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The Regrator always wears those glasses. Half the time, they’re fogged up.
Sometimes Dottore wonders how Pantalone can see anything at all with those dreadful things blocking his vision. He’d be better off without them.
“Why won’t you let me give you contact lenses?” he complains all the time, and Pantalone just smiles, shrugging in that nonchalant way.
“I like them. They cover who I am.”
It indicates shame, thinks Dottore to himself, that he has to hide himself from the rest of the world.
Those glasses, even without a layer of fog on them, reflect the artificial glow of the ceiling lights. They make it so that no one can truly look at his face. It covers who he is, and purposefully so.
Covering up those beautiful soft amber eyes he’s only ever seen once.
And yet it’s understandable, because isn’t he doing the very same with his mask? He has no right to judge.
So he keeps his want to see those eyes to himself.
He pictures them in his mind, mysterious and airy, an enigma of emotions that flicker between gold and red and violet like a setting sun.
He holds that desire, locks it into his heart, and lets it burn.
-
In the hallways, two young Fatui agents exchange gossip.
“Have you seen the Ninth recently?”
“No, not today. Not yesterday, either. He’s been missing the whole week. Last I saw him was when he came back from the mission five days ago, bleeding and furious.”
“Oh Archons.”
Within earshot, the Doctor narrows his eyes.
A visit to the Bank is in order.
-
The heart of the Northland Bank is a shrine to the Regrator.
Dottore, if he must be honest, quite enjoys looking at it. He likes to run his hands along the engravings of the pillars and stare up at every giant canvas of his pretty little banker draped across couches with that smug expression on his face. He especially likes the statues, carved by the finest sculptors in the land, painting him in such a grand light that it’s almost obnoxious.
But then today there isn’t time to look through this interesting collection of monuments.
Because the Regrator has been missing all week, and Dottore has a feeling he knows where he went.
He knows him best. Naturally, his estimates are correct.
He finds Pantalone exactly where he thought he’d be.
Today, he isn’t wearing his glasses.
At the center of eight sculptures depicting him in his finest moments, his robes splay out in a silken waterfall around him as he sits with his posture hunched and his hair hiding his face. His head is buried in his hands as he gasps for air. His spectacles lie at a side, broken into two, likely a result of the Regrator’s fits of anger.
He looks so scared that it cannot be him and yet it is.
And it hurts to watch him shiver like that, as if he is no more than the child he used to be, begging for scraps on the streets of Liyue Harbor.
“Pantalone?”
The words spring forth from his lips, a decision made in recklessness.
Amidst those images of glory, the Regrator’s quivering form provides a stark contrast as he weakly raises his head and offers his best smile.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he says in feigned cheerfulness, getting to his feet. “What brings you to the Northland Bank at this time of day?”
Dottore notes the tearstains on his normally immaculate face. The wounds on his throat that haven't completely healed.
His chest tightens.
“You were gone the whole week. I was concerned— and, oh Archons. Look at you. Look at you. You’ve been crying.”
Pantalone scowls and turns away so his back faces the older.
“No I haven't,” he says snippily.
The Doctor walks into the light, standing beside the banker so his shadow falls over him. He thumbs away the mark of tears down those soft reddened cheeks.
“You're trembling,” he says quietly. “Tell me what happened.”
“I’m just feeling a little under the weather. It’ll all be fine by morning.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“You’re relentless, aren’t you,” sighs the Regrator, but he looks relieved in secret that Dottore doesn’t immediately leave. He tugs on the sleeve of that pristine lab coat, dragging him down to sit next to him. “I was overthinking, is all.”
“Just get to the point before I slice your tongue off.”
He doesn't mean it. Both of them know that.
But there's this magical charm to his words that convinces the normally unshakable man to talk.
“I've been meaning to ask,” and his voice wavers in a manner he would normally conceal, “am I weak?”
Ridiculous, the Doctor thinks, but he doesn’t say it.
“When did you hear that?”
“You know.” he dips his head. “The tabloids like to talk. You know how they are."
He breaks off for a moment. Inhales, as if he can't breathe, then recovers and forces his face into a wry smile.
"You'd think it would all be gossip, but they're surprisingly on the nose with their stories."
Insecurities.
From the most cool-headed, collected person Dottore has ever met.
“About what?”
“I accepted this position knowing it would come with the hate of the masses, and yet I let them affect me.”
“They’re dregs of society whose opinions don’t matter,” says Dottore dismissively, waving a hand. “Don’t take notice.”
“—but they’re right, aren’t they?”
Dottore pauses.
It’s unlike the Regrator to self deprecate in any way.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They're right,” he says simply, nudging away the trail a tear has left on his cheek, “I am unworthy.”
What is he saying?
Dottore turns and peers through the mask at the mortal and his statues. Sunlight streams in through the glass dome at the top of the vast room, draping the Regrator in gold as he stands there, still, silent, a statue like all the rest.
It illuminates the slope of his nose, the firm line of his jaw, the single tear that dampens long lashes like a crystal under lamplight.
“All this wealth,” he murmurs out loud, “and I cannot buy love, yet cannot mask my hurt properly either.”
“What do you mean?”
The Regrator purses his lip, raising his head to stare at Celestia peeking in through the glass in the ceiling. Judging him. Judging them.
“Why else do you think I wear these glasses?”
A perplexed expression flits across Dottore’s face at that.
“Because you don’t trust me to fit you with contact lenses?”
A swish of robes, and he winds his scarf tighter around his neck, as if he is trying to close himself in.
