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“I can’t…I can’t let you do that,” Jayce slurs as he grips that strange, mutated hammer, and through Salo’s eyes Viktor watches Jayce sway, sees him flinch and then his entire form seems to glitch right before he collapses, falling to the ground with a damning thud.
Panic, foreign to him these days and strong, cuts through his body and he sees Sky turn to him with a startled look on her face out of the corner of his eye.
“Salo,” Viktor says, ignoring her questioning look. “Put the canister down and bring Jayce to me.”
He can feel a faint ripple of surprise in Salo’s mind but he carefully puts the canister down.
And the hammer? Salo asks, flinching slightly as he approaches Jayce’s crumpled body, the distorted weapon pulsing.
“I will send someone else for it,” Viktor says, already reaching out within the hive mind to another Piltovan member to make their way there. “Bring him to me.”
With that, Viktor closes himself off—as much as he can these days anyway—the connections with the commune members always there—lingering in the back of his mind but muted now as Viktor prepares his area for Jayce, a place of privacy and healing. He’s aware that he’s already giving Jayce the kind of special treatment he swears off for everyone else, but it’s Jayce. Jayce whose body is trembling in pain while Salo carries him, some kind of magical rot clinging to him like a second skin. Whatever he experienced, wherever he was, caused a change, the magic that buoys Viktor hurting Jayce, making his body shudder weakly in Salo’s arms.
While he doesn’t sleep in the traditional sense anymore, he knows Jayce will need something soft to lay on, so he has a few members bring out pillows and blankets, creating a soft nest of sheets. He has them bring towels, and a cool tub of water, worried at the fevered pallor of Jayce’s skin that he saw through Salo’s eyes. He steps back to observe his work—the Hexcorized globe he resides in almost looks cozy now, with an actual bed overflowing with sheets and plush fur blankets, a bowl of fruit and pitcher of water next to it for sustenance. Overhead, the tendrils of his arcane power cast a soft, warm glow on it all and Viktor exhales, ignoring Sky’s pointed look.
“All this, for one person?” she asks.
“It’s Jayce,” is all he says, and he can feel it ripple through the commune when Salo finally steps on site, faint alarm and then a sense of comfort and peace—for how are they to know that the broken man in Salo’s arms is any different than the usual hurt people who come to Viktor for healing?
Bring him to my chambers, Salo, Viktor thinks and steps out to the entrance to watch his progression, a surge of now-unfamiliar, atrophied emotion welling up inside him the more details he begins to see.
Oh, Jayce, he thinks, helping Salo gently deposit Jayce’s shivering form onto the blankets.
“That will be all, Salo,” Viktor murmurs. “Have Huck bring the hammer to me when it arrives.”
Salo pauses and nods, taking a short bow. He can feel the questions brimming in Salo’s mind, but he takes the dismissal with the kind of easy grace all of his members do when Viktor commands them. As soon as he’s gone, Viktor sits down on the ground by Jayce, taking him in.
He looks worse in person, with Viktor’s own eyes. He is pale, not just from illness but the kind of pallor that someone of Jayce’s complexion gets when he has not seen the sun in months, the usual warm olive tone snuffed out. He whimpers, high in his throat, but doesn’t wake, and Viktor can see new scars along his lips, cracked and bleeding, his hair limp and oily as it falls flat on his forehead and cheeks. He has never seen Jayce with full facial hair like this, having always kept himself the neat Golden Boy he was expected to be, and in another context, he would appreciate the way the beard softens his face, how it makes him more rumpled and approachable and sweet. But in this case, it is overgrown, clearly from neglect, not choice, and Viktor’s hand hovers over his chest.
He needs to get Jayce’s filthy clothes off to see the extent of the damage but Jayce is like a scared prey animal right now, liable to kick out and hurt if he perceives himself in danger, even unconscious. Perhaps especially so.
With a thought, a few of the tendrils of power come down near him, ready to take on Jayce’s fear if need be, though he hopes it won’t be the case. He lets out a slow, unneeded breath and rests his hand on Jayce’s chest, feeling the rapid hummingbird beat of his heart, much too fast.
