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Viktor is fourteen. He wakes up to the door opening and the hallway light shining into his room like a beacon, bright and blinding. He shoves his face into the pillow to drown out the sound of hushed conversation. It carries over to the empty bunk on the opposite side of the room. A bag drops, and it doesn't sound heavy.
When the door clicks shut again, there's a shuffle of sheets, a creak. Then they're alone in the darkness together.
“Are you awake?” a voice gently asks.
Viktor pretends to be asleep.
✧
Jayce is his name, the new boy. He just turned thirteen. The others call him gay for smelling like flowers, so he stops showering.
Viktor wakes to the sound of him crying at night. He hears, “Mom,” in a quiet voice. “I want to go home.”
When Viktor was a small child, he was driven to a field, shoved out of a car, and told that if he ever wanted to come home again, he’d have to run. Of course he couldn't, and he chased after the dust behind the tires until he fell face-first into the ground not ten steps after starting.
He thinks that’s what Jayce is feeling now, only when he finally makes it home, there will be no one to open the door and let him in.
There was never a door in the first place, and the person behind it has always been a ghost.
One day, Jayce will be a ghost too.
✧
“Faggot,” the leader of the group spits. His boot connects with Jayce’s ribs. He's the meanest because he's bigger than all the others. When the big kids get angry, the littlest ones get hurt.
Jayce is a little one. A few inches shorter than Viktor and pudgy. Soft around the middle and in his cheeks. Some of the bruises on his arms look too old to have been caused by the boys from room three.
“Get up!”
Jayce's tactic is to curl up until they leave him alone. He tried to fight back, but that just got him laughed at. Punished more for trying. Hated for being weak.
“You think you're so smart, bitch?”
Viktor steps out of the shadows, holding the screen door open as he stares at the pests. Of all the times people have treated him like a rat that crawled out of the sewers, he knows a true nuisance when he sees one.
“The fuck are you gonna do, freak?” Group leader, a boy with a lazy eye and a clumsy body, turns to bark at Viktor. It's not as intimidating as he thinks. He waits for an answer like he needs one, and he probably does. Like anyone who has never amounted to anything, who has been told by the entire world he has no right to a place in it, he craves the wrong kind of attention.
Viktor doesn't need anything from anyone, which makes him a better person.
In the absence of fists, Jayce sits up and nurses his elbow. He won't look any of them in the eye. The other boys decide they've had their fun and burned off their bloodthirst. Viktor says and does nothing, merely steps aside for them to follow the leader back inside.
When they're gone, he approaches Jayce to inspect his injuries. Not bad this time. A scrape on his elbow, sores on his knees. “Are you alright?” He stands near the younger boy but not quite beside him.
In the sun, it is muggy enough that he can't tell if Jayce is sweaty or crying until he rubs frantically at his eyes the way one rubs at a bee sting.
So it hurts for him to cry. It hurts Viktor, too.
“They won't bother you anymore,” he says softly, endeared by the grass in Jayce's hair.
The next morning, the house is woken by a piercing scream. The boy in room three never bothers Jayce again, because Viktor hammered a rusty nail straight through his shoe. He limps for weeks on his right leg, just like Viktor, conjuring even more bitterness when inevitably he gets better.
It doesn't mean Jayce is entirely safe from the others. The newcomers and the kids at school pose a similar threat to a boy with passion and brightness too earnest for his own good. Love is too much of a target. Something to be squandered, to watch burn out like a flame.
The thing is, Jayce doesn't have friends. When he gets talking, it's hard for him to stop. He listens to the teachers and offers to help the adults. Where Viktor skips out on certain luxuries, Jayce knows how to keep clean and pretty. His clothing fits right. All of this sets him apart.
All of this makes him different.
To Viktor, he is everything. All there ever was.
“I used to want to help people, too,” he says, letting the smaller boy lie his head in his lap while he cries. “Don't let them see your belly.”
Jayce rubs at his face like he always does under stress. He sniffs and looks up at Viktor with big, wet eyes. “I don't know what I'm doing wrong.”
“Nothing.” Viktor speaks simply. “Or everything. Take your pick.”
It will be years before he finds out which path Jayce intends to follow— nothing, or everything—because Jayce is in and out of the group home, and Viktor never leaves.
“Why are you here?” Viktor asks the third time Jayce shows up in the middle of the night with a black eye. It's not the way home-cooked meals and a loving mother should leave a boy.
