Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(Day One. The second floor of a drugstore. A dilapidated break room. The walls are unkempt and yellowing. One window appears shattered and badly mended. A clock on the wall reads 5:16pm.)

(VIKTOR [FILL BY COMPANY], a disheveled, visibly haunted person of about twenty nine, sits at the solitary table in the middle of the room. He is tall but slouches to appear smaller than he actually is. With golden eyes and black/white streaked hair, an uncountable amount of piercings litter his visible skin. The sleeves of his sweater and the length of his slacks hide anything beneath the neck. He is distressed but hiding it in a way that seems like it pains him. He is reckless, a knife’s edge away from a bad decision, and oscillates between moods with every breath. The audience should find him unlikeable.)

When Viktor was fifteen years old, he had decided he would either die or kill himself before he hit twenty-five.

Needless to say, this didn’t work out.

It wasn’t a lack of trying, although the trying was less a concentrated effort and more of a passive ‘what-the-fuck-ever’ that ruled his each and every move through the cesspool of being alive. He was never interested in greatness. He was only ever enchanted by knowledge. Oblivion was fine, an early ending was fine, if only it meant he could do something.

But the world was founded and funded already, built into a web of interconnected looks and glances and words like ribbons, and Viktor had tumbled into it too late to have a fighting chance.

Something like that. Something bitter.

It never mattered anyways, because he is now twenty-seven, no closer to death than he was fifteen years ago, and caught taking desperate breaths in the break room of the CVS Pharmacy in between Wilshire and Olympic Blvd. It’s the one with better parking. It's the one with the broken window two stories up that had been mended with a bit of duct tape and a lack of any real care.

(Sometimes Viktor looks out the window, between the silver tape and the film of concentrated something that bled across the glass, and wonders if that’s what he looks like too. Shattered and put back together. A life that no one really cares to mend.)

It’s all very sad.

(He usually decides that there’s nothing useful about pondering existentialism off the clock. He can wait until he’s getting paid for it at the very least.)

The lights flicker above him, thrumming with electricity that fails even on a good day. The air outside is stark with chill. The registers will be slow.

A throb of pain presses into the meat behind his eyes, greedy fingers, greedy hands, the desperate pulsing reminder that no amount of Excedrin and ice water is going to push aside the headache he’s been sporting for the better half of the day. Viktor sighs and the sound is loud in the silence of the room, echoing across linoleum. His break was over fourteen minutes ago. He doesn’t have the sick time to leave and they don’t have the coverage to find a replacement.

(Viktor’s life sucks. Objectively. It sucks marginally less than others but severely worse than most.)

It’s all very melancholic.

(He copes by maintaining a perpetual motion. By hyperventilating and snapping at himself when he won’t allow himself to snap at anyone else. He keeps one foot moving in front of the other, or one hand when even that won’t work, dragging himself towards a destination he has never been able to figure out. He hasn’t died yet and that’s reason to keep going.)

A sharp, biting pain fixes itself in the spot between his teeth and his gums, and he considers how easily he could create replicas if he pulled all of his teeth out with a pair of pliers.

The overhead speaker crackles to life around him, bringing with the sound another wave of pathetic aching, and Viktor hears his presence be requested at the Pharmacy.

He should have killed himself two years ago rather than have to endure another hour of customer service.

(It doesn’t matter actually. He exists, living, or half alive at best, and that’s that. It’s all very comforting. The fact that his life is singularly important to only himself, and his three to five annoying fucking customers that insist on making his day a living hell for ten to thirty minutes once a week.)

Viktor considers praying. He considers cursing God’s name and with any luck, they’ll strike him down entirely.

A minute passes and — nothing. Damn.

“V, sweetheart, I know you’re losing your shit up there but I need you to cope or self medicate quickly, because it is December fucking tenth and I don’t care enough to exercise kindness towards Miss Howards for trying to steal nail polish again while we have a line half out the door.”

Viktor sighs. He wills the sound to not sound impeccably bitchy. “Sure, Ren. Sorry, won’t–”

Renata Glasc rounds the corner with a sound like a vulgar scoff as she interrupts him, “it will happen again and we both know it. Stop dissociating, you look like you’re about to explode into dust at the sight of sunlight, dearest.”

Viktor halfheartedly throws a pen at her and she catches it only to throw it back at him where it smacks into his cheek and falls.

“Ow,” Viktor says, his eyes flicking up to find her face as he intones, “I’d like to request a worker’s comp form. I’ve been injured on the job. My manager assaulted me with a pen, so I would also like to contact HR.”

Renata twists on her heel. Her laughter sounds like deep bells, the low boiling point of rose water as she flips him off in favor of a real response. Viktor stands to follow her despite the way his body protests with a weak hearted flare of pain, and it is under the flickering lights of the hallway to the stairs that Viktor puts on the mask that makes him human.

(It is a shifting of muscles, a straightening of the spine, and strictness to his gait that lends itself not to comfort but to abject professionalism. Any individuality falls from him in favor of efficiency.)

He pushes aside the thoughts of stabbing the fallen pen into his eye socket and hoping blood loss will kill him before he gets to the hospital. Renata is already at the front counter, her hair falling across her shoulders in sweeping waves, so Viktor tucks himself into the pharmacy and lifts the privacy window to indicate their closure has ended.

There is a line immediately, because the world is cruel, and Christmas is in two weeks which means the pharmacy will be closed and half the city will be on vacation or trapped with loved ones or simply unwilling to pick up a fulfilled prescription while the highways are at a standstill, and Viktor wills his last remaining hour to pick up the pace and head home already.

He helps a woman with a sharp nose, her eyes gentle and her words gentler.

He helps a man who repeats his name in an accent unfamiliar to him and hands him a twenty softened by use.

He helps a man who never greets him with a hello.

He helps a woman who never thanks him for his work.

He helps a mother and her child perched atop her hip, both of them warmed over by laughter.

He dredges through words and writing and claws his way into smiling at each and every person when he tells them there's a survey at the bottom of their receipt if their experience today was pleasant, because Renata has promised to cover any shift he wants for all of January if they’re one of the top three stores in the district by the end of the month.

When nine o’clock rolls around it can’t come soon enough.

Renata calls after him to have a ‘good night and actually try to sleep for once’ and Viktor bites back a scathing sort of declination dripping in the sound of his own smile.

(It’s all very simple to be him. He exists, he pretends to be human, he leaves work, he goes home and stares at a wall or focuses on a broken project and a broken dream or he watches someone less intelligent than him speak like they know more than him on the television until sleep drags him into her clutches and it ends. Rinse. Repeat.)

The light of day is fading into a dusky wash, pouring across the street in feather orange light, and Viktor does the appropriate amount of checking before rushing across the street in a hurried jog. His head is throbbing like he’s sustained a concussion, a dull, pulsing ache that's settled carefully behind his eyes, and he considers hyperventilating into a public trash can for a second before he swallows the wave of agony and pushes forward.

Viktor likes routine, which means this morning the coffee shop he had been a patron of for two straight years was closed indefinitely with an 8x11 piece of printer paper taped to the inside of the door that said ‘Sorry!’ with an almost accurately melancholic sad face. At the time, Viktor considered only idly how reasonable it would be to slit his wrists and slather the door with his blood and last breaths intermingled for longer than he should admit. In the end, he traveled to work without any caffeine to hold him over and all his blood intact. It’s unreasonable to assume he’s allowed anything good in his life.

(He should just start drinking Redbull again.)

(He should stop drinking enough caffeine to put him out of service when he goes eight hours without.)

The coffee place two blocks down is abysmal. It is quite literally legally bad, by basis of existing as an overly expensive, pretentious shop that stays open till 3AM despite having five tables maximum and espresso that tastes like burnt vinegar while their signatures are all flavored americanos, and Viktor usually holds himself to a higher standard than spending eleven entire U.S.American dollars on a singular drink, but desperate times call for the most desperate of measures.

The door has no note of foreclosure, opens with little to no trouble, and there's a shrill, tinkling bell that sounds when Viktor steps inside. He’s hit immediately with the smell of coffee beans and artificial sweetener, something sickly and saccharine and overly cloying that makes even Viktor want to turn around and leave. A sweet tooth can only do so much against vanilla Febreeze and a vengeance.

But desperate times, etc.

He can barely see the menu. The miniscule lettering takes up the entire seven minutes it takes for him to get to the front, squinting and mentally meandering between options.

There’s a horchata affogato, which means they have horchata, which means there is at least one saving grace looking out for him in the universe.

His thanks are paid to whatever God cares enough to exist in the moment before he moves on.

Viktor steps to the cashier with his eyes still on the menu.

“Can I get a—”

And stops almost immediately after the words hit the air, his mouth shutting with enough force to make his teeth click and his jaw hurt, and whatever thanks had been paid a moment earlier is followed by a curse so cruel it’s almost a wonder that Throwaway God doesn’t smite him down then and there.

Viktor hasn’t seen Jayce ’Giopara-Internship’ in one thousand, one hundred and fifteen days, and yet he still manages to look so very… horrible.

(What Viktor means to say is that Jayce is beautiful. Stunningly beautiful. The type of man you look at and dream about and picture plastered over magazine spreads. He’s grossly gorgeous. All bronze lines and ice blue eyes and a smile like a porcelain knife. Viktor used to look at him and wonder what DNA could have possibly merged to make someone so unfairly immaculate, and then, unfortunately, Jayce had opened his mouth.)

Viktor isn’t sure how he hadn’t picked up on the sound of the most annoying man alive two blocks over.

“Do you want a picture? Would a picture help, V? Or have my charmingly good looks killed the singular brain cell you have left in your head?” Jayce asks, leaning over the counter on both of his forearms to tilt his head at Viktor. The line is going out the door. Evening rush and all. Somehow Jayce can’t bring himself to care when given the opportunity to jab the porcelain knife of his mouth deeper into Viktor’s soft belly. That, or he’s still just an idiot when it comes to any matter that isn’t mechatronics.

