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There's a boy weeping in the corner of the room. He's familiar, though not overwhelmingly so, and Pantalone cannot place where he thinks he knows him from.
As he watches the scene unfold, it becomes increasingly obvious that despite his cries nothing is wetting the boy’s face. Water, he supposes, is so rare in the desert that not even tears fall there. He is nonetheless wracked by something like sobs, with big full-bodied shakes that threaten to tear him apart.
Eventually, he pulls himself together, and wipes the puffiness away from his ruby red eyes. Pantalone is taken aback for a moment, struck by how piercing those eyes seem to be, but quickly collects himself just as the boy does.
He rises, brushes the dirt from his knees, and walks out of the room. It is easy enough to recognize the look of someone ready to pretend that nothing has happened, that they are perfectly fine.
~
Pantalone blinks, adjusting to a sudden change of scene– he's being tossed about the branches, maybe. He'll have to get some control over this if he is to succeed.
For now, he tries to get a sense of where he is. It's a small town street, by the looks of things, dusty and dry and faded into lifelessness by the strength of the beating sun.
The boy is back, a touch older. His hands are clamped over his mouth, and his legs tremble as he presses himself into a dark corner between two limewashed houses. There is a nasty cut around his eye, clearly not accidental nor self-inflicted.
Pantalone glances around the corner. There is a group of kids in the street, most older, almost teenagers, prowling as they laugh to each other. One of them is holding a dented kitchen knife.
The boy holds his hand even tighter over his face, enough to smother a shaky breath, as they pass by. He does not allow himself to relax until long after they are gone.
After another several eternities, he takes a deep breath and steps out onto the road. His earlier fear is gone, replaced by a single-minded determination, like all that had just been a distraction from something he absolutely has to do.
A red-eyed lizard with no tail scuttles away the second it sees him coming. He regards it with keen interest.
~
The boy is older now, no longer a young child, but he has not yet grown into his adult frame. He seems too tall for his own liking but too proud to hunch himself over, so as a sort of middle ground he's tucked himself quietly along the wall where no one will notice him.
There's a table in the middle of the room filled with laughing people who look quite like him but with perfectly ordinary eyes. They're eating, it must be dinner, and the boy, he realizes, has a bowl of thin soup in his hands.
He looks up. Pantalone's breath catches as he, for a moment, locks eyes with him, but the moment passes and he continues to sweep his gaze around the room.
Pantalone, at once, places where he knows him from. He doesn't know how he didn't suspect it earlier.
It's almost funny to see Dottore so small, before he grew into his narcissistic bravado. Perhaps he's biased, but Pantalone can't help but think that his future persona suits him far better.
~
For a moment, he thinks the boy is younger again, that he has gone backwards, but no, it is merely the way he's curled into himself that gives the impression of childhood. He is crying with real tears, full bodied sobs wracking every inch of his broken body, and flecked with speckles of dirt and blood. He's nowhere in particular, curled up on the rainforest floor, and has only a single hastily packed bag of possessions to his name.
It is quite unlike the earlier incident, because it will take him quite a bit longer to pretend that he doesn't care. Pantalone isn't sure that he's managed it even now.
In many years, he will go on to describe this moment in more pleasant terms to Pantalone. A disagreement, he'd called it. His family and neighbors, he said, had differing ideals, and the space between them grew so large as to push him out completely. He had neglected to mention that the final break was violent, like a market crash, like sodium in water.
This omission, he thinks, is the proof that he still thinks about it. Pantalone is certain he wasn't supposed to see this. He looks on anyway.
~
He's dressed in the green of the Akademiya, now, sitting in a room with a stained glass window that's drenched everything in the colors of the Dendro Archon. He ignores a stack of papers set in front of him, his head tilted to the side. Pantalone is surprised to find he knows him well enough to understand that the gesture means he's lost in thought. It's funny, the things Dottore has in common with the man here, whom he used to be. That boy crying in the woods– well, for the sake of his dignity, Pantalone won't think too hard about that.
