[closed]

[becomerobot]

Who: Viktor and Jayce
What: Canon Updating- Getting thrown in and out of a Moonwarp
When: Early July
Where: Edge of Crescent City
Warnings: S2 Arcane spoilers! Likely violence, body horror, gore, and men being very divorced.



[The last month went by in a blur. Viktor kept his head down, he worked on what needed to be worked on. It felt like old times, just Jayce and him doing what they do best. They did what they could to aid the Convoy with the waterlogged device, while studying its properties to help with Viktor's battery run heart. Jayce was at the edge of a breakthrough, something far more stable, something with multiple fail safes. Something Viktor could rely on, as much as anybody could rely on anything in this place. They were getting ready to make the switch, to upgrade Viktor to Jayce's hand forged heart for him.

The moonwarp wasn't a part of their plan. It struck them both on the edges of the Convoy and they were gone, thrown into a world more familiar to them, and realigned at last. Jayce had arrived so far ahead of Viktor, with regrets and guilt his partner could scarcely fathom. Viktor had catching up to do. He lived and died again, all by Jayce's will. By his hands. When revived, Viktor lacked any memory of doing just the same to his partner as Jayce did to him back home, so he walked away, outraged. He left to return to the Undercity, started a commune, he began to help those truly in need.

Finally. What they always wanted to do.

Viktor wanted so badly to show Jayce what he'd accomplished.

And Jayce reappeared, Viktor happy to see him, only for his partner to destroy it all. Viktor barely had a moment to reconcile with that, with Jayce turning his corrupted weapon upon him, before that was the last thing he knew. His mind faded, again. It fell into a void, into nothingness.

Outward, again, again, it erupted. As it had from the ego death of the Herald, awakening him in the back of Jayce's truck bed. Memories clashed and reawakened. Viktor was laid out on his back with a massive, still electrical buzzing hole in his chest. Another void. The moonwarp has a sense of grim irony, landing him where Viktor once revived Jayce from so similar a fate.

Viktor's anomaly glittering eyes are bleary, unfocused. His fingers twitch to try to grab for the cog he lost from his grasp. It rolled away. He lost it. He can't reach it, any longer... he'd wanted to die holding it, for some reason. A token for the afterlife he kept crawling back out from.

His lips open and sigh out, connection to his vocal box blown away. Viktor feels his body slowly losing the last remains of his energy and life force. The arcane within him struggles to hold on. His body always struggles to do the most basic form of living, but his will fights to the last moment he can. It is a familiar embrace of oblivion at this point. Somehow, he's yet again... not ready to let go.]

Comments

[hexrot]

[ hard work and sleepless days have finally paid off. the convoy's shields are back up, the solar panels are fully functional, and viktor's pump is ready for installation— or as ready as they can make it, at least; if it will truly work once it's hooked up to the proper tubes and wires will rely heavily on their calculations and meticulous planning. jayce is confident, but still wracked with a nervous jitter only a scientist would know when about to prove his theories right or wrong. proof, after all, was an entirely different beast when notes and supporting formula was a green flag. anything and everything could go wrong when dealing with viktor's newfound biology. jayce is also struck with a lover's concern, to top it all off— he'd much rather this work to keep his partner in better condition than something go completely off the walls and doom him. again.

viktor's constant presence and encouragement helps. jayce could feel the layers of his dry irritability and rooted melancholy peel away at times, being reminded of days he felt he could never return to. jayce was not the same man and never would be, mostly on account of being 1) dead, 2) part stag, and 3) a flesh eater, but he could find it in his slow beating heart given to him to live, to learn how to be gentle again. in simple gestures like the brush of knuckles to his partners neck or the hook of his pinkies into his golden decorum. kisses on the top of his forhead or the back of his hand, exchanging words through numerals at the work desk, mindful feeding or sweet croons behind closed doors. all he needed was time to find it behind all his fractures and mood swings.

the moonwarp is not kind to them, with that in mind. cleaning out his cargo bed for a much needed dredge after the weather and near insistent use of the forge had been a good idea. he's swallowed by the warp and put on the trek of his damn life all over again. with a beating heart and feverish hands, he remembers what it's like to be hot and human, how pain works and how at some point, he simply went through the motions, completely detached to get from piltover to the depths of zaun and into the commune. that's the only way he could. uptight and unyielding, like a wind up toy with its key forcefully jammed into his back to make him clatter to doomsday and keep an impossible promise.