Viktor drags himself into awareness with a scoff, and a hissed, “Shut the fuck up. What are you doing here?”

“Uh,” Jayce smiles at him, eyebrows lifting, “working?”

Viktor’s expression melts into a scowl. He leans off his bad leg, shifting his weight to better lift the heft of his bag as he does his best to keep from tearing all of his hair out and throwing it at Jayce. That wouldn’t be productive. Or worse, it would look like he actually cared about Jayce, and the very idea of that is just embarrassing.

“Clearly. Why are you working here?” Viktor says, gesturing vaguely to the coffee shop and its overwhelmingly positive decor. There are at least six signs that say ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ and Viktor doesn’t think he wants to see Jayce alive, nor laughing, and he’s not entirely sure Jayce is even capable of loving.

Jayce drags himself off his elbows to punch something into his register. Viktor very pointedly does not look at the way his shirt is rolled up to his elbows or how his stupid, idiot nose scrunches for a second as he misclicks something, and he does not violently recall the way Jayce’s stupid, idiot nose had shattered beneath his fist the day after he got his letter of expulsion.

“Well, you see, this place offered to pay me. Anyways, I know you’re in love with me but I have a line. Still drinking sweetmilk with a shot? That’s barely coffee, baby, you really need to get a new order.”

This time, Viktor lets himself remember what it feels like to break Jayce’s nose.

“At least I’m not fullfilling the ‘coffee made by a faggot’ stereotype at our grown age,” Viktor snaps, pulling his card out with more force than would be necessary to unearth the sword in the stone.

Jayce tilts his head in consideration, smiling at Viktor like he’s hung the stars or offered him his open back to stab, and then he says, “I mean, the stereotype is fulfilled by two parties, and you’re buying.”

This second time, Viktor lets himself imagine what it would feel like to murder Jayce with his hands.

If his therapist was here, she would tell him something about fulfilling unhealthy fantasies or behavioral patterns or how ignoring his problems for three years wasn’t conducive to healing.

“How much?” he asks instead of leaning over the counter to choke out his old lab partner with his own lanyard.

Jayce’s expression is villainous. “No charge. It’ll be ready at the far counter. Thank you so, so much for visiting.”

“What,” Viktor says, eloquent as always.

“You’re holding up my line.”

“I don’t care about your line. What do I owe you, Giopara?”

Jayce’s grin drops so severely that Viktor fears the nerve he planned to strike was something worse than it used to be. He makes a note to both do that again and to find out why the mention of Jayce’s internship program caused a reaction like a nuclear bomb. Then, he disregards both notes because he will never be interacting with Jayce again. Ever.

He makes a third note to tell his therapist about his very healthy coping mechanism that he has decided to label ‘Not Acting On Violent Fantasies and Delusions’.

Jayce recovers from his disgust quickly enough, looking instead at Viktor like he’s a particularly endearing picture, his eyes crinkled with the brightness of his amusement, and the primal part of Viktor that he killed three years ago wants to shrink away. Instead he stares.

Jayce’s voice harbors an edge of exhaustion, so well hidden that Viktor might have missed it if he was anyone else, “it’s free, Vik. Don’t worry about it.”

(Viktor has never known when to give up.)

 He opens his mouth to argue, to snap something scathing and cruel, and Jayce’s smile turns fond at the movement.

His eyes shift to the person behind Viktor.

“I can help next in line.”

Viktor sidesteps to allow the next person to approach the register like a sort of ghost, his eyeline caught on Jayce’s neck and the way he tilts in his own expressions like a marionette caught in the act. They make eye contact once more, Jayce’s expression slipping from his horrible mask to something more gaudy, pride or superego or heat death, and Viktor turns on his heel to wait for his drink to the side.

He isn’t so rude as to make a scene. Perhaps he’s just too tired. 

He hates Jayce. He wants to rip all of the beautiful parts off of him until he looks broken and bloodied and as boring as Viktor feels every day.

Instead, he watches Jayce from the corner of his eye like a stalker.

His nails are painted a red like blood. Something uncharacteristic from Viktor’s memory of years ago, something wrong when the rest of him is made up of all firm lines and hard masculinity, but fitting nonetheless. It makes his hands easy to watch. Each deft finger tapping out orders and drawing names across to-go cups like he’s been made for it.

Viktor forces himself to watch Jayce smile. His teeth shape faraway words like a carving knife.

Jayce’s gaze slides to him and Viktor turns away like he’s been burned.

They call out his name a moment later, and Viktor pulls his drink to his chest like it’s something precious when he stumbles out of the shop and back onto the sidewalk. If a too-loud ‘thank you for visiting!’ follows his retreating back, he pretends not to hear it like he had pretended not to watch Jayce’s expression moments before.

The sinking sun feels like a balm. The breeze of dusk feels like relief.

Viktor breathes.

Once, twice, his lungs heaving as if he has run a marathon and not taken ten steps to escape a killer coffee shop.

When he raises the drink to his mouth, desperate for the forgiveness of chemical compounds and sweetener, he is met with blue sharpie spelling out a series of capital letters.

I KNOW YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS.

TEXT ME ! ! ! 626-513-3615 ! ! !

(And the only thing that keeps him from throwing it into the trashcan beside him is a knife’s edge flicker of whim.)

The worst part is that it’s the best fucking coffee he’s had in months.

If he ever has the displeasure of seeing Jayce again, Viktor’s going to be sure he can feel the man’s nose break beneath his knuckles for the second time.

 

(Night. We follow VIKTOR down a series of sidewalks to a towering apartment building with a missing doorman. A clock on the wall reads 6:47pm. The elevator is as despairing as the lobby. The trip up is characterized best by the thrumming of machinery and the shuttered DING as it slows to a stop.)

(As VIKTOR passes an open door, the inhabitant slams it shut. VIKTOR sighs, used to it, but doesn’t react further. As he unlocks his front door to slip inside, he manages to feel like a thief until the door is shut behind him. He wants to be unseen. Here we see the difference between who he pretends to be and who he is. This is VIKTOR in truth.)

By the time he gets home, the sun has collapsed halfmast behind the horizon like a shitty prop in a shittier stage play, leaving the streets in a ruddy twilight and the inside of Viktor’s apartment in a warm blankness.

He flips the lightswitch on and–

(Let there be light.)

Green-gray brightness washes across the room in a flicker, once, twice, flushed between darkness and light before the lightbulb sets itself to a persistent hum and sticks. His apartment is the same mess it was when he left it earlier that morning. The corners could best be characterized by the stacks of metal and bolts found in them, power tools fallen into the carpet and half finished metal limbs prone against an unintelligible pile of scrap. The couch has a bloodstain from a week ago – (or maybe two?) – that he had meant to douse in peroxide and had forgotten to even acknowledge with the grace of a rag. The wall behind it carries the same arching splatter, grey walls freckled red and turning yellow around the edges like even his own blood wanted to escape itself.

He needs to pick up bleach with his next paycheck.

From the doorway of the bedroom comes a chirp.

“Blitzcrank,” Viktor greets.

A whirr pulls through the air, then a bump as Blitzcrank rams rather succinctly into the baseboard of the wall beside Viktor’s TV.

“Blitzcrank,” Viktor chastizes, though this time his voice lilts with pity.

The Roomba, Blitzcrank, spins one hundred and eighty degrees and slams into the opposite wall with the same confidence.

It’s Viktor's fault really. He had woken up with a deep-set fear that Blitzcrank would be unable to defend himself in times of crisis several months ago. The resulting solution, an enhanced exterior engine and retractable weapons attached to coils, had been a failure. After weaponry was deployed, Blitzcrank's improved speed had caused him to run over the coils. He would trip and be unable to move.

As a replacement, Viktor had equipped Blitzcrank with a Target brand carving knife and an amount of clear tape attaching the tool to him.

It worked.

If you ignored the fact that the weight distribution made him run needlessly into things, such as walls, couches, and ankles.

It was a work in progress.

Viktor lets his bag drop to the floor with a thump, toeing his shoes off before he goes to meet Blitzcrank at the wall.

“Come on,” he murmurs, shifting the little bot as it swivels side to side, “poor thing.”

Once freed, the Roomba twirls again before going to circle the living room. It bumps once on the edge of the carpet but continues without further need.

Viktor lets himself slide to the floor with a sigh, pulling one knee to his chest and shoving his pant leg up to meet the bend of the joint. His leg, from the knee down, is a steely prosthetic, made of paneled metal and carefully placed bolts. Viktor unlatches a hinge along his knee, twisting his prosthetic from the calf. A seam separates into two and all at once the majority of his leg sits in his hands.

He pulls the bulk of it between his thighs to fumble with the ball joint.

(From here it looks almost impressive.)

(From here it looks almost meaningless.)

Viktor digs the edge of his thumbnail between the pieces, slick with grease and spreading across his skin, and lifts the protecting casing that holds the ball in place. It slides upwards, the sound of it a loud shniickk as oil and steel slides against itself like the snap of scissors, and Viktor lets the piece drop beside him a second later. It rotates on the wood flooring in a tumbling decrescendo.

The ball comes next. It’s slippery with lubricant, heavy in his hand, and prized above all things. The last real efforts of his work before everything had nosedived into nothing.

This perfect sphere is his last memory of happiness.

Viktor wipes grit from the face of it, leaving a shineless spot in its wake, and drops the orb back into place.

When his phone, tucked into the pocket of his slacks, vibrates, it scares him to the point of jumping. He fishes the thing out with obvious difficulty, practically cutting off the circulation of his wrist in order to retrieve it.

Only two people call him.

Only one person calls him this late at night.

Viktor snaps the phone open and sandwiches it between his ear and his shoulder without bothering to check the caller ID.

“It’s not Sunday,” he says in lieu of a proper greeting, although his voice betrays an obvious affection.

His fathers laughter echoes through the tinny speakers and it's enough to make Viktor’s smile widen into something real.

“I know, Vitya, I know. Sorry I am early,” Pavel says, still fuzzy with amusement, “are they still taking your mail?”

