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Tonight, Jayce finds it harder to breathe. It’s warm, and it hugs him in a way that he cannot stand. Reeling from the force of it, the push of everything his mind had worked on forgetting but his body remembered. Scents and touches and whispers from corners of his apartment he has not touched since it happened. Jayce doesn’t speak about it, he’s made a remarkable attempt at forgetting. Detaching himself from everything because anything could be a trigger. If he doesn’t remember, it couldn’t have happened, and he could pretend Viktor’s silence isn’t what it is and Jayce will still have him, all of him.
He shuts his laptop and gets up off his couch, moving first to open a window. He peers outside briefly- it’s late but it’s bright, a full moon. There are hardly any clouds, if you searched hard enough you could spot a star. He sees it immediately, Aldebaran. A few days before it happened, he very excitedly rambled about it to Viktor. Spoke of its name origin and classification, explained why it was his favourite, narrated all the memories he could recall associated with it. Viktor had stared at him with a look in his eyes Jayce couldn’t yet fully understand but was beginning to. His finished glass of whisky burned fuzzily in his chest, and the influence softened the edges of the hypnotic unknown between them. He thought, very briefly entertained the idea that, Viktor might lean in, or him. Close the gap, indulge, taste the other. He had pushed himself backwards then, hitting the back of his knees against the low couch arm rest and buckling forward. Viktor let out a startled laugh, slightly tipsy himself, and they had smoothed over it, if there was anything.
Now, Jayce pushes himself away from the window ledge again. He didn’t want to recall anything, relive a memory he hated now. He moves to the kitchen in an effort to do something with hands that will keep his mind busy and tire him enough to fall asleep as soon as he shuts his eyes. He’s taken to rearranging his cupboards. The more specialised the arranging, he realised, the more exhausted he is when he’s done. Four nights ago when he tossed and turned on his couch so much he was basically rocking it, he cleared all his lower ground cupboards, scattering pots and pans and random machines he hadn’t used in years across the floor. Jayce spent so long caught up in that exercise he woke up with a start on the floor in the morning, aching, sore and cold, with his back resting painfully against the levels in an open cabinet. The floor was still strewn with the utensils he hadn’t yet put away and he noted, distantly, how Blitzcrank was curled asleep in a cast aside pot lid.
He had spent the following night clearing what he had left, and tonight he opens his cabinets to begin the exercise again. He starts with his plates, removing each one individually to stretch out the time. He piles them, one over the other, and places his bowls on top of them next. There’s only two, he notes, dusty with underuse and neglect. He turns to his mug and glass cabinet, placing each one down in an exaggeratedly slow process.
“This is pathetic,” he mumbles to himself.
His focus drifts momentarily to the living room, to the couch he’s been camping on. Even though his joints cry out in protest and he half freezes his feet every night, he has not moved. The result of that is Blitzcrank has found sleeping in his mess of blankets more preferable than the basket Jayce brought with him when he moved the cat from Viktor’s. His allergies have been flaring up recently because of it but he doesn’t have the heart to move Blitzcrank. He doesn’t have the heart for a lot of things.
A mug slips out of his hand, faster than his withering reflexes can keep up with, and drops first onto the counter before shattering to pieces on the floor. Blitzcrank shoots awake, eyes wide and ears sharp and Jayce groans so loud the cat leaps off the couch and skitters into his open bedroom. Jayce doesn’t even want to look down. He can feel the glass shards on his socks and it’s taking everything not to put his hands over his face and scream. The corners of his fabricated reality have been chipping, and now it feels like it’s collapsing. Like the universe would rather see him keel over and die of grief than allow him the sweet comfortable freedom of pretending. Blitzcrank was… okay. He could stomach Blitzcrank, find some way to fit him into the story he was weaving in his head. Maybe Viktor couldn’t take care of him because he had to work overtime and Jayce wanted some ‘bonding time’ with the cat. Or Viktor changed vets and picking and dropping Blitzcrank would be easier from his place. A hundred different scenarios, a hundred different ways to spare the poor cat from the instability of moving from his beloved Viktor’s apartment, to Jayce’s, to Ximena’s or Cait’s, because Jayce was finding it hard to be with him.
Cat aside, everything else was falling out of place. He returned to work after two weeks of leave, when he could no longer ignore the emails and the concerned texts and calls of colleagues who hadn’t seen or heard of him. When he walked into his office, he was so shocked to see the empty space, cleared of its desk and everything that would signal another person worked in that room, he threw up in the bathroom on his office floor. Hand shaking as he gripped the seat and held it above his head, the other covering his face as he whispered to himself to just fucking breath. When he was finally composed enough to step out of the stall and go back, he found Viktor as a box on his desk. He swallowed back his bile when he read the name on it. He couldn’t open it, he couldn’t do any of this. He couldn’t just sit in his chair and crack open his laptop when there was a gaping hole right next to him. Something belonged there, someone belonged there. It had hardly been two weeks, and Jayce was so angry.
