Chapter Text
"It's because you're gay," Jayce said. "Homosexual. Your wrist's fucking broken. Those little cha-cha songs you sing with the preschoolers and clap your hands to about all those colors in a fruit bowl when I go to pick you up every week are essentially about you, brave motherfucking soul you are, halle-goddamn-llelujah."
"Jayce," Viktor said tiredly. "I thought we talked about ketamine."
"Jesus," Jayce replied, turning up the Grease. He sang under his breath, "You better shape up, cause I need a ma-an -- no, it's obviously not about me, fuckhead. It's about the professor. The late professor. May his soul rise ever-upwards to heaven and get dropped-kicked by the immortal weight of his flaming sins, and it's about you, sweetheart. It's about you. And your pride pin."
Viktor said, "I'm not even part of the school GSA."
"Face it," Jayce said. "If I was in your position, he would've shunted me off to Arvino the moment I started showing up in sweatpants to have the undergraduate male conditioning beat back into me. He can't admit failure, not now. Not ever. Not about you, ‘cause --"
Viktor slapped him. He was wearing a shirt happily announcing his permanent status as GONE STREAKING, and Jayce half-supposed the slap was a) a natural defense by the human person for the inherent humiliation of having naked cartoon bacteria running in bright green lettering across his chest and b) one last-ditch banal attempt to make Jayce stop talking as soon as humanly possible, which was immensely counterproductive because Jayce’s two primary motivators in life were pain and human empathy, ie introducing his fellow man to even a hairbreadth of the annoyance he was brutally subjected to on a daily basis. Fucking Thomas from Philosophy 101 was going to deepthroat his boot one day.
“Ow,” Jayce said once they finished listening to the rest of the song in silence. Two cars drifted by as Olivia Newton-John danced. It was one a.m., fog rose along the highway and obstructed the small hills stretched on the other side of the railing, melting the world into cavernous pools of dark, inciting water, and Jayce imagined himself careening into footprints of long-dead giants and sinking down, down, until he met Miss Loch-fucking-Ness. Jayce had always wanted confirmation that at least one batshit sea monster was real. Well, of course they were real, Jayce just wanted to see one, it was one of those childish impurities in his every-reaching scientific soul that occasionally made him scream into a pillow at 5 a.m. and stand on balconies. “You slap like a baby kitten. Maybe try unsheathing your claws next time.”
“You’re despicable,” Viktor muttered. “Let me drive.”
“Nah.”
“At least switch the music.”
“I like Grease.”
“You think Olivia Newton-John would stand for this shit?” Viktor asked. “You really think in the depths of your immortal American soul that any of those exploited men and women tap-dancing underneath the sun in scratched-shut collars with engine oil dripping off their hair and rotting their brains would consent to --” he pantomimed what Jayce assumed was a valiant attempt at denoting ‘killing your father with a gun,’ “ -- being used as an accomplice for --”
“Shit, Viktor,” Jayce said miserably. “I’m sorry. Just say I kidnapped you or something.”
“Do you ever think about Dick and Perry?”
“I do think about dick quite often,” Jayce admitted. “It’s a point of contention between me and my father. Well, was. Damn, that feels good.”
Viktor said, “Uh-huh. It's the shock.”
Jayce pulled to the side of the road, distinctly not smashing the headlights into the railing and going rough-and-tumble down into the bottom of the crevice, because Viktor was in the car and found his desperate cries for attention unamusing, and Jayce was rapidly approaching new undiscovered heights of limitations, though admittedly there was that one time a couple of weeks ago when Vi lost her job and decided the most rational way to cope with the nightmarish tendencies of American capitalism was to do donuts, only it began to rain, and Jayce ambled over to giggle at her and they drove back with tires all fucked-up for racing doing 40ft before the brakes kicked in from sheer lack of friction and, yeah, that was the first time Caitlyn ever truly lost her shit and called him a ‘bad influence.’ It hurt. Jayce wasn’t the asshole who made her roleplay fucking Warrior Cats as a child, though he apparently was the motherfucker who got her into Stanford for Child Development on the essay. He was very proud of himself.
Viktor opened his phone and began to scroll dully through his emails. He hit refresh twice, the small sound of no new notifications! twanging through the car as Jayce shut off the engine and bit his cheeks hard enough to bleed. Clearly, his thinking was erroneous somewhere, and Jayce wasn’t the type of asshole to mope around all day thinking about how the world had monumentally fucked him up far beyond human consideration and desire nothing more but a nail-studded bat to inflict permanent justice on all the residual bits which remained, no, Jayce was a go-getter, which meant that he actively sought the hatred of the world so they’d just keep hitting so he’d keep going.
