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Pantalone hung his coat on the coat hanger by the door. It was brass, but polished to the extent that it glinted finely under the yellow lamplight scattered across his room. And his coat itself was the standard thick and white one all the harbingers wore when the snow was harsher around Zapolyarny Palace. He hung it on the coat hanger, and the glint of reflected golden light became hidden.
Ah, the smell of his room. It was familiar, and oddly comforting because he had spent simply so much of the time in his life over there. Warm. Soothing. It had decent central heating, personally fitted into his room by some craftsman from Liyue.
The layout was so - a massive wall-length window looking down on the city below on one end, then a rich Cuihua wood desk, some armchairs, a plush bed, and then a mesh borrowed from a Sumerian merchant that separated the entrance hallway and washroom from the rest of the place. That’s where he was right now, hanging his coat up on the coat hanger.
Pantalone took off his boots near the door, and then walked softly into his room, tip-tapping lightly across the wood-panelled floor. It wasn’t as big as others liked to presume. Sure, he had sizable estates in many other places, but when it came to the Palace, none of them really had much space for customisation. What little Pantalone did, he ensured that it was used to make his room of higher quality, and not just larger in size. After all, the bigger it was, the more time he’d have to give to servants to clean it, and when he wanted time for himself all of that was noticeably inconvenient.
He had held his breath, unconsciously. He finally breathed out. Pantalone went by the windowside, and reached into a certain drawer below his desk. It took some shuffling around, but after some seconds, he had fished out a pack of fresh cigarettes from it. In his slender, gloved hands, they were beautiful. Sleek, bright white, with a rim of gold foil decorating the filter side. The paper was stiff, and of brilliant quality. He’d sponsored this company half a decade ago seeing their craftsmanship, and since then their business had skyrocketed. A favour that he traded for essentially free cigarettes. And it was even filled with that delicious breed of tobacco found only in the space between the desert and the Sumerian rainforest. Truly, no one smoked quite as much as those people, what with their hookahs and sheeshas. Pantalone had tried it once, only to frown at the sweet flavour and quickly put it away.
Picking up a pretty crystal lighter from the edge of the desk, he clicked it once, twice, thrice, and then a quiet flame lit up from the opening at its top. Habitually shielding it from the wind with one hand, Pantalone put it at the edge of his lips, sucked the air in, and then set the tip of the cigarette aflame. It burned orange for a split second, before turning to mere embers at the fringes of the paper. Little wisps of smoke streaked out from it. Crossing his arms, he wedged it between two fingers permanently littered with ring-shaped burns and a smoky scent. Then he brought it further up, closing his lips around the familiar object.
Pantalone took a long first drag from the cigarette, and a nice bitter taste flooded his mouth and went all the way down to his lungs. Then he removed it from his lips and blew out a puff of white smoke. It clouded the front of his vision. Eh, should he have opened the windows to let it out? Maybe. But he liked the smell anyway, so it might yield more comfort if he just kept the smoke drifting all around him. At once, a calming relief rushed through his blood.
The world seemed to become more clear and pristine, and his eyes had an easier time focusing. His brain picked up speed and gradually lost its lethargy, as he took another drag. ‘Good’, ‘tasty’, he thought. He was reminded of coming home after a long day of work out in the cold, and then warming himself up with a dinner of cigarettes and steaming hot soup. His eyes trailed to the city below, same as always, and then up to the sky. It was a stark blue dotted with massive clouds that must feel very soft, if he could touch them. Nothing too new for him.
Pantalone brought the cigarette back up to his lips, sucked in, and blew out the remaining smoke. He found himself thinking about the last few days. He had left Sumeru and boarded a ship set for Snezhnaya, and spent that entire duration of time drowning in endless paperwork. His little desert expedition had left countless memos piling up on his desk, which he had had to make up for with sleepless nights spent aboard a rocking vessel, with a limited stock for smoke breaks. Ugh, how terrible. But then he’d taken the train to the city, a carriage to Zapolyarny Palace, and lastly, the elevator up to the floor which held his room. He’d have about a day or so more to relax and wind down before his duties beckoned.