'A fucking box', he thought as he settled in the office cafeteria. He never went there, with Viktor at least, and so he could work on forgetting that Viktor now rested as a 70x50 cardboard box on his desk and not the beautiful man Jayce loves.
Jayce forces himself to look down, and he takes a careless step back to assess the damage. The mug is completely broken. A thousand pieces have flown across his kitchen floor- a mocking sea of glass shards in cobwebbed corners and in the gaps in the tile and his socks. He squats down and picks up the largest piece and for a brief second he doesn’t recognise the coloured pattern on it.
He remembers when he got it. He and Viktor had only been partners a few months and it was his birthday. Viktor very sheepishly explained that he didn’t know what to get him, but he had observed that he only drank coffee from the recyclable cup he would walk into his office with in the morning because getting a mug for new cups of coffee from the common room was too much of a hassle. It looked hand painted, with intricate coloured patterns of what looked like webs of what Jayce could only assume would be some sort of biology specimen under a microscope. It was beautiful, white with the painted webs of green, blue and pink. He was so happy he nearly cried, but the confusion of that reaction was not enough to stop him from enveloping Viktor in a crushing hug.
He loved the mug so much he stopped coming into work with coffee entirely, opting for his sachets of instant coffee instead just so he could drink from that mug alone and from nothing else.
He doesn’t remember when he brought it home, or why, but the sudden flashback makes him nauseous. He sucks in a breath and picks the next largest piece beside him, turning it over. He sees a spot of black and picks up another shard with the same thing, putting them together like puzzle pieces. The out of place black spots spell out a scribbled name- Viktor. 'So it was hand painted', he thinks, and zones back in to find his hands are shaking. He truly does want to scream. He’s hit with a wave of self hate so strong he falls off his heels and sits on the floor. He can’t tell whether he wants to cry or not, and he distantly thinks how he hasn’t cried at all.
He’s been drifting through the motions like a ghost. Allowing time to go by without going by with it. Sitting in the past and making himself comfortable, but hating himself more with every day that passes. He hates who he is for all the things he didn’t do, all the things he didn’t say, all the missed chances and opportunities to show how much he cared. The extent of his love. The regret closes around his throat and chokes him until he is gasping for breath. His eyes water and his chest burns like hot coal against skin, his heart threatening to implode with the way it closes in on itself, like a balled fist, and rattles his ribcage when it opens. Jayce refuses to sit there and cry, so he pulls himself onto his feet, clinging to the edge of the counter with sweaty hands and hardly the strength to hold back an avalanche.
Whenever Jayce feels this way, when his emotions have simmered to the top and he’s fracturing like something under steady, increasing pressure, he thinks of his Mom. She’s always there, an island in Jayce’s ocean heart. Even when he’s being a bad son and doesn’t visit nearly as much as she tells him to, even on the nights his exhaustion gives way to a lingering bitterness that spills over on the phone and he says something in a tone that he hates.
Ximena’s been calling him everyday, without fail, since it happened. Coming over every chance she gets (which is a lot as she always seems to be there) to cook him food and do his laundry because she knows he can’t do it himself. She sits with him and untangles his hair with her fingers while he falls asleep to the sound of her voice. Jayce didn’t realise just how much he missed his Mama until she wrapped her arms around him at the funeral and whispered into his shoulder that he didn’t have to read his eulogy if he didn’t want to. He almost went to ruin right there outside the funeral home bathroom door in her embrace. Almost allowed his grief to wound and scar his Mom. His achingly selfless, unconditionally loving Mama.
Jayce startled and dropped another mug he was holding when his phone suddenly buzzed somewhere in the living room. The pulse of anger and a hundred different emotions he didn’t have the clarity to name coursing through his body came out as a half broken sob. The force of it surprised him but another shoved itself out of his chest before he could gulp it back down. He managed all of one unsteady step back from the new mess before his knees gave in and he collapsed, cutting his palms at the end of his ungraceful fall. Another sob wrecked through him, and he leaned forward and placed a bleeding hand over his aching chest. His tears were cascading down his cheeks, saltily washing his face and blurring his vision. Emotions he’d been forcibly holding back, locking away in a tower barricaded by walls upon walls of what was delusion to the average person but a saving reality to him, ripped through him like bullet through flesh. He fisted his hand around the collar of his shirt, his throat sore from the loud, rawness of his crying. Every moment, every memory, everything his body associated with the name Viktor drowned him under their weight. It was too much- he was being mutilated and strangled and hung up like an ornament by his anguish. And as he struggled to inhale, he couldn’t help the thought of 'This must’ve been how Viktor felt. This must’ve been what he was forced to live with'.
