Chapter Text
The first thing Jayce breaks after hearing Viktor’s name is a test unit designed to survive earthquakes.
This is bad for several reasons, the least of which is that the machine belongs to Piltover Structural Dynamics and costs more than Jayce’s apartment, his car, and possibly even his entire personality if you priced it at market value, which would be difficult because most of his personality is now self-deprecating humor and a concerning talent for staying up all night for several nights in a row. It is 3:14 on a Wednesday afternoon, and Jayce is at work trying to excuse himself to two junior software engineers who, to their credit, look only mildly terrified by the fact that their lead engineer has just crushed a test unit hard enough to leave pieces of it in his palms.
The second thing he breaks is the rule he made two years ago about not looking after Viktor anymore.
*
Viktor had left in winter.
That is one of the facts Jayce hates because it sounds so sad-moon poetic. Viktor might as well have left him under falling snow, with a violinist playing beautifully in an alley and the city holding its breath for dramatic effect. In a way, Jayce saw it coming. He was stupid but not blind. He had seen Viktor becoming a stranger, seen him pulling himself inward inch by inch, folding his life into smaller and smaller shapes until there was no room for Jayce inside it anymore. Viktor had packed one suitcase and three boxes of books and the ugly caca colored scarf Jayce bought him at a market because he said it matched his eyes, which it didn’t, not even close, but Viktor wore it anyway for six months. At the end, Viktor had said, “You will be fine.”
Jayce had laughed because it was either that or collapse onto the floor. “That’s a terrible thing to say to someone you love.”
Viktor had looked at him then and for one second Jayce thought he would take it back.
*
At reception, Jayce gives his name and watches the woman behind the desk type it into the computer. Her nails are painted pink. There’s a coffee stain on her sleeve. Ordinary, pointless details keep insisting on themselves while his leg jitters under him trying to flee without the rest of his body.
“Relationship to patient?”
Whatever he says must be good enough or allowed enough. Eventually he gets a visitor sticker. A nurse calls him back, and Jayce follows her down the hallway feeling like something malignant, something growing and growing under the watchful eye of an evil god himself. He becomes suddenly, violently aware of his own body in the way medical places always make him aware of it, because they do not feel like buildings so much as traps full of specific memories.
“He’s in here,” the nurse says.
Jayce stops outside the curtain. For a second he cannot move. It is absurd. He drove through rain, he signed in, he walked the whole bright hallway, but this thin blue curtain defeats him completely. Behind it is Viktor. Behind it is not Viktor. Behind it is two years collapsing into the size of one breath.
The nurse softens. “He’s asleep right now.”
“But he’s okay?”
“He came through it. Everything went as well as we could’ve hoped.”
It should comfort him but it doesn't. It crawls into his throat and stays there, a living thing with teeth. He cannot swallow around it, not even when he finds himself in the chair beside Viktor’s bed, staring at Viktor’s hands, at the tendon-thin shape of his fingers, at the small pulse moving in his chest beneath the blanket. For the rest of the evening he cannot make it past his own throat. Everything in him has climbed there and gotten stuck. He does not know how long he sits there but at some point his back starts to ache, and at another point his leg goes numb, and at some other point the sky outside the narrow window goes from bruised blue to black, and Jayce is still there, hunched forward and hands clasped so tightly his knuckles have gone pale and bloodless.
A nurse comes in and adjusts something near Viktor’s IV. She points him toward the narrow couch against the wall and shows him where it pulls out, how the metal frame gives if he lifts it from the bottom. Then she brings him blankets and a pillow.
“Is it normal that he’s still sleeping?” he asks her.
“It is,” she says. “His body’s been through a lot. Rest is good right now. He’s out of the worst of it.”
Jayce nods, but the nod does not reach any sane part of him.
“But he should wake up?”
“He should,” she says, smiling. “Some people come out of anesthesia slowly. It can look frightening but it isn’t unusual. We’re watching him closely.”
