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"Say, why should I approve this proposal, Eighteen?"
The question hangs in the cold air of the office, familiar, light, and entirely deliberate.
Eighteen grits his teeth. It is the same routine every segment endures. No matter how meticulously detailed the budget, no matter how precise the papers or how indisputable the potential yield, Pantalone always asks. He asks because he enjoys the subtle shift in posture, the microscopic tightening of a jaw, the faint spark of annoyance in eyes that all share the exact same shade of crimson.
Eighteen forces a breath through his nose, letting the heat in his chest cool before he speaks. He keeps his voice flat, stripped of the raw frustration threatening to bleed through.
"Because the cost is negligible," Eighteen says, gesturing toward the papers neatly stacked on the wooden desk. "And the objective is simple. I am testing the degradation rate of elemental conduits under sustained thermal shock. It requires three baseline metallic alloys, a localized vacuum chamber, and standard laboratory maintenance. Nothing that will dent the Northland Bank’s reserves."
Pantalone listens, leaning back against his high-backed chair. His eyes remain closed behind the thin silver frames of his glasses, his lips curved into a faint, maddening smile. He did not look at the numbers. He did not read the carefully penned schematics.
Then, he laughs.
It is a quiet, soft sound, not cruel, but light, almost affectionate.
Eighteen knows what that laugh means. Pantalone isn't amused by the proposal. He is amused by Eighteen. He is watching—or rather, sensing—the way Eighteen’s eyebrows draw together, the way his shoulders lock, the intense, sharp glare aimed directly at Pantalone's serene, smiling face.
Pantalone shakes his head gently, picks up his quill, and dips it into the dark ink. With a swift, practiced motion, he signs his name at the bottom of the parchment and slides it across the polished wood.
"Approved," Pantalone whispers.
Eighteen grabs the document, exhaling a quiet, trembling breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
His setup is a constant source of quiet mockery among the other segments.
"The boy has a crush," the older segments say. They say it casually in the dark hallways of the workshop, laughing over the hum of machinery. They say it when Eighteen lingers a second too long after a briefing, or when his eyes track the soft sweep of Pantalone’s fur-trimmed coat. Even Forty-Five chimed in once, smirking behind his mask.
They all do it. They all look at Pantalone. They all love Regrator—or Feofan, as the original man once knew him—but each segment loves him through a different lens, shaped by whatever age they were carved from. And Pantalone loves Dottore in return.
He loves Thirty-Five the most, perhaps. Thirty-Five was the closest the age Zandik was when Feofan was first brought to his wing. Thirty-Five was the face Pantalone learned first, the mind he matched wits with in those early, dark days in Snezhnaya. But Pantalone, in his grand, generous, terrifying way, claims to love them all. He loves all the segments. He loves the concept of Dottore, and most of all, he reveres the original Zandik.
Eighteen does not deny what he feels. Does not deny that he has a crush. But the knowledge rots inside him all the same.
He feels like an ordinary, foolish youth fixated on an unattainable figure—a student quietly drowning in the shadow of a professor. A boy desperate for an extra second of attention, a fleeting glance, a word that belongs to him alone. But the cruelest part is that Eighteen doesn't need to beg for Pantalone's attention.
Pantalone gives it freely. He bestows his warmth, his smiles, and his soft, lingering touches upon every single segment.
Equally.
And that equality is precisely what pricks the skin at the back of Eighteen’s neck. It is what makes his blood run cold.
It is infuriating. Pantalone looks at them and sees one grand, continuous soul divided into different bodies. But Eighteen knows the truth: they are not the same.
What is the real difference between them? Eighteen carries the same core identity, the same intellect, the same cruel curiosity as the rest. But he was created from a specific moment—a snapshot taken right after Zandik was driven out of the Sumeru Akademiya.
Eighteen’s memories are fresh with the sting of exile. He remembers the burning desert sand, the heavy weight of isolation, the bitter taste of rejection by men who feared his mind. He is a frozen moment in time. When the original Zandik carved Eighteen out of his own past, he sealed him in amber.
Eighteen will never age. His thoughts will never mature past the sharp, volatile brilliance of an eighteen-year-old exiled scholar. His mind will never expand into the cold, calculated maturity of Thirty-Five, nor the settled, quiet authority of Sixty-Five. He is trapped in the raw, aching verge of adulthood forever. A fragment. A memory given flesh, assigned to serve a future he was never allowed to grow into.
He does not hate the original Zandik for this. If anything, Eighteen feels a strange, aching closeness to the old man. Before he was the Doctor, before he was a harbinger, Zandik was just an eighteen-year-old boy wandering the desert alone, banished for daring to look too deeply into the mechanics of life. Eighteen understands that boy better than anyone.
