Chapter Text
At the center of the room, a coffin rests, its bottom encased in ice.
The man in it is beautiful. An inhuman, horrifying type of beautiful.
His lips, layered in frostbite, bleed frozen red to his chin. Glazed amber eyes stare up, forced wide open, amongst a sheet of skin paler than Snezhnayan snow. Obsidian hair has long dried, now covered in a thin whitish-blue frost. Almost piously, his arms are crossed against his wounded chest, his corpse preserved in near-mint condition.
Around him, segments scurry to and fro in a frenzied dance. There are test tubes, flasks, vials of solution in their gloved hands. Their expressions— unlike that of a usual workday— are tight-lipped.
Worried.
Afraid, even.
“Delta, I need the dragon’s-blood sample. Now.”
The harshness in Prime’s voice intimidates the segments like never before.
Obediently, Delta skids to a halt with a bottle in his hands, only to receive a scalpel to the face. He staggers backwards, mouth opening in a grimace, but dares not speak out.
“Idiot! I said blood, not saliva!”
The Doctor, though cruel, is scarcely this bad-tempered— and that is likely attributed to the news of his beloved Ninth dying.
A grubby hand slips into the coffin. Tiny Epsilon pokes the stiff limbs, trying to get a response out of the dead banker, and Prime whirls around. The shard of a broken flask flies across the room, slicing down his arm.
“Touch him again and you will wake up in Haeresys tomorrow morning,” he snarls.
The segment whimpers and scurries off, prying the shard out of his skin as he does so.
Prime scowls.
He hasn’t been this unstable since his Akademiya days. It’s well-known that his obsessions often turn unhealthy, but this is something else entirely. And maybe deep down, he knows Pantalone wouldn’t have wanted this. He would have smiled sadly and held his hand, and then whisper, in that ghost of a voice:
“Please, let me rest.”
But Dottore doesn't care. He refuses to. He’s in a state of denial, constantly telling himself that Pantalone would be happy to live once more. It’s pathetic. But it has to be done, he forces himself to think.
At three on the dot, a knocking sounds from behind the laboratory doors.
It must be Pulcinella again, nagging him to show up to the meeting instead of sending his segments. He stomps over and flings open the door for the petty sake of slamming it shut in his face.
The sweetened smell of Qingxin sedative seeps into the room. Tweezers click against each other, picking up a piece of sliced petal from the bottle and letting it float into the solution.
For once, Dottore’s face is damp, formed from an amalgamation of blood and sweat and tears. It’s unlike him to be emotional. In fact, it’s unlike him to feel anything at all. He’s meant to enjoy being cold and inhumane. He’d have clapped at any of his colleagues’ deaths, but—
Not him.
He glances at the corpse. It stares blankly back.
The segments gathered around the coffin jerk their heads up and hurriedly avert their gazes.
And this cycle repeats, day after day, until weeks turn into months, until the segments are struggling to preserve the corpse’s skin, until the knocking at his door grows louder and louder and Dottore screams at everyone to get out of his lab as he throws another beaker to the floor.
Hundreds of concoctions are made, and hundreds of them fail—
Until one day, in Snezhnaya’s chilly autumn, six months after Dottore watched him thrash against the grip of Death and cry with strained breaths as he let go of his fragile mortal life.
A dropper transfers two tiny beads of the solution into desolate eyes that have been long since tinted gray.
Then he waits.
And waits, and waits, sitting with his head propped up on his elbows as the segments fall silent, all staring at their Prime's favorite Harbinger.
Willing him to talk. Willing him to do anything at all.
“Wake up,” he whispers. “Say something, asshole.”
A glimmer of starlight streaks its way across eyes resembling an empty sky.
His skin remains sickly pale. A bony hand runs itself through dark curls, working out the tangles and brushing off layers of frost. The wounds remain, shriveled and preserved in ice, hindering his movement.
He runs a finger across his eyelids. There’s disbelief in his widened eyes.
When he speaks, his voice is scratchy, ragged with disuse.
“What have you done?”
Stunned, Dottore kneels by the coffin, wiping off crusted bits of ice. A gasp turns to a smile. He tilts his mask upwards, sliding it through locks of hair so he can catch a glimpse of what he’s been missing so sorely all these months.
There’s the reek of decomposition hanging heavy around him. One of his nails has fallen off, crusted with bits of frostbitten flesh.
The Regrator that sits before him is a reanimated corpse, not a person.