“Clearly I thought that organizing all my spiritual affairs would somehow, in a roundabout way, preclude a desire to live or die,” Jayce said. "Clearly I thought wrong."
Viktor quoted, bored, “‘There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.’”
“I hate physics.”
He archived an email and tossed his phone to the back, crossing his arms. “I can tell.”
“But I’m good at it. I’m pretty good at things, aren’t I, Vitya?”
“Let’s get ice cream,” Viktor decided. Jayce started the car. He switched to an awful classic rock station that played Careless Whisper, and sang along with the windows half-down, wiping the blood off his cheek with the trusty baby wipes he kept somewhere in the dashboard of the car. His fingers were numb from the cold, and his cheeks were numb from the slap, and Viktor watched the procession of the trees with his chin resting inside his palm, thinking thoughts that Jayce couldn’t even begin to follow.
“I hope the bastard’s in hell,” Jayce said. "To the heart and mind --"
“I’m Jewish,” Viktor said blandly. “I hope that he didn’t die instantaneously. I hope the human brain is incapable of comprehending human death and we spend our eternal demise reliving the supernova-brilliant undiscovered sensational agony of reverting to non-existence. I hope every second is the fucking boulder and I hope the mountain never ends, I hope that a shard of skull embedded into his brain and he died hemorrhaging with pain that could’ve practically been a new color with all the mystical man-made metrics we have to judge the scales of human hurt.”
“I love you,” Jayce said.
“I have an address for the place with taro,” Viktor replied. His phone dinged in the backseat, “I want a taro affogato.”
“Yes sir.”
“Hmm.”
“You sick fuck,” Jayce said with dull admiration. “Man. I don’t even know why I did that. Something something catharsis, except I feel like hurtling myself off a bridge more than ever now that he’s gone and doesn’t have a thing to say back to me. Jesus. I’m dumb as fuck sometimes. Even with all the premeditation, I didn’t realize that once all my earthly ties and all the closure he’s never going to hand to me is gone --”
“You have a physics paper due next week.”
“Oh shit, right. Maybe after that.”
They pulled into the parking lot. Food district. All the lights would be on until 6 a.m. before they retreated back into their shiny metal shells. Viktor took another wet wipe from the container and shook it out, gently scrubbing at the wetness on Jayce’s cheek until he was satisfied, crumpling it into a ball and shoving it into the trash can underneath the seat. Jayce cursed at his past self for cleaning the car before picking Viktor up for their special hang-out event, though they virtually had special hang-out events all the time and it wasn’t as if Viktor was especially bothered by the sheer amount of accumulated waste that cluttered the car before. Now the police would no longer have to dig through used condoms and magazines and torn-up physics worksheets to find the evidence, they’d just have to open the lid of the quaint car trash-bin Caitlyn bought for him during Secret Santa. Jayce got her twelve pairs of fuzzy socks. Sometimes he didn’t feel loved.
He followed Viktor out of the car and paid for his food. They sat in the corner of the store, enveloped by the sounds of wide-awake chatter and the smell of frying dough, and Viktor poured hot taro onto his vanilla ice cream and spooned it into his mouth with a sigh bordering on pornographic. Jayce leaned back in his chair and surveyed the kingdom of Thai shaved ice before him.
“I want to throw up,” Jayce realized sometime into the second bite.
“I’ll eat it.”
“You’d eat a cockroach.”
“It’s a symbol of evolutionary strength,” Viktor said. “By consuming the thing of eternal life you gain the secrets of eternal life. Bloody conquest, and all that bullshit.”
“And all that bullshit,” Jayce agreed. He fidgeted, and ate a piece of sugar-powdered boba, choking it down. He attempted to summon a joke about gargling balls. Something was wrong with the atmosphere. Vik , he wanted to say, why’d you come? Instead, he said, “Why this place? Shit’s awful.”
“I brought us here because sugar makes you susceptible,” Viktor said. “And because I’m going to kill myself.”
“Sugar does not make me susceptible,” Jayce argued. “I’m not a lactose intolerant motherfucker like you, you’re going to be hunched in that stall for five minutes before you leave because I figure you left your meds somewhere in the laundry basket next to Elison, and I also don’t believe in your subliminal-messaging ginger-root shots fanaticism about defecating for a solid three minutes to cleanse your soul, no, doll, those fucking diet drinks and protein powders are a hack clinging to the basic chemistry of muscle contraction and endorphin release. But I digress, about the --”
“Please don’t bother,” Viktor let a blob of vanilla dissolve on his tongue. “Suffice to say you’re not the only one with argumentative skills, suffice to say that out of the two of us you are the person with the least argumentative skills. Hell, I convinced Professor Stanwick to accept me in with my half-forged nebulous documents about mumble-Viktor and he didn’t even blink until he listened to my voice for too long, and I still think you bribed college admissions and wrote THIS IS FUCKING STUPID in point 40 font over your additional questions. Suffice to say that if you asked me any deeper you’d be hand-in-hand with me on the top of the highest skyscraper in this city tomorrow, suffice to say I’m something of a lyrical genius.”
