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Death is approaching.
Dottore is no fool, — and even if he has indeed gone a little blind, afraid he won't make it in time and rushing through what should have taken one more century, — he hasn't forgotten how to count.
This is the last clone.
He informs Pantalone of this when he finishes brewing yet another immortality elixir.
The Regrator lights up a cigarette, despite the fact that the laboratory is filled with easily flammable gases, and rolls his violet eyes.
"Another eighty years, then," Feofan laughs.
Dottore smiles in the shadow of his mask.
Maybe good will be defeated; maybe truth will triumph, and he will ascend, and the divine tyranny will end; maybe the flow of time will stop — or, please, turn back, and there will be no desert, no slender throat beneath his trembling palms, no torch scorching the face, no mother screaming that you are a heretic.
Maybe.
But unlikely.
Dottore knows this just as surely as he knows he will die soon.
"What is the new clone made from? A kidney? The little toe of the right foot?" Pantalone asks, exhaling smoke into the new, still-soft-to-the-touch face.
Each clone is a piece of the real Dottore. The first one.
Zandik’s piece.
"The heart," the heretic answers, and pulls his sleeve down to hide his blackening palm.
The new body is unstable.
There was almost no flesh left, not even a memory, but a sensation. Nostalgia, from which nothing can be grown except rot.
Still, even that is enough to burn the cursed tree.
"Ah. I didn't know you even had one," the Banker coughs. "It's worth me nothing, but I'm sorry."
"What is an apology to you, if you can't hang a price tag on it?" Dottore laughs in turn, and looks at the smoldering cigarette butt between Pantalone's lips.
How long will his new lungs hold out? Will they manage to last until the elixir runs out?
"You don't like empty philosophy. But I'll answer," — another drag, and Pantalone coughs again. "It turns out — priceless."
The Doctor and the Regrator laugh in unison now.
Dottore knows he will die.
It seems to Dottore that Pantalone knows it too.
"Drop that," the Doctor points at the cigarette holder between slender fingers.
"If you would only try it. You would liked it," the Regrator exhales smoke right into the crow mask's beak.
"This body is all I have left, Pheophan, I'll ask you not to poison the already-weak flesh," Dottore bares his teeth and steps back.
Pantalone opens his lilac eyes wide again; how damnably beautiful. The unnatural color is just a side effect of eternal life; a gift from Dottore.
"If you don't want to, you don't have to," Feofan says; calm and quiet, taking a step.
He stoops a little, and they come even in height — their heads find themselves perfectly opposite each other.
"But you'll try it anyway."
The Doctor jerks his head up with a sharp, nervous motion when the Regrator hooks him by the chin. Long fingers, ending in black nails, dig into the new, still-tender skin in crescents, and the Doctor retreats once more, choking between threats and chuckles.
He is the Second. Pantalone… where is he in the order? Does he make the top ten or not?
Everything that happens, happens only because the Doctor allows it to happen.
The Regrator takes another drag, long and almost painful, filling his lungs, and then quickly, awkwardly, not at all gracefully, covers Dottore's lips with his own, exhaling the smoke. So as not to suffocate, he will still, sooner or later, take a breath.
This is not a kiss.
Just a youthful pastime between old friends.
They've been telling themselves this for a third of a century already.
The Doctor breathes. The Doctor coughs and shoves Pantalone away.
"Well then. Minus ten years," the masked man demonstratively wipes his mouth.
"It was worth it," the Regrator smirks. "Until tomorrow, Zandik."
What is tomorrow, when you're dying?
When you know when and how you will die and you still hope you wouldn’t?
"Goodbye, Feofan."