Viktor rubs a finger across the purpling skin that meets his prosthetic. It hurts in the way a bruise might, ever present and good enough to want to punish. It hurts in the way a reminder does, trickling through his thoughts in a way that keeps him present.

“Ah, yeah, I think so. It’s alright. I don’t get much anyways.”

“You will need to check. Your cousin is getting married. She’s sent you an invitation.”

He lets a bit of enthusiasm color his voice, “oh, Katerina? Since when? That’s great.”

There’s a moment of rustling, no doubt his father moving whatever canvas he has set in front of him to stand and pace while they talk. This is one of the few traits Viktor inherited from Pavel; they both love to stay in motion while they explicate. His mother had used to sit at the kitchen table while they bounced around the kitchen itself, arguing and explaining and asking each other nonsense questions that meant nothing.

Even now Viktor wishes he could haul himself up and walk a circuit around his apartment while they chat. Perhaps if he wasn’t so bone-deeply exhausted he might have done it. Perhaps not.

His father clears his throat and reads off what is no doubt the calendar that sits pinned on his parent’s bedroom wall, “November nineteenth. She wanted to surprise you with the letter, but… It has been too long for you not to have gotten it, I think.”

Viktor nods as if he can be seen. “I’ll check my box again, but I haven’t seen it. How disappointing. Do you know the date?”

Again, rustling. The turning of pages.

“Three months, Vitya. February fourteenth.”

Viktor huffs out a laugh.

“I see. Of course. Typical for Miss Kat. I’ll be sure to mark the date. Do you mind emailing me the–”

Pavel interrupts him with the barely concealed enthusiasm of a toddler, “I was hoping you would bring your partner.”

(Herein lies the problem.)

Viktor does not have a partner. If it wasn’t obvious, Viktor has not been romantically inclined towards anyone since…

It has been about one thousand, one hundred and fifteen days. Give or take.

Unfortunately, approximately five hundred days into that period, Viktor’s parents had enacted a nightmare scenario that Viktor best described as ‘becoming so worried that they reverted to helicopter parentage and threatened to move countries in an effort to help him get back on his feet’. So Viktor had lied. He said he was doing better. He said he was healing well. He said he had met someone.

Pavel called Viktor every Sunday, usually with his mother in tow, and Viktor had constructed a well-made but vague enough lie that made him come across as especially well adjusted while he did nothing but rot in his apartment and lose his security deposit.

Viktor hums. “I’ll have to see if he’s busy, Pav. We’ll try but you know he works. Send me the invite, please. Do you need my email?”

“No. I have it, Viktor, but you have to promise me you will try. We want to meet him. You did not invite us to the wedding. We’re very angry, or sad, so you have to make it up to us, yes?”

“Yeah,” his apprehension turns into laughter, “I do. I’ll make it work, okay?”

The placation works. His father sounds pleased, he sounds happy, when he says, “Okay. How is work? Has your mean boss given you the day off?”

“Ah, no, I wish,” Viktor’s head hits the wall behind him, breath curling out between the gaps of his teeth as he readjusts his phone, now holding it to his ear with a hard press of his fingers, “What are you working on? Any new pieces?”

His father makes a noise of consideration. “Not exactly. I am reworking the piece with the dog.”

“Igor!”

“Yes,” Pavel confirms, equally delighted, “Igor. I am repainting him to look more– metal. Less abstract. Quite like your drawings used to be. Remember them? I wish you would send more photos, Vitya.”

“I will. It’s busy around the holidays is all. Actually, I’ll send photos if you send me that invite. But— I have to go meet up with a friend I totally forgot about. Call you again Sunday, okay?”

“Viktor, you are so forgetful. Go. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

His fingers shake when he presses end call.

There is the familiar ache of a headache behind his eyes, the dull throb of hunger pressing into his nerves, and every inch of him seems to beg for something as pathetic as relief.

Viktor presses the heel of his palms into the eyes like he can find comfort inside of a burst of pain. The staticky feeling of pressure is his only response, and after seven seconds he lets his hands drop to his phone in his lap.

He flips it open too hard, wishing for whatever bad luck seems to haunt him to just break the thing in two and emancipate him from this hell.

Half the numbers in Viktor’s phone aren’t saved. The other half are people he never wants to talk to again.

So much for working tonight.

10:17PM.

Me: 

how willing are you to accompany me on an international trip?

Renata Glasc (Work):

On a scale of 1-10, three.

Do you expect me to pay for it?

Me:

naturally

Renata Glasc (Work):

lol

No.

10:22PM.

Me:

im calling in a favor

please.

camille, you cannot leave me on read. i know where you live.

ferros. you quite literally owe me.

ugh

10:25PM.

Me:

hello

:)

Mel Medarda (Lawyer):

hello, viktor :) how are you doing?

Me:

well. how are you?

are you still in murietta?

Mel Medards (Lawyer):

afraid not. drav and i moved to montreal last summer actually.

Me:

I’m so sorry.

i missed your going away party didn’t i

Mel Medarda (Lawyer):

its fine, viktor. i understand you have a lot going on

you’ll simply have to come and visit us :)

Me:

i will. Soon

10:49PM.

Me:

Ezreal.

DO NOT ANSWER. ANNOYING:

Hey man !! whats up :D

Me:

nvm

10:50PM.

This isn’t working. Viktor has a limited number of contacts in his phone, by nature of quoting a hatred for social gatherings, social networking, social niceties, and, more broadly, everyone. The same line of thinking means it's unlikely that anyone will agree to pay their way to Latveria for nothing, all the while having to put up with him to such a degree that it seems loving. Disgusting. And unlikely.

Viktor bites at the nail of his middle finger, cringing at the accusatory coffee cup on his kitchen counter.

From there, the scribbled message faces him like a damnation.

Once more he cycles through his contact list. Once more he finds himself ticking past the same failed names.

The only remaining acquaintance is Mundo, who he is not inviting out of pride if nothing else. Viktor is marginally sure his doctorate is fake anyways, and he’s not interested in that coming to light mid conversation with his mother.

Well, Mundo and Warwick.

Viktor pulls himself to his feet to plug Jayce’s phone number into his messages.

10:57PM.

Me:

How are you.

It takes twelve minutes to get a reply.

11:09PM.

(626)513-3615:

At work. Hru

Me:

How is school?

What happened to your internship?

(626)513-3615:

You didn’t answer my question :/

Me:

?

what question

(626)513-3615:

How are you

Asshole

:)

Me:

Fine

How is school? What happened to your internship

Three minutes. Jayce sits typing.

11:13PM.

(626)513-3615:

Dropped me.

Me:

oh?

What did you do this time

(626)513-3615:

why do you care, v

Me:

Don’t call me that.

Just curious. Still on campus then?

(626)513-3615:

Nah

Staying with Vi

Cait asks about you sometimes.

what do uou do now

you*

Me:

Nothing

Jayce:

Dont be a dick

did you go to another school

we dont have to talk about school ig

Is your coffee good

:)

Why did you ask me about the Gioparas

i was overly aggressive and antagonistic towards a coworker.

bc he was being fucking stupid, so. not rlly my fault

v

viktor

This is Viktor, right?

11:32PM.

He declines to respond further.

(Day Two. The interior of a coffee shop, closing time. The walls are a forgetful pink, plastered with florals and powered-down neon signs that read a multitude of platitudes and encouraging phrases. The sparse clutter of tables sit with their seats upturned onto the tabletops. From outside comes the thundering of rainfall.)

(JAYCE [FILL BY COMPANY], is easily the most beautiful man in the world. He is tall, usually over six feet, and cleans counters with the enthusiasm of a drowning cat swimming to land. His hair is smoothed backwards on habit, not on principle, but still manages to fall out of its style. He looks worn down by the day’s work. Slacks with a seam down the center, button-up artfully rucked, nice shoes. His smile is distinctly captivating. JAYCE is an adonis with the attitude of an achilles, flickering perpetually between softness and pride. He should be a superman-type; all American.)

When Viktor comes back, the sun has sunk beneath the horizon entirely.

The streetlights are fluorescent, old bulbs the color of egg yolk, and the flicker of them highlights him like a living shadow. He’s changed clothes, but they reveal nothing more about him than a graphic tee torn half to shreds that might indicate a preference or a hatred for the band logo faded onto the front, and an affinity for dark clothing despite the fact that he’s walked here. He looks swaddled in the size of his jacket, hands pressed into the pockets while he presses the door open with his foot.

It’s raining, and yet he has no umbrella.

“You look awful,” Viktor says, as soon as the door has shut behind him with the jingling of a bell.

Jayce grins.

“It’s 3AM. And we’re closed, so, I think I’m allowed to look awful.”

Viktor doesn’t smile, not really, but his mouth twitches like he might want to. Jayce remembers the shape of it from back then, from before. He used to like Viktor’s mouth. It was sharp in every sense of the word.

“The door should be locked if you’re closed,” Viktor insists. He moves closer to the counter in quiet footsteps, raindrops glinting on his shoulders like jewels, “are you working alone?”

Jayce should kick him out. It’s against policy to have non-employees on the premises this long past closing, and the door should have been locked at 2AM on the dot, but Jayce is closing tonight, doing Vi a favor which she will inevitably owe him for, and if another second with Viktor is his repayment it will have been worth it.

Jayce throws the towel he had been using to wipe the counters across his shoulder, eyes flashing as he gives his full attention to his companion, “are you planning on robbing me, V? That’s not very nice.” 

“Is kindness one of the traits you associate with me, Jayce?”

“Well, you always did like to kiss it better.”

Here Viktor frowns, the expression small, as he realizes Jayce has played him into a stalemate, as he realizes Jayce has cowed him into acknowledging a truth. Jayce half expects him to deny it. Viktor has never shied away from a lie before, but now he simply bristles like a cat feigning ignorance and shifts his weight.

Jayce’s smile colors his words, “why are you here, V?”

Viktor’s golden gaze meets his own, his expression so dull that Jayce can barely tell if he’s infuriated or impossibly bored. Maybe a mix of both.