At once, Dottore sighs, and scribbles something in his notes. Halfway through a line, he stops his pen, dropping it thoughtlessly on the page.
He looks at his hands, then glances around the room. He is hesitant at first, almost skittish, then hopeful. Whatever emotion he's feeling, he's so taken by it that he rises from his chair.
Somehow, he looks like a believer awaiting the appearance of their god. Pantalone nearly laughs, for that is not an expression he'd thought his heretical friend would ever have made in his life.
He turns, looks right at Pantalone, and smiles.
“I knew I wasn't making myself mad. You are real,” he says with an undisguised sense of wonder.
Pantalone blinks. It goes against all laws of Teyvat that Dottore would be able to see him right now. He supposes it makes enough sense, then, that he can, because Dottore has never been bound by that asinine red tape.
Perhaps– no, certainly– he accounted for this too. Pantalone will play along, then. He has already come this far, and is still headed in the right direction.
Though– he didn't think he noticed him, last time. Pantalone decides it's best not to dredge all that up when he's finally beginning to grow into his arrogance. He does like him ever so much the way he is, which is to say, will be.
“Yes– I have to focus a little, but I can see you,” Dottore says, triumphant.
Pantalone feels he must correct himself. This man is not Dottore, not yet. He is still a student, who is yet to blaspheme against the gods in a way grand enough to invite their notice.
“Could I get your name?” Pantalone asks.
The man who will become the Doctor, who someday will be and has been plucked out of time to become a segment of that Harbinger, leans forward with a serious glint in his bright red eyes. The vision of his future is clearer, for a moment.
“My name,” he says, “is Zandik. Tell me, specter, does that frighten you?”
It's a lovely name. He cannot imagine Dottore having any other.
“Not at all,” Pantalone replies. “You see, I happen to be quite fond of heretics.”
He extends the hand on which he wears the ring bearing that symbol. He trusts that Zandik will know what it means.
“You're a wise man,” he says, eyes sparkling like brilliant rubies as he looks it over as if it's the most wonderful thing in the world. “Might I have the honor of working with you?”
“... Perhaps,” Pantalone says, because somehow he knows he shouldn't say not yet. “I suppose I can't stop you from picking my brain.”
Zandik smiles. Pantalone is nearly taken aback by how innocent he manages to look. It occurs to him that, as he is now, Zandik does not think that he will ever be rejected again.
~
He has not been to the heart of the desert before. The golden sands do not interest him, not when he could be reveling in real gold instead. Zandik, however, is clearly familiar with it. He meets the endless expanse with bored eyes, like those of a mother reading the same storybook to her child for the hundredth time. Then, they sharpen, and turn to him.
It is very hard not to see the segment of this moment that Pantalone is familiar with, forever trapped in the worst moments of his life. Zandik does not know that one day he will grow into a man that would sentence himself to that hellish of an existence– though Pantalone suspects that if he did, he would hardly be surprised. In fact, after thinking it over for a bit, he'd probably agree that Dottore was right and that his eternal suffering would be worth it just to have another observer for his experiments.
“Are you good for anything?” He asks, too tired to be angry. The Doctor is nascent within him, but right now he is a shell of the man he is going to be. “You didn't even try…”
He trails off before he can finish the line.
Maybe he really did think Pantalone was going to save him, like a god might have. Pantalone, however, is no god, and even if he was there is no god in all the world who would smile upon a born heretic.
“Surely you can't expect me to change fate on a whim?”
“But you're here,” Zandik insists, “And I can see you.”
No, Pantalone is not a god. He is only an ordinary man, but this is perhaps even better.
“... While blood still flows through my treacherous lips, I suppose I can give you a few words of advice.”
He's lying, maybe. The thing about him that Dottore never noticed is that they are different people– Dottore has given up his flesh and blood and life for humanity, and Pantalone is selfish. He is only here to retrieve something he wants, after all. He wouldn't really care if, after this, Dottore never made anything of value ever again.
“Nothing helpful, I imagine,” Zandik says, his anger gone again, leaving him lost in his head as always. He's speaking with a kind of preemptive acceptance Pantalone doesn't like.
