Chapter Text
If there is a line between being and not, it's not one Viktor consciously recognizes.
There is a thing, and it is moving. He imagines he sees the back of its head, brown and life-bleached. A slash of blue rags swaddling a creature of stumbles and stubbed toes, faun-fresh footsteps over terrain that feels five miles below.
There are cords. They are ashen greyandpurple, kintsugi spun between the threads. They are attached to something, entwined. Knotted. A hand. Viktor dumbly recognizes the warm worn limb holding tight, but not the thing in its grasp. The grey thing. The dead thing.
He is. Is he?
The thing made of metal too soft to be metal and flesh too hard to be flesh is moving and Viktor is moving with it. He hasn't quite formed an opinion on the matter, but he dimly resents the weight that holds him there, without any regard for the fact that he had been something well past this. Something that did not walk. Something that did not ram its knee into a jutted out stone where there should have been nothing. Something made of stars and spun-gold spiderwebs and a man waking, post-withdrawal, and a girl who can move her arm again and tilling the soil ignoring the splinters from their tools and-
Viktor isn't for awhile again. Probably.
The movement has stopped, at some point. The fucking thing is just standing there. The person beside it is speaking, but the words don't register. Why would they. He's not here to hear them.
The person, after much gentle noise, takes a firmer approach, putting weight onto the rock still statue. Eventually the steelstone responds, folding down. A parody of rest on the dry soil and thin blades of grass. The person lets out a great breath, before collapsing on his back.
"Close enough."
Muffled, it doesn't quite register.
Viktor, regrettably Viktor, watches the thing and the way its chest does not rise and fall like that of the human's, who is breathing deeply as if in exertion. An opinion forms, apropos of nothing: Viktor is quite tired of looking at this misplaced tool. Surely there are better uses for his time. Was he not doing something earlier? Why has he been reduced to peering over the shoulder of an ugly facsimile of a living creature? Why can't he leave?
He swims in his own mind for a moment, turning these thoughts over, making them real and defined. He thinks he is for a bit, and makes use of this fact to exert some agency over himself and look the fuck away-
The face swivels at a whip-crack of an angle; a cog slipping out of place and cranking the wrong way. There's something like a valley - more open space than Viktor had seen in his life (wrong he had seen it all seen all of space seen all of the stars studied every one until their light was burned into his fabric) - before it all snaps back and his gaze is taken up by the goddamn useless shitty thing with greasy hair and stiff joints.
"Viktor?"
Jayce speaks his name urgently, as he so often seems to do. They're in the lab. They're in a hospital room. Viktor doesn't know why the man bothers - it's not as if Viktor is there. Jayce worries often and worries much and rarely presents a solution worth the fuss. If he insists on dragging around this puppet through great tracts of sun-kissed flower fields then the least he could do is not pretend it's Viktor himself.
It's downright disrespectful, if he's being honest.
"Maybe... maybe just get some rest, yeah?"
Why would a machine need rest? If it is broken enough to require intermittent use only, then that's a problem that should be fixed with better calculations and a blowtorch. Humans will anthropomorphize anything. It's embarrassing to watch.
Something stirs in him. A need to bite back. To wield the rapier of his wit. To sneer and snark and watch his partner huff and puff and begin piecing together his impassioned counterargument. Viktor will easily parry, of course, and their spar will spiral until dawn bleeds through the windows and makes the other man's hazel eyes turn to honey.
He doesn't, though, because he is not there. The thought humbles him; how pointless an urge. He wants to see the stars again. There are ones in the sky now, but they are not his stars. They are not the ones he used to fill the holes in his lungs and his heart. They are foreign and cold and dead as the body in the blue blanket.
---
Viktor unfortunately is again at some point in the future. The metal of one thigh is branded skin-warm, but rapidly cooling; strange that he should notice it at all. The morning sun is tracing the cords of malformed metal. it might have been beautiful were the same lighting to play across a form more carefully sculpted.
It strikes him quite suddenly that he is alone.
It's not just the absence of a real body when last night there had been one, but the harrowing realization that he can't feel Salo. The doctor's signal is absent. The new but beautifully overbearing maelstrom that was Vander is nowhere to be felt.
