Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Chapter Text
Viktor had been missing for a year when the same man who took him away for a mysterious project sat down in the back row of his lecture hall. Even though Jayce can’t see his face, this specter leers over his students and listens aptly to every word he says with an unlit cigarette twisting between his bony fingers. Given that this is his only night class of the week, the typical sun rays beaming through the windows cannot help him see any other clues on his identity.
He’s distracted, but doesn’t let it ruin the lecture, only sparing one lingering glance to the man in the back before recuperating. The mere thought of information regarding Viktor’s disappearance has his heart pounding. It had been so long. So many sleepless nights wondering why he hasn’t returned. He was only supposed to be gone for a few months maximum, and Jayce has heard radio silence ever since the morning he left.
The man’s lithe frame remains shadowed until all the other students have filed out of the hall, and Jayce meets his stare again. He barely remembers what he looks like, but the subtle scent of smoke and the tilt of his head makes it apparent that this is who sent Viktor on the path he took a year ago. Jayce sighs, breaking eye contact and shoves his books and laptop into his bag.
As he draws closer up the steps, the man stands to his full stature. He’s not taller than Jayce, but if he hunched a little less he might get close. He’s frail and thin, but something about the way he holds himself tells a different story. A viper stalking in the weeds waiting to sink its fangs and venom into anyone who disturbs him.
“Professor Talis,” the man utters, slipping out from the shadowed seating area.
Now that Jayce can get a better look, he remembers more clearly. He remembers this perfectly tailored dark suit, the greying strands of hair, and the slim face and nose. Even though his eyes are covered by sunglasses, Jayce can still sense their piercing blue color. “Silco. It’s been awhile.”
Silco nods, straightening his vest. “It has.”
Jayce purses his lips and averts his eyes, trying not to make it seem like he has questions welling within him ready to burst. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’m sure you can guess,” Silco responds vaguely, walking past him and leaving the room.
“Can I?” Jayce answers, following him out of the lecture hall, as if Silco didn’t already know the project Viktor was sent to work on was top secret. If that was even why he was here at the university in the first place, but Jayce hardly believes he’s here to catch up. They never interacted at all anyways, the second he’d enter the same room Silco would make a swift exit, always giving Viktor a look that says we’ll talk later.
Silco takes him winding through the university's science building, finally exiting at one of the side entrances that nobody uses. A sinking feeling begins to manifest in Jayce’s stomach; whatever he’s about to be told it can’t be good.
Gripping at the strap in his bag, Jayce clenches his jaw. “So? Are you going to tell me why you’re here?”
A lighter flicks, and the cigarette between Silco’s lips catches. He takes a long drag before speaking.
“How much did he tell you?” he asks, a puff of smoke escaping his lips.
Jayce’s heart thrums in his ears at the words. “Nothing of importance. Just that it could be a groundbreaking discovery.”
“Good to know he used to listen to directions,” Silco scoffs, flicking the ash off his cigarette.
What happened? Where did he go? What did you find? Did you even find anything? Why are you really here? Where is he? Is he alive? Is he okay? Has he returned? Can I see him?
I need to see him. I’m so lost without him…
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jayce forces out, restraining himself from grabbing Silco by his shoulders and demanding for answers. Moreover, he wants him to take those ridiculous sunglasses off. It’s not even sunny out.
“He’s not back, if that’s what’s swimming in that thick head of yours. He’s still…out there.” Silco’s words are hush and delicate, chosen very wisely. The answer to why he’s dancing around the subject like this is beyond Jayce.
“Out where?” Jayce’s voice rises and he leans in closer, the cigarette flickers in the moonlight as his breath mingles with the smoke.
Silco takes a step back and another drag. “Let’s take a drive.”
Jayce closes his eyes and tilts his head up, taking a deep inhale to center his anger. As if he hasn’t asked the stars for enough. “Tell me what’s going on now. I have a class to teach tomorrow.”
“You won’t make that class,” he asserts, adjusting the sunglasses over his face before turning and walking towards the parking lot.
Standing in the building entrance alcove, Jayce wonders what the fuck could’ve happened for them to come to him. Who they are eludes him as well. He had only seen Silco on those few days he came to visit Viktor at the university, with his mysterious motivations and silent evaluations. They’d speak in hushed tones and exchange a few stacks of paper whenever he caught Silco in Viktor’s office. Every single time he’d interrupt they’d clam up and never give Jayce an inkling of what they were talking about.
Viktor had been so excited about this project that Jayce’s anger could do nothing but extinguish. He could see how important this was to Viktor so he kept his nose out of their business, even though the itch beneath his skin that this wouldn’t end well stayed all the way until he left.
He should've tried harder to figure things out. He should’ve pleaded on that morning while Viktor had been called in a day earlier than expected. Instead he just stood in the kitchen while his best friend chugged the tea Jayce made for him before whisking out of their shared apartment. Out of their life together.
He wasn’t even given a number to call if Viktor disappeared. He didn’t think he even needed one, but he regrets every single day not asking for a point of contact.
A year later and he still can’t wrap his head around it. Sometimes he thinks he’d prefer knowing Viktor was gone forever rather than that sliver of hope that he’d come home.
Silco keeps walking, not bothering to look behind him. He knows Jayce will follow.
Kicking himself back into gear, he hoists his bag up on his shoulder and resolves to send an email to cancel class when he can.
“Where are we going on this drive?” Jayce huffs, catching up to match Silco’s stride.
They stop in front of an old Cadillac that's rusting with age, and Silco throws his cigarette on the ground and grinds it into the asphalt. “Do you want to find him?”
“More than anything,” Jayce blurts immediately, all the more motivated at the fact that Silco is admitting that he doesn’t necessarily know where Viktor is either.
“Then get the hell in the car,” Silco says, before sliding into the front seat and slamming the door shut.
Here he is. In the dim light of the moon as the wind barely whispers to him through the growing foliage of spring. Jayce feels as if he’s on the precipice of something he might regret pursuing. On the top of the cliff, wavering for some semblance of stability when he knows that falling is what he wants to do anyways.
Day in and day out for the past year he’s been in this painfully liminal space that has him dampening his pillow a few times a month. Not knowing what’s happened or going to happen, not knowing anything, is a specific kind of insanity that Jayce isn’t sure he can keep experiencing. Sue him, he’s a scientist, he likes to know things. Especially when it comes to Viktor.
He slides into the dingy passenger seat of Silco’s old car without a second thought.
The smokey air is thick within the car, and Jayce contemplates whether it would be rude to open the window.
“It’s been a year,” Silco starts, while they’re waiting at a red light.
“I know,” Jayce grits out, resting his forehead on the window.
Silco sighs, and somehow the old leather seats manage to sigh with him as he sinks lower into the cushion. “Before we left, Viktor said you were the only one he’d trust with the…delicate nature of this project.”
Before we left? Silco went with Viktor? If so, why is he back while Viktor is still missing?
“Delicate nature? What are we, spies?” Jayce asks, recounting every single conversation he could with Viktor about the project before he left.
Unlike anything we’ve ever seen. That’s what Viktor said. That’s what his justification was for leaving, a purely academic interest in a new discovery. Jayce wonders if Viktor knew all along it would take him away this long, or that he’d know next to nothing as to what happened. He wonders if Viktor would change his mind if he did, if he would stay knowing Jayce would be kept in agonizing limbo for a year if he left.
“We were recruited by the military. I was lead on the mission,” Silco answers, and a small part of Jayce regrets getting in this car.
Military? Clandestine mission? Maybe it’s worse than he thought. Viktor hates fighting, so what was the military needing him for?
The sound of the car's turn signal interrupts his imminent spiraling, and as he gazes on the street he realizes that this is the route he takes home.
“How do you know where I live?” he demands, turning his head to attempt at piercing right into Silco’s stony exterior. It doesn’t work in the slightest.
“The mission was needed to know, the most airtight project I’ve ever been a part of. Fucking insane how quiet we had to be,” Silco recounts, taking another turn towards Jayce’s apartment.
Jayce scoffs. “Yea, I remember.”
Silco hums, kneading his hands on the steering wheel. Something about the silence that surrounds them is different. It’s thick and hard to navigate but something about how little Silco is divulging makes Jayce think there’s more to the story. He turns back to study the thin frame of his driver, noting the way he grips the wheel and the tense line of his shoulders. Even though his eyes are marred by sunglasses and the darkness of the night, Jayce notices the near paranoiac way he’s checking his surroundings.
Silco’s scared.
“What happened?” Jayce presses, nearly leaning over the console.
“If you want to find him, I need your complete discretion and commitment. Right here. Right now,” Silco says firmly, accelerating quicker down the last street before his block.
“You haven’t told me a damn thing, Silco! You expect me to trust you without any information?” Jayce yells, frustration bubbling like a boiling kettle.
Silcos swerves parallel to the curb and slams on the brakes, jerking the car to a stop and turning off the car. Jayce braces himself on the dash, turning to glare daggers at the man next to him.
What right does he have to do this? Take away someone who was一 is 一everything to him, only to come back a year later with no explanations and requests his help.
The wind has gone, nothing there except their breath and the dying thrum of the car engine. Silco leans back and drags a hand through his graying hair, before taking the sunglasses off.
Rippling puckered skin covers half his face, colored in an ashen gray that is near inhuman. Silco rubs at his eyes and looks back to Jayce’s own stricken expression, one of his previously blue eyes is a beady orange, as if lava was injected right into his iris.
“I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. I told you the mission is need to know. So I need to know if you can handle it,” Silco spits, but now that his eyes are unmasked Jayce can fully see the lingering uneasiness in his gaze.
Jayce can’t find it in himself to respond, contemplating what biological process could possibly create a mutation such as this…If it even is a mutation in the first place.
“Look, Viktor trusted you before we left. From what I remember, what we were studying…it was different than anything you’ve ever seen.”
Jayce takes a moment to process these words, but something does snag at him. “From what you remember?”
Silco groans in frustration, rubbing at his eye again. “Are you gonna help or not? You were the next choice for Viktor’s place if he didn’t accept the mission anyways.”
Despite the overwhelming lack of information, Silco’s latent dread, and an increasingly sick feeling in his gut, Jayce knew he’d say yes the second he saw Silco in his lecture hall. He knew that he’d do what he could to figure out what happened to Viktor.
“What do I have to do?” he says, taking in the inky color of Silco’s eye. What could’ve changed him like this? And if Silco was able to get back, what could’ve changed in Viktor that made him stay?
“First, you have to pack. We’re going to the airport. We’ll debrief at the base,” Silco says, putting the sunglasses back on.
Jayce huffs. So much for more information.
“Now.”
“Alright, alright. Be out in twenty minutes,” Jayce relents, opening the door and slinging his bag on his shoulder.
“Make it ten.”
“Any chance I’ll get told an actual destination?” Jayce inquires, looking at the redacted area printed on his plane ticket.
“The site is along the ocean coast,” Silco answers, adjusting the glasses on his face.
So they were studying outside and not solely working on lab work. He sucks up any further information about the mission like a sponge.
Jayce re-reads the ticket a little closer. “Is this a…private airfield?”
“Can’t have normal airport security see my condition,” Silco explains, as if that would placate Jayce’s nerves.
He resists the temptation to ask what specifically his condition is, but the near reckless way Silco’s driving makes Jayce hold his tongue. He’s holding his cool very well, but he wouldn’t be approaching Jayce if something wasn’t terribly wrong or confusing. Maybe they’re synonymous in this case.
