Chapter Text
“It’s a little like magic,” says Jayce. “You know, before we managed to harness it.”
The campanile tolls the midnight bell. Twelve chimes and then its echo duplicating it in decreasing decibels as it cascades across the courtyard, bouncing back and forth between the exterior walls of the academy.
Above: A black canvas littered with tiny, scintillating stars like holes poked into a shoebox, brass-edged, alabaster buildings rising on all sides of them into the dark. Below: Jayce, ceaselessly moving about. Restless energy abound, aplenty. No end in sight. All day. The roaming, the work, the lab, the forge. The fire. The furnace. The city. The world. All of it at his fingertips. The wind, the not-so-distant sea.
His pulse. His heart. His hands, gesturing. His body. The stairs. The body beside his own: Viktor. Viktor, listening. Viktor, like an epiphany. Viktor, in that manner which one says, My God. Viktor. It's Viktor. Eternal tangle of cowlicks. Radiant and amber-eyed. Fraternal moles to soliloquize about. Viktor. Steam-roller intellect to match his own. Ego to boot. That not-quite-but-almost smile that lingers in the corners of his mouth.
The bottle, almost emptied, passed back and forth, topples over and tumbles clink-clinking down the stone steps, rolls across the flagstone, and collides halfheartedly with the side of the fountain at the center of the courtyard.
Jayce unfastens the buttons at his wrists. “Do you remember that?” he asks, rolling the sleeves of his carmine dress shirt to elbows. “That feeling—holding the hexcrystal in your hand? That tiny surge of energy, nerve endings going haywire and all the hair on your arms and legs rising. It’s like that, kind of, only it’s inside of me. A part of me.” He rises, intent on retrieving the bottle, runs down three steps, five, ten, then turns back to face Viktor at the top. “Not very scientific, maybe, but it’s the best way I can explain it.”
"I don't really know," begins Viktor, heat-flushed and bundled up: cardigan, coat and scarf. As though it’s cold, but it’s not—though the trees are wilting and the gutters leaf-choked. "what to extrapolate from that." He runs a hand through his weed-sprung hair and then it stays that way, twisted upright. Unencumbered by gravity.
Jayce grins, hand to hip, one foot much higher than the other which is bent almost to the stone. "It's incredible, V," he says. "I wish you could feel it too." He rises and turns and goes down the length of the stairs several steps at a time, feeling the tepid wind draw up about him.
Proceeding towards the alabaster fountain which gushes pearlescent whorls of water in the synthetic lightblue of its floor-burrowed bulbs, he bends and plucks from the stone the bottle, shakes it to see if anything's left. Holds it out in the direction of Viktor who waves a hand about the air. He uncorks it, downs its contents, then stands the bottle on the edge and wipes a hand across his mouth.
"However," says Viktor, louder to let him hear but Jayce, all the same, draws close again. "If I recall correctly, which I believe I do—" the slow curl of a smile pulls up the left corner of his mouth, pearly glint of teeth. In equal fashion intoxicated and intoxicating. "—it was highly reactive, that crystal. So, if I may ask, what would happen if you were to, ah, you know—?" He curls his left hand into a fist and slams it into the palm of his right. Then he retrieves out of a pocket a small oblong tin box.
Jayce comes up the last couple of steps. "Are you asking in earnest? I can't tell if you're being serious or not."
Viktor cups a hand round the errant flame rising up from the silver-colored zippo in his other hand, lighting the handrolled cigarette dangling loosely between his lips. “Yes,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, smoke tumbling. “I ask in earnest.” A faint sprinkling of white ashes dusts his red-and-gray striped scarf.
“Well,” starts Jayce, stooping to steal both cigarette and lighter. “I have no intention of trying that, you know—“ as the smoke draws down his windpipe, he coughs, tears cresting his eyes. Viktor trembles with a laugh stifled and inaudible, lifts a hand to pat his back but reaches only his hip, pats that instead. “—you know,” begins Jayce anew, returning the cigarette, “slamming into any walls. I just have to keep steady, keep the rhythm.” He crouches down before Viktor, a hand beside his body to steady himself.
“Right,” says Viktor, nodding. “Can I have the lighter, please.”
