Chapter Text
Jayce wakes with no breath left to cry out. He thrashes between the bed and the covers, soft and terrifying in their unfamiliarity. The room is strange, and Viktor is not here, and he still feels the touch of the arcane in every part of his body–
The walls begin to close in. It’s freezing fucking cold.
In his panic, he’s absolutely tangled in the sheets, and he ends up pulling them to the floor with him when he fights his way out of bed. He hits the floor hard. Blinding pain shoots through his left leg and up his spine. Heart rate rabbiting even faster, he half-crawls, half-drags himself over to the corner to put his back against the wall.
The prey animal part of his brain feverishly scans for danger. He finds it everywhere he looks. The clothes on his body he’s never seen before, the cold breeze from the next room, the space on the other side of the double bed. The leg brace lying on the bedside table. A black thing with wide fabric straps he’s never seen before, but somehow some instinct tells Jayce it’s his own.
He shakes his head to try and clear it. Forces himself to suck air into his burning lungs.
Clutching the walls, bed, shelves, he pulls himself to his feet. He can barely move his leg. The pain hasn’t yet subsided, and he swears through gritted teeth, deliberately ignoring the unfamiliar brace as he limps forward in some kind of twisted survival impulse.
The doorway to the next room is similarly agape. It’s surgically bright and cold, empty save for the large window where the wintry air blows in – and the silhouette balanced on the low windowsill.
Knees to chest, the shadow uncurls, but does not look back. Every movement is slow, weighed with a recognisable pain. Strangely beautiful. The wrongness of it all makes Jayce feel sick. The shadow moves, cast in the blue-white light of recognition for a millisecond. It’s Viktor that tips towards the open window.
Jayce nearly screams, heart in his throat, arm outstretched.
The figure makes it a mere few inches before a soft thunk of forehead against recessed glass. The sharp angles of that lovely face soften in defeat.
Jayce squints, head pounding, staggers another step to him. The top panel of the window remains open to the colourless city outside, and the bottom of it stays closed. Keeping Viktor in.
Jayce can’t really feel his fingers, but he knows so well the weight, the shape, of Viktor’s limbs.
Viktor is still and quiet, rigid enough that Jayce has to remind himself they’re both alive. He swallows, throat like gravel, and manages to whisper Viktor’s name to fill the silence.
He makes space with his body, trying to coax him off the ledge and inside. Viktor relents easier than he was expecting him to. It’s slow and painful, and Jayce sees a brace on Viktor’s leg and wonders if a cane lies somewhere across this place that is apparently their home.
There is, and Viktor’s hands are unsure on its handle. Jayce begins to realise how fucked they are.
It snows that evening, and Jayce knows what snow is, knows what heaters are, just as he knows he should probably wear the leg braces. He refuses. He figures out the rest. This is how it’s going to be. Viktor settles aimlessly on the couch, and Jayce yanks over the blanket draped there. They both stare for a moment at the place where their hands touch on the knitted fabric.
A child’s game, connect the dots, extrapolation and interpolation.
There’s some kind of scar on Jayce’s palm, warped and unidentifiable. Viktor curls his fingers in a way that tells him there’s a matching one there.
It rhymes somewhat with the rune he remembers, acceleration.
Jayce gets caught in the feeling of it, the wind whipping past his face, the various ways that it could blow up a life or disable you forever – before he cuts that thought off abruptly. A well-trodden path for his mind, it feels like, and once he’s started remembering he’s not going to be able to stop. Neither of them can afford that right now.
The first few days, he spends in an incredibly ineffective form of denial. His feelings for Viktor, yes, always. But also… just how bad Viktor is getting. And probably not for the first time.
Jayce can’t sleep. He doesn’t sleep, for several days in a row.
He’s not quite sure if Viktor is, but he’s not willing to disturb his rest just in case.
Viktor gets the one bedroom and Jayce paces until he can’t walk anymore – at least until he starts seeing shadows.
Quick movement in the corners of his vision.
He’s exceedingly proud of himself when he thinks ah, sleep deprivation, instead of the infinitely more attractive I’m clearly being haunted.
Their hair is grown out. It’s been… an indeterminate length of time. Viktor looks different, still, from when he was in the commune, hair not spilling over his shoulders as much as then, but it’s similar in that the under-layer of it is bleached near-white. Jayce doesn’t know why, but then again, does he know why for any of this?
There is no cosmic iridescence to either of them, no glow anymore.
Viktor is…
He’s Viktor. That is all that matters to Jayce. Their language – even their language, the one the two of them had spent so much time building – has no words to pull apart and label what either of them are now. Jayce, Viktor, no more, no less.
Well. Made a bit less, maybe, by all that they’d gone through.
Viktor, now, is the hollowness of his expression, the pain in his eyes, the absolute dead silence between his lips, the scars, God, the scars.
Jayce would never say it aloud, but he looks to him like one large scar. An entire being made of a barely-healing wound. His right eye socket looks fractured and painful.
