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Silence.
It is a thing he is well acquainted with. A thing he demands, in fact; for a man like him whose line of work hinges entirely on meticulousness and care, complete concentration is necessary, and this is not achievable unless there is nothing at all to pull aside his focus in his surrounding environment.
So Pantalone usually likes silence.
This silence is different.
It is overly still, so much that it is unnerving. The absence of sound is so stark that he may as well be in a vacuum.
There is no quiet sound of rainfall by the window, and no languid breathing from across him. There is no anything, at all, and this unnerves him more than any commotion ever could.
(He can almost swear that if he presses a hand to his chest, there will be no heartbeat.)
Beside the window, the landscape merges and blurs into a writhing mass of blue and white as the train hurtles northwards through the tundra. His own face appears in the glass, and he nearly does not recognize it at first: his eyes have faded to gray, and his face is of a similar shade. He knows what Dottore would call it: malnutrition, lack of sleep, take medical leave immediately.
Pantalone grimaces, hearing the familiar voice echo in the recesses of his mind; he must admit that none of those descriptors are wrong. He has not looked so weak since he was a mortal.
As the sound of his partner’s voice dies down in his head, he thinks he catches a glimpse of a second shadow in the reflection, turned towards him with that ever-present smile on its face.
It looks sly. Amused.
Intimate.
Pantalone blinks and forces himself to tear his gaze away before he falls prey to the tricks his insomnia-addled mind is trying to play on him.
When was the last time he slept? He doesn’t remember— can’t, not anymore, for the entire past week has been such a blur to him that he’s barely aware of anything that’s been going on around him.
Tsk. How frustrating. He’s normally a lot more logical than this.
Pantalone presses a hand to his forehead, massaging the temples, and tries to ground himself by anchoring himself back into the present.
He is on a train.
He has been on this train for more than half a day.
He is alone in this carriage.
He is getting off at dawn tomorrow.
The skies are dark, and it is a quarter to ten.
He has not had dinner yet.
Nor lunch, nor breakfast too, he realizes: he simply cannot find it in himself to dine, in spite of the vast array of options he has been offered. He puts a hand to his stomach and finds that it does not growl.
(Then again, he has not felt anything since his departure from Sumeru.)
The emptiness in him is unsettling, for he is a man whose emotional state fluctuates greatly on a regular day. He is easily angered and just as easily calmed— all in all, he is always feeling something— so emptiness like this comes incredibly rarely to him.
He recognizes this emptiness, much to his surprise: it is reminiscent of that feeling, of walking into that first funeral all those years ago, when his age was still in the double digits, and standing vigil before that bolted-shut coffin until dawn broke and roused him from his trance.
Now he is older, and wiser, and centuries more experienced, but the feeling has not changed.
(What had he been expecting, anyway? How else do you cope with knowing that the very last fragment of the man who sustained you for centuries is gone?)
—For once in the longest, longest time, he finds himself at a loss for words.
He refolds his hands across his lap for the hundredth time this hour and tries to sit a little straighter, to look a little more dignified. No doubt there will be mountains of work awaiting at home, once he returns; the stunt they pulled in Sumeru is sure to have dealt a large blow to Snezhnaya’s reputation amongst the nations.
And no doubt he will face consequences, too, for how heavily he was implicated in his partner’s scheme. How inconvenient. This will be the last few hours of peace he can get before he disembarks at Snezhnograd. He ought to lie back, relax. Get some sleep.
Do something, anything, to get over himself.
He sighs at the thought. Were it not for the smoking ban in the train car, he surmises he would have been reaching for his eleventh cigarette by now.
Of course, he could have asked for a drink to tide him over, or perhaps make him tipsy enough such that this empty sensation becomes temporarily numbed, but something tells him anything he intakes, solid or liquid, will be retched up in no time.
So he sits and stares at the seat opposite him, eyes bloodshot and sleepless. He toys restlessly with the rings on his fingers, and fidgets as the train roars on to Snezhnaya, and stares so intensely he might as well be blazing a hole in the timeworn leather.