Jayce nears further and pulls it from behind Viktor’s ear to little more than an annoyed sigh, little more than mild amusement—that silhouette of a smile—and then only because he’s inebriated.
i
TIME AND SCENE: Afternoon, almost sundown. The laboratory. Archaic gleam of sun through the wide, expansive window spanning the width and length of the far wall. Light coming down gold-gleaming upon the slate desk; the slate floors; the cramped wooden shelves; the silver-gleaming sink; the blueprints lying about.
Jayce stands hunched over his cluttered workspace. Wire-tremble of bones, like a light flickering incessantly. No more that levitative, effervescent state of perennial-seeming bright-gleam of unimpeded exaltation, dynamism, present in that visage. He’s reminiscent more of a bottle shook and stoppered, pressure building inside with nowhere to go.
Enter, from the left, Viktor: finger-snarled hair, chalk on his red shirt and his suspenders loose over his shoulders. His arms bare, both sleeves rolled to elbows, the smooth pale-fleshed arms with their fuzz of dark-brown hair and the clutter of star-like moles. Furrowed brow, down-slant of mouth. He worries between his hands the handle of his cane, observing Jayce, who does not, for quite some time, notice him.
He appears as though an apparition. One moment some amorphous bright-lit space of nothing and then the next he’s standing there as though all along he had—and not only had Jayce not noticed, not heard nor seen, but altogether forgotten that he was even there to begin with. Not because he expects the lab to be empty, but because the lab too seems to have gone out of his perception, disappeared—or rather, he has, Jayce has, into some state which exists neither in body or space, maybe not even in time.
Perhaps it is not then Viktor, but Jayce who has appeared, who does, who comes to, who startles out of that nebulous imponderable no-man’s-land, surprised and bewildered, as Viktor’s hand, vein-struck and pale, comes down upon the desk in the vicinity of Jayce’s to snatch out of his grasp the pen he’s holding.
“What?” Jayce says, peering up at him.
Viktor’s brow furrows. “How long have you been here?”
“At the lab?” he asks, blinking mechanically. “Not sure. Why?—Were you talking all the while? I mean, was there a question preceding that one?”
“Is something the matter?” Viktor cocks his head as though assessing some catastrophe of which kind he is not certain requires his aid or not. “You seem—eh.” He shakes his head faintly. “I’m not certain—I don’t know what to make of it really.”
“What? I seem like what?” says Jayce. “I’m fine.”
"You know it will be fine, yes?" Viktor says. "The meeting. It isn't anything we—"
"I'm not worried about that," interrupts Jayce. "If they wanted to cut our funding they would have done so already. Do you remember where we put the magnifying glass? I want to test something."
"Did you go home?" asks Viktor.
"When?" he says. "Can I have my pen back?"
"In a moment. Last night. You were here when I left and when I came in this morning."
He steps away and goes about searching through the drawers. “No.” He begins pulling out drawers not quite randomly in search of the magnifying glass but then he quits, sudden and startled, and lifts his eyes to the window. The sky hextech-blue and the sun in his eyes—and hadn’t it been dark, just a moment ago?
“Hold on,” he says, reaching for his notebook, and flipping back to a note as though flipping back through the very time which has passed since he wrote it down. “I wanted to show you—”
“I think you showed me this already,” Viktor says, tilting into Jayce’s orbit. “Last night?”
“No.” He points. “I changed the—rearranged the order of the runes. Changed that one. See? With the purpose of, um, allowing for the transportation of larger objects that aren’t all one material without the risk of, you know—“
“Pieces disappearing in the arcane. What about the—eh, transmogrification?”
“Uh, yeah—wait a minute,” he reaches for the blueprints. “You know, natural born mages can practice their whole lives and not become proficient teleportationists. It’s a lot less a science than it is an art. But I think we can do this, V. It’ll work.”
“Have you tested it—no matter, it can wait.” Viktor points at something on the page. “What’s that one? Did you double check your math?”
“Hold on,” says Jayce urgently. “I think—no, wait. I thought I had it.” More urgent, with fervour, palming his neck. “I thought—hold on. Hold on. It made sense.”
