#statue jayce

alt text for chapter 2:

When Jayce's flesh wakes on its second day of new life, he finds that he is alone.

This doesn't warrant cause to startle. Something deeply rooted in his subconscious anticipated the solitude even in spite of the fact that there was little explanation for it. Honestly, it was more shocking when he had awoken the other day—still, but alive in Viktor's thin and familiar arms—than it was to wake like this, alone. He rises on his second day of new life uneventfully. A deep breath is inhaled to bring in the scent of dried flowers, accompanied right after by the slight remnants of something not-quite but close-enough to petrichor, like wet clay and rain on steel; there is a thick humidity left in the air from the emotionally-formed-embryonic fluid that helped eject him back into existence. The sun has just barely began to crest beyond the horizon, yet already billows of steam can be seen getting reabsorbed by the heat and light of daybreak that begins to ward off the deep indigo of night. Jayce turns his head languidly to watch it from the open face of the shelter floor he rests on, but his body remains otherwise unmoving as it bids farewell to the waning moon, welcoming the soft colors of dawns embrace.

It still feels odd, this natural and instinctual yet novel sensation: to sleep, to wake. To be. In the deadlock between life and death Jayce considered home for the last millennia, there was no bridge between conscious and unconscious. It was all combined, coagulated and intertwined in such a way that intangible, intellectual thought became the only thing left to define him. Nowhere left to run when the container of his body dissolved, removing him from the confines of mass and matter and stretching him across the intricately woven fabric of space time. There had been no way to escape the mind or thoughts; leaving no feelings, no dreams, no reprieve. Not in the way a vessel like flesh felt them, at the very least. There was no need for these things, no body or form to host such mortal needs.

What could sleep offer the dead? The dead dream only of life: of breathing, of experiencing the miraculous existence that is living at all once more. In fact, if what Jayce had known truly was death, then dying itself could be compared to a dream. A sleepless, eternal dream in the form of a wish to return to life. Jayce's own soul was no exception to this, though it appeared now that he may have merely been suspended in some kind of limbo rather than truly dead.

That, or he'd died and been revived over so many times, in so many ways, across so much of time and space, that he could no longer decipher the difference.

Jayce's thumb seeks out the weaved tall-grass braided into a ring on his finger, savoring the roughness of it as he rolls it across the digit. At least that much was still real: this body, the brand of braided devotion, the renewed mass of a mind in his skull that feels so heavy, so burdensome. It felt leaden, this… waking. Like being pulled from water right when you succumbed to the fate of drowning; the burning pain of liquid forcefully expelled from lungs that had already given up on breathing. Revival wasn't a pretty, painless experience. It wasn't some beautiful miracle. It was brutal and primal, less akin to being reborn and more like being resown from undoing, being un-reaped. An un-reading; the reforming of oneself that unraveled all things—scar tissue and old wounds undone and reopened, bleeding back out and healing in rapid rate under new flesh. Jayce wasn't sure what he was now—or who he was meant to be in the first place. Every nerve, every cell, every atom feels foreign and unfamiliar. His own skin feels borrowed, misplaced and out of sync with anything around it.

He imagines this must be akin to how Viktor felt when he'd first been revived by the Hexcore. No wonder he hated Jayce for it before. Jayce can feel some part of himself hating this, too. Why couldn't either of them be more prone to letting things go? For millennia he'd clung to whatever shreds of consciousness he could find of himself. For timeless, countless days Viktor clung to this timeline, to the possibility that Jayce may find his way back. In truth, Jayce hadn't really intended to come back. Not at this point, at least. It had seemed a moot point. Viktor had found a new purpose, and Jayce was too numb from the effects of eternal damnation to care one way or another about finding himself again. He'd resigned to the fate of being an onlooker. It's not like watching Viktor was such a bad view, and he figured eventually whatever he was in that state would fade into some sort of nothingness. It already did, occasionally. Yet somehow Jayce always found himself back here, watching, waiting.

alt text for chapter 3:

Viktor jolts awake, blinded and sweat-drenched under the blazing summer sun, hands grasping for the presence that should rightfully be before him. Instead, his palm falls on the cold, hard, and lifeless surface of Jayce's statuette.

