Chapter Text
Sometimes, Jayce dreams that Viktor dies and no one tells him.
That he walks into their apartment and it’s empty. Not physically, but spiritually. He drops his keys and no one says anything. The air is hollow-cheeked. Every object is mute.
In the dream, everything is exactly where he left it. Evacuated mid-sentence. And that’s how he knows something’s wrong.
He always stands there for a while. Looking at everything. At nothing. At the dust caught in the window light. The exact angle of a book on the floor. The outline Viktor’s weight left in the mattress. The room looks back at him. As if asking: What did you expect?
He kneels on the floor of the bathroom and puts his face against the tiles. He waits for the warmth of Viktor’s feet to return. They don’t. He tries to call him. The phone rings in the other room.
When Jayce wakes up, he goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. He touches the carton of almond milk. Checks the expiry. Not because he needs milk. Because he needs proof of time.
Because he needs to believe he’s still in it. That he hasn’t fallen out of the clock entirely.
~ * ~
The pharmacist says his name too brightly.
"Jayce Talis?"
He lifts his head. His hands are raw from over-washing, paper-thin from sanitiser. She slides the white bag toward him like it’s a pastry and not what it is: twenty blister packs of pills that choke the liver, slow the blood, thin it again, do God-knows-what to keep Viktor’s heart from hurling itself out of his chest like a feral thing.
Jayce nods, signs, walks into the wind without saying thank you. Plastic rustles inside his jacket.
They used to joke about Viktor’s lungs.
Steam-powered , Jayce would say, and Viktor would make a face like he didn’t find it funny, but he always did. That was before the blood started appearing in the sink. Before the hiss in his voice stayed between sentences.
Now, Viktor sits on the floor of their apartment, his back against the radiator. Slippers. Worn sweatpants. A hoodie that says Piltover University for remembrance. Jayce got it on eBay for two bucks. Viktor claimed it.
Jayce holds the pills up in a rattling fist. “They changed the packaging.”
Viktor shuts his laptop. "Did they change the mechanism of death, or just the font?"
“I think the font got sleeker.”
“Ah. At least I will die in Helvetica.” He coughs once, soft, dry grass breaking.
Jayce wants to say: don’t. Wants to say: I hate when you joke like that. But he doesn't. Because every time he starts doing that (hovering, Viktor calls it) Viktor folds in. Like a dog backing into a cage.
So instead, Jayce starts cutting Viktor’s pills in half. Not because the dosage changed, but because Viktor’s throat doesn’t work like it used to. Swallowing is an ordeal now.
He calls Viktor to come sit at the kitchen table with him. He lines up the pill cutter, presses down. The tiny snap of pressure. The little white halves like broken moons.
Viktor watches him. “I used to cut coke like this,” he says softly.
Jayce looks up, startled.
Viktor raises one eyebrow. “University. Once. Calm down.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You did. With your face.”
Jayce laughs. Viktor smiles, just barely, pathetic and perfect.
Rio jumps on Jayce’s lap and Jayce lets go of the pill cutter. He meows once, rubs his head into Jayce’s chest.
“Looks like our child’s hungry,” Viktor says. “Can you feed him?”
Jayce rubs behind Rio’s ears “Yeah, I can.” He sets Rio down. “He only eats the pâté now, did you know that?” he says on his way to the kitchen.
Viktor exhales, a sound like old paper. “Divine little bastard.”
The next morning, Viktor can’t open the jar of peach jam. Not because he’s weak– he isn’t, not really, not yet, not entirely– he still has enough left in his wrists to drag Jayce to the centre of a dying star with his pants around his ankles and his name punched out of his throat like a receipt.
But today, his fingers are wrong. Trembling like silverware left in boiling water too long, warped at the neck, unsure what they’re holding. The lid refuses him. Sticky with sugar. A sweet domestic fuck-you.
Jayce walks in to see him staring at the jar. Not frustrated. Just watching his hands with a weird sort of fascination. Like it’s the last thing he’ll ever be able to hold without help.
“You want me to–?”
Viktor holds the jar out. His hands don’t stop shaking.
Jayce opens it. Hands it back. Watches Viktor spread the jam on toast with the funny steadiness of someone trying not to cry or laugh or tip over.
They eat at the table in silence. A street sweeper outside groans past the window.
~ * ~
The doctor says there’s not much time left. Maybe months, maybe weeks, maybe days. Hell, maybe this is it, right here, right now, goodbye Viktor! Cue the curtain, cue the floor swallowing him whole. Exit stage left.
Viktor nods as if he’s accepting a parking ticket. Says thank you, even.