“It’s fine, Jayce. We can come back to it later. It’s well within the margin of error, but we…”
He ignores Viktor, returning to a drawer he has already searched through, and retrieves the gilded compass lying at the top, cuts his finger on the sharp needle-point end of it though pays scarcely a moment’s thought to it until, again, Viktor is there, extending a kerchief.
Jayce sucks the bloodied finger into his mouth until the warm tang of iron is gone. "Just a nick," he says, waving it about. "It's fine. I need some space—do you mind?" When he peers down his notes are covered in drying red-brown fingerprints.
"I believe,” begins Viktor, louder but from some distance. Jayce does not look at him. “We have arrived at a moratorium," he continues. "Perhaps we both, eh, ought to step away for a moment? Return in the morning with fresh eyes and—what else is it they say? Fresh minds? Clear minds. New perspectives. A night of rest could do us both good, no? Jayce?"
"I'm not stuck—we’re not stuck," says Jayce. "I'm fine. The work's fine. I'll stay but you can go if you want—if that's what you want."
"Jayce."
He looks up, the urgency in Viktor's voice yanking him out of his own mind, and in that coruscating amber, that furnace-heated iron of Viktor's eyes is visible quite clearly to him that irritation which winds inevitably inside each person who has ever had the displeasure of experiencing Jayce in this manner.
He realizes with no doubt in his body that Viktor wants him out of there—and within the span of this realization has already taken several steps back towards the door as though it was not so much the realization which had brought forth the urge to leave but rather that which preceded it, the interruption.
He says, "Fine," not bothering about the decibel so that it bounces about endlessly. "Fine, I'll go." He turns on his heel, knocking over the chair behind him, and leaves with no other word uttered.
The door, as it slams shuts, blows a gust of air through the room. Viktor looks on, then he goes and picks the chair from the floor and sits it back down against the desk.
ii
SCENE: Jayce's apartment. Through the window: the sky at dusk, parallelograms of sun upon the living room floor. Erratically decorated. Posters, tape peeling. A sofa. A rug. A kitchen, clean-scraped. Starch-white like an operating theater but dim-lit. A morgue. A game of solitaire, unfinished. Notes scribbled in black ink upon post-it’s fastened upon the fridge: reminders he forgot about anyway.
Enter, Jayce. Through the door, caught up in the momentum of his own speed, that indomitable force by which he propels forward, onward.
He stands in the vestibule looking about the place. His face in the mirror: red, lightning-struck eyes, hair askew. His tie likewise. A smudge of blood on the collar. He averts his eyes, jaw set.
The apartment: objects bestrewn about the floor like the jetsam discarded by some sea-descending ship in its final desperate attempt to remain upright; clothes, books; blueprints unfolding endlessly upon the living room floor.
He goes into the bedroom, floorboards creaking underfoot, tossing as they come off his clothes upon the blue-clad, crumple-sheeted bed, and steps into his smithing clothes. Brass epaulets clinking as he fastens them around his shoulders, the family crest. And then leaves, scampers with such haste out of there that by the time he’s across the hall the echo proceeding the slamming-shut of the door is still audible.
Down the spiral stairs and out into evening gloom: people mulling about slow and aimless. And Jayce: stuttered steps finding quick rhythm and then he’s hurled, spun, flung in the direction of the forge: the alley outside where lay heaps of rusted filaments and axles, the air blood-scented with iron rot. Everything soot-blackened, the ground upon which he stands, the stone walls, even the family crest swinging above the door, more black than red. He pushes open the door and into the welcomed heat which embraces him like home, curls belly-deep inside him, beckons him into its darkness which seems to pulsate with life.
He pushes the sleeves of his shirt to elbows, fits his hands with thick brown leather gloves, and steps before the furnace, that raging inferno which all his life has enthralled him and which seems to carry some secret veiled and hidden that he longs to learn but which he cannot. In both his hands he clutches the forceps in which grip rests the iron, raised upon that fire until its color resembles that which has heated it. Amber, honeyed eyes swimming up through the murk.
The anvil, with its horned end, sits before him immovable as he lowers the iron upon it, as he draws back his arm with the hammer clasped tight in his hand, as he allows that arm to fall, to descend upon the metal forcep-clutched in his other hand.