As if looking hard enough will dredge him back up from the dead and return him here to his side, where he belongs, and they’ll fall back into their old dynamic of bickering and making up and bickering for the fun of it again. Of slow mornings in the train car, with Dottore fast asleep on his shoulder as the sun rises by the fogged-up glass of the window.
Of normalcy.
But a delusion it is, at best, for even the most ambitious of men such as he have nothing to say in the face of certain death, and Dottore’s return could only be nothing short of a miracle, if ever.
Pantalone is practical enough to know when he is beaten.
But even so, it does not wrench his gaze from the seat. He continues to stare as the sun’s glow from outside stifles and dies on his cheek, as his vision fogs and eyes burn, and time passes him by like the in and out of waves coming onto the shoreline, washing and lapping at his ankles but never quite enough to sweep him away.
—If life did not have to go on as it did, perhaps he would have remained there for an eternity.
Pantalone reckons he must have drifted off somewhere along the way, for now he’s roused with a sudden start.
His eyes open a crack, bleary from the rude awakening, and he lifts a hand to rub the sleep from them, irritated.
Ugh. The painful silence is gone, which would have been nice, if not for the fact it had ruined the only reprieve from the waking world he’s managed to get all week.
Tired, he squints into the dark, trying to locate the source of the noise.
What on earth…?
He cranes his neck to look, and then it comes into view, beautiful, abundant: the warm lighting spilling in through the wooden archway, composed of all manner of fairy lights and lit lamps and whatnot. And on the floor lie the constantly moving shadows of the passengers, superimposed against the pale yellow glow creeping into his side of the train.
Then the culprit he was seeking makes itself known.
He hears first the lighthearted celebration and the laughter, and from there on out it only amplifies. The sound of music floats lazily in from the open door at the end of his carriage and persists, persists until his ears begin to smart beneath the strain, and with a final hiss of annoyance he rises from his chair, still half-asleep, stumbling in his steps as he does on the way to the door.
The small party comes into view as he approaches the door, a merry band of civilians celebrating their return home from Sumeru at long last (a return long overdue by weeks, he knows, for he and his partner are the cause of such delay). He catches glimpses of faces: mortals, all of them, some seated and some standing, chattering away around a messy table with plates of half-finished food and drink strewn about.
And in spite of it all, oh, the irony— Pantalone still, still finds himself gravitating towards the hearth, against his better judgement.
(A moth to the light, flitting inevitably in search of the same tender warmth that had made him into the grieving man he is today, for such is mortal nature, and try as he might he has never been able to fully cast off the shackles of his humanity.)
And here he stands now, posed as if he were a tableau, hovering at the side of the sickeningly familial scene. He doesn’t know a single person in this crowd but all of a sudden he despises them, them and their mundane, short-lived lifespans and the inexplicable joy they allow themselves at the mere fact they have lived to see another day.
It is not his place to mock, nor judge, he knows. His borrowed time is running out, now that his supply is gone, and should he allow his fate to catch up with him, he will be dead before any of these partygoers are.
—His regained mortality, however, does not diminish the sudden flicker of hollow resentment that lights at the pit of his stomach.
Pantalone’s lip curls at the thought, expression rife with disgust.
(Somehow, that is first thing he’s felt all week.)
And yet, sickening as it may be, it does not stop him from putting himself up against the door to take in more of that atmosphere: he is entranced, cursed to follow, even as the light burns and the soundwaves pulse against his eardrums in a threat to pull what is left of him apart. All of it he takes in now, in full: there’s more laughter, and then some murmuring, and then he hears a click, followed by the faltering of music and the creaking of machinery.
A gramophone, recognizes Pantalone, as a second tune winds its way upwards from within the golden shell and hangs like threads in the chill of the compartment air.
He leans closer, and then hears it: the scratchy notes of pre-recorded piano, a backing track to all the laughing and clinking of glasses going on next door.
