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He shouldn’t have looked. Every part of him had screamed in protest, desperate to avoid failure, but he had looked, and that had been it. Though he blamed it on the soft smile and the tenderness of those oil-spill eyes, part of him knew he couldn’t have done it anyway. Not after seeing his face again, no matter the expression it harboured.
If he had looked up and seen rage, he would’ve lowered the hammer. If he saw betrayal and disgust, he would’ve lowered the hammer. If there had been nothing at all, a stoic gaze with unseeing eyes, still, he would have lowered the hammer. If he had looked…if he looked, he would always lower his hammer, his weapon—the very thing Viktor had vehemently despised. There wasn’t a single part of him that could set his eyes upon Viktor’s and bring about his ruin.
Jayce’s shoulders dropped with the weight of the hammer falling, the distorted thud of it hitting the floor barely audible for the blood rushing in his ears. His entire demeanour shifted from one so full of unhinged determination to this palpable, gut-wrenching defeat. He couldn’t do it. He had looked, and he couldn’t do it. A small part of him felt relieved—how could he go on, after committing such an act, extinguishing the life of the only one who really mattered? Mostly, he felt trapped. Fated to linger in this uncomfortable dance with Viktor. Constantly skirting around the truth of it, hinging on endless distractions to avoid the bittersweet taste of what they meant to each other. When had he fallen in love with Viktor? The realisation—that the feeling was there, dark and carnal and burning—had landed upon his shoulders while he starved in that cave. Half-crazed and isolated. It had hit him one night, while he had stared into the depths of the fire willing it to consume him whole, to end it, and had felt like the world itself was pushing him down beneath the soil, until he couldn’t breathe for it. Viktor’s name, his face, his smile a whirlwind in Jayce’s head, visions in the dark just out of reach, the answer to everything but disguising itself as more questions, more confusion.
Was it love? Something worse? Oh, but what could be worse than this?
Jayce suddenly felt very small, an insignificant actor in his own life. He hadn’t asked for any of this, hadn’t exactly had a choice in it, either. The low beat of failure thrummed in his chest, intertwined with this desperate need. Viktor. He was inescapable. He didn’t even need to lift a finger and Jayce’s resolve had crumbled around him.
“Jayce.” His voice, the way he drew out his name, emphasised the ‘y’, the elongation of his accent. It was a sound he was familiar with, that always brought a certain warmth with it, but he could hardly think over his own shuddering breaths. All at once Jayce’s chest tightened around him, folding in on itself, figmental hands clawing at his sides and forcing his muscles terse. He doubled over then, body wracking with the force of his heaving gasps. These huge, desperate sounds escaped him as his fingers dug into his knees, his chest, his throat. He couldn’t breathe, no matter the great pants of air he pulled in, none of that precious oxygen reaching anywhere important enough to stop the faintness pulling over his head. With his vision blackening at the corners like an old vignette, the sound of Viktor’s voice somewhere in the distance, the overwhelming feeling of his own hands carelessly gripping at his upper arms, at the lapels of his coat, the matted hair atop his head, Jayce fell to his knees.
The walls of Viktor’s monument closed in around him, blurred and anomalous. He briefly heard his own voice rattling in his head I won't fail I swear it followed by his agonised yell and the sound of a hexcorised blast ripping through the building. He blinked and it was gone, the silhouette of Viktor before him, hands extended as if attempting not to spook a feral animal.
He was talking but none of it reached Jayce, not even when he felt the cool touch of Viktor’s metallic hand against the nape of his neck, down the curve of his shoulders, wrapping around the broadness of his back. Jayce stared wide-eyed at a point just past the waves of Viktor’s hair, shallow, helpless breaths punched from his throat even as his partner pressed his slender body against his own, one hand placed gently to the back of his head, drawing him in.
Even as he slumped into the embrace and brought his hands to grip Viktor’s waist—almost wrapping around entirely—his mind whirred with this all-consuming sense of collapse. Jayce briefly registered the legs that slotted together around his lower back, the squeeze of them as Viktor relentlessly tried to bring them closer together, to melt into one another. It hadn’t occurred to Jayce that his partner would be just as desperate as he, filled with just as much need, but that still couldn’t claw past the deterioration of Jayce’s psyche. He had failed. He had succumbed to his basal desire, and he had failed.
He felt himself falling, losing the parts of himself he needed to fix this, disregarding any emotion that wasn’t the intense urgency of his attraction. He could physically feel it as he stopped caring; about the world, the hexcore or anything other than Viktor. Felt it slip away like shucking soiled clothes.
The hammer had been moved, he wasn’t sure when, or to where, all he could focus on was the red gleam pulsing in Viktor’s eyes, the wispy strands of white in his hair, the feel of his body against his own and the desperation in his embrace. The smell of him—flowers from the greenhouse, oil, sweetness—and the kaleidoscope anomalies etched into the sides of his face. Viktor was beautiful, ethereal, almost. He was everything and yet, in this moment, he had turned Jayce into nothing. The worst of it? Viktor probably had no idea what he had done.
Jayce shouldn’t have looked, but he had, and the second their eyes met he knew he had made an unfathomable mistake.