Silence persists for another hour until they finally pull into the airfield parking lot. Silco turns the key and shoves it in his pocket, before grabbing a flip phone and dialing. Jayce squirms in his seat as the gleam of the moon vanishes behind a passing cloud.
“We’re here.” It’s all he says before immediately ending the call and snapping the flip phone in two.
The passenger door opens suddenly, and a thickly gloved hand grabs Jayce’s arm. He barely has time to react before he feels a sharp pinch in his bicep. An aroma of old leather fills his nostrils as the man's hand covers his mouth so he doesn’t scream. His vision is swimming but he manages one last look at Silco, who’s looking at him with a slight curve to his lips.
“Sorry, it’s protocol,” he says, not sounding apologetic in the slightest.
The last thing he sees is the shining moon reemerging from the black clouds.
“Professor Talis.”
The muffled words cause his eyes to peel open, only to see the pale gray of a ceiling. He takes in the starchy fabric beneath him, folding it between his fingers. Foggy memories come to him slowly while the sterile smell makes his head pound.
“Professor.” The voice is rough yet polished, it tugs on something in his mind.
Silco. Silco came to his lecture. He wants his help to find Viktor. He took him to the airstrip. He…
Jayce sits up quickly, before grabbing his head as it starts to spin. Rubbing at his temples he grits out: “Fuck. You.”
The man laughs, standing up before straightening his suit vest. “I take it you had a nice nap.”
“That wasn’t necessary,” he bites, the room finally becoming level.
“No, it’s not. But it’s necessary to them,” Silco explains, opening the curtains.
Now that it’s brighter, Jayce surveys the room. It’s small, no bigger than the single dorms at the university. One bed, a sink, and a dresser line along the opposite wall. All gray, apart from his own brown suitcase resting atop of the dresser. So sterile and orderly that one glance makes it apparent that he’s at a military institution.
“Are you finally going to tell me what’s going on?” Jayce asks, pleading to whatever above deity that he’d get some answers.
Silco’s eyes stay fixed on whatever he’s looking at through the window.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he says, before turning and walking out of the room.
He’s lucky there’s not anything nearby for Jayce to launch at his head. Huffing, he finally gets up from the cot and follows Silco out of his room.
They pass through the sterile hallways at a hurried pace. Not a single human in sight nor were there any windows to show him any indication of where he was. He knows the general area, but ‘along the coast of the ocean’ is still far too vague.
Eventually, Silco takes him through a door onto a terrace. The brightness of the rising sun makes Jayce squint, but once he becomes accustomed to the light he finds himself before a towering forest line behind a few hundred yards of thin grass. Humid air invades his lungs and he can immediately feel himself begin to sweat, whether it be the temperature or the vastness of the forest he can’t decipher.
He steps up to the ledge, looking below to find more of the same wispy grass, albeit a more yellowish tone compared to the grass closer to the forest line. Looking to the sides, he finds virtually nothing else to indicate forms of human life. No houses, no roads, no sidewalks, just a few military personnel surveying the perimeter.
Why there would need to be surveying of the area, Jayce is eager to know.
Looking back to the forest line, he begins to perceive a slight oddity in his vision. Pigments of mostly magenta, seafoam green, and a light blue begin to swirl at the start of the tree line. Pale oranges shine through as the sun rises on the horizon. Such a stark contrast to the deep green of the marshy landscape behind it.
Moving without any linear direction, these colors mingle and twist with each other, creating new hues and forms he’s never seen at this scale. It’s as if translucent oil was poured from the sky down a pane of glass, flowing gently into the soil where the trail ends.
“We were originally hired as consultants,” Silco says, breaking Jayce out of his trance.
He nods, continuing to stare at the bubbling mass before him, attempting to rationalize this phenomena.
“I’m an organic chemist by trade, although I primarily work on drug manufacturing before being hired here. I would’ve stayed at my old job but…this isn’t the type of job you say no to,” he explains, rubbing his eye. Jayce notes the orange matches the distinct color he sees in the oily fixture.
“What is it?” Jayce asks, still mesmerized by what’s in front of him.
Silco hands him a tablet, with a plan view topographic map of what Jayce assumes is the forest area. “Locals said it’s God’s reckoning, they gave us reports on a light in the sky three years ago. Whatever it was, happened in an abandoned building near the coast. Authorities went in to figure out what happened.”
He finds the building labeled on the map. Around it are concentric circles of bright red radiating from that area. He sees the small community nearby, only a few structures within.
“What’d they see?” Jayce zooms out, seeing another army base labeled some miles from the bar.
“No idea. Everyone who has gone in doesn't come back,” Silco says casually.
Drawing his gaze from the tablet, Jayce looks to him in bewilderment.
Silco inhales deeply staring at the tree line, eyes lost in memory. “Locals are a bit self-sufficient. Commune is probably a more apt term. Regardless, not many caught wind of it until most of the area was lost to the Shimmer. Remaining populations were evacuated over the pretenses of a chemical spill, not that there were that many left anyways.”
“Shimmer?”
“What we call it.” Silco holds a hand towards the forest, referencing the clear anomaly. Jayce doubts asking what it is will make things simpler.
Silco continues, moving to tap on the tablet. A timeline bar appears and his boney fingers drag it across the screen. Jayce watches as the circle from the building grows as the dial moves as well, indicating that this Shimmer is growing. Quickly.
“Government goons named it Area Z, and it’s growing over time. In another few months, it’s estimated that this whole base will be consumed.” Silco finishes, taking the tablet back.
Jayce nods, looking back to the border of the site. “You said no one ever came back.”
Silco purses his lips and turns away. “I lied, I was found by patrol officers along the northern beach edge of Area Z.”
Although it’s just an admittance of what Jayce already assumed, it still makes his heart rate rise. If Silco came back, then why couldn’t Viktor?
“What do you remember?”
The man grabs at the terrace’s metal fence, hands clenched to keep them from shaking. “Barely anything. It’s all…disjointed. Memories thrown into a blender to be turned into soup, and here I am trying to parse through the leftovers.”
Jayce cringes at the comparison, but Silco looks genuinely distraught.
“They sent many military units, none of them came back. Finally, after deciding that muscle won’t figure this out, they put together a team of scientists…My daughter was on that first expedition,” Silco reveals, voice wavering slightly.
“You went after her,” Jayce answers empathetically. He can't even imagine how agonizing it must be to come back from Area Z without even remembering if he found his daughter or not.
Gray hair falls over Silco’s marred face as his head dips. “I need to go back. They had me in isolation for almost a month, which is already too long. Poked and prodded at me for answers that I didn’t have.”
Jayce realizes that he was kept in the dark not just because they might not trust him—although that's definitely a factor—but because the mysticism surrounding the Shimmer is confounding everyone who comes in contact with it. Just looking at the near inhuman way Silco’s eye and face has changed makes no sense biologically.
“Why come to me?” he ponders. Surely they’ve got other academics to choose from.
“These government fucks don’t have any clue. I trusted Viktor, and he trusted you. Besides, it helps that you’re a scientist, and I need another reason for them to let me back in,” Silco says bluntly.
“You want me to go in with you?” Jayce responds, eager to get the obvious over with so they can talk technicalities
Silco nods, turning to face him. “I was supposed to just offer you a job here because of your knowledge of biological pathologies, but no one here is eager to go into Area Z so volunteers are limited. So I took an unorthodox approach and forced their hand.”
“Limited?” Jayce doubts there’s even anyone who’d want to go.
“Let me be frank then: no one else wants to go. There have been talks to try and blow up the place, but we’ve been able to lean them off that decision for the time being.” Silco’s jaw clenches.
Jayce shares his fear. Blowing everything up has almost never been the answer to questions regarding the unknown. Humans have a track record of destroying themselves, thus risking the rest of the world in the process.
“They’re giving you another shot?” Jayce asks. It’s doubtful they’d let their only human specimen exposed to Shimmer back into the jaws of the unknown.
“I told them I’d jump off this very terrace if they wouldn’t let me go back,” he answers, causing Jayce to cough on his next breath.
“That’s quite a convincing argument,” he says when he manages to recuperate.
Silco’s smile is sardonic, but there nonetheless. “So, will you join me into certain uncertainty?”
Jayce looks back to the hypnotizing movement of the Shimmer. Somewhere in there is the person who has populated his thoughts for nearly every day for the past year. Dead, alive, or changed, he’s going to find out what happened to Viktor.
“I’ll join you,” Jayce answers firmly.
The Shimmer is even more vibrant up close. Pools of warped atmosphere moving in no accordance to any outside influence; this is clearly its own being with its own rules. Jayce stands before this mass, while the thick air and earthy scent greets him at the gates of this new realm.
“Before we lose ourselves, I should probably tell you there were four of us in my original party. Myself, Viktor, and two others were Dr. Reveck and Dr. Young. Young’s specialty was botany while Reveck is a doctor of medicine, he’s a master of osteological identification too. We all had our own niches, none of it seemed to matter much once we went inside though,” Silco explains, hoisting his backpack.
“I thought you said you didn’t remember anything,” Jayce comments, looking behind him at the line of military vehicles and personnel fifty yards back.
Silco’s long face screws up in discomfort. “I don’t, it’s just something I know.”
A queasy feeling infects Jayce down to the cellular level. He knows that he must do this, but faced with the actuality is much different than resolving to figure out this phenomena back at the comfort of the base camp or in Silco’s old Cadillac. Although those places still aren’t what he’d deem comfortable in the first place. Comfort is home, the classroom, the lab. Comfort is all these places where Viktor is by his side.
He adjusts the automatic rifle in his hand, clutching it a bit closer to his body. The forest is so still, but something about it tells Jayce it won’t be kind to those who disrupt its calm.
“Better get moving,” Silco announces, his boots crunching the dying grass beneath.
Jayce nods, not quite finding it in himself to speak. Just a few steps more and he’ll be changed forever. Would his eye color alter? Would his face become marred? Would he be lost to Area Z like so many others? Would he lose himself before finding Viktor?
He shakes his head to dispel these thoughts. Questions like these are useless and only serve to make him less focused.
Holding his breath, he breaches the line of Shimmer. Due to its form, he thought it’d be like walking through a layer of thick honey. He’d dreamed about it pouring into his nose and down his throat before spitting him out on the other side, covered in its thick mucus. He imagined the smell of rotting earth or chemicals that would burn his nose. He’d even dreamed of cypress trees sprouting new branches and twisting around his body, suffocating him before he could walk a few steps into its wilderness.
How wrong he was. The Shimmer was nothing but a slight mist, the only indicator of existence being its warped hues. As he steps past, the air he is greeted with is just as humid as the air he’s been breathing for the past week. If anything, it’s got a tinge of freshness that he’d never get to experience in places modern industrialism has touched.
Tall grass brush up against his calves as Silco walks them through the brush. Sprawling greenery blooms before them in every direction, but when Jayce gazes up at the sun, the radiant light shines in a soft rainbow. He squints his eyes at the intensity, but as his gaze travels down the rays filtering through the trees, those same colors mixing within the Shimmer’s outer shell is also reflected with sunlight.
Sagging vines soaked with moisture drape from top branches like weeping curtains while moss and lichen converge on the base of the trees, traveling upward in designs Jayce has never seen. Fungal developments peek from the trunks, fanning out like miniature umbrellas to shade the forest even more. Roots groan beneath their boots while the wind whispers to them by caressing the forest's leaves with the softest touch.