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Viktor didn’t die in a hospital bed with Jayce’s warm hand clasped around his cold one. He didn’t drift away to the land of no return softly in his sleep, with Blitzcrank curled in the crook of his neck. He didn’t get that liberty- to be surrounded by love and unanchored hope. To feel unfettered gladness at not being alone as the sand in his hourglass drained. Viktor collapsed in the sixth isle of the local grocery store surrounded by strangers. The last thing he would’ve seen, Jayce morbidly imagined, is the unfamiliar hands of the shopper who reached out for him, the bags of pet food offering their audience as they watched his lungs hold him by the collar and say 'This is it. You will die here and that is final'.
Jayce would give anything, anything, to have it play differently. If Viktor had to die at all due to his illness, he would’ve done absolutely anything for the chance to see him as he leaves him behind. To hear him say his name one last time, feel his hot breath against his ear as he hugs him in his bed, any bed, as long as it wasn’t the unconsecrated floor of a bloody grocery store.
Jayce can still hear the stammer of the woman’s voice who called him.
“Hello, is this… Jayce Talis?” She asked, sounding so afraid and so unsure. Jayce was a little irritated. Even though he had gladly welcomed the unknown call to use as his excuse to step out of the most mind numbing meeting, his sour mood was still a cloud over his head.
“Yes this is Jayce Talis.” He replied curtly. There was a bit of a scuffle on her end of the line, some commotion Jayce couldn’t make sense of. He didn’t have the capacity to deal with whatever this was. “Sorry, I’m a bit busy at the moment. If you don’t mind-“
“Do you know who Viktor is?”
“What?” The world, in that instant, stopped spinning.
“Do you know who Viktor is?” She asked again, a hint of urgency in her tone.
“Yes… I do?” He said in a voice suddenly so small he wasn’t sure if he even heard himself.
“My name is Madeline. Something’s happened to Viktor,” she started, but the rush of blood to Jayce’s head drowned out anything else. His legs were moving before he could register the information. “…at the grocery store and I don’t know if you can-“
“Where are you?” He interrupted, already sprinting down the fire exit stairs to the basement for his car.
“Uhh, the… grocery store..? An ambulance has already been called and-“ but Jayce hung up.
He has no idea how he got there. One minute he was swerving out of his office’s basement parking lot and the next he had broken fifteen traffic laws and nearly driven straight through the building in his panic. What he has even less of an idea of is how he got there before the ambulance did. He crashed into the door, wild eyed, teary and afraid. He remembers the nice, chubby clerk that he and Viktor liked immediately rush to him and pull him through the crowd to Viktor. He remembers dropping to his knees and feeling Viktor’s cold face in his hands. The blue of his skin and the roll of his gorgeous golden-brown eyes to the back of his skull, the dried tear streaks at the corners. He remembers kneeling over his limp body, collapsing his ribcage as he counted to thirty and tried to breathe life into him. He remembers the grabby, horrible hands of the paramedics that tried to pull away him, saying over and over again that Viktor was dead and there was nothing he could do. He fought like a rabid animal- clawing at them and yelling that they were wrong. They were all wrong and they weren’t trying hard enough. That Viktor was a little like an old engine you had to cough back to life. That they needed to try his inhaler and the defibrillator they had to have somewhere in the vehicle. He watched as they lifted his bagged body onto a stretcher and rolled him into the ambulance.
There’s a vague memory of Madeline trying to talk to him before talking to the paramedics- apparently she had watched as Viktor buckled under his frame and was betrayed by his lungs. She had gotten to him first and tried what she could before someone else offered more experienced help. Jayce assumes that is when she rifled through Viktor’s tote and found his medical card with his name and emergency contact. Shortly after that must have been when he came barrelling in.
He rode in the ambulance to the hospital mortuary with Viktor’s fingers in his hands because that was all the skin the paramedics allowed him to touch and see. It only occurred to him that he should call someone when the receptionist at the mortuary asked if Viktor had any other known relatives or guardians that should be informed. He somehow managed to stutter a no, and after patting himself down and realising he left his phone in his car, timidly asked if he could borrow the receptionist’s.
