Chapter Text
The sky is beautiful.
It’s a sky Jayce has seen a million times before. Cerulean blue, unbroken and vast. It reminds him of the ponds in the Kiramann gardens. Reflecting pools . A mirror. Jayce cannot see himself gazing back, but he imagines that if he dipped his fingers in the rich expanse, eternity would ripple and bend. Fold over itself. A cosmic impossibility.
Jayce gazes up at the sky but the sky does not gaze back. He’s too small to warrant attention. Too inconsequential for something so big. Hasn’t he learned not to meddle in the affairs of things beyond his reach?
The sky is beautiful and blue as pain laps at Jayce in scalding waves. It’s his throat that hurts the worst. Each breath is a dire rasp, smoke swirling about in lungs that feel like lead. His chest aches with the force it takes to breathe. Black spots dance on the edge of his vision. Besides that, his leg. His leg. Jayce knows something is horribly wrong with his leg. He can’t feel it at all.
Jayce closes his eyes. Tries to focus on breathing . He measures his breaths. It hurts a little less. Tries to picture the wheezing compressor propped up in the corner of the hospital rooms he learned to live in. Expand, contract, expand contract. Funneling stale oxygen into Viktor’s lungs as Jayce clutched his thin wrist, fingertips over the pulse, so that he could feel the constant reassurance that his partner was alive .
Viktor. Viktor… ?
Jayce tries to push himself back into his body. He tries to twist his neck, but the resulting spasm only results in a feeble whimper. He tries to draw up his leg, the one he can feel, to know avail. His body will not comply. Obey. He spirals back into the hospital room. Dim lights. Stale air. Bargaining with doctors for a room with a window, only to be pushed aside. Crawling back to his bedside, apologies on his lips. Hoping he’d hear. Promising to do better. Knowing he won’t.
Too much at stake too much to do no time no time and now?
He does the same now, but his partner’s name is but a memory on his tongue.
Jayce thinks he is either dead or dying. If he’s dead or dying, at least the sky is nice. Pretty.
Jayce watches the sky change. The white sun becomes a smoldering, amber splotch sinking into darkness. The blue smokes, but there are no clouds to catch flame. It reminds Jayce of the forge. The only thing that ever made sense. Iron and flame, the soreness of his muscles, the sweat along his brow. Satisfaction . Work. Viktor’s eyes were like a forge, too. Burning. Smoldering. Constantly reshaped. Jayce tries to remember the color, but in the end, they were simply everything. Every color, every possibility. Honey, amber, topaz, copper, bronze.
The sky is orange now, but when Jayce blinks, he finds eternity staring back.
In fact, eternity is shouting his name until its voice grows hoarse and stricken.
Jayce’s brow furrows as eternity takes shape before him and the kaleidoscope of color dances in the eyes of the sky, its soft hair tickling his cheeks. It feels nice. Nicer than the fingers that grip his jaw so tightly his teeth ache. Pain lances down his throat. Jayce tries to wriggle away, but that only makes it worse, and he’s not stupid enough to think he’s going anywhere.
“... ce. …ayce. Jayce!”
Viktor?
Oh. Of course. Viktor’s coming to take him away. His thin face comes into focus, all sharp model angles, like a god chiseled such a perfect face from stone. But the vision fluctuates. It spasms. Jayce trembles as the images flash, his mind failing to process simultaneously. Viktor is everything and every version all at once. A doe-eyed, round cheeked child. A mage gouged of humanity, concealing what’s left beneath his cloak. Dark brows pinched with worry and curiosity. An automaton. A marriage of flesh and steel and it’s too much too much and Jayce–
Jayce is going to vomit.
Viktor’s face pinches. It’s as if he senses Jayce’s distress. Even though his tortured throat screams in agony, one of the Viktors turns his cheek. Jayce feels soft grass tickle his nose as he empties whatever is left into the field. It’s miserable, the bile pinched in his crushed windpipe. His stomach heaves twice and then he collapses, spent, head lolling. His body feels so hot. His clothes hug too tightly.