Jayce pushed the bright dyed stripes of shaved ice around. “Hey, that’s not true. I have a great tragic backstory. I wrote seven hundred words about how my allergy to shellfish is half a learning disability, as I never got to experience half the natural world.”
“You sent the school newspaper a strongly worded ‘Letter from My Past Self’ explicitly detailing a bullshit made-up narrative about the faults of affirmative action in uplifting the mediocre divorced middle class and warned every prospective sixteen-year-old who crossed your thousand-hit Quora account that writing about their pathetic little ‘trauma-dumping’ and ‘child abuse’ is a farce and no one gives a shit,” Viktor said. “There is absolutely no fucking way.”
Jayce ate a spoonful of shaved ice.
“Huh,” Viktor said. “You’re awful.”
“Well, I’m not the one who plans to take a swan dive tomorrow, Mr. Valedictorian from Missouri.”
“Tustin.”
“Mississippi. Whatever. All those fucking Southern brutes they let in for diversity are the same to me anyway. Though I guess you can write a hell of a paper, Blitzkrieg of the Modern Prometheus: Cranking the Lever of Ethics to Variably Address the Conception of Artificial Sentience in the 21st Century.”
“Retroactive praise. Fascinating.”
“Can I have your autograph?”
“Hollywood seduction. Intriguing.”
“Make it out to Jayce Faust.”
“Jesse,” Viktor said. “It comes from the bottomless pits of my heart when I say I regret to inform you that my last name is genuinely too soul-bleedingly metal for me to ever give you.”
Jayce grabbed a pen from the counter and handed it to Viktor, who smoothed out a napkin neatly and wrote, Dickhead , intellectualism will swallow you whole, love, Sonic, and slid it across the table. Jayce skirted the napkin away from the spots of condensation on the table and folded it neatly into eighths, placing it into the jacket pocket over his heart. “Take mine,” he said. “Viktor Giopara. Holy shit, I think my ears are bleeding. Gross. Anyway, marriage is an institution designed to negotiate the possession of women, so I wouldn’t be supporting it anyway.”
“I have two moms.”
“Marriage is an institution designed to preserve the sanctity and security of two or three or four loving individuals,” Jayce corrected, swallowing the bile crawling to the front of his throat. “Viktor. God. You can’t, you’ve got the world to change, remember?”
“Do I?” Viktor asked simply.
“Uh, yes,” Jayce said. “You showed me your entire twelve-step world domination plan after I showed you my dick, remember? With the flowcharts and everything. First the negotiation of the insulin market, and then the public fucking execution of every medical institution that ever attempts to sink its teeth into all our generous prospective bright-eyed physicians again. Holistic healing, right? That’s what being a doctor is, you said, the conversation between patient and doctor not as an attempt towards this determinate and exclusively defined healing, this -- gathering of a whole object. Yeah?”
Viktor replied, “I hate my fingers.”
Jayce squinted. “They’re nice fingers.”
“Are they?” Viktor asked. “They’re too long and awkward. They don’t match up with the rest of me. Every time I see them I dream of inverting them and shrinking them upon a great white canvas, I think about turning my hands backward and creating something so monstrous and powerful I’m half a titan. I think about how small they are compared to yours, compared to the hands of other men, and I think about how they trembled when they called me up to the stand and I can’t even get my damned robotics project back. It’s like you said, Jayce, the interminable locks of language. They call me up there and they can call me whatever name I want to be called, and whatever words I want them to say, and yet I am still fucking incurable .”
“This is so politically incorrect.”
“Oh, you are definitely God’s favorite,” Viktor said around the almond. “Regardless, traditional burial is fine. Or perhaps cremation. I have no family to hold me accountable for my countless enumerations against the continual community spirit.”
“If you got cremated I would get a little jar,” Jayce told him, feeling rather ill. “One of those nice jars with something awful patterned on it, you know when you walk inside of Spencer’s--”
“Do I know about walking intoSpencer’s …”
“Shut up,” said Jayce. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please don’t kill yourself. Anyway, when you go into Spencer’s they have the hack-coffee mugs with cute shit on them like, Coffee: Prescription labeled as a pharmaceutical bottle like for those pills you take for your blood pressure at the tender age of twenty. I’d get one of those jars, and place it in the corner of the classroom, and one day some professor’s going to be running real late and see the unattended mug and open it and scream.”