Jayce laughs about it in the parking lot. Can’t stop. It sounds like furniture breaking inside his chest.
On the way home, Viktor says, “That was generous.”
Jayce doesn’t ask what he means. Doesn’t want to know which part exactly was so fucking generous.
He doesn’t say anything out loud these days. But he counts everything. Not steps. Not hours.
Losses.
Viktor coughed blood again last night. That’s minus one. He didn’t finish his tea. Minus one.
He forgot the word for radiator. Called it a warm noise box. Minus, minus, minus.
Time isn’t passing. It’s peeling.
Time is a peeling hallway with no lights, just the sound of breathing ahead of you and behind you and you don’t know which is his and which is yours.
Jayce wants to rip the calendar off the wall and eat it. Keep the numbers in his mouth like loose teeth. Swallow every page before it can happen.
~ * ~
He signs the form a week later.
Not at the hospital. At the kitchen table. Between cold pasta and Rio being a furball of need and a dating show flickering on mute, two beautiful strangers fake-love each other while Viktor holds the pen.
The overhead light buzzes. The dog next door barks. Death pulls up a chair and no one makes room for it, but it stays anyway.
The metal bracelet sits between them. DNR. Three letters. Cheerful in their san-serif deathwish.
They mailed it like it was merch. Like congrats, you’re dying, here’s a wristband to prove it! One-size-fits-all. Waterproof. Medical-grade.
It’s meant for Viktor to wear in case he dies publicly. Like if he folds in half at the grocery store, between the oranges and the cash-back option. If his body falls like a marionette in the checkout line and someone with CPR hands rushes in… wait! the bracelet gleams, don’t touch him! Let him die under the fluorescents. Next to the gum. Let someone drop their rotisserie chicken from the shock of it.
Jayce pictures it too often. Viktor on the floor, coins rolling. Receipt paper still printing.
Nobody helping. Just the bracelet, shouting louder than any voice: Let him go. Let him go. Let him go.
That night, Jayce catches Viktor writing.
Not typing. Writing; pen and paper. Hands curled up like a crow’s feet. Small, tight script. Jayce can’t read it from the door, but the lines look even.
“What is that?”
Viktor flips the notebook shut. “It’s not for you. Yet.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.” He doesn’t look up. “It’s supposed to make you wait.”
~ * ~
At the grocery store, Jayce forgets to buy the ginger chews Viktor uses for nausea.
Halfway home, it hits him. He turns the car around. There’s an accident on the way back to the store. Bright lights, twisted metal, a woman screaming into her phone. A ten-minute detour bleeds into an hour.
He texts Viktor. No answer. He texts again. Nothing. Calls. Once. Twice. Six times. The ringing tunnels into his skull. Still no answer.
He throws the cash on the conveyor belt, tells the cashier to keep the change. On the drive home, he misses two stop signs. He doesn’t notice until the third. Swallows his heart like a bad pill.
He finds Viktor curled on the couch like a child, knees up, mouth open slightly. Asleep.
Jayce stares at the empty water glass on the table, Viktor’s greasy lip print ghosting the rim, his phone wedged between the cushions. Do Not Disturb.
Jayce explodes.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” His voice comes out cracked, wild. “You had your phone on silent? I thought– I thought something happened, Vik. I thought you–”
Viktor blinks, bleary. “I was sleeping.”
Jayce laughs but there’s no light in it, just static. “You’re not allowed to sleep like that. Not with me out there thinking you choked or fell or– fuck, Vik! Fuck.”
Viktor sits up. Rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “Jesus, Jayce–”
“No! Don’t ‘Jesus’ me. Turn your goddamn phone on next time. I don’t care if you hate the sound. I don’t care if it ruins your nap. I need to know if you're still alive, for fucks sake.”
The room is buzzing now.
Viktor stares at him. Quiet. Jayce’s chest rises and falls like he just ran through fire.
“Okay,” Viktor says finally. Soft. “Okay,” he says. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Jayce peels the ginger chews out of the bag and slaps them onto the table.
~ * ~
Jayce thinks about death all the time.
Not the heirloom-dusk cinematic version. Not the candle-blown-out, soul-up-the-chimney myth. Not the soul wafting out like a polite fart into God’s sweaty armpit. He thinks about the bureaucracy of it. The papercuts. The admin of loss. He thinks about the dumb, gluey death. The one that clogs the drain.
He thinks about what happens to Viktor’s Spotify account. Does it get locked? Do they send a chirpy email: We’ve noticed you haven’t made a playlist in a while! Does someone press play, one last time, and hear the song that still has his ghost oils on it?
