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Fire is always more beautiful when you look at it from a distance.
Feofan remembered this from childhood, long before he became Pantalone, long before the chair in the Northland Bank, long before his heart began to beat in unison with someone else's. Back then, fire was something that warmed the hands: here, in Sumeru, under a sky the color of burnt ochre, fire ate wood that was older than Teyvat itself, and warmed only by reminding him: everything finite one day ends before the eyes of the one who remained standing.
Into the snowy abode, Pantalone crept a blue poisonous flame.
A flame that leaves behind only the ashes of a white suit and a beastly grin of sharp teeth. One that burns alive with a single glance, destroys and leaves no trace. The most merciless, the most arrogantly repulsive of all; you don't want to burn in it, and you can't warm yourself by it.
Irminsul burned without sound. That was how it seemed to Pantalone—though he knew perfectly well that this was untrue, that the whisper and crackling of the flame could be heard from afar, that the branch-channels were screaming somewhere, that the Sumeru sages were screaming, that perhaps Teyvat itself was screaming. But in his own head stood silence, absolute, sterile, like in Zandik's operating room.
Zandik was not here. But in the straight back dressed in a white suit, Pantalone furiously could not unsee, or perhaps did not want to, the one who would never return.
Zandik stood at the root—with spectacles cracked from old age, with hands folded behind his back so calmly as if he were watching not a fire but someone else's boring experiment. Zandik had wrinkled hands, whose coolness Pantalone remembered, touching them even through gloves, and his height among his own segments had betrayed him, because the years had long since taken their due.
Sometimes you so want to say: it seems, dear friend, that I know infinitely much about you. Favorite works, which you less and less often lazily played for me in the last years of your life, the prim schedule, which you did not like to occupy yourself with and neglected, the stern tone hiding beneath itself an immeasurable softness—Zandik had the habit of never speaking, but dedicating his every gesture, his every action to Pantalone. Like an intention to spend their eternity together. Another one. In the end, it is always too little.
Pantalone turns around. Despite the fact that Zandik had long not been with him, his chest twists, and nausea swarms in his stomach at the thought of seeing how his segment, a soulless clone, leaves this world.
---
The night before, in the office it was quiet with that silence which, for Dottore, always foretold a storm rather than peace.
"You forget about food," Pantalone's voice, usually gently caressing the ear, here, unburdened by playing to the public, sharply rose a tone higher and became harsher, "This is already the third day. A bad habit costs more than it seems, Zandik."
Zandik did not turn around immediately. He stood leaning on his cane—Pantalone preferred not to pay attention at all to how harder it became for the man to move without it with each month—and looked into the darkening window with that expression which Pantalone had learned to distinguish among thousands of others: weariness mixed with contempt. Contempt for all living things, including himself. For him, you remained a restless boy. An irrepressible lump of energy.
"Hm. And you came to read me lectures about calorie economy or to remind me that I am getting old?" his voice was dry, as always, with that characteristic hoarseness that had appeared in recent years. "Both options are equally pointless, I want to warn you."
"I came because I promised," Pantalone answered evenly, settling into a dark armchair, a black spot in the middle of the cluttered white office with the smell of antiseptic. He crossed his legs with that relaxed elegance that never left him, even in the worst moments.
"Promises," Zandik repeated, and in that word there was so much venom that the air in the room seemed to become colder. "Funny to hear that from you."
Pantalone raised an eyebrow but did not change his expression. He had long grown used to the old man pricking with words like a scalpel—in the name of his restless interest. And until the last years, Pantalone had been fine with that.
"You are especially generous with compliments today."
"That is called frankness," Zandik cut him off and finally turned around. In the twilight, his face seemed even more exhausted than usual—deep wrinkles, shadows under his eyes, but his gaze remained the same: sharp and merciless even toward himself. "Do you know how old I am, Pantalone?"
"I can count. Tomorrow you will turn eighty-five."
"Eighty-five," Zandik echoed, as if tasting the number. It, however, pleased few people.
"And so what?" Pantalone frowned barely noticeably, irritation hidden behind his smooth young face. He did not like it when the conversation went in this direction—there, where calculation is powerless and numbers do not help.
"And so," Zandik struck his cane against the floor, "That this is stupid. Irrational. You are losing your grip. The only person who knows how to calculate risks better than me, and yet you continue to invest in an asset that tomorrow... or in a month... or in a year will simply..." he turned sharply—through the darkened skin sagging around his eyes, on which branches showed through like a spiderweb, Pantalone was pierced by a gaze that left a through wound in him.
Better if he had never entered this room and never started the conversation. Never opened his mouth and remained in sweet ignorance until the end of his days. Disappeared—the role in the Fatui was definitely a little less important than this quarrel. Why all this? Better if he had not started. He would have hidden in his wretched office and continued reading monotonous papers until they were worn to holes.