“I thought it was a jar with the pattern that the mug has, not the legitimate mug.”
“Shit,” Jayce tore a napkin to shreds and gathered it around the bottom of his paper cup for shaved ice. A small, wet moat. “Guess you’ll have to give me more time to sort out the details.”
He pushed his unfinished Thai ice over to Viktor, who had devoured the affogato down to its last sorry drop of melted vanilla ice cream, and Viktor began to reorganize the small mochi marshmallows, strawberry poppers, and cold scoops of boba around to his liking before eating them off one-by-one in a frankly awful arrangement. The ice remained untouched.
“Look,” Jayce said uneasily. “I know I’m the last person you’d hear this from, but there are more things to be done. New experiences, you know. Once you get past the slough of childhood and once you kill your dad and finish college things really start looking up. I feel better already, honestly, though I suppose the emotional catharsis of parental death happened at a rather impressionable age for you, and you couldn’t fully conceptualize the cathartic release of not waking up screaming every night because you see him in your doorway.” He winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean any of that. What I meant to say is that one day you’re going to dig your mothers out of the grave and make them apologize to you for giving you pigtails in your one surviving yearbook photo.”
“New experiences?”
“Disneyland?”
“Walt Disney is not going to fuck you.”
“Jesus. Lay off. I don’t know, Six Flags. Raising a kid. Seeing a whale. Getting laid in a really exciting way?”
“If someone gave me a baby right now, I would throw it.”
“Harsh.”
“Don’t you ever wish someone threw you?”
“Well, logically, if we apply the same arguments of rehabilitative justice and criminal reform,” Jayce began, “I only think I would like to be thrown as a child because I’ve experienced the hypothetical path where my parents do their damned best to make me want to be thrown. But if I didn’t dally down the path of evil unicorns and evil sunshine, I probably wouldn’t want to be thrown, and it means something that I had the hypothetical chance of having the hypothetical chance to not want myself thrown into the waste-basket as a fetus. Child. Whatever.”
“Was it really fifty-fifty?” Viktor said. “It’s not even a chemical imbalance or anything. This is just how the world has presented itself after thousands of years of civilization. It’s just what the country has resolved itself into, you of all people should know that it’s not really the fucking serotonin or endorphins or the fact that you watched too many instant-gratification Minecraft videos as a kid. Every day you wake what suppresses the livid desire to continue in your genes is the fact that our entire definition of the world is completely fucked. Wellness? Health? Normality? Functionality? Newsflash, asshole, the tinfoil glinting at the bottom of the belly of a whale is a ball of tinfoil. It’s not the sun. Anything you resolve is all smoke and mirrors.” When he finished, he was almost angry.
“I don’t think that’s what therapy is,” Jayce said encouragingly. “Caitlyn says therapy’s pretty good.”
“I don’t have insurance.”
“Bump it in, brother.”
They fist-bumped.
“This is good Thai,” Viktor said. “This is a good place.”
“Yeah,” Jayce agreed. “Too bad the name is politically incorrect. I’ve never been.”
“I’ve been here many times this month. I filled out my punch card twice.”
Upon this, Jayce looked at Viktor for the first time in a long time, ever since Blitzcrank entered the modern trial of the custody battle because he figured eating sixteen rounds of taro affogato did something to a person’s skincare routine. Viktor was thinner. He had, somehow, lost muscle mass, and Jayce remembered how Viktor used to inconsistently wake up at disgusting hours with the fanatic deliberations of having Jayce take him through his entire workout routine -- “The only gun control I don’t support is controlling these,” Jayce liked to say. Viktor said, “I sincerely fucking hope the next sidewalk frisbee skewers your head directly from your shoulders, besides, you’re forgetting half of the reasons we implemented control in the first place out of fear for civil rights -- duck! ” -- out of the primal desire to put the glories of testosterone to use and revert to the cave-dwelling anachronisms of prime sweaty manhood.
“I didn’t notice.”
“I walked."
“It’s thirty-five minutes away on foot,” Jayce said with the admiration of someone who didn’t spend his youth eating mud pies for entertainment. Viktor shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“Pending,” Viktor said. “Unless this is one of those spontaneous moments of delirium you have where you interject an investment ‘sorry’ into the usual conversation for future use, in which case I’ve rescinded our interest agreement and you are no longer accumulating apologies simply by breathing. I despise the modern-day aristocracy.”
“We haven’t been talking,” Jayce said.
“Okay.”
