Work Text:
“I still remember the way you looked at me,” Pantalone murmured as he stepped into the laboratory. Each footfall echoed softly against the sterile floor, deliberate and weighted, like crossing an invisible threshold neither of them had dared to breach in years. The air between them crackled with unspoken memories, heavy with the scent of old chemicals and bitter distance. “Like you hated needing me. But you still let me stay.”
Dottore’s gaze dropped, his eyes narrowing as he focused on the gleaming scalpel balanced between his fingers. His grip tightened, knuckles paling. “It was a mistake,” he muttered, voice clipped, as though spitting the words would carve them into the silence.
“You said it was the first time you felt /safe/,” Pantalone reminded him, his voice softer now, colored by something fragile and aching.
“I lied.” The words came out like poison. Sharp. Fast.
Pantalone flinched — barely, but enough. And Dottore saw it. The slight wince, the way his breath caught just a second too long.
He loathed himself for noticing. For caring.
“I didn’t come here to be cruel,” Pantalone whispered, stepping further in, his expression carved from grief. “But I’m starting to think that’s all you know how to be anymore.”
“What did you expect?” Dottore hissed, his body snapping upright as he finally turned to face him. His eyes blazed not with rage, but with the hollow fire of grief. Of a man who had only ever learned to scream through silence. “You loved the version of me you made up. The man who could be touched without breaking. He never existed.”
“I know,” Pantalone replied, barely audible, his voice almost lost in the hum of distant machinery. “But I saw him. Once.”
They had been younger. Less ruined. Before everything fell apart like rotted scaffolding under the weight of ambition and fear. The room back then had smelled of aged parchment, of melting snow sliding from their coats, of freshly washed hair still damp from a shared bath. Dottore’s bangs clung to his temples in damp, uneven strands, framing the vulnerable planes of his face. His shirt hung open at the collar, exposing the pale stretch of his throat, the rhythmic flutter of a pulse just beneath delicate skin.
Pantalone had reached for him then, cupping his face as if it were made of glass. His thumb brushed across the sharp angle of Dottore’s cheekbone with reverence. “You don’t have to be anything but you right now,” he had whispered, a promise wrapped in a prayer.
Dottore had closed his eyes, like the words seared rather than soothed. “You don’t know what that means.”
“I do.” Pantalone’s voice had trembled. “And I love him anyway.”
Just for a breath, Dottore had leaned into him. And with the voice of a man drowning in everything he’d buried, he had whispered, “Don’t.”
The memory clung to the air between them like smoke.
“I warned you,” Dottore muttered now, his voice rasped raw, like it hadn’t been used in days. “I told you I couldn’t give you what you wanted.”
“No,” Pantalone corrected, stepping closer still, his footsteps soundless but steady. “You told me you didn’t have it to give. That’s not the same.”
Dottore recoiled. A single, sharp step back.
“Stop,” he /whined/, the sound low and desperate, a word torn from the throat of someone who hadn’t used it in years.
Pantalone didn’t stop. He couldn’t.
“I would have followed you anywhere,” he confessed, the words falling heavy between them. “Even into the dark. I did. And you still looked at me like I was just another variable in your goddamn experiments.”
“You /were/,” Dottore snapped, his voice cracking like glass. His eyes were wide, bright with fury and something more dangerous: pain. “You still are.”
Silence bled into the room, cold and breathless.
And then Pantalone laughed. Once. A small, brittle sound that tasted like heartbreak. “I hope that lie keeps you warm at night,” he murmured. “Because I used to.”
It had been one of the rare nights Dottore allowed himself to sleep. Their limbs had been tangled beneath heavy blankets, the warmth between them fighting off the bitter howl of the storm just beyond the walls. Their discarded clothes lay in messy piles on the floor. Pantalone had rested his hand over Dottore’s chest, his fingers spread out over his heart, as though anchoring him to something real.
“You’re always running,” he had whispered into the dark.
Dottore didn’t open his eyes. “Because if I stop—”
“You’ll feel it.”
A breath. A pause.
“Yes.”
And Pantalone, foolish and unwavering, had whispered back: “Then I’ll run along side you.”
Now, the present choked the past into silence.
“You don’t even hate me,” Pantalone murmured, the words catching at the edges of his throat. “That’s the worst part.”
Dottore’s face remained unreadable. Still. Like a statue carved in ice.
“I wish you did. I wish you’d just hate me. It would be easier than this.”