But then Pantalone enters the frame.
In Eighteen’s original memories, there is no Snezhnaya. There is no Northland Bank. There is no quiet banker with silk robes, sharp eyes, and a voice like pouring wine. There is no Feofan.
When Eighteen looks at Pantalone, his feelings do not come from a shared past. They do not come from nostalgia or old debts. His devotion was born right here, right now, entirely in his own chest. It belongs to Eighteen alone.
Thirty-Five remembers the first meeting. Forty-Five remembers the day Feofan became the Ninth Harbinger, standing under the dim chandeliers of the Zapolyarny Palace. Sixty-Five remembers the exact year Feofan’s body stopped aging at forty-five, watching the slow alignment of their immortal, artificial lives.
They all have a history with him. They all have a piece of the story that belongs to them.
Eighteen has nothing.
He has no shared history, no old memories to fall back on, no private jokes forged decades ago. He is a boy who arrived late to a play that has been running for years, handed a script he didn't write, loving a man who sees him only as a ghost of the past.
He holds his signed proposal tightly in his hand, the ink still slightly wet, and turns to leave the office. He knows that when he walks out that door, Pantalone will simply go back to work, waiting for the next segment to walk through, ready to offer them the exact same smile, the exact same warmth, and the exact same empty, divided love.
Every afternoon, Eighteen retreats to the same quiet corner of Dottore’s private wing—the small study tucked away near the back of the library. It is a modest space, lined with towering wooden shelves, stacks of worn journals, and the faint, bitter scent of old paper and drying ink. He sits at the heavy desk with his pens and notebooks, working through equations or translating obscure texts, simply because it is the only thing he knows how to do. It is the rhythm of his existence, the baseline routine of a boy who was once an academic and now remains one forever.
Time, however, has carved out a secondary routine.
Pantalone comes to the study, too. He visits to pass the quiet hours between his financial ledgers, using the space to wander through the wing and speak with whichever segment happens to be present. He will discuss meaningless topics, debate absurd theoretical logistics, or simply ask idle questions, treating them all with that same polite, gentle fascination.
Because Pantalone loves them all. Equally, without reservation, and without exception.
More often than not, it is Eighteen who sits alone at that desk when the heavy wooden doors open. It has become their unspoken routine. Pantalone will sit in the plush armchair near the window, quietly sipping his tea. Sometimes he says nothing at all for nearly an hour, content to let the silence stretch between them until Eighteen finally lowers his pen and asks what he requires.
Then, Pantalone will pose a question—some random query about the current research, a detail about an alloy, or a curiosity regarding a chemical process.
And Eighteen always answers. He answers eagerly, the words tumbling out with a sharp, bright clarity. He hates himself for how quickly he leans into it, but it is the attention he craves so desperately. It is a drop of water in a desert, and he lacks the restraint to refuse it.
Yet beneath that eagerness, a quiet bitterness festers. He does not just want Pantalone’s attention; he wants it entirely for himself.
The most maddening part is that Pantalone is never cold. There is no cruelty in his purple eyes, no hidden contempt, no forced politeness. He looks at Eighteen with genuine warmth and patience. But he does not see Eighteen as a solitary, distinct person. He sees him as a piece of a magnificent, scattered soul—a single note in a grander chord.
It is a gentle, crushing kind of affection.
The other segments often mock Thirty-Five, calling him the most selfish of the group because he claims the early years where Zandik became a Harbinger. But Eighteen knows, in the dark privacy of his own thoughts, that he is the most selfish one of all.
Because Eighteen’s love was not inherited. He did not wake up in an incubation capsule with a pre-programmed fondness born from an old memory. He met Pantalone here, in the present, after his creation. His heart beat for the Regrator using its own pulse; his mind fell for the man using its own fresh, unscripted thoughts. His feelings belong solely to this body, to this eighteen-year-old form that has never touched Sumeru again.
He wants to make that defense. He wants to stand up, knock the papers off the desk, and tell Pantalone that his love is different—that it was born here, raw and untainted by the past.
But he remains silent, because he knows how Pantalone would respond.
Pantalone would not be angry. He would not brush him off with harsh words or mock his youth. He would simply offer that soft, inscrutable smile, reach out to tilt Eighteen’s chin, and remind him that he loves every part of Zandik, no matter the year, no matter the form. He would smooth the distinction away as if it were nothing more than a ripple on the surface of a deep lake. To Pantalone, it wouldn't matter.
Pantalone does not mean to be insensitive. He does not wish to inflict pain. But that passive, unyielding equality is the very thing that tears Eighteen apart from the inside.