He watches as a red-winged blackbird flies to rest atop a mossy branch, his ruffled red feather a stark contrast to the vast greenery around him.
“It’s beautiful,” Jayce notes, peering across the maze of trees.
“It’s unforgiving,” Silco adds.
Every nerve within his body is on high alert, with even the quietest of rustling demanding his attention as they walk. Despite its decadence, the warped branches and ferns that have no business as large as they are keep the churning in Jayce’s gut alive even as he becomes accustomed to the terrain.
They walk aimlessly for at least three hours, before taking a rest below a cedar tree with flaking bark and roots that emerge from the ground like waves from an unruly ocean. Jayce takes in its textural matrix, realizing how similar it is to the way Silco’s own scarred face.
“Any of this coming back to you?” Jayce asks, desperate to ease the eerie aura of the forest.
Silco ignores him and takes out the GPS from his pack, fiddling with the buttons. Jayce watches as his expression becomes increasingly distressed the longer he tries to get the apparatus to work.
“Could the amount of tree cover be why you can’t connect to the satellites?” Jayce offers, though he’s doubtful that’s the reason.
As a last resort, Silco slams the GPS against his hand to try and jog its connection. A rodent spooks and rustles the bushes behind them in its wake; Jayce barely noticed an animal was near them. He wonders what else he hasn’t noticed yet.
“Dammit.”
Jayce leans forward, looking as the screen shows virtually incomprehensible data. They don’t know if they’re on the right track to the bar, the old military base, or the settlement.
Silco chucks the GPS on the ground, hitting Jayce’s steel-toed boot in the process. Tugging on the side zipper of his pack, he grabs the compass that they were each given. Jayce scrambles to get his own.
“Fuck.” Silco says, watching the compass spin without signs of stopping.
Jayce gazes at his own to see if it would give him a different answer. It doesn’t.
“Not like I really expected these things to work. Guess we’ll have to use the old fashioned way,” Silco comments, shoving the GPS and compass back in his backpack.
Jayce looks to the sun, beaming right above their heads. He wonders if it is lying to them too. The most reliable presence to everyone on Earth, and the Shimmer could be changing it before his very eyes.
Moving east, Silco's steps are more hasty, clearly eager to find a place for camp. He falls a few steps behind, keeping his eye on the multicolored rays of the sun descending in the sky.
Eventually Silco halts before a marsh that opens to a swampy river. Cattails peek out from the tall grass surrounding the water. It’s impossible to see downstream, as the trees emerging from the water have bulbous roots bigger than Jayce thought possible. Everything starts to blue together, and the longer Jayce looks the harder it is to distinguish what’s what.
As he stares at the lily pads floating gently atop the water, Jayce hears the flick of a lighter.
“Really? Smoking in a place like this?” Jayce scolds, putting his hands on his hips and turning around.
Only Silco isn’t smoking, he’s watching the flame flicker in the shadow of a great pine tree. Mesmerized by its form, his eyes widened in something akin to realization. Or horror. Jayce really can’t tell.
“What?” Jayce asks, moving closer to the tree.
“We were here. I made the fire for camp,” he says, letting the pressure of his thumb leave the lighter, extinguishing the flame.
The look on Silco's face is haunting, making Jayce suspect much more happened their first night in the forest.
Silco rubs at his eye again. “A piece of fiery ash got in my eye.”
Jayce doesn’t speak, but it barely matters since Silco is seemingly talking to himself anyways. It’s as if he wasn’t even there.
“No wonder they found so much carbon,” he comments, flicking the lighter again.
The bright orange of the fire matches Silco's altered iris perfectly, while the black behind is a dark charcoal.
“You’re saying the fire merged with your eye?” Jayce can’t even fathom how that would be possible.
Silcos frown twists painfully, and he drops his pack at the base of the tree. “I’m going for a walk. Don’t follow me.”
He stalks off before Jayce can say anything else. He stumbles on a root trying to follow Silco into the forest, but his frame has already folded into the forest like he belongs there. Lines of trees melt together and form a monolith of swampy green, making it all the harder to see the earthy toned clothing both of them were given by the government. It’s eerily quiet too, and Jayce finds himself completely alone without the accompanied footsteps of his gruff companion. The only thing that brings him comfort is the daylight.
Jayce swears, but reluctantly decides not to go after Silco and risk getting lost. If he was really leaving him for good he would’ve taken his pack. He throws his own heavy pack on the ground as well, shedding to nothing but his automatic rifle.
Well, if Silco gets a walk he might as well have a look around too. If they’re going to camp here, making sure the perimeter is safe will be number one priority.
Jayce remembers the anguished confusion on Silco's usually impassive face. Maybe they’ll move a little more before picking a spot to camp for the night.
As he surveys the forest, Jayce begins to see pieces of paper littered within the soggy earth. He almost misses it initially, thinking it a trick of the light or him beginning to hallucinate. Kneeling down, he finds that although dirtied and deteriorating, the paper is folded into the blades of grass as if it grew that way. Muddled and incomprehensible writing can even be seen on a sheet taking up half of a fern leaf. He comes across a particular swampy willow along the edge of the marsh while following the trail of paper like Hansel and Gretel.
He takes in the tree’s drooping form, along with the pages enmeshed within the wood. Whole pages mould within the trunk while smaller slivers are found in the branches and the emerging roots from the ground. Jayce thinks the pages could create a whole book if someone really tried to extract them all. The pads of his fingers brush against one page peeking out from the side of the willow, attempting to read the scrawl on the page.
It’s barely legible, but Jayce knows that handwriting as well as he knows his own. There’s faint evidence of words and drawings on the page, but the rest is soaked with water and age.
Day 4 (?)
…….rations are gone for more days than accounted for……….fire incident…..Reveck pushing to move quickly, I’m not sure how much time it will take to get to the source……atypical alligator molars…….moving forward towards base first….my lungs are feeling better, I lost my cane but I don't remember when……..samples taken for further analysis, will need to put these under a microscope ASAP………….
………I wish Jayce was here. I need his opinion on some of my findings
Jayce jumps back from the tree, almost tripping on a root. That’s…it’s Viktor’s notebook. This must be from when they had first come through the Shimmer. He rushes over to another page, it’s lower on the tree and there’s less writing but it’s more legible.
Day ?
….I don’t know how long we’ve been here. Silco’s gone, I don’t know if he was ever here in the first place………..I think I miss home…..I wonder who took my place at the university, if I even was there to begin with…
Jayce’s lip wobbles slightly, brushing his fingers along the soiled writing. Viktor was really here, he walked through this same forest and stopped under this very tree. He wrote down his findings like the amazing scientist he is, drawing diagrams and images of what he saw. Jayce even finds a drawing of an alligator skull with wildly abnormal teeth.
He sighs, trying to control himself as he reads some of the hastily written notes about home, hallucinations, and him. Viktor mentions him a few times in the notes he reads. Some are normal, mostly about the floral and faunal samples he’s taken and how he’d like Jayce’s professional opinion. Some are also not normal, clearly from someone who is not stable.
I wonder if he misses me, I don’t think I’ll ever get out of here.
“Of course I miss you,” Jayce tells the wind, caressing the paper as if it’s Viktor’s own skin.
Lost in thought, he barely realizes he’s not alone until the snap of a twig rings in his head like a gunshot. He swerves, ripping a piece of the notebook paper in the process.
Silco stands there, face dull as he kneels down to see the paper grass a little closer. “Viktor was our designated notetaker. We all had notebooks but he was the official account when—if— we came back.”
Jayce clenches the paper in his fist. “He wrote that you left the party. Any chance you remember why?”
“Not a clue,” Silco says, shaking his head and continuing to sift through the grass with his hand.
He walks from the tree, crouching to inspect whatever Silco’s so intent to uncover.
It’s an alligator skull, presumably the one Viktor mentioned in one of the notes growing in the tree bark. Bones stained with soil and age are lodged in the dirt, grass and clover emerging from its orbital cavities and along the bottom of its jaw. Bullet holes puncture the skull in multiple places, and Jayce wonders if Viktor shot and killed this animal. He can barely even imagine him holding a gun no less killing something.
Jace traces along the mandible of the alligator before moving up to feel against the ridged texture of its teeth. Silco cracks the mouth open, revealing a second line of teeth deeper into the jaw. These teeth are…different. Periodic shark teeth or human teeth merge in with the pre-existing alligator teeth that’s already there, the cusps morphing with each other into a deadly conglomeration.
Jayce can’t even begin to fathom its form if it had flesh attached to its bones. The skeletal structure, although mingled with grass and roots, was massive.
Silco’s fiery iris and scarred face. Rainbow sun rays. Rippling roots. The paper tree. Now, this alligator jaw with concentric rows of teeth that don’t belong…
“This shouldn’t be possible,” Jayce notes with frightened awe, standing up quickly.
“No, it shouldn’t,” Silco responds, before turning and leaving the way he came, back down the trail of papered grass.
Once Silco’s footsteps fade, Jayce comes back to the foot of the tree. Kneeling down on a thick root, he splays his hand on the trunk. Flakey bark or brittle paper poke at his calloused hands, and he desperately wishes that somehow this tree gives him anything that would help him find Viktor.
He was here. He had to have been. It’s his notebook, his handwriting, and his awful diagrams that normally Jayce would redraw for him when they worked together on their thesis.
His pleas go unanswered, the tree remains silent and unyielding. Heat rapidly gathers behind his eyes and Jayce presses the heels of his palms into his eyes to stop tears from falling.
The wind, though, does answer him. The logical part of his brain deems it a trick or hallucination, but its voice is clear and tinged with knowing. It knows what he is seeking and is willing to help. It knows where to find Viktor.
Jayce.
His head jerks to look behind him, only to see the forest looks exactly the way it did before.
Jayce swore he heard his name. It was the hushest of voices but he heard it. He waits with bated breath for it to speak to him again, if only to quell the rising uncertainty in his gut. He waits for another call, another whisper… anything.
Nothing.
He drags a hand down his face and sighs deeply. Maybe it really was just the wind.
When he gets back to their camp, Silco is already starting a fire, seemingly past his initial hesitation of the area.
Jayce thanks him before opening up his pack to set up the tents, it’s the least he could do while Silco picked up the slack for him taking some extra time listening to the wind talk to him. Honestly, he really needs to keep his head. Viktor needs him to keep his head.
“Do you remember that gator?” he asks, once the warm sunset has dimmed and the stars are beginning to peek through the clouds.
Silco’s stare keeps to the fire, crackling every few seconds. “It tried to bite off Dr. Reveck’s foot. I shot it. Not much to say other than that. ”
Jayce exhales. A weight he didn’t realize was pressing on his heart lifts at the knowledge that Viktor didn’t kill the alligator.
“Do you remember anything else?” He pushes, unlacing his boots and slipping them off his feet.
“It’s all messy, but things are becoming clearer as we move,” Silco says, tugging on the gray hair atop his head.
Jayce waits patiently for him to explain more, chewing on some of their jerky rations packed for them. He can’t even imagine how confusing this could be for someone who lost so many memories like Silco has.
“We went down by the river, that I know for sure. We found some boats under a small shelter on the edge of the swamp just east of here, then crossed for half a day,” he recounts.
“Right, then we’ll start on that trail tomorrow then,” Jayce offers.