“He punched me.”
“Who?”
“My stepdad. But it was my fault—”
“Don't,” Viktor says. “Don’t give him excuses.”
So Jayce doesn't ask about the smooth, shiny scars on Viktor's arms, and he doesn't ask about the bruises. He doesn't ask about them until Jayce stops going to school because he can't get out of bed. Two weeks pass, and then three, and Viktor hasn't seen him move. Not once.
Maybe he's staying in the home for good this time. Maybe he’ll never have a properly cooked meal again, only boxed everything with a side of canned peas. Maybe his stepdad really knocked his brain loose this time. Maybe he’s damaged, like Viktor.
“Jayce?” He tries to wake him with a plate of food better than the usual Wonder Bread sandwich with mayonnaise.
It’s pizza, Jayce’s favorite. But the boy doesn’t stir. He shivers under threadbare blankets and greasy hair. Viktor sets the plate down on the wooden table beside his bunk. There are names carved into the side of it, and several crossed-out curse words.
“What happened to you?” Viktor asks.
Jayce flinches when he touches him. The pizza grows cold.
“I need you,” Viktor whispers. “Come back to me. Please.”
It’s the first of several nights that Viktor sleeps spooned up behind him. “I won’t let anyone hurt you,” he says, face pressed against the baby-soft hair at the back of his neck. Jayce still smells like hibiscus, no matter how much he tries to cover it up. He smells like a boy who used to be loved.
✧
Jayce is eighteen, and his hair falls into his face. The lobe of his left ear is pierced with a shitty looking fake gem. He has creases in his skin that didn’t used to be there, a slit through his right brow, and acne scars where he used to have bumps in the newly formed valleys between his cheeks and jawbone. Still, his bone structure is remarkably more robust than Viktor’s, and his complexion is a healthier tan.
He’s taller than he used to be, all of the awkward baby fat having melted away to reveal a handsome, lanky teen. His body is an expanse of opportunity for muscle to grow.
Viktor is surprised to find out that he comes up to Jayce’s shoulder when they meet. It’s more comfortable once they sit on the edge of his bed, several feet of mutual reservation between them, and two nervously tapping hands. Their pinkies close to touching on the quilted blanket adorning Jayce’s bed.
Jayce fidgets with his nail-bitten fingers. Those are bigger, too. Every part of him has been stretched, grown, and changed in the years of his years. No more bruises, though. Viktor almost expected those to be permanent.
In the corner of his closet, on the top shelf, sit three empty bottles of liquor and one nearly full. Jayce doesn’t know that Viktor has seen them yet, and he won’t because Viktor does not want to go down that path. He doesn’t want to point out Jayce’s faultlines. Not when he’s only just found him. Not when they're wide enough to fall down and get lost in. They’ve spent a lifetime apart already, and only a few fragmented months at each other’s side.
Jayce doesn’t seem to care about being gay anymore, or bisexual, or whatever he is, because he kisses Viktor and climbs into his lap, as if he’s still the smaller boy that needed protecting.
His hands shake around the sides of Viktor’s face, but at least they're warm. Viktor has always been cold-blooded. He’s always needed the sun.
Viktor asks if he wants to have sex, because if he’s being honest, he wants to get off with Jayce. He wants to get off inside Jayce, if he’ll let him.
Jayce nods, his face tucked against Viktor so that he can’t see it.
They whisper to one another, like a secret:
“How long have you wanted this?”
“For a long time, I think.”
Viktor should be, but isn’t surprised to find that Jayce shaves his pubic hair. A contrast to the hair on his head that’s grown wildly out of style. No longer the good boy he was as a child. Viktor slips his hand into Jayce’s boxers once his fly is open and strokes him until he’s wet.
“Did you ever think about me when you did this?” he asks, pumping his fist over hot, velvet flesh.
“Yes,” Jayce pants. “Yes.” His cock is soft-skinned and pretty and he takes it like a champ. He bites his lower lip between his teeth.
“I have always wanted to see you like this.”
“Viktor.” He bucks his hips, urging himself up into Viktor’s grip, chasing the feeling of being safe again, or running from feeling alone.
The whole thing feels like running.
Jayce paws at him clumsily until he is finally coaxed to admit with words that he wants to go down on Viktor, so Viktor lets him. Soon, Jayce's mouth is between his legs kissing the base of his cock and sucking the loose sensitive skin of his balls. When his tongue finally finds Viktor’s hole, Viktor curses, for the first time losing his composure.
