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How delusional must one be to think they are flying while falling?
That is the question the Regrator asks himself, and finds no answers for.
Instead, he steps off the edge of reality and lets himself fall. His expression is neutral, deliberate, indecipherable. but one person sees through it. One person knows.
(He does not like that.)
But he closes his eyes and pretends he is flying.
Pen poised against paper, elegant in a well-practiced pretense, he prints neatly inked words by hand in a pathetic attempt to distract himself.
He is a harbinger. He does not love.
But he often forgets that before he is a harbinger, before he is a banker, he is first and foremost human.
Human, and therefore prone to foolish things like emotion.
“No, I'm not,” he scoffs to himself aloud at the thought, then feels his gaze dart around the room, as if scanning for anyone who may have heard his madman's ramblings.
His paranoia passes, and he sighs quietly, perhaps in relief or resignation. He can't tell which.
One-two-three come the sharp knocks against his door, ever familiar to him. He raises his head.
“Come in,” he says, stabilizing himself.
He holds in an annoyed grumble as Il Dottore strides in, heels covered in blood, trailing remains of intestines on his lovely expensive carpeted floor.
“Good morning!” says Dottore cheerily, carefully making sure to stain every inch of Pantalone's precious floor.
Unamused, Pantalone folds his arms. “It was a good morning until you walked in.”
“Don't be like that,” insists Dottore, leaning across the table and scattering a pile of documents. “You like having me here, don't you?”
“Clean up your mess.” Pantalone replies, choosing to avoid the question. If Dottore notices, he makes no remark on it.
“And if I don't?”
“Well, then, I'll– I'll…”
How annoying it is that this madman is the only one who can render him at a loss for words.
He exhales. “Fine,” he snaps. “I'll send someone to clean this up later. Now sit down. And sit properly.”
Archons above, he's such a pushover.
Dottore slumps over on the plush seat on the other end of the desk. He is most definitely not sitting properly.
Pantalone eyes him and decides to give up on adjusting that dreadful posture.
“What do you want.” he sighs, trying to sound irritated, but the faintest flicker of a smile graces his face before he tucks it away.
“Funding! Funding for my clones!” Dottore shifts to look at him. Although he's masked, Pantalone can feel the doctor's eyes staring at him hopefully.
“Absolutely not. I do not need more gremlins running around this place.”
“They're cute gremlins, are they not?” protests Dottore, and receives a judgemental stare in return.
“Anything made in your likeness cannot be classified as cute.”
(It is a lie, he knows.)
From behind his glasses, he stares back, ever intently. Picturing red eyes and scarred skin under a mask. He hates him. That’s right, he hates this man and his whimsical, mildly offensive sense of humor and his immature tantrums. He’s not cute in the slightest.
“The portraits above your mantelpiece say otherwise,” offers Dottore, swinging a bloodied scalpel between two fingers.
Pantalone’s lip curves into its ready scowl at the mention of the twenty-one paintings of him with the segments that are hung in his office and chambers.
Hmph.
“Why must you always nitpick me so?” he complains. “Know that I do not like you any more than I favor those gormless colleagues of ours.”
“Of course, Regrator dearest. Whatever you say.”
It’s drawled with a hint of the Doctor’s Sumeru accent. It sounds almost mocking.
Pantalone is surprised he's not offended.
“In any case,” he says haughtily, making sure to wrinkle his nose and raise his chin, “no funding for you. Bother me any more and you might receive a dagger to the face.”
How he wants to stab him. How vexing that dumb grin is.
“Aw. You're no fun.” argues Dottore, slumping farther into his chair so his legs are almost vertical against the plush velvet. Another tangle of blood vessels spills out his coat pocket and onto the carpet.
Pantalone scoots his chair back a little at the smell. “Go spend your day with someone fun, then. I hear Sandrone is looking for a playmate.”
“That hag? Absolutely not.”
The banker offers a quiet laugh as Dottore slides even further down and ends up lying on the floor in a puddle of blood and red-matted plush carpet, dramatically wheedling for money.
With a sigh, he gets out of his seat and pulls Dottore to his feet.
“Oh, shut up,” Pantalone grumbles, yanking on his arm. “Get out and take your victims’ organs with you.”
“Not if you don’t give me that lovely funding first.”
“You—” he starts, looking offended, then sighs, reaching for the stack of papers on his desk. “Fine.”
With the flick of a hand, he’s already scribbling numbers on a cheque in neat cursive. He can practically sense Dottore lighting up as he puts down several more zeroes for good measure on the paper.
With a dramatic flourish, he hands it to him, and almost smiles when Dottore lets out that visibly malicious laugh of his, but stops himself just in time.
“I’m paying you to piss off, so be grateful.”
“Oh, I am. Thank you, dearest Ninth. Where would I be without you?”
Pantalone really can’t tell whether he’s mocking him or not.
“I’ll be taking my leave now,” says a voice by his ear, and he raises his head to find Dottore grinning with the paper in hand, strolling off his now-ruined carpet with an unusual cheerfulness in his step.
“Already?”
(He withholds the urge to ask Dottore to stay, perhaps a moment longer, and entertain him.)
“Yes, thank you so very much for the funding.”
“You’re terrible,” the Ninth mutters. “I won’t miss you.”
Dottore pauses at the arch of the door.
“Lies,” he says simply. A click resounds throughout the quiet room.
Pantalone eyes the stains on the floor and the remains of someone’s intestines crumbling on his paperwork, then sighs deeply.
He’s never been good with emotions, but surely this is a first. The self-absorbed, petty, logical Regrator in love?
No. Of course not. Ridiculous. How undignified.
With a sigh, he scans the paintings hung around his office. His eyes narrow at the artist’s depiction of him, staring up at the Second. Serene at first glance, but the gleam in his eyes is hopeful, almost admiring.
“Merely colleagues, mm?” he says to himself, turning to find a giant portrait of him at the center with segments crowding round him, and Prime leaning lazily with his elbow on Pantalone’s shoulder and that damned unkempt look of his. It’s like some sort of demented family photo.
Then he reaches out a hand and slaps himself hard on the arm.
“Shut up. Shut up.”
He is not falling for anyone.
He will never do so.
“I’m loveless,” he hisses to himself. “I will always be loveless.”
Where he once was thrilled at the prospect of it, he now feels a chill run down his spine. To spend the rest of his life in solitude. But why, really, does he mind? Why is he so worried about having only himself when he has been alone all his life?
Why does he dream of things his mind is forbidden from wandering to in the middle of the night? A hand tangled in his hair, marks down his neck, the tracing of a sharpened nail down the jut of his spine?
Stupid. That’s what he is.
Stupid.
With a sigh, he holds the blood-tainted documents at arms-length, feeling the vast emptiness of his office close in around him.
“It’s just a delusion,” he reminds himself, curving his lips into a well-practiced smile. “Nothing more.”
Just a delusion that belongs to him, and him only.