Silco hums, the beady orange of his eye all the more striking in the dark of night. “You care for Viktor?”
Jayce blanches at the question, but answers truthfully nonetheless. “Yes, I do.”
“Then you must be ready to accept that you might not like what you find. He could be gone, or changed…and not for the better. Be ready to see things, real or not.” Silco’s intensity was disarming, and had Jayce’s palms sweating with anxiety.
However out of the blue this line of questioning is or how crazy this adventure is becoming, Jayce's answer is the same as before: “This past year has been the longest of my life. Every day I wonder where he is or if he’s alright. Even if he’s not alright, I just need to find him. I need to know.”
Silco studies him for a few moments, before pursing his lips and turning back to the fire. “Good. We’ll head out at first light.”
Before Jayce can say anything more, Silco enters his tent and zips up the front. Something about his behavior makes Jayce questions as to why he made sure Jayce wasn’t being too idealistic. It makes him think that Silco found something he didn’t want out here on his last expedition.
Jayce watches the fire, now nothing but smoldering coals amongst the shine of the moonlight. He wonders about Silco’s daughter. Did he find her in this wilderness? Is he only remembering now?
If he did find her, what could possibly make him ask Jayce these types of questions?
A gust of wind coasts through their camp, and the fire blazes in front of him once more. Its heat radiates even hotter than when Silco first lit it, coiling and slithering upwards warping the forest before him. As the fire rages, he glances up only to find a figure in front of him.
It’s Viktor, his pale skin warmed by the flames in burnt oranges and reds. Dark shadows contour his face to a near skeletal degree, hollowing out his cheeks and his eyes, so much so that black pools of abyss inhabit the space instead of their usual bright amber. His frown is vacant while the hunch of his shoulder is even more uneven than normal. He tilts his head, somehow knowing and questioning at the same time. Jayce stares right back into the smokey form, seeing it sway with the fire’s glare and the sway of the night wind.
This figure is just a golem, sculpted by Jayce’s mind and the forest's inherent unknowability.
Jayce blinks, and he’s left alone once more. The fire is back to its tamed and dying form, dark ash and flecked fire left to expire in the night.
He exhales deeply, the adrenaline seeping from his body like blood from a wound. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised, Silco did mention the potential for hallucinations an hour after they entered through the Shimmer.
Just because he knew it wasn’t real didn’t help ease the pain. It hurt seeing Viktor, real or not.
The sun rises in warm vibrant hues as Silco takes them along the edge of the marsh before coming to a small shelter with three near-rotting boats left beneath. Overgrown vines entrap the boats, but they manage to heave one out of its bindings.
Just as he’s grabbing the paddles from behind, he sees a bird land on a low branch a few feet from him. The small sparrow chirps softly, tiny feet gripping the bark. Jayce smiles, hoisting the paddles over his shoulder for stability.
Roused by his movement, the bird turns, revealing another head attached to its small body. Jayce gasps, faltering back a step and nearly falling over. The bird chirps again, through its other mouth while each of its eyes move in different directions. Typically brown feathers shine in a translucent periwinkle color on the second head, glistening in the sunlight revealing its abnormal color and form.
Jayce tries to get a better look, but the bird flies off, leaving him frozen in place contemplating if that really just happened.
“Talis!” Silco’s voice is impatient, causing him to scurry off to the boat launch with as much speed as he can manage.
“Sorry, just saw a two-headed bird,” Jayce explains.
Silco rolls his eyes. “I think at this point we both know things work differently here. No need to linger.”
“Well, forgive me if it’s taking a bit of time. I’m not the one who’s been here for a year,” Jayce huffs, pushing the boat off the launch and jumping on the back.
“Forgive me, if I want to find our companions quicker,” Silco snaps.
“We’re here to study Shimmer too, we need to find out what’s happening here,” he says with frustration.
“I’m here to find my daughter, nothing else. She is all that matters to me. Next time you dally I’ll leave you without remorse.” Silco swerves around, back facing Jayce, and grabs a paddle.
Jayce winces, he does have a point. Viktor is the primary reason as to why he’s on this expedition in the first place. He grabs his own paddle and begins to row them down the river, as Jayce senses Silco is done talking for a few hours.
The deeper they get, the more anomalies Jayce sees within the natural world of this swamp. He’s not sure anomaly is the best word for it, but it’s what he’s going with for the time being. Anomaly, deviation, mutation, pathology…there are so many words he could use to describe what he’s seeing yet none of them seem to fit right in his mind. The mixing of different species is present, which by laws of nature isn’t possible. But it’s happening, it’s alluring, and it seems to weave into this landscape with an instinctive beauty.
Flowers that don’t belong on tree branches bloom from a growing ivy plant has him stuttering in his rowing rhythm. Emerald beetles glisten like floating gems in the sunlight, buzzing about in harmony with croaking toads soaking in the shade. He sees another mutated bird with its’ chicks, each having an extra limb, wing, or head. Minnows three times the normal size mingle along the side of the boat with an azul blue shine. His short musings make Silco turn and glare at him a few times, but Jayce can’t find himself to be too apologetic about it.
Even though Jayce is in a rush, something about the vastness of nature here makes him think that Viktor wouldn’t mind him slowing ever so slightly to examine the profound scientific phenomena that’s happening here. That’s why Viktor came here in the first place anyways, to be at the forefront of a discovery unlike any human has ever seen. They were both this way, eager to stretch possibilities to their limits.
He never intended or expected it to go this far. He doesn’t think Viktor did either.
Silence persists easily between him and Silco as they paddle down the river, wading through slimy algae and weedy tall grass. Even more aquatic creatures come to assess their boat, swimming through the swampy water with their Shimmer infused scales. Even the water itself seems to possess a phosphorescent tinge Jayce saw when he first saw the vast wall of misty Shimmer around Area Z.
A few hours in, Silco stops paddling, taking a moment to look at their surroundings as they approach a divergence in the river. Jayce assumes this is in an attempt to remember where they went, so he doesn’t say anything to disrupt Silco’s already sour and volatile mood. He starts to curve the boat to the right, and they’re off again down the thinning river.
As the water’s depth decreases and the amount of foliage peeking from the surface increases, a sign of stable land manifests in the distance.
“There.” Silco points to a sinking shack off the side of the water, half of its deck angled in the water while overgrown plants and fungus climb up the sides of the building.
“What about it?” Jayce asks, watching as some bass fish with mottled bright red coloring overlaying its normal scales swim around his side of the boat.
“We stopped around here, back then this sad excuse for a house was still standing. Looks like the forest got to it though,” he says, paddling towards the structure.
The hum of the forest is louder than before, a heaviness seeps into the atmosphere that makes the hairs on the nape of Jayce’s neck stand up. Dragging his hand through the grass, he sees a plant with different shaped leaves branching from the same stem structure. Clover, fern, ivy, and maple all spurring from the same source. A soft magenta milkweed plant blooms a few feet from while a pair of monarch butterflies suck at its pollen.
This area of the forest is more shaded, sunset filtering through in faded speckles or oranges and pinks. There’s Douglas-fir trees growing approximately 50 meters tall, looming over their small campsite and dropping pine cones and lodging them into the moist mud. Jayce blanches at their presence, they don’t belong in a biome like this.
Everything’s wrong here and nothing makes sense, yet it's happening nonetheless.
“Why’d you come here, Viktor?” Jayce whispers to himself, dragging a hand through the greasy strands of his hair.
“Why did you come here?” Silco asks from behind him.
Jayce starts, almost dropping the protein bar in his hand. He thought Silco was still setting up his tent a few feet away.
“To find him,” he responds, notably keeping out his latent scientific fascination with this place from his reasoning.
“Running into the unknown in search of the known. Running to or from something, it’s all the same. Just running, that’s all we’re doing. Everyone who enters this place is looking for it to give them answers.” Silco sits down on the bed of pine needles and grass beside him before flicking his lighter.
Jayce’s appetite vanishes, so he wraps up his protein bar and puts it in his pack. Silco’s words sink into him like fangs, piercing his skin and breaking him out in a cold sweat.
What could Viktor be running from? Or what was he running to? What answers was he looking for? What could this place possibly give him?
Their life was near perfect back home a year ago. Jayce had just started teaching on top of their pre-existing research gig at the university. Viktor stayed in the lab most days and Jayce joined him when he was done teaching his classes. They’d drive to and from work together, going out for drinks every Friday at the dinky bar a few blocks from campus. Jayce would make Viktor tea whenever he took too long to wake up some mornings while Viktor helped him make dinner when all Jayce could do was boil pasta. Spending weekends making breakfast and watching documentaries until the sun went down.
Things were good, great even. Jayce even had a girlfriend for a short while, although that fizzled out rapidly once it seemed like Viktor wasn’t coming back. Questions bouncing in his skull paired with the dull quiet of their apartment made it hard to open his mind or heart to anyone else.
“He was sick, right?” Silco asks, and Jayce’s stomach drops out from under him.
Every moment, every interaction, every expression in the few weeks before Viktor left is flitting through Jayce’s mind. Why would Viktor leave him like this, so abruptly and without much explanation?
“Yea, he’s always been sick, but he was getting better. He told me the doctor said he was getting better. He was, I could tell,” he says weakly, the sun finally disappearing below the horizon.
“People hide things,” Silco points out, lighting some kindling and setting it into their makeshift fire pit.
“Well, Viktor didn’t hide from me. I’m his partner. We’ve been best friends for years, he’d tell me if something was truly wrong,” Jayce insists. Viktor and him were different from everyone else, he can’t explain it but they just were.
Silco turns to him, arching one brow and giving him this look of disbelief with a bit of surprise. He scans Jayce up and down, piercing blue and orange meeting his own shaky hazel eyes. Like a robot assessing for errors, he simultaneously is judging and pitying Jayce with his gaze as each second goes by.
“We all hide things best when it’s from people we care about most,” he says finally.
Jayce shakes his head. He doesn’t believe that, he can’t believe that. Because if he does then he has to admit that he believed Viktor when he said he was fine. He has to confront that maybe he doesn’t know Viktor as well as he thought.
He doesn’t like knowing that Viktor thought he needed to hide anything from him. It doesn’t matter what it was, Jayce would understand.
His mouth tastes sour and a pit forms in his stomach. “Viktor would’ve told me if something was wrong.”
“Maybe he did, just not with his words.”
Jayce tosses and turns in attempts to sleep that night, but even when his eyes finally close are his dreams just as restless.
Chapter 2: Chapter 2
Notes:
this sooo got away from me bc work got busy and i added more than i planned...oopsies. just know that i am completely committed to finishing this and will not abandon it!!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“They’re calling me in early,” Viktor said, hand clenched on his cane as he wavered at the entrance to their kitchen.
Jayce looked up from his book, the mug of tea steaming beside him. He’d woken up early to heat up the kettle for the two of them. “What?”
“I have to leave today, not tomorrow.” Viktor rubbed at his red rimmed eyes, sleep still clinging to his body.
“They call you just now?” Jayce frowned, brow furrowed in disappointment.
Viktor nodded, chewing at his lip, a slight quiver appearing when he noticed Jayce made him his own cup of tea. Even though it's too hot, he took a sip anyway, dragging a hand through chestnut hair to tame his bedhead. They sat at their small dining room table, silence weighed on Jayce’s heart while Viktor angled his head to stare out the window where their small makeshift garden was in the backyard.