Over and over again. Motions repetitive enough it ought to be enough to lose himself inside. But it is not. It seems as though he becomes aware, hyperaware of each sound which cascades across the walls: the clangor and the hisses and sparks of fire, the short-pitched rings and his own breathing, laboured and erratic. Not as one mixed and intermixed polyphonic sound creating and recreating itself for as long as he remains there working but as separate noises, like a beam of light refracting through glass.
He lifts the hammer; he lowers the hammer. No measured cadence or even any significant strength but sheer desperation which is dragging it down repeatedly fervently obsessively as though through that beating he can pull back into some semblance of order those pieces of himself he feels floating away from him, as though discipline, which never before has set him straight, will this time be that which does. And not only that but he is certain too that with enough dedication to the task he will feel return to him that nebulous elation, star-gleaming and enchanting, out of which had sprung forth his most sensible ideas and creations, and in which nothing seems impossible—and which, now, he feels, as though it is the very blood pumping through his body, bleed out of him each time he stops for even one singular solitary second to look around himself. That magical sensation—a thing inside him volatile and unconstrained, yes, but titillating, alive, like the magic coursing through those sky-blue crystals, pulsing through them, breathed into them like life itself.
The clink-clink of that arrhythmic beating of the metal cascades, returns, circles around him like birds in formation. Separate from all else. The fire curls and flickers and dances in its stone womb.
The strain of his wasted, atrophied muscles grows with each swing until he catches himself against the sharp edge of the anvil, fevered breaths crumbling the heat-dense air. The hammer falling one final time, and that noise rocking solitary back and forth as though the room is its cradle. And the rod of iron lies neglected where his hand had caught, core-heated and beckoning as only heat can—a warm room from out of the cold; a mug of tea, tendrils of steam wafting skyward; a pale body, lean and star-painted, about his own. He ignores it, wipes the sweat from his brow and retrieves the hammer.
But no matter how he draws it up the outcome is always commutative and when next he lowers the hammer he knows he cannot once more raise it, cannot even get his hand, already sore, damp with sweat inside the glove, to wrap tight enough to allow for the kind of force necessary to beat into any other shape the metal still clutched in his other hand (not thinking, and not thinking about pressing an ungloved hand against that orange heat-glow, and so all the same thinking about it).
Sweat crawls down his temples. Shadows of the roaring fire ripple upon the soot-blackened surfaces.
Again: He picks up the hammer, raises it, arm twitching and spasming and straining. Jayce clenches his teeth and brings the hammer down, managing, somehow, to miss entirely the iron, hitting instead the anvil with no kind of force which would have even made the faintest of marks. He throws it across the room and then just buckles like a puppet whose strings have been cut.
His arms caught atop the anvil and that rod of iron still upon it half-forgotten or perhaps only forgotten in the sense that he is not consciously thinking about it, but still he was and then when he’s there, when he feels the heat sear into the only part of him not covered—a sliver of arm too high for the gloves and too low for the pushed-up sleeve—he thinks only about how there is just a fraction of a second where it actually feels hot. Then there is only pain. Flashing bright-hot, blinding and pulsing.
He flings himself backwards, screaming, then for a time he just stands there listening to that scream return to him, replicate itself in that tomb-like room. Like the pain, fading in pulses, but then he presses his hand against it like a gambler not yet reduced to his final loss, feels it return with twice the fervor, watching all the while, captivated, hypnotized, as the furnace spits fire curling and flickering, contained in its bed of coal. Sweat runs in rivulets from his brow, his hairline, his nose.
He staggers upright and into a room he rarely ventures inside: shower stalls, long pinewood benches. His footsteps echoing in the sepulchre long after he’s found the bathroom like ghosts traversing the halls, the door slamming shut behind him likewise.
Running the water ice-cold, he pushes his arm beneath until it’s numbed, twists the faucet shut and tugs the sleeve down his arm, not minding the perspiration or the soot which no doubt covers him, or even the way the fabric of his shirt chafes against the burn. He just stands there like some long since lost being with neither past nor future or even that fickle thing which we call present.
Through a small rectangular window where wall and ceiling meet, the moon flitting clumsily between clouds slices through the black and smudges it gray and caught in the mirror there are just two eyes hollow and distant staring back.