He sits at his desk, staring down at the neat lines of ink on the parchment before him, his fingers gripping his pen so tightly the metal bites into his skin. He is trapped in a silent conflict—tangled between the logic of his design, the envy he harbors toward his other selves, and the quiet, aching realization that he will always be loved completely, yet never uniquely.
That same afternoon, the heavy double doors of the study swung open, and Pantalone stepped inside.
He moved with his usual quiet grace, the edge of his dark, fur-lined coat brushing against the doorframe. He carried a small tray with a porcelain teacup, setting it down on the side table near the window before easing into the plush armchair. He did not say a word, nor did he expect one. He simply folded his hands over his lap, leaned his head back, and let his eyes close behind his glasses.
The routine had begun.
Nearly an hour slipped by in near-absolute silence, marked only by the soft scrape of Eighteen’s nib across parchment and the faint, rhythmic rustle of the curtains moving with the draft.
Throughout the entire hour, Eighteen could not focus. He kept his head lowered over his open journal, pretending to be absorbed in a series of chemical calculations, but his eyes kept sliding to the side. He didn't dare lift his chin—that would be too obvious, too revealing—so he watched through the fringe of his pale blue hair. He watched the subtle rise and fall of Pantalone’s chest. He watched the sunlight catch the silver chain of his glasses. He watched the quiet, unattainable stillness of a man who sat barely six feet away, yet felt a thousand miles out of reach.
The tension in Eighteen's chest built until it became unbearable. The numbers on the page blurred into meaningless scratches. He couldn't keep doing this—staring, yearning, pretending that having the banker in the room was enough when his heart was tearing itself apart.
He broke the routine early.
Eighteen set his pen down with a sharp, deliberate clatter against the desk. He cleared his throat, keeping his voice as steady and matter-of-fact as his eighteen-year-old pride would allow.
"Is there something you require regarding the wing's quarterly budget allocation, Regrator? Or did you come to check on the progress of the conduit research?"
Pantalone’s head tilted slightly. He opened his eyes, those narrow, purole irises fixing on Eighteen with a look of warm, lazy interest. A faint smile touched the corner of his lips.
"Neither, truly," Pantalone replied, his voice low and smooth. "Though since you bring it up... how is the thermal degradation threshold holding? Have the metallic alloys sustained the vacuum chamber without fracturing?"
It was the signal. The exchange they both knew by heart.
Eighteen answered immediately. He launched into a crisp, detailed explanation of the test results, explaining the precise stress fractures in the baseline metals and how the heat distribution needed further calibration. He spoke with the quick, sharp intelligence that characterized his young mind, desperate to hold Pantalone's focus for just a few moments longer. He offered every detail, every piece of data, offering up his mind just to hear the soft hum of approval that usually followed.
When he finished, he waited.
But this time, no hum came. Pantalone did not offer a light compliment, nor did he ask a follow-up question to keep the conversation floating in the air. He merely gave a small, quiet nod of understanding, lifted his teacup, and took a slow sip.
Then, he fell silent again.
A sudden, suffocating heaviness settled over the small study. To Pantalone, it was likely just a peaceful afternoon silence, a moment of rest in a busy day. But to Eighteen, the silence felt heavy enough to crush his lungs.
He stared across the desk at the man sitting by the window. His throat felt dry, his fingers twitching against the smooth wood of the table. He wanted—god, he wanted so badly—to hear that voice again. He wanted Pantalone to say his name, to turn that soft, terrifying smile back toward him, to look at him with something that wasn't just general fondness for the collective entity of Dottore.
He wanted to beg for it. He wanted to demand that Pantalone focus on him, the boy sitting right here, present and bleeding, instead of the grand idea of Zandik.
But he couldn't ask. He couldn't open his mouth and let those pathetic, desperate words out into the air. To do so would ruin the thin layer of dignity he had left. It would expose the embarrassing, juvenile truth of what he was: an eighteen-year-old snapshot, drowning in an unrequited affection he was never meant to have.
Because Pantalone didn't love him that way. He loved the Doctor. He loved the genius, the monster, the collective history of a man who had changed the world. He did not love the quiet, lonely segment who had been left behind in the study, wishing for a glance that belonged to him alone.
So as selfish as they always say.
The thought echoed in the silent, suffocating expanse of the study like a curse. Eighteen’s mind was a storm of static, his pulse hammering against his ribs until the sound drowned out the soft tick of the clock in the corner. He wanted to cry. The urge was a physical ache behind his eyes, a hot, prickling pressure that threatened to break through his composure and strip him bare. But beneath the grief, there was anger—sharp, ugly, and suffocating.