He called the only person he could tolerate the thought of speaking to then, his Mama. He can’t remember how it went, or how he eventually got home because when the world stopped spinning five hours ago outside his office boardroom, it hadn’t started again. His Mom must have called Caitlyn because she was knocking on his apartment door before he even slipped off his shoes. She cocooned him in such a warm, loving embrace it’s a wonder he didn’t crumble to dust. The shock of it all had frozen him over like a lake in winter, hardened the softer edges of who he was and hollowed him out. She spent the night on his couch and didn’t ask him anything except to leave his bedroom door open. He complied, he had no reason not to, and Cait had hugged him tight and close again and told him she loves him and that she would be there if he needed her.
His Mom arrived the next morning and broke his back with the strength of her hug, showering him in kisses.
“Hi Mama,” he croaked, voice strained.
“Ay, mi corazón. Mi niñito lindo,” she whispered softly. “It will be okay. You will be okay.”
Jayce could do nothing but nod and allow his Mom to guide him back to the couch Cait had slept on. He watched as she entered his kitchen and appreciated the way she sat so close to him she was basically in him when they ate breakfast. He was grateful she didn’t ask him to accompany her to the mortuary and funeral home, choosing instead to go with Cait who had left him in the company of Vi. She drove him to Viktor’s apartment to pick up Blitzcrank who he suddenly remembered existed when Vi asked about him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to handle going in to pick up the cat himself, he was trying desperately hard to forget everything. A hole was being dug in his heart where he could get rid of it. He needed to get rid of it. So Vi went in instead, and they drove back with Blitzcrank’s soft meows interjecting the silence.
He found Mel when they got back. Cait had returned without Ximena and let her in and Jayce felt so overwhelmingly at seeing her he nearly dropped Blitzcrank in his carrier. They didn’t have a proper conversation until after the funeral, when Jayce snuck away because it felt like he would boil over and spill his guts in front of an audience he couldn’t look at and found her, lonely, in the parking lot. She had a sad, distant look in her eyes that Jayce felt he could understand. She was the only other person who would’ve known Viktor like he did, the one who could at least partly share in his grief. “I’m here for you, Jayce, if you need it. He was a good friend, you didn’t love him alone,” she mumbled awkwardly. They hugged for a very long time until she eventually let go and Jayce watched as she drove away.
Ximena’s frequent visits aside, Jayce had become a shut-in. He could not be witness to the unforgiving spin of the rest of the world when Viktor lay as a mound of ashes in a vase out of sight in his living room. His meaning for life could not have dropped dead in a fucking grocery store and absolutely nothing stops to pay their respects. He held Viktor’s dangling hand from his bodybag in that stupid ambulance and watched them wheel him into a room with other dead bodies. Jayce kept helplessly still as they cleaved between his steel grip on Viktor and him. Heartlessly ripping a new tear in his soul as they pried open his palm and forced Viktor’s hand from his. How could everything be so unbothered? Jayce was so angry, so offended. This was Viktor. Viktor, who saved Jayce from an untimely end the first time they met. Viktor, who was funny and insanely smart and challenged Jayce in ways he didn’t know he craved. Jayce took him to see Ximena for the first time over Christmas in the second year since they met and she had fallen in love with him immediately. Integrated him into the family, gave him one he didn’t have anymore.
They stopped being just colleagues and became best friends. Then even those boundaries began to rub away to reveal something more- a feeling more ecstatic but homely, like they belonged to each other. Jayce had been there, with him, through the worst of his health and the best nights of their lives. He’d stuck himself to Viktor with a glue so strong he’d have to shed his skin to be apart from him. They were partners… until they weren’t. Until the universe raised a very unabashed middle finger in both their faces and yelled “Fuck you!” Then K.O’d Viktor for emphasis.
On the days Ximena doesn’t stay over and Jayce isn’t confined to the prison in his mind, he paces. He does multiple laps around his flat to help him forget. It’s something to keep him distracted, to stop him from literally falling through the abyss created by Viktor’s absence, and on some nights, takes to his kitchen to rearrange everything he can. It’s working, sort of.
He sometimes imagines Viktor’s confusions when he landed in the afterlife, if there is one. His questions and refusal to be taken so easily, looking at God and telling Him he will not, cannot, succumb to illness in such a pathetic way. On the days he is blessed with sleep, he dreams of Viktor walking back down the steps of heaven and returning to the world of the living. He resumes his shopping and texts Jayce when he’s done not to forget it’s movie night. Jayce jumps awake and checks his phone on instinct and is promptly slammed down like a Whac-A-Mole by reality so hard he retches.