He thinks about how many black T-shirts Viktor owns. Five? Eight? Which ones does Jayce keep? Does he keep all of them, let them rot into dustcloths or does he bury them in a drawer like limbs?
He thinks about which passwords he knows. His laptop’s, no. His phone’s, yes. Thinks about all the things behind those passwords: banking apps, medical records, Instagram archives, unfinished essays, twenty-nine years of bookmarks.
He wonders if Viktor has a folder named Important. He wonders if it’s empty. Or if there’s something in it with his name on it.
Jayce stands in the shower and thinks about deleting things. Throwing things away. The toothbrush. The half-bottle of vetiver cologne that smells like sick boy and salt skin. What does he keep ? What is sacred? What is just hair and plastic?
There’s a spreadsheet in his brain now. Colour-coded grief. Blue for appointments. Red for medication. Grey for after. For the blank, unfillable after. He adds to it at stoplights. While stirring soup. During sex.
He thinks: who do I become when the person I love is no longer here to see me?
He thinks: Is there still a shape to my face? Or do I dissolve into utility– pay bills, scrub shower tiles, say “he fought hard” to strangers who mean well and smell like printer paper and coffee breath and faux-leather pity?
Jayce wonders if there’s a support group for men who lose the one person who knew their true voice. The ugly, in-between voice. The one that comes out when you're sick or desperate or in love in a way that feels like throwing up in reverse.
He wonders if he’ll still sleep on the left side of the bed when it’s just him.
He wonders if the house will start speaking in past tense. If the air will start using was instead of is. If the light through the window will keep showing up, nicotine hush, like it doesn’t know who it stopped shining on.
~ * ~
They watch an old film on Jayce’s laptop. Wings of Desire. Black and white and grainy like grief rubbed between two fingers. Viktor picked it. It’s in German. Neither of them speak German. Not really. Jayce had Duolingo for three days last spring before he gave up at Guten Tag.
Jayce sits cross-legged on the couch. Rio is wedged between them. Viktor is half-horizontal, one hand curled on his stomach holding his own soul in place. The light from the screen coats his face in soft flickers. Furnace, hospital, moon.
Jayce watches Viktor watching the film. His eyes don’t blink enough. He forgets to do that now. Another thing the body forgets, like hunger, like forgiveness.
He’s so thin now. A sculpture made of wire and failed wishes. He’s only been eating sour things. He says he craves them a lot now. His favourites are lemon razors and green-apple shrieks and cherry vinegar marbles.
“Do you believe in angels?” Jayce asks him.
Viktor turns to him very slowly. His neck cracks when he does it. “Only the tax-evading kind,” he says.
Jayce snorts. “So that’s a no?”
“I believe in bureaucrats with wings and passive aggression.”
Jayce reaches for the half-dead bowl of popcorn between them. “You think if you die and go to heaven, there’s paperwork?”
“Who says I’m going to heaven?”
Jayce tosses a kernel at him. It bounces off Viktor’s shoulder. Viktor doesn’t flinch. Just picks it up and eats it.
“I’m serious,” Jayce says, quieter now. “What do you think happens?”
“I don’t know,” Viktor says. “But I know I am absolutely the trapeze artist in this movie.”
“How? You haven’t stood on one leg without wobbling in a month.”
“I contain multitudes.”
Jayce scratches his head. “If an angel gave up immortality for me, I’d feel bad.”
“I do feel bad. For you.”
“Because you’re dying?”
“No. Because you’ve chosen to watch this incomprehensible German angel film with me, on a Saturday night, instead of having sex or eating fried food like a normal American adult.”
Jayce reaches for the blanket that smells like Viktor’s red-fevered skin.
“I’d rather watch you than the movie.”
Viktor raises an eyebrow. “That’s disgusting.”
Jayce shrugs. “You’re disgusting.”
“I’m dying.”
“That’s the only reason I let you pick the movie.”
“Pity. So erotic.”
Jayce smiles. “You like me soft.”
Viktor’s eyes flick toward the screen again. “No. I like you stupid and loyal. Which you are.”
Jayce lets his hand fall onto Viktor’s knee. Feels the tremble. The absence of meat. The vibrating hum of someone still here but barely.
The angel on-screen puts his hand on a woman’s cheek like he’s never touched anything that bleeds.
Jayce doesn’t say it out loud, but he thinks it hard enough to shatter a window: Don’t leave me here. Not in this room. Not in this joke of a movie. Not in this body I don’t want without you in it.
“We should learn German,” he says instead.
Viktor’s laugh sounds like end credits. “Too late. I’ve already started unlearning English.”