jayce resents the mage for doing that, sometimes.

it's perhaps with that dead set volition that he gets to where he needs to be, that he falls short of giving up once catching sight of viktor in breathtaking meditation that leaves him in momentary limbo. he takes aim, he looks away. he fights with every fiber of him that wishes to put the hammer down and go to his partner. but he couldn't. at least, not yet. he fires, and leaves a gaping, sparking hole in viktor's chest, and by the time jayce could assess what he's done, locked into viktor's thrown gaze with a growing horror—

they are spat out. jayce, with the feral appearance of a man who hasn't seen a bath in months, dirty, cut up and freshly bruised, his chest hanging open beneath the tattered flaps of his jacket and his hooves wobbling like a newborn fawn. he's forgotten what it's like to balance on them, despite having a difficult time to this day. he's disoriented and fighting the snap of two pillars of memory fusing. his first thought is to slow the breathing he doesn't need. the second—

the second is huffing his last breaths behind jayce's pick up.

jayce scrambles, grabbing onto the sides of the vehicle to drag himself to the open rear, to look— if you asked him what happened next, jayce doesn't exactly know and he won't be able to explain it later. it's a spurred blur. he's got an empty, untamed dilation to his eyes, moving swiftly for supplies and parts, everything they had set ready on their work table is brought over with the rapid operation of an auto-pilot. it's not much different from the blank of time between ripping viktor's shirt open to force his chest to move and running to the lab with his body limp in his arms. ribs caved under his palms. jayce is not a deer in headlights but a stag actively dashing down the highway.

he doesn't say a thing. he just works, from clipping any tubes that could be salvaged from within, to jogging the solar panel's stored energy and connecting it to a jack, to just simply sticking his fingers inside the crater to assess and react all at once. the shake under his voice is held taught, ready to snap. the line of shimmering white under his eyelids doesn't dare fall. he places the pump in with the hurry of an emergency room nurse and hooks it all up the best he could in such haste.

power on. power fucking on, there can't be any mistakes— ]

[becomerobot]

[Viktor's arrival fuses his Drifter self with that of the Machine Herald in an instant, giving him another gasp at a half-life. The crater in his chest suddenly has inputs, outputs, pumps and wiring. All zap and jump with sparks of arcane energy, purple pulsing light racing to find a ground. Shimmer blood pools at his back and puddles the truck bed as Jayce's own once did, infecting it just the same with the hexcore's anomaly, twisting the shape and patterns. It morphs what is around him like his touch did to the crutch Jayce lovingly forged for his use.

Bleeding out was not the sensation he was feeling back in the commune. The death he was experiencing there was different still, felt so much more like the first time when the bomb hit and snapped his spine. He simply couldn't feel much at all, in either case.

He feels this. He feels this much more acutely. Life draining by the moment, death by emptiness, the vessel of his body losing all that made it function. When he would use his magic back in the commune, it felt each time like tipping a small portion of himself into others, giving a part of himself over to connect back to him. Creating a current, a new route for life and knowledge to flow through. He'd been so willing to give that, despite diminishing himself with each use, as Singed said to him.

Now, it just felt like a waste. Broken and spilled out. What had been the point? Why would Jayce do this to him-?

He thought that might be his dying thought, a cruel uncertainty, but then the bleeding stops. Viktor can't even recognize it is Jayce doing lifesaving work, vision too blurry and senses too fried. That is, at first. Understanding catches up, refocuses as wires are connected and Viktor gasps as a kick of energy redirects the opposite way his blood had been flowing, pumping through him instead of merely draining outward and aimless. Viktor knows the feeling of those hands. He knows that muttered voice cursing his way through a stubborn project. He even knows those eyes, despite their change in color, looking wild and bent, but not broken. That is Jayce with both of his arms dug into the injury he himself inflicted.

That this is so familiar feels like the more cruel joke of them all.

He has only enough energy, on the verge of either a new death or a new life, to mutter,]

Jayce-...