Jayce whines, shifting again, but otherwise does not react and Viktor relaxes slightly as he slowly begins to unbutton his shirt. As more of his body is revealed, his jaw clenches. Jayce is emaciated, ribs prominent over stretched skin, sweat beading down his neck and along his chest. It heaves, and Viktor sees Jayce’s fingers twitch, digging into the sheets under them.
“What happened to you?” Viktor whispers, studying the sharp jut of Jayce’s hipbones, the concave dip of his stomach. Jayce doesn’t answer, stuck in the throes of fever, and Viktor knows he needs to get Jayce’s clothes off quickly so he can cool his body down before his brain cooks itself. He makes quick work of Jayce’s pants, sliding them lower until they’re stopped by a brace that has been clearly cobbled together from the parts of something else, something made of strong, quality material, and he sees Jayce’s hammer in his mind’s eye. He studies it for a moment, tracing the metal, and catalogs the similarities to his own brace from before, a brace Jayce spent intimate time with when he would adjust it whenever Viktor needed it.
Strong emotions, still foreign at this point, settle at the base of his chest, and he pushes them down. Jayce needs action, not wallowing, and he carefully begins to unbuckle the brace, lifting Jayce’s leg out of it. When he tugs the pants the rest of the way down he hisses out a breath at the full extent of the damage. Jayce’s knee is swollen, and his calf is mottled with corrupted strands of the arcane, pulsing angrily in response to Viktor’s presence. The high-pitched whine trapped in Jayce’s throat transforms into a scream when Viktor rests his hand on the skin, and Viktor snatches his hand back when Jayce convulses.
Whatever is inside Jayce’s body writhes, reacting so negatively to Viktor it shocks him, and again he wonders what happened to Jayce to have such rotten magic inside him.
“It’s keeping his leg together,” Sky says and Viktor twitches a little, for the first time since he started this chapter of his life having forgotten her presence. “Whatever did this to him, it’s also the only thing that kept him upright at all.”
“It’s killing him,” Viktor says blankly, able to see the way the infection has begun to spread higher, over his knee and creeping up his thigh.
“You can fix him,” Sky murmurs. “All of him.”
Viktor flinches as if burned. “Not without his permission,” he says firmly. "You know that."
“And if he will die before he can give that to you?”
Viktor doesn’t answer, instead focusing on calling the tendrils of magic that float around him, having them lift Jayce up so he can peel the rest of his shirt off and carry him to the bath. He can’t stop the low, horrified noise in his throat when he sees the wound on Jayce’s back, deep and mottled, and stained with the same pink and green fractals of rot as the leg, though at a lesser scale. Jayce’s muscles twitch when Viktor touches his shoulder blade and though sensations are more muted in this form, even Viktor can feel how hot his skin is as the tendrils deposit Jayce into his arms.
Viktor’s hexcorized body is strong—stronger than any mortal man now—and he would have been able to carry Jayce even when he was at full health, but now Jayce is distressingly light, his head lolling against Viktor’s shoulder, and, much to Viktor’s shock, Jayce presses his cheek harder against Viktor’s metal skin.
“That can’t be comfortable,” Viktor says aloud, voice soft as he stops in front of the bath and gazes down at Jayce’s face, his shallow, rapid breaths puffing unfeelingly against Viktor’s skin.
“You’re cool,” Sky murmurs. “It must feel good to his overheated skin.”
Viktor doesn’t respond but gazes a moment longer at Jayce, curled and pliant in his arms, before lowering him carefully into the tub. As soon as Jayce’s skin touches the cool water he begins to thrash, gasping as if drowning, and it takes all of Viktor’s considerable strength plus three of the tendrils of power to subdue him, holding him still until he goes pliant. Jayce pants in exertion, his frail body trembling as Viktor begins to wipe him clean, resting a damp cloth along his forehead in an attempt to cool his body down.
Emotions—a nuisance he no longer needs to deal with—have been distant to him ever since he’d awoken in this form, but as he washes Jayce, he can feel that unfamiliar-familiar sensation building inside him, pushing against the placid calm he has maintained since he began this project in the depths of Zaun. His hand clenches hard against the side of the tub, denting the metal—anger, he thinks with faint surprise. He’s angry. Furious—at whoever did this to Jayce, whoever isolated and tortured him to the point of starvation and illness, his entire body fighting to stay alive.