His grip against the doorknob slips and falters when the melody drifts into his ears. He knows it as soon as he hears it: centuries of watching the segments play have trapped hundreds, if not thousands of songs in the subconscious of his mind, and this one in particular had suited his partner’s tastes very well.
The warbled notes piece gently together in his mind to form an old Nod-Krai lullaby, rerecorded and repurposed to keep up with the times. He bites down on his tongue to stall the unexpected cry rising in his throat.
The song hits a crescendo, and Pantalone jerks away from the light, as if he’s been slapped.
Now the music has begun to swell. An arpeggio, a trill, drawing away from the original’s dreamlike quality into something more dramatic. The melody soars; the notes solidify, crystallize, hang in the air like fairies in flight.
The spark grows into a flame.
His vision blurs. The scene in the compartment condenses and disperses before his empty eyes, and through the haze of lantern light he can see the leather, the flex of fingers, flying fast across a keyboard at the heart of a ballroom, drowning out the noise of the background into no more than accompaniment to the melody.
All of a sudden he is not standing in the doorway of a train carriage, watching the carousal from the shadows as it hurtles homeward to Snezhnaya.
He is in his office, and the man opposite him is not Omega, not a segment, but a memory centuries back, in flickering dawn’s-glow, a first time sitting from across the man with which it all started. Long before he knew of the fate that awaited his partner: a simpler time, he thinks, between two freshly-anointed Harbingers with time on their hands, a long ways off from their final stand against the divine.
Far be it from him to call it a properly gentle affair— for the way they exchange words has never been so— but it is as close to softness as he can get and that is enough to leave a bittersweet taste in his mouth. The tune soars and dips, a crow in flight against the onslaught of everwinter, and along with it he flies, drunk on the buttery-warm taste of the memory, stepping into the shoes of a version of himself that once was: younger, less cynical, and still yet to be touched by the gift of immortality.
The world falls inert before his very eyes, obscured in a haze of cigarette-smoke that forms the polished inner walls of his office back in the palace. His vision wanes as he hones in more closely through the spillage of hanging notes, and his body dredges itself upwards of its own accord from the shadows to drift closer to the man sitting at the grand piano.
The man is a work of art himself, even more so than the song he plays. He makes each motion so purposefully, theatrically elegant, that swoop and flourish of his hands across the keys in a fashion that resembles the flutter of feathered wings. His head is bowed towards the score, and his hair falls past his shoulders as he plays, catching the glare of the evening against loose strands frizzy from the static in the air, beautiful and glorious and mortal in all his entirety.
And Pantalone, he cannot see his face, but he knows, he knows as the music dwindles to silence and his hands cease their playing, exactly which point in time they are at, remembers what he looks like as if it were yesterday; and in the morning mist, in between the cloud of dust motes suspended within the slant of light, his long-dead Zandik turns to face him.
His hand extends in a wave, and Pantalone smiles, despite himself, lifting his own to mirror the gesture.
“Regrator,” begins Zandik as he swivels, as his face comes into view—
Pantalone blinks at the sight, heart hammering against his chest.
His features are soft.
He has none.
He is smiling.
Pantalone can’t see his face.
His eyes are—
Are what? Bright? Red? Warm?
—Regrator, when will this farce of yours end?
The scene falters, flickers before his deceived eyes. He tries to find Dottore’s face and comes up with nothing.
His hand falls to his side as his mind catches up with him, and the realization hits him so hard it takes hold and yanks him straight out of the flickering trance.
—Not him.
In seconds, the dream falls apart.
The soured notes stick out to him now— how had he never noticed it before?— glaring, stiff in the flow of staves hanging in the air. The taste on his lips is of home, but a garbled version of it, the tone edited over and dragged out to be livelier, easier on the ears. Too easy. The playing is lackluster, next to that which he remembers: not horrible such that it is unlistenable, but jarring nevertheless, a too-far cry from the familiar, trained sequence of aged hands against keys that his mind has wired itself to expect.