[hexrot]

[ perhaps it's the terror rushing through his bones, or the satiation, that keeps jayce from diverting his attention to pooling shimmer blood immediately upon its shedding. as he stradles viktor's hips to work and the wetness soaks his knees, jayce is completely rapt in his efforts and the precision needed to stem the leaks and isolate the wires, tether the necessary circuits and slot in the new clasps. it doesn't have an exit wound. that's one less thing to worry about but brings up a mirage of other quips that jayce would simply have to leave be on the lengthening list of priorities. he's— disjoined, from this, to move the way he does like he would a bomb about to burst in his hands rather than a useless, trembling mess who's just shot his partner. he needs suction, suction, mouth? no, he can't reach the depths of the cave-in with his face— sponge. fabric. anything, to absorb the blood still puddling at the base of his metal encasing because it couldn't just stay in there, in front of the spine— jayce can't find a sponge within reaching distance. he uses his button down instead, yanking it off his arms by the sleeves and bundling it into a messy fist to soak the free fluids until they were damp, squelching and heavy around his clutch. the "heart" still works, but viktor's lost so much blood. does he need more? they essentially share blood, would they need to transfuse? would jayce need to ingest what was lost and give it back? was it even safe to transfuse from an essential corpse? was that ludicrous thought even possible?

jayce,

jayce does not stop until he's certain it's working as it should. he could be overthinking things a mile a minute but he's still grabbing plyers and twisting screwdrivers. still confirming that everything is properly fixed, that the mechanism remains fluid. that everything works in unison. when he breathes out with relief, it's when the lined white under his eyelids fall with the slightest blink. his clarity blurs and slips when his own breathing stutters, when the blood's smell is burning in his twitching nose and he catches sight of how stained hands were, plum and magenta creeping up the elbows. his truck was a basin of raw sustenance and his ears quiver forward—

jayce's bright, ice blue eyes were like twin moons beckoning for tides. he brings the cold with his rattled emotion. fear, worry, regret and an invasion of all that with hunger, need and want. he can't want now, gods, not now— but it is so much of his beloved's acrid vitae that he must visibly fight it, sweating cold through strange fever born from abstinence. ]

—It's working, [ another huff; his lungs don't know what to do, even as he drops his spanner to their sides and slups his shoulders and bobs his head, ] it's, it's working.

[ for the first time since they've been hurled back into revan, jayce finally makes eye contact.

something in his chest drops. ]

[becomerobot]

[The gaping void in his chest may remain, but the sparking wires and slacking tubes find connections. Jayce weaves and braids the parts of him until the paths have proper inlets and outlets. His body, at the edge of complete failure, jump starts with a sputter, then a kick. Viktor's entire frame bursts with arcane energy interlocking with stored, battery power. He jolts forward, arising with a splash upward from his own pooled blood. The weakly muttered name turns to a scream. His eyes overwhelm with white glow, shuttered only by his eyelashes as they're throw wide.

Both his hands strike forward, grabbing Jayce by the throat, fit to collapse his windpipe if only the rush of strength would last him-]

You-! Why-!? [his voice is heraldic in its rage, so angry it turned emotionless and unnervingly robotic. The energy sputters again, his internal engine popping from being pushed too hard too freshly started up. His fingers loose their strength and slump into the divot of his collarbone, nearly falling through his likewise gaping chest,]

... why, Jayce-? Again-?

[hexrot]

[ his throat snaps shut and all the time jayce has is to react by trying to instinctively pry, tap, reach, anything to be freed from what felt like a wolf's death lock for his jugular. for what it's worth, jayce is glad he doesn't actually need to breathe for once, but that doesn't mean he's free of harm. fear spikes. he sees it all happen again, the dolls in his nightmares. the herald in his death. frost births from his hold as he fails to wrangle his startle.

his hooves are locked into the half bend to straddle viktor; he can't kick, but he certainly jostles, near convulses to thrash free. the muscles of his neck threaten to collapse, snap, and the blood going to his brain is cut off. he doesn't necessarily need oxygen, but, he does need blood. jayce's vision clouds at the edges and he begins to slump like a marionette being snipped right off its strings.