Pantalone was silent for several seconds—too long for a man accustomed to answering instantly.
"Allow me to decide for myself where to invest my time. This is the only resource I manage uncontrollably, and I do not recall asking your advice on this matter."
"Advice?" Zandik smirked, briefly, angrily, without a trace of amusement. "This is not advice. I am stating a fact: you have relaxed," Zandik, leaning half his weight on the wooden, hard stick, moved farther from the board, lowering himself into the armchair with a puff. "What will happen to our dear Regrator," Pantalone would lie if he said his heart did not ache more strongly, "when life finally turns its back on him? I gave you everything you need. Do not waste your talent on such..." the old man made an incomprehensible gesture with his hand, collapsing back against the soft back of the armchair. "Mere trifles."
Sometimes it happens that love is nothing other than those very invisible threads which, no matter how you try, do not break completely.
"Be silent," Pantalone said, and in that word, for the first time all evening, there sounded something remotely resembling confusion, immediately hidden again under the mask of indifference. "You are saying this on purpose. You enjoy causing pain when you cannot do anything else about it."
"And you enjoy pretending that pain does not concern you," Zandik parried, arrogantly smirking with his hoarse voice. "You are a cynical businessman, Pantalone. You yourself told me this more than once, with pride, incidentally. So explain to me why a cynical businessman behaves like a child being torn away from his mother?"
Silence fell. Perhaps this is a good enough return to reality, which forces him to act decisively, putting the mask back on.
"Because even businessmen," Pantalone finally said slowly, weighing each word like gold on an apothecary's scales, "sometimes keep assets in their portfolio not for profit. But because parting with them would mean admitting bankruptcy of a completely different kind. And I am not ready to declare it before the deadline that you appoint for me, and not I myself."
Zandik looked at him for a long time, studyingly, with that very gaze with which he looked at specimens under a microscope—a gaze that Pantalone had always both loved and hated at the same time.
"Romantic," he finally drawled with sarcasm, behind which, however, something resembling pain flickered. "I did not expect such sentimentality from you. How... inefficient on your part."
"Consider it my only unprofitable deal," Pantalone answered coldly, stretching a smile across his lips. "Since it is so important to you to evaluate everything in terms of profit and loss."
"Leaving?" when the armchair creaked, in Zandik's voice there sounded something remotely resembling doubt, immediately crushed by himself with a weary sigh.
"Leaving."
He took his gloves from the table, put them on—unhurriedly, with the same cold elegance with which he did everything—and headed for the door without turning around. He should have been more careful. He should have foreseen the failure, because when it concerns Zandik, any of them, perhaps, caution would suit anyone. But even now, in the neatness of his gestures, Pantalone holds himself delicately.
At the very threshold, he nevertheless stopped for a moment, as if he wanted to say something else, but changed his mind. The words that could have fixed everything got stuck somewhere between pride and resentment—and remained there.
"Pantalone," Zandik called after him quietly, almost in a voice not his own.
He did not turn around.
"See you tomorrow," he threw instead of an answer, glancing back to show Zandik a neutral smile, against which the cold of Snezhnaya was no more than a strong wind.
The door closed with a dry click, leaving Zandik alone in the darkening laboratory, among flasks and blueprints, among the silence which—though he would never admit it—suddenly seemed far heavier than usual.
---
The snow that morning fell as if the sky had decided to shame the earth for yesterday's sin—quietly, without wind, without haste, covering the streets of Snezhnaya with an even cold sheet, as if nature itself were preparing for a funeral of which no one yet knew.
Pantalone woke earlier than usual. True, insomnia had tormented him at night, and drowsiness caught up with him only toward morning—he tossed and turned, recalling yesterday's words thrown in the heat of the moment, recalling how Zandik had looked at him for the last time: not angrily, no—wearily, with that special, almost childlike offense that only geniuses accustomed to being misunderstood know how to carry.
Despite his sometimes cruel, stern, and truly irreconcilable character, he, however shameful it was to admit, loved more deeply than he should have. He knew how to cherish valuable personnel and sincerely worried. It was a dangerous occupation next to a mad scientist: but Pantalone knew that if you lock your own heart with a thousand locks in an icy fortress, then Zandik would never try to open each of them.
Their relationship had undergone metamorphoses: a whole multitude over the long years spent side by side in different roles. They never called each other lovers or beloved ones; sometimes it even seemed to Pantalone that he merely exaggerated the doctor's every gesture and took it close to heart, forcing it to beat harder, to spill blood and life through his body. In the end, between two men, especially of such high position, this was a considerable taboo, surpassing numerous tortures of people or deception for large sums. Nevertheless, their days passed as in the best stories: mainly devoted to robbery and capitalist hell, which Pantalone lazily read when the large bed became too empty.