“Jayce,” he groans. “Don’t stop.”
Jayce eats him out like he would a woman, at one point, helping to flip him over so that it’s easier to shove his face between his cheeks and drool all over him.
It’s filthy, and Viktor almost comes thinking about Jayce doing this to some pretty girl who would still say no if he asked her to prom.
Neither of them lasts long by the time Jayce is seated in his lap again, mindful of his leg as he rocks his hips. Viktor’s cock is long and thin like the rest of him. It reaches deep. He can feel Jayce’s body all around him, beckoning him deeper and gripping.
The only sound in the room is the sound of soft panting and the springs of the mattress as it creaks. Jayce won’t look him in the eye, but Viktor never leaves his face. He watches every twitch, every clench of his jaw, the way his eyes squeeze tightly shut. The way he can tell that Jayce is praying, and Viktor, admittedly, with his cock buried deep and about to burst, he is too.
Never leave me again, he thinks. Be mine forever.
If I could change the entire universe for you, I would crush the whole world with my teeth.
I am so hungry and you are the only thing that feeds me.
He feels like the single greediest man alive.
Afterwards, they walk together under flickering streetlights to get shitty takeout, bright yellow rice and hockey puck meat. Jayce tears into it like a man-starved, he swallows without chewing while Viktor sits across from him at one of the only places open past midnight and sips soda through a bendy straw.
“How is your mother?”
Jayce looks up at him just after popping another chunk of mystery meat into his mouth. “Fine,” he says around it. “She’s still with—”
“We could kill him.”
Jayce stops chewing because he knows that Viktor isn't joking. Finally, he swallows hard and looks down at his plate. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Viktor, you can't just hurt people—”
“She would be free.” He says it like it's the most logical thing in the world and it is simple really but Jayce doesn't want to hear it.
“Stop,” he whispers harshly, pushing around his rice with a plastic fork.
“Don't tell me that there is still some part of you that thinks he’d actually—”
“He's my dad.”
“And you are nothing to him.”
Jayce’s lip curls back and he snarls like a feral animal with food stuck between his canine and incisor teeth. For a moment, Viktor thinks he might actually punch him. “I don't know what your family was like but mine—”
“You were covered in bruises when they brought you, Jayce.”
“My mother—”
“Would leave him if she loved you.”
“She does. She’s so full of love you wouldn't understand it.”
“Why wouldn't I?” Regret paints Jayce’s features, knowing he's spoken out of turn. “Spit it out, miláček. Why has my protection ever been such a curse?”
This time, the table rattles with Jayce’s words. He’s like the boys from room three with bloodlust to burn off. “I never asked you to save me!”
Viktor snarls back. The louder Jayce gets, the quieter he speaks back to him. “But you did need to be saved.”
“My mother loves me.”
A silence falls between them. Viktor is overcome with a feeling somewhere along the line of skepticism and jealousy. She has no right. She has no claim to her kin when Viktor was the one nursing his bruises and singing him to sleep at night. She was the one hiding his pain, covering bruises with the sleeves of Jayce’s hand-knitted sweaters.
He sips his soda.
This is what they come from, these heated moments and vicious fights. They snap at one another like animals because that is what their parents did. Self-defense is in their blood. Fight or flight.
Viktor’s straw makes an ugly sound a it moves against the plastic lid of his 32 ounce cup.
Jayce is shaking.
Viktor takes his hand.
You are just like her, he thinks.
✧
Jayce is nineteen and Viktor thinks he would do anything for him, even kill his father.
He was raised by wolves, it's his nature. He has always known the smell of methamphetamine and how to shoot a gun.
Jayce was raised by sick people, slaves to love. People who are incapable of giving up. Viktor understands it— somewhat —the first time he sees Jayce drunk.
He’s a sloppy drunk, but he isn't angry. Knocking over a glass and attempting to pick up the shards with his bare hands, still so apologetic and conscientious. Still so sweet.
“Sorry, m’sorry, V,” he slurs, holding himself up against the wall, slipping down it.
Viktor isn't able to pull him to the bedroom when he falls over, so he sleeps out in the hallway passed out in his piss.
“When did you start drinking?” Viktor asks, sometime later, when Jayce is hungover and useless.
“I don't—” Jayce stops himself from lying. He remembers all too well. “At parties.”