~ * ~
He watches Viktor sleep. He does this a lot. Jayce watches Viktor sleep and wonders which breath will be the last one that doesn’t look like it.
He wants to ask, Are you scared? But he knows Viktor would lie. Or worse, he’d tell the truth. And Jayce isn’t sure he could survive that sound.
So instead, he watches. And counts the breaths. And when Viktor stirs and opens his eyes, Jayce leans in and presses his mouth to the fever-warm curve of his forehead.
~ * ~
The night they’re supposed to sit in velvet seats and listen to flutes play Spirited Away, Viktor throws up blood in the bathroom sink.
Not a little. Not even a dramatic splash. Just a slow, stringy red.
Jayce leans in the doorway, toothbrush still in his mouth. They make eye contact in the mirror.
It’s not the first time, of course not. Jayce is so used to seeing his blood in the five years they had been together.
Jayce hands him a towel.
“I’m fine,” Viktor says. There’s blood on his lip. It makes his teeth look sharper than they are.
Jayce spits. “That didn’t look like fine.”
“It happens,” Viktor says. “I coughed too hard.”
“Do you want to lie down?”
“I’m not a fucking dog, Jayce.”
Jayce flinches. Just a little. Viktor catches it.
“Sorry. I’m… I’m tired,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
The tickets are on the kitchen counter. Printed. Folded. Jayce doesn’t look at them. He just runs the tap and holds Viktor’s shoulders while the sink turns pink and the music stays in its wrapper.
~ * ~
Another night Viktor asks: “Would you lie to me?”
Jayce is folding laundry. He holds up one of Viktor’s old shirts.
“Depends,” Jayce says.
“On what?”
“On whether it’s kind.”
Viktor nods. Looks down at his hands. They’re resting in his lap like dead birds.
“Then lie to me,” he says. “Just sometimes. Not always. But sometimes.”
Jayce kneels beside him. Puts the shirt aside. Takes Viktor’s hands gently.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he says.
The curve of Viktor’s smile slices a tear in half.
~ * ~
Jayce wonders if grief has a smell.
Like ozone. Or meat left out. Or violets crushed in a coat pocket.
He tries to catch it on Viktor's pillowcase when Viktor’s not in the bed. He sniffs like an animal, hoping for trace. Nothing. Just detergent. A hint of fever.
He wonders if his body is already learning to forget. If muscle memory knows Viktor is leaving before he does. If his hands are rehearsing a life with no one to hold.
He wonders what Viktor dreams about. He wants to ask. Wants to crawl inside Viktor’s skull and watch the reels spool out:
Are you walking? Running? Are you back at the lab with both lungs working like gods?
Are you dead in your dreams already?
Do I follow you there?
~ * ~
He wonders if the illness has made Viktor more beautiful. If it’s sick to think that.
But Viktor is lit from inside now, all bitter daisy and ashmelt, eyes too big for his face. A kind of starved grace. Something feral trying to behave.
Jayce almost hates himself for noticing. He wants to scrub the thought out with steel wool.
~ * ~
He pictures the funeral sometimes.
He pictures someone he doesn’t know saying Viktor’s name wrong. He pictures screaming in public. He pictures stealing the ashes and keeping them in a protein powder container because it’s the only vessel big enough. He pictures lying in those ashes like a widow bird. He pictures baking the ashes into bread and feeding them to pigeons in the park.
He pictures swallowing them himself.
~ * ~
One evening, Viktor asks, “Do you hate me for doing this my way?”
Jayce, sitting on the floor, leaning back against Viktor’s knees, says, “No.”
And it’s almost true.
But in his chest, a smaller voice whispers: I hate that I don’t get to try. I hate that there’s no fight left. I hate that love isn’t enough. I hate that you’re braver than me.
~ * ~
Viktor peels his apples in long, curling strips and lines the skins on a paper towel. He only eats the skins now. Jayce watches him do it again, thumb pressed hard into the meat of the fruit, knife trembling just slightly.
“I’ve been craving bitter things,” Viktor says. He glances up, meets Jayce’s gaze.
“I know,” Jayce says. He slides onto the other bar stool, watches Viktor nibble one translucent edge like a mouse.
Jayce reaches for the discarded apple flesh, takes a bite. It tastes like nothing.
“Do you want to go to the river?” Jayce asks.
“No.” A pause. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Jayce nods. He wants to press his hand to Viktor’s chest just to feel the beat, to make sure it’s still going. He wants to count the seconds between each breath. Instead, he pulls out his phone. Opens Spotify. Plays the playlist he made. The one called Playlist for when your boyfriend stops breathing.
