Chapter Text
The next day after talking to Silco Jayce leaves for the lab and Viktor is still in his room.
He is still there when Jayce returns in the evening, the lights are off in the apartment and nothing in the kitchen has been disturbed. Jayce hovers near the door to Viktor’s bedroom, looking at the stripe of the soft warm light underneath and then goes to the kitchen.
He makes Viktor’s favorite tea with sweetmilk, and waits for the quiet Come in before entering Viktor’s room.
Viktor is curled on his side in the bed, face pale and there is unhealthy flush on his cheeks. His forehead is hot beneath Jayce’s palm, and the tea is forgotten on the nightstand when Jayce sits down beside Viktor and tries to push away the memories of all the times that he was waiting at his friend’s bedside.
Fear grips the words in his throat, but even silent he has always been easy to read.
“It is fine, Jayce,” Viktor speaks up. He sounds raw and tired, and Jayce should have checked on him this morning. Instead, he just left him here alone for the whole day. And for what? For work that is ninety percent stalling, lest he finishes a 10-year long project before the two of them can even decide what direction they want to take it. “It’s just a fever, I will sleep it off.” Viktor pulls himself up and sits down in his bed. He takes the tea from the nightstand and lowers his eyes, watching the murky liquid. “Still have ten more years anyway, remember?” He adds impassively, like it doesn’t bother him that not only he has a ticking timer inside him, but he knows precisely how much time there is left.
There must be something in Jayce’s eyes when Jayce looks at him, or perhaps it is the way he is gripping the covers on Viktor’s bed. Because Viktor glances down on Jayce’s hand curled up in a tight fist, looks back up at his face and frowns. And then there is a hand with bony long fingers covering Jayce’s fist. It is too warm and slightly clammy, but the fingertips are somehow still as cool as they always are, and Jayce feels his hand relaxing, and only now notices the pain in his jaw from how hard he has been grinding his teeth.
“What’s happened to you, Jayce?..” Viktor asks tiredly, and somehow it sounds like Jayce doesn’t have to answer. Like Viktor will accept never knowing, if Jayce chooses not to share.
But Jayce perhaps has always been his own enemy, so he he asks,
“What do you mean?”
The hand around his fist pulls back and Viktor lowers his eyes, unseeingly watching the tea in the mug.
“You never showed that much worry for my well being before.” Viktor shrugs with one shoulder dismissively, “Well, I suppose you had other matters to occupy your mind.”
And Jayce deserves this, he really thinks he does, and he wouldn’t be able to come up with an argument against this even if he wanted to. He doesn’t want to.
He hangs his head and pushes back the memories of Viktor’s lifeless body before him, and fights against the urge to just grab his hand and press his thumb against the pulse point there and never let go. Jayce is looking down at the blue-and-red blanket laid over Viktor’s duvet and listening to Viktor drinking his tea, and tries not to think.
The mug is set aside with a quiet clank against the nightstand, and Viktor slides down under the covers, pulls up Jayce’s… no, already his, blue-red blanket up to his chin. His eyes are trained before him, looking at nothing, likely seeing something only he can see. Jayce understands this. He himself often finds himself doing the same. Oh, how broken they are…
“Can we really do it again, Jayce?” It is a quiet, tired question, unsure and bereft of any hope.
Jayce swallows around the everpresent lump in his throat.
“Hexcore?” he asks. Viktor turns to him and shakes his head slightly.
“No,” he says. “Us.”
Jayce sucks in a breath and blinks against the stinging in his eyes.
“I…” he begins and trails off. He doesn’t know the answer to this question. It should be simple. The things they have been through, that connection between them engraved in the arcane… They should be irrevocable. In all the timelines and all possibilities. But it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt.
“We both are not the same people we were, Jayce, we―”
“Come back to the lab,” Jayce interrupts Viktor before he can say something that will stretch out that chasm between them, pulling something that is connecting them too taut for comfort. “Please, Viktor…” Come back to me.
Viktor watches Jayce’s face for a moment and then nods.
“Of course, Jayce. Of course.”
~
It takes Viktor almost a week to recover.
Despite his protests, Jayce calls in a doctor to check on him. The doctor listens to Viktor’s lungs and checks his temperature and then patiently does it all again when Jayce can’t stop hovering and asking if she is sure she didn’t hear the beginning of a deadly disease in Viktor’s lungs. Viktor smiles at her, and apologises for ‘my partner ’, and she only laughs not unkindly saying she could only wish for such a caring husband for herself.
Viktor doesn’t comment. And Jayce is too busy swallowing around all kinds of feelings lodged in his throat to answer. It is a new thing for him, to be out of words, to process inside more than speak out loud. It slows him down, he thinks. Not in a bad way, but just enough to notice things, outside of him as well as inside. There are a lot.
The doctor leaves, and Jayce goes to buy the medicine against the flu that she recommended. He takes the next few days off as well, and Viktor just sighs, resigned, and doesn’t argue.
Every day Jayce makes Viktor his favorite tea, and reminds him of the medicine, despite that he has no doubt in his partner’s capability to remember such a simple task on his own. He freezes at every cough he hears, and presses his hand against Viktor’s forehead every morning, despite that a thermometer certainly does a better job measuring Viktor’s temperature.