he's even luckier that the offending fingers tight around his trachea fall, leaving it damaged in the way he pulls for a breath because he needs as much to speak, although now its out of pure reobtained habit— and all that comes is a crackle like thick paper being crumbled into lumps. the bandages around his chest have come undone, sloppy in his haste and exposing the little thrum of his heart— viktor's heart, playing a tune of adrenaline. quick skips, stammers. the song of panic.

he doesn't know who he's looking at, anymore. was this his viktor, or the twisted shell the hexcore had left behind? the one that would kill them all? the one he promised to save at the very ends of the earth, in a plane far from this one. but what has he done? to keep viktor alive has meant he has made the sacrifice of ending his first husk meaningless. jayce is confused, out of his damn mind as it fights to assimilate his memories of both revan and piltover properly. part of himself says he should've finished the deed, he should stretch out his arms right now and wrap them around his neck and squeeze twice as hard to make up for it. it would be easy. snap it and wait for the next husk, just like the mage had prophesized.

he messed it all up, now.

but his eyes travel down to the honeycomb crater his hammer has left behind. his mind keeps rewinding to his last breath, and the look in his eyes as he went. how he did nothing, how he turned his back on him. how that moment was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. how the mage had cornered him into accepting the impossible. now, what looks back at him is rage, and he cannot answer it.

because maybe he's in his right.

jayce's fingers twitch; he doesn't know what to do, now. "overhelmed" barely covered it. blood has spewed up from viktor's lunge, splattered on his elbow and cheek. the smell is becoming increasingly pungent. he is . . . the picture perfect example of a startled deer in headlights. ]

[becomerobot]

[Jayce just looks at Viktor... so afraid. For him, of him-? It's unclear. Probably both in equally high measure. Rushed with new life, body struggling and pained as it fights to kick start back into working order, Viktor only feels rage. Fury most profound, with only one place to direct that emotion.

If only it was all gone, this agony and anger. Viktor feels that urge boiling up, the desire to collapse such emotion down into an all consuming black hole. Become that masked one. That horrific Herald that once did just the same to Jayce as he's done now, killed and then revived in a desperate attempt to not go entirely mad.

He manages, through some great willpower, to smother that impulse. He will not give in to the Herald. He remembers that being, that part of himself. It cannot have him, not so soon,]

Get off of me, Jayce. [his voice levels out, but the threat of it is quiet and the scary kind of calm. It's also accompanied by the ominous rising of that third arm still anchored to his back, just above the blow out hole through his chest. The hexclaw twists and aligns aim, before the sound of gaining energy chimes from it.

A fair enough warning, Viktor can hope.]

[hexrot]

[ this is disorienting beyond jayce's comprehension. he's demanded space, but jayce does not give it, neither does he show signs that he's even considered heeding viktor's eerie smooth warning. jayce's ears pin back, his hands tic, and his eyes— twitch. a rapid blink, a subtle flinch at the hollow whirl of his partner's voice box, changed by that damn thing he didn't have the gall to destroy. it was his fault, he used it on him. but was jayce in his right mind to blame himself all over again?

absolutely not. he spent months doing that. again. it's not his turn again. jayce's dirty, uncouth face scowls at the commune's herald, at the claw awakening from behind him to threaten with clicks, sounds and the vibration of energy being bided.

he searches viktor's tecnicolor eyes for any residuum of the man he loves. when he cannot find him, two things rush to the forefront of his mind. the first: he killed viktor, because viktor told him to. the second: he saved him. he was rejected for it, not once, but twice, now in fury and now a shared, bound force of karma. they have destroyed each other and put each other back together. they revive out of lovesick desperation, and they circle around this dance without offering what the other needed at exactly the time it was needed.

jayce begins to feel it, too: a pool of unresolved grief that forges into bitter steel. if anything, viktor's anger was angering him all the more— they were even now, weren't they?

why are you looking at me like that when you did this? ]

Or what? [ the gravel in jayce's voice grates like stones.
he doesn't move, and the cruelty in his retaliation spikes after the fresh reminder that viktor had left him not once not twice— he's losing count, now. ] You'll kill me again?