“We had a whole day planned, that new exhibit at the museum looked fascinating,” Jayce commented letting his cheek rest in his palm, but all Viktor did was hum in response and began to curl the strands of his hair with his finger.
Jayce cringed at his poor choice of words, that was not what he should’ve said. Reluctantly, he stood up and moved to make breakfast, at least that hasn’t been hijacked by Viktor’s mysterious employer. As he grabbed a pan and turns the stovetop on, Viktor moved from his spot on the table and limps to the kitchen to lean back on the counter.
“I’m sorry, Jayce,” he said, voice quiet even with the minimal space between them.
“It’s fine, we can’t always control things like this. Just wish you could tell me more about the project.” Jayce took out the eggs, cracking them into a bowl and whisking them with a fork.
Viktor was silent for a few moments, then moved from behind him to Jayce’s right as he poured the eggs into the pan. They both gazed at each other with magnetic force, and Jayce watches as Viktor scans his face. Whatever he’s looking for, Jayce has no idea.
“You need to leave now?” he asked, listening to the eggs sizzle.
“I do.”
“Now, now?”
“Yes.” His whisper was firm but guilty, it’s clear Viktor doesn’t want to leave this instant either.
Jayce sighed again, trying not to let how upset he is show on his face. He turned back to the eggs and grabbed the spatula. “Get dressed then. I’ll handle breakfast.”
Viktor didn’t move for a second, and his eyes burned into Jayce with intensity. He watched out of the corner of his eye while Viktor finally grabbed his cane and walked back into his room to get dressed.
He threw some bacon on another hot pan, unflinching as the oil popped and seared his skin when it jumped from the metal. Scrambling the eggs, Jayce watches the uncooked liquid yolk swirl around the pan before solidifying under the heat. Cooking is typically meditative to him, but the circumstances prove difficult to make him relax. Now, all he could do is mourn their dinner reservation at a new restaurant that he will no doubt have to cancel.
A few minutes later, Viktor walked back out with his duffel slung over his shoulders. He resisted the temptation to grab the bag from him to carry it himself, but the twisting tension in his stomach at the thought of being close to Viktor right now made him hesitate.
The toast pops up, breaking him out of his dissociation. He grabs their plates and begins assembling their breakfast: the eggs are a little overcooked, toast is soaked with butter and raspberry jam, the bacon is chewy but not too much. Just how Viktor likes it.
“Thank you, Jayce.” Viktor lowered himself into his chair, taking another sip of his cooled tea.
Jayce smiled despite his sadness, trying to make the best of their last morning together for a while. “My pleasure.”
Viktor fiddled with his eggs for a long moment before inhaling sharply and raising his head to look at Jayce. “I know I don’t say it often, but you’re very important to me. I’m lucky to have you as my friend.”
“You’re important to me too. Wouldn’t have survived academia without you as my partner.” His heart warmed remembering their time at university together, before and after they were students.
A soft smile formed on Viktor's face, one reserved only for him. It’s crooked and faint but the look in his eyes really sells its rarity and meaning. It never fails to make Jayce smile right back.
However, it faltered seconds later, and there’s a grimace in his brow. “Just thought I’d remind you. Since I’m…leaving.”
Jayce smiled awkwardly to try and break the tension. “Not like you’re leaving for good. You’ll be back in no ti—“
His phone buzzed in his pocket, Mel’s contact glowed before him when he grabbed it. He let it ring, they can talk another time.
“Aren’t you going to get that? It’s Mel, right?” Viktor inquired, finishing his breakfast and grabbing their plates from the table. He has them both in one hand and his cane in the other as he walks into the kitchen and places them in the sink.
“I’ll call her later. I’d rather spend time with you,” Jayce answered immediately.
A fork clattered in the sink. Viktor stomped back into the dining room with a reddening face.
“What?” Jayce asked. Obviously he’d rather be spending time with him before he leaves than on a phone call with his girlfriend.
“Nothing.” Viktor sat back down and chugged the rest of his tea.
Okay. He’s being weird. “So…do you have to go this second or can you watch the new docuseries episode with me that came out last night?”
Viktor scoffed, smirking and shaking his head. “I think I can postpone my exit for a short while.”
They sat on the couch and Jayce tried not to notice how much Viktor sneaked glances at him. Just as Viktor pretended not to notice how close Jayce sat next to him on the couch, much closer than normal.
The episode ended and Jayce helped him put his duffel in the trunk of his car. Chilly winds flowed right through his thin sleep shirt but the sun is warm and inviting, it almost dampened the bitter taste in his mouth. Distracting himself from how wrong this feels, Jayce went in for a quick hug. Viktor’s never been too touchy with anyone, but he normally lets Jayce hang off him whenever he likes.
“You okay?” Jayce asked, committing the feeling of Viktor in his embrace to memory.
“I’m fine,” Viktor responded, before pulling himself from the hug. Jayce reluctantly let him go.
“See you later?” Jayce offered him a smile, which Viktor didn’t return.
“Goodbye, Jayce.” He barely spared him a glance before opening the car door and slipping into the front seat.
Even after he’s driven out of sight, Jayce stayed gazing down the street for a few minutes before walking back inside. The sun has faded behind the clouds and the wind became sharp and cold.
Silco and Jayce move out at first light, the sun is hot and heavy on the back of his neck. Thickets of brush are denser than ever before, and the wet forest it nigh impossible to navigate without the light of the sun or Silco’s hazy memory.
A trail of flowers begins to manifest as they walk further down. Small with a yellow bulb at the top of a thin stem, its petals curve and fold in like a teardrop with a small opening at its point. The further they walk the more flowers litter the ground, some stems shooting up to a few feet with tiny leaves growing on the side. Over countless field operations he’s gone on throughout his career, he’s never seen flowers like this. Jayce wonders what this flower is supposed to look like outside of the Shimmer’s influence or if it is completely individual to this place.
The pair of them come out to an opening in the forest, in front of them is a sign titled Authorized Personnel Only with mustard yellow lichen slowly covering the writing. Jayce guesses any road that used to be here is long lost to the forest.
“We’re close to the base,” Silco says, pointing to a fence line in the distance across the field.
“These flowers, were they here before?” Jayce asks, kneeling down and lightly touching a petal. He peels back to peer inside the bulb, only to press too hard making his finger plunge into the center. Quickly retracting his finger, a sticky sap coats the tip and Jayce frantically wipes it on his pants.
Silco shakes his head. “Not like this.”
The base comes into view once they approach the front fence gate, twisted metal coils and brutalist concrete buildings are a stark contrast to the lush nature around them. The flowers persist, peeking out from the cracking cement trail beginning at the gate into the base. Silco pushes at the gate, causing it to creak and groan with misuse.
“We stayed here for a while,” he comments, but his brow furrows as he assesses the growing flowers and colorful lichen climbing up the outer walls of the buildings.
Jayce infers it’s changed quite a bit since Silco was last here, or since he last remembers.
A particular spur of lichen catches both their eyes. The colors are much more vibrant than what they’ve previously seen on their journey, its form is furry with moss and fungi sprouting at the edges. There’s bouts of feathery leaves towards the edges of the growth as well, more physically imposing compared to the thinner lichen in the middle. Warm colors of the sunrise bloom at the center before fanning out into seafoam greens and sky blues, even a bit of periwinkle sprouts in one section.
Jayce grabs tweezers from his pack and approaches the growth, picking out a small sample and depositing it into an empty vial. It oozes from the center as he picks at it with the tweezers, its consistency similar to the sap he’d accidentally touched from the flower. He can’t resist leaning in and sniffing the growth, perhaps it’s emitting a Shimmer in another way, but no aroma enters his nose.
“Huh, could just be malignant,” he ponders out loud, looking behind him only to find Silco walking towards a different building to their left.
Rolling his eyes, Jayce shoves the vial back in his pack and hurries after Silco.
“We camped in the mess hall. It was close to an old community garden space that was ripe with potential mutated samples,” he says once Jayce catches up.
“What’d you find?” Thick clouds begin moving to mask the sun.
“Lots of the same. Fucked up plants and animals that don’t belong. Some fruit even.”
Jayce sighs. Silco really doesn’t care at all about the gravity that this place holds, the weight it has on humanity’s current understanding of the natural world. He doesn’t feel drawn to this place like Jayce does, nor does it seem to grip him so viscerally. His curiosity runs rampant here, and the jittery feeling of being the one to view this mystery first hand manifests within him with every passing second. The temptation of the unknown draws him in with a force he can't explain nor remember ever experiencing with such vigor before this mission.
It’s moments like these that has him missing Viktor even more, they always were on a wavelength of discovery that no one else could balance like they could. Did Viktor feel like this when he entered this mutated realm? Did he wish Jayce was by his side taking samples and wondering what the microscope will reveal? Did he also feel compelled to move deeper into the forest?
A misty rain starts up, not enough to soak through but enough to rest gently atop their clothes and hair. Any heavier rain and Jayce would contemplate going inside, but he likes the rain even if it gives him a slight chill.
The small community garden comes into view, overflowing with yellow flowers into the entrance sidewalk. Even in the damp rain they shine bright as ever. Other plants weave together in a conglomerate spiral he’d never even fathomed before today. Stems whirl, flow, and try to divert attention from the mass of yellow but they don’t compare.
The rain begins to come faster and harder, droplets heavy and thick. Water seeps into his hair and trails down the nape of his neck beneath his collar. A shiver courses through his body.
“Let’s go inside. We’ll camp here when night comes.” Silco turns to leave and walks down the sidewalk towards the mess hall a few yards behind them.
Jayce takes a moment to feel the frigid rain—letting himself feel it in his bones. He’s shivering, but he doesn’t care, it’s the first semblance of complete freshness compared to the humid air he’s walked through for days until now. He opens the palm of his hand and lets rain pool there, watching Shimmer ripple in faded turquoise and pink within the water. The longer he is hypnotized by the rain in his hand the more he sees his own skin swirling with the Shimmer’s movements as well, his fingerprints and the creases in his palm moving back and forth like water down a drain.
He wonders if he cries he’d see Shimmer in his tears.
Two days. It rains for two straight days, thick balls of hail even pelted down on them from the sky for a few hours. At first, it was beautiful. Liquid diamonds dropping from the sky, dazzling with the refraction of the sunlight. However, when night came on that first day, the storm became vicious and all consuming. Its howls kept both of the men up for hours, surrounding them even in their dreams. Despite being inside the safety of the mess hall, the wails of the wind even stopped Silco from going outside to look for his daughter.
They resided to clear the mess hall for any immediate dangers. They found maps, journals, broken sample vials—all covered with a layer of dust or creeping flora that was brought from the outside. The rain proved too mesmerizing for them to investigate further. Jayce spent hours just watching shimmery water stream down the foggy windows.
On the third day, Jayce wakes to the chirps of the birds and the purring of the forest, it’s hum latent yet it still manages to penetrate the concrete walls and slither into his body. Silco is already up and gone, but his backpack is still here so he must be surveying the base for any sign of his daughter after losing so much time because of the rain. Last night, Jayce tried to pry for answers as to who his daughter was but Silco was as tight lipped as always. All he got was her name, hair color, and that she’s the most brilliant scientist there is. Jayce disagrees, Viktor is more brilliant than anyone.
