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“It’s just a dream, Jayce.”
“I know.”
“I am not here, Jayce.”
“I know.”
The early morning sunlight loves Viktor. The pale wash of light gives his skin an almost ethereal glow, rendering the wine-dark bruising left by his brace and the jagged crescent blush of his scars in an iridescence that shifts to the steady rhythm of his breathing. His hair is mussed with sleep, and in this liminal half light all of his sharp edges appear somehow softened.
Jayce aches with every fibre of his being to reach across the space between them, which is at once a matter of inches and an entire universe, but that would break the illusion. He knows this because he has tried. And tried. And tried.
Viktor sighs, half hidden in his pillow, and fixes Jayce with a look that is two parts concern and one part sad fondness. The sun has not yet caught his face, but his honey eyes shine. “You cannot stay here forever, lásko.”
“I know that too. Humour me?” Jayce can feel the childish pout twisting his mouth. Apparently it's just his luck that he has chosen to love a man so pedantic that he insists on disproving Jayce's own personal fantasy of him.
The corner of Viktor's lips quirk as if he has read Jayce's thoughts. Which, he supposes, is plausible seeing as they are both residents of his own head.
“Jayce,” he says, the shape of it pulled up playfully along the curve of his mouth. “I love you, you know this.”
The gaping void nestled between Jayce’s stomach and lungs yawns wide enough to swallow the sun. Viktor stretches out an arm towards him and Jayce wants to beg, to scream, to do anything to make him stop, because this means that the dream is over and he is not ready for the dream to be over. He screws his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to watch the colours wash out of the scene like old laundry as it fades.
As he hovers on the precipice of consciousness he can almost believe that he feels the brush of cool fingertips feather light over the line of his cheek.
Jayce wakes to the palid light of dawn insinuating itself around the edges of the heavy curtains. He does not look at the sickly way it highlights the oil slick of webbed scars across his ruined leg, nor at the insistent fingers that creep across the smooth, cold sheets and the empty pillow on the other side of the bed.
He presses a hand over his face as if that might hold in the phantom sensation of Viktor’s fingers against his skin. Tries to convince himself that the gentle prickle on his cheeks is the remnant of Viktor's touch and not the cooling of tear tracks.
His mother will be at the door soon; he can hear her downstairs preparing food that he will choke down as it turns to ash in his mouth. The day stretches before him, interminable in its length, and yet he knows he has no choice but to face it. To move like an automaton through the tasks that will tire his body until he is able to fall once again into the arms of sleep.
He runs a hand over the empty pillow, smoothing out the creases left by a sleeping ghost.
“I’ll be back soon, Vik. Wait for me?"