Any warmth in the air evaporates, as if sucked into a vacuum, replaced by a stony-cold absence that raises his skin in erupting bouts of gooseflesh beneath the fabric of his suit. The music shuts completely off, and the sound of hushed conversation fills his ears, replacing the mellow sound as quickly as it had come.
His hand grasps absentmindedly at his chest, as if clawing hard enough will scare the palpitations away, and comes up with only fabric fisted into a creased ball between his gloved fingers.
The tremor shoots through his nerves and spreads through to the rest of his body. Out of the corner of his sleep-addled mind he can hear the shaky puff and pant of his breaths, ones that sounds too far away to even be his own: they come in quick, quick succession, clawing up his trachea, as the partygoers pick up on the silhouette standing on the car’s opposite end and their stares press pins through his body, celebration melting into bewilderment at the sight of the banker, still and stiff in the golden afterglow.
Pantalone’s smile goes rigid.
He takes an unsteady step backward, dizzy from the unsteady thump of his heartbeat in his ears. The world seems to sway precariously on its axis, and it almost tips on its side entirely till he manages to dig the points of his nails into his twitching palms and paces himself enough to clear the swimming layer of black from his line of vision.
Then a second step, and a third. He makes his silent retreat, keeping his steps small and unhurried to maintain some semblance of a dignified air, and slips into the uncomfortable chill of the first-class carriage where the shadows swallow him whole.
With that, Pantalone grabs hold of the door and slides it firmly shut, shutting out the light as the revelry resumes its course, and along with it the lit fuse sizzling within him dies with a hiss.
—No more.
He does not want to hear it.
It rips through him now, the bitter cold that tears the air from his lungs and flays him from within. It is somehow worse than that first time— the morn of Zandik’s eighty-fifth, and the autopsy that followed, for at least some piece of him had remained in his segments after his passing, and he’d pulled through all these years on that alone.
The segments, in turn, seem to have left their imprints on him across the span of these four hundred years, and in the wake of this final loss a hole has emerged in his heart, one too large to be filled by any other.
Not grief. That would imply something existed there, which it does not.
Pantalone’s heart has become a heavy weight that crushes against his ribcage as he turns on his heel and walks back into the gloom. His coat drags as he trudges to his seat, confined to silence once more, for even that is preferable to holding up hands to a warmth from afar that he will never feel again.
The weight does not subside as he takes his seat, coat draped across the unfilled row, and he shifts to make space beside him before he remembers that he is the only one in this compartment.
He will be dead soon, and no one is coming to save him. Nor is he capable of saving himself: the meticulous skills of a banker do not carry over to that of alchemy, and there is no one left in this world who will be able to engineer the elixir in his Doctor’s place.
Maybe there will come a miracle, if he seeks one out. He can search for a cure, if he wants, and find some other way to prolong his life.
—But what then? What will he do going forward?
There will be nothing that comes after. He will complete his work with the Harbingers, and maybe witness the heavens’ fall; that is what he first joined them to do, after all.
And then comes nothing.
He will live on, but never will there be another mind that matches his own with the same level of ferocity, that enables his worst impulses as he does. His Doctor is a fluke, a glorious, terrible mistake of the gods that no other will be able to replicate.
He will live on, and yet there will always be something missing from the new world that will come to pass; one that he had conspired, for centuries, with Dottore to build—
—And suddenly, eternity sounds more like a curse than a gift.
The last remaining vestiges of warmth from the party next door fizzle out and die on his clasped hands. The carriage chill gnaws at his skin, hungry for flesh, and he wonders numbly if he would feel anything were it to cut him apart as well. The disappearing patches of snow-dusted grass ebb away by the window as the train plunges through the wilderness into white everwinter, past the borders of Mondstadt into Snezhnayan territory.
All around him, the air is cold.
Pantalone rests his head against the train window, chest heaving, and feels nothing.