gleed

The soft lining of the waistcoat that had been abandoned on the very chair Viktor sat on. A cruel mimic of a chest, pressed to his back, hand carved rungs poor imitations of sturdy ribs or thick muscle.

He really was moments away from cutting out his own heart.

I have to cut it out. I’ll cut it out and I’ll replace my lungs and I’ll put a stop to this discordant singing in my blood and I’ll stop seeing purple and runes every time I close my eyes and he sees me like a brother? A fucking brother?

“My brain is kind of on fire right now and I really don’t need another - ”

“Is it always on fire?” Viktor said bluntly.

“What - ?”

“Are you always on edge - ah , forgive the term of phrase,” Viktor considered where they had stood not three hours ago, the way Jayce had dangled like bait in the gaping maw of his obliterated lab. So much could change, he thought, in so little time. “How should I put this…do you ever find yourself wondering if everyone’s brain is as loud as your own?”

“Talking to people…” Jayce’s response came slow and faltering, words only half formed as he forced his tongue to work. Viktor studied every infinitesimal twitch of his face, watched his throat expand and contract as he swallowed what could have been a sob. Somewhere in that sculpture of cells and atoms, he would find a point to his thesis - “…it feels like someone left me out of the joke, you know?”

- and there it was.

“The whole world’s a stage, as they say.” Viktor responded. “But the play is fucking awful, and you weren’t given a script . ”

“You and I are the same.”

“Yeah,” Jayce was breathless all over again. “ Yeah .”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Holy shit . I’m - I’m not crazy.”

“Or we both are.”

“We’re both crazy?”

“I think we’re both crazy.”

“We are. You’re right. We are both crazy.”

What if they had been exiled?

( “I would have gone straight back to the ledge.”

“And I would have talked you down again.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”)

His mother had told him once, when he was small and quiet and unaware how little the world thought of him, that one should never bottle their emotions. And he took that advice. He didn’t make his chest a wine cellar of frustrations and fears - he alchemised. Reuse and redistribute - take the energy and transform it into something useful.

“The world was to you both a secret which you desired to divine - it is rare that two people so perfectly aligned are blessed with such serendipitous circumstances.” The kindness in her soft voice struck Viktor like a bell, a resonating chime that soothed such sour thoughts he’d dare to cast her way, a balmy voice of reason. He hated such political games. “I’m sure I cannot even begin to understand what it is the two of you share.”

“He’s…we’re very close.”

“He looks at you like you hung the stars.”

Two things could be true at once.

“Here,” Jayce found the crumpled playing card squashed between the sheets. “You’ve already ruined it, you menace, you’ll just have to get her a replacement.”

He unfolded it with a faraway smile, and handed it to Viktor.

“I’ve always found it so quaint how you play games with tarot cards in the undercity,” he mused at the colourful illustration that hovered against his palm above them, the off white veins cracked into the ink. “Tempting fate, don’t you think?”

Viktor hummed and pressed the card against his shaky thigh.

“Tarot is a game, really.”

He crushed the smouldering end of the cigarette between the tortuously tangled fingers of The Lovers.

“Before Jayce was Piltover’s Man of Progress he was the academy’s resident fire hazard. After the lab incident the students called the two of us Rata-Tat-Talis and The Molotov Cocktail. ”

Councillor Medarda laughed fondly, genuinely. A sound Viktor wasn’t sure he had heard before. For a brief, bitter moment, he thought that Jayce must be more than familiar with it.