[ as far as jayce could see, they were both abominations because of each other. jayce got to feel what it was like to live again, only to suffer, to get it stripped away from him and twist back into this thing that was considering, once again, to drink the blood off the cargo bed.

he never blamed viktor for it. he never wanted to frame him. but a man washed with profound anguish and heartache all at once couldn't possibly remain sound. someone needed to be the one blamed and jayce was tired of being the scapegoat.

he was tired of being picked up and then abandoned. ]

[becomerobot]

[Jayce's words strike as if another blast was sent through the spot Viktor's heart once held. It hurts less this time, just burns the edges of what was already gone from him. Kill him again- why shouldn't he? Because... it will just set off this cycle once more.

Round and round they go. One killing the other, bringing them back, wishing the hang on. The other, left with resentment, anger, loss of self. Then the mutual longing, desire, love profound-

Viktor drops his head and the energy building in the claw reverses. It flows back down into him, swallowed behind grit teeth. The sparking electrical charge pushes down into his heart, which whirls and overworks the new, more robust battery of their partnered devising. Power moves to the rest of his body, Viktor's slumped hands rotating and digging into Jayce's clothing in bunches. He begins to lift the man by each side of his jacket held so tightly that the seems begin popping,

Fury, lost for calm, cascades through his voice,]

No. Not again. [He lifts Jayce with the awful strength this body allots him, awkward in their positioning of the man already straddled over him, but it is enough to lift all of Jayce's weight up and away, as demanded. Viktor's body roars with a mechanical storm,]

I will find a pit- and I will throw you down it to starve, alone and forgotten!

[Jayce can attempt to hold on, but Viktor is very much attempting to throw him fully out of the back of the truck bed,]

[hexrot]

[ jayce cannot believe what he hears— it crashes through him like blades, rips him open, ensanguines him like a culled lamb; what he had thought that already ached but left unsaid, replaced with quiet words and palpable longing from the mage has warped into hurtful truth he couldn't have fathomed. something that makes him go colder and hollow in his marrow, stunned enough to be easily thrown out of his cargo bed with the whites of his eyes rounded and startled with betrayal. when he hits the ground, a sickening crack of bone follows.

his silence is his own brand of wounded defiance; if he broke something, it won't be killing him. he doesn't feel where it comes from, unlike his limbs or ribs. jayce stays down for a moment as the words sink into him, repeat like an ugly revelation, and he tries damn hard not to fuel a rush of old panic at the sound so close to his ears. the cold dirt against him feels more welcoming, forcing him to pull a single breath— because his nose stings, and his chest stutters. the throb at his temple just feels . . . dull. everything does, and if nothing quite matched the chronic pangs seeped deep into his bones, this certainly surmounted it.

that was a gutted wound gone too far. any trust that jayce had remaining behind a harsh viel of anger and grief shatters. that's not viktor, he tries to tell himself, and by then the glossy line over his lower eyelids have already begun to pool. refusing to stay demolished under viktor's shadow, jayce forces his hands to find dirt and rubble. press down. rise up. like he's always managed.

his right antler has snapped, dangles from its middle spliters and scrapes at the split near his temple, behind his shaggy hair. he doesn't bother to wipe the blood that seeps from it like thick slime. what was something jayce felt unsaid in his heart and only a figment of brutal imagination was now tortuously solidified. a nightmare in the flesh. viktor wishing to abandon him.

viktor wishing to put him back in the very ravine that changed him forever. that he deserved to suffer to such an extent— simply because he could not live without him. if jayce had thought for a moment revan would be different, he was proved terribly wrong now. as he gathers himself to rise on his own with no aid, he shakes his head, a huff coming out humorless and a murmur hushed mostly to himself: ]

That's twice now, too. [ it takes some staggering, but he's up on his hooves eventually. twice is a pattern. twice. many times in death. thrice the abandon, if he counted viktor's leave from the lab when all jayce had wished to do was the right thing, to protect them— did what they have really just twist into something so ugly? so . . . messy? or had it been that way for . . . quite some time? perhaps they simply hadn't the heart to unload, then. affection held them together, as viktor once said befkre he turned his back. jayce's lip quivers before another bundle of strained words drop. ] . . . And every damn time— I come crawling back to you.