Pantalone remembered his every word and regretted every one. Taking his morning shower, combing his hair, smoothing his turtleneck. He glanced at the small box—a gift bought a week earlier, when there had not yet been a quarrel: for the last twenty years Zandik had only grumbled at any gifts and congratulations, calling them handouts, but had not thrown away a single one of them. He preferred generous funding to unnecessary watches or expensive rings.
"Happy birthday"—and immediately "forgive me." Maybe the other way around. Maybe say nothing at all, just come and embrace him, even if for two men this was excessive sentimentality?
He left the apartments at dawn, while the city was still sleeping under the snow, and the streetlamps had not yet managed to go out. The road to the laboratory was familiar to him down to the last stone—he had walked it too many times to count—but this morning every step seemed longer than usual, as if the earth itself did not want to let him in, as if it were trying to warn him.
The door was locked. Pantalone smirked to himself—his doctor, the great scientist, not allowing himself relaxation even on such an important holiday. A disturbing thought slipped through his head about how his fragile-old Zandik, like him, could not close his eyes, but preferred obsessive rest to work in order to pass the night. Therefore he lowers his glasses and opens the scanner to the iris of his eye, ready, if necessary, to complain and impose his care.
---
"You preserve yourself even now," Pantalone said, and in this there was neither reproach nor surprise—only the weariness of a man who knows too well the one with whom he is speaking.
"And you expected that at the last moment I would suddenly become different?" Dottore smirked again, but this time his smirk came out less confident. "Sorry to disappoint you."
"You did not disappoint," Pantalone answered. "You simply remained yourself. This is precisely what..." he fell silent, searching for a word that he had never allowed himself to utter over all these centuries, "what I tolerated you for so long."
Irminsul groaned somewhere in the depths—a sound like the cracking of splitting ice, only a thousand times louder. Dottore raised his head toward the fire, and for a moment his face became completely calm, almost serene—the face of a man who had searched for an answer all his life and was finally ready to pay for it with the only currency that had not yet been taken from him.
"Do not look like that," he said quietly, suddenly without a trace of irony. "You always take finales too seriously, Feofan."
"And for me," Pantalone said, "it is you."
He did not specify whether he was speaking about Zandik or about Omega.
Dottore looked at him—for a long time, longer than he had ever allowed himself to look at anything living—and in that gaze at last there remained neither mockery nor superiority. Only that one thing which he would probably never be able to voice, while in the last minutes in Pantalone's eyes there was endless devotion to Zandik.
The flame reached him at the moment when he was still looking at Pantalone, and not at the fire.
---
He smelled it before he saw what was happening with his own eyes.
Metallic, heavy, familiar, usually in the atmosphere gently comforted by Zandik: antiseptic; anesthesia; needles and scalpels, everything needed to get through layers of bones, muscles, and fat to the very heart. And then—sound. Wet, methodical, as if someone were disassembling a clock mechanism, only instead of gears there was something softer, more alive, more terrifying.
Six figures bent over a table in the middle of the room. Six identical faces, six pairs of equally indifferent eyes illuminated by a cold and bright lamp. They moved in unison, almost tenderly—this is how one cuts not the body of an enemy, but a find, a rare specimen that can finally be studied without haste, without pity, without the right to refuse.
And on the table, amid this snowy, sterile silence, lay...
The mind—that very mind accustomed to instantly reading numbers, risks, profits, and losses—suddenly stalled, refused to assemble what it saw into a single picture. He saw the face he had tenderly admired yesterday morning, still before the quarrel, still when everything was fine. He saw the hands that yesterday had held a pen, irritably scratching something in a notebook, and today hung limply from the table, as if they had been deliberately arranged that way—neatly, without resistance. He saw the eyes—open, frozen, staring at the ceiling with that very expression of eternal, icy curiosity that had not left Zandik even in death, as if even while dying he continued to observe the world as an experiment.
One of the clones raised his head. Looked at him—without surprise, without guilt, only with slight, almost academic irritation, as if an important work had been interrupted.
"Ah, it's you," said the twenty-fifth in a voice Pantalone knew by heart, a voice that had whispered to him quite recently, quite different words. "Do not interfere. We are busy."
"What are you..." Pantalone stepped forward, and the snow from his boots began to melt on the cold floor, mixing with what had spread out from under the table. "What are you doing?!"
"He was weak," another clone answered—their faces blurred into one, and everything around darkened—raising his gaze with concern to the face that each of those present here knew too well. No one here wished him pain. But Pantalone still... "He died on his own. We are simply... using what is left. Reasonable. As he himself taught us."
The words fell into the silence of the room like drops from the ceiling, and each burned more strongly than the previous one. Pantalone stood, unable to move, unable to look away from the face that was half hidden by blue medical cloth. It looked peaceful, calmer than Pantalone could ever remember, but for the first time Zandik's calm did not extend to himself.
...Pantalone felt bile and saliva rising to his throat, only a moment before, with a cough tearing his chest apart, the contents of his stomach spilled onto the floor of the laboratory.