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jayce wakes with his body aching, cheek pressed to a ground that he doesn't recognize. there's a disonance between his mind and body and it takes him a moment to figure out how to move his hands, like he'd been asleep for weeks. everything feels coated with a thick fog, memories distant, slipping through his fingers like sand. his mouth feels full of sand, too, he thinks briefly while the word is in his mind. he tries to put together where he is, what happened, as he struggles to haul himself to his feet. he'd been in the hexcore reactor- not alone, who was he with?- and there had been a flash... it's all a mess after that, he cannot wrangle the sensations and emotions into a cohesive thread. he pushes himself up onto his knees with a clank- odd- why was there a brace on his leg?- and uses his hammer to get up the rest of the way. his hammer... it looked different. smoke curled off of it, even the handle was warm to the touch, as if it had recently been used. he recalls the way it burned in his hands in the shimmer pit. what was he doing here that he'd be launching attacks? where exactly was here? trying to put the pieces together sends him staggering into a wall, and it finally occurs to him to look around. it's not like anything he's ever seen (and yet he's quite sure he's seen it all before and will see it all again), curled chunks of earth and metal floating unnaturally. they look like the swirls viktor would doodle in notebook corners, he thinks idly for a moment, before it all comes crashing back to him. the name functions as a magnet, snapping every piece into place. viktor, viktor, viktor- his viktor, his best friend, his partner, his vitya, his viktor- jayce starts running back to the center of the floating pieces, and he hardly hears the chorus of screams. viktor- he sees a crumpled body on the floor that had briefly been viktor's. viktor- he sees him with eyes that are not his own, phantasmal threads stringing him up like a marionette. viktor- he sees him looking back at him with something in his gaze that was entirely alien. viktor- he sees him as a pile on the ground, gear spinning out of his limp fingers, fluttering eyelids growing stiff. viktor- and jayce enters what could have been a temple and is now a mausoleum, a tomb holding zaun's savior, a nameless grave for someone who should have been dead for years now, rubble crushing something that ought to have lived forever. and his blood is on jayce's hands. jayce enters and he half expects viktor to be levitating again, or turned into something ethereal, or clutched by any of the dozens of worshippers. he is, instead, still just a pile on the ground, looking more human than he ever had. jayce is frozen for what could only be a moment but feels like an eternity, just as he had been the last time he saw viktor's body dead and cold and broken. and then, just as he had last time, he drops everything and runs to it. he can't hear anything beyond the ringing in his ears, anything that could be happening anywhere to anyone suddenly infinitely less important that what had happened right here to the two of them, because of the two of them.
"viktor, viktor, vik- no, no, please-" he falls to his knees beside the body, the blanket draped across it pinched in the gears of his brace. "-please, i didn't- i wasn't-" his hands find cold flesh, made even colder with the embedded strands of brass, shining dully against the grey-purple mess that had been skin. "-i'm so sorry, i'm so sorry, viktor, please-" his fingers scrabble from the shoulders to the neck to the face, the one bit of the body left soft and pale and his own. (he'd lost one of the moles on his cheek, and if jayce were not grieving the thing within the body at the moment, he would've grieved the mole. he would've held a funeral for it, if the thing in the body would let him.) "-no, no, viktor-" he bundles the body into his embrace as if through warming it, it could become alive once more. "-viktor-" his voice breaks and he sobs something guttural. the world around him burns, tents aflame, statues collapsing, and he doesn't see any of it. (he wouldn't care, even if he did.) he had taken this man that was loved- so loved- and turned him into this cold broken thing with a gaping hole in it, its eyes half open, staring emptily up at him with irises that didn't belong in those sockets.
jayce talis loves hard- anyone who knows him could tell you this, he loves hard and wholeheartedly and with everything he is. this means he grieves equally, all-consumingly and self-destructively and desperately. he sobs so hard he thinks he might cough up his heart, and he'd be happy to if he could fit it into viktor's chest. viktor's chest- splayed open as if he's a bird to be stuffed and cooked, ripped open like a cherry with its pit punched out, hollow and still and silent like a jar that'd had all its fireflies turned loose. jayce sobs and clutches the body and a tear runs down his nose, dropping into the wound. rivulets of purple light pulse for the briefest moment. another tear, another flash- dim, hardly there, but something. jayce recalls viktor recounting how the hexcore seemed to grow more powerful after drinking his blood, how it had eaten sky whole and fixed his lungs. jayce talis loves hard. jayce talis is a scientist. jayce talis is truely desperate. jayce talis, heart racing with the faintest glimmer of hope, touches his fingers to the wound. something tugs at him, and he knows this is his last chance to turn back. he presses further in and almost has the audacity to smile as the pulses of light grow stronger, as black ribbons shoot up his arm and consume him. jayce talis loves hard. he presses his lips to viktor's cheek and could swear he feels a breath escape the body's lips before he is devoured entirely.