It’s him alright. He talks like him and glares like him and the ever-endearing curl of his lip is precisely like him. But he’s still a corpse, just with a soul. Nothing more.
Dottore rushes over, ignoring the segments’ stares.
“I used up your funding to resurrect you.” he says in a rush. “You’re back. Archons, you’re really back. It’s you.”
Pantalone doesn’t reply, instead staring at his robes soaked in icy water and the sewn-up wound on his chest.
His silence instills panic. And with it, worry.
“Are you not pleased?” blurts Dottore.
“I— I…Dottore…why?”
“Why the negative attitude? Come on, you’re alive now. Smile! Don’t give me that look.”
When Pantalone speaks again, his voice is breathier than usual.
“I‘m sorry.”
There’s a short pause as the words sink in.
“Sorry for what?” Dottore gawks at him, smacking a hand down on the side of the coffin. Ice chips spray everywhere, and Pantalone flinches, standing up and stepping out of his tomb.
“But— did you not want to live—”
Pantalone rounds on him, eyes blazing, as if he's prepared to hurl a barrage of insults right at the Doctor's face.
Then he sees Dottore's worried expression and changes his mind. His face softens, as if he’s concerned seeing him so frustrated, because it’s not like him to fret like this. It’s not like him to care for someone so deeply at all.
And to think he dedicated months just to reunite himself with him—
The lump in his throat is hastily swallowed. He can’t bring himself to say it. He can’t bring himself to break to him the bad news.
Instead of exploding on the spot, he calms himself and sighs.
“I'm sorry for ruining the mood,” he says, biting his tongue to shut himself up.
“No, go on. What were you saying?”
“Never mind it.” He silently resolves to tell him later.
Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe he should be direct and tell him to finish the deed earlier so he will not have to suffer through this blurred mess of an expired half-life. But how excited he seems to have him back, how eager to hold him again that it would hurt more to be outright about it.
There’s a shift in the atmosphere. Even the antisocial Doctor knows something’s wrong. The corpse isn't trying to hide anything, but he feels off. Like there’s something he wants to say but can’t.
But he doesn’t want this to feel like an interrogation. Not when he's just found him again.
So his almost nonexistent sense of morality wins over his curiosity.
“Do you want to spend tonight together, then?” he opts to say instead of addressing the uncomfortably large elephant in the room.
And like the perfect partner, the corpse composes himself and smiles, taking his hand. Flawless. Eerily flawless, glitched but somehow functional still, forcing himself to remain cheerful.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere, actually,” admits Dottore. “I was so fixated on bringing you back that I didn't pause to think about what to do afterwards.”
“…Of course.” Reckless as ever, exactly the way he remembers his grumpy Doctor. It never fails to amuse him, how awfully disorganized a meticulous Akademiya-trained scientist can be. “Why must you be like this?”
“It could be worse,” cracks Dottore. “I could be you.”
Then Pantalone gives him that sarcastic side-eye, and Dottore makes a remark about his attitude, and then they're back to old times, squabbling over the most inconsequential things, their worries forgotten for the moment.
“You're so annoying,” grumbles Pantalone, shaking his head in feigned irritation.
“Likewise.”
From behind them, the segments are watching this strange little show. Some of them look excited. After all, it's been a while since they've spent time with their Prime's so-called “worst enemy”.
“You had better find a plan for tonight,” sighs Pantalone, rubbing a piece of skin that’s fallen off his arm. “Archons, I wish you’d be more organized.”
Dottore grins.
He remembers precisely what his Regrator once said, one snowy evening in a horse-drawn carriage. And he’d always regretted that he never found the opportunity to see it executed.
“I'll take care of it, don't worry.”
Pantalone purses his lips. “Don't tell me we're going on a murder spree.”
“Of course not. I'm not a barbarian.”
“Hm.” His eyes sparkle a little brighter as he glances around the room at the segments skipping about and tugging on his arm. “I never know when it comes to you.”
Dottore resists the urge to roll his eyes.
“Find me in the ballroom,” he says. “My segments will ensure you’re well cared for until then.”
Pantalone sighs.
He’s not normally such a pushover, but he also can’t say no because he knows Dottore will annoy him until he relents.
“It's a date.”
The segments love him.
And he jokes and insults and laughs with them all as they cluster around him with hushed, excited tones and help him prepare for his night with Prime.
“Did you wait outside my office every day, young Kappa?” and the little one nods with tears running down his face, bless his heart.