“With who?”
“Doesn't matter— Friends.” Once again, he catches himself. He can't lie to Viktor, and he’s terrible at deflecting.
“Which friends?” When Jayce remains silent, Viktor pokes at him with orange steel, ever persistent. “Right, it doesn’t matter. I see.”
Jayce visibly stiffens. “They're not people you would like. They probably don't even like me.”
“I like you,” Viktor says plainly. “You have me.”
And when Jayce throws up again, Viktor has him. When he starts to shake and sweat, Viktor is there.
Jayce is a cup for Viktor to pour into, or maybe he is more like kindling, keeping Jayce alive and burning. Maybe Jayce is his river and he is the dam. Maybe he is parasitic. Maybe he would reach into Jayce’s chest and palpitate his heart for him if he could, force it to beat. Hold it in his palm, slippery and meaty, and squeeze.
✧
Jayce moves into Viktor’s apartment a few months later. It works well. He makes money giving private guitar lessons to children and delivering newspapers in the morning, and Viktor works at the autoparts factory on the same assembly line his mother did before she married his father and took on a new job getting pregnant and running drugs.
He thinks that's why he is the way that he is. Because she was inhaling fumes and shoving coke up her pussy.
Jayce cooks and keeps the apartment in relatively decent shape, but his forgetfulness has Viktor tripping over objects left where they shouldn’t be some days. They have sex every morning because they’re both too exhausted when they fall into bed at night, Jayce crawling into Viktor’s lap, or Viktor reaching into his sleep pants and grabbing hold of his morning-stiff cock until he cums.
They don’t talk much. They work around each other efficiently. Jayce asks Viktor what he likes to eat and learns how to make it if he doesn’t already know. It’s nothing fancy, and since he’s harder on himself than he should be, Viktor eats every meal even if it’s overcooked or under seasoned. It’s still better than anything he would normally buy from the one-and-only burger place where he’s pretty sure the employees spit in the drinks.
It takes a surprisingly long time for Jayce to tell Viktor that he loves him, and it’s only during an argument that he finds the courage.
Viktor’s side of the story is this: A bird flies into the window and kills itself. Jayce cries for an hour about it because he is a fragile person. Fragile people blame themselves for everything, even a bird following its own path into an inanimate glass window pane.
Viktor excuses himself from the room because fragile things have always bothered him. When he returns, Jayce is cradling the dead sparrow in his palms.
“You shouldn’t cry over things that have nothing to do with you,” Viktor says while he busies himself around the apartment with tasks that suddenly need to be done.
“Why? Who am I hurting?” For once in his life, Jayce fights back instead of apologizing. It makes Viktor more agitated. He can feel the thoughts bouncing around in his brain, particles accelerating until they heat up uncomfortably like the chain reaction of an atomic bomb.
“I don’t want to listen to this.” He shoves pots and pans into the sink because Jayce never cleaned them after cooking the night before. Macaroni and cheese, how childish.
“Why are you always angry at me?” Jayce asks.
“I am not angry.” Clunk.
The pile grows. The dish water stinks.
Jayce looks away, back down at the bird with its head bent at an eerie angle. “Right, because you don’t feel anything.”
Clank. “I am annoyed right now by your childish behavior,” Viktor clarifies.
“You’re just like him,” Jayce mutters. “I'll never be good enough for you.”
Unable to tolerate anymore, Viktor storms into the living room and attempts to grab the bird, curling his long fingers around Jayce’s wrist when he pulls away too quickly.
“Let go.” Jayce’s hair has fallen into his eyes. He looks at Viktor like a feral thing. A dog that used to be loyal.
“Give me the bird.”
It isn’t a game, but it feels like one. A stand off. The unstoppable force of self-determination meets the immovable object of fate.
“Stop!” Jayce growls. “You’re hurting me!” He could just as easily pull himself free from Viktor. He could free himself and throw Viktor to the ground, even kill him if he wanted. Something is thrilling in that knowledge, that Jayce could, but he doesn’t.
All for the stupid sparrow that he refuses to give up on.
“Give me the bird, Jayce—”
“No!”
“It could be diseased—”
“I’m not going to keep it! I just want to look at it. Maybe bury it outside—”
“Let it go!”
“What if it's still alive?!”
Viktor’s nails dig into Jayce’s skin. Not enough for him to bleed. They dig deeper and deeper until Jayce whimpers in pain.
