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The pain is agonizing, which makes him realize that he is still alive. Through waves of burning misery, he manages to throw open his eyelids– the rest of his body is still in too rough a shape to move. He nearly shuts them again, and does scream, he thinks, at a sharp pain in his abdomen.
Reflectively, he looks down. Some stranger has his stomach sliced open, and is fussing about with his organs. Or– closing him up, maybe? He's doing stitches. Feofan got hit pretty bad there, he thinks, but he doesn't exactly suspect that this underground doctor who bought him off the street cares about his well being.
“It's hard to get useful data when the subject comes damaged,” he mutters disdainfully under his breath. Ah, so that's the sort of person he's dealing with. What he'd expected, more or less.
The man, whose face is invisible behind a birdlike mask, sets aside his thread and needle, then reaches up and fiddles with the dial on some bag of something connected to his arm. Feofan watches as whatever it is slides down the clear tubing and into his bloodstream.
“Are you going to kill me?” He asks.
The man laughs.
“That would be a waste. I bet there's a lot I can learn from you.”
He reaches over, and grabs a syringe filled with a bright blue liquid.
~
“Why do you wear that ring like you're married?” Dottore asks flippantly. It is not hard to guess that he's jealous, and Pantalone bites back a laugh.
“Call it a certain someone's dying wish,” he says.
“Not yours, I hope. I've put in so much effort to keep you alive.”
“Have I ever thanked you for that? Thanks, by the way.”
“Do I detect a hint of sarcasm in your tone?”
Pantalone merely laughs. Dottore goes to scoff, but catches himself, and remembering his purpose grabs his hand. He holds it with the offending ring visible, and as if it is some kind of undesirable lab specimen.
“Seriously,” he says. “Why do you wear it like that?”
He wonders if Dottore at thirty-five ever dreamed of marrying him. He certainly dreamed of growing young together, not knowing that only one of them would manage it.
“... You're the one who told me I should wear it like this,” he admits. “You don't remember. Zandik did it after he was you.”
Dottore looks at his hand. Slowly, he sinks down to one knee, still hanging on, looking up at Pantalone like he's a God in need of worship.
“Let me ask you properly this time,” he says.
~
Feofan winces as whatever drug the man is testing, something bright blue like poison, gets injected into his veins.
“Thank you for not resisting,” the man says. It doesn't sound like he's trying to make a joke. “Most people have made an attempt to run by this point.”
“You just cut me open,” he replies idly. “I can hardly get far like this.”
“You had internal bleeding, which I fixed. You're welcome.”
Feofan laughs. It pulls at his stitches. He feels a little funny.
~
“Snezhnaya doesn't get real summers,” Dottore complains.
It's more than warm enough for Pantalone. He likes the snow, the cold, the way the sun sets before dinner half the year.
Dottore is a different sort of creature. The rainforest is in his blood, and he never quite adjusted to northern weather. Or maybe he did, later, in his old age.
“In Sumeru–”
“Oh, don't bring that old place up. It has nothing to do with anything.”
At thirty-five, he is still too proud to talk about how he wants to go home. This was to Zandik’s detriment, he thinks, because he never got to go home before he died. For a segment, though, there is still time. He wonders if he'll make it.
~
“How are you feeling?” He asks the air.
It's uncomfortable air, thick and humid, just like how he'd been told Sumeru would be. He tolerates it for his sake.
“... Wonderful,” says Dottore’s ghost, trapped in Irminsul and newly whole. “I missed you.”
~
He wakes in a private room, his injuries bandaged and seemingly clean. Feofan looks at them with suspicion– whatever back alley doctor bought him does not care about his well being, surely.
That doctor, the same as the one from last night, quickly appears. Now that he's a little more lucid, it's not hard for him to deduce who this must be.
“You're Dottore, aren't you?”
He stills for a moment. He is very hard to read, if only because of that mask he's got plastered above half of his face.
“Do you not remember yesterday?” he asks, his voice perhaps a touch stilted, though he might be imagining things.
“I remember you injecting me with something, and not much after that.”
Dottore seems to ponder this for a moment. Despite himself, Feofan can't help but notice that he looks almost delicate in the light diffused by the frost glazing the window. Perhaps that's an odd thing to think of such a man, but it's true.
“I was told you were a businessman,” he says.
He tries not to wince. The wound is still fresh– quite literally. The bandages around his middle hide the incision but not the pain.
“I was.”
“What's your name?”
This is a strange question indeed. Surely, a subject number is enough to label him in his eyes. Why would Il Dottore ever need his name?
“Feofan,” he admits after a moment, perhaps only because he’s curious about where this is going. “Feofan Sergeyevich Veksel.”
Dottore pauses for a moment, and then another, until the silence stretches into something strange. He cannot begin to guess what he is thinking about.
“You need a job, don't you?”
Feofan blinks. Surely, the dread Dottore who bought him on the black market is not about to– what, let him go?
“The Fatui need a bank clerk,” he says. “Can you do it?”
He– wants to see what happens here, he thinks. It just might turn into something good.
“Yes,” he says.
~
“Dottore,” Pantalone grumbles, throwing open the lab door, “how many times do I have to tell you–”
He thinks he has gone back in time for a moment, or else that Zandik has invented some way to bring a memory to life. A face that has grown unfamiliar, covered by a birdlike mask, looks up at him.