The commune has always been missing something, and he had made his way back to the lab when he realized what it was—a partner, to share ideas with, to help him manage. Someone at his side. He had thought of telling Jayce he could finally heal him of those anxious, dark thoughts that always lingered in Jayce’s mind, finally make him happy, content at his side. But the lab had been dark and empty, just a stale sandwich and three half empty teacups on Jayce’s desk. Jayce, missing for months, and he’d thought the worst, had thrown himself into the project with Sky at his side, but the entire time something inside him was empty. Sky never leaves him, but she just isn’t Jayce.
“Viktor,” Sky says, alarm threaded in her voice, and Viktor breathes hard through his nose as he forces his fingers to unclench, staring at the divots in the metal rim of the tub from his fingers. He flexes the tendons, staring at the purple and gold ligaments as they shine dully under the warm light of the arcane web above him.
“It’s a waste,” Viktor says, nearly unable to recognize his own voice for how low it is, staring down at Jayce; he is calmer now, his chest rising and falling less rapidly. “A mind such as his, a body, wasted away to nothing, to fight an illness determined to burn him out. A peak specimen of the human body, ruined for what?”
Viktor snarls wordlessly after and Jayce flinches, whimpering softly. His eyes widen and he forces himself to be still, to find that centering place inside him that contains the placidness he’s come to enjoy.
“You can make it so, again,” Sky murmurs and Viktor shakes his head, reaching out to gently push Jayce’s lank, unruly hair back, now slicked with water instead of fever sweat.
“An offer I will give him, when he wakes,” Viktor says.
“And if he doesn’t?”
Viktor’s lips thin, the anger still there but subdued; his usual calm permeates through his body as he finishes washing Jayce, keeping him cool with damp clothes to his forehead. When Jayce begins to shiver, he pulls him out, tendrils holding his pliant body upright as Viktor dries him off, kneeling down to clean his feet. He’s gentle around the distended ankle, not broken as far as he can tell, but swollen from the way it had to hold the weight of Jayce’s destroyed leg.
As he settles Jayce back down in the blankets, now dry and clean, he studies Jayce from above. Jayce murmurs something unintelligible, seeking out something with his body until he ends up with his head in Viktor’s lap, cushioned by the blue blanket-robe Viktor wears, and sighs, low and long, body easing into a more restful sleep.
Viktor stares down at him—his parted lips, his fever-flushed face. He traces the scar along his eyebrow with his thumb, and for the first time since he was transformed, wishes he retained the full range of sensation. Wishes he could feel Jayce, skin to skin, a secret desire long buried and forgotten pushing its way through the hairline cracks in Viktor’s mind. He doesn’t notice, but Sky’s form blurs behind him, flickering for a brief second before solidifying again.
Through it all, Jayce sleeps, and Viktor watches over him.
—
The first two days are hell—Jayce’s body goes through periods of extreme heat, sweating and thrashing and as he whines plaintively, and extreme chill, the kind that makes Viktor check and double check that his heart still beats, that he isn’t a corpse that Viktor is willing through sheer will to survive. He wonders if this is how Jayce felt when he ran to the lab with Viktor’s broken body in his arms. He imagines it was worse for Jayce, whose emotions always ran hot and charged, while Viktor’s currently hide behind a veneer of placid calm.
Sky is quiet mostly, but Viktor can see her in the corner of his mind's eye, hovering, waiting for something he refuses to give name to.
While Jayce is fitfully resting, Viktor studies the strange, butterfly shape of Jayce’s hammer. He thinks of Jayce’s brace, which he swore was made of the broken down pieces of the hammer he had seen Jayce with all those months ago, and now this weapon he’d come back with, corrupted and twisted. He wonders again where Jayce has been for all these months he’d been missing, what environment led to his body becoming as warped as this strange, rotting version of his hammer. Something to ask Jayce, when he heals, especially since the magic inside the hammer repels Viktor every time he tries to touch it. He frowns, tilting his head as it pulses malevolently.