“You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Viktor said cheerfully. “I’m just utterly fucking flabbergasted at how useless you are!”
“It was an astounding character witness statement.”
“It was an awful character witness statement,” Viktor replied, stabbing his fork into the depths of the paper cup, scraping at the flakes which turned his lips a bleach-like combination of orange and purple. “You’re the reason I’m losing this case.”
“I consulted a lawyer. My great aunt wrote it, asshole.”
“Your great aunt hates me.”
“Yeah, but not because she’s racist. She hates me, and I’m her blood relative four times removed,” Jayce said hurriedly. “Look, I don’t know what the actual fuck you expect me to do about your robotics project when I was summarily in Vermont doing lines of cocaine off a caddy’s shorts, like --”
“You have to be shitting me.”
Jayce tried again, “When we were living in the same apartment together. I don’t know! You act like you want to maul me every time we cross paths, I don’t know what to do, Viktor, I wasn’t there for a single scrap of that shit and you know what the professor’s playing at anyway, and the college will break its spine sucking its own cock before it lets him go because he’s one of the richest motherfuckers on the board with the most books. I’m sorry , Viktor. God. I’m sorry.”
“I’m losing the case,” Viktor said softly.
“I mean, we don’t know that,” Jayce backtracked.
“I’m losing the case,” Viktor said more firmly. He drank the last of the melted shaved ice and slammed the cup down. “Jayce Giopara, I’m losing the case and this is the first time we’ve sat down and talked for weeks. I want water.”
Jayce went to the counter, and they made him pay a dollar to apologize for his existence and the amount of time he was spending hunched in the corner booth with Viktor. He brought the cups back, and Viktor took a tentative sip of the cold water, cleaning the sugar from his gums with the tip of his tongue. Jayce’s knee bounced against the seat. He clasped his fingers together, resting them on the table, a platform where he wanted to put his forehead down but the jitters were driving him insane and if he looked away Viktor would vanish. Chair behind the door and all that. Viktor drank deeply, sighing.
“I’m sorry,” Jayce said, hands trembling. Sugar always did that to him. “I don’t know. There’s something chasing me. There’s this -- thing behind me, everywhere I go there is this giant fucking shadow behind me like a weighted blanket with, I don’t know, a weighted blanket with burrs and every inconsequential burr sets off all the inconsequential tripwires in my brain and my skin’s fucking crawling, I go crazy every time we’re in the apartment together and you can’t talk to me. I’m scared, Viktor, I’m so uselessly scared.”
Viktor said nothing.
“It’s gone now,” Jayce muttered. “I fixed it. I fixed myself. It’s gone now.”
Viktor said, “I think --”
“Don’t push yourself.”
Viktor gritted his teeth. He said nothing for a while, tracing arbitrary squiggles where the ice made the cup wet, and they listened to the chattering stream of college students entering and exiting the ice cream store.
“You know,” Jayce said. “I saw four hot pot places on the way here. I’m starting to think there’s an oversaturation of the market.”
“It’s because it takes hours to eat,” Viktor replied distractedly.
“Only takes me twenty minutes.”
Viktor closed his eyes. “I want this to be over.”
“Please don’t kill yourself,” Jayce said. “I’m at the place of my academic career where being monumentally fucked-up and bragging about it doesn’t necessarily get me into research programs anymore, and I have to start shitting out actual papers, and god, Viktor, I don’t know. I’m fixing this. We can fix this entire bullshit thing, we can go do two years of community and crawl somewhere state I don’t know, Vik, I want to know.”
Viktor closed his eyes and placed his cheek onto the cold marble of the table. Jayce put his hand on his head. His hair was limp, unwashed, and it fell in rather clumpy strands over his eyebags and barely moved even from the force of his deep, trembling breaths. He sounded as if a bird was attempting to emerge from the depths of his windpipe and he was swallowing it back down furiously as Jayce sat with his fingers circling into the hard points of his scalp, fingers shaking like a motherfucker.
“Hey,” Jayce said. “I’ve seen at least five assholes with their eyes so red from smoking that I don’t think crying gets you anything free at this establishment.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m not crying.”
“Okay,” Jayce agreed. “That’s just the residual vanilla extract leaking from your tear ducts.
Viktor turned his face into his arms. “You always ruin everything.”
Jayce said, “Nature, nurture, etc. etc.”
“Do not fucking etcetera etcetera me.”
"It's not so impermeable now," Jayce said. "I thought I didn't feel anything but I think I felt the bubble burst, somewhere."
"Shut up," Viktor interrupted. "I'm tired, and you're loud."
"That's fine," Jayce replied agreeably. "We'll go when you're ready."