Jayce barely sleeps. Listens to Viktor’s tired sighs and coughs through the wall connecting their rooms, and is afraid to wake up in the morning and hear only silence. When he inevitably falls asleep, the dreams are all the same. Stirred up by Jayce’s increased worry, his brain diligently mixes up the worst of the memories of Viktor’s deaths, and the reality he is in. He wakes up with his heart pounding, afraid to go into Viktor’s room and see his nightmares come into reality.
It gets only marginally better after Viktor recovers. They begin coming together into the lab. The first day Viktor spends sitting at his desk staring silently at his empty notebook and the tools scattered across the surface.
He seems to shake himself out of it the day after and begins writing something in his notebook, as Jayce works on stabilizing the crystal for Viktor’s leg brace. After lunch, which Viktor barely touches, Viktor rolls his chair to Jayce’s desk, studies his notes and immediately spots an error in Jayce’s math that rendered the last several hours of work useless. For the rest of the day they talk math and physics, and Jayce thinks he needs to make more errors in his work if it helps to make Viktor look almost like his old self, distracted from his burdens by throwing himself into science again.
Jayce has missed this. Missed these talks, and the way Viktor’s face is so animated when he argues equations and theories. Missed working together with him, and finishing each other's sentences.
But for every new step they take together it is still not good enough just yet and the fallbacks are inevitable.
Sleep is still difficult. Every night Jayce sees dreams and sometimes they are so vivid he has trouble discerning them from reality. He wakes up more tired than he was when he went to bed and then spends the whole day waiting to be pulled away from this word and into another one.
He watches Viktor and the perspective of being separated again makes the blood run cold in his veins. It must be unhealthy on some level to be so attached to someone. But after what they have gone through, can they even be measured against something that is considered to be normal? Can Jayce really be blamed for this when half of the nights he experiences himself dying, and then wakes up with a scream lodged itself in his throat. And the other half he is watching Viktor die, from Jayce’s hand, explosion or illness, and at these nights his awakening is silent, but the pillow is wet with tears.
Jayce used to enjoy dreaming. Sometimes he was getting good ideas in his sleep, his brain processing the problems he was faced with during the day, offering him solutions at night.
Now all he sees in his dreams is death.
And Viktor is sadly not spared of this either.
When Jayce is woken by his dreams in the middle of the night, he almost always hears Viktor shuffling in his room, just a thin wall away.
Sometimes Jayce walks out to get water and Viktor is already in the kitchen preparing tea. Jayce doesn’t ask what dreams keep Viktor up at night. He thinks he can guess and every time he thinks about it the guilt of what he did nearly suffocates him. He should have tried talking. He chose the simpler option.
Viktor doesn’t ask what Jayce dreams of either and Jayce is not eager to put one more burden on his friend’s shoulders.
One time Jayce wakes up with his heart pounding and a tight ring of headache around his head. His hands are trembling, no, only one, he realizes as he opens his eyes.
Viktor is sitting at the side of the bed, one of Jayce’s hands is held tightly between his. He is in his pajamas, and he looks sad and tired.
“You called for me, in your sleep,” Viktor says quietly. His thumb strokes against Jayce’s knuckle. “You sounded… distressed.”
It is a dream, Jayce thinks. He is still sleeping, perhaps, imagining this. But it is better than his previous dream, where he held Viktor’s dead body in his arms.
It is all so, so tiring…
Jayce moves before he can register what he is doing. He sits down, pulls his hand from Viktor’s hold, and then pulls him into an embrace. Hesitantly Viktor’s arms wrap around him in return.
“You died,” Jayce mumbles into the crook of Viktor’s neck. The ends of Viktor’s messy hair tickle his forehead. “You died, you know, in the explosion.” He is so slight, Jayce can probably wrap one arm around him. Viktor’s vertebrates are sharp under Jayce’s palms. “It broke your spine, you know, we didn’t notice at first, I thought…”
“Jayce.”
“I thought you were just unconscious, but you weren’t breathing, I tried, Viktor, I really tried.” Jayce sucks in a breath, and Viktor’s arms tighten around him. “And then again, when I…” Jayce thinks he might be crying, but it is hard to say. Viktor’s neck is warm and damp against his face, and when Jayce breathes in there is this faint scent of skin that Jayce can’t compare with anything, but it is pleasant and very comforting. He buries his nose in it and Viktor’s breath hitches slightly, but his arms are still tight around Jayce. “And then there were other lives, so many, and you died in them too, and I couldn’t do anything, just watch and then leave. But I keep seeing it, V, keep dreaming it.” There is a hand in Jayce’s hair, cool fingers with blunt nails scratching slightly at his scalp, and Jayce tries to focus on this feeling, tries to pull himself out of this morbid reminiscing.
“That dream of yours,” Viktor says quietly, and Jayce feels the movement of his throat against the side of his face when he swallows. “The one with Zaun without Gray.” The hand in Jayce’s hair pulls away, and Viktor relaxes his hold around him. Regretfully Jayce leans back. In the warm light of the small lamp on his nightstand, which Viktor must have turned on before waking Jayce up, the pale skin on the side of his neck is slightly red from Jayce pressing his stubble against it. “Would you tell me about it?”
And Jayce tells.
He carefully omits the rings on their fingers, and how he cried, his head in Viktor’s lap, and the way Viktor’s accent rolled around ‘dear’.
Jayce hasn’t begun unpacking it yet. He knows he will have to, sooner or later.