They're so enthusiastic about his return, it would be a crime to steal that away from them.
Poor things.
Poor, horrid, misunderstood things they are.
And that evening, the doors of the Tsaritsa’s ornately decorated ballroom fly open. A figure glides in like a lost spirit, with two segments walking after him.
There’s a stiffness to his movements, like he is still somewhat dead, and powder is caked around the line of his jaw where semi-rotted flesh should be. Every ring on his finger glitters brighter than gold, jewels hanging in priceless dewdrops from his earlobes.
Fabric lighter than air and softer than feathers sweeps across the ground as the clack of his heeled shoes signals his arrival.
He lifts his chin into the softly glowing light of the chandelier and smiles, his signature flamboyance lasting even after his death.
All words that Dottore has been waiting to say fade into the dusty spaces of his mind. He can’t even begin to describe how seeing his undead Regrator makes him feel. It’s not because he looks incandescent, or because his eyes are the only part of him that resemble something alive.
It’s the fact that he's here at all that shocks him.
“You look surprised,” says an amused voice by his ear that cuts clean through his chaos-filled mind and calms his raging sea of thoughts.
He opens his eyes to see Pantalone standing before him, resplendent in a jet-black gown that trails to the ground and exposes the black-and-white symbol of heresy tattooed just below his collarbone.
Dottore swallows. It’s unlike him to be speechless.
“The segments did a good job with you.” he manages at last after a period of silence, and Pantalone lowers his head, letting out a laugh.
“I always dreamed of waltzing the night away in this very ballroom. Just the two of us.”
“You used to complain about my dancing skills.”
He’s strangely excited after months of emptiness, so much that it’s blurring his sense of logic entirely.
The Regrator arches an immaculately tipped brow. “I’m praying that they’ve seen improvement, but given your personality, I’m sure you never found the time to practice.”
“Ever the joker, Regrator dearest.”
Pantalone pulls a face, refusing to acknowledge it and changing the topic instead. He lifts his hand to pick at the cuff links of Dottore’s outfit.
“I’m genuinely surprised you dressed for the occasion. You never bothered to change out of that revolting laboratory coat.”
“Rude,” huffs Dottore. “That coat is a prized treasure.”
Pantalone just laughs.
It's strange, all of this, how they slip back into arguing like an old married couple after months of separation. How it's normalcy for them to exchange barbed words one moment and then grin at each other the next.
It makes Dottore wish even more that he can keep what stands before him, untouchable and icy and yet it's exactly what he's been missing so sorely.
His fingertip twines against the graying temples above Pantalone's forehead.
Old man, he used to tease. So much white hair. You’re going to die soon.
It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.
“Dance with me.” He proffers his hand.
“But—”
“Please.”
Please.
It’s terrible, the hidden fear in his voice, as if he is afraid that Pantalone will leave him once more. Begging him to stay, even just for a moment longer.
In midair, the banker’s hand freezes, then shifts forward to slip under tangled teal curls and touches the back of his neck gently. His eyes soften. The stench of death and clotted blood hangs around him as he moves in, still so compliant to the wishes of the only person he’s ever cared to stay for.
Dottore’s mouth opens and closes in a silent prayer. There’s the slightest bit of shimmering beneath his eyes.
“Don’t look at me that way.” whispers Pantalone, skimming a finger across tearstained eyelids. “Shh. Fine. I’ll dance with you, okay?”
The tap of his shoes is smooth against marble. There’s a new kind of frigidity to the atmosphere, and it isn’t from the blizzard raging in the nearby mountains.
It’s been so long since he’s danced, but he’s sure he can pull it off. Dottore’s dancing ability, meanwhile— it leaves much to be desired, but surely it can’t be that bad, can it?
With an exasperated sigh, he guides Dottore gently into the center of the room. There is no music, no swift and nimble fingers flying across the monochrome keys of the grand piano.
But they hear it, a melody that’s a brew of the whistling wind and the weeping of the skies and the birds’ calls in unbound euphonium, a music that is reserved for them and them only.
And with that, Dottore finds himself swept away in the grip of the only man he'd ever worship.
It's incredibly painful waltzing when one party is well-trained in ballroom etiquette and the other is struggling to stand still.
But he's having fun. He hasn't felt so light in ages.
“You look like him,” he murmurs. “You look so much like him.”