*
Late had become a third person living with them, sitting on the couch, eating their food, wearing Viktor’s clothes, the time Viktor came home, the hour Jayce started hearing phantom keys in the door, when dinner became leftovers became something congealed and depressing in a pan. Late was when Jayce stopped being worried nicely and started being worried in the ugly way, the pacing-in-the-living-room way, checking his phone every two minutes.
It was a little after midnight one night when Viktor came home. Jayce heard the lock turn and felt his whole body react before his mind could assemble anything dignified. Relief first, so thorned it was almost anger. Then anger, because relief makes you realize you have been stupidly afraid.
Viktor came in quietly, hair damp from the mist outside, scarf half-unwound, his shoulders hunched up around his ears. He looked exhausted, worse than exhausted, he looked gray and feverish and badly put together like a kid had drawn him from memory.
“Oh, you’re awake,” Viktor said.
Jayce was standing by the counter with his phone in his hand, wearing the same shirt he’d worn all day, suddenly aware of how pathetic the scene looked with the lamp on, the bowl of soup he’d made for Viktor three hours ago because Viktor had texted at six that he felt like he was coming down with something, then disappeared off the face of the earth.
“Yeah,” Jayce said. “I’m awake.”
Viktor closed the door with his heel. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
“You missed your meds.”
“I needed a clear head.”
“Great, okay.” Jayce sighed, closed his eyes, opened them. “And I had to hear from Sky that you were staying late.”
“You called Sky?”
“I called the lab first.”
“For God’s sake, Jayce.”
Viktor shut his eyes for a second. That should have stopped Jayce. The way Viktor looked standing there, pale and damp and tired. It should have made Jayce gentler. It did not. Worry had already fermented inside him, had become something sour and alcoholic and cretinous.
“I do not need you to call around my workplace,” Viktor said. “I do not need you to conduct a search operation because I did not answer the phone for a few hours.”
Jayce stares at him for a few seconds before knocking twice against the countertop and says, “I’m going to bed.”
*
Jayce startles awake with an ugly inhale and finds Viktor looking at him. For one stupid second, his brain refuses to understand it. Viktor’s eyes are open. Viktor is awake.
“Oh my god,” He sits up fast. “You’re awake. Should I call the nurse?”
“No need,” Viktor’s voice is rough and dry. “She was just here. Gave me water.”
Jayce’s face feels mashed and hot from sleep. He wipes at the corner of his mouth and finds, with immediate horror, drool.
“How long was I asleep?”
“I don’t know,” Viktor says. “Three, maybe four hours.”
Jayce stares at him. “And you didn’t wake me?”
Viktor winces when he coughs. “Why would I?”
“What do you mean, why would you?”
“You were sleeping.”
“And you were awake.”
“Yes,” Viktor says, like this is a very simple sequence of events and Jayce is failing a child’s puzzle. “And you were sleeping.”
Jayce drags a hand down his face, still trying to make his heart stop sprinting out of his chest. “I was sitting here waiting for you to wake up.”
“Well,” Viktor sighs. “Now that you are awake and I am awake, you are welcome to leave.”
Jayce goes very still. Viktor looks away first, toward the dark window, toward anything that is not Jayce’s face. “I’m sorry they called you. I’ll update my emergency contact to, I don’t know, my neighbor. I’ll figure it out.”
“Wait, no. That’s not– that’s not the point. I–”
“It seems very much like the point. You were dragged here in the middle of your life because I was too negligent to replace your name on a form. And for that I sincerely apologize.”
“It’s…” He stops, because fine is the wrong word. Nothing about this is fine. Viktor being in the hospital is not fine, and neither is Jayce’s heart, currently trying to chew its way out of his chest. “It’s okay. Let’s not worry about that right now.”
Viktor’s expression says he finds that unlikely. Jayce leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped too tightly together. “How did it happen? I mean, what happened? I want to know, if I can.”
Viktor sighs. “I’m sure they already told you what happened.”
“Well, yes, but–”
“But?” Viktor turns his head slightly on the pillow, eyes narrowed. “Are you waiting to scold me after I confess I was also too negligent to have my appendix removed before it burst inside me?”