The scar tissue continues in a thin, surgical line down the middle of Viktor’s face, bisecting it exactly. It’s a little different from the other marks he carries – flat and almost unnoticeable if you’re not looking for it. A small patch in the middle of Viktor’s hairline is silvery from the root. Jayce touches it as often as Viktor lets him. It gives him an excuse to cup Viktor’s face so tenderly between his palms, tracing his thumbs down his forehead, rewriting the line over and over again.
The TV in this apartment stays running. Racking up an energy bill, probably, but Jayce has bigger things to think about. Viktor’s silence is… well. He needs to get used to it, he supposes.
Jayce loves him, he does. He just can’t take the quiet. It sends him back to jumping at everything that is or even could be behind him, full fight-or-flight that takes hours to calm, only to come out at rock bottom.
The programming is mostly nonsense in the background – except for when an odd line of dialogue cuts through clearly.
“You’ve got to be cut out for the job, if you’re going to be a nurse. Remember that one rookie hire? We drove him so off his rocker he was picking holes in his arms in a week.”
Viktor tenses, all at once, and the air in the entire place goes thin.
Jayce snatches at the remote. That’s the end of that show.
Viktor rarely lets Jayce see when he’s doing… it. Hurting himself, though Jayce doesn’t like thinking about it that way. Doesn’t like what it implies, accurate though it might be.
Jayce is kind of grateful for that, in some fucked-up way. It’s… sickening. Turns his stomach, to watch Viktor tear through layer after layer of his skin like it’s nothing at all.
Jayce presses his knuckles into his own eyes in frustration, but blinks the sparks away quickly to glance at Viktor again. Afraid to miss something crucial, some sign of life.
“Can you at least understand me?” he asks him. “Its okay if you can’t speak. Or don’t want to. I– I’m here, Viktor, and I’m not going anywhere. But I would love to know if you can hear me.”
There’s a long, stinging pause before Viktor gives the tiniest of nods.
Here’s what keeps getting worse, what Jayce probably should have seen from the beginning. Viktor carves himself mercilessly open, over and over, and it’s not even a fucking metaphor. He’s dragging his fingernails along the webbed pattern of his scars. He’s wounds and scabs, and every time Jayce looks up, he looks even more raw.
Jayce is, somehow, powerless to stop it.
He can bat aside V’s hands, poke him until he stops, grasp him firm yet gentle – but he learns how painfully small it is. He can’t be there all the time. There’s nothing he can do to stop the scabs from appearing, spreading, taking over Viktor’s limbs.
Nothing he’s willing to do yet, anyway.
Viktor’s shoulders are unspeakably tight when Jayce settles his palms gently on them. It’s such a human instinct, to protect the neck. It kind of makes Jayce want to cry that he’s letting him touch him there anyway.
He does his best to show his gratitude by pushing his thumbs into the muscle just the way he remembers he liked. A tad gentler, maybe – he’s unwilling to hurt him now, even a little.
It’s altogether more clear-cut, more sane, somehow, than his time in the crevasse. Maybe it’s just the presence of Viktor. Cold and silent as he is by his side, it’s still an infinite comfort. It’s not an absence, and that’s what matters. It has to. The winter numbs before it aches before it stabs deep into his bones.
Jayce catches him unfurling – or attempting to unfurl – from a tightly curled position, wincing deeply in pain.
This happens, now, and it’s how Jayce knows it’s bad again. He sees him like this, when he thinks he’s not being watched.
Any small job Jayce gives him, things he can usually do. Put on your clothes. Peel this orange. Jayce makes the mistake of leaving him alone or even just unobserved – it’s happened with Viktor literally standing just outside his line of sight. An hour will pass, maybe two, and the task won’t get done. Viktor will be almost frozen in time. The only thing different will be the blood staining his fingertips.
It’s horrible, how innocuous the expression he makes. In any other context, almost endearing. Jayce knows it, knows how it used to be painted on Viktor’s face after a long day’s work. But now, instead of elegant math and scribbled sketches, now, Viktor is bent to stare at his handiwork: open scratches gouged into the first layers of his skin. Maybe more. Red-brown of rusting blood, pink of exposed flesh.
He knows Viktor is not all there. When he does it. He doesn’t blame him. And so even as he tells him to stop, he knows it won’t work.
Worse, he can see that the impulse is something Viktor never stops wrestling with. It’s taking a toll.
Jayce wakes to the sound of a gasp and pained whimper – Viktor’s gasp and pained whimper.
He’s hunched at the opposite corner of the room, crying near-silently. Jayce is crawling to his side before he can even blink.
“Vik, it’s me, it’s Jayce. Shhh,” he soothes, taking his hands. The ceiling light flickers, and Viktor’s fingers are bloodstained, and he doesn’t stop sobbing.
“Show me?” Jayce gently turns his arms when he stays limp, pushing at his sleeves to check over his skin. “It’s okay, I promise, but can you show where?” His forearms are a battleground of a bad sight, as is usual now. But there are no fresh wounds as far as Jayce can see.
Jayce lets go, a furrow to his brow.