"Does it not feel wrong to you that the Ninth of the Fatui Harbingers is a mortal?"
The glare of the sun falls over crystal lenses, obscuring empty eyes lost in a distant memory.
The Knave had not been gentle with her words. It was a brutal truth, another blow to the mind of the newly knighted man struggling to find comfort he had been deprived of in a merciless winter.
He doesn't wait for a reply and carries on, ignoring the pitching of his voice that indicates weakness.
“My glasses reflect other people’s faces in place of my eyes and hide vulnerability where I do not wish it to show. It's embarrassing enough, really, that their Harbinger is an ageing mortal man with back pain."
Oh.
Dottore swallows the lump in his throat that has been threatening to spill over since he entered this room.
“It is not embarrassing," he insists.
“Don't bother. I don’t deserve it.”
Those words are shakily stated, choked out in his fit of panic.
How dare he think so little of himself. How dare he loathe himself, someone so flawed and beautiful at the same time and yet so unaware of it.
When the Doctor speaks again, it comes out softer than he’d intended.
“You are many things, from deplorable to selfish to ill-tempered beyond belief. Embarrassing is not one of them."
Pantalone scowls. "You're hundreds of years old and everyone quakes when they see your face. Don't even start.”
The people of Teyvat see a money-hungry Harbinger and judge him for the front he puts up.
Snezhnaya's ninth-ranked, the heart of all gold in the world, and still weak, still mortal.
This, perhaps, is proven by how easily affected he is now by these words.
It’s no wonder he’s so scared to show the world anything but his ruthless side.
“It is clear you are in need of company right now.”
Who that company is, he does not say, but the answer is clear in his mind.
“I deserve nothing and I know it,” he hisses. “I take and take from the world because I deserve none of it but want so, so much.”
Untouchable, heartless, arrogant.
It's what he presents himself as.
In reality, he is gentle– perhaps even a little too much– and that, precisely, was why he formed a shell around his porcelain heart.
To keep himself locked in.
To keep bystanders out.
He drifts over to the tallest statue, like a ghost padding along marble floors, and lets his head rest against the marble-carved palms of his own sculpted image.
A man who gives himself statues.
Not because he deserves to be worshipped, but because if he does not love himself, no one will.
(And the true irony, perhaps, lies in how he still does not love himself.)
Despite all the shining effigies, products of his life's work laid out before him, that which brims in his raw red-rimmed eyes is nothing but hatred and self-pity.
From behind him, hands slip around his waist. Dottore's chin rests on his shoulder, a strange new form of intimacy neither of them have known well in their turbulent histories.
It surprises him how light and fragile his banker is, he thinks to himself, as he pulls the trembling man into his arms and holds him in a tight embrace.
“They said that about me as well,” he says, soothing the tears that run freely down ashen pale cheeks. “I was once a weak mortal too, no?"
"You aren't anymore," protests the banker faintly.
"Its effects on me persisted."
Pantalone laughs, shakily, at the thought anything could ever render the stubborn Doctor insecure.
Dottore smiles, mirroring him.
"– but then I found something.”
The touch of rough hands scarred by battle cups the line of a jutted chin.
His voice is deep, slightly ragged, but still a melody in the Regrator's ears.
Still beautiful.
Dottore turns and a rare, genuine smile graces his lips.
“I found someone who was just as unlovable as I was, and I grew to love him more than the world. I like him better without his glasses, by the way. He's more real when he takes them off.”
It's you.
That's what he screams in his mind, what they both want to say out loud but can't.
Their fingers lace together.
Pantalone glances at their hands and offers a tentative smile.
“I did too,” he says, “but do I deserve the person I fell for?”
A grin snakes itself onto the line of Dottore's lips.
“You deserve so much better than this. You deserve someone who will spoil you rotten and hold you when you break and bring out the best in you…
Sadly, you're stuck with me now.”
Stuck with him.
Pantalone had always complained about how annoying the Second was.
And yet.
“And I wouldn't have it any other way.”
A mask clatters to the floor, next to a broken pair of silver-rimmed glasses.
Under a shower of light, away from the harsh Snezhnayan winter, they clutch each other tight, their only sources of warmth in a world that has treated them with nothing but cruelty.
“The heavens have been so harsh to you,” breathes Dottore. “You’ve been so hard on yourself.”
A glass heart breaks down into pieces and repairs itself as he falls into the grasp of the famed Doctor who is said to be apathetic and cold, but is so, so much gentler than is given credit for.
The Regrator will not shatter anywhere else but here. This place, where he feels the safest, where he feels—
Loved.
It brings a warmth to his fragmented heart, a red thread sewing back together the shards torn apart by his past and those around him.
“Whoever says you are unlovable will have to speak to me.” Dottore murmurs, delivering a kiss to his cheek and leaving a pink flush where his lips have met skin. “You deserve to have the world, and if you so wish to own that, I will personally seize it and deliver it at your feet.”
A laugh escapes dried lips at that statement.
“You're the last person I ever pictured by my side like this.”
“The world is full of surprises, Regrator dearest.”
And the only response to that is an amused flash of a smile.
Red eyes sparkle in sunlight, meeting crystalline amber. Marks of tears are wiped hastily away, and for the first time in their lives, they fall into the arms of someone they know better than themselves.
Free to be vulnerable. Free to care for another without fearing the consequences.
Flaws and all, they lock themselves in the other's embrace, masks undone and souls intertwined–
Two unlovable heretics finding love in a house of gold.