“To insult you of course.”

Jayce could swallow down his voice. The sound of put-upon apathy, each word muted into the sort of quietness that Jayce can pinpoint to only a dozen other memories. Because Jayce has always remembered Viktor. He is an enigma. An equal. Something so tangled that Jayce could do nothing but watch him and follow him and love him. To love the man present or to love the faraway memory, both have haunted him for years.

The sound of his voice is the same.

It sounds like every dream Jayce has ever had, and that is enough to cleave him apart.

Jayce sighs.

“Why else?”

Viktor’s hands pinch, nails pressing one by one into his palms in a familiar gesture of anxiety. One of the only tells Jayce was ever able to peel out of him.

His gaze is scalding, hot water and salt in the wound, as he says, “if you come with me to my cousin’s wedding in three months you can move in with me.”

Which means it’s Jayce’s turn to push away his immediate instinct and remember how to act like a functioning human being. He finds himself biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste the bitter, metallic inkling of a wound, and when he opens his mouth to speak nothing comes out.

He shuts his mouth.

Opens it again, frowning.

“Propose that again but with further detailing.”

Viktor’s won. They both know he’s won, because if he’s given room to explain himself, Jayce has given him room to persuade him into stupidity.

Viktor’s expression matches this realization in utter brightness.

“You need a place to live. I have a functional apartment and a King sized bed. I require a date to a family event—“

“A wedding, yes, I heard.”

“—semantics. Don’t interrupt me. I require a date, and you’re the only living person that I figured might agree.”

Jayce sits in it. 

He wants to argue. Or, that’s hardly it, he knows he’s supposed to. He’s supposed to say something about hating Viktor, or knowing he was always a liar, or he should tell him to go fuck himself for asking for help. He’s supposed to demand an explanation for his three year absence. He’s supposed to beg Viktor to tell him where he’s been hiding for so long while Jayce needed him.

Instead, Jayce says, “we get to share a bed?”

Which sounds far more pathetic and stupid and horrible than it should. It was a genuine question.

“I only have one bedroom, so yes. But I didn’t think you would mind,” Viktor says, factual and patient.

Jayce considers. He watches Viktor’s bright eyes flicker between his face and anywhere else.

He tries the next dealbreaker, “I have a dog.”

And Viktor’s words are near scalding. “You have what?”

“A dog. You can’t laugh.”

Viktor doesn’t laugh, not quite, but Jayce watches his face do something close to humor. His mouth seems more sombre than it used to be. Like he doesn’t smile as much. The lines around his eyes are red with bruising, the hollows of his cheeks bright with youth that has yet to escape him. Even ghostly, Viktor maintains his fucking baby face.

Finally, Viktor’s response: “Was this an attempt at finding a friend that couldn’t leave you?”

Jayce sneers.

“Worse.”

“Oh, pray tell.”

And in the same breath Jayce’s pride crumbles into nothing. It’s easy to bicker in frivolity, harder to admit the truth.

“He’s named Blitzcrank,” he says.

The words are so shocking, so utterly pathetic in the same way they’re utterly predictable, that Viktor actually laughs, the sound full bodied as it shudders through the length of him. Jayce holds his gaze to Viktor through the motion as if he can memorize the sound, the shape, the frilled beauty that washes across Viktor’s features during it.

“You didn’t,” Viktor provides, accusatory as he is enamored.

Jayce’s sigh feels like a punctuation curving around the warmth of Viktor’s smile.

“It’s all he responds to. I’ve tried to change it.”

“Jayce, if I was less intelligent I would even think you missed me.”

“I did.”

“Very funny, asshole.”

But Viktor missed him too. The knowledge trickles through him like cyanide, a surety, a fated bet where the odds refuse to confirm that they are in Jayce’s favor even when the math confirms it in blinking lights. Viktor had to have missed him too.

(He’s here, isn’t he?)

Viktor’s stance shifts, one knee bending minutely as if easing some unseen pressure. When he speaks it’s with a put-upon resolution, “It’s fine. There’s a yard. My next-door neighbor has a pomeranian. You don’t have a pomeranian do you? Is it a chihuahua?”

Jayce smiles. “He’s a poodle.”

And Viktor blinks prettily. “Oh.”

Jayce would very much like to dash across the counter and press his hands to the skin of Viktor’s cheeks, to hold both sides of his face in wholeness, to press their skin together until it warps and spreads beneath itself and he can feel rivets and rings and whatever metal bullshit Viktor has stabbed into himself hold fast against Jayce's palms or fingertips until he knows that Viktor is alive beneath his grasp.

Instead, he exhales. Pulls a hand through his own hair.

Jayce says, “Yeah.”

And Viktor steps forward until he can put both hands against the counter where Jayce cannot help himself from looking. His eyes find the dark metal of Viktor’s left hand, polished like a threat and glinting. It’s new.

When he last saw it—

Viktor interrupts his thoughts with an inquisitive, “The little version?”

“No,” Jayce replies.

“Oh.” Again.

“Yeah,” again, and Jayce tears himself from the thoughts of when he last saw Viktor, from the memory of red so deep you would wonder if it was a sea, “but you already agreed.”

Viktor’s fingers tap against the countertop in one by one, a disjointed melody, and Jayce watches the corners of his mouth fade into a muted acceptance.

He doesn’t look older so much as he looks aged. Worn away in the same way a signpost begins to decay. A steely object that has taken on graffiti and the elements, the touch of a stranger, the spill of a drink, the brush of time doing more than the rot of cells.

Jayce watches a slip of black ink creep past the neck of Viktor’s shirt. Between a gap in the fabric he sees the ghost of pale skin and pink scarring. Viktor’s head ducks and the rings lining his ears catch the light enough for Jayce to count them in obsession.

He is a ghost doused in life.

He’s just as beautiful as he was when he died.

Viktor lifts his gaze to meet Jayce’s, his expression twisting when he catches the blatancy of the stare. The shock only lasts a moment. Then he blinks back into neutrality. Viktor says, “I already agreed. I’m off this weekend. Sunday’s better. If you can.”

Somehow Jayce is at the edge of the counter, barely two feet between them, barely anything in the universe so important as being close to Viktor.

Jayce could not quell his smile even if it was a matter of life and death.

“Sure, V,” then, because he’s always loved seeing Viktor light up red, “do you need my number again or did you put it in your phone?”

Viktor, predictably, raises to his full height as he startles. His face turns splotchy like a peach. This time, he fails to blink himself back into control, and for a moment he doesn’t speak. A second too long for Viktor’s particular brand of breakneck vitriol. A loss inarguably.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Jayce continues, snapping the words out before Viktor can manage his own retort. Viktor stands with the sound of a dismissal cut off in his mouth. His face remains flushed floral, and the sight makes Jayce grin, it makes Jayce flush in turn, his blood warm and pleased and altogether too comfortable for someone he’s meant to hate.

Viktor doesn’t try to argue with what Jayce knows is true.

“Shut up,” he says instead, succinct and flat, and then, “I’ll send you the address. Don’t arrive before noon.”

And Jayce watches him twist to leave, his jaw held high as if he can regain some fickle dignity while Jayce douses him in a look of bleeding affection.

He lets Viktor leave. Jayce barely breathes in case of missing him, in case he fails to watch Viktor blink back out of existence, in case the hallucination fades a moment too early and his life fades back into the mundane monotony that has plagued it since his best friend died one thousand, one hundred and fifteen days ago.

Viktor reaches the door and pushes it open. He leaves in two steps, crossing the street and degrading into the haze of the winter rain, his fragmented gait weaving into the dark of night as if he really were a ghost.

Jayce breathes out a sigh, shaky as a newborn, and forces himself not to chase after him.

(Curtain.)

(END OF ACT ONE.)

Chapter Text

(Dawn. Between foliage, JAYCE walks along an empty hallway. He seems younger, if not by appearance itself, by the way he carries himself. The face of his phone shows a time close to sunrise. He follows a labyrinth of halls in a college campus. The scene is cold. The scene sharpens as he notices a door meant to be locked hangs open. Something bad is happening.)

(As JAYCE steps inside his footstep echoes with a splash.)

Three years ago his best friend had died.

It was very simple in the fact that it was his fault. It was very simple in the fact that he had watched it happen. It was simple in the fact that he had failed to stop it at all.

There had been so much blood. Buckets of it. Enough that Jayce wondered if he could find a paintbrush and slather the walls in it, to paint the whole world the color of Viktor’s insides, and then maybe they could both see how lovely he had always been beneath a red sun.

 But there was nothing beautiful here. There was only blood. 

Viktor’s breath had sounded like a panic. The noise an animal makes before you bash a rock against its skull and put it out of its misery. His eyes were swallowed in black, pupils fat and fattening by the second as if his high was consuming him, eating him away, swallowing him into nothing other than pooling black and blankness.

Jayce had watched him shiver. Twitch. Seize. He had been useless for a moment. He had spent so long watching Viktor’s eyelashes vibrate in time with his trembling and then he had stumbled forward, slipping in the mess of blood, to grasp Viktor’s bleeding wrist and seal his fingers over the gargling wound.

It was not a simple laceration but a full amputation.

His hand sat about a foot away. The nails were freshly painted, freshly shaped into ovals, and Jayce had grasped that too, pulling it to his chest. The skin was warm. Pale skin soft to touch. He could almost imagine it was still attached to Viktor’s arm, delicate fingers sliding against his palm like he longed to touch Jayce in turn, but when Jayce tightened his grip he felt nothing but the pop of dead joints and a flat nothingness in response.

He sat there, fingers covering clenching arteries and severed bone, fingers clenching covered fingers and severed skin, until he had become aware of his own wailing.

It was an indelicate sound. The return call of a dying thing, though pain was not the resounding emotion. It was closer to grief, a feeling turning the corner on utter desolation, a metal screech that promised one’s life would forever change.

Viktor was dead. Viktor was alive and dead at once. Choking on his own blood and swallowing his own tongue and Jayce could do nothing but clutch at the wet parts of him and watch him die.