He recoils with a gasp, scrambling across the dusty floor and away from the brutal reminder that he is not where he should be, vision still blurred in the brightness and lips cracking from dehydration. His tongue darts to wet them and is met with the taste of iron. The air is devoid of any remnants of life; the aroma of sulfur and stagnancy is all that remains. An utterly unfamiliar sense of disorientation and confusion washes over him, followed by a tidal wave of grief and rage when recollection fully settles into his bones. It evokes a dry sob that shifts to harsh coughing. His chest returns to the old, painful sensation that had been lost on him, burning and stinging as his mind races to remind him what has occurred, how he slipped back through time. All at once, he feels the same small, sick, and subjugated man he had been in his youth. His lungs struggle to do their job. Eventually he forgets to attempt to calm himself all together, lost in the narrow pathways of his mind attempting to explain the inexplicable.

In the shadow of his addled sleep, he wonders if perhaps the entire occurrence had been a dream all along. It hadn't made any sense for two versions of him to exist in one universe without time and space bending in on itself in the first place. Had Jayce truly ever been revived at all? Or had Viktor simply been here like this the whole time, freshly-rewoven into flesh instead of machine, curled among the corpse of his partner, his subconscious supplying hallucinations of the harrowing desire for an apology and reconciliation that he could never fulfill? Had other seasons ever come at all? Would he ever see night paint the sky again? The mere idea of it all feels so far away, inconceivable and impalpable, as though it happened only in theory and thought. He feels outside of it all; outside of himself. He cannot place how long he's been here; whatever amount of time may or may have not lapsed is not accompanied by the movement of the sun scorching the little remaining proof of life from its fixed point at high-noon. Viktor's body is rigid, equally frozen as the heavens and hell he finds himself in as it runs through the various hypothesis explaining what occurred. The most likely still settles on it never having occurred at all.

His thumb is the first thing that manages to brave movement again. It seeks for his ring finger unconsciously, and finds a greeting of braided tall-grass. The tension is in his body is erased, but in its place grief and sorrow settles.

No. It was real. I cannot waste this time on useless thoughts; I must find my way back.

Viktor's mind betrays him, supplying continued thoughts of panic despite how firmly and restlessly he lifts his body. Was it always this heavy? Had he always felt gravity so much? His heartbeat drums loudly as he rushes towards the familiarity of his shelter past the curved ledge of Jayce's memorial. Some part of him feels a need to look backwards, to prove that the monument is there at all: but the sight of it is too much, sour-flavored saliva pooling at his tongue as nausea overtakes him. He tries his best to shove it aside—there are bigger concerns to worry about. The trivial concerns pop up anyways.

Had Jayce felt this helpless when he'd found Viktor collapsed in the lab? Was he this desperate when he merged Viktor's body with the Hexcore? Jayce is going to wake up alone. Will he think Viktor abandoned him on purpose?

Will he think that I left him alone again?

He wants to gag. He wants to scream, to break things, to break down in tears: but worst case scenario and he has to relive everything all over again, then he will have to save every drop of emotion for the spell. His head is tossed back, eyes blinking rapidly when they threaten to pour over despite his effort to push it aside. Instead, he digs his dirty, uneven nails into the soft flesh of his palm, and continues to stomp his way forward towards the shelter, clinging to the hope that what resides inside will give him some sense of when he is. The books or journals, or the flowers pressed between the pages will offer some placement. Alternatively, the lack of them at all will confirm his new fear: that he's found himself at the beginning.

ramblings/AN's:

the parallels in the openings of these chapters was initially unplanned actually! lol i realized after writing the first two paragraphs of ch3, that both chapters started with both jayce and viktor waking up, and their initial sensations. i loved that it formed a parallel here: jayce's calmness vs viktor's anxiety, the differences in their enviorments, the switch from magevik being in control to jayce being the collected one who knows what's going on (somewhat. sort of.)

these chapters are turning out to be really fun, but they've also been a challenge to get through. in order to figure my way back to a happy ending, the plot has gotten even more complex and convoluted. i love that, but it's been a lot of planning and not as much actual writing as i'd have liked. also been pouring most of my effort into wrapping up ch2 of fate forged from failure instead, cause it's right at the cusp of being done; whereas premise of promise not only is harder to get through because it makes me emotional and touches on so much grief and in general has less ready. i hope to at least get ch 2-4 for this one posted by the end of this year; alongside a ch or 2 of fate forged in failure & one chapter for both wanting, wrapped in red & AMSATASM. i feel like i'm juggling a lot of works, but overall it's been helpful to be able to shift gears and jump between things when i lose steam on one work.