[ jayce takes a single step back, his head shaking in denial that this was truly happening. he knows— he knows what he just did. but he didn't act alone. he was not the only one at fault. if that's coming out of his mouth—

he was right to have taken the shot. and he'd have to keep taking it until he's carved his partner out of that shell. but what would that mean, here . . . ? does it even mean the same thing anymore? that he should walk the same path? remain firm and reject him at every corner until the time was right?

it hurts. it hurts more than jayce could ever feel. ]

I can't do that anymore.

[becomerobot]

[The strength necessary to hoist and toss Jayce's form from him overexerts Viktor's whole system. His body burns and the backfires internally, nerves and electrical patterns all worked too far. Limits hit him and he screams as arcs of energy dance across limbs to his chest. The new heart briefly hits an overdrive fail safe, shutting down with a snap. Viktor collapses onto his side like he'd gotten the power chord ripped out of him.

Before it, of course, kicks back on in "safety mode". He absolutely curses that they build a device so well designed to not kill him from malfunction. He's stuck in place while it boots back up, the dull beeping an all too familiar notification of his vitals sign. Clinging on, like he always does,

All he can so is stare with burning disdain as Jayce rights himself.]

Isn't that... nice? That you can always... just get back up again?

[Viktor's rage is misdirected, but he just doesn't care. Jayce ruined everything Viktor built and he didn't have to feel the collective deaths of all those in the commune along with him. He only had to heard their wailing screams, the pain and terror of their final moments would never have to weigh on his heart... or lack-there-of. Jayce took so much from him, he broke his promises, he corrupted their dream-...

Shared responsibly is an undercurrent Viktor cannot escape, guilt always catches up with him. He can't hear Sky anymore. He cannot form those distant nebula's for his consciousness to inhabit, far away from a failing and ailing body. He's trapped, resentfully, in this tomb of metal and magic. It beeps to tell him he's still so frustratingly alive, but he cannot yet move it. He's trapped just laying here, glaring at the man who saw this fit.

Somehow, the hurt look in Jayce's eyes is what makes him the most sick of all of this,]

... go, Jayce. Just leave me... it's your turn. Go.

[hexrot]

[ the silence grows heavy and the knife delves deeper between jayce's ribs, but it fails to kill his heart. he just said he couldn't do this anymore, couldn't do this again— but there jayce was, concerned when the mechanism reboots, comcerned if and when his creation works to do its job efficiently. he could be angry all he wants, but inside, so deep inside—

it is the hope, and the love, that makes him plant his hooves like an unmoving statue. it is where the thought of storming away would be easier, how it would mean that viktor had succeeded in pushing him away and he's had enough of it. the worst of it all was that jayce couldn't bring himself to leave. even when resentment pools at the base of his chest, the very same spot pangs with wrecked guilt when he imagines that same man, beyond the years jayce thought he'd see him live past, alone and forgotten, at the edge of a dead world trying to make everything right in the way he knew how.

it still hurts, just like all of this. but staying, in his defiance, showed he thought different. jayce finishes snapping off the dangling portion of his antler before it pokes his damn eye out.

he's trembling, with his hands balled. and he at last approaches the truck, shaking his head— the weight feels off, now. ]

You don't get to bury me.

[ it was a dangerous moment for jayce to act on impulse— it's already been dangerous. but viktor can't move, from the looks of things. i won't fail. i swear it. if this was considered a failure or not— jayce couldn't tell any more.

he just knew that if viktor wanted to leave him, he'd have to do it on his own, whenever that was. he wasn't going to give up on them. plus, if jayce was going to take accountability for what he did, viktor will have to, too. jayce's rotting corpse was one of plenty testaments and he was not going to disappear to save viktor the mercy.

jayce finds his frustration spewing sideways when even now, what he sees sprawled helplessly at the back of his pickup is beauty. it hurts even more to consider viktor never asked for it, that he is the way he is now because he had no choice. but,

neither did jayce, when he pulled the lever. they did this all together, in the end. ]

[becomerobot]

[Tipped onto his side, laying in a pool of his own shimmering blood, Viktor can only muster energy enough to sigh when Jayce refuses his demands. He can do nothing more but bite with words and wit. The latter is in short supply. His anger is red hot, but dull now. What had sparked him to such vicious insults is now just boiling and bubbling misery. Guilt sinks him like a stone.