His eyes drift towards the sky but he cannot see past Viktor.
Viktor ?
Jayce groans as his head is lifted into a soft lap. Colder fingers brush his hair from his face, smoothing over his cheeks. They glance down his throat until Jayce tries to squirm away. Through the haze, he finds Viktor, the sky folding to darkness and rippling into a multitude of stars behind him. Jayce begins to tremble in earnest, tears bending Viktor’s portrait amongst the cosmos.
“I didn’t fail you?” Jayce rasps.
“No,” Viktor breathes. “You succeeded.”
Jayce begins to weep. The thoughts swirl together, all at once, too many to process. Above them all, rising like a comet through the night sky, is relief . His memories are a blur. All he recalls is one massive outpouring, like he’d plunged a knife into his sternum and ripped himself barren. Allowed Viktor to sort through him and finally understand that all Jayce ever was, everything that composed him, was love for the man cradling him now.
And how beautiful he is.
Viktor’s face settles into one image. His hair is long and bounces at his shoulders, the sweet chocolate brown intermingled with a sterling silver. His eyes are everything all at once, every color Jayce has ever loved. He’s tired, but beautiful. Jayce spies the Arcane webbing encroaching his forehead, his cheeks, trailing down his neck.
Jayce tries to lift his arm, but it’s so heavy. He wants so badly to touch. To run his hands all over Viktor and know that every piece of him is real and here and tangible and safe. In the end, Viktor takes his limp wrist and guides it to his face. Jayce manages to wrestle control of his fingers to press his index against the mole above Viktor’s lip. It curls into a miserable smile that flips Jayce’s stomach and makes his tears fall. Viktor swipes them away and Jayce sinks into his touch because he doesn’t know where else he should be.
“Rest,” Viktor whispers.
“You’ll be here?” Jayce asks. “If I wake up?”
Asks, as if he does not plead . He needs to know that when he closes his eyes, it will be Viktor that he wakes to. No astral cosmos. No warped, splintered sky. Viktor . Viktor places Jayce’s arm across his chest. Before he can retreat, Jayce seizes him. He presses his fingertips against Viktor’s wrist. It’s cool and where Viktor’s heartbeat fluttered before, it whirs and steams.
But it’s Viktor.
“ When you wake up, I will be here.”
Jayce nods, surrenders, and sleeps.
***
When he wakes, the sky is blue and distracted fingertips are swirling the loose hair around his temple. Jayce blinks to clear the fuzz from his vision. Viktor’s face hovers somewhere above him, lifted towards the soft sunlight. It makes the platinum in his hair shimmer. But his expression is strangely… empty. Jayce’s skin crawls. Jayce realizes his head rests in Viktor’s lap, his forehead pressed against Viktor’s stomach. Jayce wiggles his fingertips to make sure they’re still there. Then, he raises his hand. He has to make sure, he has to know …
Jayce taps Viktor’s cheek. The man startles, jostling Jayce into a position that is far from comfortable. Torn from his thoughts, Viktor peers down at Jayce. His expression is carefully arranged. Blank. Even his irises are clear, refracting whatever color glances off of them. But he still slides his fingers down Jayce’s cheek and Jayce finds the cracks in his perfect face, watches as indescribable agony oozes through like some seeping infection. He looks like he wants to cry. Like he doesn’t know how. Jayce would give him that permission, if he needed it. If Viktor needs permission to feel human again, after…
Jayce reaches for him.
Viktor brushes his hand away.
“Can you sit?” he asks, softly. There’s a metallic ring to his voice that sets Jayce on edge.
Jayce can, albeit… slowly. It takes coaxing and support, and even when he finally manages to get up off the ground, his body is little more than a million knots and aches. His head feels sloshy. Viktor keeps a hand at the small of his back. Jayce sinks into the contact. More than the earth itself, it grounds him. Tethers him. He sways into Viktor’s shoulder, once, and when Viktor pushes him away to sit up straight, Jayce rationally wishes the earth would swallow him whole.
