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“Yet now… the experiment has officially drawn to a close.”
His steps were light. Dottore closed the distance between them, with his back facing the Iriminsul.
If it's an interesting ending he wants, Pantalone can't think of anything more fitting.
He exhales, slow, and lets something in his chest settle into place. If was not grief, not yet, just the shape grief will eventually take. Then he bows. One hand drawn back against his ribs, the other extended, palm up, fingers loosely open, an invitation rather than a request. It is, he thinks, the most honest gesture he has offered anyone in decades.
“Dottore, humour me, will you?”
The Doctor goes still. For a moment, Pantalone wonders if he's miscalculated. He hasn't felt the fear of rejection in a long, long time. He wonders if there is, even now, a refusal waiting behind that mask, some final dissection of motive before consent. It would be very like Dottore. Pantalone keeps his hand extended anyway, patient, the way one waits out a wary animal, though he'd never say so aloud. Dottore would find the comparison insulting.
“...My form will not last the entire length of the dance.”
It was said so plainly. Pantalone supposes this is what honesty looks like, on a man who spent his whole existence avoiding it.
“I’m aware.”
“And yet you ask anyway.”
Pantalone sighs. There's an ache somewhere underneath the sound, small and unwilling. “And yet I ask anyway.”
A sound, low, that might have been a laugh if Dottore still had the breath to spare on amusement. “Then, let's create a memory worth savoring, even as it fades into oblivion.”
Pantalone smiles, a suffocating sense of melancholy welling up in his chest. Dottore takes his hand, gently. Gentler than those hands have ever been with anything living. Or dead.
Waltz. Dottore let him take the lead. Perhaps he's recognised that fighting over roles would just be a waste of his already limited time.
There was no music playing in the background. No audience to judge them as they danced. The flames igniting the Iriminsul replaced the crystal lighting from a grand chandelier. The acrid smell of smoke curled between them, overpowering the scent of both antiseptic, coming from Dottore, and Pantalone's cologne.
The burning of the Iriminsul was a magnificent sight. He peers over Dottore's shoulder, and can't hold back a bitter smile.
It was everything he could have ever asked for.
“You've improved.” He says, more to fill the silence than anything.
Dottore laughs. “So I have.”
“Modesty was never your strength.” Pantalone tutts.
“Why begin practicing it now? There's hardly time left to perfect the habit.”
“There's a comfort in that, I suppose. Dying exactly as insufferable as you lived.”
“I'll take that as a compliment.”
Dottore's foot catches half a beat too late on the turn. A small thing. A human thing. Pantalone feels it more than sees it — the faint stutter where there should have been none, a hitch in a body that was never built to tire and is now, finally, allowed to.
Pantalone frowns. He sweeps Dottore down, hand at his back easily supporting the weight.
He stops. Dottore's face comes into his view, grin bright like the sun. The embers dance past his face, framing his features with a soft glow. Pantalone wonders what his current expression looks like.
He would have reached out to take off the mask, had he been a little more selfish. Omega would not like it, the reminder of what was beneath the mask. The greatest gift Pantalone could give him now was the farce that he would die as Zandik.
He's not sad, nor is he happy. Everything must come to an end, and he never expected a happy ending to be given to people like them. It was fitting, in a way. A clumsy waltz while the World Tree, and Dottore, burns.
For a moment neither of them moves to rise. Dottore's weight is light in his arms. Lighter than it should be. The mask tilts up at him, unreadable as ever, and Pantalone almost laughs at the absurdity of it. That even now, draped backward over his arm with his world ending behind him, Dottore gives nothing away.
“Sentimental now, are we," Dottore murmurs, and it isn't quite a question.
"Hardly." Pantalone draws him back up, slow, unhurried. "I simply prefer my endings choreographed.”
“A pity. I rather liked the idea of unsettling you, just once, before the end.”
“You've unsettled me plenty over the years. Allow me this one small mercy of composure.”
…
He can only keep up the banter for so long.
Both of them can sense the end.
“What do you want me to call you? Zandik? Or would you prefer Dottore?”
The dance has slowed without either of them deciding it should. Pantalone can feel the tremor building under his palm now, fine and constant, the last current of whatever keeps a body like this upright, draining out by degrees. He holds on a moment longer than the steps require.
“Suit yourself.”
Dottore extracts himself from Pantalone's desperate grip. Pantalone doesn't reach for him. He wants to- some old, useless instinct rising in his chest. But he understands that to reach now would be its own kind of cruelty. A man should be allowed to end on his own terms, even now. Especially now.
To you- my final act of love will be to stifle every plea. So that you don't feel burdened by my ache. Please, don't spend your last thinking of me.
“Goodbye Feofan. This time, that's what it truly is.”
Dottore takes a step back, bowing theatrically. A palm over his chest, head tilted down, afraid of meeting his gaze even with the mask on.
Perhaps it was for the best that the mask stayed on. The last memory of Zandik should not be such a somber moment.
Pantalone hears the rustle of grass. He keeps his back straight, and turns away slowly. Because some part of him understands that watching would make it real in a way he isn't ready for, and another part understands that it's already real regardless of what he chooses to see.
He's saving himself half the trouble.
The sound of breathing faded quickly.
He stands there a moment, listening to the absence where it used to be, and something in his chest finally gives. Not grief exactly, not the kind that has tears in it, but something quieter and heavier, settling into the shape he'd felt forming since his very arrival in Sumeru. The fire roars on behind him. He thinks, almost fondly, that Dottore would have approved of his indifference. He always did hate being mourned.
“And don't I know it. Goodbye Zandik.” Offhandedly, Pantalone wonders if he will ever utter that name ever again.
Faded into ash and gone with the wind.
He bows towards the Iriminsul.