This was the closest they would get to sex. This was the closest they would get to love. This was the closest they would ever get to being one thing instead of two.

Jayce’s body heaved beside Viktor’s, wet and warm for how Viktor’s blood had blanketed his legs and chest and throat, and Jayce had watched from inside Viktor’s chest as his own body pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed nine-one-one.

They were both dead. Alive and dead.

There was something beautiful here, swimming inside the color red with many tongues.

The last thing he remembered was laughing while sobbing, Viktor’s crooked fingers tucked carefully against his chest, while the fire department shattered the windows across their bodies.

There was nothing after that.

Days. Weeks. Months.

The voice of a soft woman, the feeling of pamphlets beneath his palms, the reminder that he had seen something traumatizing and it was okay if he wasn’t okay. He needed time, they said. He needed space. 

He recalled Viktor’s blood smudging across his mouth.

He had run his tongue across his lip, nervous.

The taste had been in his mouth like a brand, like the welling of his own split vein, for weeks, months, years after.

He was sure if he tried hard enough he would have been able to recreate it in picture perfect accuracy. The smell of antiseptic in the air, the sharp twist of blood on his hands, in his mouth, the searing brightness of the light falling over them like holy light searing innocence from sin and leaving them with nothing else.

He had needed time. He had needed space.

(He was not sure when enough time would pass or enough space would exist to make him feel normal, to make him feel like he had a place  anywhere, like he had a spot on the Earth that would shove him back into an orbit he had never felt until he had met Viktor and succinctly watched him die between his palms.)

There was never enough time. There was never enough space.

He had just continued to live. There wasn’t anything else for him to do.

(Dusk. Between a crowd, JAYCE rushes along a bar of machinery. He seems tired, if not in appearance itself, by the way he carries himself. The face of a clock shows 6:21pm. He follows a familiar pattern of nicety and dismissal. The scene is warm, thrumming with energy as he works. The scene sharpens as the door opens on a new customer. Something is happening.)

(As VIKTOR steps inside, the world reshapes itself anew.)

Three days ago his dead best friend had walked into his place of work and offered him a place to stay for the foreseeable future.

All things considered, Jayce thinks he reacted well.

He was funny almost. Casual.

He had not gone into the back room to have a panic attack until after the rush, after Ezreal had left, and he had fully cleaned the entirety of the espresso machine. The panic attack had been efficient. No more than fifteen minutes with his entire body shoved into a corner on the floor beneath the safe, knees pressed to his chest and his hand curved across his mouth to shunt the sound of his own hyperventilating.

(He looked ridiculous. A fully grown man trying not to take up space and failing.)

He hadn’t thrown up at the first message. A sign of fortitude that didn’t always stand true. Jayce left his phone on the bar in case the screen lit up with another message, and for three hours he had poured over black and white text as proof.

When Viktor had returned, after Jayce’s shift was technically over, when the door was meant to be locked, he had been forced to accept that the moment had not been a wish turned into a horrific delusion. The interaction had not been a hallucination of the dream he had spent drunk nights vomiting over and weak days weeping for.

Viktor hadn’t smiled, but he had laughed, a simple thing, a sure thing, and Jayce had agreed before he realized what the offer even was.

It was Thursday when he was visited by a ghost.

(Jayce packs each of his belongings into the backseat and thinks that his life might be rather sad, if all he is can be packed into two seats and a past no one is willing to acknowledge.)

It is a Sunday when Jayce leaves his car idling in front of Viktor’s apartment building and pulls one of two suitcases into the mirrored elevator that will take him to the fourth floor. Between his legs shifts Blitzcrank, a standard poodle groomed better than Jayce himself.

Viktor is waiting upstairs already, and he says the AirCon is out in the lobby but it’s still working in the apartment. While he spoke, Jayce had watched his mouth move over the words like he could memorize the shape of them. Like he could imprint his thoughts with the delicate bite of Viktor’s front teeth. The elevator is warmer than the lobby itself, but the discomfort is welcome when it is the only thing distracting Jayce from the picture of Viktor, the sound of Viktor, the feeling of his hand brushing Jayce’s for nothing more than a heartbeat.

(He’s still not sure if this is all real or if he will wake up in a week and find himself missing a life that never really belonged to him.)

The elevator doors open with a faraway ding, and Jayce steps into the hallway like it will vanish if he thinks about it too hard.

To his right, Viktor leans into view with hair so wet it drips. When he’d come down before it was with skin so slick it distracted. Now he shines like an oil spill over the ocean, so clean he begs to be smudged.

“Jayce.”

The sound tastes like blood, sounds like screaming, feels like body-warm regret. He would listen to it a million times if he could. He would crush the word out from between Viktor’s teeth, tearing the sound like meat from a bone, shredding it between his fingers until it split and he could find whatever part of himself he could stomach.

His name on Viktor’s tongue was the best he had ever been.

“Sorry again that I’m late,” Jayce says, rushing to meet the doorway, to see Viktor, to catch another glimpse of him between now and when his brain manages to catch up to reality. Blitzcrank presses into his leg with his nose. Jayce remembers to breathe.

Viktor calls into the open hallway, “it’s fine. I expected it.”

And that makes Jayce scoff. As if Viktor has managed to keep track of every one of Jayce’s flaws in their time apart.

Only he could be so fucking petty.

Jayce crosses the threshold of his new home to see Viktor half bent across a couch stained rusty, pulling a throw atop the back of it, and for a moment Jayce holds himself still so he can theoretically map out the vibrant curve of Viktor’s spine beneath cotton. He figures that it is not the same as it once was. He figures that the same divots sit above Viktor’s waistband at just the width that Jayce could press his thumbs into the meat of them.

He figures that Viktor is wet there, too.

Jayce considers turning around and leaving instead of pursuing the line of thought.

Viktor turns as if caught in the act, his golden eyes slitted, and Jayce sneers.

“You know, you told me to come at noon,” Jayce says, accusatory as he is annoyed. It’s just like Viktor to act as if he’s being put upon when he’s the only one with a real grip on the situation. It’s just like Viktor to pretend the only clothes he owns are threadbare t-shirts and sweats hung so low they might as well be taken off.

He’s infuriating.

He is driving Jayce insane.

Viktor’s expression plays the line between smug and disgusted, thrill creeping along his teeth as his lips part. “Yeah, well, I didn’t tell you to leer. That one was all you.”

The laugh that springs from Jayce’s throat feels like barbed wire.

“I’m sorry, V, wasn’t I supposed to be the egomaniac between the two of us?” his suitcase drops to the ground with a thump, too loud for even Viktor’s sensibilities, and Jayce watches as his jaw sets with a twitch, “I’m getting the rest of my stuff.”

From the couch, Viktor remains unmoving. His glare feels molten, thick and sinister even when he does nothing but watch, and Jayce doesn’t manage to meet it for longer than a breath.

He takes the stairs down instead of the elevator. He shuts his car door hard enough that for a moment he fears the window shattering. He heaves out a bitten breath when the staircase door snaps shut behind him.

When Jayce makes it back to the apartment, his second suitcase in hand, the door still lays ajar but Viktor remains absent from his perched spot on the couch armrest. Instead, Blitzcrank sits curled across the centermost cushion of the couch.

Whatever.

Jayce spends the better half of an hour unpacking the two boxes Viktor had bothered to bring up himself, both filled with cutlery and miscellany and ceramics. He washes the dishes, knowing that anything from outside coming in will need to be thoroughly disinfected before Viktor even thinks about eating off of it.

By the time his hands are pruning and the hot water is threatening to give out, Viktor slinks out of what Jayce assumes to be the bedroom.

He looks particularly offended, a spooked animal on quiet feet, and Jayce does his best to ignore him. The decision is not mutual. Viktor creeps beside him to look over the dishes, eyes sharp and quick as razors, then moves closer to watch Jayce spread dish soap throughout the interior of a bowl.

(His breath is warm against the exposed skin of Jayce’s throat.)

“What are you doing?” Viktor says, tone colored in confusion so genuine it seems to have outweighed the antagonism that colors each of his other actions.

Jayce lets out a humming noise of consideration. “Cleaning.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Jayce begins, looking at Viktor from his periphery, “you like it better this way.”

Viktor doesn’t answer in any words. He barely reacts at all, although Jayce’s own fear keeps him from turning any further to confirm, afraid that he might meet Viktor’s gaze if he seeks it.

After a moment of silence Viktor turns and leaves to tuck himself into the corner of the couch. Jayce goes back to washing each item he’s brought that can be doused in scalding water.

He tries not to watch.

(It’s not his fault that Viktor is beautiful.)

The delicate curve of Viktor’s metal wrist, the replicant mold of a bone that makes his silhouette look inhuman. Each long finger and his segmented palm sliding over itself to bend across the back of his phone. The oil-slick finish of metal kept and cherished. Both knees bent in a way that lets Jayce gawk at whatever lies beneath soft fabric in crisp lines, slips of glinting synthetism beneath the hem.

He sees Viktor’s gaze flick to him once, then moments later, twice, and Jayce does his best not to revel under the mutual curiosity.

The dishes are dried after they’re done being washed, and Jayce does revel in the fact that Viktor’s dishtowels are embroidered with the emblem of the Autobots on them.

For a second he thinks to ask Viktor if he still reads those comics like they might be taken away from him the moment he looks away, but – Jayce thinks better than to ask after something so simple. He doesn’t know where they are anymore. Is this meant to be transactional or something worse? Something better?

There is little sense for him outside of the balming relief that came with Viktor’s presence and the aggravating hurt of knowing he had waited for something after all.

Jayce drops a plate with more force than he should.

After that he keeps his eyes to himself.

Eventually Viktor tells him, ”I have to take a call,” and slides into the hallway with the slinking quickness of a thief.

From there Jayce can hear him through the wall, and somehow he sounds happier than Jayce can remember him ever sounding when they had known each other.

(Either that or the memories were soured.)