“How do you feel?” Viktor asks.
Awful . Jayce’s body screams for a million wants. His body feels like sheet metal clobbered together by an enthusiastic and overly-ambitious child. Jayce closes his eyes. He rocks back into Viktor’s anchor at the small of his back, trying to squirrel away from it all.
“Okay,” Jayce rasps.
His voice is shredded. He can feel the press of the hand around his throat. It comes rushing back. The swing that missed because Jayce couldn’t hurt him, not again. Being torn from the air like a ragdoll, clawing at a hand that would not budge . Pressure, pressure, growing pressure before being hurled, unceremoniously, into his surrender. He tries to picture the compressor again, but the mechanical ease with which it moves is impossible for him to replicate. Jayce touches his throat. He knows the bruises are dark and ugly. He knows Viktor sees them.
“Are you okay?” he chokes out.
Viktor looks at him like Jayce has rammed a knife through his gut, eyes wide and owlish, lips gently parted, and Jayce’s first delirious thought is to lean closer and seize the answer himself.
“How can you ask me that?” Viktor whispers.
“ Are you ?” Jayce insists.
Viktor does not answer. Instead, he bows his head where Jayce cannot find him and that is answer enough. Jayce is too weak to turn him around. To fight him a second longer. He settles for the hand still resting on his spine and the gentle warmth that spirals up from his touch. Jayce doesn’t know if it’s magic or simply Viktor, but his addled mind suggests there’s never really been a difference between the two.
“Where are we?” Jayce asks.
“... The place where it all began,” Viktor murmurs.
Jayce raises his head. Keeps it there as he appraises the clearing where they’ve been… summoned? Dumped? Jayce recalls the void with startling clarity. The moment it all ended. But whatever came after…
He looks to Viktor imploringly. From the blank, dazed look on his partner’s face, Viktor knows no better.
Jayce returns to the clearing and feels the breath punched out of his lungs with a spur of coughs.
It’s the field. Row after row of pristine white and yellow and orange flowers until they spill out in the sea. Their round petals bounce in a gentle breeze. The wind is cold from the mountain yawning overhead, piercing the big blue sky like an unsightly black tooth. It sends a trickle of fear down Jayce’s spine, even now, no matter how changed he is. Jayce leans away from it, and Viktor catches him before he loses his precious balance, and Jayce finally wakes up enough to really drink his partner in.
He’s as beautiful as he was every day Jayce lost him.
Viktor’s hair is long. Gentle curls swoop under his chin and tickle his shoulders, a chocolate brown tapering into starlit silver. A few locks are tucked behind his ear, meshed with the web of the Arcane, just like he used to do in the lab. Viktor’s eyes, which stubbornly refuse to meet Jayce’s, continue to flicker through every prism imaginable. Jayce takes in the melt of flesh to arcane steel, though it is not as stark as before. In fact, the longer Jayce looks, the more the metal seeps into Viktor’s flesh, pulsating and sinking. He has a desperate need to touch, to feel the texture beneath his fingertips. But once Viktor realizes his staring, he tugs his blue cloak over his collarbones and banishes himself from sight.
“It… I thought…” Jayce doesn’t know what he thought. Or did. Only that he was prepared to throw away his soul for good, if it meant Viktor returned to him. “What…?”
“It seems our… connection… created a wild rune,” Viktor murmurs. He twists his hand. It’s mostly flesh, though knots of gold form at his joints. “It flung us here. Apart, but I found you. You can feel it, no?”
Jayce can. Sort of. His senses are more preoccupied with internal distressors at the moment, but he can taste the lingering buzz of magic in the air. He feels it coursing out of Viktor, latent, powerful, dormant. Jayce wonders if Viktor senses anything from him. Exhaustion, maybe, because Viktor’s fingertips dig soothingly into the knots of his vertebrae.
But beyond that?
Relief. Joy. Exuberance. Jubilation.