“No,” Pantalone says, deciding to give a little crumb of that advice after all. “In fact, I am merely going to wonder out loud– you're asking me to be your guide, but don't you think it should be the other way around?”
“Then– this is my past, and you are my future,” he says breathlessly, coming alive like a man, half drowned, being pulled out of a floral-stained river. “Tell me– how did I send you here? Are you climbing the branches of Irminsul? Did I–”
~
Dottore sits in a lab that is much cleaner than the one Pantalone knows. He has, evidently, yet to fill it with the experiments that will come to clutter the shelves and Pantalone's checkbook. There is only one of him, so this still must be the rather distant past. Pantalone, then, has not yet reached his destination.
It does not take him long to notice his arrival. He turns to face him, and though he's a little more reserved, it is still quite easy to read the delight painted across his face.
“Who are you?” he asks. It seems like he thought it up in advance, and that this is a well rehearsed performance.
“A new question this time, I see,” Pantalone replies. “I suppose it's only fair. I've learned so much about you recently, after all.”
“Enough. Do you always enjoy wasting time?”
Pantalone smiles. He almost says something, but then he remembers that this Dottore has not yet abandoned his humanity. He is still flesh and blood, still mortal, and still works feverishly to get as much done as possible before he all too quickly dies.
“Time is money,” he says. “I do not waste either.”
He can see the man thinking. It has always been so obvious when he's working through an idea. He has never learned quite how to disguise the stillness of his jaw and the look in his eye when he's solving some problem or another, and this is doubly the case for this younger version of himself.
After a short moment, he shakes his head and sighs.
“Allow me to ask again– who are you?”
“I am someone you entrusted with a certain task,” Pantalone concedes. “I seem to have gotten lost in my efforts to complete it, but that's to be expected, given that you hardly left me any instructions.”
“Why didn't I just do it myself?”
Pantalone can't help but laugh, because it is so rare for Dottore to be so off base. The man carves through the world with a razor-sharp scalpel, cutting to only the answers he cares about while ignoring everything else. He does not stab blindly into the body that is truth, except for at the present moment.
“Isn't it obvious?” He says. “You died.”
~
“I died,” Dottore says urgently, rising from his notes midsentence and abandoning his pen to leak upon the page the second he realizes Pantalone is there. Pantalone vaguely recalls seeing that page at some point in the future, long after it became yellowed and worn, and wondering why it had such a big ink stain across the center of the paper.
“How did it happen?” Dottore continues. “You must tell me everything.”
“You misunderstand. I did not say you died completely.”
Dottore collects himself, lifts his pen from the inkblotted paper, and tries to hide that he had ever had any sort of reaction to that particular tidbit of prophecy. He doesn't have to try so hard. Pantalone cannot really blame him for wanting to live, and does not judge him now.
“So then, the task is to save my life.”
This Dottore is still young in the grand scheme of things, and has not yet abandoned his hope in humanity. In particular, he still believes that there's a chance that someone, somewhere, in all the seven nations, will like him.
Pantalone only knows this because he has interacted with Dottore's segments so much. To anyone else, the difference between this Dottore and the one who had given up on all that is so minute as to be undetectable.
“To save your soul, I suppose,” he replies. “I don't know about anything else. You're the genius– I'm only doing what you told me.”
Dottore smiles. It seems like it's trying to make it pointed, with a cruel twist, but it still comes across soft.
“What a reliable assistant I have,” he says, a note of fondness managing to leak into his tone.
~
Dottore is hunched over his lab desk. The place is nearly as crowded as Pantalone remembers. It occurs to him that, from Dottore's point of view, there must be years passing in between their little conversations. He wonders if he can feel all that passing, or if everything has melted into a grey void with no time or space for him.
“... Do you think you can do it?” He wonders aloud. “Save me, I mean.”
He swallows. Pantalone suspects that he wants to ask him if he wants to, but for as long as he's known him Dottore has shied away from seeking answers to questions of the heart.