Viktor’s illness had almost taken him once before. He and Jayce were together in his apartment, spending a casual evening together, when he suddenly went faint. Jayce had never been more terrified in his life. He remembers how he shook as he squeezed Viktor’s slender fingers blue in his hospital bed. Crying, praying, begging to whatever higher powers existed to give him one more chance. Viktor had already fought so hard. He’d been so ill the past months and the one moment he’s well enough to allow himself to breathe, the scare of death swipes a gunny bag over his eyes and takes him blind. Jayce felt he would wrestle the being hidden behind that cloak and scythe if he had to. He would bend the boundaries between realms and steal Viktor back. The laws of nature he would break to fit his will, all the things he would give up and throw away if it meant feeling Viktor’s pulse in his neck when he clung to him.
This time… This time it was just unfair. A horrible scheme to rob and leave him bloody and broken. A vile, malicious act of cutting the wire on their shared telephone with sheers and then strangling Jayce with the ends. Somewhere, in the place Viktor was resigned to, Jayce was being laughed at. He knew it, he felt it in every unchanging moment, every unsympathetic act he was victim to like packaging a whole person, an entire life, in one measly, pathetic box left unfeelingly on his desk. He should’ve stormed into someone, anyone’s office, and found out who moved Viktor’s desk without his consent. He should’ve yelled his throat sore, asking why no one cared. Asking what about Viktor was so insignificant to them all they would dare sort through his things and choose which was more important to him, or Jayce, and toss out the rest.
An aching hole had been blast through his chest and he couldn’t stitch himself back together. He was falling to pieces on his kitchen floor with glass cutting into his palms. Choking on everything he had tried so hard to forget and grieving someone stolen from him. His tears burned his cheeks as he tried again (always, always trying) to call them back in and stop their steady march down the outlines of his face and from painting him so mournfully. Between breaths as jagged as a shore line, his mouth spelled out home in six letters. First as a whisper, then a wind blowing in a storm.
Viktor. Viktor. Viktor.
Over and over like the prayers he would recite as a child. Half on his knees and half sitting, one bloody palm stretching the fabric on his collar, crying his name, unguarded and wounded. He was clinging onto the fabric of Death’s coat and weeping at their feet.
“Please… please. There are so many things I let unsaid. I swear, I swear to you I really do, please, if you give me even just one more minute I will not fail. I promise I won’t fail.” But Jayce was walked over and ignored and he folded into himself like a frightened child and wept.
___________________________________
He must have fallen asleep at some point, because when he opened his eyes he was on his couch, hands bandaged and covered with blankets. Ximena sat up when she heard him shuffle.
“Jayce… how are you feeling?” She asked quietly, afraid to probe in case she dislodged something.
He nodded slowly, he didn’t trust his voice to cooperate.
“Are you hungry? Do you need anything?” She got up from her chair and sat on the coffee table by his head, rubbing her hand over his hair.
He shook his head, leaning into her touch. They stayed quiet for a long time, Ximena’s repetitive movement giving Jayce the anchor he’d been needing.
“I called you… you didn’t answer so I… came over,” Ximena started, slowly. “I’ve been worried about you.”
Silence stretched uncomfortably between them, and before Jayce could think any more of it, started talking.
“Mama… it feels like, there’s this… wound in my heart… and it’s bleeding continuously and I’m growing faint with everyday that passes.” He whispered softly.
Ximena sighed. “When your father died, I thought I would rather die with him than watch him be lowered into his grave. Everything hurt, so much I thought I was burning inside.” She moved her hand from his hair to his arm, rubbing up and down in a soothing motion. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I felt aimless… but then you were there.”
Jayce turned his head to see her.
“I would see your father in your big beautiful hazel eyes and feel that maybe, I could do it. If for nothing else, then for you.” She said, smiling sadly. “I know how much it hurts… I know that it feels like you cannot go on, but I am here, Jayce. So many people that loved him are.”
She moved off the coffee table and sat in a space on the couch near his chest, her hand gently cradling his face. She pulled him up into a hug, pressing his head into her shoulder and rubbing more circles between his shoulder blades. Jayce’s hands slowly came up to hold onto her shoulders, not making much of an effort to avoid creasing her blouse with his grip.
His Mama was always so soft. She was holding out her hand the way you would to a kitten you want to pet. Waiting patiently, selflessly offering her presence and comfort. The tears were rolling down Jayce’s face faster than he was ready for, and he breathed in her scent in a hopeless attempt to ground himself.
“Está bien aceptarlo, mi amor. No te van a pedir que lo sueltes, pero no te vas a morir después de aceptarlo. Ya verás.” She mumbled, squeezing Jayce a little tighter.
The hacking sob that crawled its way out his chest startled Ximena, and she pulled him even closer, whispering a hundred different truths as he sobbed on her shoulder.
“Estás bien, Jayce. Vas a estar bien.”