His first cigarette was already done with, so he stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray and pulled another one out of the packet. Pantalone lit it, and then finished that one too. One by one, he depleted the ten-stick pack, barely taking a second between each one. This entire time, he kept his brain sort of switched off. The nicotine certainly helped, and each drag slowed him down more than it energised him. This meant that he should’ve become drowsy in no time at all, as it had happened before, but sleep refused to pay him a visit. Such an annoying conundrum jolted his brain out of its autopilot setting.
Ah, one whole pack? Pantalone glanced at the ornate clock hanging on the wall. In thirty minutes? Hm. He looked around his room, which was utterly stuffed with wisps of smoke floating around each surface, to the point at which everything appeared covered with a white-grey haze of sorts, not dissimilar to the aftermath of a snowstorm…perhaps one pack was enough for now? He sighed audibly, disappointed at his mentally-absent state having ended so quickly.
Deciding for a change of scenery, Pantalone flopped down on the bed with all the grace he had left in his broken body. With a deep sigh, he closed his eyes. The mattress was undeniably soft, perhaps one of the best in Teyvat, and it was covered with the finest and purest and softest cotton that Mondstadt could give. Not silk - it wasn’t nice to his skin for prolonged periods of time. Sleep, sleep. He tried to bring a state of drowsiness into existence, but nothing seemed to work. Yet, because he was an excessively clever man, he decided to go to the root of the problem.
Why couldn’t he fall asleep? He had the right clothes on, he was tired, he’d just smoked, and had his own bed to boot. What the fuck was the problem then? Well, apologies must be made for being so rash, but Pantalone couldn’t help himself. These specific cigarettes tended to get him more riled up than other varieties. And anyway, no matter the method of expression, his question was justified. If everything was pristinely perfect, the conditions for good sleep tested and tried time and time again, then what could possibly be the problem? The frustration crawled up on him like a persistent type of bug, burrowing into the depths of his mind. He frowned, to no one in particular, but to the ceiling of his room.
What a nuisance. And then he took a deep breath in, and all the smoke lingering around made its way to his brain yet again. The frustration disappeared. Pantalone now flicked through possible answers with a clear mind, and, well.
He had an answer, he was a very self-aware man. After all, that quality was what made him aware of the emotions and schemes of others in his role as a banker. And yet the answer displeased him so thoroughly, he even opened his eyes back again. The sky outside was a dark and lonely blue now, littered with stars that he could barely make out from across the haze of white smoke. The city below wasn’t visible from the angle he had while lying on his bed. Pantalone’s heart sped up, purely due to his mounting frustrations. Just imagine this - one has a bothersome question, manages to find an answer to it, and the answer isn’t even to their liking. That would be like digging up gold and seeing it turned into coal the very next day when you wake up.
Speaking of which, Pantalone was very much awake now. He gazed out at the sky above, and lost himself in the black clouds and twinkling stars. His mind wandered, unconscious and actually too tired to monitor itself with too much care. It is said that when one wanders, the reality of their form comes into the light. Something similar happened to Pantalone, for lines of thought that he had long since cut off spring back up to the surface like bubbles of air trapped below a murky pool of water, only now that his mind had begun to wander into his subconscious.
He let his eyes wander too, to a dark red box sitting at the edge of his nightstand. A watch. An old gift from…
Dottore. The very reminder of his name made a part of Pantalone’s being fall away. Rationally, he would’ve just thrown all the reminders away. But not just yet.
Dottore. Zandik. Pantalone’s heart gave a lurch, and then started to fall apart. The pieces of muscle and the blood that must be somewhere in his chest hurt. A pit formed at the bottom of his stomach. That pesky little heart ached so deeply. Like a piece of paper that would disintegrate upon first contact with water. Or even…fire.
