letting the rose draw a thin red scratch on his hand as he slips an arm around his partner’s waist, “cemeteries are a place of rebirth. And you, by some forsaken miracle, have reawakened my long-dead heart, so…”
He smiles, a genuine one this time, weaving the withering bloom into the Regrator's silken locks.
“Perhaps I, too, could revive yours in return.”
And like the unfolding of petals, of two lives brought back from the dead, hands caressed by the tips of thorns hold each other, they stand alive in a place of death. Joy in a garden of mourning.
The beating of two hearts align as the Regrator relaxes into that familiar touch.
And golden eyes lock with red ones, sealing their promise of love in place.