“It is made of the same arcanic compound that is inside Jayce right now,” he says, and Sky hums, still uncharacteristically silent. Viktor tries to touch it again and energy flashes out at him, skimming his fingers and sending a bolt of electricity through his system. He moves away, eyeing it warily, and when Jayce begins to make those soft, plaintive noises of distress, he makes a decision to leave the problem of the hammer for another day. A project for when Jayce is ready to join him, perhaps.
Huck, Viktor calls through the commune’s consciousness, and when he arrives Viktor nods to the hammer.
“Keep this safe for now, but don’t let anyone else look at it. I will want to see it as soon as Jayce is on the mend.”
Huck bows his head and grasps it, the both of them wincing when the head of the hammer crackles with a high-pitched electric whine that presses against Viktor’s mind. Huck hurries away with it and Viktor grunts in relief as the pressure on his body eases the further away it is.
“V-Viktor?” Jayce’s voice is weak, breathy, and when Viktor turns to look at him his eyes are gleaming gold, bright with fever and whatever magical corruption is wreaking havoc in his body. They used to have more green, he thinks, almost wistful, before he reaches up, wanting to touch Jayce’s cheek before pausing.
“Please don’t go,” Jayce whispers as he clumsily reaches for Viktor’s hand and brings it to his face, tears beading along his waterline like diamonds before they drip down. “I’ll do anything, I promise.”
A sob breaks through his words and Viktor makes a soft noise, fingers twitching against his cheek as he sees those frail shoulders begin to shake. “Let me come with you, I promise I’ll be good. I’ll do anything, please, Viktor please—” His words are frantic, eyes wide, and Viktor realizes Jayce is back in the lab, back when Viktor told him that only their affection for each other had held them together for this long. Back when Viktor left him and then regretted it for months after, but Jayce had disappeared and then come back like this. A wretched, broken thing, sobbing loudly.
“Jayce,” Viktor whispers, stricken, and he cups his face with both hands, wiping the mess of tears and snot off his face with his thumbs, trying to calm him down. “Easy, easy, breathe with me,” he says but Jayce is too far gone, too caught up in the memory, and he claws at Viktor’s wrists and gasps for breath, trembling hard when Viktor presses their foreheads together as he begs near-silently, mouthing Please, please, over and over until his fingers go slack and the fever takes him down again.
Viktor stares, Jayce’s face still in his hands. His breathing is raspy, reminds him uncannily of the way his own breath sounded near the end of his life, and when he rests a hand on Jayce's chest, his lungs sound labored. His fingers twitch, itching to pull in his powers and look deeper inside of Jayce, find the broken threads and stitch them back together, fix him and bring back the man he once knew. But he can’t—Jayce is in no condition to consent and Viktor only takes the willing, no matter what the magic inside him is howling at him to do.
Sky watches him, a small frown on her face, but like he has since Jayce arrived, he ignores her, knowing exactly what she will say and not wanting to hear it. He lets Jayce sleep.
—
Viktor is drawn back to his bedchamber by the sound of whimpering and the thread of alarm from Huck, who he’d asked to keep an eye on Jayce while he spent long overdue time with the members of the commune. He hurriedly excuses himself, striding over, and finds Jayce thrashing out, trying to kick the blankets off of himself and moaning low in his throat. Huck looks at Viktor helplessly.
“He tried to attack me but wasn’t strong enough to get up—he keeps saying something about how he ‘failed.’”
Viktor gets to his knees and grasps Jayce’s wrists, easily wrestling him down with his superior strength.
“Thank you, Huck,” Viktor says when Jayce goes limp under him, a high animal noise leaving his throat. “You may go back to your regular duties.”
He feels Huck hesitate, possibly about to say something, but Viktor nudges him out with his mind and Huck finally leaves. Jayce has stopped struggling but now he can hear the soft, agonized words.
