@feministfandomgeek

His ankle ached where he tripped over rubble trying to reach Victor. He'd been so still, draped across broken pillars and stone. He would have gone to the lab If he hadn't already destroyed the hex core. He almost guiltily wished that he hadn't. He didn't know what the right choice to make was. But he couldn't let Victor go.

He couldn't bring himself to look around at the glowing green jars and tubes that lit the space. Singed had kicked him out of the room after he'd collapsed over a bin, throwing up everything he'd eaten that day. He had wanted to stay, to help Victor. But he was less than useless here. No more than a distraction.

So he stared down at his shaking hands. And he hoped he'd made the right choice.

He couldn't tell how long it had been by the time singed open the door and shouted for him. Time had seemed to move and stutters and starts. His mind replaying images from the explosion, wondering about the carnage that he left behind. The city and the council he had so quickly abandoned for Victor.

He left to his feet, stumbling for a moment as his aching ankle threatened to give out, But he managed to stay upright. He lurched through the door and couldn't stop his gasp at what he saw. Victor's skin was pink, with splashes of white and purple like animalistic markings. There was a bunch of some kind of thin growths emerging from each side of his throat. And there was blood everywhere.

Singed snapped at him, “ pick him up. We must get him to the tank.”

Jace hesitated for a moment before sliding his arms underneath Victor's knees and shoulders. He cradled him to his chest. He was so light. And he tried not to think about the fact that there was something growing off his back bouncing against Jayce’s hip as he moved.

“Hurry up, boy,” Singed as he directed Jace to the tank. He had to walk up a few stairs of a step ladder before he could lower Victor into a green viscous liquid. He stumbled back down the steps and washed as Victor floated in the large tube like tank.

As he watched the growths on the side of Victor's neck began to spread out and look like the fronds of a waverider. The growth from his back turning into a tail. Slits on his skin opened up and in the back of his minds Jayce realized they were gills.

But he was breathing. He couldn't look away from the rise and fall of Victor's chest. He was alive. That's all that mattered.

@opensesamepandemonium

A light, sharp and blinding, filtered through the thick glass. A cloud of disorientation overwhelmed his waking brain. Viktor stirred, moving through the green fluid that clung to his skin like a second layer, his limbs remaining weightless in the heavier than water liquid. The sterile smell inside his glass confinement was too cold, too artificial, and yet strangely reminiscent of the gasses he’d grown up inhaling.

*How am I breathing?*

His body felt foreign, a strange amalgamation of something once his own but now far removed from it. He caught the reflection of his face on curved glass that showed features he barely recognised. Mauve skin, still holding the same sharpness as it had before, but with the addition of scaled sheen. As if the gaunt plasticity of his sickness, who he was, had been replaced by something more experimental, more inhuman.

Panic bubbled up, but it was soon drowned by the realisation; he was no longer just a person. Whatever he had become, whatever he had been made into, it was something beastly, and entirely new.

Thank you both so much for this!

For the end, close up of Viktor!