Chapter Text
52 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes, and 11 seconds. This is the time that has passed since Dottore, for the third and final time, has died.
Pantalone hasn’t been counting, no—in fact he didn’t need to. At first he thought as though time would sink into itself; becoming an indistinguishable mass of hours that felt like eternities, and mornings that blurred from dusks to dawns and back to dusk again.
To that end, it should also be noted that in Snezhnaya, oftentimes the hour of day was impossible to tell from the sky, because snow blanketed it so heavily it blotted out the sun. In addition to the already bleak reality wherein Snezhnaya got little sunshine to begin with, due to its northern position, this was commonplace to the Fatui stationed there.
So in regard to time becoming one meaningless block, this was not the case. Instead, Pantalone had become increasingly, torturously aware of the ticking of the clock. It consumed his waking hours—and lest it be forgotten—he rarely slept.
His subordinates have noticed that as of late, Pantalone has adopted the peculiar habit of opening his eyes only to stare at nothing. No one has had the guts to ask him about it, and none were particularly keen on doing so either. It was apparent to all who spent even a moment in his company that he was declining, and rather rapidly.
In truth, Pantalone believes he has lost his mind, which in light of recent events could not entirely be dismissed as impossible.
He wakes in frantic bouts of delirium, in which the makings of a voice can just barely be heard; he sees figures that should not (and most certainly cannot) exist; and, if all that was not bad enough, sometimes even his sense of touch has become unreliable in its determining of what is real and what is not.
If it was not for the fact that the elixir of immortality was meant to cease alterations to the brain, Pantalone would be thoroughly and entirely convinced of his sudden madness.
And yet. Could it merely be that grief prevails even over the last miracle that doctor had managed to concoct? Is grief so powerful a thing, that it destroys the certainty of the last thing Zandik had left him?
The thought alone was altogether unpleasant, and Pantalone pressed his lips to a thin line as he kept his knuckles against his forehead in a meager attempt to quell his headache.
He could recall the first time it happened with the same horrible clarity as one could remember an event that formed an irrational yet all pervasive fear—it was impossible to remove the recollection from his memory, and with time it would only increase the unease brought on by similar incidents.
The desperation with which he had, at first, clung to the remnants left after the burning of Irminsul should have startled him more than the onset of hallucinations had. But they did not, as there was always comfort in the assurance of the past, and—consequently—only a yawning chasm in the future.
As such, the first time, Pantalone was stricken by not only an immense, suffocating pressure, but (and he would argue against this) an inkling of hope. If the gods were worth half so much as they tried to be, Pantalone would swear on each of their lives that for a brief moment, Dottore’s voice was indeed present. His form, even, was tangible.
It could have been anywhere from 9 in the evening to 2 in the morning, Pantalone had been sleeping—however fitfully—on his desk, which had become the standard for his brief lapses of slumber. When he awoke, his head had been hurting, not unlike currently.
It would have been easy to dismiss those hallucinations as a feeble conjuring of his subconscious, but Pantalone had never experienced anything like it before. He had heard, clearly, that same voice; imperceptible warmth—it was smooth, bereft of that jagged tone that had consumed Dottore by the end.
Pantalone had loved that voice. If his grief had deigned that his fate was one of delusions and false hopes, he would take the blade that hung over his head, and end his life himself. If for nothing else but to put a stop to the borrowed time Zandik had given him.
That same instance, the first hallucination, he had blearily opened his eyes, but could see scarcely a thing. Only enough to make out a form, and it was terrible in its familiarity. The coat, the gold linings, the egregious shade of teal—
Pantalone, in his delirium at the time, had tried to speak but his throat was raw from smoke. He had feebly slid a hand across the cold surface of his desk, grasping perhaps, at that spectre. His fingers had nearly gripped it; nearly, but not enough, no. It would never be enough again.
From that point, approximately 48 days had passed. Pantalone slept less, but the mirage of his only friend haunted him ever more frequently.
The agony was inexorable.
Zandik was written in everything, his presence was ingrained within Pantalone’s existence. There was no fathomable way to escape him. Not within Regrator, Pantalone, the Ninth—even Feofan, there was no shelter, no mask that Pantalone could don that Dottore had not invaded. He was scrawled within every report, he had etched himself in the halls, in the silence and in the noise, Pantalone saw him when his eyes were closed, he heard him when he tried to avoid the sound of the piano crescendoing in some faraway room, when Pantalone drank he thought of how his organs were scarcely his own, when he wore his glasses he could not forget that his remaining sight was a result of Dottore, every thing he wore, was a reminder that his skin was altered by those same hands.
He lived only in the festering absence of Zandik. Everything, everyone, all that Pantalone was, is, and would yet to be, is unutterably, wholly, and inexhaustibly Zandik’s. He had given Pantalone this— and then as that glorious fire raged, he had left Pantalone to marvel, groveling in pain at the thought, of how hollow a life could be when stripped of the things that shaped it.
Pantalone made a grieved noise, burying his face in his hands, pushing his glasses askew as he hunched his shoulders.
What a horrible thing it was, to live waiting only for death.