jayce wakes with his body floating, feeling oddly at peace. death doesn't seem so awful when you're the one it happens to. he stretches his hands and they look more normal than he anticipated. his surroundings, though, live up to expectations much more. its like drawings he's seen of god, the night sky through the academy's observatory telescopes, eyes rubbed so hard the world fades into colors for a moment. as long as it worked. he hardly has time to think it before something collides with his back. he thinks for a second that it's an asteroid, maybe the lamb and wolf come to tell him he ended up in a better place that he was meant to. he pivots, not entirely sure how he does without anything to push off of, to see-
"viktor?" his hair is white, glowing softly, his body looking like its been painted in neons, but his face- he has both moles, his eyes are golden, he looks like himself. for the first time since the bomb, even since a few weeks before that, he looks like himself, like the viktor that had saved jayce's life all those years ago, who told him not to ask permission, who drove him to strive to improve the world every day, who jayce had fallen for in a way he'd never quite put the words to- this was him. this was him. he looked furious, his fists balled against jayce's chest, and jayce hardly cared, seeing anything on his face that wasn't just a vacant gaze was enough for him.
"jayce- what did you- why would you-" his mouth contorts like he can't even verbalize his rage.
"viktor, i'm so sorry, i wasn't-"
"why would you do that?" this is the most outraged jayce has ever seen viktor, and he can't blame him.
"i didn't mean to, i swear- i wasn't in my body, i still don't know what it was, i swear i'd never hurt you-"
"you sacrificed yourself to save me?" for the first time, he notices the tears welling in viktor's yellow eyes, glowing the same as his hair. jayce is given pause by this. he had been under the assumption, fairly logically, he thought, that viktor was angry because jayce had shot him through the chest. that didn't seem to be the case. "my god, you idiot-" and viktor punches his chest to accentuate the point, "-you'd destroy yourself, not even knowing if it would work?" he looks truly astounded at jayce's foolishness.
"i missed you," jayce breathes. it's hardly audible, not even a full whisper, but to the two of them it feels like a sonic boom. there's a bird fluttering in jayce's chest and he cannot find anything else to say. luckily, he doesn't have to. viktor collides with him once more, hugging him tighter than jayce thinks he ever did in life. viktor hugs him the way jayce had hugged him after the hexcore spat him back out into the world, mangled and inhuman and alive. jayce freezes for a moment, briefly unable to accept the possibility that his... affection for viktor may not be one sided before hugging him back. tears well in his own eyes, and he smiles. "wait-" he pulls back so they're holding each other by the shoulders, their bodies no longer flush with each other, and it makes his chest ache to do so. "-viktor, what are you doing here, didn't it bring you back?" viktors gaze lingers on jayce's face, wandering across it in a way that makes him feel peeled open.
"it's... difficult to explain, the 'me' you are speaking to right now is not precisely the 'me' you spoke to through salo, and not the same one in my body." jayce's face apparently betrays his befuddlement and viktor smirks the same way he had when jayce first told him they needed to 'crank it'. "if i'm being honest, i don't quite understand myself- you're distracting me!" he hits jayce's chest again, almost comedically gently. "you idiot."he can't even bring himself to look convincingly angry at him anymore. "although i suppose- rather selfishly, i know- i'm glad to have you here with me. with this me." he touches jayce's cheek softly, and jayce feels such fondness for him that he's surprised he doesn't burst on the spot.
"i love you." the words tumble out of him before he has the chance to reconsider, to convince himself this is an awful plan, but is there even a point in hiding it anymore? he's already laid it bare- willing to give up his life's work to save viktor, willing to vote his mentor off the council to save viktor, willing to destroy himself to save viktor. he loves him, he's already said as much wordlessly for near a decade. viktor continues the conversation the same way, and silently kisses jayce. it's soft and hesitant, and jayce can hardly take it. his eyes stay wide open even though he knows they're not supposed to, his breaths quickening, his heart racing. viktor pulls away and looks him up and down. his face goes pink and he turns away.
"i'm sorry, i thought-" jayce kisses him back, hungrily, the way he had quietly wanted to for years, like the lack of it would kill him all over again. viktor's arms are thrown around his back, bony fingers weaving into his hair (shorter than it had been a few minutes ago in life, just the way it had been before things went wrong). jayce encircles viktor entirely, drawing his radiant form into himself, his hands planting at viktor's nape and the small of his back. jayce talis loves hard, and viktor finds that he does too.