“No.” Jayce says quickly. “No, Viktor. I’m not trying to scold you.” He laughs nervously. Viktor looks away again. “I was worried about you,” he adds but hates how plain and small it sounds. How it does not even come close to the size of the thing in him. “Like, very worried.”
“I sincerely apologize,” Viktor says again. “You are welcome to leave.”
Jayce makes a face. “Stop sincerely apologizing. It sounds– it sounds weird.”
Before Viktor can answer, the door opens and the nurse steps in with a tray.
“Well, good morning, sleepyhead,” she says to Jayce.
Jayce turns toward her, horrified. “Me?”
“You,” she says, smiling as she sets the tray on the little wheeled table. “Slept pretty well for someone who was very adamant he absolutely would not be sleeping.”
Viktor’s eyes slide toward Jayce.
Jayce feels his face heat up. “I didn’t sleep that well.”
“You drooled on the blanket,” Viktor says, raising an eyebrow.
The nurse only smiles, completely unhelpful. “Before you two start, I need to confirm a few things.” She glances down at the chart in her hand. “Some of your outside records didn’t transfer over, so I just want to make sure we have your medication list right.”
“I gave them this information already,” Viktor says.
“You gave us some of it,” the nurse says kindly. “But you were still pretty groggy, so I want to double-check. Are you still taking Meloxicam?”
A small silence opens in the room. Jayce looks at him. Viktor looks at the blanket. “I was,” Viktor says eventually.
“Do you remember the dose?”
“No.”
“Fifteen milligrams,” Jayce hears himself say. Both of them look at him. He clears his throat. “It was fifteen milligrams once a day. With food, technically, though he treated the ‘with food’ part like a suggestion.”
The nurse’s pen moves over the chart. “Okay, that's helpful.” She turns back to Viktor. “Any medication reactions we should know about?”
Viktor says nothing for half a beat too long.
“Codeine,” Jayce says.
The nurse looks up. “Allergy?”
“Not technically,” Jayce says. “It just makes him really nauseous. Like, gray-faced, sweating-through-his-shirt nauseous. He won’t mention it until it’s already bad because apparently admitting medication makes you sick is the same thing as losing a war.”
The nurse presses her lips together in a way that suggests she is trying very hard to remain employed.
“Anything else?” She asks.
Jayce and Viktor both shake their heads.
After the nurse leaves, the room goes very quiet. Viktor is pale against the pillow, one hand still braced against the mattress, his mouth tight from the effort of sitting up and pretending it did not hurt. Jayce waits for himself to say something but instead he stands up. The movement seems to surprise Viktor, only a little, a flicker across his face, gone before Jayce can decide what to do with it.
“I should… uh,” Jayce says. “Go get myself breakfast then. Heard the food isn’t too bad here.”
“I can’t have coffee.”
“Does it mean I can’t come back?”
“...No?”
Jayce sticks his tongue out, mockingly. It is the same gesture that used to make Viktor throw socks at his head from across the couch. “I’ll be twenty minutes.”
The nurse who had been tending to Viktor comes around the corner just as Jayce exits the room.
“Oh, hey. Excuse me,” he lowers his voice. “How is he really doing? You know, after waking up.”
“He’s doing well for where he is,” she says. “ His vitals are steady. He’s alert, talking, complaining, which is usually a good sign.”
Jayce lets out something that is almost a laugh accompanied with an eye roll. “Yeah. He is very gifted at that. Complaining, I mean.”
The nurse smiles. “He’s going to be sore. Tired. Probably irritable too.”
“But he’s okay?”
“He needs rest, monitoring, and time. But yes, right now, there’s nothing happening that makes me worried.”
“Okay,” he says. “Good. That’s good.”
She studies him for a moment. “Relax! Your partner is going to be fine.”
“Oh,” he says, then laughs. “He’s not… I mean, we’re not–”
But the nurse has walked away and left a wild Jayce in his natural habitat with his mouth still open.