He strokes his thumb back and forth across the ankle cuff of Viktor’s soft pants – then tries checking them. Fending off his half-hearted objections, he pulls up the fabric. He tries to quiet his instinctive gasp when he sees the damage.
It’s so much surface area. Bloodied spots cover the entire insides of his legs.
“Have you been here the whole time since I went to sleep?”
The question doesn’t need a response, not really, and Jayce screws his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids, he can still see the red. He gives himself two seconds until he has a white-knuckle grip on his control again.
So does Viktor, apparently, swiping aside his tears already. Almost angrily. Wrapping his arms around himself, defensive the same way he used to be.
It sends Jayce right back to – a memory, maybe. An image of Viktor, knocking hesitantly on his Academy-provided door in the middle of the night. I’m fine, but do you happen to have any spare medical supplies?
Tightly crossed arms, posture closed so far off he was almost unreachable even though he was standing right in front of him. Jayce noticed the way he kept his fingetips pressed into a certain spot above his elbow.
It didn’t go anywhere more after that. Viktor backtracked so quickly Jayce was lost, floundering, Viktor a stone wall unresponsive to his questioning.
“We do not need to speak of this again. I am okay, Jayce.”
Jayce pressed him to take a small box of bandages, at least, not even knowing if that was what he needed. Worried, worried, worried beyond belief.
“I am not in any danger, I promise you. Physical or mental,” Viktor had added delicately. “Do not worry.”
Jayce swallows, hard, shattering the vision. Rearranging the shards, piecing together what he thinks Viktor would say to him now. That night, years and years ago, he got away. This time, Jayce tells Viktor, tells himself, it can be different. He can catch him in his arms, hold him close, tell Viktor he’ll take care of him forever if he’s allowed.
He’s well-practised in it by now, anyway. Ice is what Viktor needs, and disinfectants that smell as sharp as they probably feel. And he needs more, still, things that haven’t been invented yet, less bloody ways to flay himself, some clean slate to start again from.
Viktor is a good patient in that he never makes a sound. The melting water drops hit the carpet and don’t soak in for what seems like years.
Jayce can’t feel his fingertips. He runs them, icy, along Viktor’s inflamed skin, first right, then left. It is… frankly, horrible. An imitation of the way he wants to touch him.
But Viktor’s body eases up, just a little. He’s sitting on his hands to stop them magnetising themselves to the open the cuts again.
“My V,” Jayce whispers. “What am I gonna do with you?”
Jayce wishes he’d chosen biology over physics, way back when. It’s kind of a familiar thought from back when Viktor was his lab partner, wilting like a cut stem. Jayce laughs, humourless, then has to turn his back before he breaks into hysterics.
“Jesus, Viktor. It looks like you’ve been punched in the face.” He can’t pinpoint a moment when Viktor had the time to do it to himself. It looks like it should be deep and bloody and open, but his skin is trying to repair itself already, a dark matrix over the whole area on his jaw where the skin has been scraped off.
It’s funny, how the scab looks much more horrible than the damage itself, clean and clinical. And they both just have to look the other way.
Today, for once, Jayce can’t speak. The waking nightmare sticks to the inside of his mouth, tangled with reality.
They’re frozen there together, silent apart from their heaving breath, neither one of them with words for it – any of it. But once Jayce is back to himself, he settles for tilting his head down to meet Viktor’s wide eyes, to show him that at the very least he’s here, not lost to panic anymore.
He lets his eyelids slide shut again. He wishes he were… a Hexgem, weirdly. That word doesn’t even belong in this universe, this life, this after. But the concept of energy that doesn’t get depleted, not sapped forever at simply taking a step, it’s almost fantasy.
There are good days and bad days for them both.
He feels the weight of Viktor leave from beside him, and it tips abruptly, panicked, from bad right into worse.
There’s a terrible image that won’t leave his brain. Viktor just ripping his wrists open – accident, on purpose, he doesn’t know, but he can’t stop seeing the blood pour out against crumbling snow. And his hands are tied to stop it. He doesn’t have the right words to take any of Viktors’s pain away, especially not now, where the prospect of anything at all is too much, too heavy, too real for him. He is barely here.
Viktor comes back, settles by his side. Like an animal curling up to die. Jayce is faintly grateful, very grateful, really, of the physical affection that’s become so much more frequent between them lately. His own voice cracks from disuse some days. Here, lying on top of the covers, he cannot muster the strength to even look at Viktor. He’s exhausted, sick and tired of feeling this way.
Viktor’s arm brushes his side as he brings it up. Head bent. Staring at the backs of his own hands.
It clicks, and Jayce stiffens unconsciously. A pattern he knows well by know. Any moment now, the stupid fucking skin picking will start up again, and Jayce will be trapped in his own body witnessing Viktor claw at his.
But there’s a long, shakily still pause.
Viktor moves. Not to scratch across his scars but instead to settle one hand on the side of Jayce’s head. Those long, beautiful, cursed fingers, vibrating with something like hate and love all at once. Once, twice, combing through Jayce’s unbrushed hair. His other hand comes to sit beside it.
Jayce’s muscles relax. They both know it won’t last long.