It’s what he’s been living without for half a year, feeling the emptiness of a giant king-sized bed and cold sheets creased over his shoulder, no snoring next to him, no sleeptalking, no…nothing. And morning after morning, he’d visit the coffin and drape himself over it, speaking as if his words could be heard.
I should have saved you. I let you die.
I let you die.
And he’d feel wetness on his cheeks and caress a cold face that he worked tirelessly to bring a smile back to.
And now it’s been done. The corpse looks like him (it is him, after all), but also somewhat not. He’s still beautiful, but dead.
Still not completely alive.
“Focus on the dance,” chides Pantalone, poking him with the tip of his shoe and dragging Dottore forward to the slightly offbeat rhythm of the howling wind. “Your horrid skills aren’t doing you justice, you know.”
“Don’t fuss. We have plenty of time to practice.” dismisses Dottore, waving him off and continuing to trip on his own feet.
“Hm?”
“We can do this again tomorrow night, if you'd like?” Simple, hopeful, veiling desperation. It’s the way his curls shake and he smiles while he holds on just a little tighter. It’s almost unnoticeable.
But Pantalone notices.
A heaviness clangs in his chest at the sinking of his heart.
Try as he might, he can’t escape reality, and as much as he’d like all this to last—
He can’t.
He can’t.
“Right,” he says tightly. “Of course.”
Dottore raises an arm, then swings it backwards, sending himself toppling ungracefully into Pantalone’s chest and squashing him flat.
“You’re doing the nervous tone again.”
Pantalone swallows.
He’s always been a secretive man, but there’s sadly one person in the world who could dissect his every thought and guess, so accurately, all that is concealed behind his polished glasses.
“I'm not.”
A lie, of course. An unconvincing one at that.
But that is all they are. Liars. Good ones, too, and most people would be unaware of the lies they told, but Dottore is not most people.
“What did you really want to tell me back there in the laboratory?” insists Dottore, subconsciously cupping his palm around his lover's cheek. There is no affection in the way he speaks, but it is there, and Pantalone knows it because he knows him.
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Is that so?”
Dottore tilts his head with an alien intensity burning in his gaze and waits for a response. It tears through the Regrator's delicately folded paper heart and eventually, he makes an exasperated noise.
“You'll be angry.”
“No I won't.”
So stubborn, as always.
“I changed my mind. Don't sugarcoat the truth. You’ve been acting off ever since I brought you back.”
Pantalone glowers at him. “You'll not be happy with what I have to say.”
“Better miserable than ignorant, don't you think?”
Then comes another quiet, resigned sigh, barely audible against the birdsong in the backdrop.
How easily he gives in.
He’s too soft-hearted for this. Too relenting to his Doctor’s needs. So relenting, in fact, that he wonders why the older ever chose to want him in the first place.
Archons, why does he let this man walk all over him?
As the faint music stops, he leans down and speaks at the corner of his ear, so close it looks almost like a kiss.
“I came here,” his words seem to flicker in the air, sinking in painstakingly slowly, “to ask you to kill me.”
A foot trods on his pointed toes as Dottore halts and whirls around.
“I beg your pardon.”
“I can’t live.”
The silhouettes in the middle of the ballroom drop each other’s hands. Bright are the lights hanging from the ceiling, blinding them so badly their eyes start to water. And maybe it’s tears they’re drunk on. Or just the high of being loved again. Or the chandelier’s enthralling glow highlighting their faces in gold and white.
“Don’t give me that agonized face…Zandik, please.”
“But–”
“Hush.”
With that, he sweeps out a hand and pulls him in, adjusting the loosened line of his collar. The needle-sharp point of his nails grazes Dottore’s neck, wandering down to his shoulder before his palm touches the frame around a cluttered metallic heart.
Underneath it, he counts, one-two-three, a quickening pulse, an immortal bomb that shattered with his partner’s departure.
Then he gently takes the Doctor’s hand and presses it against his chest.
No rise and fall. No one-two-three.
It’s surprising how jarring silence can be.
So Dottore closes his eyes and slowly, steadily takes a single step forward. His marred face feels the tickle of decay’s sharp smell, and lips brushing his cheek like a butterfly’s alighting.
“Our heartbeats aren’t synced anymore, are they?” whispers Pantalone, lowering his hand, only for it to be snatched back up again by the desperate scientist. His iron grip on the Regrator’s hand turns their knuckles pale, caging them in a moment that traps the flow of time momentarily.
“No,” murmurs Dottore shakily. “I wish they could be.”