The red and blue blanket he arrived with over his lap is all tangled up in his legs. Staining the mixture of the two colors it held, red into blue... purple blood... everything they are is the same here as it was back home, right?]

Jayce... you were always meant to bury me. I'd been- at peace. With that. Almost.

[He'd been trying to save himself, but once Sky was killed by his actions, Viktor gave up on that. He couldn't live at the expense of others. Jayce had only needed to destroy the mistakes his foolish partner made and then put him in the ground.

The attack on the council should have made that easier, he could have been a blameless casualty. Jayce could have left his partner's legacy to burn out...

Viktor had already accepted he'd be forgotten.]

Why..? Why return to kill me, just to force me back into this half-life, once again..? I don't... understand....

[hexrot]

[ the skin above jayce's lip twitches, like a hound would when provoked to bare teeth, but he barely flashes any of his. his fingers have flexed and relaxed countless times over in his overthinking now, the scent of bloodstains everywhere driving him to a quiet madness that threatens his attention span. even now. even when he tried his best to curve his apetite for viktor far prior to this harrowing return they've both had the displeasure of visiting, the hooks have sunk in like hanging chunks of meat in a freezer. he's thought about it long enough, and before he could think to act against it, jayce frees the stake pockets and allows the front of the bed to drain, right onto the floor.

he's not going to consume any of it.

the taste of acceptance of anything feels sour just as everything else that's been spat between them— until he actually lifted his hammer and shot a hole through viktor. who once gave him life he did not ask for, now also gave him a death he did not ask for. because there was no other way to bring them closer to an end that, perhaps not exactly chosen, but . . . enough to make sure viktor was saved within the confinement of their fates, and that jayce would be with him. that's the end he cares about, now.

he hates that it had to come to this. hates, plenty of times over, that the mage did not give him a choice in the matter other than accept or decline. and jayce would not ever decline viktor, nor his only chance to return to himself. three steps forward, two steps back.

jayce's ears flip and twitch with discomfort at the sound of thick blood being wasted, drained. he busies himself by snatching the blanket, and still pulling the blanket over viktor's gaping, mechanical wound, and thus the rest of his body in a surprisingly gentle sweep. as angry and hurt as he could be, jayce could not bring himself to disdain him, could not fathom hating him for anything at all. they now match in the worst ways. ways he should resent.

jayce is guarded, conflicted— his promise pulls one way, their new history, threading between the gaps of the memories of his world, tugs the other way. ]

. . . Same reason you couldn't let me go.

[ love was not meant to be understood, and certainly nothing as tangled as their's. jayce smears the blood at the side of his face, sticky like slime. his antler has coagulated, leaving the reflective iridescence of it in the dark like the strips of a beacon. ]

I didn't want this, Viktor.

[becomerobot]

[He didn't want this... as if their wants have ever matter much to the grand scheme of things. Viktor musters all the strength present in him to shrug shortly. For the first time, he sounds entirely like himself, without the radio crackle affecting his voice. It is as short lived as he is,]

Of course not.

[The blanket is wrapped around him and he closes his eyes, feeling the drain of blood past him, hearing it splatter to the ground. What a waste, he thinks, knowing how much it means to Jayce to feed on him. It was horrific, but it was their way with one another, in this place. A means to share their bodies- their love... it is so strange to have so many new memories pop back into place. Just- who knows how long ago- it felt like minutes- there was no love spoken between them. Felt? Of course. Said? Of course not.

Beeping steadily, the heart monitor keeps time better than Viktor's hazy and static filled mind can. This is hell. His voice is back to the distortion state this form put upon him,]

... this must stop, Jayce. We cannot save one another... that much is clear.

