Work Text:
Here’s something that the pamphlets say, but also don’t.
Those stupid little pieces of coloured, oddly-folded and not very aerodynamic (he’s tested it) paper that the doctors keep handing him more and more of with every visit. They started innocent enough—Four Important Tenets of Optimal Recovery from Knee Surgery—but they grew twists and turns like a mutant lichen, knobs against the back where there shouldn’t be any—Finding Yourself After Traumatic Death, Grief and You, Regaining Purpose After Loss.
They’re clinical, but they’re trying not to be. While making it glaringly obvious that they’re written by someone who doesn’t know adjectives from other sources than medical textbooks.
He tries not to be pissed off about them. At them. It’s well-intentioned, he tells himself. But here’s the thing about good intentions: most of the time, they’re hollow. That’s the kind of shit that Viktor tells him to fuck off with—that in the Undercity, you take what little goodwill you can get. It’s annoying, because Viktor’s the one who’s the pessimist.
And he’s making Jayce feel crazy without even knowing it. And it’s not even because Jayce is thinking about how good it feels to bend Viktor over his workbench.
Here’s something that the pamphlets say, but also don’t:
Jayce has a plant in the corner of his office that he knows he’s supposed to water. It’s a gift from Mel, and he doesn’t know why she entrusted him with it, but she did and now it’s not that he’s forgetting to water it; it’s that he’s walking into the room, noticing that it needs watering, but sitting down at his desk to knock some work out and swearing that he’ll do it when he gets up again.
But he doesn’t, because he’s just not like that. He pours over everything that’s late, and notices how the pile’s growing instead of shrinking, and he only gets up when he hears a crash and in the time it takes him to shove his ass off the chair and dart to the door, he’s already imagined four ways that Viktor could crack his head open on the kitchen tiles and that’d be the end of it.
Mel got him the plant when he revealed that he’d taken her suggestions seriously and decided to work from home, to turn the terrible spare room into a home office. There’d been a nice card with it. It hadn’t been hollow. It’d been the only one from his co-workers that hadn’t.
He doesn’t know why people buy greeting cards at newsagents; he doesn’t know why’d you’d bother. It’s a sad gift. It’s a gift that says that you didn’t have a single thought about this other than that everyone else was doing it, so now you’re doing it, too. Jayce doesn’t want to say that Viktor dying has made him have… different opinions about his co-workers than he held before, but he’s also not in the business of lying to himself anymore.
He leaves most of them on read, and Mel’s probably the only reason that he’s not booted off. She’s terrifying, and she’s insisting that he stays on. He thinks that Mel could convince him of anything and has the molten steel coursing through her veins to follow through. She seems like someone who could pull a trigger.
Mel’s also given (read: forced on him, insisted that he take, threatened if he didn’t take) him five of her paintings—the ones that just a year ago, he’d wheedled Viktor into going to the opening for their stint at a fancy gallery with too expensive champagne for Jayce to have gotten too drunk and spilled it all over himself—it’d been the kind of dumb fun that they should be having.
Viktor had ended up practically carrying him home. Now, one of his Viktor’s doctors asked Jayce if he’d like to install an alarm on Viktor’s bed so he’d know when he got up because he’s got a bracelet around his wrist that he always takes off when he remembers it that says that he’s a fall risk. Good thing that the painkillers—the ones that aren’t optional, absolutely not—muddy his mind. Jayce usually hates that they do that, and he’s trying to reach a plateau of where he doesn’t think about flushing them.
Because he knows that he can’t do that.
He just also knows that he had a last time maniacally going through theories about the nature of the universe with Viktor and he didn’t even know it. He knows it isn’t fair of him to ask for another, just to remember him by. He knows that it’s his job to gild every little thing that he remembers. He’s sure someone would tell him that’s unhealthy. They’re full of shit. They’re hollow.
They don’t know what he’s going through because they’ve only read about it in books, and they probably wouldn’t understand why he wants to set fire to the sympathy card section of the newsagent down the road. He doesn’t know how to explain that to a prick with a degree and no self-awareness; he doesn’t know how to explain that he knows, despite everything, that his relationship is healthier now.
Before, they’d fuck or fight. That’d be that. Now, they talk about shit. Of course, Viktor sleeps for eighteen hours or so a day and Jayce is embodying a coked-out squirrel when he’s graced with Viktor’s presence, to the degree that he knows he’s being suffocating, but they talk—because Viktor doesn’t have the lung capacity for either fucking or fighting anymore. And that’s the issue.
It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s that they can’t. It’s that it’s not fun to yell until you’re getting your shirt torn off and dick sucked if it’s one-sided. But that’s not the kind of thing you can say in a office with cream walls and whale sounds. That’s the kind of thing you can only say to Mel because she knows that you used to do it in public.
She’ll laugh into her hand, in that way she does when she’s proving that she’s classier than Jayce and doing it completely non-intentionally. Even though he’s also eaten her out in the council’s very not-just-theirs offices. Even though he’s made her scream, just out of the challenge because she said that he couldn’t. They don’t talk about what she did to him. They don’t talk about the noises that she coaxed out of him. All he’s going to say is that Mel always wins.