When the dance resumes, their positioning is stiff.
Neither of them smile.
And Dottore's face is more desolate, more frustrated, a storm of unimaginable emotions brewing behind his stare.
Pantalone observes the shadows that fall on eyes that used to gleam with excitement whenever he brought up his new inventions or talked about his latest test subjects.
It's horrible, how the selfish immortal himself is more lifeless than the corpse he so cherishes and loves to the point of worship.
He finds himself falling forward, caught up in firm arms that seem to give way under his back. Clumsily, Dottore careens sideways into him and skids past, failing miserably to regain balance.
“Apologies,” he blurts, and it’s unusual to hear someone as pompous as him say sorry— a sign he’s not himself today.
“It’s alright.”
His words are crystal, smoothened over time, but soft, comforting, airy.
They share a discreet, small smile for a fraction of a second, then look away from each other.
Pantalone leans backwards into Dottore’s touch, throwing his head back so curls are shaken out of his eyes and he finds himself staring at the friezes in the ceiling. The sculpted forms of cherubs dance and sway in carved gold. There are twelve people painted onto the ceiling, robed in black furs and drawn down to the last detail in perfection. Tartaglia is the odd one out, painted as an unpleasant-looking gremlin with neon orange hair. It’s been remarked on by several visiting nobles before.
He lets out a small chuckle. He should know. This design was sketched out by his own hand, after all.
He’d always had a strange affinity for messing with his colleagues’ images, be it in ruining portraits or bribing people into creating hideously done statues.
“What are you grinning about?” a voice cuts into his thoughts.
Pantalone laughs, tilting himself upright and feeling a foot kick against his leg. Dottore clearly hasn’t gotten any better at dancing in the time he’s been gone.
“Just my lovely ceiling decorations.” he says, eyes curling into amused crescents. “Tartaglia looks quite the sight up there, doesn’t he?”
Dottore finds a bubble of laughter erupting up his throat. It’s funny, really, because it’s been so long since he last felt this carefree. He’d never found the time to smile. Not after the funeral.
“These things we call beautiful were made when you were alive,” he says quietly. “Do you not miss it? Being alive? Why must you die like this?”
He’s always been one to slip prickly little jibes into his speech.
Pantalone’s smile vanishes.
He falls silent as his hand falls from Dottore’s shoulder.
“Oh Zandik.” he says. “Don’t say that.”
Dottore tenses at the mention of his birth name. His hand goes taut against the banker’s waist.
“What more is there to say?” he says angrily. “Do you know how long I spent bringing you back to life?”
Pantalone stops dancing.
“Funny, isn't it,” his voice sharpens a fraction, “how our conversation just jumps back here the moment you get the chance.”
“I can’t help it, stupid,” huffs Dottore.
“Just forget I spoke and let us have this one night together. We can talk about this later, Zandik. We have time. We still have time.”
And isn't it hilarious how those were Dottore's exact words when the Regrator was wheeled into the operating room six months back, on the verge of death?
We still have time, he convinced himself.
They didn't.
Dottore scowls, his jawline hardening in annoyance.
“Tell me what's happening,” he insists. “Tell me why you want me to— do this.”
“If you knew it hurt me to live, would you force me to?”
Dottore's hand freezes inches from rotted skin.
“Come again,” he says slowly.
He watches in horror and fascination as a small chunk of flesh falls off the edge of his palm.
“I feel far too weak for my liking.”
“Weak?”
“I’m not alive enough to be human. Not dead enough to be a corpse. It hurts,” grouses Pantalone, adjusting his arm. There’s a pop as his dislocated elbow clicks back into place.
Weak.
That's what he dislikes. Imperfect things. So he, too, must demand perfection from himself– unreachable, untouchable perfection.
“I can fix it. I think.”
“You vastly overestimate yourself, Doctor.”
It’s not meant as an insult, but Dottore takes it as one anyway. “I brought you back. There’s nothing I can’t do.”
Stubbornness edges his tone.
“You can’t make me belong to this world,” comes the reply. A skim of fingers brushes across his cheek, gentle, deceitfully so.
Dottore holds those bare hands with its peeling skin and unnatural roughness and glares. “I need to see you alive.”
“You need to kill me,” he implores in return.
You need to abandon me.
And something in Dottore snaps.
His hand clenches into a fist.
“No,” he says wretchedly. “Never.”
And then there's a thump as he jerks Pantalone's hand free and runs from the room.