“I failed, I failed, I’m sorry,” he whispers, and those glittering eyes open, but when he stares up at him Viktor can tell he isn’t actually seeing him. Whatever he’s seeing terrifies him, his chapped lips parted, and his skin is pink with fever, hot to the touch even considering Viktor’s limited sensation. Viktor worries about his mind, his beautiful, brilliant mind, that his brain is being boiled from the inside.
“C-couldn’t do it. Couldn’t—” Jayce starts crying again and Viktor can’t take it, he can’t stand to see Jayce so miserable, begging whoever did this to him for forgiveness when they should be apologizing for doing this to Jayce. Reducing him to this sick, frail creature who is trapped inside his own mind, unable to break out, and so he presses his fingers to Jayce’s temple and pushes him into a forced, deep sleep.
As Jayce’s breath evens out, he sits back, flexing his fingers and staring down at him, shaken.
“He will die, if you don’t do something,” Sky says and Viktor’s eyes flash to her, his teeth baring into a snarl.
“He won’t,” he says and Sky just tilts her head, frowning.
“You know he will. The magic inside him is rotting him from the inside out. If you don’t do something soon…”
“Leave me,” Viktor hisses, the arcane swirl around him flashing black, and Sky looks startled, floating back. He curls up small, his astral self bending with an ease his original body was never able to. He can see, from here, the threads of magic running through Jayce’s body, the angry pulse of it centered on his leg. It’s dying, that leg, and it’s spreading upwards and outwards, determined to take Jayce’s entire body with him.
“Please wake up,” Viktor whispers, watching the way his eyes move frantically under his eyelids, the magical sleep he’s under barely granting him any respite. He needs Jayce lucid, even if only for a moment. Just a moment where he can get permission.
Let us fix him, he hears, the arcane whispering to him like a siren song, the desire to lay a hand on him, wipe out the imperfections that mar Jayce’s beautiful body, smooth out the wrinkles of his pretty brow. That thing inside him that yearns to make Jayce the best version of himself he can be, a version with no troubles, with a body that doesn’t fail him.
He forces himself back into his corporeal body, that perpetual calm settling inside him as he keeps a critical eye on Jayce. If he doesn’t make any progress soon, he will have to make a decision.
Losing Jayce is not an option.
—
Jayce often wakes up screaming but the most distressing aspect of it is that he’s silent as he does so, jaw tensed hard enough to crack a tooth to keep the noise in, his hands curled into desperate claws as they cling to the sheets. This time, his eyes are wide and bloodshot and they can’t seem to settle, darting to the corner of the room, then the ceiling, then Viktor as sweat beads down his temples.
“G-go away,” Jayce says in a trembling voice. “You’re not real.”
“Easy, Jayce,” Viktor murmurs, taking a step closer and then going still when Jayce tries to scramble back, making an aborted noise of pain when he tries to move his leg.
“Don’t touch me,” he rasps, flinching at nothing, at phantoms, at something his mind has conjured. A version of Viktor that doesn’t exist. “Don’t—don’t wanna be like them.”
Viktor’s brow furrows. “Like who, Jayce?”
Jayce’s eyes dart over to Viktor without seeing him, then still on the empty space in front of him. “I’m not—I’m not gonna be one of your dead things. Don’t touch me,” he snarls, a sudden, fierce thing that takes Viktor aback at its violence. Viktor comes closer on silent feet, watching the way Jayce stares warily at empty air.
“You’re not him. You’re not Viktor,” he says and Viktor feels something in his chest crack. “H-he wouldn’t do this. I killed him. I killed him,” he gasps, flinching away from nothing.
“Jayce,” Viktor whispers, close enough now to touch him if he wanted, and Jayce finally seems to notice him, his eyes going wide and liquid.
“Viktor,” Jayce breathes and Viktor feels his lips curve up. “Are you real?”
“Yes, Jayce,” Viktor says, reaching up to touch his cheek, and Jayce flinches back slightly, fear twisting his face into something heartbreaking.
“You won’t hurt me?” Jayce asks, voice small, and Viktor didn’t even know he could still feel this way, didn’t even know the perpetual calm inside him could break at the sound of Jayce’s voice in that tone.
“No, I won’t.”
Jayce inhales shakily. “You won’t disappear?”