Viktor raises his arm.
Jayce snaps at the same time he flinches. “You’re not a bird, Viktor! You’re not a bird with a broken wing. You’re not something that needs fixing, or saving; that’s not why I love you! I know that’s what you’re afraid of, okay? I know you wouldn’t able to live with yourself if— if—”
“Leave.” One word is all it takes for Jayce to freeze. “Get out of my house.”
“You can’t—”
“Your name is not on the lease.”
He watches as Jayce goes pale with fear and begins to lower his hands. Viktor finally takes the bird from him and puts it in the trash bin. It falls to the bottom of the scented plastic bag with a thunk, already rotting.
“I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“You can either leave of your own accord, or I can phone the police and they will escort you.”
It’s a low blow, but if Jayce is going to compare him to his father, then he’s going to give that man a run for his money.
Jayce is prettiest when he’s on his knees, crying and pleading with Viktor not to make him leave.
Now you have something to cry about, Viktor thinks, with Jayce curled at his side and clingy. Only then does he change his mind. After the sobbing, and begging, and getting snot on Viktor’s shirt.
“Please, Viktor,” he cries, sounding too young and too small. “Please don't make me leave.”
“I won't, my heart. Stay here with me.”
“I'll do anything.”
“I know.” Viktor pets his hair. “Right now I want you just to stay here, like this, curled in my lap.”
Jayce nods, draped across Viktor’s lap like the wilted petals of a dying rose.
“I love you, too,” Viktor says. “I love you,” because he doesn’t know how to apologize. “I love you,” because he doesn't realize yet that Jayce is his glass window.
✧
Jayce is turning twenty-two. Viktor wants to do something for him, so he takes him to a nice restaurant and tells him to dress up. They bring him ice cream and sing Happy Birthday and he beams through the whole thing. He sits in the red leather booth with his shirt buttoned up to the collar and a smile that shows the gap between his two front teeth.
Viktor looks around at the faces of the people in the restaurant. The happy couples, their children. The young waiters who don't want to be there. Jayce, smiling like it hurts him. Going pink at the tips of his ears. His long hair is gently slicked back, stubble beginning to show because Viktor surprised him with the date, and he didn’t have time to shave before they left home.
To Viktor he's still that scared little boy in the group home.
“I'm sorry,” he says.
Jayce pauses with the spoon in his mouth. Vanilla ice cream, but the kind with real vanilla leaving imperfections in the white cream.
“I… I'm sorry I…” Viktor’s face feels wet. He reaches up to touch it, and his fingertips come away shiny.
For the first time in his life, he thinks he feels fear. Fear that he may need to leave Jayce here with these gentle-faced people and their patience. A lamb returned to its flock, a fish in a school.
But if he did, all the love in the world couldn't keep Jayce from coming after him, from ending up on his knees with his arms around Viktor's frail waist, begging.
He can't leave, even if he should.
Jayce eats his ice cream with rainbow sprinkles and Viktor thumbs a bit of whipped cream off his upper lip. Afterwards, he takes him home and fucks him slowly.
Neither of them have done laundry in a while, but it's okay. Viktor drapes himself over Jayce's back and shifts his hips just to hear Jayce gasp, or curse when he pushes deeper.
He loves those little noises. Yes, loves.
Fuck, when he gives a harder thrust.
God, when he sinks all the way in.
Viktor, when he pauses.
I love you, when he comes.
It's always hard not to finish when Jayce does, so this time Viktor follows him, his forehead pressed between Jayce's shoulder blades while he fills him with the meager amount of semen his body will produce.
Infertile, most likely. Not like it matters.
Jayce falls asleep in his arms, curled against his chest. His knees drawn up to make him smaller, his hands curled against his chest.
Viktor’s heart beats with his and they breathe.
They breathe.
They breathe.
✧
Jayce wants to join the military. He says they have good benefits, and that's why.
“What's wrong with what we have now?”
Jayce has tried and failed to show Viktor the pamphlets. “We don't have anything now. What if something happened? What if you got—”
“Me?” Viktor turns to face him, he snaps his safety goggles up to his forehead as he prepares to leave for work. “Why would it be me?”
Jayce deflates. “I just meant… I don't know. I'm sorry.”
Viktor gives his final verdict before he leaves: a resounding “No.”
Jayce sighs, and Viktor hears him chuckling dryly as he shuts the door. He knows.
