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“Jayce,” Viktor says, “Are you alright.”
You blink, blearily, at the Machine Herald, then at the hole in your window still faintly glowing around the edges from being melted through with a laser, then out at the warm summer midnight beyond. And you say to him,
“I’ve got the air conditioner on, man.”
You’re standing in your living room wearing nothing but your boxers, caught between one glass of whiskey and the next, contemplating the broken glass on the floor and sort of wishing it had stayed one melted heap instead of falling through the carved hole in the center.
You haven’t left your house in three weeks.
“Jayce,” Viktor says.
“It’s hot as sin,” you say, walking past him to the alcohol shelf in a convenient little alcove in the wall. The house you live in is oppressively fancy (courtesy of your contract, which was more a benefit for the clans to not endure the embarrassment of you living out of a perfectly respectable apartment), and whoever built the place meant for it to be a place to display something — a sculpture, or a painting, maybe, so it’s got these neat little spotlights that shine prettily through the glass like it’s something to be proud of. The bottle of whiskey is right where you left it, and for a second you think about sipping from it straight, but decide you’re not there yet. Besides, there’s still ice in your cup. “What am I gonna do with a hole in my window, V?”
You move to take a sip from your freshly-poured glass, but Viktor catches you by your wrist.
“Jayce,” he presses again, “Are you alright.”
Viktor speaks flatly in that way he does, the words posed like the vocalization is a courtesy and not a question. It may as well not be, given Viktor already knows the answer. And since Viktor already knows the answer, you don't bother to respond.
“ Jayce .”
You wrench your arm out of his grip, but it’s much looser than you expect so the liquid sloshes a little over the side of the cup.
What does he want you to say? No, I'm not? Then what? You have a sweet little heart-to-heart, you and the nightmare toaster oven over tea and a box of tissues?
What makes Viktor think you’ll tell him?
There's this audacity that pisses you off, inherent to the fact that Viktor is here at all — that he's come all this way because he thinks he has to, that not only will Jayce tell him, but that he is the only one Jayce will tell. That he’s still the emergency contact, even after everything. It’s patronizing. Insulting.
And the worst part is he’s right.
The worst part is you’d been relieved when his stupid fucking laser shot through your window, July heat be damned, because as much as you tried to tell yourself off you did want him here, need him here — because you’ve never really been able to sever the part of you that calls him your best friend.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it?
How do you tell someone standing right in front of you that you miss him?
How do you tell someone you’ve spent the last three-weeks-or-ten-years in your cups wishing things were different? That when you look at him you ache for what you used to have, that some days you just sit in your study and think about what that might have grown into if given the chance?
You don’t think you could bear it, to hear him explain why it’s not possible. Because you know, alright? Because this city is a fucking tar pit, because the clans have you as their pet monkey, because of Everything, you know — but some days.
Some days you wonder if Viktor would have stayed in academia. If he’d have become a professor — you think he’d have been good at that. Started a scholarship for Zaunite brilliance, a real one this time. Kept credit of his steam golem while Stanwick goes to hell.
You’d probably still have your contract be bought out by the clans but at least you’d have someone to bitch to. And you’d still make more money than you know what to do with, but the house wouldn’t be so oppressively lonely. You’d frame something in that little alcove, maybe a newspaper clipping, or a family photo. You wonder if you’d have made good fathers. You wonder if you’d actually be able to make a difference.
You wonder if you’d be happy.
You’re well aware of how pathetic it is. Stuck up your own ass about some dream life you’ll never have that maybe wasn’t even a possibility in the first place, but you guess you’ll never know, huh? It’s a road that diverged a long, long time ago. Sometime into your thirties you well and truly accepted the impossibility of it — but the want for it, that crystallized into something permanent. Routine. An old friend.
Viktor’s still standing there, waiting for you to say something. You suspect he will until you do.
When you decided to hole up in your house until the Gioparas or the Ferroses or whoever it was that pulls on your dick these days came for your head (they never did, because they don’t actually give a damn what you make anymore so long as they have the Defender on-call for a handshake, so you changed that criteria to ‘dying of liver failure’), you hadn’t actually prepared a contingency plan for if Viktor came to get you. You hadn’t, because you didn’t want to be disappointed if he didn’t show.
And now you’re free-falling.
Three weeks and ten years and one conversation to tell him how you’re washed, how you realized you’ve been wanting for so long that it’s become mundane, that you fear it’s just who you are now. How you’ll never outgrow that old schoolboy. How you peaked in college. How you don’t feel human without him, how some days you think you’re made only of regrets. How you miss him.
Most of all, you miss him.
And for a moment it's on the tip of your tongue. Just those three words, I miss you, like maybe they’ll be enough to convey ten years, twenty years’ worth of saying the wrong thing or nothing at all, twenty years’ worth of wishing for something more from someone who probably wanted the same damned thing but you’ve both been idiots, but maybe you can finally stop doing that, if you can just tell him that you miss him, that you love him, so you open your mouth, and you say —
“I’m forty.”
— and it slips down the drain.
Viktor stares at you, and you raise the glass in your hand in mock toast.
You can’t tell him. You don’t think you would survive it.
“Cheers,” you say.
And then he hugs you.
It’s not sudden, not physically. His movements are deliberate, telegraphed — slow enough that you could have easily stepped away (and if you had Viktor probably would have killed himself) but you’d sooner have expected him to strangle you (again) or dislocate your shoulder (again) so you sort of just stand there and let it happen, and by the time he’s holding you in his arms you don’t care any more to internalize the fact that there is no world where you don’t let him do whatever he wants to you.
Standing there in your living room, there is an acute awareness of how terribly, nakedly human you are. Viktor runs warm, almost too warm against your skin. There is no heartbeat under the panels of his chest, only a rotary hum where the twin chambers fulfill the duty of pumping blood, or whatever it is, through his circulatory system. His breathing is metered and motionless; no rise and fall to his chest, all safely tucked inside to where you almost can’t tell which is the inhale and the exhale if not for the filtering of air somewhere in his neck that just lightly brushes the top of your hair. His hold is not soft, and there is no give.
It is comforting all the same.
The glass slips from your fingers and shatters across the hardwood as you move to bury your hands and face in the folds of his cloak. The whiskey splatters on your bare feet and soaks into the trailing edge of the fabric but neither of you move to do anything about it, and you don’t stop to think about all the fucking glass on the floor because it doesn’t matter, because you’re rooted in place, because he has you and you don’t want to let go. And when Viktor’s hand comes up to the flat of your shoulder blade to rub your back you stifle a sob and clench your fists in the fabric like it’ll stop their shaking, and you just cling to him. And you stay like that for a very long time.
—
When he pulls away, you don’t look at him. He doesn’t comment on the awkward dampness of his cloak or the redness of your eyes or the stubbornly lingering tremble in your pursed lips. He stares at you, and he waits for you to say something, and you don’t.
When he leaves, you pour yourself another glass.