Viktor was not supposed to know about it but he found it by accident. That’s a lie, he found it by searching Jayce’s phone while he was asleep. Jayce didn’t want to tell him. The songs are sad, yes, but worse than that, they’re specific. That one song they danced to in the kitchen during that blackout. That instrumental Viktor played while sketching blueprints with a shaking hand. The one by The Smiths he said was too obvious.
Jayce closes his eyes and lets the first song play.
“Do you remember that rock you fell off at the river?” he says. “Scraped your whole hip. You bled like a lame horror movie.”
“You called the paramedics.”
“I panicked. I thought you broke your femur. You were screaming in three languages.”
Viktor snorts. “I was screaming at you. For screaming.”
Jayce’s grin softens. He wants to touch Viktor. Wants to press his hand to his back, feel the knobs of spine, remind himself that this is his. But they don’t touch much these days. Not out of distance, but preservation. Viktor bruises like fruit left in the sun.
Instead, he eats another bite of Viktor’s rejected apple. It’s sour sap now. He chews it anyway.
“I don’t know if you saw it but your mom called.” Viktor says after a while. “Your phone was charging.”
“Oh, what did she want?”
“She wanted to know if I’d talked you into proposing yet.”
Jayce lets out a breath. “Jesus.”
“I said not yet. But you’re easily manipulated.”
Jayce laughs. He doesn’t mean to. But it erupts, sharp and startled. “You’re a dick.”
Viktor peels another apple.
Jayce stares at the paper towel lined with red skins. They glisten. Like blood. Like little strips of tongue torn out for telling the truth.
He gets up and makes tea. Honey and ginger. Viktor drinks it without complaint. They sit in the kitchen with the dim light humming above them, both pretending it’s just a Tuesday. Not a countdown. Not the middle of a story with no climax, just a slow sinking into everything they swore they’d survive.
Outside, the city swallows itself in dusk.
Inside, Viktor holds his tea with both hands. His fingers look too long for the cup. He looks like an old photograph. Overexposed, beautiful, disappearing.
Jayce wants to scream. Instead he says, “If not the river, do you want to go to the bookstore tomorrow?”
Viktor smiles without showing teeth. “Only if we go to the one with the cat.”
“But that cat hates you. It hisses at you every time you get near it.”
“He’s misunderstood,” Viktor says. “I’ll bribe him with treats this time. Classic manipulation.”
That night, Jayce adds another song to the playlist. I Will Follow You Into the Dark, Death Cab for Cutie.
~ * ~
They're parked in front of the pharmacy, rain tapping the windshield. Viktor's too tired to go inside, even for the ginger chews and the sour sweets, so Jayce ran in alone. Came back soaked. The bag in his lap is starting to bleed paper.
Jayce sits behind the wheel and doesn’t start the engine.
Viktor stares straight ahead. He looks like hell. Hood up. Salt ache. Lips cracked.
“You okay?” Jayce asks.
It’s a stupid question. A placeholder. Something to put in the air instead of the sound of his own panic.
Viktor shrugs. "Cold."
Jayce turns on the heat. It rattles. Old car. No money to fix it now. Everything’s going toward bills. Prescriptions. Ubers to the clinic on bad days.
Jayce says it because he needs to put it somewhere other than his ribs. “I don’t know how to do this.”
Viktor doesn’t turn.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, Vik.” His voice shakes. “I go to work, I come home, I watch you fade. And I don’t say anything, because I don’t want to scare you. But I’m scared all the time.”
Viktor closes his eyes.
Jayce’s hands are fists on his thighs. “I want to talk about it. But you won’t let me. You make a joke or change the subject or say something like 'We all die eventually, Jayce,' and it makes me feel like a child.”
Silence.
“You’re not a child,” Viktor says finally. His voice is frayed. “You’re someone who loves a dying man. There is no manual for that.”
Jayce looks down. His throat feels full of static. “You still let me love you.”
Viktor nods.
“I don't know if that makes it better or worse,” Jayce says.
Another pause. Then Viktor says, very quietly: “I would’ve married you, too.”
Jayce lets out a sound, not quite a sob. More like a laugh with the bones stripped out.
The truth is, he wants to smash a plate and say: Tell me what to do. Tell me how to keep you from leaving without leaving.
But he doesn’t. That night he updates the playlist. And learns how to spell EXECUTOR.
Because love is boring like that. Because love stays to sweep up the bones.
On the way home they listen to Black Flies by Ben Howard.
~ * ~
Jayce thinks about embalming fluid. The word sounds like honey and murder. He wonders if it smells like chemicals or childhood. He wonders if Viktor would think it’s efficient.