Pantalone recognizes him. Of course he does. He'd approved the funding for the segment project, of course, had read all the documents and knows how they work, but he finds himself quite unprepared for meeting one for the first time.
“Do you know who I am?” The segment says, idly getting up from the desk where he's finishing the very paperwork Pantalone had come to collect.
“Of course,” he answers. He knows very well what Dottore looked like in his thirties. It is not something he could possibly forget. “And do you know me?”
“You're Feofan,” he says. “You look older.”
Dottore hasn't called him that in a long time. He finds he quite likes it.
“It's Pantalone now, actually.”
“Pantalone,” he says, almost sparkling. “You became a Harbinger? The future is truly wonderful.”
Not, Pantalone thinks, half drowned in nostalgia, as wonderful as the past.
~
Dottore has delicate fingers. It's not that he can see them now, hidden as they are behind his gloves, but the way they move across the piano is like a ballerina dancing across the stage. It betrays an innocence about him that Dottore at this age believes himself to have lost.
“Aren't you going to berate me?”
It would be reasonable. Those segments had taken a pretty penny to create. More than that, Pantalone had liked them. Every version of Dottore he'd considered a dear friend, and now they are all dead save the one before him.
He'd walked in on it. It was a nasty scene. It was the second time Zandik died, too.
“Is that what you want?” Pantalone says, taking his seat at the table across the room. “You've always hated that you are Zandik, after all.”
“When did you get so bold?” Dottore complains, his fingers following muscle memory learned centuries ago by someone else.
He likes Dottore, even now, even when he is selfish and forever thirty-five. Everything he admires about the man is there inside of him, even if he cannot see it, and that's probably why he's inclined to let all this slide.
“I've been bold since the day you met me, Doctor.”
He doesn't say anything. The tearoom is fine, with just the two of them, but the lab must feel completely barren. He can hardly imagine the place without the segments all pursuing their different goals at one. It hasn't been so lonely in close to four hundred years.
“I'm a little nostalgic, actually,” Pantalone admits.
“Are you really?”
“Don't you remember? It used to be just the two of us, like this.”
Dottore stills, running his tongue over his teeth like he's trying to chase the words he's looking for. The sound of the piano trails off in the air.
“Of course I remember,” he says. “I'm the Zandik who first met you. It's been like that for me, forever, even when…”
When it wasn't, he figures. He wonders what Dottore thought of him when he watched him, who ought to be his alone, with all his past and future selves. He imagines it wasn't pretty. He killed them, after all.
“That song,” Pantalone says. “Play it again, will you?”
~
Zandik watches him as he files paperwork. He'd told him he had work to do, that he ought to go, but the bullheaded man had been determined to stay in his office. He's not being distracting, so whatever, Pantalone will allow it.
Zandik reaches out and takes his right hand. Perhaps Pantalone expected too much of him– Zandik is, after all, a selfish man.
He's got a ring on his middle finger. It's nothing too special, just a piece of silver set with purple stones. He'd had it commissioned oh, ages ago.
Zandik takes it off, then slides it back on his ring finger. Pantalone looks over at him. He does not make eye contact.
“Tomorrow is my birthday,” he says. “Won't you stop by in the morning?”
Pantalone looks down at it, sitting on the finger where wedding rings go.
“Sure,” he says, perhaps a little more breathless than he'd intended. “You're turning eighty-five, right?”
~
It's sunny today. The light falls through the window in heaping streams as Dottore plays the piano. Pantalone has heard every song he knows before, but sits to watch him anyway.
“It’s a beautiful day,” he notes. “The view from here is lovely.”
“Don't tease me, Pantalone,” Dottore replies, smooth and soft and not skipping a beat.
~
“Did I ever tell you that I was the one who killed Zandik?”
“I was under the impression that you all stood by and watched him die.”
“Well, yes, but I…”
He reaches out with one hand in the vague direction of his neck, and makes a squeezing motion. It is practiced and familiar.
“I helped him along,” he finishes.
This Dottore is funny. Pantalone likes him more than many of the other hims, though he'd never admit it. Perhaps it's just a twisted sense of nostalgia, or perhaps it is a faded echo of young love before it matured into something familiar.
“Why'd you do it?” Pantalone asks.
“He had to die so that I could make you live,” he says.
~
In the heat of the night, the space of four hundred years seems to collapse into one moment, and then nothing. The face of the man who fell for him, crystallized forever at that sublime instant, slides away.
“And don't I know it,” he says softly. “Goodbye, Zandik.”
He turns away. He does not know how to live his life without him. It occurs to him that it has been several hundred years since nobody loved him, and now it will be– forever, if he lives that long.
He won't.
~
He fiddles with a couple monitors and jots down some notes. The sterile laboratory lighting reflects sharply off his mask. His–
“You're Dottore,” Feofan says, his speech slurring a little. What drug could he have possibly been testing? “The Second Harbinger.”
“Ah, you recognize me?”
He's really getting tired now. Did the Doctor push him painkillers alongside that blue substance? Those have always lulled him into sleep.
But– he can't fall asleep, not yet, not when he is in the company of the most remarkable man in all the world.
“Of course,” he says, slowly now, unable to fight the urge to pass out any longer. “I've always– admired you.”
“... Admired me?”
The pain abates somewhat.
“Yes,” he says slowly. “I think your dreams are wonderful.”