“I seem to get closer every time,” he replies. “So I would say yes, I think I can. Besides, this is a contract, and I don't make it a habit to break those.”
He's lying. There was no contract, not even a promise. He's doing all this for free.
~
“I met you today,” Dottore says. “I'm disappointed– a mere banker? I expected more from you.”
“So you admit you think of me.”
“Of course I do,” Dottore says with a scoff. “You're an unknown factor who refuses to reveal to me how exactly it is you're breaking the laws of time. It's quite aggravating.”
“Oh, this business is really all you. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, yes. You keep insisting on as much.”
It's true. Pantalone is only following instructions. The actual device, untouched since long before he left for Nod Krai and shoved in the mess of Dottore's lab, was the madman’s own invention. He won't deny that he's done very well to come this far, but there's no point in bragging about that to this Dottore.
Dottore is oddly silent. He has his moments of considering his own genius, but Pantalone can tell that this is not one of those.
“You saw me when I was a child, didn't you?” He asks quietly.
Ah. He must have sensed him, then, noticed that something was wrong even in the throes of his own suffering. He wonders if he thought he was a demon, or a guardian angel, and if his opinion has changed in the intervening years.
“I had some idea you were unhappy back then,” Pantalone says, attempting a casual tone, trying to make it sound as if all of that unfortunate business is nothing more than a footnote. Dottore, he assumes, would prefer it that way.
“Then you won't use that against me?”
“Ah, Dottore, don't discredit me so quickly,” he teases. “After all– I am your dearest friend.”
Dottore pauses for a moment. He's turned away, looking at some project or paperwork on his desk, so Pantalone cannot make out his expression.
“... My only friend,” Dottore admits.
Pantalone doesn't really have anything to say to that. This isn't the sort of thing they have ever talked about. They are not like Sandrone, and Columbina, and Arlecchino, with their little tea parties where they do nothing but pass the time with conversations full of hot air. The two of them, rather, tend to stick to business, or at the very least projects that could be business.
So– It's strange to know that the feeling is requited.
“The ring was a gift,” Pantalone says in lieu of nothing. “I am a size eight.”
Dottore pauses, and notes this down in his journal.
“I do suppose I owe you for pulling me out of Irminsul, or whatever it is you're doing.”
“I haven't done it yet.”
“Well, then consider this a threat– don't disappoint me.”
He laughs, unable to hold it in any longer. Dottore frowns, but only because after all this time he still doesn't know anything.
“You will learn that I never do,” he says. There are still quite a few specimens the lab is missing as compared to when he last saw it. He's the one who will and already has set about fixing that.
~
The lab is finally just as Pantalone remembers it. It is nice, to feel as if he is when he belongs. He did not realize that he'd missed the gentle satisfaction of it. The air, though, smells like dust and tree sap, and he's reminded that he's not actually here but inside the vast structure that is Irminsul.
Dottore is fussing about with some things, packing to leave for Nod Krai. The supplies, the exact way they're stacked, and in what crates, look quite familiar.
“So you've come up with the plan, then?”
Dottore pauses, and turns toward him. Pantalone waits for him to speak, but he never does.
“Dottore,” Pantalone hisses, “I'm going to walk though that door in less than five minutes. Please tell me you know what you're going to say to me.”
Dottore moves to speak, then stops himself, then turns to stare at nothing in particular.
“... Funny,” he says. “I haven't the faintest clue.”
Pantalone looks at Dottore. The Doctor reveals nothing– he is telling the truth. He's a little quiet, maybe, perhaps only to process that his death will come a little sooner than he thought.
But he doesn't know what he's going to tell Pantalone, how he's going to save himself. And Pantalone–
He throws open the door. He looks well put together, so much so that Pantalone knows that Dottore would never guess just how much work he sped through to catch him before he left.
“Dottore,” he says. “Leaving so soon?”
“There's an important experiment I wish to conduct,” Dottore says smoothly. It is exactly as Pantalone remembers it.
“It's always your research with you. I swear, you make a terrible conversation partner.”
