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It’s an odd sensation, Jayce thinks, to feel the flame of his life sputtering out beneath the preternaturally frigid fingertips of a puppet.
The faceless thing that Viktor is inhabiting clenches graceful fingers around his neck and for a moment Jayce is so shocked by the aching softness, the slow deliberation in its movements, that he lets it happen. The world slides out from beneath his feet at an almost languid pace, like water gliding down a slope; the way Viktor draws him into the air is almost tender in its own slow, artless way. Even the hand clasped around his throat feels dispassionate, disconnected from the reality of it’s actions. It does not feel like an act of violence; it feels like raw, objective truth.
Jayce fights in the beginning. One rough hand scrambles for purchase along the puppet’s wrist, the other clenched into a white-knuckled fist around the handle of his hammer. He’s straining to breathe, gasping against the fingers pressing down tighter and tighter around his throat with calm resolution, legs kicking out uselessly. The puppet is unmoved. Viktor is unmoved. Jayce tries not to feel the sting of that and fails miserably, as he’s done so often as of late; it seems as though he can’t seem to stop failing his partner.
Has he always been destined for this? He’d promised Viktor so much over the years, and more often than not he’d failed to deliver. Jayce had wanted to keep this last promise more than anything, but it didn’t matter now. This was the price of his ambition. This was divine punishment.
The puppet leans forward so slowly that Jayce hardly realizes until its blank face is inches from his own. Only then does it draw its free hand up and rest it atop his own, its long fingers easily covering Jayce’s, pale fingertips skimming the handle of Jayce’s hammer over the top of his fist. The puppet is impossibly smooth and bitingly cold to the touch. So unlike Viktor. So achingly unfamiliar when compared to the warm, work-worn hands of his partner.
The puppet draws the weapon away from him without much struggle. Jayce is losing himself; the weapon parts from him like the sea pulling away from the shore as he puts more energy into drawing in air, and the puppet lets it fall to the ground to be forgotten. It raises Jayce higher, drawing their faces apart, holding him at an arm’s length.
Then it’s just them. Jayce and the puppet. Is Viktor still in there? He hasn’t spoken. The room is silent save for the sound of Jayce’s desperate, shallow breaths. Perhaps he’s already moved on to the next host and left Jayce to die like this, suspended in a puppet’s unfeeling grasp as the breath ebbs out of him.
He gives one last desperate kick, a futile last-ditch instinct, and then he lets his legs go limp. Inexplicably, heat burns behind his eyes.The Viktor Jayce knew would never have left him to die like this, but perhaps that Viktor had been gone for longer than Jayce was willing to admit. Maybe he’d never had any hope of convincing Viktor to end this.
Maybe he was going about this all wrong.
“Viktor—” Jayce rasps, still clutching the puppet’s wrist, his own hand trembling. His vision is starting to spot. He feels numb, cold all over. He stops trying to speak. It doesn’t matter. Wherever Viktor was, he was too far away to hear. He’d grown tired of listening, and Jayce was beginning to wonder if it wasn’t for good reason.
What had he ever been able to offer Viktor as his partner, really? Maybe it was better off this way. He hopes he’ll be of some use to Viktor as a puppet, at the very least.
Jayce lets go.
His hands fall limp at his sides. His eyelids drop shut. He does not cry; he does not try to apologize. His life does not flash before his eyes. He waits, suspended, for the hand around his throat to tighten the last bit, to extinguish him for good.
And then the world swings in a great, swooping arc. Jayce’s eyes fly open as the puppet abruptly drags him forward, its free hand outstretched. Jayce thinks for a split-second that it’s going to hit him and finds that he does not possess the energy to flinch, but it doesn’t matter; the puppet merely settles its fingers over his forehead and draws him outward, somewhere beyond himself. The feeling sends the world spinning out around Jayce until it’s an incomprehensible blur of light and sound all around him. He closes his eyes against the dizziness, and when he reopens them the world has resolved itself into the shifting infinity Viktor inhabits.
Jayce can only manage to look into his face—every other line of Viktor’s slender body is imbued with light, a cosmic brightness that Jayce suspects would blind him if he looked too closely—but it seems Viktor wants his eyes there anyway. Why else would he be watching him so intently, staring straight into Jayce’s amber eyes with distraught intensity etched into every line of his face?
“Jayce,” Viktor says, and his voice is so soft, so pained that Jayce is struck by the sudden, inexplicable desire to collapse to his knees before him. He lets himself, dropping soundlessly, and Viktor’s eyes blow wide. “What are you doing?”
A sense of strange calm has fallen over Jayce, a startling clarity. He’s surprised Viktor doesn’t already know, but he says it anyway: “I’m giving in.”
Viktor’s face twists; the lines of his mouth twitch down, his brows pulling together, his eyes burning with something Jayce thinks is contempt. “Why?” He asks, and he sounds desperate in a way that makes Jayce’s heart ache.
He hasn’t heard raw emotion from Viktor in what feels like an eternity. His voice is so placidly monotone when he speaks through a puppet that to hear him like this, with such obvious emotion coloring his speech, draws an unexpected wetness to Jayce’s eyes.
Viktor is here . He may not be the same, but Jayce finds that it doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is that they aren’t alone. Viktor hadn’t left him to die at the hand of some faceless doll; he’d been watching every moment, waiting for an excuse to pull Jayce back from the brink.