Ah, Viktor thinks. Wherever Jayce was, he must have hallucinated Viktor before, must have reached for him and been met with nothing but air, Viktor as incorporeal as a ghost.
Viktor gently touches his cheek and Jayce makes a wounded noise, practically throwing himself into the touch. He doesn’t know if Jayce is completely there, but this is the closest he’s seen so far, Jayce’s golden eyes tracking Viktor’s face like a parched man finally given water after he had already resigned himself to dying of thirst.
“Will you let me save you, Jayce?” Viktor asks, stroking his fever-flushed cheek with his thumb.
“Please.” Jayce trembles. “Please. It hurts. Take it off.” He closes his eyes briefly and Viktor can see the pain etched into the lines of his face, the kind of pain Viktor used to know very well. The pain he never would have wished on Jayce, no matter how frustrated he would get when Jayce just didn’t understand.
“Now is the time,” he hears Sky say and he ignores her, focused on soothing Jayce with his touch, Jayce nuzzling at his palm. Jayce has always been sweet, Viktor knows, but he’s only ever seen him like this once before, weak and kitten-ish in his needs, all his walls obliterated until he’s just a raw, open wound of a person. Jayce had gotten sick one winter with an illness that had been going around the lab. He’d insisted that Viktor, with his weaker immune system, take work back to his apartment so he wasn’t exposed. But the ridiculous, self-sacrificing man had still gone in himself and when Viktor hadn’t heard from him in three days he took himself to Jayce’s place and found him delirious in his bed to the point of worry, his skin so hot it nearly scalded him to touch.
Jayce had been so wanting, pawing at Viktor and nuzzling into his touch, and maybe Viktor should feel more guilt over the fact that he enjoys when Jayce needs him so desperately, enjoys when Jayce is weak and vulnerable and looks to him for comfort. But guilt is a useless emotion, and one he discarded as soon as he stepped out of that lab and made his way to Zaun, and he lets Jayce cling to him as he slides his hand down his naked flank, gentle as he touches his mottled leg, and Jayce's body jerks.
“Hurts,” he hears Jayce whisper, feeling him tremble against him. “Get it off. Get it off.” He can feel Jayce’s panic begin to rise again, that deep animal fear inside him that had been temporarily eased taking root again.
Viktor hisses softly—the leg is much worse than it had been when Jayce arrived, the green and pink of whatever arcane rot inside him spreading and mingling with a sickly green-black—it's the kind of injury he’s only ever seen from miners saved from rockfalls, but their limbs had turned black and septic and the infection had killed them in the end. Jayce groans, low and soft, and he leans to the side and throws up, bile and phlegm and toxic, black blood oozing from his lips as he breathes wetly.
Viktor feels real fear flicker faintly inside him as it fights through the wave of calm that he usually embodies so easily, and he brings the magic tendrils around to hold Jayce still as he begins to thrash again. Jayce’s entire body is burning from the inside out and Viktor bares his teeth, splaying one hand on his knee and the other on his calf and closing his eyes as he lets the arcane move through him, pushing it into Jayce’s body and watching as it travels through the rotted sinews of his leg.
There is nothing to save, he thinks bleakly, the dead tissue inside of Jayce mingling with the magic rot in a catastrophic way.
“This is…” Viktor’s astral form floats among the ruins of the inside of Jayce’s leg, looking around helplessly. “Perhaps I should have cut it off.”
“Or you can change him,” Sky says, floating with him, clad in her customary astral lab coat.
“There is nothing left to change,” he says, reaching out to touch a floating particle of bone. “He should not have been able to walk on it as is.”
“His leg is a shell,” she says. “So fill it. Evolve it. You know what to do.”
And Viktor can see it now, Jayce standing strong and tall again, his cheeks pink with a healthy flush instead of fever, eyes bright with his customary intelligence. His leg, carved out from the husk of his old leg, porcelain threaded with the hues of Viktor’s touch, golden like his eyes. Jayce walking around with ease, the leg moving with him as if he was born with it.