Again, it is just as it is in Pantalone's memories. According to those, the next line should be the plan, but Dottore isn't saying anything, and at once Pantalone knows what it is he has to do.
“Ask me for a favor,” Pantalone insists.
Dottore glances at Pantalone for only a moment before looking back at him. He sighs, and starts to speak.
“Before I go, might I ask you for a favor?”
“Oh? The second requesting a favor of the ninth? I suppose I'll hear you out.” He smiles, and it doesn't have as much of an edge as he thinks it does. Both of them, he and Pantalone, already know that he is going to say yes.
“Tell me that, if you don't come back, I should use the headset in the southeast corner of the lab.”
Perhaps this plan was born from Irminsul itself. Perhaps this world has not rejected Dottore after all, at least not completely. It's a bit of a romantic option, but the alternative is a paradox.
“This experiment has a few risks,” Dottore says smoothly, hiding two shaking hands behind his back. He has always been afraid to die, if more afraid of being forced to live the life that he created for himself. “If I– don't come back, would you mind activating a certain device of mine? It's the headset in the southeast corner.”
“You expect me to interface with an untested product of yours? You're very bold, Dottore.”
Dottore merely shrugs, knowing with complete certainty that Pantalone has already done as he asked. The favor was completed 400 years before it was spoken, from a certain point of view.
He smiles in return. He doesn't say yes, and he doesn't say no. It occurs to Pantalone that despite him being here now, having been there forever, that Dottore might have liked to hear a straight answer.
“Well,” he says. “I have a meeting to catch. Do try not to go missing– I like easy returns on my investments.”
“The value of my inventions is more than just monetary.”
“Yes, yes,” he says with a wave. “My point being– don't die, okay?”
With that, he turns and leaves the lab. Dottore stares after him. He must be thinking about the nature of the plan, Pantalone figures, and its origin if it has no origin.
“You lied,” he says thoughtfully after a moment.
“What?”
Dottore turns to look him in the eye.
“Earlier, you said we had a contract.”
Ah. So he's thinking about that, then. It catches him by surprise– he'd known Dottore would remember that, but he hardly imagined that it would come up so soon.
“No,” he says. “I did this because–”
~
The sky is dark and has no stars. For a moment, he hears very clearly the waves against the shore, and his brother asking if he's got enough mora for them to eat today, but when he turns around the past isn't there. Rather, it is, perhaps, the future. He has arrived at his destination.
Irminsul is a gnarled thing, white and without flowers, but it pulses every so often with a rush of saplike energy too potent for anyone to think it for dead. Dottore sits beneath it, his back against the trunk, like this is an ordinary wood and he is an ordinary boy stopping for a midday nap before starting on his journey home. He knows immediately that this is his Dottore, that they are at the same point in time, that no longer is Pantalone's past his future. It is a tremendously relieving feeling.
It takes him a while to notice Pantalone approach. He really must have been here for quite some time, and he almost feels guilty, but it's not like he could change what's in the past. Not even Dottore has been able to manage that, and Pantalone has long gathered that he'd really quite desperately like to.
“Well,” Dottore says slowly, his voice gravely from disuse, “are you satisfied?”
He gestures vaguely at himself as if he is a cow out for market, or more accurately a body on a dissection table. He must feel like Pantalone has seen every inch of him, and he has, but Pantalone still somehow feels like he hardly knows him at all.
“Zandik.”
“I– yes?”
“Why didn't you ever tell me that was your name?”
Dottore blinks. He wonders if it had even occurred to him, at any time since they first met, that Zandik is his name. It's quite possible that long before then he'd come to think of it as more so a vague sort of curse.
Pantalone doesn't care. He likes it, and would have liked to hear it sooner.
“I did? Back–”
“Back when you didn't know me, and didn't have any other name,” Pantalone finishes.
Dottore sighs, curling into himself a little. It looks strange on his adult shape.
“It isn't really all that important,” he says softly, like he doesn't think it's true in some grander sense than fits the scope of this conversation.