He thinks about putting Viktor in the freezer. Just for a while. Just to keep him. He pictures folding him in like leftovers. Labelling him with the date. Checking occasionally to see if time has softened.
He thinks about what Viktor's laugh would look like if it were a physical object. Something he could hold. Press to his throat.
Jayce thinks about burning the couch they used to fuck on.
He thinks about teeth. Specifically: will he keep one? Viktor’s. Like a relic. Like saints in gold boxes. Would that be insane? (Yes.) Would it help? (No.)
He thinks about cloning. About the ethics of uploading Viktor’s consciousness to a drive. A black market Viktor. A Viktor 2.0 made of pixels and memory and none of the sickness.
He thinks about Viktor's hair in the bristles of his brush.
He thinks about Viktor’s handwriting in the margins of books. Reads them over and over. One says: “This argument collapses under its own weight.” Jayce writes it on the wall. Later, Viktor tells him, what the fuck.
He thinks about sound. What sound Viktor’s lungs will make when they stop. Will it be like a screen door swinging shut? Like a balloon deflating? Like nothing at all?
He thinks about putting speakers in the walls. Filling the apartment with Viktor’s voice on a loop. His lecture cadence. His petty monologues about coffee beans. He imagines a home that speaks only Viktor.
He wonders if Viktor will haunt him. If he’ll still hear him in the kitchen, correcting how he stirs the sauce. If he'll feel a weight next to him in bed like memory wearing a coat.
He thinks about never washing his pillowcase again.
He thinks about letting the apartment rot around him. Milk going sour. Plants folding in. Dishes growing their own language of mould. Like the walls themselves are grieving. Like they should have that right too.
He thinks about how love makes no sense. How it’s this ridiculous flesh-sacrament. This fever. This bruise that says you were here. He thinks about what love turns into when there's no one left to receive it. Where does it go? Into the walls? Into the liver? Does it calcify? Does it sour? Does it just turn into rage?
He thinks: If I could, I would unzip my body and hand it to him. Say, Here. You use it. I'm done with it anyway.
He thinks about the last place Viktor kissed him in the morning. Not on his mouth. Not his neck. But the tip of his middle finger. Jayce holds that finger in his fist for a long time, some days.
Sometimes, Jayce imagines just crawling inside Viktor’s hospital gown and staying there.
~ * ~
Viktor is reading a book called The Secret Lives of Dying Cells.
It has a cracked spine and a cover that looks like a magnified rash, red and mottled and somehow pulsing even though it’s paper. Jayce found it in a used bookstore between Advanced Carpentry and Erotic Medieval Poetry.
He gave it to Viktor as a joke. Now Viktor’s obsessed with it.
They’re on the couch. Viktor’s curled up with a blanket around his shoulders Victorian ghost style. Jayce is next to him, half-asleep, sockless, nursing a mug of something that used to be tea.
Viktor flips a page and gasps softly.
“Oh, this is disgusting,” he says. “Listen to this: ‘Apoptosis is not the chaotic death of injury, it is choreographed. The cells shrink, fragment, and pack themselves up like regretful travellers.’”
Jayce opens one eye. “That’s beautiful. And upsetting.”
“Right?” Viktor beams, eyes wide behind his glasses. “They fold themselves up. They don’t want to make a mess.”
“Very polite of them.”
“Death by tidying. Honestly, I relate.”
Jayce smiles. “You’d absolutely fold yourself into a suitcase if it spared me the cleanup.”
“I’d label each organ. ‘For Jayce. Do not microwave.’”
Jayce snorts. “You’re horrible.”
“I’m delightful.” Viktor nudges Jayce’s thigh with his foot, sock sliding off a heel. “You know, some cells explode instead. Necrosis. That’s the messy kind.”
“I know.” Jayce sets down his mug and stretches, joints popping. “So you’re choosing apoptosis? The neat death?”
“I’m still deciding,” Viktor says, and taps the side of the book. “There’s a whole chapter on how dying cells send goodbye signals to their neighbours. Chemical farewells. Isn’t that kind of romantic?”
Jayce looks at him. The knife-hook cheek, the sweater– a wool comet, too big and once soaked in gym sweat and winter breath.
“You’re already doing that,” Jayce says quietly.
Viktor raises an eyebrow. “Reading gross science out loud to you?”
“No,” Jayce says. “Saying goodbye. Little by little. Every time you laugh at something awful. Every time you look at me like you know I won’t know what to do without you.”
Viktor goes quiet. Then he closes the book gently, like putting a child to sleep.
“I’m not saying goodbye,” he says. “I’m just narrating.”
Jayce reaches for him. Viktor lets himself be pulled close. Lets his head rest on Jayce’s shoulder. He smells like peppermint and pages.