He ventures back out into the heat, swiping a hand across his sweat-damp forehead.
iii
He drifts like an amnesiac between the cold-clotted washed-white buildings rising indifferently into the darkness. Desolate and forlorn with his arm wrapped about his stomach like he's cradling a small child.
He tilts into the wind, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him, when upon the cobblestone the very first snow lands: tiny fluttering flakes spinning, hurrying down to melt upon the still-warm ground like little motes of dust swirling about in chunks of sun.
He pulls his coat tighter, and shuffles westward, winds without thinking, without even realizing that’s where he’s going until he gets there, at the lab.
SCENE AND TIME: The laboratory. Night. A stillness about it, like the deepest of oceans, abyssal.
Viktor: first little more than a gray smudge in the murky distance, but coalescing incrementally into a being solid and tangible like pieces of a puzzle fitted (here the back of a head, the mess of his hair, here the shoulders, a welding tool in a gloved hand.) Then, as though these things may only be permitted to exist in polarities, opposites—the not seeing and then the seeing—Viktor becomes all that which he is capable of seeing: the light—that solitary lamp upon the table with its soft golden glow—seems to draw towards him as though he himself has a gravitational pull stronger than that of the planet’s, curving spacetime in such a fashion that light must follow that curve, that curve which leads to him, and no other one.
The laboratory real, the desk, the light, the stool, the model and all else, and he, at its very center, realest of all, but withal, a dream.
It is more than thirty seconds going by the tick-ticking of the wall-mounted clock before he acknowledges the presence, and then it is only by a glance over a shoulder in the direction of the door. Jayce could leave and Viktor’d be none the wiser. He could. Yet he does not. And then Viktor looks in his direction again. Leaning further back, twisting his torso, actually taking in that fuliginous figure beneath the arch, like a shadow in the wake of an explosion, and rising, not coming towards him, but rising all the same, dropping the welding tool upon the desk beside the model he was working on. He lifts the dark, brass goggles to his forehead, pressing into the red marks they left round his eyes two fingers each. Then he squints in the dark, an expression upon his face at first surprised and then metamorphosing surreptitiously into something akin to worry.
“Viktor,” says Jayce, caught somewhere in the vast wasteland between dread and relief, between the act of approaching and that of running away. “You’re still here.”
"I usually am," replies Viktor. He's got his cane hooked over the edge of the slate desk and reaches for it, sets it on the ground but does not yet approach. "Has something happened?"
"No," Jayce says, with urgency but no real conviction. "You did say you were leaving though, didn't you?" He can taste the soot still, like bile at the back of his throat, the air of that furnace-heated room, and his arm pulsating, that tiny mouth-shaped wound hidden beneath the sleeve of the arm still wrapped about his middle as though even the slight stirring, the slight motion of moving it down to hang will duplicate, triplicate the pain and drive him to those tears which he feels threaten behind his eyes.
“I did do that, yes,” says Viktor. “Well, technically I suppose I said—sorry.” He shakes his head. “It’s not relevant.” Now he draws close, and asks, “What happened?” with more urgency this time, even in his steps so that before Jayce can reply or even decide what to reply with, he’s standing in front of him, with his head aslant and his hair spiked and erratic where it’s held away from his face by the goggles.
Jayce looks away, finds upon the wall his own face in the small mirror, covered in soot and with his hair askew and his face gaunt-seeming, pale and almost moribund.
“Are you hurt?” asks Viktor.
Jayce clenches his teeth, makes a noise through those teeth close to a whimper, finds the handle of the door and yanks it, and then he just goes. Stumbles on the threshold but rights himself and heads through the doorway. Down and down the endless-seeming corridor lit up by lanterns that rattle wind-caught as the door behind him closes.
Passes through those halls which countless times he has passed through before, but not as a student, not as a scientist, not as the failure he was or the success that he is, but disconnected, a phantasm, something observed through a glass, an adumbration. Passing at blind full tilt into some vast darkness, and away from himself and the truth and that shocking arresting immobility which perhaps still lies ahead of him not as a destination but as something inside of him and thus cannot be outrun. But not yet does he quit—not until he hears him: first the door opening behind him and then that clink-clunking of metal rhythmically connecting with stone, its echo.