The elevator is mirrored, unfortunately. Jayce is forced to look at himself as the doors close. He looks exactly how Viktor’s nurse had looked at him. Like someone’s boyfriend. Like someone’s ghost. The elevator climbs down slowly. Jayce watches the numbers change and thinks of turning around.
*
It does not feel good that the hospital called Jayce. It does not feel any better that Jayce came. This, Viktor thinks, is perhaps the worst part, not the little worm of an organ that is the appendix, or the anesthesia still clinging to the edges of his thoughts, or the small colony of wasps under the gauze. No. The worst part is Jayce. The worst part is knowing Jayce must have sat here while Viktor was unconscious, and there is nothing Viktor hates more than being witnessed when he cannot curate the damage.
Viktor has seen pictures of him. Recent ones, posted to the Piltover Structural Dynamics portal. Not that Viktor stalks him, obviously not. He does not sit alone at his desk at inadvisable hours typing Jayce’s name into public search fields. He simply, occasionally, checks whether Jayce is alive and employed, that is all. In the pictures, Jayce looks polished and successful and well-rested. He stands beside prototypes and council members and donor plaques, smiling with all his teeth, eyes bright, happy, proud of himself.
But Jayce in person, right now, is different. Jayce in person, after being worried for Viktor, looks terrible, wrecked, un-human in the most unforgivable way. Viktor hates that most of all, that Viktor still has that effect on him, that Jayce can look like this again because of him. That worry still knows where to sit on his face, that after all this time, after the winter and the leaving and the root-deep extraction of each other from daily life, Viktor’s pain can still reach across a hospital and make Jayce’s eyes go red, make his hand travel the old roads through his hair, again and again until it gives up any pretense of order, make his jaw carve tight, presses his mouth into that miserable line he gets when he is trying very hard not to feel something at full volume and failing in front of everyone with his whole stupid face.
It did not feel good, seeing Jayce like this. It did not feel good at all.
*
Viktor remembers one morning. He had been sitting at the table in one of Jayce’s shirts, the collar slipping off one shoulder, one knee drawn carefully up because his leg had been bad that week and he was pretending, with immense dignity and no success, that it was not. Notes were spread everywhere. Diagrams, measurements, revised joints, pressure points, a new prosthetic model for work– an important one– the important one– the version that would finally be sent out, used by real people with real bodies and real pain and no patience for failures.
A pen was leaking ink onto the side of his hand. He remembers that too. The blue-black stain spreading along his skin. He remembers thinking the morning had already been ruined by pain, by fatigue, by the animal ache in his leg. And then Jayce had made breakfast, or attempted breakfast, which was not legally the same thing, but he did, and Viktor was fed, and afterward, Jayce had looked at him once, then twice, then said nothing, which was how Viktor knew he was planning something intolerably kind.
“Give me your leg,” Jayce said.
“That is a grotesque sentence.”
Jayce laughed. He sat at the end of the couch and took Viktor’s bad leg carefully into his lap. His hands were warm. His hands were gentle. He worked his thumbs into the muscle, firmer at first then softer when Viktor’s breath caught and his hand tightened around the edge of the couch.
“Too much?” Jayce asked.
“No.”
Jayce looked up at him. Viktor looked away. “Perhaps. Slightly.”
Jayce smiled and adjusted the pressure. “Tell me when.”
Viktor closed his eyes, but there was no relief in the dark. “Would you still love me if I fail at this?”
“What?”
“The project. The prosthetic model. If it fails. If I fail.”
Jayce laughed then moved his hand to Viktor’s knee, holding it there.“I would love you if the project failed.”
Viktor looked away.
“I would love you if it sparked, smoked, exploded, grew legs, and ran straight out of the lab,” Jayce said. “ I would love you if the whole prosthetic program collapsed tomorrow and you had to start again from nothing.”
Viktor stared at him.
“I know what this means to you. I know you want these sent out to people who actually need them, people in countries where they don’t have access to anything like this. I know it matters. But you failing at this would not make me love you any less.”