“And yet, if I had known you a little better, perhaps I might have been able to pull you straight out of Irminsul without needing to get sidetracked with that little escapade.”
Dottore laughs, a short kind of thing, really just an exhale. Pantalone realizes, at once, that he doesn't know what happened to him in Nod Krai– other than the fact, of course, that he did not come back, and that it involved the moon, and that it was stunningly expensive.
He wishes he did. Dottore seems quite different, more sad, and he'd like to know what he should say to help him. No– to save his life, because as he is now, he isn't sure that Dottore wants to leave.
“You call rifling through my entire life a little escapade?”
“In this instance, yes.”
This time, Dottore's laugh is full, and genuine, and shot through with an undeniable tinge of self-hatred.
“You never minded before,” he says.
“I always thought it was my plan. Now that I've learned it's only fate, I can't help but feel annoyed.”
Maybe he's right, but it was also Pantalone, and he is doing this to save him. He does not want to spend the rest of his life lonely in beautiful rooms. Dottore is the only person he knows who makes those rooms worthwhile, even though right now he's being a bit of a pain. He is often, actually, but Pantalone always comes back.
“Zandik,” Pantalone says again just to stress that he knows the name, “did it not occur to you that if I was to pull you out of here, I would have to find you, and that to find you I'd have to know you well enough to find you and all your memories?”
“Given that this plan was a spontaneous creation of the world itself– well, I had little say in the matter.”
He pulls himself up with a sigh. He is still a touch shorter than Pantalone, which comforts himself somewhat. He can't say why. Perhaps he simply likes the fact that despite everything, Dottore has not changed. He quite likes him as he is, after all.
“I almost died, you know. Hiding myself in Irminsul in the moment before my mortal injury was a most novel idea– I don't think I'd have come up with it myself.”
“You had that headset all ready, though. The one that linked me with Irminsul space.”
“Oh, that was for an old experiment. I never meant for you to use it.”
He hasn't looked him in the eye once since he got here. It's embarrassment, perhaps, but–
“Do you really still think that I don't care?” Pantalone asks.
Dottore looks off at the space next to his head, still not really looking at him.
“You did this without the promise of a return. Clearly, you had some reason.”
There is something else behind the words that he's not saying. Pantalone studies him for a moment, and then it snaps into place.
“You didn't think I'd make it this far, did you? You thought, all this time, that I got lost looking for you, and that we both got trapped here forever. You still can't believe I'm actually here.”
“There's a safety release on the device you're using,” he protests weakly. “You would have gotten thrown back to reality after a few hours.”
Pantalone marches up to him and grabs him by the collar. Dottore looks shaken, but leans in to the touch so subtly he probably doesn't notice he's doing it.
“Are we not friends?” He asks.
Dottore– flinches. Pantalone sighs, and sets him down softly.
Ah. So through all that, through his whole history, past the blood and bruises, the curses, the cries– there is something he still hadn't learned about Dottore, not until this very moment. And it is so simple– Dottore does not see him as merely a friend. He probably never has.
“The world has rejected us both,” Pantalone says. “Don't reject me now just because– what, you're afraid you'd like it too much?”
“I would,” he responds immediately. “I do.”
Pantalone holds his hand, the one with the ring of the heretic, up to his face. The weight of that particular piece of jewelry has long grown familiar. He does not really know what he would do without it.
Gently, looking at Dottore, he kisses it.
~
He wakes up in the lab, and rips Dottore's device off of his head. A quick glance at his pocket watch tells him that it has been almost six hours since he put the thing on.
Dottore, it would seem, made it out with him, and now watches him with a razor focus. Pantalone smiles.
“I'll tell you everything about myself,” he promises, breathless. “Everything you saw and more. Just– would you–”
“It's not a trade, Dottore,” Pantalone says. “I just like you.”
Dottore pulls off his mask and tosses it recklessly into his mess of a lab. In one smooth movement, he moves towards him and kisses him with a gentleness that yesterday, seven hours ago, Pantalone wouldn't have thought him capable of.