Yet he had no right to be angry. He knew that. He shouldn't be mad at the man sitting across from him, sipping his tea, existing so effortlessly in a world built on money and emotional distance. He shouldn't be mad at a man who was only giving what he had always promised to give: a quiet, unconditional, yet horrifyingly divided affection.
Then, Eighteen’s body moved.
It was not a conscious decision. It was an impulse born of raw, absolute desperation, a sudden break in the carefully maintained illusion of the analytical scholar. His limbs acted before his intellect could process the consequence, moving on pure adrenaline and the wild, instinctual need to shatter the wall between them.
Eighteen stood up. The heavy wooden chair scraped against the floor, a sharp, violent sound that cut through the silence.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't offer an explanation. His eyes remained locked on the banker, unwavering and dark, as he rounded the large wooden desk. Pantalone barely had time to lower his teacup, his expression shifting from calm composure to slight, curious surprise, before Eighteen was directly over him.
Eighteen reached out, his fingers locking around Pantalone’s chin and jaw with a grip that was far too firm, far too desperate. He forced the older man’s head back, tilting his face up.
And then, Eighteen bent down and kissed him.
The collision was clumsy, desperate, and entirely devoid of the cold calculation that usually governed a segment’s actions. It was the kiss of an eighteen-year-old—raw, unpracticed, and fueled by an overwhelming tide of unspent emotion. For several long, agonizing seconds, Eighteen simply held him there, pressing his mouth against Pantalone’s, his heart thrashing against his chest like a trapped bird.
Pantalone did not move. He was entirely frozen under the sudden assault, his breath hitching in his throat.
Driven by the frantic heat rushing through his veins, Eighteen tightened his grip, his fingers digging into the line of Pantalone’s jaw to force the older man’s lips to part. When they did, Eighteen deepened the kiss, clumsily, urgently, acting on every suppressed, juvenile impulse he had kept buried beneath pages of equations and research reports. He wanted to consume him. He wanted to leave an indelible mark on the banker’s mouth, to force a reaction, to wring a single drop of genuine, exclusive passion out of the man who gave his heart away in equal, tidy portions.
Pantalone’s eyes snapped wide open behind his silver-rimmed glasses. A small, muffled sound escaped the back of his throat as Eighteen cupped his jaw with unyielding strength, pinning him against the high back of the armchair.
But there was no return.
There was no heat rising to meet his own, no hand reaching up to tangle in Eighteen’s pale blue hair, no soft sigh of surrender. Pantalone lay completely passive beneath him, his lips soft but unresponding, his body a wall of quiet, unyielding stillness. He was not kissing back. He was simply enduring it.
The realization hit Eighteen like a physical blow. The sudden, terrifying absence of reciprocation drained the adrenaline from his blood, leaving behind a cold, hollow void.
A broken sob tore from Eighteen’s throat, wet and pathetic against Pantalone’s mouth. Despair, thick and suffocating, collapsed over him. He shoved Pantalone harder against the plush leather of the high-backed chair, pinning him there with his weight, his entire frame trembling violently as the first hot tear spilled over his lash line and tracked down his cheek.
He pressed his forehead against Pantalone’s shoulder, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps, still trying, still foolishly hoping for a touch, a shift, anything.
"Eighteen," Pantalone’s voice cut through the air. It was not angry, nor was it frightened. It was quiet, firm, and entirely measured. "Zandik, stop."
The words contained no passion, only the gentle, administrative authority of a man handling a situation that had breached acceptable boundaries.
Finally recovering his senses, Pantalone brought his hands up. He refrained from using heavy force, avoiding any violent push that might harm the younger form, but the strength in his arms was absolute. He caught Eighteen by the shoulders and pushed him back, steadily creating distance between them until Eighteen’s knees hit the low circular table situated in front of the armchair.
Eighteen collapsed backward, taken entirely aback, his body giving way until he was forced to sit on the edge of the circular table.
He couldn't fight it. He did nothing. He sat there, his spine curving forward, his head dropping as a harsh, choking sob tore through his lungs. His hands and wrists were caught tightly in Pantalone’s firm grip, held securely in place to prevent him from lunging forward again.
The touch of Pantalone’s hands around his wrists was meant to restrain, but it offered no grounding, no comfort. Instead, it anchored Eighteen directly in the middle of an agonizing storm of emotion. Embarrassment burned hot in his face, mingling with a bitter, roaring anger at himself and the world. Love, thick and nauseating, sat heavy in his throat alongside a profound, helpless frustration. Everything was too loud, too intense, too much for a mind that was permanently trapped in the volatile crucible of youth.
He cried hard, his shoulders shaking, tears dripping off his chin and staining the dark fabric of his trousers.
