Work Text:
The apartment's got the wrong shadows nailed into the corners, and Viktor keeps looking at the ceiling like there is a person hiding up there, or the old train station from when he was twenty-two and an assistant and trying to leave with no money and one shoe giving up at the heel, except he is not twenty-two, he is in Jayce’s bed with his bones showing through his skin and the room smelling of fever and laundry detergent and the sour metal stink of blood. He does not know where he is. He knows Jayce and then does not know him and then knows him with such monstrous clarity that it wounds him awake.
Jayce sits beside him with one hand on his wrist because Viktor keeps trying to get up.
“I have to go,” he says, and Jayce says, “No, you don’t,” and Viktor says, “I do, I do, I missed it already,” and then his face changes, collapses inward like paper in bathwater, and he says, “I don’t want to die.” Jayce feels the sentence go into him and stay there. “You’re not dying,” he says, which is funny because they both know, except Viktor does not know, except some animal part of him knows so completely that it keeps pushing the words out of his mouth like vomit.
“I don’t want to die,” Viktor says again, staring past him, terrified of the wall, the door, the lamp, the shape of his own hand on the blanket. “Jayce, I don’t want to die,” he says.
“You’re not going to,” Jayce says, and his voice behaves so well it is hilarious.
Viktor grips his sleeve. His fingers are hot and weak and damp. “Promise me,” he says.
“I promise.” Jayce says it like a fool, like a husband, like a big fat lawyer signing false paperwork at the end of the world.
Jayce gets him into the bath because Viktor has sweat through everything and because there are so little indulgences left that washing someone becomes one of them. Viktor sits in the water with his shoulders hunched and his eyes wide open, shivering even though the room is warm, his knees fishboned beneath the surface, his hair hanging in dark strings against his face. He looks younger and older and not like a person at all but the angel of death dug up from the heavens. Jayce wets his hair carefully. Viktor flinches then frowns at him.
“Where are we?” he asks.
“Home.”
Viktor considers this. “No,” he says.
“Yes.”
“No,” he whispers, and then, with so much panic blooming ugly in his throat, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.”
Jayce sets the cup down too hard and water jumps over the side of the tub onto the floor.
“You’re not dying,” he says. “Look at me.” Viktor looks at him and does not see him for a second and Jayce has the pretty little thought that maybe this is what death does first, taking the eyes before it takes anything else.
Then Viktor sees him. His mouth trembles. “Jayce?”
“I’m right here.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know.”
“I know,” Jayce says, and washes shampoo through Viktor’s hair with hands that are shaking so badly he has to press his palms against Viktor’s skull to hide it. He rinses him once, twice, water running grayish down the slope of his neck, and Viktor keeps murmuring it, not even always to Jayce, sometimes to the faucet, sometimes to the ceiling, sometimes to the other place he thinks he is in.
“I don’t want to die,” Viktor says.
After the bath Jayce dries him with a towel warmed over the radiator and helps him into clean clothes. The shirt has been too large for too long now, the whole world and everything inside it has become the size of hell. He sits Viktor on the closed toilet lid and brushes his hair, slow from ends to roots because Viktor always hated when he yanked through tangles, and for a minute Viktor is quiet, his eyes lowered, his hands loose in his lap, almost peaceful in a way good way so that it makes Jayce hate the word peaceful forever.
“I don’t want to die,” Viktor says.
Then Viktor says, very small, “Will you come with me?” Jayce stops brushing. “Where?” Viktor does not answer.
Viktor’s face contorts terribly to something lucid and broken. “I am frightened,” he says, and that is worse than the other sentence somehow because Viktor has spent his whole life being brave and sly and indecently clever and nothing like this naked childlike thing sitting in the steam between them. Jayce puts the brush down and crouches in front of him.
“I’m coming with you,” he says. “I’m here.” Viktor looks at him, searches his face like a page in a language he doesn’t know.
“I don’t want to die,” Viktor says.
“You’re not going to die tonight.”
“Tonight?”
Jayce feels himself split open around the word. He corrects himself. “You’re not going to die.”
In bed Viktor curls toward him, bony and fever-hot. He clutches Jayce’s shirt like Jayce is the side of a boat. The room is dark except for the thin yellow leak of streetlight through the curtain. Viktor’s breathing stutters.
“I don’t want to die,” he says into Jayce’s chest.
Jayce presses his mouth to Viktor’s hair and says, “You won’t. I’m right here. I will sleep next to you and you won’t die.”
Viktor makes a sound. Relief? Pain? Jayce keeps talking because silence makes him feel like he’s drowning. “I’m right here. I’m not leaving. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Vik. Nothing is going to happen while I’m here.”
Viktor’s hand tightens in his shirt. “Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Don’t let me.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t let me die.”
“I won’t,” Jayce says, and by then his face is wet against Viktor’s hair, his body folded around him like a devil trying to argue with god.
For a long time Viktor does not sleep so much as flicker. He startles awake to say it again. He forgets where he is. He screams. He calls Jayce by name and then by no name at all. Once he asks if the train has left. Once he asks where his mother is. Once he asks Jayce why the ceiling is moving. Jayce answers everything. No, the train has not left. Yes, you are home. No, the ceiling is not moving. No, you are not alone. No, you are not dying. No, no, no, no, no. He says no to death until the word becomes a beehive in his mouth.
Sometime after midnight Viktor finally goes quiet, his face turned into Jayce’s throat, his breath thin and damp and still there, still there, still there. Jayce counts it. One, two, three, four. He counts like if he misses one breath it will be his fault. Five, six, seven, eight.
The bottle on the nightstand is full, freshly refilled. It sits beside the glass of water. Jayce looks at it for a long time. Viktor sleeps against him, and Jayce thinks of the promise, how he has made himself into a door and now cannot bear the thought of opening. He thinks that Viktor asked him to come with him. He thinks that he said yes. He is careful not to wake Viktor. He is careful with the water. He is careful with everything except the only thing that matters.
When he lies back down, Viktor stirs. His eyes open halfway, clouded and dim, but he finds Jayce anyway. He always does. “Jayce?” he says.
“I’m here.”
“There’s so much water. I can’t swim.”
“I’ll help you swim.” Jayce pulls him close, so close there is almost no room left for either of them.
“Don’t leave me alone.”
“I won’t,” Jayce says. Viktor exhales against him. The sound is almost happy. Jayce kisses his forehead and keeps his mouth there. “Sleep,” he whispers. “I’m right here. I will sleep next to you and you won’t die.”
“See you tomorrow?”
“I will see you tomorrow,” Jayce says.
The room holds them, the dark gets into everything. Jayce keeps his damp mouth against Viktor’s skin, pressed there, peaceful, so peaceful. And, before anyone understands the shape of what has happened, they look ordinary, two people asleep, two people who have nowhere else to be.