He scrambles for memories, for placid smiles and pearlescent fingerprints- gold and iridescent latticework stripped from the core and gifted without restraint to anyone. Everyone. The memories are still there, but they are distant. A faded footprint where once he had slipped between them as easy as smiling. Many eyes, many faces, many hands. Lived experiences, lived trauma, lived life.
It's gone now. They're gone. He's gone.
He's not him. He's not him. He's not himself. Himself is gone. Was he ever? Surely he was. If he hadn't been before then it wouldn't make sense for him to be now. Not that now made any sense. Now with its third person perspective and claustrophobic quarters.
These thoughts continue for some time, in what one with their faculties about them might call a spiral.
Gods he misses the fucking stars.
"V- Vik? Oh, shit, hey, Vik. I'm here. Shit, ah, are you, alright? What do you need? Speak to me."
There are hands on his shoulders and he screeches like metal on granite.
No. Not on him. A phantom of something. It's not the calloused hands of a desperate man, rushing back towards the body to Viktor despite a fierce limp. Not a panicked reaction to seeing one's best friend perform some breathless play at hyperventilating in a field. A show. Theatre. A memory? A ghost.
Jayce's hands are promptly removed with what can only be described as a surprised yelp, which would be entertaining coming from a man of his stature, if it was real.
"O-oh...kay... Sorry. No touching right now. That's fine. I'm here though, if you need me. If you can talk. I was just looking for some water, ah, I'm here now though. It's okay. We're here."
This is a lie. It makes Viktor's non-existent stomach turn, and then shudder. Jayce doesn't lie. He says stupid things, born of rash passions and ego and a desire to do good. Jayce may be many things, but Viktor has never known him to be a liar. This fact feels like shards of broken glass scraping against each other. The dissonance is nauseating, as is his inability to feel nauseous at all.
Viktor is nowhere. Is Jayce fucking stupid? Did that trip to the alternate future impact his logical skills as well as his actions?
Jayce spends a long time on his knees, in front of the body. Viktor seethes through every painful second of it; the idiot is going to mess up his broken leg beyond repair. And for what, to stare into the eyes of this abomination of his own making? And pretend that it is his friend? His partner?
"I just want my partner ba-"
We can't all get what we want, Counselor. Golden boy, man of progress. Sheltered topsider.
Labmate. Coworker, co-conspirator. Confidant. Friend.
He hates most of all that he can not hate Jayce Talis, no matter how many times he has died to his hands.
---
Viktor is actively trying not to be, and it's getting more difficult.
Jayce is dragging the body along again. It's slow going, what with his own brutalized leg and the creaky stiff movements of an unoiled contraption in tow. He mutters about a lack of resources and shelter, and his apprehension to be so visible on the side of a cliff, “just in case.” He never elaborates on the case in question.
Viktor does not have any say in the matter, the light guided pressure of the man's warm hand keeping him bound in place tighter than any soldering iron could manage. Occasionally the man will mutter quiet observations about the plant life, or squint off into the horizon as if searching for something. Mostly he is careful to guide the automaton around any rough terrain and shrink every time his stomach makes a noise.
Jayce walks, and he walks, and he is so slow, and it is so uphill, and he is slower, and he is slower, and he sucks in an utterly devastating cry when a loose bit of shale slides under his left foot forcing his leg to shoot out.
Viktor's grip turns to locked steel. Idiot Jayce takes to take another step and finds himself pulled short, nearly losing his balance and stumbling backwards into Viktor's statue. He flounders, an action that looks increasingly ridiculous, what with his post apocalyptic disaster of a self, and several words fight for space in his throat before a rough, "V, I'm fine," finally makes its way out of the gates.
Viktor does not react because he does not have a body to do so, but Jayce says some more nonsense about needing to move and tries to pull away again and no they fucking don't he is staying right here.
Jayce tries tugging at the body, but its artificial grip does not falter. "Oh come on."
Hypocrite fool. "Oh Viktor I'll grab that for you. Oh you've been on your feet all day, don't worry about it. Do you want to take a rest there? Here, let me-"
Viktor has no cane with which to bang Jayce on the shins with. All he has is a fucking body and his long-standing spite and
A body.
Viktor has a body.
Oh.