And Jayce tries to think about whether he could fuck Mel, again. After this. Because he’s walking across a tightrope, but there’s an end. It’s not a light at the end of the tunnel—it’s not even flickering. Jayce doesn’t believe in shit like that. Not anymore. He doesn’t believe that there’s something at the end of his life, waiting to take him in with open arms.
Of course, he’s talked about this with Viktor. This is the kind of crap that you talk about when you know that you’re going to die. Just like how Viktor asked Jayce if it’d haunt him forever if he shot him. Phrased directly like that. Phrased almost like a challenge, like the kind that Viktor knows Jayce is loathe to refuse. Looking straight up at him, half-naked, wide-eyed and asking Jayce if it would haunt him forever to end his misery before it progressed.
Jayce said he had to think about it. In the tone that plead with Viktor to never bring it up until Jayce did.
He feels bad for Mel, because of course she’s the one who’s picking up his pieces, now. She’s the one that he stumbles into, at asshole in the morning, sitting on her balcony and waiting for her to notice.
He doesn’t know what’s caused her to decide that she’s going to stick around in his life, he knows it’s not the animal magnetism of finding your male co-worker half-naked on your balcony, in the rain, looking very much on drugs because he’s taken bumps and swigs and shots before making the terrible decision to go and bother her, but he appreciates it.
She crosses her arms and tells him to get his ass in before he discovers what pneumonia feels like. He’s always liked the fact that Mel’s direct, that she can’t be bothered to tiptoe around. It makes sense. She’s watched people die. She’s got a leg up on him, there. She knows that there’s no point in fucking around.
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” she states directly as she’s opening the sliding door wide enough for him to walk in, instead of awkwardly shimmying his way through. He’s learned that it’s a thing she does; that how widely she opens the door shows how willing she is to deal with his shit. And yes, that means that he’s trialled it. That he’s shown up on her balcony multiple times.
He’s ashamed of it, when he’s not too drunk and melodramatic to think.
“I don’t want you to fuck me,” he answers curtly, shaking off before stepping inside, because he’s sure that she’s more diligent with cleaning her place than he is. He tries not to track dirt in, but he also chucks his mud-crusted boots into a corner instead of leaving them outside the door. He’s sure that his neighbour lets her cats out into the hallway, and that they piss in his shoes. He’s sure of it.
“You’re not wearing shoes, a shirt or… pants that are appropriate. It’s fair enough of me to think that you came here because you wanted to reacquaint yourself with me… carnally.” She’s waving her hand everywhere, gesturing to his everything.
“I’m wearing a robe—” he tries to argue, but she cuts him off.
“A robe that isn’t yours and doesn’t fit you and allows me to see that you’re also wearing underwear that isn’t yours—”
He throws his arms up in the air. “How could you possibly—”
Mel, ever cool and composed, just rolls her eyes and continues, as if he hasn’t even spoken, “—Because you’ve left enough of your clothes at mine when I’ve fucked you out of your mind, and you haven’t thought of it when you’ve done your walk of shame. Whether it’s in my office, my apartment, the hallway closet, the meeting rooms… well,” she licks her lips, clicks her tongue and shoots him a shit-eating grin that reminds him too much of who he ran away from, “One of us has to be good at cleaning up the evidence because neither of us want to get caught, hm?”
And he supposes that she’s right.
And he supposes that he has a hundred-and-one things that he has to say to her, a thousand apologies that need to fall off his lips, but the thing is: he’s terrible and Mel isn’t dying. He has Mel forever. Or, he has Mel until forever falls apart. And then, he’ll just have the same crisis, but he’ll know the steps. So, he’s a coward and he never says what he means when he means it.
The night ends how no one’s going to believe. Apparently, the bottom drawer of Mel’s dresser is just filled with his shit, and he doesn’t know how to feel about that—specifically, he knows he’s feeling something and he finds it impossible to name, which leaves him embarrassed. Against her glory, he’s just a dirty imbecile, and yet, she shoves a bundle of clothes into his hands that are both folded and washed with her detergent that he’s always thought smelled so great.
He ends up sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against her couch as she’s raking her hands through his hair and lamenting about how he’s growing it out but never taking care of it.
“I have other priorities,” he tries to argue, but again, she cuts him off.
“Viktor is dying and he has great hair,” she argues, and he’s not going to try against that, because she’s completely right. “You should ask him for pointers,” she continues, but he interrupts her.
“Viktor asked me if I’d find it too traumatising if he asked me to shoot him.”
“Ah.” Mel pops her tongue against the roof of her mouth. It’s the kind of thing she does when she’s stalling for time because she doesn’t know what to say. It’s a very rare sight, but he’s managed to make it come out, and he doesn’t know if he should feel proud or ashamed at that.
“Tell me about it,” is what she finally settles on, and he does. Pours everything out like the wine at her gallery opening, stains her sparklingly perfect floor. And here’s the final thing that the pamphlets say but also don’t: it doesn’t make him feel better, telling her all of this, but her hands in his hair do.