As he pictures this, he can see the magic begin to make connections from his mind to the inside of Jayce’s leg, bright motes of it replacing or revitalizing dead tissue, muscle and sinew, and new bone forming. On the outside, light explodes from Viktor’s hands and into Jayce’s leg, and Jayce screams until his voice gives out, his body too weak to fight back even as Viktor fixes him, heals him.
“Shh,” Viktor says, and the tendrils tighten around Jayce so he can’t move and disrupt the process, so focused on the task at hand he doesn’t see the way Jayce’s body goes limp as the pain overwhelms him and he passes out.
It could be minutes or hours, maybe even days by the time Viktor comes back to himself, slumping in exhaustion when he removes his hand from Jayce’s body and sits back. He gives the newly-healed limb a critical eye. From just above the knee downwards, Jayce’s warm-toned skin shifts into a sleek prosthetic completely infused into his body, the color of a freshwater pearl with streaks of shimmering gold forming the shape of the improvised brace that used to keep Jayce upright and mobile. Viktor is pleased by it—a nod to Jayce’s ingenuity and adaptability, even if no longer necessary. Unlike with a flesh and blood leg, Jayce’s knee and ankle are on hinges, also gold, moving with flexibility and ease meant to easily take Jayce’s weight.
There will be a learning curve for walking, but Jayce should be able to move almost normally without needing any aids. Viktor will need to rest before expending anymore arcane energy, but a quick scan tells him that the fever has left Jayce’s body. Now all he needs is rest.
As he gazes at Jayce’s sleeping face, he thinks of how beautiful he’d look with his fingerprint marks on his brow, along his jaw and neck. Anywhere visible for others to see, to mark him as Viktor’s. As his favorite. His one and only equal. He looks forward to Jayce waking up, to introducing him to this world Viktor has built, a world where they can both finally help people as they always wanted to do.
Jayce rejoins the land of the living on something soft, and for a moment he drifts in that half-awake, half-asleep state where he is just a creature of sensation, cataloging the ache in his back and along his hip, stretching out sore muscles with a soft groan. His fingers curl in fur as he stretches them over his head, but when he tries to flex his calf muscles and roll his ankles he frowns when the movement feels uneven and strange, eyes slowly fluttering open. As his vision clears, he blinks up at the strange lights that criss-cross the pockmarked ceiling above him. He doesn’t recognize where he is and he tenses.
“Jayce,” he hears and when he turns his head his heart lurches in his chest, Viktor gazing at him with a pleased look on his face. “You’re awake.”
Jayce opens his mouth and then closes it, wincing when a sharp spike of pain lances through his skull. He braces for the kaleidoscope of horrible visions of the future that he’s come to expect, a leftover warning from the mage, but the pain simply fades away instead, Viktor staying in focus.
Jayce flinches in shock when he feels a cool touch to his brow, startled to find Viktor is now right next to him, his metal hand softer than he expected it to be as it rests on his skin.
“Your infection seems to have passed.” There’s relief in Viktor’s voice, Jayce notes with faint surprise. He remembers this version of Viktor having been cold, distant. Emotionless.
“Viktor,” he croaks. He is on a bed of furs, he realizes, fingers of one hand still curled in it, but he’s surprised to see the blue blanket he gave Viktor before he left is draped over him, keeping him warm.
“Oh! You must be thirsty.” Viktor brings a cup of water to his lips and Jayce drinks from it eagerly, eyes sliding half shut as the water soothes his parched throat. “I forget, sometimes—this body has no need for sustenance in that way.”
Jayce finally takes him in, licking water droplets from his cracked lips. Viktor’s hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, with streaks of white on the ends. It is long like Jayce’s is long now—not borne of a style choice but simply because time has passed and it has grown, and Viktor doesn’t seem to have felt the need to take care of it. Viktor’s body is as he remembers on that awful day he turned over and over in his mind while he was shivering and starving in that ravine—sinewy muscle turned into purple and gold metal, stripped of all human pretense.
He shivers, fear from the visions the mage gave him battling weakly with the sharp, desperate yearning for Viktor’s touch, but everything seems muted right now, Viktor’s fingers gentle as he wipes the water Jayce spilled as he drank. Jayce shifts and frowns again, finally realizing what woke him in the first place—the pulsing pain from his leg is gone, but instead there is something else, something strange with the feeling there, and he tugs the blanket away from his lower half.