[hexrot]

[ it is— confusing, in it's own right. people, even the best, may say twisted things that harm out of sheer frustration, or whatever duty jayce felt himself the need to carry like a cross. frustration put out, in jayce's dire need to keep up or release or deal with what all of this had become—

he is now angry for a completely different reason. it seems that everything viktor says tonight is gifted with sending jayce into a painful oblivion that he still desperately clings to: with folded ears, tense jaws, opaque dead eyes that somehow look more alive than he's ever been to snort, too-cervid with a sweltering, grinding heat. he can't hide his true feelings like this. he's furious to think viktor is giving up. giving up on them. he's gutted that viktor is in his own blood and he cannot hug him. dry him. clean him off and care for him the same way viktor did for him.

instead, he must use his grievances for fuel. he hates that he has to do this, both out of uncertainty if he should be doing it at all and sworn promise that he would not fail him, no matter how painful it was. viktor had warned him.

he accepted.

why did he always fall for the ones that wound him up like toy and made him dance, whether he liked the dance or not? what forms on jayce tongue is precise, cold, meant to cut deep— reject what he says, ]

Then I was right to grieve you. [ jayce removes himself from the slight lean he's put on his own truck. he removes himself from all of this. he detaches, and lands the final blow: ] My partner never made it out of that room.

[becomerobot]

[Detachment sinks him, an anchor cut loose to fall away from the ship it once steadied. Tried to, at least. Viktor was never all that heavy. Maybe only on Jayce's soul and conscious. Maybe. He's better set free like this, left behind to seek brighter shores,

There's relief in his expression, to be left this time. All things even between them, right? What a terribly even partnership they have, what horrible symmetry. It needs to end.]

Your partner died long before that... all I was was a specter. Clinging to fruitless hope.

Trying to make your grief less... complex.

I failed you in that.

[Beep. Beep. Beep-

Each noise hits with each sentence, rambled out in hazy thoughts, tone edging towards... bemused. Viktor isn't smiling, he looks half awake, grasping even now to that past feeling of hanging on. Of trying to do right. By Jayce, by himself, by their dream.

What can he do now but see the gallows humor of it all?

Beep.]

I'm not the person that I thought I was. You loved a ghost of me.

[Past tense.]

[hexrot]

[ jayce could almost laugh, but it is a single whisp of humorless irony. how kind of you. how fucking thoughtful of you. this and the final straw was the kind of retort that was meant to land square where it was aimed. it was meant to hurt, with surgical precision.

you loved a ghost of me.

jayce completely stills, his pupils becoming nothing but specks in a spread of glowing ice blue. his shoulders square in a way that frames a man stuck between staying and leaving. to say loved reopens a wound still fresh from being cast into the depths of his worst nightmares. the anger within him quivers his ears and enrages past what little of human he had left and into a bull provoked into a fight. he wants to charge at something, clash his antlers into solid surface, he wants to give air to the wretched bugle thqt brings ice storms.

the mage had told him to keep firm; he never imagine it to be twice as hard as it already was.

does being loved terrify you so much? are you that fucking selfish? is there anything left of you? i shouldn't have— he says nothing but swallow dry, constricted and rasping tight words right through his teeth. ]

If I meant nothing to you, you could've just said so.

[ instead of— whatever it was that they were clawing after, here. jayce, towards the viktor of the past, and viktor— maybe just fleeing from a version of him that he feared. no matter how many times jayce would tell himself that this was not the viktor that would listen to his reason later, it will not cease to tear a new hole into his chest and rip away the heart that was given to him. if he stays, he will regret so much more.

jayce finally turns his back to leave viktor, at the back of his own truck, with the final spit and shuffling hooves: ]

Would've failed me less.

[becomerobot]

[As much as it terrifies you. Yes. Unlikely. We shouldn't have- questions and answers all go unsaid. There is too much to say and no time, no energy, and no drive to speak it. Viktor can only remain slumped, staring at Jayce's back with glazed over eyes. Good. He's walking away. Finally.

The man can sail on and Viktor can sink under the weight of his own burdens alone. That's all his pride ever wanted, self defeat is at least a choice he could make for himself. One last stand of his autonomy.

Phantom pains plague his empty chest. What is there only beeps to remind him he's alive. A rational organ, no longer an emotive one. He wishes he had the heart left to fight, to be outraged and enraged by Jayce's assertions. Meant nothing-? Of course not. Absurd.

He hates Jayce more than anything, but only because his partner is everything to him.]

Goodbye... Jayce.

[That's all that is left to say.]