Heh, how ironic. Zandik’s grand experiment had ended his own life in a brilliant flame, but perhaps he had gotten a hold of Pantalone’s heart on his way down to those fiery pits of hell, and dragged it all the way. Perhaps that was why Pantalone was feeling this way at all. So, a bit of his heart had burnt away, leaving not even ashes in its place.
Emptiness. That must be what he felt, if one were to put a name to the feeling. His chest rang hollow, like a room with all its furniture missing. His forehead ran hot, probably due to his brain working too hard and feeling too much. And oh, his heart. It ached and ached and ached, the flame that took away a chunk of it still well and alive, and burning off more and more as time went on. Pantalone had tasted literal snake poison many years ago, as some weird seal to a business partnership with an equally weird Inazuman woman. It had stung his mouth so harshly, he had felt the effects of it for literal weeks afterwards destroying the cells in his mouth one by one. Now, it felt like his heart was drenched in that very same sharp poison that ate away the flesh inside him and filled the remaining skin and bone with an unrelenting, burning agony.
There’s acid in everyone’s stomachs, right? Well, Pantalone felt like his stomach had been punctured, and all that toxicity had spilled out into his body. Because that’s exactly how it was! Starting from his heart, the strange sensation of debilitating pain had spread through his body just like acid would pool from a ruptured stomach and burn everything in its path. The ache refused to stop. It swallowed everything in its wake, until Pantalone’s mind was left empty of any reasoning and could only think of the pain, and nothing else.
Agony, emptiness, hollowness - all very fitting words for the things within him. Red and raw, his heart lay stripped of all its wholeness. Pantalone found himself picturing a literal dissection, the kind done on Dottore’s living test subjects. They were always nauseating to view, and even more disgusting to think about for a man as refined as him. Dottore had never really ‘dissected’ him, always with the purpose of putting things back where they should be. Pantalone had always had nightmares about one day waking up on the cold metal of an operating table as some sort of agonised abomination, but always known for sure that no such thing could happen under the Tsaritsa’s watch. And now, fate openly mocked him. Dottore was gone, and Pantalone only now felt that cloying feeling of having his soul taken away from him, of dissection, of parting, of sorrow.
Oh, Zandik. You just had to leave, didn’t you? Venom streaked the voice inside his own head. Pantalone found himself despising Dottore with an unmatched passion, because why? Why did he have to do his useless little experiment, and then all but disappear from this world? Why did he need to give his life up for the sake of blasphemy? Wasn’t there a better way to stick to his ideals? Why did the passage of time seem to be unbearable without him? Why did Pantalone have to spend all his days without seeing his grinning face that he adored so much ever again? For all of eternity? Why did Zandik have to leave him by himself, all alone on Teyvat? There was, quite literally, no need to do something of this scale, but the man’s own hubris! Pantalone sneered at the clouds, enraged beyond measure.
His breathing sped up, and his heart clenched harder and seemed to fall on itself a little more with each passing moment. The burning flame in his heart rose to his throat, to his mouth, and then to his eyes. A tear formed at the corner of his eye, condensing all his hatred into a single drop of water, and then slipped down his face onto the pillow below. It was cool and soothing against his hot skin, but Pantalone couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread as it dampened a patch of cloth below his head. A tear. He had cried. He had actually let the pain in his heart leave his body through a single tear, for the first time in goodness knows how many decades. Huh.
Grief. Pantalone scoffed to himself. He had found his word - he was grieving Dottore. The scoff turned into a choked sob, as another tear spilled out of his eye. Then another, and another. He smiled like a madman, and the crying just didn’t stop. It kept going on involuntarily, and Pantalone was helpless to do anything except laugh about it, which he did. The sounds of his abrupt giggles mixed in with heart-wrenching sobs sounded undoubtedly crazed, no? Yet Pantalone couldn't help himself. The tears only kept coming, not showing a single sign of stopping.