His breath catches in his throat, eyes going wide as that weak fear comes roaring back with a vengeance.
“What did you do to me?” He can barely recognize his own voice, a low, choked thing as visions of the strange, gold mannequin creatures from the other world fill his mind, his left leg encased in the same material, transformed. Bile fills his mouth as he sees the version of himself above the Hexgates, kneeling and frozen, as he imagines what’s on his leg infecting the rest of him, crawling over and up his body until all that’s left of him is a white featureless face, and an unrecognizable hammer in his hands.
“I healed you,” he hears Viktor say, quiet, distant as a roar fills his ears and he scrambles away from him, and he claws at the leg, fingers trembling, breathing so raggedly it’s the only noise he can hear.
“You—this—get this off me,” he wheezes, panting, blood streaking the white metal of the leg—his leg that he can’t get off because it’s not a prosthetic it’s part of him—as his nails break in his desperation to pull it off, and he snarls when Viktor tries to grab him, tries to stop him, but he’s too weak from the sickness of before to fight off Viktor’s new strength even as he bucks his hips up when Viktor pins him down, arms over his head.
“I didn’t ask to be fixed,” he snaps. “Get it off me.”
Viktor’s eyes flash, inhuman and flat, and Jayce goes still in fear, heart rabbit-fast. “I didn’t ask for this either,” he says coolly. “But I thought you’d understand. You, of all people.”
Jayce stares up at him but he’s not really seeing him, all he’s seeing is his own face, up on those Gates, all he sees is his body overcome with the white and gold metal, his mind taken over and now he knows he’s failed, that this timeline is doomed, and his breath comes in harder and faster until his vision fades out and everything goes dark.
When he wakes again, he has clothes on—a loose shirt that hangs off his thin chest, soft pants that feel strange on his clean skin, the sensation muted along the new leg. He swallows hard, staring at the strange joint of his ankle, the white foot with no toes.
“Are you going to panic again?” Viktor asks, and when Jayce looks up he can see Viktor floating, what he thought were long lines of lights actually tendrils hooked into Viktor’s back. Viktor watches him from his position, frowning and wary, and Jayce runs a hand down his face.
“I didn’t want this,” he says into his hand, and he hears Viktor’s feet touch the ground, feels the cool touch on his wrist as he pulls Jayce’s hand away.
“You were dying,” Viktor says after a moment and Jayce looks up, meeting that multi-colored gaze. “Your leg had gone septic and there was nothing left to save. It was this or cut off the leg completely.” Jayce watches as Viktor looks away, his jaw working around something.
“I—I wanted to give you your mobility back. I wanted you to be without pain. All of this is…lonely. Without a partner.”
Jayce closes his eyes tightly, feels the word like a punch to the gut. “A partner?” he whispers and shivers when he feels a touch to his jaw, Viktor’s fingers tipping his chin up to make Jayce look at him.
“A partner. An equal. To do what we always wanted to do—help people.” Jayce feels his resolve weakening, the mage, the visions, all a rapidly fading memory as Viktor’s thumb traces along Jayce’s jaw, then pets along his lower lip. Jayce’s breath hitches as he parts his mouth.
“Join me, Jayce,” Viktor whispers, eyes flicking from Jayce’s mouth to his eyes, intent. Jayce makes a soft noise when Viktor’s other hand slides along his side and then rests on his left leg, over the seam where Jayce’s skin ends and the strange, organic white metal begins. He shivers as Viktor’s fingers trace over it through his pants, the touch bright and electrifying, like that part of him knows it’s Viktor’s and is just waiting for the rest of Jayce’s body to catch up.
“Viktor,” he breathes weakly, and Jayce can see the shift in Viktor’s expression when he realizes he’s won, that Jayce can’t say no to Viktor, not now, not with the proof of Viktor’s desire on his body—changed and transformed, and always, always Viktor’s.
When Viktor finally kisses him, one hand gripping his chin, the other splayed over his left leg, it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels inevitable. It feels like peace.