Jayce stands stock still, close to the doorway, for the entirety of Viktor’s call. The words are muffled and faraway, nonsense noise, and yet the familiarity of their pattern leaves him petrified. He thinks to press himself against the wall, to chase the meaning of Viktor’s amusement and find whatever it is that could have possibly brought him so much endearment, but something stops him from it. The knowledge of his own depravement. The fact of his own desperation. Jayce simply stands and listens, happy if anything to hear Viktor’s dull pleasantry through wood and drywall.

After a while there’s only silence.

Jayce holds himself there, doing nothing but breathing. Doing nothing but hoping.

Time drips like syrup. Blitzcrank pads up beside him, holding the length of his body to Jayce’s calf in a weight that is meant to be reassuring, and waits.

Eventually Jayce goes back to moving his mugs into Viktor’s empty cabinets.

Eventually Viktor comes back smelling of mint.

“Sorry,” is all he provides in explanation, and Jayce asks him for nothing further.

From there they move around each other in arching loops, two pendulums so close to meeting but never close enough to clash, both stacking Jayce’s tableware into drawers and cupboards as Viktor lists off the amenities.

The amenities and the made-up rules he lives by.

They haven’t changed very much since Jayce used to camp in Viktor’s dorm for days on end while they studied.

Shoes off at the door. Viktor sleeps at two am every night with no variation. He will not change this. The roomba does as it pleases. Laundry is done every Sunday at seven pm, Jayce is allowed to include his laundry in this if he so chooses but he needs to separate his clothes by outside and inside. There are three towels in the bathroom and none of them are to be put on the floor. Unfortunately there is nothing to be done about the blood stains on the couch. Unfortunately there is nothing to be done about the blood stains on the bedroom ceiling. Unfortunately there is nothing to be done about the blood staining the bottom of the bathtub. If Jayce turns the lights on while Viktor has a migraine, he is legally allowed to attack Jayce with a knife. If Jayce turns any of the six living room lights off while Viktor is working, he is legally allowed to attack Jayce with a knife. Viktor has no car, so Jayce can have their assigned parking spot.

(Isn’t he just so generous?)

Each word out of Viktor’s mouth feels like some sort of pushed bruise.

It’s all painfully mundane. Painfully nostalgic. A situation engineered to make him tear his hair out while Viktor recites Jayce’s own genetic memory from a life that never properly ended.

Jayce wants to be angry. He wants to touch Viktor. He wants too many things, sorted from ascending or descending, and he wants them all to happen simultaneously, to ricochet off one another and impend into one brilliant display of vulgarity and relief. He wants one hundred things. One thousand things. He wants every wish and nightmare to crush him all at once, and then maybe the feeling in his chest will feel more like a serendipitous misery that he can understand.

He ignores it.

He copes.

Jayce watches Viktor move around his own apartment like a cat.

He’s overly cautious. Prickly. He curves into himself in a shape so organic that it could not be dead or alive, and yet Jayce cannot find a way to articulate it with how many walls Viktor has shielding his expression from his intention.

Jayce finds himself biting down old arguments. Old wounds begging to be dug into. He doesn’t know how to make whatever Viktor has become uncoil itself.

Jayce finds himself digging his fingers into his thigh. He wants so badly to reach out and assign feeling to memory. He doesn’t know how to convince himself that Viktor is even real.

There is no relief.

Jayce manages one stab at the false memory tearing apart his thoughts, “Your voice sounds… lower. Almost.”

Viktor smiles like a snake from his spot on the couch, toothy and sly. “I smoke.”

“Ah. Of course,” Jayce replies, sliding into the spot on the opposite end, “I forgot you’re engaged to killing yourself. Shame you couldn’t bring her along to the wedding, right?”

Viktor does his half smile then, brighter than the previous, the one he doesn’t seem to realize he’s capable of. He twists in place so he’s facing Jayce, and Jayce can’t help his stare.

“Well, sure, it's not like you were my first choice,” Viktor says, smug as sin.

“Yeah? How many people turned the one and only, the glorious Viktor down?”

Golden eyes flutter half shut, flickering to the side as if embarrassed. As if Viktor were capable.

He says, “is that relevant?” with the dismissive attitude of a child.

Jayce can’t help his own smile. He turns his cheek into the back of Viktor’s couch to stifle the feeling.

“I’m kidding, V. I know you’re universally beloved. That’s why you got all the T.A. spots, clearly.”

“Yeah. Great luck with my T.A. spots,” Viktor breathes out a laugh, “expelled and my research stolen less than a month later. Thanks for the reminder.”

“I tried–”

And here Viktor hits some sort of limit, some kind of hard edge that cuts him away from whatever soft thing he was becoming as he says, “You didn’t.”

The words stick in the air like nails.

It’s quiet. There is no tension, no mounting anger, just a simple fact and Jayce’s own heart breaking itself out of his throat in an immaculate sort of nightmare induced nausea. Jayce doesn’t know what to say or how to explain himself, how to tell that he would have tried if he had been capable of anything at all.

He wants to say something, but Viktor untangles himself in a great tumble of arachnid limbs and webbing before Jayce can manage to find a word that sounds human.

“Come on,” Jayce says instead, annoyance sinking into his voice like an anchor.

“No,” Viktor says, whirling to look at him with the most ravaged expression Jayce could have imagined, “I don’t want to talk about this. It’s over. That isn’t my life.”

Jayce bristles. “Yes, it is. You tried to fucking kill yourself in that lab, and you left me behind, so. That is your fucking life as well as it’s mine.”

“I told you I didn’t want to talk about this.”

“Do you want me to just sit here and pretend you don’t exist?”

Viktor cuts him off with a delighted, “Yes, actually, I do.”

And Jayce talks over him just the same, “Do you seriously expect me to do that? I haven’t seen you in years. And now we live together, your idea by the way, so you’re not allowed to wall off what of our tragic fucking backstory is acceptable to exist and what isn’t. Don’t be a fucking asshole, Viktor.”

“Then don’t be so stupid, Jayce,” Viktor’s tongue flashes along the bottom of his teeth, pressing to his canine as if keeping him from something impermissible, “get your stuff.”

And he stalks back into the bedroom as if the conversation is anywhere near finished.

Jayce has never seen Viktor not run from a situation.

He’s the most cowardly man alive, the sort of person who would dig his own grave if it meant he could sleep in it, and for a moment Jayce is impeccably tired.

It has been a day and he is exhausted.

Jayce stands, meanders to pull his suitcases towards the bedroom, and submits to Viktor’s will.

(Night. We see VIKTOR alone. He seems on the precipice of a disaster, each part of him taut as a wire. His room is unprepared for guests to any common onlooker, the corners cluttered and the walls awash with personal miscellany. He is unwell.)

It’s been less than twenty-four hours. It’s been less than twelve hours.

He can’t do this.

He needs another solution, or a way out that doesn’t involve going through, or he needs a way to carve the sticky, mangled mess of emotion from his chest before it threatens to spill out of his mouth and dirty the carpet.

Viktor’s hands are shaking, both of them, metal be damned, and that is something particularly disgusting about him.

From beyond the bedroom door comes the sound of wheels rolling over carpet, Jayce’s steady footsteps accompanying them like an executioner dragging their blade, and for a bare moment Viktor feels something like guilt lance the center of his mind and trickle down into his body. He almost wants to cry. He almost wants to apologize. Instead, he turns to flick the lightswitch on as Jayce pulls the door open.

For a moment longer there’s terse silence. Viktor is sure Jayce will try to force him back into the conversation he so artfully declined, so well tensed for it that he almost flinches at Jayce’s sweeping curiosity towards the bedroom.

Instead: “You weren’t kidding.”

Viktor shifts his gaze to Jayce’s face like it might burn him. “About what?”

“About sharing a bed.”

“Obviously,” Viktor says, moving to point at the side of the bed devoid of any pillows. His own are stacked on the left side of the bed in a comfortable semi-circle, “you can sleep there. Half of the closet is cleared and one of the drawers. I assume you know we are not sharing toothpaste. And I assume you know to wear clothes when you sleep.”

He stops, considering, and then punctuates the explanation with a succinct, “Goodnight.”

Jayce’s expression flares and Viktor is able to point out: amusement, disbelief, staunch affection, and incredulity. There is no: disgust, rage, displeasure.

“You’re putting me to bed?” Jayce asks, leaning his hip to rest against the doorframe.

“It’s eight pm,” Viktor replies easily. He does not react when Jayce’s laugh counters him in a softness so sweet it seems suffocating.

“Sure. Do you think I’m a ten year old?”

“I think you’ve gone to sleep at eight every night since you were sixteen years old. I fail to see how this would’ve changed in the few years we were unacquainted.” Which seems like a double standard when he’s barred Jayce from mentioning the period. It also feels like Jayce’s karma for even trying to bring it up in front of Viktor.

The corner of Jayce’s mouth ticks downwards.

“I sleep at nine now.”

“Ah. So you’ve made it to twelve years old. What a monumental change.”

Jayce rolls his eyes, petulant and beaten, and Viktor manages a sort of almost-smile at the sight.

“Whatever,” he says, lifting from his spot at the door to stalk to his side of the bed. Viktor moves as if repelled by his presence, replacing Jayce’s absence from the doorframe.

Jayce tracks the move with his head, and when Viktor hesitates at the threshold, calls out, “You’re not coming to bed?”

“I sleep at two.” He feels trapped in his own home. Viktor is a fly stumbling into a web of his own making, the call of misery like a siren song when it comes from between Jayce’s teeth.

(A part of him says, sure, he could sleep. He’s tired enough. Jayce is comfortable enough company.)

(The better part of him says, crawl out the window and hope the fall kills you quickly.)

Jayce doesn’t reply right away, and Viktor doesn’t turn to find his gaze. He lets the moment curdle like milk between them. He hopes the rot will keep Jayce an arm’s length away from whatever horrible thing he’s become.

Meaning, Jayce’s touch on the side of Viktor’s neck, on the spot where his pulse sits and groans a steady rhythm, takes him by surprise. Viktor twists immediately, his skin sliding along Jayce’s fingers the whole way. He finds nothing but curiosity. He finds nothing but Jayce’s distraction.