Stops dead right there in the dim-lit, narrow, winding hallway without doors but the one he left behind him, no windows either like some torch-disrupted cavern. Stands there with his arms about his torso, holding himself, embracing himself—stands there motionless with his head ducked to the floor and his shoulders about his chin, and feels well up inside him some pain ancient and parasitic: like a hook caught inside him, yanking his intestines, then that cold sting of nausea traveling north; that familiar needle-point prick of tears accumulating behind his eyes, the world before him blurring into an incoherent sulphuric mess, but no tears yet to fall, just that occlusion, that clouding-over.
No sound about them but that metallic thud, and then that too ceases.
A hand comes round the bend of his elbow, and Viktor says, soft, in that slow, gentle way of his, “Jayce.” Just that, nothing else, and yet it is that—coupled with the hand still at his elbow, loose-fingered and gentler even than his voice—which does it, delivers not the final blow but the notice, perhaps, the word unspoken, or conveyed, at least, not in words but in that touch, that it is over, that he need not struggle so hard to keep his composure. He can let go. Though it is no choice that he makes—because he is already breaking open, splitting like overripe fruit lightly prodded with a finger.
He gasps like he’s been struck, overwrought with coiling despair, and crumbles to the floor. Face to face with the cornflower-blue carpet scuffed with shoeprints and so eroded the pattern of the stone beneath protrudes out of it. And the hand at his elbow still there, somehow, not moved, not raised to shoulder or slid entirely off him as he expects it to, still there.
“It doesn’t matter,” chokes Jayce, trembling. “I’m not even here.”
Spiraling ever downwards as though he’s not sitting, crouching there counting the tile rising stubbornly out of the thin worn carpet but falling through some vast and substratumless chasm, vertiginous and half-gone, half-mad, half-delirious, half of something—not whole, not anymore. But then that hand moves, Viktor’s hand moves, not leaving his body but traveling along it: arm then chest, then beneath his arm and over his back, and by increments he becomes aware of Viktor calling his name.
“V,” Jayce says. Like the very first breath upon reaching the surface of some deep and murky water.
Viktor’s face comes swimming up out of the gloom, tear-occluded and myopic, but undoubtedly smiling kindly. “There you are,” he says. He’s crouching before him, right leg straight out, left foot planted firmly on the ground, unlike Jayce, balancing precariously on his toes. “Let’s go back to the lab.” A little firmer, a little quicker, still gentle, patient, he manages through no small effort to raise him to his feet. “So that I may take a look at that wound of yours.” Viktor touches lightly the arm which Jayce had been cradling before, then he raises that hand to Jayce’s face, knuckles the soft protrusion of cheekbone. "You are here," he continues, softer still, amberous eyes glinting in the lambent gloom. "Would I be able to do this if you were not?" And something in that touch, of flesh against flesh, which crumbles, abrogates all established order, harmony, all what little composure remains in him.
Jayce closes his eyes and sighs and wilts into him, spine softening, past all ratiocination and past all ability to remain upright—except to raise his head from where it has come down to rest upon Viktor’s shoulder, and say, quietly, trembling and still crying, “I’m sorry,” then quieter, “Oh god.” He puts his face against the worn-soft collar of Viktor’s shirt, engulfed in his scent—galbanum, faintly medicinal, and faintly of cigarette smoke.
Viktor puts his arm about his shoulder, splayed out over the blade, breathing a little erratically as well, heart thumping. “It’s okay,” he says, close by Jayce’s ear. “It’s okay.”
The two of them standing there, no sound between them but Jayce’s hiccuped breathing. The slight rustle of fabric as Viktor works the heat back into him. A hand up and down his back. Standing there in that crepuscular, lantern-disrupted darkness, when Viktor raises that hand to cup the back of Jayce’s head, fingers tangling in the sweaty, damp mess of his hair. Not moving for a long time, not saying anything either. Then both in quick succession, so that neither the act nor the words seem to in anyway register to Jayce for several pulses: he presses his hand firmer against his skull and then he tilts his face towards Jayce’s, says, soft and solemn, and so quiet it barely stirs the air between them, “I have you,” and presses his mouth to the place where his eyebrow splits.