He unzips the sleeping bag before standing and stretching his arms above his head, feeling his spine crack and muscles loosen. He grabs some empty vials from his pack and sets up his microscope on a table nearby before slipping on a jacket to go outside. The smell of damp earth and the sharp glare of the sun greets him as he walks outside. Typically humid air has a newer fresh tinge to it, and Jayce breathes easier than he has the whole mission. He strolls to the garden, eager to grab some samples from the plants and soil.
When he arrives, there’s a figure crouched in the garden. Jayce’s hand moves to grab his gun but as the figure extends to its full height, he nearly drops the gun on the ground.
It’s Viktor. It’s got to be. Jayce would know that silhouette anywhere.
His hair is longer, nearly touching his shoulders. He’s wearing deep navy clothing that contrasts with the small bag hanging at his side filled to the brim with different brightly colored flowers and plants. He holds himself differently too, there’s a calmness that Jayce has never seen before. Before, his chronic pain would keep him from ever fully relaxing but now his shoulders don't possess their signature tenseness nor does his hip lean to one side to relieve tension in his back.
He doesn’t have a cane in his hand either, but a staff that wasn’t there a few days ago rests against the fence. It throws him off kilter, truly conceptualizing how long it’s been since he’s seen Viktor. What else has changed?
“Jayce? Is that you?” Viktor’s eyes shine gold before easing back into their usual deep amber.
This time, the gun slips from his grasp like a bar of soap, clattering onto the cracked cement below him.
“Viktor?”
His partner stays still, flowers clenched in his fists. Jayce suspects Viktor might think him a hallucination; he’s not entirely sure this is real himself.
Jayce rushes immediately towards him in the garden, stepping on valuable samples but he doesn’t care. He grabs Viktor by the wrist and hauls him into an embrace—he’d almost forgotten how good it felt to hug him.
Jayce is happy to find that he’s even gained some weight in his year gone, only a few boney angles digging into his own muscular frame as he draws Viktor close. He’s taller too, somehow, as if his spine has righted itself in his absence. He can’t feel a brace through the baggy clothes he’s wearing but he longs to trace the notches in Viktor’s spine to make sure there’s nothing wrong. He needs to press at his core to feel all his organs are intact. He wants to inspect every inch of Viktor to make sure he’s alright.
He’s here. Jayce has found him.
“You’re real.” He’s breathless with awe.
Viktor is clearly caught in shock, but eventually his thin arms wrap around his core and clutch at the fabric of his shirt. Jayce feels lithe hands press into his back with a terrified intensity, as if he’d vanish at a moment's notice. He notes that Viktor's wearing a glove on one of his hands.
“Are you real?” Viktor asks, arms finally relaxing and he moves to break the hug, his brow furrows when he gets a good look at Jayce.
For the first time in a year Jayce feels a weight from his heart alleviate. His partner has some new freckles, hints of blond on the tips of his hair that’s only visible in the sunlight, and a warmer hue to his cheeks, but it's still him. He’s still got that mole right above his mouth and the curious glint in his eyes.
This can’t be a hallucination, he doesn’t think he could bear it.
“Of course I’m real. I came to find you,” he explains, resting his hands on Viktor’s shoulders.
Viktor gives him an incredulous look, eyes darting from the hands on his shoulders back to Jayce's face. “What do you mean? I’ve only been gone a few weeks, a month maximum.”
Jayce’s eyes widen, hands dropping from their resting place. “Viktor, it's been more than a year.”
Viktor’s initial shock and acceptance slowly morphs into hesitation and confusion, and he takes a step back. “How are you here, exactly?”
Jayce walks forward in a desperate move to stay close to him, but Viktor takes another step away.
“I brought him.” Silco’s voice is rough, ripping through Jayce's lingering euphoria from feeling Viktor’s flesh against his.
Viktor's eyes widen, locking onto Silco’s looming form behind Jayce. “Why have you come back?”
“Why do you think?”
“She told you to walk away.” Viktor says cryptically, hugging the bag closer to his body.
Silco’s sudden confused rage is palpable in the air, and both him and Viktor tense up at the look in his eyes. He stalks past Jayce and grabs Viktor by his lapels, drawing him close and giving him a look of pure malice. Jayce readies himself in case he punches Viktor in the face, because by the look on his face he just might.
“You know where she is.” Silco’s hands shake as he clenches the fabric.
Viktor clenches his jaw, before nodding slowly. His eyes are focused and contemplative while staring at Silco’s hands, as if he still can’t believe they’re actually there. “So do you. You don’t remember?”
Silco shoves him off, causing Viktor to stumble and nearly fall over into the garden.
“Hey!” Jayce yells, tugging on Silco’s shoulder to get them separated. A hand gun is produced out of nowhere and pointed right at his chest.
“Don’t even think about it,” Silco spits, before turning back to point his gun at Viktor. Jayce didn’t even know he was given an extra gun.
“Silco. Put the gun down.” Viktor’s voice is calm and level despite the gun at his face.
“Where is she?” Silco demands, finger pressing slightly harder on the trigger.
Jayce’s heart is nearly beating out of his chest. He just found Viktor, he can’t let it come to this. “We’ve been cooped up for a few days. Calm down, you’re not thinking straight.”
Crisp air of the morning is now strained beyond measure, and the longer Silco stares at Viktor down the barrel of the handgun the more it sends Jayce’s mind spinning. He can’t lose him now, not after he’s come all this way.
“Don’t let this place get to you,” Jayce pleads. He doesn’t believe it’ll do much to ease the mood, but he can’t help but try as Silco unravels before him. He risks a glance at Viktor, who continues to ignore him in favor of analyzing Silco’s body language.
Silco’s arm is shaking and his frown is twisted with anguish, but he exhales before dropping the gun slowly from its place in front of Viktor. A curdled groan escapes him and he brings his hands to the side of his head. The hand without the gun goes to rub at his eye with a worrying force, pushing and tugging at his scarred face. Viktor finally looks back at Jayce, but his eyes narrow ever so slightly and a shadow crosses over his face.
Viktor turns back to Silco, who is now hunching his shoulders in pain. “I’ll take you to her tomorrow. It’s on my way back.”
Jayce is about to ask where he’s going back to, but Silco beats him to the punch.
“You’ll tell me where she is now,” he sneers, pointing the gun at Viktor again.
“It’s more than a day trip back, I’m afraid. We’ll be back tomorrow not because I don’t want to help you, but because we have to,” Viktor explains, holding a hand out to try and calm Silco down.
“Back where?” Jayce manages to ask.
Viktor looks back at him for a moment, pursing his lips and averting his gaze again to the mess hall behind him. Seconds past and Jayce realizes that Viktor is holding his tongue purposefully, carefully choosing his words not to give anything away.
He’s nervous. He doesn’t want Jayce to know.
“Well? Answer him, ” Silco hisses, casually gesturing back to Jayce with the gun. He really needs to put that thing down.
“The town,” Viktor answers, but his words are stilted.
Silco seems suspicious as well, so he lowers the gun and moves closer to Viktor’s face. His vindictive sneer meets Viktor’s cold pacificity, but neither of them move as they size each other up. Jayce can do nothing but witness the invisible and indecipherable conversation they’re having before him.
Silco’s eyes widen ever so slightly, and he takes a step back to holster the gun. “Where are Reveck and Sky?”
Viktor contemplates answering, but resides to walk slowly over to the fence to grab his staff. At first glance it’s nothing but a simple oak wood staff, but as it moves lines of Shimmer within the wood glint in the sunlight. “We should depart immediately.”
“Talis, go pack up our stuff.” Silco folds quickly from wondering about the other scientists.
Jayce sighs exasperatedly, throwing his hands up in the hair before turning to go back inside. He stomps towards his dropped gun and slings it over his shoulder.
“Jayce. Wait.” His name on Viktor’s tongue is like a mirage in the hottest desert.
He immediately turns around, only to see Viktor and Silco staring each other down again. Silco mumbles something low before walking away himself, making sure to shoulder check Jayce on the way back into the mess hall. Jayce gives his retreating back a scowl, before turning to face Viktor once again.
He’s got that look on his face similar to the one he gets when he’s trying to figure out a confusing equation or approaching a chemical reaction that wasn’t accounted for. There’s a small tick in his brow and a slight frown on his face while his eyes are unfocused on what's around him in favor of what’s in his head.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Jayce lays a hand on Viktor's shoulder, feeling the warmth of his skin through the cloth. “I’m really here.”
Viktor looks to him, then to the hand atop his shoulder, before abruptly saying: “Jayce, you must turn back.”
“What?” Jayce’s brow furrows and his heart sinks. Turn back?
“I never intended for you to get mixed up in this. In fact, I was adamantly opposed to your recruitment…” Viktor trails off, huffing in frustration.
What? Words fail him, but Viktor isn’t done speaking anyways. Jayce’s hand falls from his shoulder.
“Though I suppose Silco doesn’t care. He only brought you to convince the higher-ups to let him back in here, they’d never let him out of their sight alone otherwise. He didn’t care that you might get hurt, or die, or worse,” Viktor says, massaging his temple.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Viktor was supposed to greet him like the friends they are. He was supposed to rein Jayce into his findings and show him all the experiments he’s done to put them both on the same page. He was supposed to ask him his opinions on what’s going on here and what he thinks of the forest. He was supposed to ask Jayce to fix his drawings and diagrams since his hands get shaky after writing for too long. Viktor’s supposed to lean on him for support, like all partners do.
Jayce was supposed to embrace him again and feel him in his arms. They were supposed to…
He shakes his head. He feels awfully stupid now for thinking everything would be alright the second they locked eyes. “I’m not going back. I just got here.”
Viktor inhales, hanging his head down a bit causing a few chestnut colored strands to fall and shadow his face. He leans on the staff, flexing his hand on the wood causing the purple Shimmer striations to pulse with energy. Jayce can tell he’s frustrated and that he’s holding his temper, but no matter how much Viktor tries Jayce is done leaving him behind.
“You don't think I can handle it? Since when do we work separately anyways?” Jayce pushes, hoping to appeal to the nostalgia of working together again.
“This is different than before, different than anything we’ve ever done. It must be handled delicately,” Viktor explains.
“You don’t trust me? Is that it?” Jayce tries not to let the hurt show into his voice, but he suspects it doesn’t work.
“Jayce, you’re the only one I trust. So trust me when I say you need to go back.” Even though Viktor’s voice never rises to a yell, his words are just as powerful.
Jayce stands there in shocked silence for a moment before pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to keep balance and not get too angry. He knows Viktor is probably just trying to protect him from the uncertainty of Area Z rather than rejecting him. “Viktor, life out there when you were gone, it felt wrong. Since the second you left it’s been wrong. Here, with you, feels right. I’m not leaving, I want to figure this place out. I want to help you.”
“You don't know what you're saying,” Viktor mumbles.
“I really think I do,” Jayce insists.
“You have no idea what this forest is capable of, if it even is a forest at that. No one does. Not even me,” Viktor contests, voice rising slightly.
“So let's find out. Together.” Jayce moves closer, eyes connecting the moles on Viktor's face that he knows even when his eyes are closed.
Viktor begins to chew on his lip, searching Jayce’s expression for…something, he really isn’t sure. Whatever he finds, it must change his mind because moments later he acquiesces, nodding before pulling away to lean on the staff. Jayce can’t help but smile, giving Viktor a returning nod, and retreats into the mess hall for his supplies.
Although they’re hurrying for different reasons, Jayce and Silco manage to pack up their things in record time. He takes a moment to lament the fact that he set up his microscope only to put it away not even an hour later, but he is given comfort in the fact that he’s sure he’ll be able to do so at the settlement where Viktor is taking them.