From here Viktor can see Jayce’s throat bob as he tilts, his hand sliding into the space between Viktor’s shirt and his skin, fingers grazing across his collarbone. He pulls at the fabric with the motion, revealing flesh and ink in such a clinical way that Viktor shies away before Jayce can properly make a snap judgement.

“Are those new?” Jayce asks, his voice gilded in indecency.

Viktor slaps at Jayce’s still raised hand, knowing he’s curious before thoughtful by nature, and he snaps, “no.”

A lie.

“Liar. Those are new,” he takes a step closer between the words so he can slide Viktor’s sleeve up his wrist, “let me see.”

“No,” Viktor repeats, pulling his arm away entirely. He shifts backwards again and meets the wall at his back.

Jayce follows him, mere inches taller but towering enough that Viktor straightens his back in an attempt to regain his own sense of threat.

“Mind your own business, Giopara.” He lets an edge of antagonism lilt into his voice, and he knows that inviting a fight isn’t helpful but it’s fun and he’s had no one to tear into for ages.

It’s a guilty pleasure and–

Viktor misses this. The realization hits like a ton of bricks atop a concussion, dealing damage to a wound already inflicted, but it doesn’t stop the vapid desire curling into the tips of his fingers. He remembers snapping at Jayce. Arguing with Jayce. Swinging at Jayce. The sharp, sour sound that their teeth made when they snapped together and drew blood from caught lips.

Jayce isn’t far behind. He leans in further, meeting Viktor’s height with closeness, as he says, “come on, V, it’s hardly anything I haven’t seen before.”

He’s barely hiding the curve of his smile.

Viktor feels the color red before he even sees it, indignance flaring like a grease fire within him. He backs off immediately until he is pressed fully to the wall behind him in the mockery of a casual lean. He lets his features meld into disgust. He pretends this weight tearing at his guts is displeasure instead of giddy adrenaline.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you don’t remember me peeling your shirt off in the hall between your BioChem lab and that one janitorial closet? Likely.”

This is part of the corpse that shouldn’t be dredged up. Part of the off-limit crime scene. Part of the blood that he’s begging to putrefy before he’s forced to clean it up.

Meaning, it should not taste so good to dredge his teeth into the corpse and let its decay flourish over his tongue.

Viktor’s gaze slides the meet Jayce’s with the appropriate amount of disdain. “You must be mistaking me for another one of your countless dalliances. Campus bicycle, are we?”

Jayce’s laugh is like ribbon. It ties Viktor’s heart in a bow and tugs.

He smiles fully into his words, too amused to even be upset, and Viktor finds that this specific theory is still unreasonable despite his best efforts. Jayce had never been particularly popular. He was blunt and self-centered and the most selfish man alive, and somehow the horrors of customer service have yet to break him of that. Viktor’s fault for assuming someone so utterly entrenched in their own ego was capable of any growth.

Jayce says: “You can’t seriously believe I was hooking up with anyone besides you.”

“We weren’t hooking up,” Viktor hisses, moving to flick Jayce’s forehead in a move so predictable that Jayce catches his wrist and lowers it before he can even make contact, “and this just proves you’ve been bitchless for four years now. Hardly something to brag about.”

“Would you believe me if I said I was in love with you?”

“No.”

Jayce’s expression shudders through a cacophony of emotions in a matter of heartbeats and then falls to blankness. It’s uncanny in the way that it isn’t dredged in Jayce’s usual brand of open flagrancy, and Viktor feels his nerves prickle when Jayce fails to respond in time. Suddenly it’s real. Suddenly it means something.

Again, the moment sours. His mistake.

They are not allowed to have been in love with one another. Love does not exist for someone like Viktor. It is an accumulation of chemicals and selfish need, the act of claiming someone because you want what they can give you. That, or a dopamine hit. He’s not stupid enough to fall for either. He’s not stupid enough to believe that anyone as smart as them could rely on anything but themselves.

Viktor’s gaze flickers away and back, uncomfortable.

Maybe this isn’t what he missed. They’ve lost something in their years apart.

(The corpse between them bloats on its own shame and threatens to burst.)

Desperate for something shapeless, Viktor spits out: “I got cut-lines in the places I believe would be enhanced best by augmentation.”

“What,” Jayce asks, stupid and honest as ever.

Viktor slides his sleeve up for Jayce to see the carefully lined tattoos, all dotted lines in segments. His wrist. Circling the crook of his elbow. Lining along the joint of his shoulder. He looks like a butcher’s guide, segmented into the pieces that are fatty and the pieces that are lean, the spot you would thrust in a blade to separate bone from being, and the part where you would slide a razor to remove the skin in one clean slice.

Jayce’s fingers pull a line down his forearm, tracing the guideline as if entranced beyond any sensibility.

The touch is so soft that it burns.

“You still want to cut your body into pieces and become a robot.” Jayce’s expression hasn’t taken on the vagrant disgust that anyone else’s might. Instead it looks almost sad. Viktor wishes he was disgusted.

He goes to cover himself. “Cybernetically enhanced. With the proper grant money and facilities it’s possible.”

“Sweetheart, you know I adore you, but I really thought that was the exhaustion induced psychosis when you first brought this up.”

Viktor bristles. “It was. Originally. But the logic was sound, the theory is reasonable, and it’s not my fault that test subjects are impossible to find anymore.”

“You need any real research, Viktor. Clinical trials take forever to be approved and even then you need to be sure everything is already going to work. There are no subjects without equipment, without actual–”

“I have the equipment.”

“Shoddily made prosthetics from your living room, right.”

“My arm is functional.”

“Your arm is functional. I can tell from how you walk that your leg hurts like it's trying to cut you in half. And either way, you still sawed them off while high out of your mind and half bled out on the floor of an unsupervised lab, V. You could have died. You’re a genius but you’re so impeccably stupid, it’s almost impressive.”

“Thank you for the observation, Jayce. I’m sure everyone is so impressed by you and your superior intellect. Clearly you know more than everyone else, living or dead. Should I remind you that this is your fault?”

Jayce frowns.

Viktor continues, emboldened by Jayce’s silence, “I would have been fine. I would have succeeded if you hadn’t fucking called the cops on me. You’re the reason my life ended. This is your fault.”

“You can’t actually think that.”

He doesn’t. He does.

Viktor pushes past Jayce, angry and half stumbling on the carpet with how numb his entire body feels.

(A part of him says, he missed this. The all-encompassing anger. He missed Jayce.)

(The worse part of him says, hurt him until he never tries to look at you again.)

“Why do you care what I think?” Viktor spits, speaking to the air in front of him rather than looking at Jayce for another second, “you never did before.”

He doesn’t need to turn. Jayce’s hand finds his shoulder and yanks him backwards. It’s not the sort of strength that he can even register, not nearly hard enough to hurt, not enough to make him remember it as much as he remembered Jayce’s gentle reverence on the skin of his wrist.

Jayce isn’t even yelling. He sounds defeated.

Viktor wants to scream.

“This was always your problem, Viktor. No one else’s opinion matters as much as yours. You can’t actually think any of that is real.”

“It isn’t yet.”

Here, Jayce cracks. “Sweetheart. You’re delusional.”

“And you’re a corporate sellout,” Viktor wants to laugh, but the sound that echoes out of his mouth sounds like a strangled animal, whining and loud, “looks like we’re both failures.” 

Jayce sighs, crossing his arms across his chest in what can only be a signifier of ultimate submission, and the look of it makes Viktor smile.

Jayce’s expression shudders. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what, Giopara?”

“Like I pushed arsenic down your throat and you liked it.”

Viktor’s smile widens by a fraction. He knows he looks insane. He feels it.

“Oh, Jayce,” there is some slippery humor chasing his voice, pulling it taut, “that would have been preferable. I would rather you had let me die. You can’t really think this is preferable.”

Jayce’s sigh comes out warbling, wobbling, the sort of defeated sound of a man that cannot take another hit but bears his face to the executioner's blade anyways.

He says, “I dont–”

And his voice breaks open. Viktor watches him turn away again, one hand going to smooth his hair as if that will seal all of him back together into one thing that does not threaten to break at the smallest of inconveniences. Viktor cannot find the place to rip him apart like this. There are too many lifted corners. Too many abrasions, microtears begging to be pulled, and to pick one would be to ignore the others. He is a lousy butcher with a cut of meat bleeding while his hands shake.

“I don’t want to fight about this. Please. Viktor.”

Then Jayce deals the killing blow as he says, “I’m sorry,” like the words have any meaning at all.

“Fine,” Viktor wants to be angry and all he can manage is a dead neutrality. His vocal cords are nothing but power lines that have never felt a surge, their bodies forgotten and plasticky and failed, “get out then. Go find someone else.”

Jayce’s eyes snap to him like he’s witnessing a car accident. “Viktor.”

“What?” He wants a fight. He wants to watch Jayce blame him.

“You’re being mean.”

His jaw tightens with a snap, teeth clicking as he bites back something scathing.

The air is tense enough that a knife could not cut it, harsh enough that it nearly burns, and Viktor cannot bear to loosen his mouth enough to even counter it. He does not look at Jayce. He does not speak.

From his periphery, Viktor watches Jayce’s body loosen. An exhale pulses through him, intentional and bearing. Jayce’s gaze slides away from him. Viktor’s fingers twitch.

A moment passes.

Finally, Jayce sighs.

Time trickles like blood.

Jayce has always cowed to him when it really matters, and this is no different. He is as much a coward as Viktor is. He is a disappointment till the end.

“Why don’t you have a fire alarm?” Jayce says, soft, nodding his head to the decapitated corpse of where the alarm used to be housed.

Viktor still cannot look at him. “So I can set fires. Are you done asking stupid questions?”

Jayce’s laughter is warm and bare as a ghost, hidden like he can’t even bear to hold a grudge, and that is enough to make Viktor look at him, to chase the sound, to chase the expression gliding across Jayce’s face like something beautiful and fleeting.