It made Viktor want to laugh. It made him want to cry. It made him want to take Jayce’s face in both hands and tell him to stop offering impossible things so freely, because someone would take them. Someone would ruin him with them. Maybe Viktor already had.
“What about you?” Jayce asked. “Would you love me if I were a worm?”
“No.”
Jayce gasped. “No?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You wouldn’t love me if I were a worm?”
“I would not even recognize you, what’s the point”
“You would definitely know it was me.”
“How?”
“My eyes,” Jayce batted them at him, shamelessly pretty. “You could keep me in a little jar.”
“I could also throw the jar into the river.”
Jayce’s mouth fell open in genuine betrayal, and Viktor laughed enough to hurt his ribs. Jayce looked at him like the laugh is worth the insult, like he would become a worm, a beetle, a carbonized piece of toast, anything, if it meant making Viktor laugh like that in the kitchen again. Viktor remembers liking that look on Jayce. Just not when it was turned on him.
*
Jayce looks down at his hands. There are little cuts across his palms from the test unit he crushed, thin red lines bright against the creases of his skin. He had not noticed them until he had nothing else but to wait for Viktor to wake up. He flexes his fingers. The cuts pull.
His tray of food sits in front of him, half-eaten. The eggs were actually pretty decent; he just doesn’t have the appetite to finish them. He pulls out his phone. First, he types an email to work. He says he will not be in today. He says there has been a medical emergency. He says he is sorry for the inconvenience. Then he sits there with the phone still in his hand. This is a mistake, which does not stop him, because Jayce’s intelligence has always operated separately from his behavior. His mind is brilliant. His behavior is a dog eating batteries under a porch. He scrolls.
Recent photos first: schematics, a cracked housing plate, the inside of the test unit, a screenshot of a grocery list, a blurry picture of his mother’s sink when he was fixing the pipe, memes and more memes, one terrible selfie, a stray cat, etcetera. Then older ones the more he scrolled. Two years ago, three, four, the gallery becomes more dangerous the farther he goes because Viktor keeps appearing.
Viktor was never easy to photograph properly. The majority of Jayce’s old pictures of him are blurry, obstructed, half-ruined by motion or protest. Viktor moving out of frame, Viktor covering his face with one long hand, Viktor asleep at his desk with a pen still trapped between his fingers, Viktor on the couch, turned away, wrapped in Jayce’s ugliest blanket like a moth, Viktor glaring over the rim of a mug, Viktor’s cane leaning against their kitchen table, Viktor’s hand on a page of notes, ink smudged along the side of his thumb, looking furious and soft and so pretty Jayce has to put the phone facedown on the table for a second.
There is another picture of Viktor in the doorway, smiling because Jayce had said something stupid enough to win. Jayce stops there. His thumb hovers over the screen.
In the photo, Viktor looks younger. His face is thinner now upstairs in the hospital bed. Two years have not been kind, though Jayce has no right to be offended by time doing its job. In the picture, Viktor is wearing Jayce’s sweatshirt and holding a mug of tea. He liked wearing Jayce’s clothes for some reason. Jayce liked it for some reason too. In the picture, Viktor is mid-eye-roll, but his mouth has the beginning of a smile tucked into one corner. Jayce remembers that day with such stupid clarity it almost knocks the air out of him.
Sometimes Jayce wishes he could go back to those moments. Sometimes he wants to go back so badly it makes him feel physically sick. Like there is a door somewhere in the room and he has simply forgotten how to find it. Other times, he thinks Viktor would say the opposite. Viktor would say there is no use going back. Viktor would say memory is a liar. Viktor would say Jayce is romanticizing a period of their lives in which they were both sleep-deprived, young, emotionally naive, underfunded, and one disagreement away from becoming evidence in a couples therapist’s dissertation. And he would be right.
Still, Jayce can’t help but miss the shape of them before they knew exactly where to hurt each other. Before every sentence had a casket and before love became something they kept trying to survive instead of something they knew how to live inside.