“Read me more,” Jayce says. “Even the gross parts.”
“I only read the gross parts,” Viktor says.
~ * ~
The doctor lets him go home with a little white bag of chemical mercy. They are told as needed, which is doctor for when it gets unbearable.
Jayce translates that to soon.
Viktor’s already putting on his coat, half-limping, half-floating. He’s got too much energy. Too much salt-glow in his eyes.
Jayce has seen this once before. Not in Viktor, but in his grandfather. Days before he died, the old man got up, danced in the kitchen, and asked for meatloaf. He hadn’t walked in weeks. It was called terminal lucidity, but it felt more like death playing dress-up.
Now Viktor is humming.
Humming in the elevator. Humming outside. Talking too much about nothing: pigeons, air pressure, something he read once about time being a flat balloon.
Jayce watches him from the driver’s seat. Watches the way Viktor’s leg bounces, restless. Watches the way his fingers drum against his knee like a heartbeat gone crooked.
"You okay?" Jayce asks. “How are you feeling?”
“I feel good," Viktor says, almost singing. His eyes are glassy, bright, as if someone turned the contrast up on his face. "I'm hopped up on synthetic joy. This is the best I've felt in months."
Jayce doesn't smile. Viktor leans his head back against the window.The streetlight paints him in strips. Jayce grips the wheel. His palms sweat.
At home, Viktor kicks off his shoes like he’s twenty again. He puts on a record. Something jazzy and teeth-melt. I Fall In Love Too Easily, Chet Baker. He dances in the kitchen with a glass of orange juice and a pill bottle in his back pocket. He laughs when Rio trips him.
He eats two meals that night. Cleans up. Wipes down the counters. Organises the spice rack. Folds towels. Re-folds them. Laughs too hard at a rerun. Puts on music again. Sings a little. Asks Jayce if they should start a puzzle as they listen to music.
“Please?” he says.
Jayce nods. Swallows hard.
But all he wants to do is scream. To get on his knees and beg. Wants to throw the pills in the sink. But instead he walks over. Wraps his arms around Viktor’s thin waist. Holds on before the music stops at any second.
~ * ~
When Jayce met Viktor, he thought: This is the kind of person who leaves dents in things.
Not dents like damage. Dents like fingerprints in wet paint or the soft cave-in of a pillow after someone’s head has been there a while. You don’t see it right away, but later, when you turn around, the shape is still there.
He met him in the second semester of university, rain-wet and late. His usual seat was already taken, so he dragged his body to the back of the lecture hall. And that’s where he saw him. The pretty one. Hair too long for a boy who didn’t care, glasses slipping down the slope of his nose, an old band tee faded into soft ash– something that used to say something. A band, maybe. Or a last word. The name curled and cracked across the chest like a dying vine. Jayce didn’t recognise it. Didn’t ask until later. Much later. Probably in bed, probably half-naked, probably trying not to fall in love too fast. Viktor said: Květy. They sing about rot. I like that.
Jayce hadn’t seen the cane that was leaning too close to the seat, so when he tried to sit down, his knee bumped it and the thing almost swan-dived to the floor.
The boy caught it mid-fall. Quick wrist. Long fingers. Moth-like motion.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Oh, no worries. I’m sorry,” Jayce said, all lightning and wet denim. “Thanks. Did I miss anything important?”
Viktor shook his head. He wasn’t taking notes. He was sawing something into the margins of his notebook, something part skeleton, part orchid, part ghost-bloom crawling out of its own ribs. A thing that flowers and rots at the same speed.
Jayce probably said something else that was loose and forgettable, strung together with nerves and boyish garbage. He had a way of filling silences like they were holes he might fall into.
Viktor looked at him, and inside that look was a whole play Jayce hadn’t auditioned for but was suddenly starring in.
No fireworks. No holy choir. Just a click. A feeling like metal sliding into bone. That this person, this stranger with hair like dusk and eyes of fossil burn, was already carving a door into him. A door with no knob. By the time he noticed, it’d be too late to lock it.
Later, Jayce would try to remember who said I love you first. He never could. Just the bruise of it. Just the shape of being seen.
Someone humming his name before they’d ever heard it.
~ * ~
Jayce sits in the ugly corner chair and watches Viktor sleep. Not real sleep. That weird half-conscious drift that illness gives you, where the eyes flicker under the lids as though they’re dreaming of static. Viktor’s mouth is slightly open. One hand twitches on the blanket.
There’s a tube in his nose. A line in his arm. The monitor chirps every six seconds.