As they breach the forest line at the edge of the base, a rotting watchtower marks their exit. Vines climb up the legs of the station while bulbous mushrooms eat at its form. Their dark purple, nearly black, stems fade into a soft lilac that is near translucent in the rising sun. Even though they’re small closer to the ground, the further they crawl upwards their size increases to proportions that, at this point, Jayce should get used to but nevertheless takes his breath away each time. Fleshy canopies stretch to the size of a regular umbrella, giving them a few moments of well needed shade. As he gazes up into the gilled underside of the cap, only to see Shimmer pulsing through the lines of the mushroom. He finds himself watching as bright indigo streaks of energy shoot into the stem of the mushroom like blood pumping into a heart.
It might just be the wind but Jayce swears he can see the fungus breathing with every burst of Shimmer. He wonders what would happen if he plunged his fingers into the thin folds to trace what's beneath, as if this gentle action would somehow assimilate any knowledge this being had of what exactly Shimmer was doing to Area Z.
“Keep moving,” Silco grunts, hoisting his pack higher on his shoulders and adjusting the gun in his grip.
Jayce quickly apologizes, looking around him to assess his surroundings again only to find Viktor merely a few feet away from him, transfixed with the underbelly of the mushrooms just as he was. He lets his gaze linger on Viktor, his swaying balance from foot to foot and the narrowing of his eyes makes him just as mesmerizing as the mushrooms to Jayce.
What is he thinking about?
Jayce swears he sees a flash of violet in Viktor’s eyes when he turns to face him, but it quickly fades as he begins to turn and walk forward deeper into the thick forest. Silco trails behind, huffing to himself in words that Jayce doesn’t bother trying to decipher. He knows Silco is on edge, no need to get further confirmation.
They walk for hours, every step sinking slightly into the wet loam while the dew covered brush soaks the tops of their boots. There were moments when they could clearly see the forest floor, but the foliage spanned so tight that it was as if they were wading through ankle deep water rippling with each step. Every so often a rustling would make the leaves whisper, Viktor in particular has a sharp reaction. His neck would snap in the exact direction of the movement, eyes laser focused until the sound faded into memory and the leaves or grass settled.
Silco seemed to notice this as well when a particularly fat red squirrel emerged from the brush to squeal at them for encroaching on its territory. “Care to tell us why you’re spooked by a rodent?”
Viktor’s line of vision stays locked on the squirrel that scurried up an oak trunk. “You never know what's going to emerge.”
“You think there’s a threat?” Jayce asks, adjusting his hold on the automatic rifle in his grip.
“Depends on your definition of threat,” he responds, averting his gaze from the animal and wading through the greenery once more.
Both him and Silco are struck confused for a few seconds by the meaning of Viktor’s words. Silco manages to recuperate first, but not without contention.
“Fucking cryptic fortune cookie bullshit,” he swears under his breath, clutching his gun.
Although not with such annoyance, Jayce agrees. If anything, he’s more worried than frustrated.
Regardless, they pass through the thickets without much trouble. Abnormal occurrences within the natural ecosystem and landscape still occur, and the longing to observe proves overwhelming. Unfortunately, their impatient companion controls their pace as his hands are glued to his gun. Of course, Jayce could threaten him with his own automatic, but every time he contemplates raising the barrel to Silco's chest all he sees is the broken look in his eyes when he talked about his daughter during the storm.
His stomach growls impatiently, breaking the tight tether his thoughts have on his consciousness. He rips open the wrapper, salivating as the salty beef grinds between his teeth. However, when he goes to take another bite of the jerky, questions fill his brain like a rising tide. Biting into the dried meat, he thinks back to how Viktor’s body felt in his arms. He was firm and strong, nothing like junior year when he spent most of the winter in a hospital bed. Jayce has their last moments together back home catalogued in his brain forever, and in those moments Jayce still felt like if he squeezed him hard enough he might snap.
What the hell was he eating this whole time?
There’s no way they were given rations enough for the four of them to last a few months much less a whole year. Sure, Viktor could’ve stretched the leftover food from Silco once he left, but that still wouldn’t have kept him healthy. Even if all of the other researchers that went on their mission had died prematurely—which doesn’t seem to be the case anyways—he’d still have some deficiencies.
The lingering joy of finding Viktor fades into more questions than Jayce can fully organize at the moment. He guesses that they’ve figured out how to subsist for this long, if there even is a they anymore. It could just be Viktor, alone caring for a garden full of ripe fruits and vegetables. Jayce doesn’t doubt it, he was always the one with the greener thumb between them. It’s not like Jayce didn’t like gardening—they both avidly obsessed over their little garden outside the kitchen window—but Viktor always applied a certain care to the plants they grew that Jayce found himself never fully understanding. It was as if he could speak to them without any words at all.
He feels like this now as he watches Viktor wade through a forest he might have helped cultivate without Jayce, the pads of his fingers caressing the leaves and his feet carefully avoiding growing plants desperate to drink in the sun. He watches as he softly lays a palm on the coarse bark of a birch for balance as they walk, barely disturbing its delicately peeling bark. Jayce knows this isn’t the full conversation, it’s as if he’s left to try and translate from afar a language he doesn’t understand.
Jayce supposes he shouldn’t care, that the only thing that matters is that Viktor is okay. He shouldn’t think about it further too much, lest he ruin their reunion and poison it with doubt.
He shouldn’t…but he does. He can’t help it; the quiet hum of the forest is the perfect atmosphere for his mind to race.
Every second, in fact, seems to make more questions exponentially populate his mind in an attempt to rationalize Viktor’s place in this new ecosystem.
Silence stretches taught as they walk, and Jayce finds himself missing Viktor again despite him being just a few feet ahead of him.
Around a mile later, they come up upon a cabin with vines overtaking stone foundations. They slither upwards and sprout more types of flowers than Jayce can accurately count. It’s as if nature itself couldn’t decide what to grow and threw it all onto the vines. As they approach the building, Jayce raises a hand to a particularly vibrant peony with petals unfurling to soak in the late afternoon sun. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Viktor stroll up a few feet from him, gazing at the conglomeration of flowers as well. Two long fingers press lightly onto the labellum of an orchid, letting its pollen coat the tips of his fingers while circling within the inner petals. He draws away, a soft yellow dust atop his nails.
Viktor inspects the pollen for a moment, before sticking the tips of his fingers in his mouth and sucking the pollen clean off. The action makes Jayce jerk his own hand from his peony, staring dumbly at Viktor. His friend merely turns to meet Jayce’s confused wide eyed stare, before smiling and gesturing at the flower growth.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he states, moving closer to look at the flowers near Jayce.
“Uh, yeah. It is,” Jayce responds, brain not quite fast enough to ask Viktor why he thinks all these flowers have mutated to grow like this.
“The old woman who lived here loved her flower garden,” Viktor murmurs, petting another orchid growing from the same stem as the peonies.
“How do you kno—” Jayce starts, but Silco’s gruff voice interrupts him.
“I’m guessing we’re staying here for the night?” he asks petulantly, causing him and Viktor to swerve in his direction.
“Yes, it's another few hours to the town. This is a wayward structure, there’s a few others surrounding the commune but most of the other houses are relatively close together. A lot of the people who used to live here were very subsistent,” Viktor explains, but the moment Yes came out of his mouth Silco checked out and walked inside, leaving Jayce to soak up information about this place like a sponge.
“You talk as if you know them,” he comments.
“In a way, I do. You can learn so much about people from what they leave behind.”
Jayce doesn’t know what to say to that, and Viktor doesn’t give him much opportunity anyways as he enters the house following Silco. In an attempt to not catalogue every flower present on the side of the cabin, Jayce reluctantly walks inside as well.
Multiple layers of dust coat nearly every surface of the inside, albeit that isn’t much given the lack of furniture. There’s a small kitchenette area with a fractured dining table that reminds Jayce of the one he and Viktor had thousands of meals at back home. A few chairs on the floor with broken legs litter the floor near the kitchen, but the only place to sit is a loveseat a few feet to the right with leather so old it looks like it would disintegrate if Jayce sat on it. A fireplace is on a far side of the wall with small bluebells growing within it, not a single charred log of wood present in the hearth. Three framed pictures are set up atop the ledge of the fireplace, seafoam green lichen covers the front of one while the other two’s glass is cracked beyond saving. Pictures fade and even though Jayce scrubs at the dust off the broken glass cover, he can’t decipher what image is below.
“What a dump,” Silco says, dropping his backpack on the floor.
Viktor just shrugs, before setting his own bag full of flowers on the kitchenette counter. “It’s suitable compared to the wilderness.”
Silco grunts, tearing through his pack to grab something to eat. “So—” he starts in between chewing. “What happened?”
He doesn’t need to be specific, everyone in the room knows what Silco is referring to.
Viktor’s calm demeanor instantly sharpens and his hand clenches around the staff. He looks at Silco’s demanding gaze and then to Jayce’s own apprehensive one. He chews on his lip, continuing to look between the two of them, and Jayce has the sinking feeling that he’s an unwarranted weight on the conversation the two of them might have. Silco looks to him as well, his cold scowl warning him to leave.
“Talis, take a walk,” Silco orders.
Jayce scoffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “If you think I’m leaving you alone with him—”
“Jayce,” Viktor cuts in, and his voice holds almost as much emotion as it used to. They all wait in stiff silence for a few seconds, before Jayce exhales deeply and clenches his jaw.
“I’ll just—I’ll survey the perimeter,” he relents, waving a dismissing hand and moving to walk out the door. He tries not to take it personally, but it’s hard since the last time Viktor tried to leave him out of this mission he went missing and everything turned gray.
“Wait,” Viktor says quickly, taking a step from the counter.
Jayce swerves around immediately, hoping Viktor will ask him to stay. He doesn’t, but the look of guilty sorrow on his face is enough to placate Jayce’s insecurities.
“Don’t go far,” he says gently, causing Silco to roll his eyes dramatically.
Jayce nods curtly, before striding out of the cabin, wishing there was a door that he could slam behind him. He lingers for a moment hoping to eavesdrop, but he can’t hear anything over the calls of birds and the thrum of the forest. Sunset is closing in, and the dull oranges warm his skin—a pleasant contrast to Silco's glare and the stifling awkwardness.
After walking around the cabin, he busies himself with counting all the types of flowers he recognizes the trail along the side of the building. Stems twirl, enmesh, and braid along the rotting wood like the winding roads Viktor and him drove down senior year after they graduated. It was an impromptu road trip, exhausted from focusing for so long Jayce had the sudden urge to escape even if it was only a moment.
“You wanna go for a drive?” He’d asked randomly, mind numb with a sudden silence after being so overworked during finals week.
Viktor turned to him over their morning tea, bags under his eyes and ratty T-shirt hanging off his frame exposing his left collarbone. He stared right through Jayce, expression clouded with contemplation.
Silence persisted between them and Jayce began to feel awkward for asking, but then Viktor responded: “Where to?”
“Anywhere we want,” Jayce said, smile growing bright. Viktor returns the smile, albeit a tired one.
He wishes they could go back, Jayce never took advantage over how simple things were then. He could read Viktor like the back of his hand just as well as he could read Jayce—they worked in tandem as a team, like it had always been since they met freshman year.