Something cracked in Dottore’s expression — not visibly, but there in the way he breathed, the faint tremor in his fingers. He stepped forward. Slowly, like the weight of the moment threatened to crush him with each inch. His hand lifted, hovered near Pantalone’s jaw, trembling, so close to a touch.
Almost.
But he couldn’t do it.
His fingers fell away.
“I’m not the man you loved,” Dottore whispered, barely more than breath. “And you’re not the man who believed I could change.”
He turned again, back to his workbench, to the comfort of metal and silence and things that didn’t feel.
Pantalone stood still, his silhouette etched in sorrow. Like if he didn’t move, he wouldn’t come apart at the seams.
“You’re right,” he admitted.
His voice was thin, shivering with something deep.
“I was foolish for thinking you could ever change.”
He should have walked away.
Pantalone knew it with every fiber of his being. Every carefully measured breath, every quiet second stretched thin like the taut strings of a violin, told him that the moment to leave had arrived long ago. Dottore expected it too. The sterile, cold room had been arranged to encourage escape—faint clinical lights casting long shadows, the faint sterile scent pressing against the edges of memory and pain. Everything seemed designed for finality, for parting.
But still, Pantalone stayed.
He remained rooted to the spot, watching with a strange, fractured tenderness as Dottore’s hands trembled while reaching for his instruments. The scalpel, the scissors, the delicate tools of destruction and creation—they were extensions of the man who wielded them with careful cruelty. Pantalone saw the slight slump in Dottore’s shoulders, the way they almost, just almost, sagged beneath the invisible weight of years spent hiding from himself. The shallow, quickened breaths whispered his fear, each inhale a fragile thread holding back collapse.
The breaking was coming. It was inevitable.
Dottore still tried to outrun it with brittle silence and jagged deflections. But the cracks were widening, shadows gathering.
“I used to think you were heartless,” Pantalone began, voice low, soft enough that the confession felt like a fragile offering. He didn’t move from where he stood, didn’t want to startle the fragile quiet. “That all of this,” he gestured vaguely toward Dottore’s rigid form, the cold distance in his eyes, the sharp edges of cruelty and isolation, “was just who you were.”
Dottore didn’t look up. His gaze was fixed on the shining surface of the bench, as if searching for something lost beneath the sterile steel.
“And now?” Pantalone’s words hovered, a question coated in tentative hope.
“Now,” he whispered back, his voice so thin it was almost a sigh, “I know you’re terrified.”
The scalpel slipped from Dottore’s fingers, falling with a sudden clatter that shattered the quiet like a gunshot. The metallic sound echoed painfully in the confined space, final and jarring.
He did not reach to pick it up.
“Get out,” Dottore snapped, his voice sharp and cold like broken glass, but the edges trembled beneath the surface, betraying the brittle armor. It didn’t sound like his own voice, not really. It sounded empty, raw, and cracked.
Pantalone took a slow, deliberate step forward. “No.”
Dottore’s fists clenched at his sides, nails digging into pale skin. “I said—”
“You don’t get to keep pushing people away and expect anyone to stay,” Pantalone interrupted, his words fierce despite the exhaustion that coated his bones. His eyes burned with the fierce ache of love and grief tangled together.
“That’s the point!” Dottore spun around so abruptly it startled even himself. His eyes were wild, bloodshot from sleepless nights and hidden tears, desperate beyond all reason. “I don’t want anyone to stay. I’m not stable, Regrator.”
“I never cared if you were stable,” Pantalone confessed quietly, as if stripping himself bare.
“Well, you should have,” Dottore spat, his voice cracking, fragile as broken glass. “Because I ruin everything I touch. You think you were the only one bleeding after I left? You think I wanted search for you in the spaces between my thoughts? In every ruined experiment? Every night I couldn’t sleep without remembering the way you—”
His words broke off, caught in a choke that squeezed the air from the room.
And then the silence shattered.
Not with angry words.
But with a sound Dottore had never allowed himself to release in front of anyone.
A sob.
He staggered back against the table, his body trembling as if it could no longer bear the weight of years locked inside. One shaking hand flew to his mouth, trying desperately to hold back the flood of grief, guilt, and exhaustion, but it escaped anyway. The raw, ragged sound spilled into the room, filling every hollow space with the unbearable truth of his pain.
He slid down the wall until he sat on the cold floor, knees pulled close, hands digging into his arms as if trying to claw out the weakness.
Pantalone stood silent, unsure how to bridge the widening chasm between them. He watched, heart breaking, as the man he loved crumbled.
“I don’t know how to fix it,” Dottore whispered through clenched teeth, voice raw and ragged. “I don’t know how to fix me. I tried to cut you out. I tried to burn it away. I even tried to replace you and it didn’t work. Nothing. Nothing ever worked.”