Jayce stands up, crosses the room in two long steps. Touches Viktor’s forehead. It’s warm. Not fever-warm. Just alive-warm.
Viktor opens his eyes.
“Hey,” Jayce says.
Viktor blinks, slow. His skin is paper-thin. Parchment over bone. His eyes are rimmed with red. His lips are pale. The IV bag hangs beside them, dripping sorrow.
“Did you bring the ugly juice?” Viktor asks.
Jayce squints. “What?”
“The green smoothie. The one that tastes like swamp but makes me fart vitamins.”
Jayce smiles. “No. You weren’t awake. And I didn’t want to drink it alone and die of regret.”
“You’re weak.”
“You’re dying.” The words hurt. But Jayce knows they make Viktor happy. Viktor grins like a little king every time someone calls death by its real name. It’s so weird, how it feeds him in a way Jayce doesn’t understand.
Jayce sits beside the bed. The chair groans. He leans his elbows on the railing. Viktor shifts. Winces.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“A few hours. You missed two soap operas and a man outside screaming at a tree.”
“Was it me?”
Jayce laughs. “I wouldn’t stop you.”
Viktor turns his head slowly. His eyes meet Jayce’s. There’s something molten in them. Something past pain. Past knowing. They sit like that for a minute. Machines murmuring. Time leaking out under the door.
Outside, a nurse wheels past. A tray clatters.
Inside, Jayce reaches for the call button. Not because Viktor asked. But because he looks too tired to keep pretending.
“You need anything?” Jayce asks.
Viktor doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed again. His chest rises. Falls.
Jayce sits back down and watches. And watches. And watches.
~ * ~
That night, Jayce climbs into the bed, careful not to tug all the wires. The rails creak.
“You’re gonna fall off,” Viktor murmurs.
“I won’t.”
“Your hip is in my rib.”
“You don’t need that rib anymore.”
Viktor chuckles. It’s a ragged sound, but so, so real. Jayce shifts until they fit imperfectly perfectly. Jayce’s arm around his chest. Viktor’s feet cold and tucked between Jayce’s calves like coins placed over the eyes.
Jayce presses his face into the back of Viktor’s neck.
“You’re warm,” Viktor whispers.
“So are you.”
“No I’m not.”
Jayce listens to Viktor’s breath. Not to count them or measure, just to remember the rhythm. There’s no point in counting them now. No point in measuring.
Viktor shifts, just barely. “Mm, look,” he hums. “We match.”
Jayce looks down. Sees their wrists side by side. His own: the bracelet Viktor gave him long ago, with the blue stone that always looked like sky waiting to break. Viktor’s: silver, stamped with DNR. The final instruction.
Jayce leans closer, forehead to clavicle, kisses the sliver of cold moonlight that’s already claimed him.
“Hey,” Viktor says. “Don’t look so sad.”
“I’m not sad,” Jayce says. His throat is stuffed with bees.
“Good,” Viktor says. “Because I’m not. I’m not sad.”
“Good,” Jayce says.
“You did enough,” Viktor says. “You are enough,” he whispers.
Jayce swallows the scream. He cranes his neck to look at Viktor’s face, to memorise the slope of his nose, the mole on his cheek, the way his eyelashes curl at the tips. These are not clichés. These are facts. Anchors. Viktor is beautiful. He is known. He is loved.
Somewhere down the hall, a monitor chirps. Viktor wraps his arms around Jayce, makes him the little spoon in a world of knives, presses too many kisses into his hair. He goes quiet, holding.
“Jayce,” Viktor says a bit later.
“Mm?”
“I’m tired.”
“You do look tired,” Jayce tells him.
“Can I sleep now?”
“Yes,” Jayce whispers. Bites his tongue until copper floods his mouth. “Sleep,” he tells him.
“I want to fall asleep in your breath,” Viktor says.
Jayce nods, his whole face against Viktor’s shoulder. “Okay.”
He kisses that shoulder again and again and again. Then he shifts, carefully, until Viktor’s head finds the soft cage of his chest.
They fall asleep like that. Just like they have in the last five years. Slowly, like a candle folding in on itself. Softly, like the end of a song.
And in the morning, only one of them will wake.
Only one will stay to watch the nurses strip the bed. Only one will drag his body to the sink. Only one will brush his teeth. Only one will stand in the mirror, both their names fat in his mouth, heavy as bruises, blooming purple behind his teeth.
And on the way home all alone and half-in-his-own-body, Asleep by The Smiths will spill through the speakers all syrupy and slow, a lullaby for the part of him that will stay behind in that bed.
The tears won’t fall all at once. They will pool. They will salt his collar. They will wait for the chorus.