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Sometimes Jayce wakes up in the middle of night and watches Viktor sleep. Puts his hand in front of Viktor’s nose to feel the warm exhale of life. Fights the urge to pry open his eyelids and check to see if his eyes are the right color. Jayce doesn’t even know what the wrong color would be. Just knows what’s the right one.
Today he goes back to sleep and wakes up five minutes before his alarm goes off. Jayce hasn’t needed the alarm in months but he still leaves it on as a precaution.
He slips out of bed and puts on a pot of coffee before taking a quick shower. When he comes back out to the kitchen Viktor is sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee, his hair standing up in tufts.
“Did I wake you?”
Viktor makes a noise and takes a sip from his mug. Jayce interprets that as a no. He pours himself some coffee and by the time he looks back up Viktor’s eyes are already closed.
Jayce nudges Viktor’s arm; Viktor blinks back blearily at him. “Why are you up, then,” Jayce says, though he’s pretty sure he knows the answer already.
Viktor seems to wake up a bit at that. “Need to study,” he says, frowning. He’s been accepted into the local university, but now they want Viktor to take some not-quite-entrance exams to place him into the proper classes due to his rather lacking (really, lack thereof) transcripts.
Jayce looks over to the living room area where there’s a layer of notes over the couch, the armchair, the table, the floor; it looks like snow. “What’s it today?”
“Chemistry,” Viktor grimaces, “and physics.”
Jayce pats Viktor’s shoulder. “I can help you when I get home later, if you want.”
Viktor shrugs, indolent. “Thanks.”
Jayce has a bagel for breakfast; he gets dressed and ready for work, brushing his teeth, fixing his hair, stretching his legs. His calf, his knee twinge like usual but not in a painful way, not today at least.
When he comes back out to the living room Viktor is already curled up in the armchair with a workbook he’s borrowed from the library. He doesn’t reply when Jayce says goodbye, but Jayce isn’t fussed about it. It’s almost nostalgic, actually.
Jayce spends his commute split between reading his book—a nonfiction book on the mythology of ancient Egypt, which Jayce has been enjoying comparing the contents to what he remembers about Shuriman history—and checking his phone.
He had bought Viktor a phone a few weeks earlier, a flip phone that was clearly designed for the elderly, with a simple display and large buttons. But even that was too much for Viktor. Jayce had tried calling him while he was out the next day; he came home to the phone smashed to bits and Viktor complaining about how it started making noises out of nowhere and he didn’t know how else to stop.
Jayce snorts to himself as he remembers the memory, then yawns. At least Viktor is starting to get the hang of computers. The train creaks; the announcer lets Jayce know it’s almost his stop.
It’s a ten-minute walk from the station to where the machine shop is. The foreman greets Jayce as he clocks in. He’s an older man, graying hair and failing eyesight that he refuses to address; he’s always needling Jayce to go back to school and become a proper engineer. “You’re too smart for us. Too much potential.”
Jayce always laughs and shakes his head. He likes being an operator. The machines don’t sing like hextech but they have their own music. The money’s not the best but at least he’s doing something with his hands. The constant sound of the tools grinding and deforming metal into shapes overwhelms him in a good way.
It’s a small business, with only a few employees including Jayce; a pair of high school students come by twice a week to train as apprentices, but they usually end up just doing the work nobody else wants to do. The shop mostly specializes in making custom parts for customers; one of their clients is a young, aspiring engineer-entrepreneur who reminds Jayce far too much of a past self.
He eats his lunch in the breakroom. The high school students are there, still shy and too polite despite having worked here for a month now. They only talk to Jayce to ask if they’re doing something right or not; he never gets a chance to ask them for their names again.
He takes a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket and starts working on it again. After a couple minutes he feels eyes on him and looks up to see one of the students sitting a table over leaning forward trying to see what Jayce is doing. When he realizes he’s been caught the student flushes and timidly asks Jayce what he’s working on.
“A design,” Jayce says, “for a music box.”
The other student has looked up from his phone now. “Is it a gift?”
Jayce nods, holding up the paper and the students nod back, enthusiastic in their support. “It looks cool,” the first student says before going back to eating his lunch, though he still glances curiously every so often at Jayce.
Jayce clears his throat and the students jump. “Actually, I’ve just about got the schematics for the actual instrument down, but I’m not sure about the wooden box itself yet…” He looks at the students; their brows are furrowed, earnest in their effort to help, and he smiles to himself.
He sits down at their table and lets them look at the schematic properly. They ask if he’s got a song in mind; he does, but it’s not a song they would have heard of. The three of them brainstorm for a while until the lunch break ends.
One of the students stays behind and waits for Jayce to put the paper away. “Actually, I have a friend who’s taking woodworking this year,” he says. He fiddles with the hem of his shirt. “I can ask her for some scrap wood that you can use…” He looks at Jayce expectantly.
“That’d be great,” Jayce says, and the student beams.
By the time he’s out of the shop the sun is already close to setting. Orange and pink streak into blues and violets across the sky. He takes the scenic route back to the apartment, picking up some takeout along the way.
Viktor is right where Jayce left him when he comes back. Jayce calls out to him but it’s obvious he’s fallen asleep, his chin tucked into his neck. Jayce takes a peek over his shoulder; his book is open to a section on electricity. There are question marks and underlines in blue ink everywhere on the page.
In Jayce’s brain Viktor is always like this, sitting in the sun, looking over papers with a pen resting against his mouth. Pink bougainvillea crawling over the white limestone behind him.
Jayce turns the lights on, and Viktor wakes up with a start. “Oh, Jayce,” Viktor says, voice deep and scratchy from sleep. He stretches out like a cat, rubbing his eyes.
Viktor hands him the physics textbook as they eat dinner on the floor; it’s the part of the living room that’s been least affected by Viktor’s study habits. In the light Jayce can see all the plastic tabs sticking out from the pages. “Explain these to me,” Viktor says plainly and Jayce does.