He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes, as if he could wipe away the tears before they spilled over.
“I’m tired, Pantalone,” he breathed, every syllable soaked in exhaustion and despair. “I’m so fucking tired.”
And in that moment, Dottore looked less like a harbinger and more like a man who had forgotten how to live with a heart beating inside his chest.
Pantalone sank slowly to his knees beside him. His hands reached out, trembling with desperate hope, and cupped the side of Dottore’s face. He braced himself to be shoved away, to be bitten or burned. But Dottore surprised him. He leaned into the touch, his eyelids fluttering closed like it hurt too much to be touched and hurt even more to be left untouched.
“I don’t care if you’re broken,” Pantalone whispered, voice cracked but fierce. “I never did.”
Dottore’s eyes opened, barely, and for the first time in years, he did not look sharp or brilliant or unreadable. He looked lost. Fragile. Human.
“I do,” he whispered back.
Dottore had stopped shaking, though the tremors still whispered beneath his skin like echoes of a storm just passed. He sat hunched against the cold metal of the laboratory bench, the chill seeping into his bones as if trying to freeze the ache that clawed at his chest. His breath came in ragged, uneven pulls, chest rising and falling with fragile uncertainty. His hands rested limply at his sides, fingers splayed and pale, as if drained of every ounce of strength and will.
There was no mask left now. No shield of brilliance or cruelty to hide behind. Just a man hollowed out by the weight of years spent burying everything too heavy to hold, the weight of regrets too sharp to speak aloud until all that remained was silence.
Pantalone pulled his hand back slowly, the warmth retreating like a fading promise. For a brief moment, it seemed as though he might reach out again, his fingers trembling with the raw need to mend what was fraying beyond repair.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he rose from his knees, standing carefully and quietly, as if moving too quickly might shatter them both entirely. Dottore did not look up. Perhaps he already knew the words that would come next.
“I spent years waiting for this,” Pantalone said, voice low and flat, stripped of any hope or bitterness. His words fell like stones into the hollow space between them. “Waiting for you to finally let something through. To prove that all those nights—every whispered promise, every stolen moment—meant something.”
He took a breath, the air shallow and deliberate.
“And now that it’s here,” he continued, voice heavy with resignation, “I realize it doesn’t matter.”
Dottore’s jaw clenched, the tension visible in the twitch of his fingers curling against the cold floor. His eyes remained fixed on some distant point, as though searching for an escape that did not exist.
“You want honesty?” Pantalone asked quietly, but the sharp edge in his tone cut like glass. “Fine. Here it is. I do not pity you. I do not feel sorry for your tears or your regrets or whatever remnants are left of your soul. You chose this. You chose to close yourself off, to become a ghost in your own life.”
He stepped back, the weight of his words sinking between them like stones sinking beneath a still lake.
“You tore me apart, piece by piece, and called it protection. You loved me like a scientist loves a failed experiment—briefly, obsessively, until I stopped being interesting. Because that was all I ever was to you.”
At last, The Doctor looked up, and Pantalone met the storm of pain in his eyes. The kind that lives beneath the surface when everything you trusted has been lost beyond repair, when it is too late to turn back time.
Pantalone’s expression did not falter. He did not flinch from the rawness of that look.
“Look at you,” he said coldly. “Begging with your eyes. You never wanted love. You wanted submission. Something to control. And now that it’s gone, you cry like a child who has broken the only toy he ever cared about.”
“That isn’t true,” Dottore whispered, voice cracking as if the effort to speak the lie was draining the last of his strength.
Yet still, he said it, as if the words themselves might somehow matter.
Pantalone’s gaze hardened. “Yes, it is.”
The silence that stretched between them was absolute now. Final. Empty in a way that swallowed the room whole. The possibility of reconciliation, of healing, had vanished like smoke.
Pantalone turned, footsteps measured and slow on the cold floor. Dottore made no move to stop him. What could he say? Please stay? Please pretend I didn’t destroy everything?
There was nothing left to bargain with. No apology strong enough to undo years spent rotting in the dark.
At the door, Pantalone paused, just once. He did not look back.
But his voice came, quiet and cold.
“I would have died for you.”
A pause, filled only by the faint hum of the lab’s machinery.
“But I will not live like this for you anymore.”
And then he was gone.
The door clicked shut.
Dottore remained where he was, motionless.
No tears fell.
No screams tore the silence.
He simply sat there, in the wreckage of what he had finally tried to feel, and let it die again.