He feels weak, an addict chasing a high, trailing after an end that will take him in hand and ruin him entirely. 

(Why is Jayce not upset? Why is Jayce not yelling, not rushing out, not begging to be anywhere that isn’t beside him?)

Viktor’s heart storms within his own chest, a shivering, quivering mess of emotion and stamped out anticipation. He is an animal, out of control.

“You’re going to kill Blitzcrank,” Jayce tells him, eyes scrunched in his amusement.

Viktor crosses his arms, nails digging into the skin so he does not betray an emotion better kept in his own head. He isn’t sure the expression would even come out right. His teeth feel jagged. Sharp. Too steely for his own mouth.

“Your dog, name pending, is going to be fine. We’ll open the bedroom window.”

“You’re not trapping my dog in the bedroom. Or changing his name.”

Viktor turns again to the door, stepping past Jayce and forcing his gaze away. “Goodnight.”

“Come to bed,” Jayce says, delicate and convincing.

Viktor does not answer. He shuts the door behind him without sewing up all the wounds he’s leaving behind.

Nightfall comes with a dread so old it feels familial.

Viktor spends the better half of it leaned into a couch cushion, staring at the white of his bedroom door like it might creak open and swallow him within a gaping maw of blackness. He blinks, every now and then. He convinces himself that the door is sliding open, pulled along an invisible line to an invisible hand, a brushing of fingers along the doorknob.

In that invisible sensation, Viktor finds himself wallowing. He is made up of five points of contact.

One, the spot where his neck meets bone. Stinging with Jayce’s feathered appreciation.

Two, the skin of his wrist. His heart beats there, fluttering.

Three, the parallel in steel. A thought-memory or a ghost weighing his hand to close around it.

Four, the bite of his shoulder. If only the force had been enough to shatter them both.

Five, the trailing artery down the length of his arm. Jayce’s touch dredged a wound that Viktor prayed would be his last.

In the stillness of night, Viktor is nothing but the places where his body has had the dignity of meeting Jayce’s own. He is only real where he has been touched. He has forgotten how to exist for years and years and years, and now Jayce has brought him back to living as he reminds Viktor that he is real enough to be felt.

Jayce’s voice, his gaze, his hands are a distraction, even hours later.

Swimming in Viktor’s periphery, the bedroom door sits like a monument of his terror.

He disregards it in favor of snapping a transistor into place with the pads of his thumbs.

Then, like a harbinger of doom, Viktor’s phone chirps, the trilling sound of an alarm to signify it is 2AM on the dot, and if he doesn’t sleep now he’ll be asking for whatever suffering he goes through tomorrow. He ignores it until the sound makes his teeth grit.

He ignores it a moment longer, just to make it hurt.

And when Viktor finally turns to snap the button into baleful silence, his fingers are rubbed raw and hurting. Each touch feels sparking, feels like the peaceful ache of connecting wire to battery and pulling razors along the edge of casing that don’t turn out to fit anything that matters. Each touch feels like his own personal failure.

He had built something out of nothing and it still turned out to be nothing in the end. It was humiliating. A childish agony. The tactile shape of an animal clawing at itself in a way that embarrassed and disgusted him.

Viktor stands in an aching posture. The door feels monumental, heavier than guilt and crueller than his own tongue. These were old feelings acting like he had made a place for them. He pushes the door open with one hand, creeping into the dark of the bedroom like a monster making its way beneath its own bed, and despite each of his fears, there is nothing waiting for him.

Nothing save for Jayce.

(In the blankness between light and shadow, Jayce’s breath sounds something like a memory.)

Viktor undresses slowly, bleary with a day’s exhaustion and pulling clothes off and on with the same sort of mindless droning that would come from something preprogrammed. His shirt falls to the floor, then his sweats, then his socks, one after the other. He pulls a shirt off the floor to replace his day clothes, and when it slides across his face he realizes it’s one of Jayce’s. Whatever he had worn earlier, having fallen off the edge of the bed.

The smell of him is rich and warm. Expensive like everything Jayce has always wanted.

He can’t bring himself to slide it back off his shoulders.

Half blind, Viktor tucks himself onto his bed. He pulls the comforter up to his nose, cold, and Jayce shifts beside him, turning so he can slide his hand across Viktor’s stomach and pull him closer. Viktor goes without question. He does not mention it, does not speak, barely moves until Jayce has stilled, and only then does he fit himself better into the curve of Jayce’s body. One leg hooks over Jayce’s thigh, one hand bends between the two of them, pressed against Viktor’s own chest while he burrows his face into the junction of Jayce’s neck, and he shifts until every inch of his bare skin is held against the warmth of Jayce’s. His breath puffs hot against sleep softened skin.

A routine from another life. A corpse puppeting their movements. A dream made real.

Jayce says, “goodnight,” his voice half muffled by waking and half smothered by his pillow, and Viktor mirrors the sound in an exhale. He pretends this is normal, this is fair, that he does not feel smothered in comfort, but the slow buzz of sleep creeping into his throat can find nothing to keep him from fading. He pretends that they have always had this.

Sleep comes easy then.  Fatigue claims him into perfect stillness, tucked between warmth and sweetness, and Viktor falls asleep at the same time that Jayce’s dog curls up behind him.

(We catch VIKTOR through a dream. Light fades into dark and back again. The world is a haze, intercepted by memory and mask. A clock amidst the gloom reads 4:59am. The room should feel senseless or forgotten.)

(The room should feel safe.)

He dreams of family.

A distant wedding in severity. The first dance, his mother’s approving nod and his father’s comforting smile, and in this dream it is Jayce’s hands clasped within his own. It is Jayce’s mouth smiling into his cheek, Jayce’s laughter like a balm to soothe away his anxieties, and when he stumbles Jayce is there to catch him. It is as if they have always had this, a normalcy he never allowed himself.

They repeat vows in a language Viktor can’t recognize.

They press metal onto each other's fingers, the rings so hot they burn.

Both of his hands are soft with flesh. When he steps into Jayce’s grasp, there is no pain. No miserable weight between each step. He is not himself.

Viktor is a stranger born without the disappointment he has always courted, and like this, he has made everyone perfectly fond. Like this, they’re happy.

Jayce is smiling. The smile he reserves for Viktor alone, soft and amused and adoring, and Viktor is the one who tugs him forward, desperate and needing a moment of reality while he is allowed it –

He wakes up in a startling jerk. Sunlight peaks through the blinds, grey and cold, and he feels the loss of Jayce’s warmth like a missing limb. 

Viktor is idly aware of weight being pulled over him, the comforter, and then a pillow being arranged beside him, a replacement.

His breath patters like a rabbit heart.

“I want a croissant,” Viktor says, into the murk of waking.

“Sure, sweetheart. Go back to bed.”

“I’m serious.” His voice fails to harbor the edge he feels it should. He wants to find Jayce’s hand and pull him back, to demand he maintains the temperature he’s set beneath the blankets if he’s so insistent on closeness. He wants to return to the feeling of happiness. Viktor can’t find the energy.

Jayce’s tone swells with pleasure as he says, “I know you are. I’ll get you one, it’ll be here when you wake up.”

Viktor hums, satisfied, and he thinks to ask for something else, something worse, when sleep overcomes him again.

This time he dreams of waves. Water crawling into circuit board, and he can feel the energy of it thrumming within his fingertips. He shifts and pain tugs at the junction of his elbow, heavier than he remembers.

His shoulder aches.

His back feels like a split wound or a thousand needles digging into flesh, and when he steps away from the pain it chases after him like a shadow crawls through sunlight. He is drowning. Sinking beneath salted waves.

He opens his mouth, ready to drink, ready to drown and choke on wiring and water. He knows his body has never learned to swim in anything but agony with how easily it takes the pleasure of an end.

Instead of the tilt of death, Viktor feels brilliant warmth reach for him. He shakes beneath it. He breathes in air like shattered glass.

Jayce’s voice cuts through the fantasy in bellows of light, murmuring words that sound half like pity and half like disgust. No matter how many times he reaches for the sound, the weight of his limbs keeps him from touching that light.

Viktor thinks that Jayce might have been happy to see him dead. It would have been a mercy towards them both, to feel the end like a friend, to feel the end beside a friend, and yet, as Viktor claws at sand and tide to return to rushing of waves and current –

He wakes in time to feel Jayce’s weight settle beside him on the mattress.

Again, he is breathless.

“Did you not set an alarm?”

“You’ve ruined my routine,” Viktor says, each word chalky in his throat.

“I haven’t, actually,” Jayce pauses, smug with his fingers petting at Viktor’s forehead, “you just have a grudge against me.”

At that, Viktor manages to crack one eyelid open. “Stop touching me. Seductress.”

He gets nothing but a gigawatt smile, an ivory thing, a diamond expression like the sun itself has imbued Jayce with a furious victory. Viktor closes his eyes again.

“Oh? You admit you want me?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

Viktor allows Jayce’s hand to rest at the center of his chest. So comfortably fitting that it might as well belong there. He provides, “On whether or not you brought me a croissant.”

Jayce is a disgusting thing in the morning. Too alive to be real. Viktor wants to smother him, wants to silence the vibrant sound of his amusement and feel blood break beneath his hands, and yet, he sits in stillness while Jayce presses a warm cup into his feeble grip and a crinkling bag beside his hip.

He courts the corpse between them while he can. He lets memory pull a threat between his teeth and picks at no more scabs than is allowed. He is an animal performing weakness.

(Viktor figures that he deserves something sweet before the end.)

(Day Four. A cluttered bedroom just before noon.  The walls are riddled with holes, plastered over and slathered in notes from projects long forgotten. In the corner there is a photograph of two young adults, their bodies pressed together from cheek to hip, smiling. The paper is stained with water damage. From a pillowed bed comes the sound of laughter. From outside comes the interruption of rainfall. The scene cuts to the feeling of skin pressing to skin.)

(Curtain.)

(END OF ACT TWO.)