“Do not suggest such things anymore!”
When Viktor returns home and Jayce already has food made for him, they are almost like a family. They curl up together, Viktor props his leg up comfortably, and they read until Jayce turns on the TV so that he can fall asleep on Viktor’s shoulder.
✧
“Tell me what you remember about your father,” Viktor asks one night, while he still can, before Jayce is too drunk to speak intelligibly. “Your real father.”
“It's not much,” Jayce admits, shifting where he sits. He made dinner for them earlier: potatoes and roast chicken. Better than anything they ever had in the group home. “I remember… I remember he'd be outside working in the garage every morning. I could hear him hammering. Or drilling. Sawing wood. I remember the smell of the sawdust. Getting it in my eyes. Um… he used to take us fishing in a little boat. My mom and I.”
“Did you eat what you caught?”
“No,” Jayce answers. “We’d just let them go. I never really understood it. Baiting, and dragging them through the water. The hooks in their mouths. I didn't like seeing them bleed just for… I don't know. Fun?”
“You would rather they die for your effort?” Viktor asks, amused.
“I would have rather just fed them.” Jayce laughs. “Throw the whole bucket of nightcrawlers into the river.”
“Not so fun for the worms, I think.”
“Never a happy ending for the worms.”
This time, Viktor gives a silent laugh at his own teasing. It only sounds mildly like he's sneezing.
“My mom was happy,” Jayce adds. “I remember that.”
In the end, he ceases speaking in favor of swallowing his drink and Viktor thinks about taking him to feed the fish in a koi pond.
✧
Jayce is twenty-five and he hasn’t seen his mother in years, but he still talks about her home-cooked meals and her hand-knit sweaters.
✧
Jayce is twenty-six and he says that he is happy. He starts playing gigs on weekends, just for fun. He could be so much more if he wanted, Viktor tells him that. He’s smart.
✧
Jayce is twenty-seven when he tells Viktor that his stepfather didn’t just physically abuse him. That there were times when his eyes were cold and his hands would wander.
✧
Viktor is twenty-nine and he has smile lines.
✧
Jayce is thirty and he isn’t lanky anymore, but he still fits in Viktor’s arms.
✧
Viktor is thirty-two, and he’s been coughing more often, but he doesn’t complain lest Jayce start talking about joining the military again.
In two months, Jayce will die walking home from a lesson.
But right now he’s alive, and he's handsome, and probably looks like his biological father.
It will be ‘an accident’.
He will be three years sober. The crash will be a hit-and-run. Neither of those things will be accidental. He gets caught in the metal of the car and dragged for a hundred feet.
It will be some kind of sick joke, because it’s supposed to be Viktor. Viktor is supposed to go first, the way it should be, so Jayce can go and be with those patient people from the restaurant. So he can return to his flock.
He won’t even get to see the body. By the time he's told, there won’t be a body anymore.
He will kill Jayce’s father two days later in front of a woman he's never met. She will scream.
The house will be left unlocked. When he steps inside, he will hear her call for him.
“Jayce?” she’ll say with teary eyes.
She either won’t know that her son is dead, or she will be seeing things in her grief. The same delusion he displayed in his younger years, sitting by the front door of the group home, waiting for her to come.
Viktor will walk past her, one hand on his crutch and the other, non-dominant hand holding the gun. She looks like him, he will think.
Four shots will be more than enough to take the man down. He can only wish Jayce had known instead of dying, wondering if these people ever really loved him. Wondering what he did wrong, why those boys beat him so mercilessly in the group home. Why Viktor couldn’t give him everything he deserved.
Viktor will be told that what was left of him after the accident were only pieces. The rest ground away. Rinsed from the truck that someone will still be out there driving.
So he will shoot him four times, Jayce’s father, and then he will put the heated barrel of the pistol up to his temple.
Jayce’s mother will be crying or praying in Spanish. He won’t be able to tell.
Viktor’s last thought will be hoping he sees Jayce as soon as he closes his eyes.
But for now, they are together sleeping and it's raining quietly outside, and they are safe. Viktor has Jayce in his arms, and he doesn't know what will happen. An entire lifetime lived in one bedroom. Short, but long-lived. Apart, but together.
He is angry and Jayce is fragile but they will never again have to be apart more than the three days it will take for them to identify Jayce’s mangled, broken body.
Ghosts together, always.
And just as Viktor predicted, the only real open door is the last one.