And now here he was, looking at Jayce as though he’s never seen him before, watching his partner surrender himself with such obvious emotion that Jayce feels foolish for having ever questioned whether some part of Viktor was still in there. He was here; he’d always been here. He’d never left Jayce behind for long, always left the door open for Jayce to fall in at his side even when he’d gone off on his own—and now Jayce is finally ready to step through it.
“Because I don’t want to lose you.” Jayce says. He feels absurdly calm, more self-assured than ever. Nothing else matters. Just this. Just them.
Viktor steps forward. He moves cautiously, watching Jayce intently as he approaches. When he’s close enough, he reaches out and cups Jayce’s cheek. Viktor’s touch is tentative, exploratory; he starts with the pads of his fingers, testing the waters. When Jayce makes no move to stop him, Viktor gains some confidence and cups his face with both hands, his grip gentle as though Jayce is something delicate. Something precious.
His hands are warm and calloused, nothing like the touch of the puppet he’d been inhabiting before. Jayce sags into his hold with a heavy sigh of relief, letting his shoulders slump. His head dips; he almost looks as though he wants to fall asleep pillowed by Viktor’s hands. Viktor watches, eyes fascinated and fearful, his thumb tracing small circles along one of Jayce’s high cheekbones.
“You said your partner was dead,” Viktor murmurs. There’s no accusation in his voice, only wonder. He’s staring at his thumb as it grazes over Jayce’s cheek as though he cannot fathom being allowed to do such a thing, as though this small act of tenderness is revolutionary.
Jayce doesn’t deny it. Instead he gazes up, looking into Viktor’s eyes once more, and smiles with soft amusement. Viktor’s face is haloed by the starry brightness of his hair, the vastness of space laid out behind him. He looks unearthly, unreal. Divine. He looks like a God. Jayce thinks he would not mind being an acolyte if it is Viktor he is devoting himself to.
“You don’t want a partner, Viktor.”
Viktor blinks in surprise, but offers no protest; they both know it would be futile and dishonest. If he’d needed a partner to do what he was going to do, he would have insisted upon it long ago. Asking Jayce to join him had been an olive branch, a desperate effort to keep the connection between them alive in some capacity.
Slowly, Viktor asks, “What would you be, then, if not my partner?”
Jayce shifts, ducks his head and ghosts his lips over the heel of Viktor’s palm. “I’d be yours,” he whispers, his head bowed, sinking deeper and deeper into Viktor’s open hands.
Viktor trembles. Something escapes him; a soft, pained groan. Jayce jolts, irrationally afraid that he’s somehow hurt him, body jerking into action. The long-buried instinct to comfort, to protect his partner comes back full-force, the image of Viktor as he’d been a lifetime ago still buried deep within his psyche. He draws himself forward, preparing to catch Viktor if he proves unable to support his own weight, anticipating a coughing fit that does not come.
Of course. Viktor is not sick anymore; Viktor is not human anymore. The thought makes his heart ache, but Jayce tries not to dwell on it. Viktor may have ascended to godhood, but Jayce is still only mortal; he can only do so much for him now. He cannot be a source of protection any longer, but perhaps he can still be an object of comfort.
“Mine,” Viktor says wondrously, drawing Jayce’s gaze back up by sliding a gentle hand down to his chin. Jayce looks up, smiles sadly at the expression of disbelief on Viktor’s face. Even now, even as a God, he still doubts his own desirability.
Jayce cups Viktor’s palm, clutches it firmly. If this is all he can be, then he will devote himself entirely to the task. He will right his wrongs; he will do for Viktor what he’s failed to do so many times. He will let go of his own ambition and keep to his word.
“Yours,” he affirms, fingers curled over Viktor’s, squeezing down lightly as though hoping to physically impress the words upon the man’s pale, glowing skin. “Whatever that means for you. Whatever you want me to be.”
Viktor groans again, falls heavily to his knees before Jayce’s prostrate figure. His hands clutch tighter at Jayce’s face, as though afraid the man will slip through his palms and disappear. His eyes are frantic, hungry; they lock on to every minute detail of Jayce’s face, drinking him in as though Jayce is water, food, sustenance, light. He looks at Jayce like he’s in a dream, or maybe like he thinks Jayce has lost his mind; either way, he is utterly incredulous, face entirely open and displaying rich, bright emotion.
Jayce takes Viktor in much the same way, indulging in the contact. How long has he been yearning for this? It should feel wrong, giving himself over to someone hellbent on the destruction of his world, but all Jayce feels is an overwhelming sense of release . He’s finally allowed to be open with Viktor, to touch him, feel him, speak plainly with him. He can give up, lay himself at Viktor’s feet and let him do the rest. He can become nothing—he can become everything. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Viktor isn’t alone. Jayce will give himself over entirely if it means he hasn’t failed Viktor yet again.
“Do you—do you understand what you are saying? You are asking to—to—” Viktor doesn’t seem to be able to say it. There’s a hint of color on his cheeks; Jayce finds it oddly endearing that he can still blush even in this form.
“I’m not letting you do this alone,” Jayce says simply. He feels calm, completely at peace with his own annihilation.
Viktor trembles, gasps, lunges forward and crashes their lips together. Jayce yields; heat blooms between them, a searing pain-pleasure. It only lasts a moment before Viktor drags himself back, wide-eyed. Then his face splits into a jagged smile.
“Mine,” he says, no longer hesitant, and the word seems to echo endlessly. His voice has weight to it, a physical force pressing down upon Jayce. Viktor leans back in; the heat burns like a brand when their lips meet.
Jayce surrenders.