Now here Viktor is, an aura of indifferent calm and knowledge of a forest that has confounded Jayce the second he stepped into its changing ecosystem. It stings that Viktor so obviously is keeping things from Jayce. What else could he be keeping from him, things that aren’t apparent to his naked eye?
Jayce drags a hand down his face, pinching at his nose bridge. As he finishes another wider perimeter through the surrounding brush of the cabin, Jayce notices the line of flowers not only descends from the walls but into the muddy ground as well. The line is oddly linear, peppering vibrant flowers among the deep green and brown of the forest. A sudden urge tempts him to follow the trail.
“Can’t hurt to go a little farther,” he says to himself. It hasn’t been long since he left the cabin anyways, and he doubts his two companions are done conversing.
As the sunset fades into deep magenta, branches and leaves crunch beneath his boots as he avoids the thinning trail of flowers and their delicate petals. Is it the soil that causes this particular growth, or some other influence? Where are they taking him? What can these flowers show him? What’s waiting for him at the end of this journey?
How long has he been walking?
A root seems to rise from the ground out of nowhere, catching on the toe of his boot. Musty loam invades his mouth while the rich scent of earth enters his nose. Jayce coughs and spits out the dirt, pawing at his face to clean it off as quick as he can. Wiping his eyes, he comes face to face with a pearly white chrysanthemum, dew glistening off its soft petals. Jayce suspects if he licked the petal the moisture would be crisp and pure.
Raising his head a bit higher, he spots the bottom of a human foot mere inches from his face. Wrinkled gray skin hides underneath the flowers and grass, making him nearly shout with its abnormal color and presence. Uncaring of the flowers beneath Jayce shuffles back and rests on the heels of his palms, rose thorns prickling into his hand.
Trying to balance out his breathing, he rises to his full height, taking in the sight of not only a dead foot, but a dead human. At least, he thinks she’s dead by the color. Stiff skin is stretched taut on her frame, rigor mortis has clearly set in. He suspects that even with his strength he would not be able to bend even her fingers into a fist. She’s laid to rest on her back, expression delicate and soft—she did not die in pain. Fungus growth sprouts on the side of her head and along the sides of her arms, but never enough to morph her obvious human-ness. This was a woman, perhaps the one who resided in the cabin until her demise.
Her chest has caved in, creating a perfect space for the flowers to bloom within her. Spider lilies of the brightest reds and electric blues fester in her ribcage, mingling and winding around the exposed bones. Stems weave into her rigid epidermis like patchwork around the edges of the bloom. Flies hover around the body while bee’s hum before resting on the petals of the lilies. Jayce moves closer, hesitant in case she jumps out to drag him into the soil with him. It would’ve been so ridiculous it was laughable to Jayce a few days ago that it could happen, but nonetheless his steps are tentative and wary. As he inspects closer, the inside of her chest is completely hollowed out to make space for the roots.
It’s curious, how the flowers have eaten at her flesh and inner organs as if starved for a meal.
Jayce looks for the trail again, only to find that this woman is the incubator for this trail of flowers. He wonders if this is where the trail ends, or rather begins. Why are they moving in this way, what could they possibly be searching for? Are they a part of her? Is she still technically alive if these blossoming lilies were born from her own cells?
“Jayce!” A voice cries out to him, piercing the haze in his mind and sharpening his senses.
He shakes his head, blinking hard and grimacing as a migraine manifests. Rustling comes up from behind him, and he swerves to meet the intruder. Viktor meets him, cheeks red and chest heaving with exertion. His staff plunges into the dirt and his hand rests on a flakey birch next to him. Amber eyes search the clearing, wide and hurried before calming immediately when they rest upon Jayce.
“I told you not to go far,” he scolds, a lighthearted tinge to his expression. He looks young and exasperated, a pang of longing shoots through Jayce’s heart at the familiarity.
“Sorry, I thought I stayed close,” he responds, shrugging sheepishly.
Viktor huffs, leaning off the birch and walking towards him. “Well, you didn’t. We’re nearly fifty yards from the house.”
Jayce grimaces in shame, rubbing at the back of his neck and feeling the sweat at his nape. “Well, I followed the flowers and—”
“Oh, you found Laura,” Viktor interrupts, eyes laser focused on the body embedded into the ground behind Jayce.
Jayce moves toward Viktor, before turning to face the flowery woman at his left. “Was she the one who lived here?”
“Yes, I met her when we first walked through,” he nods, crouching down to stroke the thin curled petals of the spider lilies.
“How come Silco didn’t recognize the cabin then?” Jayce comments absentmindedly, frowning in confusion.
Viktor freezes, retracting his hand slightly. “Must have been after then.”
Jayce’s frown deepens at the hint of confusion in Viktor’s voice. “Is this type of…decomposition typical here?”
“Nothing is typical here but…I have witnessed something similar,” he says, fingers moving back down to probe at the innards of Laura’s chest cavity. Jayce watches aptly as lithe fingers trace down thin stems in an attempt to find their origin.
“Similar like…” He trails off, not knowing how to describe the reaction in front of him. He’s seen decomposing flesh before, but never like this.
“Like they’re woven into the landscape?” Viktor offers, finishing his analysis on Laura and standing up again.
Jayce sighs. “Yea. It’s like she belongs here. She looks…comfortable.”
“She’s lived here all her life, refusing to leave even when the evacuations were carried out.” Viktor explains, smiling sadly.
He unconsciously leans towards Viktor. “Wonder what happened to her.”
Jayce wishes he’d tell him something more—about her, about the flowers, about the forest, about what he was looking for inside her ribcage. He wishes the inquisitive shine in Viktor’s eye would return when he’s thinking about something really hard.
Instead, all he says is: “We should get back, not much light left in the day”
Silco is eager to get moving at the first sliver of light, so Jayce is awoken with a swift kick to the abdomen and a gruff demand to get moving. Even though it’s only early sunrise when they leave, the humidity is heightened more than any of the past few days Jayce has been in Area Z.
Viktor is more amicable today in the form of walking next to Jayce and not in front. He brings Jayce’s attention to intriguing flora and sometimes scuttering fauna when the opportunity arises, making his heart and cheeks warm in the thick heat. Jayce hopes it’s a sign that Viktor doesn’t regret letting him stay, although it might take more than a day to get back to where they were a year ago. Even then, Viktor’s sense of time has clearly been warped due to the unknowable effects of Shimmer. Jayce wonders how long it’s been for those on the outside ever since he’s left himself.
After a couple hours, Viktor’s expression turns terse and steps slow as they approach another clearing. Glimpses of structures slowly manifest in his field of vision; it must be the ghost town.
“What’s wrong?” Jayce asks, and Viktor glances at him worriedly.
“We’re close,” he murmurs. What they’re close to, Jayce has no clue.
Mere seconds later, Silco takes off in a sprint, flattening the foliage in his wake. He nearly loses them in the forest but the line of destroyed branches and plants makes it clear the way he went.
“Hey!” Jayce yells, moving to run after him. He looks back to Viktor to see if he follows, but he just stays walking at the same pace.
Stray leafy branches flap at his face while he races through the forest, finally breaking through to the less dense settlement area. Everything is so still, which makes it relatively easy to spot Silco a few yards away. He’d dropped his pack to move quicker, and Jayce picks it up before striding to the other man. He’s now crouched at the base of a massive oak tree, its thick branches coiling outward with roots no doubt just as vast beneath the ground.
Jayce’s breath is labored and legs burning as he approaches Silco kneeling at the tree, his hands splayed over the bark. If the tree’s size wasn’t enough, lichen swirls around the trunk and up into every visible branch. Leaves are tinted with a phosphorescence present even in the midday sun, nearly glowing with Shimmer.
“Jinx…” He hears Silco utter, voice broken beyond repair. His nails dig into the lichen, its form braiding itself down into the grass beneath.
Something about the lichen…it’s color so vibrant that it had to have been introduced from an outside force. Electric blue with a hint of aqua mixed in as well creates a magnificent color, more vibrant than anything Jayce has yet seen in the forest.
“I see you’ve found her,” Viktor says from behind, making Jayce jump and drop Silco’s backpack onto the grass tickling his shins.
Silco tenses before drawing his gun again, aiming for Viktor and pulling the trigger without hesitation. Jayce lunges towards the line of fire but the handgun stutters, the bullet staying solid within its casing. Silco growls, slapping the gun against his hand before moving to fire again.
This time, Jayce manages to tackle Silco to the ground, swiftly pinning him and grabbing the gun from his grasp. Silco gets one forceful kick in and Jayce is thrown off to the side. He doesn’t move to take down Silco again though, he’s without a weapon now since the knife and automatic was left in his frantic sprint towards the tree. Jayce turns the gun in his hand, noting small roots and thistles emerging through the mechanisms of the gun. He guesses that if he were to disarticulate each piece of it that there would be vines blocking each element that would cause a bullet to fly.
“You, ” Silco spits, wobbling to his feet. “You killed her.”
“I did no such thing.” Viktor’s voice is calm, yet the warning is there nonetheless.
“You told me she was at peace!” Silco’s rage is palpable as he points an accusing finger at Viktor.
“In what way is this not at peace?” he asks patiently, as if Silco is nothing but a child having a tantrum.
“She’s not alive! She’s not here, with me!” he insists, hand sweeping to gesture behind him while his hair dislodges from its usual stable state on his head to fall over his forehead.
“Are trees not alive? Do they not grow and change like we do? Is she not behind you right now?”
“You know what I mean!”
Viktor's expression barely changes in reaction to Silco's blatant irritation. “We’ve had this conversation before, Silco. Don’t you remember?”
Silco’s lip wobbles, but the scrunching of his nose and brow make it clear he’s still filled to the brim with anger. A single tear leaks from his marred eye and down the grooves of his scarred face. He takes a deep breath, before turning back to the tree.
“She was like this when we found her, right?” Silco rasps, hand caressing the swirls of lichen so delicately, as if they were his daughter's real hair.
“Yes. She was.” Viktor affirms, and a quiet sob escapes Silco’s chest.
Jayce’s heart aches for Silco despite his attempt to shoot Viktor only moments ago. It seemed as if Viktor suspected he would try something when they got to her tree and jammed the gun the night before. Either that or the forest knew what might happen and reacted accordingly. Whatever the circumstances, he’s thankful the bullet didn’t fly.
“She…she spoke to me. I don’t know how, but I knew she wanted me to walk away. She wanted me to forget and start over,” Silco murmurs, talking to himself more so than the two of them. As far as Jayce is concerned, they have faded into the background.
A wretched smile appears on his face, and he laughs with a quiet hysteria. “She’s so kind.”
Viktor’s gaze moves from Silco and the tree, meeting Jayce’s eyes and silently beckoning him closer. He walks softly through the thin grass, periodically glancing at Silco as he brings his forehead to rest on the tree.
“We should leave him be. He’ll find us if he needs to,” Viktor whispers, grabbing Jayce’s forearm to tug him away.
Jayce nods dumbly, relishing in the grounded feeling Viktor's grasp gives him. “Is she really under there?”
Viktor shrugs. “Under, within, beyond…Nothing but words to try and describe the indescribable. We came across the tree and it was Silco who told us it was her. He didn’t need to explain at that point, we all knew what was possible here.”
“So you don’t know how she really died?” Jayce asks, voice hush in case Silco hears.
Viktor’s brow furrows, casting a quick glance behind them to the tree and the bright blue’s littered within. “I don’t think she’s dead at all.”
Notes:
thank you for reading!