He sat up on the bed, failing to wipe away some of the wetness on his face with a sleeve. That strange feeling that envelops one while crying enveloped him too - the air begins to smell rank, the eyes go red and raw, the face gets incredibly hot, and one loses some of their presence of mind and becomes disoriented. Pantalone, now occasionally gasping for air and barely able to see anything since his glasses were off, pushed himself up off the bed, and hurt his shin at the edge while doing so. The blooming pain at that spot only made him shed tears with more intensity, and really, nothing could be done about it. So, Pantalone did the one thing he always did upon finding himself in helpless situations.
He trudged over to the Cuihua wood desk, felt around for a knob and pulled a certain drawer open with a creaking sound. Then he grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes and blindly felt the surface for his lighter. Once he had both in hand, he took a cigarette with one hand and perched it in between his wet lips, and started lighting it with the other. The lighter clicked thrice before giving in and producing a brilliant flame. A tear fell onto the cigarette and made a spot on it damp. It lit up. Pantalone took a long, long drag, felt the bitter taste on his tongue, and then sobbed a little madly while exhaling the smoke as well. He had come undone, only as a product of his own thoughts.
Zandik wouldn’t be here anymore. He wouldn’t drop by Pantalone’s office thrice a day, or bring him outrageous gifts, or suggest insane ideas for experiments in the middle of a conversation about funding, or play haunting melodies on the piano just for his eyes and ears, or chuckle with him about the stupidity of new recruits, or complain about the terrible weather, or grin stupidly whenever Pantalone said something bordering the line between impoliteness and sheer snark. He wouldn’t be here anymore. Pantalone drank away at his cigarette, only stopping between each drag just enough to breathe and sob stupidly once again. The effect all this had on him was laughable, wasn’t it?
The cigarette burnt to a stump, and he brazenly tossed it onto the floor. Somewhat eased with his breathing regulated once more, he trudged back to the bed and fell down on the mattress once more. Oh, his heart. It refused to stop hurting.
Pantalone thought of everything in that moment. The chaste, meaningless kiss they had shared on a drunken night mere months ago. The way he seemed to melt whenever Dottore himself broke out of his mechanical shell and showed some of his humanity. How the cold nights passed oh so quickly as long as the two of them had decent company to sit and chat with. The way that Dottore had taken such offense to not being invited to Sandrone’s tea parties, that he had decided to host his own with only Pantalone receiving an invitation for every single one, a masterclass in pettiness. The way that he was so mad, and so utterly cruel, but how Pantalone wasn’t all that different himself. The way they both scorned the gods, and with each added late-night conversation felt that the two of them were the only ones in the world to see it this way. All the words that were left unsaid when either one ‘observed’ the other for a second too long, or made time out of his busy schedule exclusively for the other. Companionship as true as this was rare. Love as true as this was rare.
Pantalone smiled to himself, tears still slipping out his eyes freely. I love you, I fear. You are gone, and yet my love for you isn’t. He chuckled at the absurdity of the thought, and then shed another tear at its truth. Hell, he loved Zandik. And the two of them did somewhat acknowledge this, for they were both smart enough to see co-dependance as it was, but the words had never been said out loud. And now, they’d never be able to say it anyway. Love was a remarkable word, and not to be used lightly. Yet all that Pantalone could feel was that suffocation deep in his heart, and its twisting agony, and all he could do in that moment of smoke-laden grief was accept it.
Ah, well. “I love you. I will miss you, Zandik. Goodbye.” he whispered to the empty room.
Pantalone closed his tired, red eyes. He thought of Dottore once more, replaying the fond memories over and over again. Soon enough, the tears stopped, and he fell asleep.
Lying there, with an almost entirely damp pillow below him, Pantalone fell peacefully asleep. A smile twitched at the edge of his lips, and he looked serene whilst bathed in the wisps of white smoke.
When he woke up the next morning, he would think of Zandik again. And perhaps again and again until the end of all time.
But for now, he was asleep.
He would deal with the rest later.