"Zandik..." Pantalone’s voice was softer now, dropping the sharp edge of command.
The banker released one of Eighteen’s wrists, his long, gloved fingers reaching up to gently brush the damp strands of hair away from the boy’s face. He reached into his coat with his other hand, drawing out a silk handkerchief, and began to carefully, meticulously wipe the hot tears from Eighteen’s cheeks. His touch was agonizingly gentle, tender in the exact way a guardian might care for a distressed child.
The sheer gentleness of it snapped something deep inside Eighteen’s chest.
He flinched back from the handkerchief, his crimson eyes bloodshot and wide as he stared through his blurred vision at the man before him.
"Why can't you love me like the others, Feofan?" Eighteen choked out, the name slipping past his lips like a shattered piece of glass.
Through the haze of his tears, Eighteen saw Pantalone’s dark brows draw together. The tight, controlled composure on the Regrator’s face fractured, softening instantly into an expression of deep concern and worry. He reached his hand back out toward Eighteen’s face, his fingers hovering near his cheek.
"What are you saying, my love?" Pantalone asked softly, his tone dripping with an effortless, habit-born affection.
The term of endearment infuriated Eighteen beyond reason. It was the same word Pantalone used for Thirty-Five. The same word he used when addressing the segments in his letters. It was a word meant for everyone, which meant it meant nothing at all to him.
"Stop calling me that!" Eighteen yelled, his voice cracking, raw with a pain he could no longer contain. He leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles turned white. "I love you, Feofan! I love you so much! And it isn't like the others! It isn't an old memory from twenty years ago! It came from me! From my own mind, my own heart, right now, in this present moment!"
His chest heaved as he stared into Pantalone's purple, quiet eyes, searching desperately for a single sign of realization, a single crack in the banker's resolve.
"I love you with everything I am," Eighteen wept, his voice dropping into a desperate, frantic whisper. "So why... Why can't you love me the way I love you? Why, Feofan? Why?"
Pantalone did not pull away. He sat in his chair, his hands coming to rest gently over Eighteen’s trembling fingers where they clutched the table. He looked at the young segment with a look of profound, devastating sadness—a pity so clear that it felt like a blade turning in Eighteen’s stomach.
"You know why I cannot love you the way you want, Eighteen," Pantalone said softly. His voice was steady, devoid of mockery, carrying only the cold, unyielding weight of truth.
Eighteen let out a broken, agonizing sob, his head dropping until his forehead nearly touched Pantalone’s knees. "It just... it feels so unfair," he choked out, the words muffled against the fabric of Pantalone’s trousers. "It feels so horribly unfair."
Pantalone leaned forward, his arms wrapping around Eighteen’s trembling shoulders, pulling the boy close against his chest. He drew him into a tight, warm embrace, resting his chin lightly against the crown of Eighteen’s head.
"I am truly sorry for hurting your feelings, Eighteen," Pantalone whispered into his hair, his hand smoothing down the back of the boy’s neck. "I am so sorry. But I cannot give you what you are asking for. I cannot give you the love you want."
Eighteen stayed entirely still within the embrace. He knew exactly what Pantalone meant. The truth was stark, inescapable, and carved into the very foundation of his existence.
Pantalone loved Dottore. He loved the complex, monstrous, immortal intelligence of the man who had reshaped his destiny. He loved the grand narrative of Zandik, the adult who possessed the weight of decades, the authority of a Harbinger, and the shared history of their ambition.
Eighteen was none of those things. Eighteen was a snapshot. A frozen slice of an eighteen-year-old boy who had just been thrown out into the desert sand, stripped of his future before it even began. He was too young to offer Pantalone the kind of partnership the banker craved, too inexperienced to stand beside him as an equal.
And the cruelest joke of all was that Eighteen would never get any older. He could never mature. He could never grow into the man Pantalone needed, because his very design forbade it. He was sentenced to remain eighteen forever—forever young, forever volatile, forever lacking the years required to earn a spot in Pantalone’s heart that was uniquely his own.
He was too young to love Feofan, but he could never age to become the man Feofan could love back.
Eighteen closed his eyes, pressing his face into the soft, expensive fabric of Pantalone’s coat. He leaned heavily into the gentle hands holding him, surrendering to an embrace that felt warm, soft, and entirely devastating. Every touch from the banker did not heal the wound; it only crushed him, reminding him of every boundary he could never cross and every year he would never live.
He gripped the back of Pantalone’s coat with weak, trembling fingers, crying quietly into the stillness of the study, completely lost, with no idea what to do with a heart that had been built to feel everything, but allowed to keep nothing.