Jayce rests his head on Viktor’s shoulder. Or collapses into it. He selects the former for his pride, but he’s well beyond pride at this rate. Viktor doesn’t buckle under his weight, in fact, he rearranges himself to hold it. Jayce smiles. Smiles . Because it worked. It worked . The pain doesn’t matter. The numbness in his leg is irrelevant. Nothing beyond the bubble of the starlight void can touch him at this moment.
“I got my partner back,” Jayce sings, although it's more of a deflated wheeze, and Viktor gives him a look that suggests he’s contemplating if the Arcane finally shattered his mind.
Viktor allows him none of the revelry.
“Can you stand? Walk?”
Jayce wants to do neither of those things. But he tries, because Viktor is asking, although it finally forces him to come to terms with what’s become of his leg. Jayce was vaguely aware he… landed on it. Was vaguely aware it slithered behind him as he knelt before the hammer, but in the void, the pain had melted away. Nothing else had mattered, aside from the man beside him.
Those two thoughts do not prepare Jayce for the wretched angle his leg is twisted in. His brace is obliterated. His pants are torn in places where the metal must have bent and snapped and pierced his flesh, but Jayce… feels nothing. When he wiggles his toes, there’s a dull response.
“Um…” Jayce supplies, helpfully.
Viktor stands. Jayce’s mind runs blank. He moves with the grace and fluidity of a ballerina. Poised, precise. He crouches and offers Jayce his hands. Jayce takes them.
“Brace with your right foot,” Viktor instructs.
Jayce nods, planting his heel. Viktor gives a gentle, loose tug and Jayce rises. But when he plants his left?
“ FUCK –!”
His knees buckle and Viktor snatches him before Jayce can inflict more damage. Jayce does not have time to consider that Viktor is strong, that he’s the only thing stopping Jayce from making matters worse. He gathers Jayce against his chest as Jayce rests his forehead on Viktor's shoulder, taking short, shallow breaths – as many as his damaged throat can take. He scrambles for purchase, fists bunched in the hood of Viktor’s cloak. It sends him back, the realities tearing apart, shifting and fracturing, and Viktor’s body is firm, just as firm as the cave floor where he lay prone and writhing, the damp and mildew and the steady drip off the stalactites hitting his cheek because Jayce was too weak to move –
“I have you,” Viktor murmurs. “Jayce? I have you.”
Viktor places a hand at the small of his back. The gesture is so tender. Viktor stares up at his sweat-stricken, flushed face with dewy eyes – flashing colors as hidden emotions war within him. Jayce sags with relief, but he cannot stop the feeble whine that breaches his lips as agony tears through his lame leg like shrapnel. Viktor presses more insistently. The pain fades. The limb goes blessedly numb as Jayce hovers his crooked leg two inches off the ground. Jayce focuses on Viktor, against him, with him .
“It might be tricky,” Jayce says, voice warbling.
“Here.”
Jayce blinks as something cool slides into his palm. He recognizes Viktor’s staff, elongated, glowing faintly. Viktor taps the metal and it shrinks. It becomes a crutch. Viktor carefully slots it under Jayce’s arm.
“Better?” Viktor asks.
Jayce nods. Viktor fixes him with that inscrutable look again, his hand drifting up to Jayce’s face. Jayce drifts towards it. He swallows down the bitter taste when Viktor takes it away, pushing them apart to test Jayce’s ability to stand on his own.
“Good,” Viktor nods. “You cannot stay here.”
“Me?” Jayce blanks. “What about you? Where… Vik– You can’t– You know I– ”
Viktor silences him with a single look. The thought dies on Jayce’s lips. You know I need you. Want you. Love you. Don’t you know that? Didn’t I show you?
“Where are you going?” Jayce asks.
He despises how small he feels. He despises how his voice shakes, like he’s a trembling child. But he was, once, in this very field. Filled with the awe and wonder that only Viktor can impart upon him, and now terrified that he might strip it away.
“Nowhere,” Viktor answers.
But Jayce cannot help but fear that there is a
yet
attached.